The Ice-Cream Makers (4 page)

When my great-grandfather was young and dreaming of ice-cream, Venas was still a village of farmers and artisans. Every now and then a fortune-seeker with a suitcase would cross the ocean, but the great wave of immigration had yet to happen. You tended to stay where you were born, and you died where you had lived. Families grew bigger rather than smaller, and they didn't fall apart. The house where Luca and I had each had our own room had accommodated my great-grandfather's family of eight. Giuseppe was the eldest son, but his grandmother was the senior resident, well into her seventies and still sharp. It was a crowded house, filled with the sounds of voices and pots and pans.

When autumn came around, the father summoned his son. ‘I've found you a job,' he said. ‘Bruno is looking for someone to help him.'

Giuseppe beamed. Bruno was the lumberjack who travelled to Vienna every year to sell roasted chestnuts. Their aroma filled the streets — the beautiful streets, with their imposing buildings. It was an intoxicating smell that revived memories of winters of yore. People were tempted by it, in the same way that no one can resist the seductive song of the Sirens. They stopped in their tracks and ate chestnuts from paper bags, without noticing their fingertips blackening a bit.

But Vienna was also the city where ice-cream was sold from copper vats.

That afternoon, Bruno stopped by to take a look at Giuseppe's shoulders. They had to carry a stove on which to roast the chestnuts.

‘All right,' the lumberjack said, slapping him on the back as though he were buying a cow. Giuseppe saw the look on his mother's face. She was proud, but quiet, too. She wanted to put it off, keep him a little longer: the boy she'd raised, whose hair she'd stroked when he was scared. She thought he was handsome, incredibly handsome, and wanted to say so, whisper it in his ear like she used to, when she'd tell him every day how gorgeous she thought he was.

They travelled on foot, the way most people did in those days. Distances were greater then; it took you weeks to get from one place to another. Vienna was a three-week walk away. The stove weighed a ton, but they took turns carrying it. During the first few days Bruno carried it for longer. He was a giant, a titan like Atlas. They were put up for the night by farmers with wizened faces and bad teeth. Sometimes there were cows lying right beside them. Before dawn they would wash with cold water from the mountains.

After a week Giuseppe began to find it easier; the burden appeared to have lightened. In reality, he'd become more muscular. Those first few days he thought he'd never make it all the way to Vienna with a stove on his back. But he arrived in the metropolis with a neck the size of a bull's.

They sold chestnuts on the corner of the Volksgarten, not far from the famous Café Landtmann, where artists and politicians met, and where Sigmund Freud drank his coffee. Giuseppe learned the trade in a single day. It wasn't hard. The main thing was not to burn the chestnuts, and not to scald yourself on the iron. The following day Bruno retrieved a stove he'd stored away the previous year. He set himself up down the road, and so together they filled the neighbourhood with the fumes of fire and chestnuts, and tempted residents and flaneurs alike. They came from all directions, walked up to him, and waited impatiently for their helping. For that magic moment when the blackened skin was peeled open and the sweet aroma was released. An oyster containing amber, yellow amber. The people blew into their hands as they ate.

Snow came down, large flakes falling on the knitted bonnets of little girls. Young children on sledges were pulled along by their parents. Last winter he had been on a sledge with Maria Grazia and had whooshed down a hill with her. They had fallen off, one foot deep in the snow, her red cheeks only a kiss away from his mouth. But they had been children, a boy and a girl, neighbours, and they had quickly run after the sledge, which had slid further down.

In Vienna's white world he thought of the new shape of her body. He spent hours picturing it. During some parts of the day, when the street seemed all but deserted and the snowy silence deafening, there was plenty of time to do so.

A few days later, the cold set in. The light was a chalky white in the morning, the wind biting. People warmed themselves by his stove. And then they ran out of chestnuts. He sold the last portion to an ancient man.

‘
Danke
,' the man had said with a voice as delicate as paper.

