Free The Ice-Cream Makers by Ernest Van der Kwast Page B

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.
    â€˜Where are you off to?’ my father wanted to know.
    â€˜I’m going out for dinner.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I have to go,’ I said.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    Heiman was already at the restaurant. He always turned up early for appointments. You’d walk in somewhere to find him reading a book of poetry. You’d always see him with a book, even on a barstool. People who didn’t know him might think he was uncommunicative. On the contrary. When a conversation ran dry, it was Heiman who got it flowing again. He was a fount of stories: anecdotes about poets, rumoured nominations for a major award. Or else he scattered a few unfathomable stanzas among those present.
    He sensed immediately that I was sombre. ‘If you were my son I’d have hugged you right now,’ he said.
    And when I didn’t react, ‘What’s the matter?’
    I told him I had been helping out at the ice-cream parlour. ‘I feel as though I’m betraying everyone, as if I’m leaving everybody in the lurch.’
    I was hoping he would comfort me with a few lines of poetry, an ancient English quatrain I didn’t know yet that captured all of my feelings. It could be saccharine for all I cared, dripping with emotions. Moonlight, dead trees, an empty heart — all of that.
    â€˜Oh, dear,’ Heiman said instead. ‘We all feel that way sometimes. It’s how I used to feel: eighteen and all alone in the world. It’s okay. It will pass.’
    I couldn’t imagine that Heiman had ever felt the way I felt right now. He exuded a certain unassailability. The fact that he never married didn’t make him any less complete than others. He didn’t need marriage as the be-all and end-all of life. There was the spacious apartment with the many paintings on the walls, some gifted by artist-friends; there were the premières and the exclusive parties. Women admired him — the prettiest interns at the festival had all fallen for him.
    â€˜Only poets stand to gain from melancholy,’ he said. ‘We ordinary mortals have a duty to be happy.’
    He was happy, and I was keen to be guided by him in life, the way the lighthouse on the island of Pharos had guided seamen into the harbour for centuries. To this day I think of Heiman