The Ice-Cream Makers (2 page)

‘What's the weather like in Ireland?'

My mother is obsessed with the weather. Back in the day, when she was still working at the ice-cream parlour in Rotterdam, she'd open the newspaper to the page with the weather. And she'd eavesdrop on conversations at the supermarket checkout if they were about showers and frost. Now she's retired and many miles from the ice-cream parlour, but she still can't help asking everybody about the weather. The weather today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next week. It doesn't matter where — it could always make its way to Rotterdam. She reckons the sky above the Netherlands is a vortex where everything gathers, but especially rain, wind, and frost. The beat of a butterfly wing in Brazil is bound to cause a hail storm of biblical proportions above the ice-cream parlour.

‘Sunny,' I reply. ‘Persistently calm and summery weather, with the odd patch of fog in the morning.' Before adding, ‘No cloud-wrapped buildings.'

She doesn't say anything, but I know she's smiling. My mother has less of an issue with my choice for a different life. Just like she is obsessive about the weather, I love poetry, and my father loves tools. My brother is the only one still making ice-cream.

‘Beppi's lost his mind,' she says, and repeats what she heard him say. I laugh at the muscles my father wants to kiss.

‘Maybe it's Alzheimer's,' my mother says. ‘Fausto Olivo pulls his underpants over his head. The doctor says he's suffering from dementia.' She's referring to the old ice-cream maker from La Venezia in Leiden. He retired only a couple of years ago. His eldest son is continuing the tradition.

‘Mrs Olivo told me that Fausto thinks she's the neighbour and that he keeps pinching her bottom.'

My mother knows more about Alzheimer's than mobile phones. She's quiet for a moment. Perhaps she's looking at the photos on the kitchen cupboards, at the portrait of her grandson, who left for Mexico a week ago.

‘She's got red hair,' she resumes. ‘Your father's new love has got long red hair.'

I think about the women I've seen in the street here. There are lots of red-haired women in Ireland. They're quicker to blush, because their skin is thinner and the blood shines through more easily. But often they're even quicker to look away. Yet not so the young woman who welcomed guests at the Fermoy International Poetry Festival. As she stood behind a small desk, I noticed a pink bra underneath her blouse and a milky-way of freckles on her skin. When I looked up again, I looked straight into her eyes, but she didn't bat an eyelid, neither literally nor figuratively. She'd seen what I'd been gazing at. Eventually, my eyes conceded defeat and I looked down at the form on the desk.

‘What should I say to him?' my mother asks. ‘He's been a bit depressed. I know he's dreading spring and finds it hard to enjoy life because he thinks it's all over. I need to lay out his clothes for him or else he'll wear the same ones, day in, day out.'

Some people become more beautiful as life wears on, as the years refine their character like a fine wine, as everything that's been ripening — the things they've learnt, experiences, major life events — turns into an elixir that may not prolong life, but does add a sheen to it. It's not that my father has forgotten anything, but that all of these things have ruined his character.

‘He's still talking to the television,' my mother says. ‘Would you like to hear it? Should I walk over to him with the phone?'

‘That's okay,' I reply, but I can hear her walking out of the kitchen.

‘I'm calling the doctor tomorrow morning,' she says to me, having made up her mind. ‘He'll have to come over on a Saturday. It's an emergency.'

‘It is nonsense, says reason,' I say, citing the famous poem by German poet Erich Fried. ‘It is what it is, says love.'

‘What's that you're saying?'

My gaze lingers briefly on the art in my hotel room, a watercolour of a grassy plain. In the distance is a boy, walking away.

‘It's a poem,' I say. ‘About love, what it is.'

‘It's insanity, that's what it is,' my mother says. ‘He's hugging the television!'

In my hotel rooms I sometimes try to establish contact with the flatscreens that greet me:
Dear Mr Giovanni Talamini, it's a pleasure to welcome you to the Ascot Hotel;
Welcome G. Talamini! Enjoy your stay in Radisson Blu
;
Welcome to the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Dear Mr Talamini, it's a privilege to have you staying at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. To continue, please press okay
.

