The Ice-Cream Makers (13 page)

‘Now,' Luca yelled, and I dove into the cocoon, feeling his body behind mine a split second later. At first we often got it wrong and ended up lying on top of each other and overturning. There was snow everywhere, even in our underpants, and Luca's red cheeks were barely a centimetre from my laughing mouth. After a while we began to master the technique, and we'd be whizzing down the slopes like proper bobsledders. We shot across bumps, careered around impossible bends, and hurtled ever faster towards the future. But the dream would never come true.

At the dinner table we were quizzed on our search for the inventor of ice-cream. ‘You must go and talk to Serafino Dall'Asta,' my father said. ‘He knows who invented the ice-cream cone. Maybe he also knows who invented the ice-cream itself.'

We no longer believed that we might one day discover the origins of ice-cream. Signor Marinello had been awake throughout our second visit, but his story failed to bring us any closer to the truth.

‘Isn't it beautiful?' he had said while gazing out of the window.

‘What is?'

‘The snow.'

Luca and I said nothing. It had been snowing for days on end. As far as we were concerned, it was about time it stopped.

‘It's the same snow my grandfather trudged through,' Signor Marinello said. ‘In winter he'd practised the art of confectionary in the Po Valley, and in Venice he'd learned how to cool a mixture. The necessary salt was brought in from Sicily.'

He didn't sound like someone who was forgetful and might suddenly claim that his great-aunt had created the hamburger.

‘Round about what time was this?' Luca asked. ‘When was your grandfather in Venice?'

‘It may have been my grandfather's father,' Signor Marinello replied. ‘Or even my great-grandfather's father.'

Luca's left eyebrow shot up, but I was prepared to hear the story out.

‘I was born nearly a hundred years ago,' Signor Marinello elaborated. ‘My great-great-grandfather would have been born another hundred years earlier.'

The distance of time was too great to get our heads round. Hardly anything had been passed down: no photos, no objects; only a story, which had been twisted and turned by each new generation.

‘It's the snow,' Signor Marinello explained. ‘Everything gets buried, the tracks erased.'

And yet many could picture their grandfather up in the mountains with his sleeves rolled up and a pick-axe in his hands. Maybe they could picture it because their fathers had followed in his footsteps, and they themselves in their fathers', and some of them could see even further back, through the snow that was identical to the snow in their own lives. Once upon a time, the very first ice-cream maker must have stood there, shrouded in mist, in that blinding, frozen landscape.

Snow. Snow is unbelievably common in poetry, even more so than falling autumn leaves. The cheerful snow of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the snow of Ted Hughes, which is sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's flakes, descending ‘silent, and soft, and slow'; the hurried flecks of Alexander Pushkin; and of course
les neiges d'antan
, as envisaged by François Villon. But it was only after reading the English poet Maura Dooley that I began to view snow differently. This was more than thirty years after Luca and I had interviewed Signor Marinello. When I read the poem ‘The World Turned Upside Down', about ‘a skein of snow', I was instantly cast back into the past.

Everything drained, thinned
to a blankness, pattern that lost
all pattern, a bleakness that took
Wilson Bentley a lifetime to define.
Snowflake, no two ice flowers alike.

Until then, the name Wilson Bentley had slipped my mind but it had not been lost forever. As my eyes skimmed over the letters, it was as if the sulphurous head of a match was lit, instantly igniting the story.

‘I'd like to show something,' Signor Marinello said on that day Luca and I interviewed him. He rose from his armchair and walked over to the bookcase. For a moment I thought he was going to take out a photo album, like Mr Zampieri. Not so. The book he removed did contain photos, but not of himself as a handsome young man at a station that had long ceased to exist.

‘This book contains two thousand five hundred photos of snowflakes,' he said. ‘They were taken by Wilson Alwyn Bentley.' He told us that Bentley hailed from Jericho, a tiny place in Vermont. As a teenager he became fascinated by snowflakes and tried to draw them with the help of a microscope, but the ice crystals were too complex to copy before they evaporated. A folding camera with bellows offered a solution. Bentley hooked the camera up to the microscope and caught the snowflakes on a velvet cloth. It was exceedingly complicated. Even below freezing, snowflakes evaporate without melting first. But on 15 January 1885, Wilson Alwyn Bentley photographed his very first specimen. Many more were to follow. During his lifetime he photographed more than five thousand snowflakes.

‘He held his breath for each photo,' Signor Marinello said.

Despite the technical limitations, his photos were so good that for nearly a hundred years hardly anyone else would photograph snowflakes. Later, Bentley would also turn his attentions to measuring the size of raindrops.

‘He died of pneumonia after trudging six miles through a snowstorm,' said Signor Marinello.

We looked at the photo book, at all the pictures of snowflakes, the dazzling ice crystals. To Bentley each specimen was a masterpiece in itself, whereas we leafed through the book the way we walked through the white streets — young and indifferent.

‘He looked right through the snow,' Signor Marinello told us. ‘And when he did, he saw miracles of beauty. That's what he called his snowflakes: miracles of beauty.'

We had gradually begun to give up hope. It may well have had something to do with the new girl who had moved into our village. There was no direct correlation, but it wasn't a complete coincidence either that the end of our search for the original ice-cream maker of Cadore coincided with our first infatuation.

We had spotted her in the snow. She had her head tilted back and her mouth wide open. She must have noticed us staring, because at some point she said, ‘It's funny to see you're holding hands.' Then she walked off and disappeared among the riot of flakes.

Luca had immediately wrenched his hand from mine.

We wouldn't see the girl again until several days later, when we also saw just what a long tongue she had. She could easily touch the tip of her nose with it.

