The Ice-Cream Makers by Ernest Van der Kwast Read Free Book Online

were drifting off on the flavour, the way you drift off to a deep sleep. It was a game, an age-old game, but new to Giuseppe. It never occurred to him that he was expected to make a counter-move.
    A minute passed. Maria Grazia opened her eyes. Giuseppe had been watching her nipples poking through the fabric of her clothes. He wondered if they were the same colour as the ice.
    They emptied the cylinder together. When they went back upstairs, his brothers and sisters jeered. They wanted strawberry sorbet, but had to make do with the sight of the ice-cream makers’ pleasure: Maria Grazia’s lips were glistening like a forbidden fruit.
    Summer descended. Heat and drought, the scent of hay wherever Guiseppe went. The days were long and light, the skies clear blue and drenched with the scent of lavender and lemon in the evenings. Every morning Giuseppe walked up the glacier on the Antelao. He harvested ice and returned soaking wet. Maria Grazia picked fruits in the forest — glossy blackberries and dull, almost black blueberries. They turned them into indigo ice-cream, which he sold by the side of the road. People waited in line, ready to be surprised by a new colour, a new flavour, every day.
    Giuseppe bought apricots and peaches from Bolzano. Farmers dropped off plums and pears, and later figs, too. He transformed them into frozen yellow, grey, and pink substances that had to be consumed at once — although occasionally there were children who had to take the ice-cream home, to a grandmother who had given them money. ‘Run as fast as your legs will carry you,’ Giuseppe would tell them.
    Churn, churn, churn.
    Maria Grazia’s head swam. Some days they stood side by side in the kitchen or in the cellar with everything suffused with the smell of red fruit and sugar. Their fingers were sticky; even their breath smelled of raspberries.
    She waited another month, but still nothing happened. That is to say, the thing that Maria Grazia was hoping for, what she was longing for, did not happen. Something else happened instead.
    Looking back, people saw a connection with the increasingly outlandish colours and flavours Giuseppe produced. That’s where it all started, they said. That’s when we should have realised.
    One afternoon he sold a pale orange-coloured sorbet along the main village road. The customers took a very cautious first bite, but loved the flavour. ‘I can taste tomato,’ a man exclaimed. ‘I can taste actual tomato!’
    Giuseppe also made ices with goat’s milk, elderflower, fresh mint, and pine needles. Maria Grazia had picked the needles off the trees, and Giuseppe had put them in a pan with water and sugar. It called for the precision of a pharmacist: too much sugar made the ice too soft and sweet.
    When Maria Grazia was offered a taste, she felt as if she had just taken a bite from the forest in which she had spent half her childhood, hunting for pinecones, building huts, and using branches for swords. She could taste all that, as well as the spokes of light falling among the tree trunks and the hollow sound of her feet on the root-filled earth.
    This was what she had seen in his eyes, in his enigmatic gaze. She had known that he could engender this feeling in her, that he had the power to let her be in two places at once.
    The following day Giuseppe made espresso ice-cream. He had added an extra ingredient, a chunk of Swiss chocolate bought from Tiziano De Lorenzo. Some ice-cream eaters detected bittersweet notes, but Giuseppe refused to reveal what it was. The best recipes are secret, the Viennese ice-cream maker had said.
    â€˜Is it camomile?’ someone asked.
    Giuseppe said nothing.
    â€˜How about cinnamon, then?’
    That night, many had trouble falling asleep.
    Maria Grazia, who had sampled plenty of spoonfuls, couldn’t stop tossing and turning in bed. Her mind was on Giuseppe’s strong arms, and on his hands, too. While they could not bend