The Ice-Cream Makers (27 page)

‘The food's almost ready,' I say, as softly as possible.

‘That gives us a couple of minutes,' my father replies. ‘Look at this beauty.'

I walk over to him and look at the heart materialising from the dark iron.

‘It has to be exactly four kilos,' my father says. ‘That's the tricky thing. There's a fifteen-gram margin, but that's nothing.'

He shows me the other hearts. They're all different. ‘This one here's the biggest,' my father says, sounding like a sculptor. ‘But the bigger, the slimmer.'

I pick up another heart, smaller and thicker.

‘Great, don't you think?' my father says. ‘I want to make a whole series, maybe as many as ten.'

The melancholy is gone. The ghosts have dispersed. Down here, in his basement, he's the young man who used to make nuts and bolts in a workshop in Calalzo.

‘I'm also planning to make one with a jaunty tail. Imagine Betty Heidler becoming world champion with that.'

I can't imagine.

‘Maybe she'll improve her own world record.'

‘Shall we head upstairs?'

‘The magic frontier of eighty metres! An unbelievable distance.'

I look at the pillar drills. Back in the day they had seemed gigantic, but now they tower only a couple of centimetres above me. Luca and I were never allowed to touch them. Unlike the Cattabriga, which we were allowed to fill and switch on.

‘Have you seen a picture of her?' Beppi asks.

I nod. I had checked out a photo of her on the internet. She was a woman with red hair and enormous upper arms. I didn't get it. But when my father picks up the smallest heart and holds it in his hands, in his open palms, and starts whispering sweet nothings to it, my memory harks back to almost twenty years earlier, and two images slowly elide.

The songbird has mutated into a hammer-thrower.

We are sitting at the kitchen table, my father, my mother, and me. All three of us are twisting our forks. When the plates are empty and the napkins covered in tomato stains, we shall have to talk so as not to hear the silence. We're not there yet. We chew, we swallow, we drink the red wine. Every so often I look into my mother's eyes, her irises grey under her long lashes, surrounded by the craquelure of her skin. Only once do I catch my parents looking at each other.

It's the empty chair. Giuseppe's chair. He has been travelling for nearly two months now, around Mexico, Guatemala, Belize.

He had phoned once, to say that he had arrived in one piece. Luca spoke to him. It was a Saturday afternoon, warm and therefore busy. The terrace was heaving, and customers were jostling in front of the display. The telephone must have rung about ten times before my brother finally answered. ‘Ice-cream Parlour Venezia,' he said. ‘Luca speaking.' His voice must have betrayed his grumpiness. It always did when you phoned him in summer.

There was noise on the line and a faint beep quite far off. It took forever before he heard Giuseppe's voice, ‘It's me.'

It was morning in Mexico City, bright and cool, but the air was already thick with smog. I was familiar with the airport, Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez. I had been there twice — the first time for the festival in Michoacán; the second time for a new festival in Colima. There were pay phones beside the taxi rank. I remembered a young woman in a tight skirt. While on the phone, she had leaned against the pillar with one arm above her head, her eyes hidden behind jet-black sunglasses. But perhaps there were phones inside too, in the immense arrival hall, and Giuseppe was calling Rotterdam from one of those. My brother doesn't know. He cannot remember whether he heard the sound of cars and buses, or the buzz of the departure lounge: hundreds of voices, children's screams, and trolleys and suitcases being wheeled in a hurry.

‘I had a tub of ice-cream in one hand and the phone in the other,' Luca had told me. ‘It was a Saturday and it was sunny. Half the city was queuing.'

‘What kind of ice-cream was it?'

‘Does it matter?'

‘Yes.' I wanted to know every single detail.

‘Lemon sage.'

This was a new one to me. For a moment I tried to imagine the combination: the tart flavour of the lemon and the sharp, robust sage. It must have been divine on a summer's day.

‘I could barely make out a word he said,' my brother told me. ‘It was a poor connection.'

‘What did you say to him?'

‘Not much.'

‘What did he say?'

‘I've told you a dozen times. That he had arrived in one piece and that he was off to find a hostel in the city.'

‘And you didn't say anything in return?'

‘Not much,' my brother replied. ‘I didn't have the time to be on the phone, and he should have known that. He knew what time it was in Rotterdam, how busy we are then.'

‘What's a couple of seconds?'

‘You have no idea! Or you've forgotten. But Giuseppe knew. He knew perfectly well. Ice-cream is churned. It's churned all the time. Churn, churn, churn. But when it's churned too long, it becomes grainy and doesn't come out right. It's ruined.'

Luca resented him for going travelling in summer, for insisting on seeing the world while his father was working seventeen-hour days.

‘Who hung up?'

‘I don't remember.'

‘Yes, you do.'

‘All right, I was the one who hung up.'

The plates are empty. My father presses his napkin to his mouth and drinks the last of his wine. I'm curious to hear if my mother will bring up the weather or if Beppi will get to the basement before she can.

‘He's bought a new shower,' my mother says to me, gesturing at my father. ‘One with a seat.'

‘The old one was completely knackered.'

‘That's what you thought.'

‘Would you like to see it?' my father asks. ‘It has eight adjustable massage jets.'

‘What?'

‘Plus a hand-held showerhead and a ceiling-mounted one.'

‘It's a gigantic plastic contraption,' my mother says.

‘It's a shower cabin and it's made of acrylic and safety glass.'

‘There are no taps to turn on.'

‘It's all electronic,' my father says proudly.

‘Push the wrong button and it's like someone empties a bucket of water over your head.'

I can't believe my ears.

