The Ice-Cream Makers (7 page)

Even now, after all these years, I try to read the golden letters in my mind. Could it have been
To Urania
by Joseph Brodsky, or Philip Larkin's
High Windows
? Was he reading
The Last Rose
by Anna Akhmatova, or perhaps the collected poems of Paul Celan? I can no longer ask him; he has crossed the river, taking all his memories with him.

‘Would you care to order something?' I asked.

He looked up, startled. ‘Pardon.' One word, followed by those blue eyes trying to peer inside. ‘Had you been waiting long, sir?'

No customer had ever addressed me as ‘sir'. It befitted his character, but I wasn't to know that until later. Back then I saw what made him so gallant: at times he seemed to hail from a different era altogether. The era of the poets he held so dear. The Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey. And Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron, of course.

He ordered an espresso.

The following day he opened a different book. I decided not to ask him what he wanted to drink and brought him an espresso. To my surprise he looked up from the poem he was reading and said, ‘That's very kind of you, sir.' Then he fixed his gaze back on the book.

It was a month before I plucked up the courage to ask what he was reading.

‘This,' Heiman replied, ‘this is contemporary, impenetrable poetry with the occasional crystal-clear image. Let's start with something else.'

He asked me to join him at his table, and when I was seated opposite him he began to recite from Percy Bysshe Shelley's long autobiographical poem ‘Epipsychidion'. First in English, then in the Dutch translation. ‘
I never was attached to that great sect, / Whose doctrine is, that each one should select / Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, / And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend / To cold oblivion
.' His hands moved as though he was reciting before a full auditorium. The other customers were looking at us, and even my mother, who was scooping ice-cream for a little girl, turned her head. ‘
Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, / The life that wears, the spirit that creates / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A sepulchre for its eternity
.' That was it, and he looked at me with his watery eyes, the eyes of an old man.

It was as if something had wafted up from those lines, a certain scent or perfume.

Time and again I have wondered why he chose this poem, why he recited these particular stanzas from ‘Epipsychidion'. At the same time I ask myself: if I were given the opportunity to show someone the beauty of poetry, what poem would I initiate them with? Where to start? So many teachers manage to put students off with their very first poem, or worse, saddle them with a lifelong aversion to poetry. The choice seems infinite, but there's really only one option: a different poem for each student's soul. Poems should never be read in front of a class as a whole.

Heiman asked me what I thought. I didn't know what to say. I was young; my voice hadn't even broken yet. What could I have said? That I was going to change my life's course? That I was now going to open my heart to a hundred women, all of them the love of my life? Or had the poem already done so? Had the door to one of the rooms been opened a crack, without me noticing? Sometimes I think so.

He broke the silence by telling me about Shelley's premature death, at the age of thirty. ‘He drowned in the Bay of Lerici after his vessel, the
Don Juan
, sank.' The poet washed up on the beach between Massa and Viareggio a couple of days later, a collection of poems by John Keats in one of the pockets of his white sailor's breeches. The poems, as well as his body, were burned on the beach. Those were the days of cholera and the plague; everything that washed ashore had to be consumed by fire. The ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome,
a rolling green lawn beside the city wall
where
the wind whispers through the leaves
and where three years previously his young son William had been buried. ‘Shelley's heart wouldn't burn,' Heiman told me, ‘and was sent to his wife Mary.' After her death in 1851, it was found in one of her desk drawers. Wrapped in the poem ‘Adonaïs', it had crumbled to dust.

Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive.

After the death of his last surviving son, Percy Florence, what remained of the heart was buried in Bournemouth, where Mary lay buried too. By then his mistress Claire Clairmont had already passed away. She had been buried, by her own wish, with a shawl Shelley had given her.

Before he became director of the World Poetry Festival, Richard Heiman had been a lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to that he had spent some time at Stanford, a place of low sandstone buildings and foxglove trees with squirrels clambering up their trunks. The governor had had his will drawn up by him, and the university's president had also had his deeds executed before him. But there had been an affair with a female student nearly twenty years his junior, the daughter of a prominent public notary. Despite Heiman's promise and the high regard of his colleagues, his position had become untenable. It was the only transgression of his life, but he didn't see it that way. He would always remember California fondly. The long, mellow evenings and the eternal sunshine. Her magnificent face — Natalie, her name was — and the slender chain with the bee-shaped charm around her neck. It was a present from her father or her first boyfriend; he forgot which.

But he never forgot a poet. He knew more about poetry than anyone. He couldn't imagine life without it.

‘Nonsense,' my father said. ‘You can live perfectly well without poetry. I've done so for over forty years.'

It was a different life, Richard Heiman meant to say. A life less beautiful. He used those words without qualms, but also without wanting to be elitist. He was like the doctors of yore who prescribed oranges; poetry enriches your life, he told others. He proclaimed it in lecture theatres, standing behind the lectern, his hands moving while he spoke.

He could recite poems in five different languages — Dutch, English, French, German, and Latin — and had an anecdote about every single poet.

‘Charles Baudelaire dyed his hair green and would tell everybody at parties that the taste of children's brains reminded him of walnuts.'

‘Gérard de Nerval owned a lobster that he'd walk on a blue silk ribbon in the gardens of the Palais Royal.'

‘When Anna Akhmatova was under surveillance by the secret police, she wrote her poems on cigarette papers. Visitors were asked to memorise them, after which she lit a match under the paper.'

