The Ice-Cream Makers (5 page)

‘More!' his youngest brother yelled.

‘Me too!' his other brother shouted. ‘More!'

And then they were all shouting it. His mother came out of the kitchen and wanted a taste as well. She stood in front of Giuseppe and looked at him without blinking. He raised the wooden spoon with the cherry ice-cream to her lips, and as they parted he saw just how beautiful she was. A forty-year-old woman with flushed cheeks.

His father refused to taste; he was too proud. ‘Please,' Giuseppe pleaded. ‘One small bite.'

‘If he doesn't want any,' hollered the grandmother, who had just woken up, ‘I'll have two.'

‘All right,' his father said eventually. He gave in, unable to resist temptation. Giuseppe could tell he liked it by the lines around his eyes.

Then Enrico Zangrando appeared in the doorway. He happened to be passing their house when he overheard the glee. There was a little bit left in the cylinder, the very last of the batch. Giuseppe walked over to Enrico with the cherry ice-cream. The landowner instantly noticed how mature and muscular the lumberjack's son had become. As the spoon approached his mouth, his eyes automatically closed. But before he'd had a chance to say how delicious it was, Giuseppe had slapped him on his bald pate. It produced an exquisite sound.

Spring arrived and the grass awoke from its winter sleep. The land looked a little different, less drab every day. Some parts were pale green, while others had yet to be brought back to life by the sun, which was beginning to feel warmer. Logs were cut into planks by the river and the roofs of barns were repaired. But then there were days that crept up like ghosts from the night. Wet grass, wet leaves, diffuse light. A sea of mist parting slowly, wispy clouds among the trees, snow in the mountains.

When the dandelions sprung up, Giuseppe made dark red raspberry ice and pale yellow apricot ice. On the advice of Enrico he had prepared them without milk and eggs. His experiments with the fruits in his mother's jars had yielded divine sorbets. More and more people from the village stopped by. Giuseppe gave them a taste of the ice outside in the sun. It was nothing short of a miracle. With his eyes still closed, one person exclaimed, ‘I can picture the colour of the ice!'

Maria Grazia plucked up the courage and knocked on Giuseppe's door. His father answered. He saw the girl who had become a woman. In her hands she held four jars of strawberry jam. The jam was lighter in colour than her lips. The father immediately summoned his son.

‘I want ice-cream,' she said when he remained silent.

Giuseppe's gaze travelled from her eyes to the jam, but along the way it chanced upon her breasts. He couldn't help it. Hers was a beauty that turned heads. First he heard himself swallow, then his neighbour's voice, ‘I can help you gather snow, too.'

She smiled, revealing unbelievably white teeth.

All of a sudden he felt afraid, too scared even to look at her neck, her hands, or her wrists.

Maria Grazia held out the jars as if thrusting a baby into his arms.

‘Thank you,' he said as he took them, but he knew he had to say something else. There was a brief silence before he added, his eyes on the ground, ‘See you tomorrow morning. I'll come and collect you.' And with that he quickly pulled the front door shut.

It was bright and early when they climbed the Antelao. The low-lying fields were dotted yellow with dandelions. As children they had snapped the stalks and watched the white juice trickling out before daubing it onto their skin. Maria Grazia had started the game.

‘It's a bit sticky,' she had said, while tracing circles on her arms.

‘Isn't it poisonous?'

‘I like it.'

‘Have you tasted it?'

She shook her head. ‘It feels nice,' she said. ‘Refreshing.' And she daubed some on his arms, too.

The following day Giuseppe had picked dozens of flowers. He pressed the juice from the stalks and left a trail of drops all over her body. On her feet, her tanned legs, her hands, her wrists, her slender arms.

‘Don't forget my head,' she said.

He quickly picked a few more flowers and left a trail on her face as well. He even dripped some milk around her mouth.

Then she snuck a taste, a very quick one, with the tip of her tongue.

