Why Giuseppe Talamini Fled to the New World

The girl next door had become a woman, with a body bursting at the seams. It had happened almost overnight. She had turned into a beauty, curvaceous and voluptuous, and she wasn’t ashamed of her new body, either. In fact, Maria Grazia now actively met men’s eyes when she was out in the street or at the bakery. She was aware of the effect when she opened her mouth a little, her lips parted slightly. It was one of the best combinations imaginable: naughty yet gracious.

Whenever Giuseppe spotted her in the street, he immediately looked away. He was afraid of her; a mere glimpse of her hair hanging in loose waves down her back was enough to set his pulse racing. They never spoke these days, but his right hand missed her left hand, the hand he’d held all summer for years on end.

My father’s father’s father lived in the house in which I too grew up. It’s on the edge of the village, which was hardly any smaller back then than it is now. Most of the houses have thick walls that are more than a hundred years old. But they accommodate fewer people nowadays. And like the houses, the streets are less lively, too. My generation has moved elsewhere, to towns and cities. Every autumn, when the ice-cream season is over, my brother and his wife return to the mountains. He’s an exception. Venas di Cadore is becoming a village of old men and women, a village slowly emptying.

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.

‘More!’ his youngest brother yelled.

‘Me too!’ his other brother shouted. ‘More!’

And then they were all shouting it. His mother came out of the kitchen and wanted a taste as well. She stood in front of Giuseppe and looked at him without blinking. He raised the wooden spoon with the cherry ice-cream to her lips, and as they parted he saw just how beautiful she was. A forty-year-old woman with flushed cheeks.

His father refused to taste; he was too proud. ‘Please,’ Giuseppe pleaded. ‘One small bite.’

‘If he doesn’t want any,’ hollered the grandmother, who had just woken up, ‘I’ll have two.’

‘All right,’ his father said eventually. He gave in, unable to resist temptation. Giuseppe could tell he liked it by the lines around his eyes.

Then Enrico Zangrando appeared in the doorway. He happened to be passing their house when he overheard the glee. There was a little bit left in the cylinder, the very last of the batch. Giuseppe walked over to Enrico with the cherry ice-cream. The landowner instantly noticed how mature and muscular the lumberjack’s son had become. As the spoon approached his mouth, his eyes automatically closed. But before he’d had a chance to say how delicious it was, Giuseppe had slapped him on his bald pate. It produced an exquisite sound.

Spring arrived and the grass awoke from its winter sleep. The land looked a little different, less drab every day. Some parts were pale green, while others had yet to be brought back to life by the sun, which was beginning to feel warmer. Logs were cut into planks by the river and the roofs of barns were repaired. But then there were days that crept up like ghosts from the night. Wet grass, wet leaves, diffuse light. A sea of mist parting slowly, wispy clouds among the trees, snow in the mountains.

When the dandelions sprung up, Giuseppe made dark red raspberry ice and pale yellow apricot ice. On the advice of Enrico he had prepared them without milk and eggs. His experiments with the fruits in his mother’s jars had yielded divine sorbets. More and more people from the village stopped by. Giuseppe gave them a taste of the ice outside in the sun. It was nothing short of a miracle. With his eyes still closed, one person exclaimed, ‘I can picture the colour of the ice!’

Maria Grazia plucked up the courage and knocked on Giuseppe’s door. His father answered. He saw the girl who had become a woman. In her hands she held four jars of strawberry jam. The jam was lighter in colour than her lips. The father immediately summoned his son.

‘I want ice-cream,’ she said when he remained silent.

Giuseppe’s gaze travelled from her eyes to the jam, but along the way it chanced upon her breasts. He couldn’t help it. Hers was a beauty that turned heads. First he heard himself swallow, then his neighbour’s voice, ‘I can help you gather snow, too.’

She smiled, revealing unbelievably white teeth.

All of a sudden he felt afraid, too scared even to look at her neck, her hands, or her wrists.

Maria Grazia held out the jars as if thrusting a baby into his arms.

‘Thank you,’ he said as he took them, but he knew he had to say something else. There was a brief silence before he added, his eyes on the ground, ‘See you tomorrow morning. I’ll come and collect you.’ And with that he quickly pulled the front door shut.

It was bright and early when they climbed the Antelao. The low-lying fields were dotted yellow with dandelions. As children they had snapped the stalks and watched the white juice trickling out before daubing it onto their skin. Maria Grazia had started the game.

