‘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, polishing, and cutting machines: screaming monsters with large benches, as well as lovely little adjustable wrenches and the minuscule instruments used by watchmakers and engravers. He bought everything, absolutely everything he didn’t have yet, including seven-inch nails, cap nuts, lock nuts, rivet nuts, right-threaded screws, left-threaded screws, double-ended screws, endless screws, blind bolts.

One day a lorry driver pulled up outside the house in Venas, having been directed here by the ironmonger in Belluno. The man had been looking for a particular nut for years. My father listened to the driver’s description the way a child listens to a fairytale and then escorted him down into the basement. When he switched on the light, the treasure chamber sparkled in all its glory. The lorry driver’s pupils dilated instantly. He couldn’t believe his eyes — and it probably contained only half of all the tools there are now. These days the double garage is full of shiny metal too.

Except for that one occasion, my father never showed his collection to others, ‘because nobody understands’. Most people think it’s an illness. But the driver congratulated my father on his wealth of tools and machines.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said.

There probably wasn’t anything like it.

My father rummaged in a couple of metal trays and a minute later retrieved a nut.

‘Yes,’ was all the driver said at first. ‘Yes.’ Then his eyes filled with tears. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said. ‘This is it. Yes, this is it. This nut …’

It was the best day of his life, and probably of my father’s life too.

He liked to tell the story whenever my mother expressed her disapproval of a new drill or sander.

‘I hope one day you’ll find the screw that’s loose in your head,’ she would reply.

‘Nobody understands, not even my own wife.’

Once she gave him an ultimatum. ‘If you buy that workbench, Beppi,’ she declared, ‘I’m leaving you.’

My father bought the workbench, my mother stayed. My brother and I didn’t get it. We were young and knew little about marriage — about the threats, the compromises, the cracks. My mother never said another word about my father’s collection, but the grooves in her forehead deepened, looking as if they’d been chiselled there.

My father used the life he led as an excuse to buy tools. He had never wanted to be an ice-cream maker and had never wanted to take over his father’s ice-cream parlour. But he had done so anyway.

‘For seventy-five years I didn’t have a summer,’ he often said after he retired, before opening a box with a spirit level or a metal saw. For over half a century, no long, sun-drenched summer, no early summer, no empty summer, no sultry summer, no cool summer, no sweet, melancholic summer and no summer by the seaside. That was his lament — or the mantra with which he tried to convince himself and others.

Many are the occasions when I had fruitless discussions with him. ‘Why didn’t you do something else?’

‘It was impossible.’

‘Nothing’s impossible.’

‘No, not in those days.’

‘You should have carved out your own path.’

‘That path had already been mapped out for me,’ he said. ‘And when a gap opened up, when there was finally some space, you scampered off.’

My father likes to blame me for the fact that he had to make and scoop ice-cream until the age of seventy-two.

‘While you were groomed by your poetry pals, I had to help Luca.’

‘I wasn’t groomed.’

‘Brainwashed, then.’

‘It’s called passion.’ It sounded more dramatic than intended, but I couldn’t think of another word on the spur of the moment. ‘The way you love a chainsaw, I love poetry.’

‘You’ve been brainwashed.’

He was referring to the team behind the World Poetry Festival: the then director, his editors, the beautiful interns. Their offices were located across the street from the ice-cream parlour. In summer they would often come over for an ice-cream after work. But the director also came in the morning, just after we opened, when it was quiet, to drink an espresso. His name was Richard Heiman, a man with watery blue eyes and a deep voice. He was never without a volume of poetry. He would open it on the table and keep reading as he sipped.

I don’t remember what volume he was reading when I first took his order for espresso, but I do remember that the dust jacket was missing and the cover was red. Dark red with golden letters, which you would have felt if you were to trace your fingers across them. Beauty is something you don’t notice until you reach a certain age. It’s invisible to children. It is there, but they look right through it. I like to think that the glossy letters on the burgundy book of poetry afforded me my first-ever glimpse of beauty.

