The Ice-Cream Makers (17 page)

‘Is it possible to stop writing poetry?' the biographer asked.

‘Borges tried,' I said. ‘But after a thirty-year break he picked up the pen again. He published another ten books.'

‘He was blind by then.'

‘Beethoven was deaf when he wrote the Ninth Symphony.'

‘Not completely though, right?'

‘Oh, yes,' Joan replied. ‘At the end of the première they had to turn him round to face the auditorium so he could see the audience applauding him.'

Nobody knew whether or not Borges could still see towards the end.

‘He began to live in his memories,' Robert said. ‘His poems consist of enumerations. You could read them over and over again.'

Something occurred to his wife. ‘François Villon was a thief,' she said.

‘And didn't he kill someone too?'

‘Yes, but he received a pardon,' I clarified. ‘It was a love rival. He was jailed for theft.'

‘If you want to be rich, you shouldn't become a poet,' Robert noted.

‘Byron sold ten thousand copies of
The Corsair
on the day it was published,' the biographer said.

‘That was two centuries ago.'

‘You could win the Nobel Prize,' the editor contributed, ‘and become a millionaire in one fell swoop.'

‘How many poets have won it?'

‘The first Nobel Prize laureate was a poet: Sully Prudhomme.'

‘There have been quite a few: Pablo Neruda, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky.'

‘Yeats,' the young woman said.

‘T.S. Eliot.'

‘Salvatore Quasimodo,' I offered.

‘Who?' someone asked.

‘A truly major poet.'

‘Says an Italian,' Robert said with a laugh.

‘He thought his work was better than Shakespeare's.'

‘Has he been translated?' the biographer asked.

Robert thought for a moment. ‘No idea.'

‘His wife said the Nobel Prize was the beginning of the end,' I explained.

‘Why?' Joan asked.

‘Twenty-two million lira at once,' I said. ‘At long last there was money, but Quasimodo spent it like a sailor. On other women, of course. The year of the Nobel Prize was also the year of their divorce: 1959.'

‘I once had a relationship with a billionaire,' Joan said. ‘Well, relationship is a big word. I was one of many. It was a long time ago and I was extremely young. I can't even remember the currency unit. Drachma, was it? Or dinar?'

Joan's laugh was infectious. Her stories were good, too. How many women can say they have shared a bed with a billionaire, but can't remember the currency?

‘He had a Swiss watch which was more expensive than ten Lamborghinis combined. He kept saying it, ad nauseam, but as a young girl I was impressed.'

We all looked at her, and then she said, ‘
C'est la vie
.'

The evening was coming to an end. The dessert plates were on the table, the cutlery placed together on top of them. Coffee was served, and Robert came round with a bottle of Armagnac. The conversation no longer involved the whole table; instead, people talked among themselves. The young woman talked with Robert's wife, while Joan Foks talked with me. She told me she had spent a lot of time in Italy, but none in the north. ‘Or maybe I have, in Cortina d'Ampezzo.'

‘It's great for skiing,' I said.

‘Oh, I never saw any mountains. We stayed at the hotel that's featured in that James Bond film.'

‘
For Your Eyes Only
.'

‘That's right,' she said. ‘Except that it was filmed much later. I was in my early twenties.'

‘I actually saw Roger Moore,' I told her. The truth of the matter was that I spotted a man in a blue ski jacket who was said to be the English actor. Luca claims it was a stunt double. We had taken the bus to Cortina in the hope of meeting the film's stars, but had to make do with the autograph of a champion skier.

‘The Miramonti,' Joan said. ‘That's what the hotel was called.'

There were three lives: before her marriage, during her marriage, and after her husband's death. It was into that latter life that she was now gradually admitting new people. She could come across as shy, but wasn't really. If she seemed shy, she didn't like you and didn't fancy talking to you.

There was a time when men had vied for her attention, but most of them never stood a chance. She always asked if they were married. More often than not, the answer was yes.

It was impossible not to picture the young woman she had been, unmarried, available. A Venus. To imagine the pleasure of looking at her, of talking to her, of touching her.

‘I'm renting an apartment on Herengracht,' she said. It might have been interpreted as an invitation, a remark giving the conversation a different turn, had she not gone on to say, ‘I'd have bought it if the piano had fitted through the window.' The piano remained in the detached house in Haarlem, which she didn't want to sell. It's where her husband's shirts were still in the wardrobe and she always left a small light on for him. She could see it gleaming in the distance when she entered the gravel driveway.

I asked her if she had children.

She shook her head. ‘I wanted them, though,' she said.

The conversation ground to a halt. Maybe she thought the question was impertinent, or she found it a difficult subject. To be honest, I had expected her to have children — sons studying abroad or travelling through Southern Europe without a care about the rest of their lives.

‘Do you want children?' she asked suddenly.

‘I'm twenty-four,' I replied.

‘That's a wonderful age.'

‘For children?'

‘For anything.'

‘I don't think I'm suited to family life.'

‘That's what I always thought,' she said and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Until it was too late.'

I looked away, at the broken capillary. It was a small crack in an otherwise perfect face.

‘But men don't have that problem.'

Simon Vestdijk came to my mind. He had written twenty-four books of poetry and had fathered a son and daughter at a ripe old age. His wife was forty years his junior.

Joan pushed her chair back a little, getting ready to go home. I was going the other way, but offered to escort her to Herengracht.

‘There's no need,' she said. ‘Really.'

A brief, awkward silence ensued, as though I had made a different kind of offer.

‘
Au revoir
,' she said eventually.