‘Can you believe it?' I hear my mother's voice in my ear again. There's a brief glitch, and I imagine that perhaps for a split second the radio waves containing her words cross Betty Heidler's path from space into the television room in Venas di Cadore. ‘I prefer to hear his usual complaints about his life and about yours.'

At long last, memory kicks in: I see my brother in the ice-cream parlour, a white cap on his head, in his right hand
the
spatola
, the small flat spoon he uses to scoop ice-cream for the customers. It's late in the evening, but still mild outside. Black birds whizz through the air, and even higher up an Airbus is making its way to America, the lights in the cabin dimmed, although you can't see that from the ground. Young women are out in the street, some in skirts or denim shorts with the pockets hanging out. Luca's eyes linger on their bums. His wife is sleeping, laid out like a swimmer, one arm stretched above her head, the other beside her body. The last few customers are sitting outside on the terrace: boys and girls who've been to the cinema and now fancy a strawberry and mango cone, an old man who finds solace in a milkshake just before midnight.

The Discovery of Ice-cream by My Great-Grandfather in 1881

My father's father's father was also called Giuseppe Talamini. He had wavy hair, a big nose, and a twinkle in his dark-blue eyes. The story goes that he lost his life in an accident involving a runaway cow. The cow, a 900-kilo Tyrolean Grey, had broken through the pasture fence. After pattering down the steep slope towards the farmhouse, she somehow managed to clamber onto the roof of the small hayshed in which my grandfather took his daily nap in total seclusion and silence.

The silvery grey cow fell through the timber roof and crushed my seventy-six-year-old great-grandfather. He probably didn't die instantly, but succumbed to his injuries later. When he didn't turn up for dinner a search got underway, but he wasn't found until the sun had sunk behind the mountains. The cow was still lying on top of him, licking his clothes. My great-grandfather had a remarkably serene expression on his face. In fact, he appeared to be smiling.

The cow was put down that same evening; both her forelegs were broken, so there was little choice. Then, gradually, night fell and the foxes came out of the forest and the dogs started barking in the cold mountain air. The following morning, the people talked about the sudden death of Giuseppe Talamini and soon concluded that however strange it may have been, this was a death that befitted my great-grandfather's life. His was a life full of unexpected twists and eccentric turns, a life from which he'd always demanded the most, right up to his death. Perhaps that was the reason for the smile on his face.

What was my great-grandfather thinking of as he lay dying under the cow with nobody to come to his rescue, as he felt his life ebbing away? What do you think of when you know you're dying? As he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. A similar image came to Giuseppe Talamini.

It was the summer when the tiny ripples underneath the dress of his neighbour, Maria Grazia, became voluptuous curves. An indecent miracle.

They had grown up together — had searched for pinecones in the forest together and had lain hand-in-hand under the clear sky of their childhood. Maria Grazia loved the sun, and the sun loved her honey-toned skin. Privately, Giuseppe called her
girasole
, sunflower. As the sun, slow as a billion-year-old, crossed the sky to the west, Maria Grazia moved her body with it, inch by inch, wanting to catch as many rays as possible and not give the shade the time of day. Giuseppe never moved, so they ended up lying in the grass like a life-sized clock.

Then came the last summer they were children. By now Giuseppe was afraid to look at his neighbour. It was as if her breasts were growing in the sun, becoming rounder and fuller by the day, like loaves rising in an oven. He fantasised about the colour of her nipples. One day they were pink, like her lips; the next, pale and transparent like the palms of her hands, or dark like hazelnuts. When a gentle breeze drifted over from the mountains one afternoon, he saw two tips poking through her blouse. While the cicadas were singing and the May beetles buzzing, Maria Grazia and Giuseppe lay quietly in the tall grass. They held hands and looked at the clear sky. Everything was the same, yet everything had changed.

