The Ice-Cream Makers (37 page)

I had told Giuseppe about the first time the World Poetry Festival had welcomed poets from China. This was back in the Seventies. Before then it had been unthinkable for writers to be allowed to travel outside the strict Communist country. There were no translations, but the audience, aware that this was a special occasion, listened respectfully to the three poets from the People's Republic. Until, that is, Frans Vogel got up and yelled at one of the muttering Chinese men on the stage, ‘Louder! I can't hear you!'

Giuseppe had asked for Vogel's most recent volume and had been particularly impressed with its motto by Breyten Breytenbach: ‘The function of the poem is to fuck the words good and hard.'

I don't say a word about Boris Ryzhy. After I gave him
Wolken boven E
, Giuseppe wanted to know everything there was to know about the poet, a young Russian who wanted to sing like a drunken whore. His poetry was saturated with melancholy and despair. He was both a poet and a street fighter. Giuseppe was hooked by the direct and plain language, the drunkards and junkies that peopled his poems. Ryzhy had a huge scar across his face. He claimed he had sustained it in a fight, but in actual fact he'd had a nasty fall as a child.

His appearance at the World Poetry Festival had been a disgrace. Drunk for most of the time, his behaviour was completely out of order. And given his atrocious English, it was practically impossible to communicate with him. The audience was disappointed. Ryzhy staggered up to the lectern and read his poems in the wrong order, so they didn't correspond with the projected Dutch and English translations.

Less than a year later he hung himself in his parents' house in desolate Yekaterinburg. ‘I loved you all, I kid you not! Your Boris,' he had jotted down on a piece of paper found on his desk. Twenty-six he was, the same age as Lermontov, who had been shot in a duel he didn't think was serious.

I won't read my brother the poignant poem Boris Ryzhy had read during the closing night of the festival. Written for his son, it starts with the lines,

When I return from Holland I'll give you Lego and we'll build a beautiful castle, you and me. You can make them come back, the years and the people, and love too — mark my words, you'll see.

Every time I read the poem, my eyes linger over the line
We'll live and loiter until the snow falls
, and then I think of the sun Giuseppe is chasing. The sun so rarely seen by the ice-cream maker.

Instead I tell Luca about the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, the three colossal rock formations that are visible for a second and a half as you drive up the road between Cortina and Dobbiaco.

‘Did you take him to the Tre Cime?'

I nod. The two of us had walked up there on a clear day, a rucksack slung over my shoulders, a drink bottle hanging from his belt.

‘When was this?' Luca wants to know.

I need to think about it, calculate back. ‘He was seven,' I reply.

My brother is silent. He is calculating back too, to the spring when Giuseppe was seven, to the ice-cream parlour where both Beppi and our mother were still working at the time, to the flavours he made that season.

‘What did he make of it?' he asks. It was hard for him not to be envious, but to keep asking, to find out more.

I remember Giuseppe walking faster and faster as we approached the Tre Cime. There are different walking trails leading up to the peaks, one of which starts from a large car park some fifteen minutes away, but we had risen early and had walked all morning. In his right hand Giuseppe held a stick he had found. His left hand was in mine. We had removed our pullovers. It was a warm day in May, with hardly any snow on the peaks around us.

The Tre Cime don't suddenly appear out of nowhere — you can see them from a distance — but with each step they grow bigger and more spectacular. Giuseppe, who had been talking nineteen to the dozen about his plans for the summer, didn't breathe another word as we walked along the narrow path among the rock fragments. He appeared to be hypnotised by the mountain in front of us. The mountain his father and grandfather had never seen. Not from up close, anyway.

Then we came to a halt and looked up, at the gigantic peaks and the sharp contours of the rocks, a trident that had risen from a tropical primal sea two hundred and seventy million years ago. Fossilised coral reef. He couldn't take his eyes off it. It was terrific to stand there with Giuseppe. To look, to be silent, to hear him breathe. To hold his hand and squeeze it with all my love.