‘It's bitter,' she said, and started giggling. ‘Would you like to try some?'

Giuseppe shook his head.

‘Are you scared?'

He didn't respond, but when she rose to her feet he yelled, ‘No, don't!'

They were both equally tall and equally strong. But perhaps Maria Grazia was at an advantage; after all, she had jumped on top of him, pinning his hands to the grass. He couldn't break free from her grip. As she planted her shins on his arms, she quickly picked a dandelion from beside his ear. Giuseppe floundered like a fish, but Maria Grazia managed to hold his head in a vice with her knees. She towered over him, relishing the experience and laughing as she sprinkled the milk on his lips.

Now, years later, they walked without a word up the paths and through the fields — Giuseppe in front, Maria Grazia following. They had to climb a lot higher than he'd done the first time. Occasionally he would glance over his shoulder and wait for Maria Grazia to catch up.

‘We're heading for the glacier,' Giuseppe said, pointing to the freezing cold necklace around the top.

She noticed the wet patches on his clothes beneath the leather straps of the basket. She was sweating, too; small beads were dotted around her nose. But they carried on without resting. The landscape grew quieter and more bare. First the birds disappeared, then the trees, and finally the leafhoppers that had sung the praises of morning, too. Now all that remained was the sound of their breathing in the rarefied air. Both had rolled up their sleeves.

For a while it seemed as if nothing had changed. Or only something on the outside. When Giuseppe and Maria Grazia stood in the perpetual snow and the light forced their eyes shut, their hands found each other again. There was no awkwardness, no fear, only the childlike delight in the sunshine.

Giuseppe took off the basket and dug a hole in the snow. He lifted a handful to her mouth. She sucked the water from the ice and chewed the crystals. The cold shot straight to her head. ‘Ouch,' she said, her face contorted.

He knew the feeling, like a dagger through your skull.

Ignoring the pain, Maria Grazia insisted, ‘More.'

She was thirsty, and she was warm. More than anything she wanted to kneel down and dig two holes in the glacier and press the ice to her skin, to her neck and to her chest, to feel the snow in her cleavage. It was the intimation of these things that left her reeling and him trembling.

As Giuseppe took in the harvest, Maria Grazia saw the steam coming off his arms. He hewed large blocks of ice out of the glacier and placed them in the straw basket she held up.

Nothing happened, just like nothing had happened when they lay under the old autumn sun.

They walked the long road back to Venas di Cadore. Like those of the
porteurs de glace
in the Pyrenees and the poor men descending the ice path on Mount Etna, Giuseppe's legs occasionally buckled under him. His limbs felt as though they were filled with lead. Blocks of ice are heavier than bags of flour and sacks of coffee beans. There's nothing quite like it. The only advantage compared to the dead weight of flour and beans was the fact that ice melts. As the meltwater dripped from the basket and fell on the thirsty earth, his yoke lightened. By the time they got home, the harvest had dwindled. Maria Grazia looked on as Giuseppe put the ice into the wooden barrel.

‘Will it be enough?' she asked.

She had followed him inside, as she used to do in the old days when she came round to play. There was a game they had invented. It involved him removing his shirt and lying on his back, while she let the cascade of her hair splash down on his chest. If Giuseppe cried mercy, he had lost.

Above them, Giuseppe's little brothers and sisters were lying on the wooden floor. They heard all kinds of sounds and then the wheel spinning into action.

Giuseppe churned at a steady pace and never took his eyes off the cylinder, as though he was part of the machine.

‘May I?' Maria Grazia asked after a while.

He moved aside for her. She reached for the handle and started churning. He felt the heat coming off her skin and heard her breathing quickening. Churn, churn, churn. She kept touching him ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, and so it happened that they were both, at the same moment, witness to a miracle. Maria Grazia saw the red jam becoming lighter in colour along the edge, and the icy mass slowly acquiring an airier, creamier structure. Giuseppe discovered that her breasts were soft. Softer than summer light.