And so it happened that by the end of the summer Giuseppe walked past the door he'd knocked on every single morning. He was joining his father, a lumberjack with a penchant for whistling. Sometimes Giuseppe would recognise a melody and he'd whistle along with his father. At the end of September the trees on the mountain were cut down, twenty-metre larches with dead-straight trunks. It was hard work, and not without danger. You never knew exactly how a tree would come down. Cutting, cleaving, felling — the stark sound ricocheting off the other trees, followed by the dull thud and the earth shuddering like a passing locomotive. On another slope, in another year, a tree had landed on top of a lumberjack. He was killed instantly.

Giuseppe helped strip the trees by removing all the branches with an axe. Next, he and his father cut the trunks into five-metre logs. The sweat that mingled with the sawdust, the resin that stuck to their bodies — the smell was sharp and stung his eyes. Never before had Giuseppe been as tired as after those long days in the forest.

Around Christmas, when the entire region was covered in a blanket of immaculate snow, the logs would be taken on a sledge down to the river, the Piave, which ran all the way to Venice, nearly two hundred kilometres further south. The logs were tied into large rafts, which were then pushed into the water. Hundreds of them floated downstream. Days later they arrived in Venice, where they were driven deep into the muddy, sandy soil, eight piles per square metre. Giuseppe could picture it, the fairytale city built on the water, with its countless bridges, churches, and high-ceilinged palaces. On special evenings, candles dripping in silver chandeliers would illuminate frescos of timeless tales, he imagined.

But winter was still a long way off, and snow graced only the highest peaks. One morning his father woke him earlier than usual. It was dark outside and the stars shone in the clear night sky. Giuseppe heard the voices of other men from the village. He recognised the sonorous bass of Antonio Zardus, the metalsmith. The men were talking softly, tall shapes leaning in towards one another. He felt like a witness to a conspiracy. They set off in the stagecoach. Of the seven men, Giuseppe was the youngest. As they drove out of the village, they all smiled at him. He could see the moon-white teeth of his father's friends.

They were silent, listening to the rattle of the hooves, until the sun rose above the mountains. Golden and rosy-fingered, it was a Homeric dawn. Giuseppe now recognised other faces too. Sitting beside him was the tinker, opposite him the locksmith. Strong men, each of them.

‘Look,' his father said, pointing to the slope where two roe deer stood between the pines, immobile like statues, alarmed by the sound of the coach. They were only there for a split second, and then they darted off into the forest.

Antonio Zardus broke a loaf of bread; the locksmith cut slices off a chunk of dried meat. They ate open-mouthed, with great relish. The wooden floorboards of the stagecoach were covered with pickaxes and shovels, which shook and shifted to the rhythm of the horses' tread. Giuseppe had no idea what these men and he were about to do. His father had woken him, telling him only to come along. After getting out of bed, he had dressed really fast.

‘They spent nearly ten years building it,' he heard someone say. ‘The teams worked towards each other; more than a thousand people on either side.' It was Enrico Zangrando, who possessed more cattle than hair on his head. The other men sometimes slapped him on his bald pate for the beautiful sound it produced. He owned quite a bit of land by birth, but didn't put himself above anyone else.

‘It's the longest railway tunnel in the world,' Enrico told them. ‘Fifteen kilometres long, straight through the Saint-Gotthard Massif. They started off with tunnel-boring machines driven by compressed air, but when they couldn't get through the hard stone they switched to dynamite.'

The explosions had been terribly loud, like the violent noises of war. Demand was such that an explosives factory was built on the northern side, not far from Lake Lucerne. Holes a metre deep were drilled and the dynamite detonated inside. Poisonous gases filled the tunnel, causing inflammation of the workers' eyes and lungs. Forty-six men lost their lives in the explosions, until, on 28 February 1880, a breach was achieved. Hands gripped one another, hammers and pickaxes enlarged the hole, and then, finally, the first man stepped through. It was almost unreal, as though he had stepped into another world.