The Ice-Cream Makers (14 page)

Sophia didn't make things any easier for us. One morning, when she was catching snowflakes again, she asked, ‘Do the two of you taste the same as well?'

She simply held her head tilted back and waited for a response while the occasional flake whirled down onto her tongue.

‘Well?' she demanded after neither of us answered. Now she actually looked at us: first at Luca, then at me. She took a step towards us, and then another one. I knew I had to say something.

‘I taste of broccoli,' I said, ‘and Luca of strawberry mousse.'

‘Broccoli's my favourite vegetable,' Sophia said at once, ‘but I quite like strawberry desserts as well.'

Either Luca hadn't heard the latter half of the response, or it felt like second-best to him, because when we were in bed that evening he was livid. ‘You should have said you tasted of horse piss.'

‘Who tastes of horse piss?'

‘Who tastes of broccoli?'

It goes without saying that I was just as ignorant about love as Luca, but I wasn't shy or scared. That's how it started. Maybe Sophia was perfectly aware of Luca's debilitating love, but equally aware of something else — of me, trying to swallow my love, hiding it deep inside.

We both played ‘hard to get' to an absurd degree. It was a question of waiting until another would walk away with our bone. But it never came to that; there would never be another.

In bed I assumed the role of Cyrano de Bergerac, whispering useful lines into Luca's ear. ‘Tell her you want to know what she tastes of'; ‘Tell her you want to touch the tip of her nose with your tongue'; ‘Tell her you'd like to be a snowflake on her tongue.'

But he didn't say any of this.

‘Tell her you want to brush her hair for ever and ever. Tell her you can't hold your breath much longer, that you're suffocating and dying without her love.'

He never said a word.

Of course, there's no knowing what might have happened had he actually said all of this. They say love is a chemical reaction in the brain, but I reckon it's a mechanism that lacks any logic. Try too hard and you put the other off. Do nothing and the other will want you — although there's also a chance they may never even notice you. What do we know about the workings of a heart? How to make it beat faster, how to conquer it and make it yours forever?

On the day it stopped snowing, Sophia suddenly said, ‘My mother claims the two of you are in love with me.'

We were at her house, sipping our tea. Tiny sips, but Luca still managed to swallow the wrong way.

‘She says I have to choose.' She looked at both of us in turn. Even though I didn't feel entirely at ease, I did meet her gaze. Luca couldn't stop coughing; he had tears in his eyes.

I decided to slap him on the back, and after a couple of slaps he was doing better and we returned to our tea as if nothing had happened.

I waited a bit, during which time all three of us took two sips of tea, and then I said, ‘I'm not in love with you.'

And what did my brother say? The twit, the oaf, the tongue-tied idiot said, ‘Neither am I.'

Of course Sophia had to follow suit. ‘I'm not in love with you two, either.'

I should have drained my glass, put on my coat, and left them to it — the two of them, in the spacious front room. But I was afraid that Sophia would come after me, and if not, that Luca would finish his tea and run off to catch up with me.

So the three of us just sat there and drank the herbal tea Sophia's mother had made for us. I was the one who finally said, ‘Shall we go outside?'

There were some clouds in the sky, a veil the sun was trying to pierce. No more snowflakes were coming out.

Sophia bent down and used both hands to scoop snow off the ground and fling it in the air. It was like a haze descending on us. We followed suit, shovelling up snow and throwing it high up in the sky.

Needless to say, Sophia opened her mouth and tried to catch the powdery snow with her tongue. But the flakes also ended up in her hair and inside her collar. Before long, we were caught up in a snow fight. We did fashion balls of a kind, but we didn't take enough time with them. While still in flight they turned into an ever-growing flurry. At first Luca only threw at me, me at him, and Sophia at us, but at some point we began to throw back. Together. She got completely inundated by snow. It landed in her collar and in her neck, and she felt it between her shoulders and on her arms and her yet-to-develop breasts and her stomach — just about everywhere. I threw and scooped and tipped snow all over Sophia.

She begged for mercy. ‘Stop!' she yelled. ‘No more!'

But I carried on. I felt like shouting:
You have to choose. You have to choose one of us. Go on, choose!

Then she fell over and took a direct hit on the head. It was one of my balls. She refused to give in and scooped up as much snow as possible with her small hands and hurled it at me with all the strength she could muster.

It was cheerful snow and hurried snow, it was masculine and feminine snow, and it was also the snow of yesteryear, the same snow Signor Marinello's grandfather had trudged through, in which my grandfather had stood, and my great-grandfather, too. It was a flurry that stretched from the distant past into the future. Into now. And it is now that I see that no two flakes are alike, as Maura Dooley writes in her poem, and it is now that I too look through the snow and finally see the miracle.

Luca threw a snowball at me, a ball he had taken pains to shape: rock-hard, unexpected, it was like a slap in the face. I felt the cold burst on my forehead before it trickled down into my neck. And when the snow slid further down to my chest, I felt the betrayal. Luca was standing up for Sophia; he was protecting her. He threw again, a ball that turned into a mist that briefly obstructed my view. It was the miracle I wasn't aware of at the time — I didn't realise the incomparable mechanism that had been set in motion. Luca had done not too much, not too little. He had done exactly the right thing.

I stumbled and fell and got showered with snow. Four hands at once. Snow in my eyes, snow in my mouth, snow in my nose. I didn't get it, and I wouldn't get it for a long time to come. But now I get it, now I know that he couldn't have done it any other way. This had been the only way for my brother: without words, without tenderness, issuing a blow so hard it knocked me down.

Years later, when I had already turned my back on the ice-cream parlour, my brother and Sophia got together and she became his wife. But it was decided back then. Back then, in the snow, while I lay on the ground and the final few flakes fell down on me, silent, soft, and slow.

