The Ice-Cream Makers (8 page)

The Israeli poet hung up, furious again.

Since becoming the director of the World Poetry Festival I've been at the receiving end of angry emails from misunderstood poets. And I'm frequently accosted at literary festivals up and down the country. The bard's state of inebriation tends to aggravate things.

‘Why would you like to appear at World Poetry?' I always ask.

‘Because I'm the best poet in the world.'

‘But why do you think World Poetry is so important?'

‘No, I'm the one who's important!'

I try to remain professional and explain that World Poetry has become the major festival that it is because it doesn't just accept any old poet, and we're proud of our autonomy. Not a single sponsor, mayor, embassy, literary foundation, or board interferes with our programming.

Richard Heiman compared the status of the festival to the lighthouse of Alexandria. ‘We're a shining example,' he used to say. If I were to say that, poets would have a go at me and call me an arrogant twat. Heiman could say anything to them. He could make them laugh, too. His imitation of Joseph Brodsky was brilliant: the same accent, the same sing-song delivery. Even Brodsky himself thought it was funny. Many national and international poets had dined in Heiman's apartment on Westzeedijk, built in the New Hague School style of the Thirties. Down in the basement were the old servants' quarters, to which he would retreat occasionally with a stack of poetry books, but in summer he would sit in the large communal garden with roses and snow-white hydrangeas.

‘You must choose,' he said when I was eighteen. We were sitting at the round iron table on the lawn, a bottle of Soave in the wine cooler. ‘Are you going to devote your life to poetry or are you going to become an ice-cream maker?'

My father was an ice-cream maker, his father had been one, and his grandfather had started it. They all had the same thumb, calloused and strong. At the age of four I had made my first ice. Pear sorbet. It had brought tears to my father's eyes. ‘
Sei un piccolo gelataio
,' he proclaimed proudly. I grew up, got an education, started shaving, and broke a heart, but in his eyes I've always remained an ice-cream maker.

‘I want to break with the family tradition,' I said.

‘I thought you might,' Heiman said.

He took a sip of his wine and looked at me. Despite his eyes, there was something boyish about him. Perhaps it was his clean-shaven face, the cheeks that flushed when he cycled. His hair retained traces of blond, the yellow of chicory. Every now and then he'd run his hand through it.

Then suddenly, as though he had made up his mind, Heiman said, ‘Congratulations.' He smiled and raised his glass. With the sun illuminating the golden liquid, we proposed a toast.

‘Fortune favours the bold.'

‘And rejects the fearful.'

Those were the words of the most illustrious of Roman poets. But later that evening in the ice-cream parlour, I didn't have the guts to tell my family that after the summer I would be embarking on an English Literature degree in Amsterdam. I felt as if I was betraying them all — my father; my brother, Luca; and my mother, who held the
spatola
in her hand until midnight. She was always hunched over the ice like a farm labourer over potatoes.

In the garden, with the roses and hydrangeas, the decision had felt like freedom, like disentangling myself from a web of history and tradition. The threads appeared to have snapped. But that had been an illusion. Although so thin as to be practically invisible, the gossamer of the threads remained intact. Little did I realise it at the time, but I would never manage to free myself completely. I removed myself further and further from the ice-cream parlour — I went to university, moved to Amsterdam, and worked a part-time job at Tofani's — and yet the fine familial threads still clung to me.

‘At Tofani's?!' my father yelled. ‘Have you gone mad?'

‘I need money.'

‘They're from Bagni di Lucca. They're Tuscans!'

Most Dutch ice-cream makers came from Vodo or Venas, from the Cadore Valley. They looked down on the Tuscans, who had originally sold figurines but now made a living selling ice. The Tuscans were seen as copycats, their ice of inferior quality, at least by the ice-cream purveyors from Cadore.

‘They offered you a job to get their hands on our recipes! They're thieves.'

‘I'm not preparing ice, I'm scooping it.'