We sold some five hundred copies of most of the poetry collections we published, sometimes fewer, and on a rare occasion we had an upward blip. From a commercial point of view, books of poetry were totally uninteresting, but they represented a different sort of value for the publishing company. Its reputation hinged on it. Poetry had a certain grandeur. It was my job to see to it that as many of our poets as possible were nominated for various awards. To this effect I had to maintain contact with critics who served on juries. It always helped to slip a brief note into a collection, or to take them out to lunch and brazenly recommend a poet.

‘Are you trying to bribe me?' a female jury member once asked me.

‘I wouldn't dare.'

‘I think you are.'

‘It's not unusual for me to have lunch with colleagues in restaurants; it's part of my job.'

‘Am I a colleague?'

‘We're in the same boat,' I said. ‘Of course there are differing interests, but at the end of the day we've got the same objective.'

‘Which is?'

‘To serve literature.'

‘And that's why you're picking up the tab?'

‘The publisher is paying,' I replied. ‘Robert Berendsen.'

I signed the credit-card receipt and put the pen down on the white tablecloth.

‘Are you taking the other members of the jury out for a meal too?'

She was teasing me, I could tell by her upper lip.

‘The chairman of the jury is on the agenda,' I said. ‘But I intend to take him to a more expensive restaurant. Do you have any suggestions?'

‘The Excelsior. It's got a Michelin star.'

‘Sounds like a good choice.'

‘I need a new dress,' she then said.

‘For the ceremony?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘And high heels.'

She could no longer suppress her laughter.

Lobbying was like flirting, albeit less egotistically. It didn't revolve around you, but around the poet and his collection. But there were no guarantees. In the end, the prize went to another poet, an established name. A safe choice, which wasn't uncommon when it came to the bigger awards.

The jury member I had lunched with came over to me after the ceremony. She wore a red silk backless dress. ‘What do you think?' she asked.

‘I think the dress is better than the winner.'

In an attempt to attract fresh talent, I joined forces with some of the poets on the list and founded a poetry journal. It was to come out monthly and also feature translated poetry. To this end I contacted the World Poetry Festival. I hadn't been back to the office since Richard Heiman's death, although I had attended the festival every year.

The new director was older but no less passionate. His name was Victor Larssen and he wore beautiful shoes, two-tone brogues in brown and dark green. Next to his desk stood a basket from which a pug stared at me with beady eyes that wouldn't have looked out of place on a human child.

Victor Larssen sat at the same wooden desk at which Heiman had written his letters. The portraits of poets still graced the walls, too. Clara Janés, Seamus Heaney, Herman de Coninck, Margaret Atwood, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Sarah Kirsch, Tomas Tranströmer — they had all appeared at the festival, along with hundreds of other poets from all over the world. The bookcase was full of jacketless hardbacks, each annual volume in a different colour. These were publications for internal reference, printed in a very limited edition, no more than ten copies. Every now and then you might find one in an antiquarian bookshop. They contained all the poems that had been read at the World Poetry Festival in both their original language and translation. The paper was thicker than that of a prayer book, and larger too, but ultimately the reading experience was just as powerful.

There were sound recordings as well, countless tapes. The readings had been recorded right from the inaugural festival, in 1969. On many an occasion Heiman had pushed a pair of headphones into my ears, saying, ‘Listen. This is 1973.' I would hear the tape whirring, white noise, crackling, followed by a poet's voice. Often they were reading in languages I didn't understand — Chinese, Spanish, Norwegian — but the tapes were always a pleasure to listen to. The rhythm, the sounds, the silences.

The portraits, the books, the sound recordings — it was a glorious, borderless world. History in poems. It was all there: wars, assassinations, and tsunamis, as well as the sound of summer, the birth of babies, and the scrapping of a Chevrolet Impala.

It felt good to be back. The publishing world was more frantic. Books were meant to follow one another in quick succession, new writers meant to be discovered all the time. If you took your eye off the ball you ran the risk of seeing a promising debutant lured away. It was less of an issue for poetry, but you were surrounded by editors who wolfed down their lunch while quickly making another phone call. Robert Berendsen was not immune, either. He had actually bought a foreign title without having read it first. Fortunately it became a bestseller, the way you can strike it lucky on the roulette table.

‘Have you read Patrick Lane?' Larssen asked after we had talked about the festival's most recent edition. ‘I think he may be right for your journal.'

I knew the name, had perhaps even read a poem of his, but no lines sprang to mind.

‘A Canadian poet.'

His dog sat up and barked. ‘Hardy,' Larssen said. ‘Quiet!'

The animal lay down again and stared straight ahead with those cute little eyes in that sad, wrinkled face of his.

‘I read a terrific poem by Patrick Lane,' Larssen told me. ‘About a logger who saws off his hand.' He patted his dog on the head absentmindedly. ‘You don't happen to know it?'

I shook my head.

‘It was an accident, and a colleague took him to hospital — a five-hour drive over mountain roads, the severed hand in a bucket of ice water between them. The nurse wanted to know the man's name and date of birth and asked for a piece of paper with his address. That's when his colleague lifted the logger's sleeve. The nurse averted her head from the veins and tendons. The doctors examined the wound, but it was too late for the hand: it was dead and couldn't be sewn back on. The colleague drove back to the north. After several hours he stopped by a bridge and took the hand from the bucket. He couldn't keep it and he couldn't really give it to the logger's wife, either. He considered burying it, but it was cold and dark and he was working the morning shift. And so he threw the hand “high off the bridge and for one moment it held the moon still in its fingers”.'