‘It’s a bit sticky,’ she had said, while tracing circles on her arms.

‘Isn’t it poisonous?’

‘I like it.’

‘Have you tasted it?’

She shook her head. ‘It feels nice,’ she said. ‘Refreshing.’ And she daubed some on his arms, too.

The following day Giuseppe had picked dozens of flowers. He pressed the juice from the stalks and left a trail of drops all over her body. On her feet, her tanned legs, her hands, her wrists, her slender arms.

‘Don’t forget my head,’ she said.

He quickly picked a few more flowers and left a trail on her face as well. He even dripped some milk around her mouth.

Then she snuck a taste, a very quick one, with the tip of her tongue.

‘It’s bitter,’ she said, and started giggling. ‘Would you like to try some?’

Giuseppe shook his head.

‘Are you scared?’

He didn’t respond, but when she rose to her feet he yelled, ‘No, don’t!’

They were both equally tall and equally strong. But perhaps Maria Grazia was at an advantage; after all, she had jumped on top of him, pinning his hands to the grass. He couldn’t break free from her grip. As she planted her shins on his arms, she quickly picked a dandelion from beside his ear. Giuseppe floundered like a fish, but Maria Grazia managed to hold his head in a vice with her knees. She towered over him, relishing the experience and laughing as she sprinkled the milk on his lips.

Now, years later, they walked without a word up the paths and through the fields — Giuseppe in front, Maria Grazia following. They had to climb a lot higher than he’d done the first time. Occasionally he would glance over his shoulder and wait for Maria Grazia to catch up.

‘We’re heading for the glacier,’ Giuseppe said, pointing to the freezing cold necklace around the top.

She noticed the wet patches on his clothes beneath the leather straps of the basket. She was sweating, too; small beads were dotted around her nose. But they carried on without resting. The landscape grew quieter and more bare. First the birds disappeared, then the trees, and finally the leafhoppers that had sung the praises of morning, too. Now all that remained was the sound of their breathing in the rarefied air. Both had rolled up their sleeves.

For a while it seemed as if nothing had changed. Or only something on the outside. When Giuseppe and Maria Grazia stood in the perpetual snow and the light forced their eyes shut, their hands found each other again. There was no awkwardness, no fear, only the childlike delight in the sunshine.

Giuseppe took off the basket and dug a hole in the snow. He lifted a handful to her mouth. She sucked the water from the ice and chewed the crystals. The cold shot straight to her head. ‘Ouch,’ she said, her face contorted.

He knew the feeling, like a dagger through your skull.

Ignoring the pain, Maria Grazia insisted, ‘More.’

She was thirsty, and she was warm. More than anything she wanted to kneel down and dig two holes in the glacier and press the ice to her skin, to her neck and to her chest, to feel the snow in her cleavage. It was the intimation of these things that left her reeling and him trembling.

As Giuseppe took in the harvest, Maria Grazia saw the steam coming off his arms. He hewed large blocks of ice out of the glacier and placed them in the straw basket she held up.

Nothing happened, just like nothing had happened when they lay under the old autumn sun.

They walked the long road back to Venas di Cadore. Like those of the porteurs de glace in the Pyrenees and the poor men descending the ice path on Mount Etna, Giuseppe’s legs occasionally buckled under him. His limbs felt as though they were filled with lead. Blocks of ice are heavier than bags of flour and sacks of coffee beans. There’s nothing quite like it. The only advantage compared to the dead weight of flour and beans was the fact that ice melts. As the meltwater dripped from the basket and fell on the thirsty earth, his yoke lightened. By the time they got home, the harvest had dwindled. Maria Grazia looked on as Giuseppe put the ice into the wooden barrel.

‘Will it be enough?’ she asked.

She had followed him inside, as she used to do in the old days when she came round to play. There was a game they had invented. It involved him removing his shirt and lying on his back, while she let the cascade of her hair splash down on his chest. If Giuseppe cried mercy, he had lost.

Above them, Giuseppe’s little brothers and sisters were lying on the wooden floor. They heard all kinds of sounds and then the wheel spinning into action.

Giuseppe churned at a steady pace and never took his eyes off the cylinder, as though he was part of the machine.

‘May I?’ Maria Grazia asked after a while.