‘Are you selling sandwiches too?' my father asked disparagingly.

Tofani's sold sandwiches as well as ice-cream. In fact, the family had a second ice-cream parlour in Amsterdam that served chips too. In my father's view there was nothing worse than an ice-cream parlour that reeked like a chip shop.

‘Whatever next?' he once asked at the dinner table as he railed against the Tuscans. ‘Soft serve?'

I wasn't working for the enemy. I was working for barbarians.

Luca no longer talked to me. Whenever I was in the ice-cream parlour, he pretended not to see me, or he refused to leave the kitchen, where the ice-cream was made. Since I wasn't working, he had to work. He wanted me to see it, to feel it.

Only my mother enquired after my studies and wanted to know what Tofani's ice-cream was really like.

‘Their fruit flavours aren't as good as ours,' I told her, ‘but they've got ice-cream made of pine kernels that is irresistible.'

My degree was everything I expected it to be. All my classes were taught in English. In lectures, the academics showed the same dedication to their subject as Heiman; in seminars, we discussed literary texts in small groups —
The Spanish Tragedy
by Kyd, Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
, Shakespeare's sonnets. It made you feel like an aristocrat from the Elizabethan age. You ended up talking like one, too. All flowery and posh. It wasn't everybody's cup of tea. Some students dropped out after a month, switching to another degree.

I spent most of my time in the library, where I read the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great English poet.
The Canterbury Tales
,
Troilus and Criseyde
. It was indeed a choice for a different life; there was the same silence that surrounds monks, except it came accompanied by young women burying their noses in heavy tomes. Sitting across from me on one occasion was a girl reading Shakespeare's tragedies. The bard had written the greatest and most powerful within the space of just a few years:
Othello
,
Hamlet
,
King Lear
,
Macbeth
. Heiman reckoned these were his best plays. They were tragedies that cut through the soul, but without the frills and the plethora of confusing names you find in history plays such as
Richard III
. Shakespeare had followed
Macbeth
with a couple of romances, but none of them achieved the depth of his best work.

The girl had blonde hair and a snub nose and came from a village in Brabant called Wouw. When she woke up the following morning, she said: ‘Gosh, you move a lot in your sleep.'

‘I dreamed about what we did.'

She rubbed her eyes and yawned. It made her look innocent, extremely young. Or maybe it was the snub nose that did it, the freckles on the slightly turned-up tip. She turned into a little girl when she stretched.

I hadn't been allowed to make any noise. Her housemate was already in bed and the walls were like cardboard. She had taken me home after we'd had wine in a café — glasses to begin with, and then a whole bottle. The plan had been to go for a meal, but by the end of the evening the wine had driven away the hunger. A different hunger had taken its place.

‘You pedal,' she had said.

I didn't have a bike in Amsterdam at the time and used to go everywhere on foot. But now I was invited to mount an old-style granny bike that had been painted yellow, with a girl on the back, her legs dangling down the left-hand side. The headlights of the passing cars made her nylon tights shimmer.

And so I lost my virginity underneath a bookshelf that also held a diary somewhere — in between W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to be precise. She pressed her hand on my mouth. She had lost her virginity at fifteen. The person in question had been a bad boy, she told me when we were lying next to each other in the morning. Quite a bit older. He had also slept with her best friend. She had expected it to be a special experience, virginity being something you can only give away once. The second time had been much nicer. It was with another boy, her childhood sweetheart who'd stayed behind in Wouw. He had a spluttering Zündapp and a quiff.

I was afraid to tell her that I had lost my virginity to her. We spent the rest of the morning in bed. We kissed, we had sex again — and then we had it a third time. Her name was Laura. It was Saturday, it was September, it was sunny. In the ice-cream parlour I knew my mother would be leaning over the ice-cream, my father holding a tray with coffee aloft, and my brother filling the Cattabriga cylinder with a mixture of milk, sugar, egg yolks, and ground almonds.