‘Your mother is afraid to sit down.'

‘I don't
have
to sit down. I don't have mobility problems.'

‘Why don't you try it tonight, Giovanni? Just sit down and activate the massage jets.'

‘It feels like being attacked from all sides by kids with water pistols,' my mother says. ‘And do you know what the thing cost?'

‘It was cheaper than a pile driver.'

My mother slaps her forehead. ‘Don't talk to me about that pile driver!'

‘It's a thing of beauty, Giovanni. The most beautiful machine you've ever seen. And just a tiny bit bigger than the shower cabin. Ninety centimetres wide by two metres high.'

It doesn't take them long to break the ensuing silence.

‘He's eighty and he wants to buy a pile driver,' my mother despairs. ‘If that isn't Alzheimer's, I don't know what is.'

‘It causes hardly any vibrations. And that's because you can drive in steel piles.'

‘I won't have any pile driving here!'

‘I'm not going to use the pile driver for driving in piles, am I?' my father says. ‘I just want to look at it.'

‘We're going from bad to worse.'

‘I wouldn't mind an espresso,' I say.

‘Me too,' says Beppi.

My mother gets up and walks over to the kitchen cabinet. She picks up the moka pot and fills the base with water. Once the cups are on the table and she is back on her chair, she glances outside. Then she turns her gaze to me and says, ‘There's a mirror in the shower cabin, but it keeps misting up.'

We're back to square one.

‘You're supposed to switch on the built-in ventilator.'

‘I want my old shower back.'

It's as if both of them are suffering from dementia. Their grandson is in Central America and hasn't been in touch for two months and they talk about a shower cabin and a pile driver.

With the empty cups in front of us on the table, we wait for the coffee to be ready. The silence is palpable by the time the moka pot starts gurgling. The aroma of espresso fills the kitchen and finds its way to our nostrils. Sticking out of my father's are black hairs that he used to trim with a nail clipper, something my hairdresser now does for me, unsolicited, with mini trimmers.

Just as you can tell from the sound of the scraper blade when to take the ice-cream out of the machine, and you can tell from the poetry whether a poet has reached the summit of Mount Parnassus, you can tell when the coffee is done. The lid of the pot sounds as if it's trying to take flight.

Sometimes, when I'm miles away, the memory of that wonderful, warm aroma from this particular shiny coffeepot with the black handle that gets incredibly hot will suddenly creep into my nose. Oddly enough, this tends to happen to me at large, modern airports, all air-conditioned and sterile. As I walk across the smooth, square tiles of a terminal, the kitchen in Venas springs to mind: floor and ceiling, kitchen cabinets and table, chairs and pendant lamp, spice rack and calendar.

My mother lifts the moka pot and pours our coffee. Nothing is as familiar as this espresso, and yet everything is different.

‘Right,' my father says once he has emptied his cup. ‘I guess I'll be going back down.'

A couple of days later Beppi takes me back to Dobbiaco, where I'll catch the train to Verona before going on to Bergamo. My plane to Rotterdam The Hague Airport leaves in the evening. I should be home just before midnight.

We drive past the dilapidated houses and the advancing trees. I wait for my father's melancholy, for the ghosts to emerge. But what follows are not the names of families, of ice-cream makers who are only alive and kicking in his mind. Instead he yells at a driver who shoots out onto the road: ‘Salami!' A second or two later, he mutters, ‘Women are trouble.'

For a moment I fear this is going to be a very long drive, filled with resentment and rancour, but after Beppi has made the bear under the bonnet growl, he appears to become calmer with every kilometre we cover. As we leave the valley of the ice-cream makers, he says, ‘We're living on top of gold, but we just can't reach it.'

‘Yes,' I reply. ‘That's what they say.'

I look out of the window, at the steep slopes, where the first skiers will be in action in a month's time. Snow or no snow. Hypermodern snow machines will create white pistes.

‘It's true,' my father says. ‘Venas comes from
vena
, or vein.'

‘I reckon it's just a myth.'

‘The gold is buried very deep down. Bringing it to the surface would be too expensive.'

In school we were taught the geology of the Dolomites, including that of the rocks underneath Venas, the many different rock strata with million-year-old fossils of shells and sea urchins, but nobody ever mentioned a seam of gold deep beneath our village.

‘Has anyone ever tried to bring it to the surface?'

At first my father doesn't react, but after a while he says, ‘I've been living on top of gold my whole life.' He starts chuckling. ‘Would you believe it,' he exclaims. ‘What a joke!'

His father, too, had spent his life living on top of gold, Beppi resumes once he has stopped laughing. And so had his grandfather. They had slogged and slaved away, had worn out their backbone and joints, and all that time they had been walking across a stretch of earth that hid, deep down below, like a great secret, a vein of the purest gold.

If so, we had all walked across it. Luca and me, too. In our youth, in winter, in the snow with Sophia.

As we drive through Dobbiaco, the house of the man who won the lottery looms up. The curtains are drawn, and there is a rusty drying rack in the garden. My father slows down. ‘It really is unbelievable,' he says. ‘To win a million and then die. Perhaps he never even lived to see the money in his account.'

Friedrich Hölderlin, the German lyrical poet, comes to mind. Not when I'm standing on the deserted platform with my father and we gaze in silence at the rails in the distance; nor when I'm waiting for the Milan train among countless other travellers in Verona; nor at the airport, where the names of passengers are announced non-stop. But hours later, high in the dark sky, far above the patch of earth with gold.

Some poets descend into the darkest regions of their soul and never return, and some poets reach for the light, for true happiness.