I had seen plenty of customers read, at the tables both inside and out. It was usually the paper, but some women read paperbacks with sumptuous covers, while taking forever to finish their cup of vanilla, hazelnut, or chocolate.

‘Your ice-cream is melting,’ my father would sometimes say from behind the counter.

And then the woman would look up, blushing, as though he had read her mind, seen the images of passion conjured up by the sentences.

Richard Heiman was reading the most beautiful book I’d ever seen. Aged fifteen then, I attended the grammar school in Valle di Cadore but spent the three-month summer holidays in Rotterdam, reunited at last with my parents, so I hadn’t seen Heiman before. He failed to notice me by his side. He was completely engrossed in a poem.

Even now, after all these years, I try to read the golden letters in my mind. Could it have been To Urania by Joseph Brodsky, or Philip Larkin’s High Windows? Was he reading The Last Rose by Anna Akhmatova, or perhaps the collected poems of Paul Celan? I can no longer ask him; he has crossed the river, taking all his memories with him.

‘Would you care to order something?’ I asked.

He looked up, startled. ‘Pardon.’ One word, followed by those blue eyes trying to peer inside. ‘Had you been waiting long, sir?’

No customer had ever addressed me as ‘sir’. It befitted his character, but I wasn’t to know that until later. Back then I saw what made him so gallant: at times he seemed to hail from a different era altogether. The era of the poets he held so dear. The Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey. And Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron, of course.

He ordered an espresso.

The following day he opened a different book. I decided not to ask him what he wanted to drink and brought him an espresso. To my surprise he looked up from the poem he was reading and said, ‘That’s very kind of you, sir.’ Then he fixed his gaze back on the book.

It was a month before I plucked up the courage to ask what he was reading.

‘This,’ Heiman replied, ‘this is contemporary, impenetrable poetry with the occasional crystal-clear image. Let’s start with something else.’

He asked me to join him at his table, and when I was seated opposite him he began to recite from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s long autobiographical poem ‘Epipsychidion’. First in English, then in the Dutch translation. ‘I never was attached to that great sect, / Whose doctrine is, that each one should select / Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, / And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend / To cold oblivion.’ His hands moved as though he was reciting before a full auditorium. The other customers were looking at us, and even my mother, who was scooping ice-cream for a little girl, turned her head. ‘Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, / The life that wears, the spirit that creates / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A sepulchre for its eternity.’ That was it, and he looked at me with his watery eyes, the eyes of an old man.

It was as if something had wafted up from those lines, a certain scent or perfume.

Time and again I have wondered why he chose this poem, why he recited these particular stanzas from ‘Epipsychidion’. At the same time I ask myself: if I were given the opportunity to show someone the beauty of poetry, what poem would I initiate them with? Where to start? So many teachers manage to put students off with their very first poem, or worse, saddle them with a lifelong aversion to poetry. The choice seems infinite, but there’s really only one option: a different poem for each student’s soul. Poems should never be read in front of a class as a whole.

Heiman asked me what I thought. I didn’t know what to say. I was young; my voice hadn’t even broken yet. What could I have said? That I was going to change my life’s course? That I was now going to open my heart to a hundred women, all of them the love of my life? Or had the poem already done so? Had the door to one of the rooms been opened a crack, without me noticing? Sometimes I think so.

He broke the silence by telling me about Shelley’s premature death, at the age of thirty. ‘He drowned in the Bay of Lerici after his vessel, the Don Juan, sank.’ The poet washed up on the beach between Massa and Viareggio a couple of days later, a collection of poems by John Keats in one of the pockets of his white sailor’s breeches. The poems, as well as his body, were burned on the beach. Those were the days of cholera and the plague; everything that washed ashore had to be consumed by fire. The ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, a rolling green lawn beside the city wall where the wind whispers through the leaves and where three years previously his young son William had been buried. ‘Shelley’s heart wouldn’t burn,’ Heiman told me, ‘and was sent to his wife Mary.’ After her death in 1851, it was found in one of her desk drawers. Wrapped in the poem ‘Adonaïs’, it had crumbled to dust.

Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive.