During his time there Giuseppe had learned a smattering of German. He lived ‘
weit weg
' and had come to Vienna ‘
zu Fuss
': ‘
Jawohl, den ganzen Weg
.' On hearing that he had walked all the way, people looked at him as though he had walked on water. With a stove.

‘We can head home now,' Bruno said. ‘Your mother will have missed you.'

Giuseppe nodded. He was looking forward to going back, but first he wanted to visit an Italian he had spoken to over his stove a week ago. He was an ice-cream maker living in Vienna and prepared to sell Giuseppe an ice-cream machine.

‘Do you know how it works?' the man asked when the two of them stood in his workshop.

Giuseppe thought of Enrico Zangrando's words. Churn, churn, churn. The glossy sheen that would come over the substance. He nodded.

‘What matters most is a good recipe,' the man said.

‘How do I find a good recipe?'

‘The best are secret, but I don't mind giving you one. If that comes out right, you have to start experimenting.'

He lowered his voice a little, perhaps subconsciously. ‘Anything is possible; you can make ice-cream out of anything.' It was like hearing a prophet.

The man was short and sinewy, in his early fifties. He had a long, rather posh name for someone from his background — Massimiliano — but in Vienna everybody called him Max. The road Giuseppe had travelled was one he had walked countless times, many a springtime, with the sharp outlines of the mountain tops silhouetted against the pale blue, cloudless sky, before heading back again in the autumn. But these days he had lodgings in the city too, above the workshop he now owned.

The ice-cream maker Antonio Tomeo Bareta had been the first to come to Vienna. He hailed from Zoldo, a small village in the Dolomites, not far from Venas di Cadore, and in 1865 he had obtained an official licence to sell ‘
Gefrorenes'
in Austria's capital. Next, Bareta had gone to Leipzig and led a business comprising twenty-four ice-cream carts. Later he settled in Budapest, where he opened several ice-cream parlours and had sixty hawkers riding carts across town for him, men with caps and a leather pouch for the money. He had sold the Vienna licence to Massimiliano.

Giuseppe carried home the ice-cream machine, a wooden barrel with a cylinder and a small hand wheel, all by himself. He didn't need Bruno's help.

Back in the village Bruno offered him a job in his sawmill. But Giuseppe wasn't interested in cutting logs. His father shook his head. ‘What are you going to do then?' he asked. ‘You're a man, you've got to work.'

‘I'm going to make ice-cream,' Giuseppe told him.

‘In winter?'

‘It's nearly spring.'

‘You've lost your mind!'

The grandmother cut into the conversation. ‘It runs in the family,' she said. ‘My husband lost his mind during our wedding night.'

Voices filled the house. Only his mother was silent. His little brothers and sisters whispered, standing in the hallway, looking wide-eyed at the shiny cylinder in the wooden barrel. The youngest spun the hand wheel very tentatively before scuttling off.

The recipe he'd been given by Massimiliano was for cherry ice-cream, but it was February: the first cherries wouldn't be ripe until June, late May at the earliest. Every summer he would secretly climb an old tree on Enrico Zangrando's land and tumble out, drunk on sweetness.

His mother bought cherries on the market every year and made them into jam. The family ate it spread on thick slices of bread. The glass jars were kept in the cellar.

Giuseppe asked for three jars. His mother gave him five, her whole supply.

In the early morning light he headed up into the mountains, on his back the large basket he used for carrying hay down from the steepest slopes in summer. It was a warm, sunny day, but he kept going until he heard snow crunching beneath his shoes. He was now two thousand metres up the Antelao, the King of the Dolomites. Much higher up, on the north face of the pyramid-shaped peak, were two glaciers, sparkling in the sun like a jewelled necklace. Giuseppe took the basket from his back and began digging. He was the only one for miles, the sound ricocheting off the rocks. It didn't feel like harvesting, it felt like theft. He was stealing snow from the king.

Maria Grazia saw him return from the mountains, the straw basket with snow on his back. It had been months since she saw him last. His shoulders were broader, his bare forearms muscular. As he got closer, she also saw the look in his dark-blue eyes. It was a bashful, somewhat enigmatic look, which reminded her why she was in love with him and not with any of the other men who ogled her.