On the train home on Sunday, I couldn't stop thinking of Laura's sex. I had kissed it, the urge stronger than myself.

‘What are you doing?'

I had no idea; I couldn't help myself. My heart was pounding like a fist on a door.

‘It tickles.'

I kissed the whitest part of her body until she said in a firm but velvety whisper, ‘I want you inside me.'

When I got home, Luca could see it, I knew it. Just as I entered the ice-cream parlour, he came out of the kitchen with a tub of virtually white pineapple ice. Our eyes met — his dark, like Kalamata olives — and he knew it. You can tell. Sometimes you can even smell it. A certain glow, pheromones. When I'm on my way to an international poetry festival and too tired to read poems, I play a little game: I try to guess who has just had sex. The early-morning flights are the best. You see the fresh faces, the rosy glow on some cheeks, the recently washed hair of the women. And then you look into their puffy eyes, the bags under them. The alarm clock that woke them from a deep sleep, the alarm deliberately set too early so there would be some time for snoozing. You think about the men having to travel to Shanghai for work, and their wives snuggling up against them, mounting them. You think about stewardesses having to hurry and their boyfriends not wanting to let them go, hitching their skirts up and taking them with their hair still wet. Once, on the train to the airport, I saw a dark-skinned woman in a sky-blue uniform rubbing a stain from her jacket.

For a moment I worried that my brother might drop the container of pineapple ice, but he made his way stoically to the front of the shop, where my mother was serving an elderly lady. He set the tub in the chiller display, turned on his heels, and walked back to the kitchen. This time he avoided my gaze.

My mother asked if I was free to help. It was going to be a warm day. I nodded and walked to the back to fetch an apron.

‘Feeling guilty?' my father asked when he saw me.

‘No, I'm happy to help.'

‘We started making ice-cream at six this morning.'

I knew. I could tell by his puffy eyes, the bags underneath. That was all I saw, that was all I wanted to see. I went outside and walked over to a couple sitting in the sun. The woman had to tell me her order twice. It was a late summer's day that felt like spring. ‘The heart is pounding and not here,' the poet J.C. Bloem wrote in ‘First Day of Spring'. I thought of Laura, of the freckles on her nose and of her sex.

Every time I entered the ice-cream parlour that day I could see my brother through the small window in the kitchen door. He held the ice ladle in his right hand like a gigantic phallus. He had never had sex. The ice-cream parlour was his future. As it had been mine once, the route mapped out for me. The two of us were going to take over Venezia like the Tofani brothers had taken over their parents' ice-cream parlour. Later they'd been joined by wives, and one of the brothers had helped the other set up his own ice-cream parlour. It had been the same story for my father and his younger brother.

Early in the evening I hung my apron over a chair. The big rush was over; it had been a good day.

‘Where are you off to?' my father wanted to know.

‘I'm going out for dinner.'

‘We don't eat till nine.'

We always ate late; first Luca and me, then my parents. We lived above the ice-cream parlour. The dining room and my parents' bedroom were located on the first floor. Luca and I slept in the attic.

‘I have to go,' I said.

‘I have to work,' my father retorted. ‘I have to help your brother.'

He'd never been able to do anything else, because it was out of the question in those days, or because he'd never had the guts. But I didn't have the nerve to say so.

‘Go on,' he said. ‘Go to your poetry pals.'

Years later I would slink out of a woman's house in much the same fashion, on my way to a mistress. The woman would be my first girlfriend, my only long-term partner. Sure, I felt guilty when I walked out that evening, under the ice-cream parlour's red-and-white striped awning and into the late summer evening. Those gossamer-thin threads kept tugging at me. Everything was connected to everything else: my stomach to the pulsating ice-cream machine; my heart to the knife in the kitchen, its blade red with strawberry juice; my head to the house in Venas; my feet to the pine forest, the earth threaded through with roots.