He moved aside for her. She reached for the handle and started churning. He felt the heat coming off her skin and heard her breathing quickening. Churn, churn, churn. She kept touching him ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, and so it happened that they were both, at the same moment, witness to a miracle. Maria Grazia saw the red jam becoming lighter in colour along the edge, and the icy mass slowly acquiring an airier, creamier structure. Giuseppe discovered that her breasts were soft. Softer than summer light.

His heart was thumping so hard his chest was vibrating. He was afraid Maria Grazia could tell, could hear, perhaps. Animals can smell fear.

‘I’m so incredibly curious,’ she said.

‘Not much longer now.’

He picked up the large spoon and clutched it, his thumb wrapped tightly around the handle. The ice-cream was a reddish pink, with small dark specks.

Maria Grazia took a bite, and as the ice melted on her tongue his fear too became fluid, less solid. Now that her eyes were closed, Giuseppe looked at her lips, her bare arms, and her breasts, which rose and fell with her breath.

‘It’s amazing,’ Maria Grazia said. ‘It’s better than anything in the world.’

She had caught him at it, but didn’t let on.

He held up the spoon again. Maria Grazia took a bigger mouthful of the ice-cream. This time she kept her eyes closed for longer, as if she 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.

‘Is it camomile?’ someone asked.

Giuseppe said nothing.

‘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 coins, they were all the better at stoning apricots. In the middle of the night she crept outside with a candle, stood under Giuseppe’s bedroom window, and softly called out his name. When she got no response, she started throwing small pebbles at the glass.

Giuseppe stuck his sleepy head out.

‘I want to show you something,’ she said.

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

It couldn’t wait any longer. She had waited long enough.

After a short while, the door opened and Giuseppe came out in his nightshirt. He saw the wild look in Maria Grazia’s eyes, but before he had a chance to say anything, she spoke. ‘I love you.’

Giuseppe said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t speak the language of love.

Maria Grazia stepped forward. That’s when she unbuttoned her nightgown. She wore nothing underneath. He was afraid to look, but he looked anyway.

Her breasts gleamed in the candlelight. They were whiter than her belly, two dizzying copies of each other. But what struck Giuseppe most were her nipples. They had the colour of amber and the golden glow of roasted chestnuts.

This is what she had wanted to show him.

Giuseppe could barely believe that the woman standing before him was Maria Grazia. He had sawn giant trees in half and he had carried a stove across the mountains, but he was no match for this beauty.

‘Give me a baby,’ she said.

Instead of ripping the nightgown off her body and giving her lips a lingering kiss before taking her under the star-filled sky, he whispered only a single word, almost inaudibly: ‘Mercy.’

It was August, not far into the month. Two more nights and it would be the feast day of Saint Lawrence, who, tradition has it, suffered a martyr’s death on a red-hot gridiron nearly two thousand years ago. There had already been sightings of falling stars, Perseid meteors entering the Earth’s atmosphere. This would reach its peak in the early morning of 13 August, with dozens of falling stars every hour — Lawrence’s tears. By then Giuseppe was already walking across the hinterland. His aim was to walk to the Gotthard Tunnel and travel straight through the mountains, but he became disorientated under the hail of meteors and eventually ended up in Genoa, where he spotted the stately Kaiser Wilhelm II oceanliner in the port. Giuseppe had never smelled the sea and he had never seen a ship before.

The 140-metre ocean liner of the Norddeutscher Lloyd was getting ready to set sail to New York. Trunks were hauled on board, and men carried suitcases across narrow gangways. First class could accommodate one hundred and eighty passengers; second class, eighty-six; and between decks there were berths for six hundred and forty-four people. The hull was completely white.

His mother waited in his room with the window open. Maria Grazia had cried for days on end. Her dark, wavy hair hung in front of her face like a widow’s veil. She clutched one hand with the other, but still felt the loss. It ran through her blood. She feared she would never see Giuseppe again.

Those first few days, people lingered by the side of the village road in the afternoon, speculating about a new, exceptional flavour that was difficult to prepare. It was said to be blue-black as the night. But when, after a week, there was still no sign of the ice-cream maker, people walked past his spot as though he had never existed, as though it had all been a dream.

Meanwhile, in the green water of the Port of Genoa, the Kaiser Wilhelm II had set sail. Looking majestic, with a small wave in front of its bow, the ship made its way to the sea. There had been no little jolt; all of a sudden they were sailing, they were on the move. From the quayside — with its tall cranes and the folks staying behind with handkerchiefs and hats in their hands — it looked as if the ship was barely moving, but the wake splashed and foamed. Inside, stokers toiled and 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.