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

boilers blazed, and large clouds of smoke billowed from the round funnels. The mood was one of parting, but also of joy, the prospect of a new life. Those standing on the afterdeck could see the coast fade from view. The ship’s horn was sounded one final time.
    Ten days later, at nightfall, Giuseppe Talamini was standing alone at the rail. The ship was sailing at full speed, sixteen knots, cleaving the dark waves. He hadn’t travelled through the mountains, he hadn’t seen the light at the end of the tunnel. But what he saw now was just as luminous as snow. There was land in sight, and above this land hung a giant sun.

‘The Spirit That Creates One Object’
    The hallway of our house in Venas di Cadore boasts an impressive Native American headdress. The feathers are those of an eagle, ‘the biggest and strongest of all birds’.
    The headdress is said to have been brought back by my great-grandfather when he returned from America. Upon his arrival in Castle Clinton, he joined a group of immigrants to work on the construction of a skyscraper. The bricks are probably still in place, but the name of the tower, with its many windows, hasn’t been passed down to us. Next he is thought to have worked with other Italians on a railway up north, felling trees and putting down sleepers, the track lengthening and disappearing into the distance. After that it gets more nebulous, the picture blurry. It is said that he went to Wyoming, where he hunted buffalo, the cattle with the large heads and mighty horns, the long and stiff brown coats. I imagine it was while doing this job that he encountered the Sioux, the Blackfoot Indians who were already living on a reservation in South Dakota by then. The legendary Chief Red Cloud had led his people there after the Treaty of Fort Laramie, each feather in his war bonnet symbolising bravery in battles against other tribes — the Pawnee, the Crow, and later the colonisers, too. White feathers like bolts of lightning, representing land conquered and reconquered, and ultimately lost forever.
    To the first man Giuseppe saw on his return to the Northern Italian mountains, he said, ‘Greetings, paleface.’ That, at any rate, is the story which has been passed down from generation to generation to generation.
    My father, the other Giuseppe Talamini, walks past the Native American headdress and down the steps to the basement, which has been further excavated and reinforced with new pillars. He presses the switch. The light bounces off the cement mixer and on to the pillar drills, past the thousands of screwdrivers, monkey wrenches, files, pliers, and brackets on the walls, and against the chisels and brushes, the sanding machines and workbenches. A treasure trove of tools. This is my father’s life’s work — or, rather, his life’s revenge. He worked as an ice-cream maker for fifty-seven years, but he’d really wanted to be an inventor.
    My grandfather was an intractable man. He had no faith in his son’s dreams and ambitions, and besides, he needed his son in the ice-cream parlour. At the age of fifteen, my father had to cycle through the streets of Rotterdam with an ice-cream cart. ‘Some days the ice-cream would melt faster than you could sell it,’ he used to tell us at the dining table when we complained about work. ‘Not only would you have a sore back and arms at the end of the day, but your legs would ache, too.’
    During the winter months, he would busy himself in a workshop in Calalzo fashioning nuts and bolts from large chunks of iron, his eyes screwed up a little, his black shoes planted among the filings on the floor. Every year he spent the money he earned on new tools. It began with the basic items all households have — except a bit more extensive, perhaps — but once he had taken over his father’s ice-cream parlour and started earning his own money, he bought his first drilling, sanding,