In Amsterdam

After finishing my first degree I embarked on a PhD, but what I really liked to do was hang out in cafés with writers, journalists, and editors. And it was in a café, amid a haze of cigarette smoke and conversations sustained by booze, that I was offered a job at a publishing company. It was more of a suggestion than an actual offer, really, but such distinctions fade as the evening draws to a close. It came from a short man with a bulbous glass in his hand. His eyes were barely visible, since he tended to squeeze them shut, like someone sensitive to light. In reality, the squinting came with the generous smile of Robert Berendsen, a man who not only loved literature but also had a great appetite for life, especially after a few glasses of De Koninck, his favourite beer.

‘Why don't you drop by tomorrow,' he had said. ‘I'm looking for a poetry editor.'

As it did all other evenings, the conversation had revolved around books and authors. Someone had mentioned K. Michel's debut,
Yes! Bare as the Stones
, which had been published a few days previously. Some poets thought it was loudmouth poetry. Noise. ‘Too many exclamation marks,' one man shouted over everybody else. ‘I've lost count.'

Others thought it was a spectacular collection introducing a wholly new voice. ‘I've never read anything like it,' said a man who wrote for a paper. ‘It's frivolous, fresh, and profound at the same time.'

‘I don't think it's poetry,' another person said.

It was an observation made at least once a week. It seldom elicited a response. Some people expected poetry to deliver the same as tap water — clarity above all else. And yet the conversations in the pub were almost always interesting, if only because everybody had different ideas about a particular poet or collection. And because they involved alcohol.

The discussions could get pretty intense. Every so often an exchange would become so heated it degenerated into a fight, at which point the barman would step in. ‘Out,' he would say. ‘Get out! Go and fight outside.'

At university my fellow students and I had studied writers who were six feet under and buried under layer upon layer of literary criticism. We were expected to form our own opinions, but we didn't feel free to do so. Now we were in the thick of it, in the smoke and the buzz, because only a few doors down poetry was being written, and we could say what others hadn't said before.

A young woman joined the conversation. ‘I love K. Michel's sense of wonder,' she said. ‘It's a totally different way of looking at ordinary things.'

I felt compelled to make some qualifying remarks. While I thought it was an incredibly strong collection, neither the language nor the form were new. ‘That outsider perspective,' I said, ‘isn't that something it shares with Martian poetry? And that goes back ten years.' It was a movement which had arisen in Britain in the late Seventies, with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid its trailblazers. In their poetry they viewed the world the way someone from Mars would look at the things around us.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up.

‘If anything, I thought it was liberating to read poems that weren't written by a melancholic for a change,' I said.

Robert Berendsen nodded. ‘Away with wistfulness.'

Another round of beers was bought. ‘To the Martian poets,' someone toasted.

The following year K. Michel would be nominated for the C. Buddingh' Prize, given for the best Dutch-language debut poetry collection published in the previous year, but failed to win the award. It didn't detract from the poet's dream start, though. He had shaken up the literary establishment, or at least a section of it — its crowning glory, poetry. For many, his book opened a door to another world. Young poets tried to bring an even greater sense of wonder to the things around them. Cue experimentation, agitation, hallucination. During that scintillating time of innovation I started a job as an editor at a company that boasted over a hundred years of publishing history.

‘Why don't you drop by tomorrow.' It had sounded like a promise that evaporates the minute you exit the bar, but when I climbed the steps to an impressive canal-side house the following day I received a warm welcome from the publisher. Robert Berendsen's eyes looked even smaller. I was to start the following week.

I shared the news with my parents at the ice-cream parlour. We were sitting in the dining room on the first floor. My brother was downstairs, making coffee for the first few customers. ‘I've got a job,' I said. ‘On Monday I start work as a poetry editor for a publishing company.'

‘What about your thesis?' my mother asked.

It was a question I had anticipated, but had no real answer to. The truth is, I was stuck with my thesis on anonymous poets. ‘I want to work,' I said. ‘I don't want to waste this opportunity.'

‘He says he wants to work,' my father exclaimed. ‘He can't wait to get started. Well, you know what? It's August: grab a
spatola
and get started. I'll have a nap for an hour.'

He got up from the table and walked to the door that opened out onto the roof of the ice-cream parlour's kitchen. There was a lounger there, on which my father now lay his weary body. As he did so we could hear the tubing creak under the tightly stretched fabric. It was only later, after he had retired, that my father started complaining about the many aches and pains in his body: in his back, in his legs, in his hands. Everything ached, even his crotch and his teeth. All his life he had fought the pain, not given in to it, and had simply carried on bending, stoning, pounding, pureeing, pressing, and walking up and down the terrace. There was no time for suffering.

‘He's having a hard time accepting it,' my mother said after a while. ‘He's still having a hard time accepting it.'

I walked down the stairs to the ice-cream parlour. My brother was out front, serving a boy with short, spiky hair. A small queue had formed, mainly children with their parents. It was a warm morning.

I put on an apron and joined Luca. ‘Hello,' I said, and when no reaction was forthcoming, ‘I've come to help.'

Luca nodded, just as he had only nodded when I walked into the ice-cream parlour half an hour earlier.

‘I've got a job,' I said as I filled a cup with vanilla and strawberry ice-cream.

No congratulations, no nothing. He looked at me as though I were a Martian.

In the years to come Luca would do his utmost to say as little as possible to me. Just as he had said hardly anything to Sophia when a boy, he limited his contact with me to a few words. Only when I insisted would he say, ‘I heard you.' It was supposed to be an answer to a question, except that it wasn't. At times I felt like charging at him with the
spatola
.