‘Zio!' he suddenly exclaimed. ‘Look! There are people.'

I looked towards the spot he indicated, halfway up the overhanging north cliff of the Grande Cime. It took me a while but then I saw two tiny dots. Mountain climbers.

‘Would you do that?' Giuseppe asked.

‘No.'

‘I would.'

The next moment he pulled at my hand, intending to walk up the rocky slope to the base of the rock tower.

‘He wanted to climb the Grande Cime,' I say to my brother.

At first Luca doesn't react, but then he smiles, as though picturing his precocious son, tugging at his uncle's hand.

We both picture him tugging and trying to break free, keeping at it until the link is severed.

Now it's autumn and the nights are closing in. The ice-cream parlour will be open for just a few more days. People are wearing coats again, and the leaves on the trees are yellow. There's still the occasional queue, but only at the weekend. It's not a bad autumn at all; it doesn't rain much.

‘We're talking about him as if he's dead,' my brother says.

‘He isn't.'

‘How do you know?'

I don't respond.

‘I asked you a question,' Luca says.

At first I want to remain silent, just like he never used to answer when I asked him something, but Luca perseveres. He keeps repeating the question. His words ricochet off the kitchen tiles, the same white tiles that amplified the frequent fights between Giuseppe and my brother.

‘Because I'm his father.'

All goes quiet. Even the ice-cream machines appear to fall silent for a moment. Then slowly the sound returns: the blade starts scraping, the ice-cream starts whispering again. And Luca opens his mouth. I expect him to explode, but he isn't angry. ‘I was afraid you'd say that,' he says, ‘and I hope you're right.' He looks at me with tears in his eyes. ‘I can't live without him, and nor can Sophia.'

Maybe I can. I was used to always being away from Giuseppe. From the beginning, from the day he was born. He was always a small, distant dot, but I could see him when I focused long and hard enough. The way I can see my brother in the ice-cream parlour when I have my mother on the line. It happens automatically. My memory makes it happen.

Luca would say I was making things up or getting my stories all mixed up to fill the gaps. A huge gap.

And yet I see Giuseppe before me, walking down the street in Mexico, in Michoacán or Colima, or along the white beach of Chacahua, where pelicans plunge into the waves and resurface with fish in their beaks. A tiny dot, growing ever more distant. The ice-cream maker in search of perpetual summer.

Could it be that I know more because I'm his real father? Or do we both not know him all that well, because we only know part of him?

‘Sometimes I think I'd lost him before he even set off,' Luca says.

I could say the same; he'd always been lost to me.

There are moments when I think Giuseppe knew, that he could see it, just like Sophia's mother saw it.

Luca and I are in our late forties. We are men with wrinkles, thinning hair and crowns on our teeth, but we look less alike now than we did twenty years ago. My brother is heavier and stockier, due to muscle I don't have. His shoulders are firm and broad. I'm slight, skinny even, compared to Luca. Time has magnified the differences between us. It's no longer just the colour of our skin. My brother's gait is different; his back is hunched.

On West-Kruiskade, not far from the ice-cream parlour, is a Halal butcher. Benali. The old Moroccan butcher himself no longer works there since his sons took over the business, young men who have always worked in their father's shop. His oldest son, however, is a writer. He has published a couple of novels, including a bestseller, and now lives in Amsterdam. A life of ambition and adventure, of book launches and frisson with young women working at publishing companies, of getting up late. Every now and then the writer takes the train to Rotterdam, and occasionally I see him sitting outside Venezia with one of his brothers. The butcher is pale, like the strip lighting over his head, balding and with a body that betrays his enormous strength as much as the gruelling nature of his work. His brother, who wears a hip Italian cap, is darker and as fit as a marathon runner. One is exhausted, laid low, the other bursting with energy and plans. An ox and a stallion.

Giuseppe once waited on the brothers outside. They had ordered ice-cream. He noticed the parallel immediately.