After the death of his last surviving son, Percy Florence, what remained of the heart was buried in Bournemouth, where Mary lay buried too. By then his mistress Claire Clairmont had already passed away. She had been buried, by her own wish, with a shawl Shelley had given her.

Before he became director of the World Poetry Festival, Richard Heiman had been a lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to that he had spent some time at Stanford, a place of low sandstone buildings and foxglove trees with squirrels clambering up their trunks. The governor had had his will drawn up by him, and the university’s president had also had his deeds executed before him. But there had been an affair with a female student nearly twenty years his junior, the daughter of a prominent public notary. Despite Heiman’s promise and the high regard of his colleagues, his position had become untenable. It was the only transgression of his life, but he didn’t see it that way. He would always remember California fondly. The long, mellow evenings and the eternal sunshine. Her magnificent face — Natalie, her name was — and the slender chain with the bee-shaped charm around her neck. It was a present from her father or her first boyfriend; he forgot which.

But he never forgot a poet. He knew more about poetry than anyone. He couldn’t imagine life without it.

‘Nonsense,’ my father said. ‘You can live perfectly well without poetry. I’ve done so for over forty years.’

It was a different life, Richard Heiman meant to say. A life less beautiful. He used those words without qualms, but also without wanting to be elitist. He was like the doctors of yore who prescribed oranges; poetry enriches your life, he told others. He proclaimed it in lecture theatres, standing behind the lectern, his hands moving while he spoke.

He could recite poems in five different languages — Dutch, English, French, German, and Latin — and had an anecdote about every single poet.

‘Charles Baudelaire dyed his hair green and would tell everybody at parties that the taste of children’s brains reminded him of walnuts.’

‘Gérard de Nerval owned a lobster that he’d walk on a blue silk ribbon in the gardens of the Palais Royal.’

‘When Anna Akhmatova was under surveillance by the secret police, she wrote her poems on cigarette papers. Visitors were asked to memorise them, after which she lit a match under the paper.’

‘Johnny van Doorn makes the most potent garlic soup! It contains forty cloves and is a remedy against depression, irregular bowels, sensitive skin, menstrual problems, and dizziness.’

‘Edwin Arlington Robinson asked his family to carry his bed outside so he could die under the stars.’

My father had to cycle through the streets with an ice-cream cart at the age of fifteen. I listened to poetry. During the years Heiman frequented the ice-cream parlour I received daily poetry lectures, covering everything from Aesop to twentieth-century Dutch poet Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager. They were brief excursions, but I began to long for a more extensive sojourn in this world of autumn days and still inland lakes, of white blossom and the wide, wide ocean.

‘That will do for now,’ my father would say every morning. ‘There’s work to be done.’

In the early days he had greeted Heiman with a smile. That was back when we first had our espresso machine, a Faema E61, streamlined like a sports car. It came from Milan and drew a lot of attention from Italians living in Rotterdam. They praised its curves, and the taste of the espresso even more so.

‘Buonissimo.’

‘Perfettamente.’

Some claimed to detect a hint of roses in the aroma. The Dutch were less effusive. The first customer to be served an espresso by my father was flabbergasted when he saw his cup.

‘What’s this?’

‘Espresso.’

‘There’s hardly anything in that cup.’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘I can almost see the bottom.’

A week later a bucket appeared next to the espresso machine. Whenever someone complained about the small quantity of coffee relative to the price, my father’s standard response would be, ‘You can have a free bucket of water with it.’

Only Heiman drank his espresso like an Italian. He savoured it, as though it were a short poem, a haiku.

My father stopped greeting him warmly after I started joining him at his table a month later. It was like the song of the Sirens. Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast. Given the choice, my father would have chained me to the ice-cream machine.

‘You can’t live off poetry,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you seen those poets swarming around him like flies?’

Every now and then Heiman would sit on the terrace with a couple of poets and treat them to an ice-cream.

‘That young man over there has used sticky tape to fix the sole to his shoe,’ my father whispered. ‘Do you see that?’

Or, ‘If it weren’t for Heiman, I’d have mistaken them for tramps and chased them off.’

