The Ice-Cream Makers (6 page)

‘Is it camomile?' someone asked.

Giuseppe said nothing.

‘How about cinnamon, then?'

That night, many had trouble falling asleep.

Maria Grazia, who had sampled plenty of spoonfuls, couldn't stop tossing and turning in bed. Her mind was on Giuseppe's strong arms, and on his hands, too. While they could not bend coins, they were all the better at stoning apricots. In the middle of the night she crept outside with a candle, stood under Giuseppe's bedroom window, and softly called out his name. When she got no response, she started throwing small pebbles at the glass.

Giuseppe stuck his sleepy head out.

‘I want to show you something,' she said.

‘Now?'

‘Yes.'

It couldn't wait any longer. She had waited long enough.

After a short while, the door opened and Giuseppe came out in his nightshirt. He saw the wild look in Maria Grazia's eyes, but before he had a chance to say anything, she spoke. ‘I love you.'

Giuseppe said nothing. He didn't know what to say. He didn't speak the language of love.

Maria Grazia stepped forward. That's when she unbuttoned her nightgown. She wore nothing underneath. He was afraid to look, but he looked anyway.

Her breasts gleamed in the candlelight. They were whiter than her belly, two dizzying copies of each other. But what struck Giuseppe most were her nipples. They had the colour of amber and the golden glow of roasted chestnuts.

This is what she had wanted to show him.

Giuseppe could barely believe that the woman standing before him was Maria Grazia. He had sawn giant trees in half and he had carried a stove across the mountains, but he was no match for this beauty.

‘Give me a baby,' she said.

Instead of ripping the nightgown off her body and giving her lips a lingering kiss before taking her under the star-filled sky, he whispered only a single word, almost inaudibly: ‘Mercy.'

It was August, not far into the month. Two more nights and it would be the feast day of Saint Lawrence, who, tradition has it, suffered a martyr's death on a red-hot gridiron nearly two thousand years ago. There had already been sightings of falling stars, Perseid meteors entering the Earth's atmosphere. This would reach its peak in the early morning of 13 August, with dozens of falling stars every hour — Lawrence's tears. By then Giuseppe was already walking across the hinterland. His aim was to walk to the Gotthard Tunnel and travel straight through the mountains, but he became disorientated under the hail of meteors and eventually ended up in Genoa, where he spotted the stately
Kaiser Wilhelm II
oceanliner in the port. Giuseppe had never smelled the sea and he had never seen a ship before.

The 140-metre ocean liner of the Norddeutscher Lloyd was getting ready to set sail to New York. Trunks were hauled on board, and men carried suitcases across narrow gangways. First class could accommodate one hundred and eighty passengers; second class, eighty-six; and between decks there were berths for six hundred and forty-four people. The hull was completely white.

His mother waited in his room with the window open. Maria Grazia had cried for days on end. Her dark, wavy hair hung in front of her face like a widow's veil. She clutched one hand with the other, but still felt the loss. It ran through her blood. She feared she would never see Giuseppe again.

Those first few days, people lingered by the side of the village road in the afternoon, speculating about a new, exceptional flavour that was difficult to prepare. It was said to be blue-black as the night. But when, after a week, there was still no sign of the ice-cream maker, people walked past his spot as though he had never existed, as though it had all been a dream.

Meanwhile, in the green water of the Port of Genoa, the
Kaiser Wilhelm II
had set sail. Looking majestic, with a small wave in front of its bow, the ship made its way to the sea. There had been no little jolt; all of a sudden they were sailing, they were on the move. From the quayside — with its tall cranes and the folks staying behind with handkerchiefs and hats in their hands — it looked as if the ship was barely moving, but the wake splashed and foamed. Inside, stokers toiled and boilers blazed, and large clouds of smoke billowed from the round funnels. The mood was one of parting, but also of joy, the prospect of a new life. Those standing on the afterdeck could see the coast fade from view. The ship's horn was sounded one final time.

Ten days later, at nightfall, Giuseppe Talamini was standing alone at the rail. The ship was sailing at full speed, sixteen knots, cleaving the dark waves. He hadn't travelled through the mountains, he hadn't seen the light at the end of the tunnel. But what he saw now was just as luminous as snow. There was land in sight, and above this land hung a giant sun.

‘The Spirit That Creates One Object'

The hallway of our house in Venas di Cadore boasts an impressive Native American headdress. The feathers are those of an eagle, ‘the biggest and strongest of all birds'.

The headdress is said to have been brought back by my great-grandfather when he returned from America. Upon his arrival in Castle Clinton, he joined a group of immigrants to work on the construction of a skyscraper. The bricks are probably still in place, but the name of the tower, with its many windows, hasn't been passed down to us. Next he is thought to have worked with other Italians on a railway up north, felling trees and putting down sleepers, the track lengthening and disappearing into the distance. After that it gets more nebulous, the picture blurry. It is said that he went to Wyoming, where he hunted buffalo, the cattle with the large heads and mighty horns, the long and stiff brown coats. I imagine it was while doing this job that he encountered the Sioux, the Blackfoot Indians who were already living on a reservation in South Dakota by then. The legendary Chief Red Cloud had led his people there after the Treaty of Fort Laramie, each feather in his war bonnet symbolising bravery in battles against other tribes — the Pawnee, the Crow, and later the colonisers, too. White feathers like bolts of lightning, representing land conquered and reconquered, and ultimately lost forever.

To the first man Giuseppe saw on his return to the Northern Italian mountains, he said, ‘Greetings, paleface.' That, at any rate, is the story which has been passed down from generation to generation to generation.