‘You mean you can't do that?' she asked, baffled. Her eyes were grey-green, I noticed.

Luca was the first to try, then me. But neither of us managed to pull it off.

‘Again,' the girl said, and pulled Luca's nose without warning. ‘You're nearly there now,' she said. ‘You're just a hair's breadth away.'

I was up next. I felt her cold fingers around the wings of my nose. I stuck out my tongue as far as possible and she pulled as hard as she could. It hurt. Luca must have felt it too, but he never let on.

She shook her head. ‘You can't do it either.'

‘I'm Sophia,' she said then.

We introduced ourselves and told her where we lived. She came from the south, from Modena. Her parents weren't ice-cream makers. Her father was the new boss of one of the glasses factories in the region.

‘I can catch two snowflakes at once.'

We gazed at her long, narrow tongue, which appeared to hover in the cold air, and at the masterpieces landing on it. We held our breath.

That evening in bed, Luca asked, ‘What's on your mind?'

I was thinking of Sophia's tongue, but replied instead, ‘A new jump for our sledge.'

‘Same here.'

She was thirteen, a year younger than me, a year older than Luca. We had the tacit agreement that boys his age were his friends and boys my age my friends. But with Sophia being in between the two of us, the question was who she belonged to.

The following morning we rang her doorbell. Her mother answered. Like her daughter, she had blonde hair and a wide mouth. But she also had long and smooth tanned legs sticking out from under a yellow dressing-gown. We were too young for them, just as we were for the buttocks she clothed in tight skirts when she was out and about. The men in the village were all exactly the right age, but they couldn't believe their eyes the first time they saw her. A mirage, a summery woman in the middle of winter. Everybody wondered what she was doing here, this big-city beauty.

The same was true for her daughter. She turned our world upside-down.

Luca, who was usually so chatty, had been rendered speechless. I had to do all the talking. ‘We've got a sledge,' I said. ‘Do you fancy coming with us?'

‘I'd like to stay in for a bit,' Sophia replied.

‘All right.'

And so we stayed in, but we had no idea what to play with.

‘You can take your coats off if you like,' Sophia said after a while.

Her mother brought us all a cup of tea and then must have left to get changed, because shortly afterwards she re-entered the living room in a purple dress with flowers on it. There was July in that dress, the sun high in the sky. Sophia smiled when she saw her mother.

Meanwhile Luca and I hadn't said a word, just taken turns sipping the hot tea.

Eventually Sophia said, ‘Who'd like to brush my hair?'

Suddenly it was Luca who was the quickest off the mark.

He was handed a brush and set to work on Sophia's blonde hair. It gleamed like the halos of the statues in church. My mother had strong black hair with a blue tinge to it. We had often brushed it when we were little, so we knew how to move the brush through and how to get the tangles out without hurting. Still, every now and then I could see Sophia grimacing with pain, but that may well have been feigned. Perhaps she didn't want to let on that she was enjoying it. I used to brush one half of my mother's hair and Luca the other, but this time he didn't hand the brush over to me.

‘Have you been practising?' Sophia asked me.

I didn't know what she meant until she stuck out her tongue and brought the tip to her nose.

I shook my head. ‘Does practising make a difference?'

‘It did for my father,' she replied. ‘He can do it now.'

We hadn't seen her father yet. He was the boss of one of the bigger glasses factories, or so we had heard at the kitchen table. ‘They hired him to outwit the Chinese,' my father had said. ‘To crush them.'

‘Ouch,' Sophia said with a smile as Luca finished brushing.

She looked prettier when Luca put the hairbrush down on the table.

‘What next?'

I glanced at the bristles, at the spool of golden hair caught in them. I had to stop myself from pulling it out and slipping it into my pocket.

Since Luca wouldn't say it, I did. ‘Let's go outside.'

The sledge's cocoon wouldn't hold all three of us, so we took turns going downhill with Sophia. I had no idea whether Luca talked when he was alone with her, whether he held her, and what the exact distance between his mouth and her cheeks was when they lay in the snow after a tumble. I only knew what happened when I slid down the white meadow with her and hurtled across the bumps. I ended up with her hair in my mouth when we veered off the track. She pulled it out with her index finger and thumb. Her eyes darted from my lips to my eyes and back again. I had no idea a moment could last that long.

That evening Luca and I lay awake again.

‘What's on your mind?' Luca asked.

Every single thought seemed to evaporate instantly, assuming the shape of a girl's face instead. ‘Signor Zampieri,' I lied. ‘His biscuits.'

‘I'm thinking about Sophia.'

All was quiet for a moment.

‘I'm thinking about her hair. I want to brush it again.'

My brother had decided to be honest with me, seeing as we had always shared everything. He opened up his heart, while mine remained closed.

‘You're in love,' I said.

‘Aren't you?' He sounded as though he couldn't quite believe it.

‘No,' I said, but I couldn't quite believe it myself. And that's why I took it one step further, so there was no way back. ‘You can have her.'

Luca was silent, and it took a while before he said, ‘You've got to help me. I don't know what to do.'

‘I'll help you,' I said. I made him a promise. I was his older brother; I would always help him.

The promise meant that every single time Luca went to her house I had to come along. I told him it would be better if I stayed at home and he went on his own, but he didn't have the guts.

‘That way you'll have to talk to her,' I said.

‘What am I supposed to say?'

‘How would I know?' I replied. ‘Why don't you tell her you dreamed about her?'

But he didn't speak the language of love. At least he wasn't as bad as our great-grandfather, who had actively fled from love. When Luca saw Sophia he just said, ‘Hello.' And when he left, ‘Bye.' Or ‘See you.' But in between he remained eerily quiet, and I had to make sure we didn't come across as two socially challenged idiots.