He had noticed her, looking young and ravishing. There's a kind of beauty that entrances, that transports you. It was her arched upper lip, her dark eyes, and the curves of her body, which her clothes failed to conceal. All together an outrageous promise. At the same time her skin retained the pallor of winter, lending it something almost sacred.

Giuseppe glanced at her very briefly.
Fall under my spell
, her dark eyes appeared to be saying. Then he rushed inside, feeling he had got away, but he knew it was out there waiting for him. The beauty that eclipses all else.

He broke eggs and separated the yolks from the whites. To the yolks he added the sugar he had bought from Tiziano De Lorenzo, a merchant who had been to Argentina and America. De Lorenzo was the son of a pioneer and had a broken nose. The world glimpsed from a hot-air balloon was small to him. The salt that must be added to the snow came from his stores, too.

Giuseppe whisked the egg yolks and the sugar until the mixture was nearly white. He wasn't entirely sure what he was doing, just followed Massimiliano's instructions to the letter.
Slowly add the milk to the egg mixture and bring to a simmer
. It was hard to do everything slowly — he wanted to do everything really fast. In his mind's eye he was already spinning the hand wheel and tasting his own ice-cream. His very first ice-cream.

He opened his mother's jars and tipped their contents into the milk mixture, spooning out the remains. He couldn't resist licking the spoon. His tastebuds were spinning the wheel of his imagination. For one brief moment he was back up Enrico Zangrando's tree.

Leave everything to cool
. In the meantime he crumbled the snow into the wooden barrel and added the salt. Giuseppe and his ice-cream machine were in the cellar of the house. He had locked the door to the staircase, not wanting to be disturbed, but he knew his brothers and sisters were waiting impatiently upstairs.

The moment arrived. He poured the cooled mixture into the cylinder lined with snow, reached for the handle, and began turning the wooden wheel slowly, yet barely able to wait for the end result. The recipe had specified the proportion of water, sugar, and fruit, so he could only hope that his mother's jam met the requirements. Then again, Massimiliano had also told him to experiment.

He turned the hand wheel faster. One floor up, his little sister was lying on the wooden floor. ‘Hurry,' she shouted. ‘Listen.' They all lay down on the floor with their right ear to the wooden boards. Hearing their big brother churning brought the wheel of their imagination in motion, too.

‘He's making ice-cream,' one of the girls said.

‘It's colder than snow and sweeter than sugar.'

‘When you swallow it, you start floating.'

After a while a brittle layer of ice formed along the wall of the cylinder. Giuseppe saw it happen. It was unlike anything he'd seen before, like a first enchanting glimpse of a woman's loins. The colour grew lighter, the volume bigger. His heart pounded in his chest like a fist on a door.

Churn, churn, churn.

He picked up the large wooden spoon he had borrowed from his mother's kitchen. His thumb wrapped itself around the handle quite naturally. There was no sign of any callousing just yet, but it did mark the beginning of a long-standing routine, and of the rough-skinned thumbs that would pass from father to son.

The ice was ready. It was firm, thick, and pink. Giuseppe brought the wooden spoon to his mouth, which he opened wide. He took a mouthful with his eyes closed, as though he were kissing a girl. Once again, his tastebuds tossed him this way and that. In a single mouthful he climbed up the old cherry tree, only to fall out again at once, intoxicated. He immediately took another bite. It melted on his tongue and he swallowed it in one. Then he dropped the spoon back in the cylinder and scooped out some more. It was delicious and he couldn't get enough of it. He emptied half the cylinder.

Then came the guilt, as though he had tasted of the forbidden fruit. It was prompted by the sounds above him, the fidgeting of his brothers and sisters. They were calling out his name and banging on the door, the masses calling for the king's purple blood. Giuseppe went upstairs with the cold cylinder and the spoon. They were told to line up and close their eyes. One by one, he served them and watched their faces. For a brief moment they appeared to be blushing and rising up off the floor. Then they all opened their eyes.