My father, the other Giuseppe Talamini, walks past the Native American headdress and down the steps to the basement, which has been further excavated and reinforced with new pillars. He presses the switch. The light bounces off the cement mixer and on to the pillar drills, past the thousands of screwdrivers, monkey wrenches, files, pliers, and brackets on the walls, and against the chisels and brushes, the sanding machines and workbenches. A treasure trove of tools. This is my father's life's work — or, rather, his life's revenge. He worked as an ice-cream maker for fifty-seven years, but he'd really wanted to be an inventor.

My grandfather was an intractable man. He had no faith in his son's dreams and ambitions, and besides, he needed his son in the ice-cream parlour. At the age of fifteen, my father had to cycle through the streets of Rotterdam with an ice-cream cart. ‘Some days the ice-cream would melt faster than you could sell it,' he used to tell us at the dining table when we complained about work. ‘Not only would you have a sore back and arms at the end of the day, but your legs would ache, too.'

During the winter months, he would busy himself in a workshop in Calalzo fashioning nuts and bolts from large chunks of iron, his eyes screwed up a little, his black shoes planted among the filings on the floor. Every year he spent the money he earned on new tools. It began with the basic items all households have — except a bit more extensive, perhaps — but once he had taken over his father's ice-cream parlour and started earning his own money, he bought his first drilling, sanding, polishing, and cutting machines: screaming monsters with large benches, as well as lovely little adjustable wrenches and the minuscule instruments used by watchmakers and engravers. He bought everything, absolutely everything he didn't have yet, including seven-inch nails, cap nuts, lock nuts, rivet nuts, right-threaded screws, left-threaded screws, double-ended screws, endless screws, blind bolts.

One day a lorry driver pulled up outside the house in Venas, having been directed here by the ironmonger in Belluno. The man had been looking for a particular nut for years. My father listened to the driver's description the way a child listens to a fairytale and then escorted him down into the basement. When he switched on the light, the treasure chamber sparkled in all its glory. The lorry driver's pupils dilated instantly. He couldn't believe his eyes — and it probably contained only half of all the tools there are now. These days the double garage is full of shiny metal too.

Except for that one occasion, my father never showed his collection to others, ‘because nobody understands'. Most people think it's an illness. But the driver congratulated my father on his wealth of tools and machines.

‘I've never seen anything like it,' he said.

There probably wasn't anything like it.

My father rummaged in a couple of metal trays and a minute later retrieved a nut.

‘Yes,' was all the driver said at first. ‘Yes.' Then his eyes filled with tears. ‘Unbelievable,' he said. ‘This is it. Yes, this is it. This nut …'

It was the best day of his life, and probably of my father's life too.

He liked to tell the story whenever my mother expressed her disapproval of a new drill or sander.

‘I hope one day you'll find the screw that's loose in your head,' she would reply.

‘Nobody understands, not even my own wife.'

Once she gave him an ultimatum. ‘If you buy that workbench, Beppi,' she declared, ‘I'm leaving you.'

My father bought the workbench, my mother stayed. My brother and I didn't get it. We were young and knew little about marriage — about the threats, the compromises, the cracks. My mother never said another word about my father's collection, but the grooves in her forehead deepened, looking as if they'd been chiselled there.

My father used the life he led as an excuse to buy tools. He had never wanted to be an ice-cream maker and had never wanted to take over his father's ice-cream parlour. But he had done so anyway.

‘For seventy-five years I didn't have a summer,' he often said after he retired, before opening a box with a spirit level or a metal saw. For over half a century, no long, sun-drenched summer, no early summer, no empty summer, no sultry summer, no cool summer, no sweet, melancholic summer and no summer by the seaside. That was his lament — or the mantra with which he tried to convince himself and others.

Many are the occasions when I had fruitless discussions with him. ‘Why didn't you do something else?'

‘It was impossible.'

‘Nothing's impossible.'

‘No, not in those days.'

‘You should have carved out your own path.'

‘That path had already been mapped out for me,' he said. ‘And when a gap opened up, when there was finally some space, you scampered off.'

My father likes to blame me for the fact that he had to make and scoop ice-cream until the age of seventy-two.

‘While you were groomed by your poetry pals, I had to help Luca.'

‘I wasn't groomed.'

‘Brainwashed, then.'

‘It's called passion.' It sounded more dramatic than intended, but I couldn't think of another word on the spur of the moment. ‘The way you love a chainsaw, I love poetry.'

‘You've been brainwashed.'

He was referring to the team behind the World Poetry Festival: the then director, his editors, the beautiful interns. Their offices were located across the street from the ice-cream parlour. In summer they would often come over for an ice-cream after work. But the director also came in the morning, just after we opened, when it was quiet, to drink an espresso. His name was Richard Heiman, a man with watery blue eyes and a deep voice. He was never without a volume of poetry. He would open it on the table and keep reading as he sipped.

I don't remember what volume he was reading when I first took his order for espresso, but I do remember that the dust jacket was missing and the cover was red. Dark red with golden letters, which you would have felt if you were to trace your fingers across them. Beauty is something you don't notice until you reach a certain age. It's invisible to children. It is there, but they look right through it. I like to think that the glossy letters on the burgundy book of poetry afforded me my first-ever glimpse of beauty.

I had seen plenty of customers read, at the tables both inside and out. It was usually the paper, but some women read paperbacks with sumptuous covers, while taking forever to finish their cup of vanilla, hazelnut, or chocolate.

‘Your ice-cream is melting,' my father would sometimes say from behind the counter.

And then the woman would look up, blushing, as though he had read her mind, seen the images of passion conjured up by the sentences.

Richard Heiman was reading the most beautiful book I'd ever seen. Aged fifteen then, I attended the grammar school in Valle di Cadore but spent the three-month summer holidays in Rotterdam, reunited at last with my parents, so I hadn't seen Heiman before. He failed to notice me by his side. He was completely engrossed in a poem.