‘Johnny van Doorn makes the most potent garlic soup! It contains forty cloves and is a remedy against depression, irregular bowels, sensitive skin, menstrual problems, and dizziness.'

‘Edwin Arlington Robinson asked his family to carry his bed outside so he could die under the stars.'

My father had to cycle through the streets with an ice-cream cart at the age of fifteen. I listened to poetry. During the years Heiman frequented the ice-cream parlour I received daily poetry lectures, covering everything from Aesop to twentieth-century Dutch poet Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager. They were brief excursions, but I began to long for a more extensive sojourn in this world of autumn days and still inland lakes, of white blossom and the wide, wide ocean.

‘That will do for now,' my father would say every morning. ‘There's work to be done.'

In the early days he had greeted Heiman with a smile. That was back when we first had our espresso machine, a Faema E61, streamlined like a sports car. It came from Milan and drew a lot of attention from Italians living in Rotterdam. They praised its curves, and the taste of the espresso even more so.

‘
Buonissimo
.'

‘
Perfettamente
.'

Some claimed to detect a hint of roses in the aroma. The Dutch were less effusive. The first customer to be served an espresso by my father was flabbergasted when he saw his cup.

‘What's this?'

‘Espresso.'

‘There's hardly anything in that cup.'

‘That's the idea.'

‘I can almost see the bottom.'

A week later a bucket appeared next to the espresso machine. Whenever someone complained about the small quantity of coffee relative to the price, my father's standard response would be, ‘You can have a free bucket of water with it.'

Only Heiman drank his espresso like an Italian. He savoured it, as though it were a short poem, a haiku.

My father stopped greeting him warmly after I started joining him at his table a month later. It was like the song of the Sirens. Odysseus had himself tied to the ship's mast. Given the choice, my father would have chained me to the ice-cream machine.

‘You can't live off poetry,' he said. ‘Haven't you seen those poets swarming around him like flies?'

Every now and then Heiman would sit on the terrace with a couple of poets and treat them to an ice-cream.

‘That young man over there has used sticky tape to fix the sole to his shoe,' my father whispered. ‘Do you see that?'

Or, ‘If it weren't for Heiman, I'd have mistaken them for tramps and chased them off.'

Heiman never looked down on others. His suits were handmade and he always wore a tie, but he hadn't forgotten his roots. His parents were simple folk, like Shakespeare's, whose father had been a glove-maker. Heiman's most vivid childhood memory was the smell of fried udder. They ate it every Saturday, and his mother always made do with the smallest portion. He didn't put himself above poets; he admired them — many of them, anyway. It didn't just take talent, in his view, but something else too, something that defied description. It had to do with seclusion and perseverance, as well as a detachment from things, from possessions. A table and a sheet of paper were all you needed. As with monks, it was a choice for a different life. There were poets who couldn't hack it. Some became addicted to alcohol or drugs. Some committed suicide. The list was long. Heiman had known two in person. They had been younger than Shelley.

I have never wanted to be a poet. I lack the talent. It's not in my blood, the sacred to which all else must be sacrificed. Of course, I tried in those early years, touched by the language of the tormented souls and the illustrious dead. I produced three poems, including a sonnet in the style of Petrach, the swan of Vaucluse. But my sonnet sought to be more lyrical than the whole of the
Canzoniere
. I was the swan of Venice, albeit not of the lagoon city, with its hazy mornings and lions overlooking the tranquil canals, but of the ice-cream parlour, with its sweet flavours in all colours of the rainbow.

Yet at least twice a year I am invited to a poetry festival somewhere in the world. They're not the most insignificant festivals, either. Sometimes I'm already on the poster. I've got several programmes featuring my name: Giovanni Talamini, renowned Dutch poet of Italian descent. My poetry is praised for its ‘keen insight into the human psyche' and, on the far side of the world, for ‘the light-heartedness' I combine with ‘a subtle sense of mortality'.

Many festival directors are poets who are keen to appear on the most prestigious stage of all, the World Poetry Festival. They think it's a case of quid pro quo. A couple of years ago I had a spat with an Israeli poet. He phoned to tell me that he wanted to read in Rotterdam. The time was ripe.

‘What do you mean that's not how it works?' he asked indignantly.

‘As a matter of principle I never book poets who are also directors.'

The Israeli poet was the director of the Sha'ar International Poetry Festival. Its emphasis was on dialogue between the Hebrew- and Arab-speaking cultures. It hosted socially engaged poets from around the world. It was an important festival.

‘But you get to perform at mine,' he offered.

‘I don't want to.'

‘On the main stage.'

‘I'm not a poet.'

‘You've written the odd poem, haven't you?'

‘I don't want to read them, not even with a gun to my head.'

There was a moment's silence on the other end of the line. ‘I've recited at festivals all over the world,' the Israeli poet resumed. ‘In Medellín, in Berlin, in Struga.'

No doubt the directors or programmers of Medellín, Berlin, and Struga had also performed in Tel Aviv, but I didn't say so.

‘When you're no longer a director, I may consider it.'

The Israeli poet hung up, furious, but not long ago he phoned again. ‘I'm not a director anymore,' he said gleefully. ‘So you can book me now.'

I told him he'd receive an invite in due course if we thought his work was good enough.

‘So if I don't receive an invite, my work isn't good enough.'

That's what it boiled down to, but many poets were unable to accept this.