‘You see those two?' he said to his mother while she scooped their ice-cream. ‘It's as if Papa and Uncle Giovanni are sitting there, except younger and Moroccan.'

Sophia laughed, but Giuseppe persisted. ‘I reckon the one with the cap is flirting with you,' he said. ‘See how he looks at you?'

‘He's a handsome man.'

‘What about his brother?'

She didn't react, at least not directly. She thought about her answer and then said, ‘The other man strikes me as shy.'

‘Who do you think I look like?'

‘You don't look like them at all.'

‘That's not what I meant.'

Sophia stopped scooping. ‘Then what
do
you mean?'

‘I mean, do you think I look more like Uncle Giovanni or Dad?'

She had to squeeze her
spatola
tight so it wouldn't fall from her hand. ‘You look like me,' she said, forcing a smile.

‘Everybody thinks I look more like my uncle.'

Giuseppe looked at his mother, but her eyes were cast downward, at the ice-cream in the display.

‘Wouldn't you say so?' he asked.

Now Sophia met his gaze. ‘If you work from morning till night,' she said, ‘if you slave away all summer, if you spend years in the kitchen, you'll eventually come to resemble your father.' She carried on scooping ice-cream for the butcher and the writer. ‘Don't you worry about that.'

Sophia, the fairytale princess of my childhood. The girl who had emerged from a flurry of snow and who had enchanted me. The woman who had married my brother and who had made a child with me. The woman who had brought reconciliation and had kept the family together. She is lying in bed now, refusing to come out.

It started mid-August, a week after Giuseppe left. At first Sophia started getting out of bed later and later — at eleven, at eleven-thirty, long after midday. Then she stopped getting up altogether. My brother reckons the pattern's the same as when she couldn't get pregnant. History repeats itself. But this time there was nobody to take over from her. Luca was already working for two, because Giuseppe was away; Sara had replaced my mother. My brother was obliged to hire a student for the rest of the summer, and for the evenings in autumn. Now and again I see the kid behind the ice-cream or waiting tables, looking like a stray who has been taken in by a strange family, a family that's not a family anymore.

My father is in the basement in Venas, polishing a new heart, while my mother is studying the weather forecast in the kitchen. Giuseppe is somewhere in Central America. Luca empties one of the ice-cream machines in Rotterdam. I'm off to Estonia tomorrow.

The woman who had kept the entire family together is lying in the dark, behind permanently closed doors. It's warm and airless inside the bedroom. Sophia has buried her head under the covers. Her long hair appears to have been robbed of its lustre once and for all. My brother has told me that nothing can pull her from this drowsy underworld. The room smells stale. When Luca draws the curtains and opens a window, Sophia starts yelling from under the sheets, but it sounds as if she is yelling from a deep sleep. Her cries are barely audible and she doesn't stop until he has left the room. She doesn't answer any of his questions. She won't let him touch her. He's unable to comfort her.

I walk under the red-and-white striped awning and into the ice-cream parlour, past the display and the till, through the door leading to the stairs. Nobody asks me what I'm up to. Sara is behind the counter, staring out of the window. Luca is in the kitchen. I have his permission to go upstairs. ‘You've worked miracles before,' he said. Then he went back to work.

Back when I first climbed the stairs to see Sophia, I skipped every other step, and when I visited her to see my newborn son I soared up the stairs. This time I don't have to go up to the attic, and yet the ascent takes me longer. I grip the banister and hear the steps creak under my shoes. Why am I doing this? What debt do I still owe? Why not turn on my heels, walk under the awning, and make myself scarce?

A line by Boris Ryzhy waltzes around my head.
You can make them come back, the years and the people.
But I doubt if the miracle will repeat itself. Sophia won't answer the door in a dress with peonies, she won't have flushed cheeks; there'll be no golden braid. This time round she'll lie in bed with chapped lips and dark circles under her eyes. Withdrawn, worn out by grief. She's waiting for Giuseppe. Only his return can pull her out of this woe.