His heart was thumping so hard his chest was vibrating. He was afraid Maria Grazia could tell, could hear, perhaps. Animals can smell fear.

‘I'm so incredibly curious,' she said.

‘Not much longer now.'

He picked up the large spoon and clutched it, his thumb wrapped tightly around the handle. The ice-cream was a reddish pink, with small dark specks.

Maria Grazia took a bite, and as the ice melted on her tongue his fear too became fluid, less solid. Now that her eyes were closed, Giuseppe looked at her lips, her bare arms, and her breasts, which rose and fell with her breath.

‘It's amazing,' Maria Grazia said. ‘It's better than anything in the world.'

She had caught him at it, but didn't let on.

He held up the spoon again. Maria Grazia took a bigger mouthful of the ice-cream. This time she kept her eyes closed for longer, as if she were drifting off on the flavour, the way you drift off to a deep sleep. It was a game, an age-old game, but new to Giuseppe. It never occurred to him that he was expected to make a counter-move.

A minute passed. Maria Grazia opened her eyes. Giuseppe had been watching her nipples poking through the fabric of her clothes. He wondered if they were the same colour as the ice.

They emptied the cylinder together. When they went back upstairs, his brothers and sisters jeered. They wanted strawberry sorbet, but had to make do with the sight of the ice-cream makers' pleasure: Maria Grazia's lips were glistening like a forbidden fruit.

Summer descended. Heat and drought, the scent of hay wherever Guiseppe went. The days were long and light, the skies clear blue and drenched with the scent of lavender and lemon in the evenings. Every morning Giuseppe walked up the glacier on the Antelao. He harvested ice and returned soaking wet. Maria Grazia picked fruits in the forest — glossy blackberries and dull, almost black blueberries. They turned them into indigo ice-cream, which he sold by the side of the road. People waited in line, ready to be surprised by a new colour, a new flavour, every day.

Giuseppe bought apricots and peaches from Bolzano. Farmers dropped off plums and pears, and later figs, too. He transformed them into frozen yellow, grey, and pink substances that had to be consumed at once — although occasionally there were children who had to take the ice-cream home, to a grandmother who had given them money. ‘Run as fast as your legs will carry you,' Giuseppe would tell them.

Churn, churn, churn.

Maria Grazia's head swam. Some days they stood side by side in the kitchen or in the cellar with everything suffused with the smell of red fruit and sugar. Their fingers were sticky; even their breath smelled of raspberries.

She waited another month, but still nothing happened. That is to say, the thing that Maria Grazia was hoping for, what she was longing for, did not happen. Something else happened instead.

Looking back, people saw a connection with the increasingly outlandish colours and flavours Giuseppe produced. That's where it all started, they said. That's when we should have realised.

One afternoon he sold a pale orange-coloured sorbet along the main village road. The customers took a very cautious first bite, but loved the flavour. ‘I can taste tomato,' a man exclaimed. ‘I can taste actual tomato!'

Giuseppe also made ices with goat's milk, elderflower, fresh mint, and pine needles. Maria Grazia had picked the needles off the trees, and Giuseppe had put them in a pan with water and sugar. It called for the precision of a pharmacist: too much sugar made the ice too soft and sweet.

When Maria Grazia was offered a taste, she felt as if she had just taken a bite from the forest in which she had spent half her childhood, hunting for pinecones, building huts, and using branches for swords. She could taste all that, as well as the spokes of light falling among the tree trunks and the hollow sound of her feet on the root-filled earth.

This was what she had seen in his eyes, in his enigmatic gaze. She had known that he could engender this feeling in her, that he had the power to let her be in two places at once.

The following day Giuseppe made espresso ice-cream. He had added an extra ingredient, a chunk of Swiss chocolate bought from Tiziano De Lorenzo. Some ice-cream eaters detected bittersweet notes, but Giuseppe refused to reveal what it was. The best recipes are secret, the Viennese ice-cream maker had said.