Heiman never looked down on others. His suits were handmade and he always wore a tie, but he hadn’t forgotten his roots. His parents were simple folk, like Shakespeare’s, whose father had been a glove-maker. Heiman’s most vivid childhood memory was the smell of fried udder. They ate it every Saturday, and his mother always made do with the smallest portion. He didn’t put himself above poets; he admired them — many of them, anyway. It didn’t just take talent, in his view, but something else too, something that defied description. It had to do with seclusion and perseverance, as well as a detachment from things, from possessions. A table and a sheet of paper were all you needed. As with monks, it was a choice for a different life. There were poets who couldn’t hack it. Some became addicted to alcohol or drugs. Some committed suicide. The list was long. Heiman had known two in person. They had been younger than Shelley.

I have never wanted to be a poet. I lack the talent. It’s not in my blood, the sacred to which all else must be sacrificed. Of course, I tried in those early years, touched by the language of the tormented souls and the illustrious dead. I produced three poems, including a sonnet in the style of Petrach, the swan of Vaucluse. But my sonnet sought to be more lyrical than the whole of the Canzoniere. I was the swan of Venice, albeit not of the lagoon city, with its hazy mornings and lions overlooking the tranquil canals, but of the ice-cream parlour, with its sweet flavours in all colours of the rainbow.

Yet at least twice a year I am invited to a poetry festival somewhere in the world. They’re not the most insignificant festivals, either. Sometimes I’m already on the poster. I’ve got several programmes featuring my name: Giovanni Talamini, renowned Dutch poet of Italian descent. My poetry is praised for its ‘keen insight into the human psyche’ and, on the far side of the world, for ‘the light-heartedness’ I combine with ‘a subtle sense of mortality’.

Many festival directors are poets who are keen to appear on the most prestigious stage of all, the World Poetry Festival. They think it’s a case of quid pro quo. A couple of years ago I had a spat with an Israeli poet. He phoned to tell me that he wanted to read in Rotterdam. The time was ripe.

‘What do you mean that’s not how it works?’ he asked indignantly.

‘As a matter of principle I never book poets who are also directors.’

The Israeli poet was the director of the Sha’ar International Poetry Festival. Its emphasis was on dialogue between the Hebrew- and Arab-speaking cultures. It hosted socially engaged poets from around the world. It was an important festival.

‘But you get to perform at mine,’ he offered.

‘I don’t want to.’

‘On the main stage.’

‘I’m not a poet.’

‘You’ve written the odd poem, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t want to read them, not even with a gun to my head.’

There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the line. ‘I’ve recited at festivals all over the world,’ the Israeli poet resumed. ‘In Medellín, in Berlin, in Struga.’

No doubt the directors or programmers of Medellín, Berlin, and Struga had also performed in Tel Aviv, but I didn’t say so.

‘When you’re no longer a director, I may consider it.’

The Israeli poet hung up, furious, but not long ago he phoned again. ‘I’m not a director anymore,’ he said gleefully. ‘So you can book me now.’

I told him he’d receive an invite in due course if we thought his work was good enough.

‘So if I don’t receive an invite, my work isn’t good enough.’

That’s what it boiled down to, but many poets were unable to accept this.

The Israeli poet hung up, furious again.

Since becoming the director of the World Poetry Festival I’ve been at the receiving end of angry emails from misunderstood poets. And I’m frequently accosted at literary festivals up and down the country. The bard’s state of inebriation tends to aggravate things.

‘Why would you like to appear at World Poetry?’ I always ask.

‘Because I’m the best poet in the world.’

‘But why do you think World Poetry is so important?’

‘No, I’m the one who’s important!’

I try to remain professional and explain that World Poetry has become the major festival that it is because it doesn’t just accept any old poet, and we’re proud of our autonomy. Not a single sponsor, mayor, embassy, literary foundation, or board interferes with our programming.

Richard Heiman compared the status of the festival to the lighthouse of Alexandria. ‘We’re a shining example,’ he used to say. If I were to say that, poets would have a go at me and call me an arrogant twat. Heiman could say anything to them. He could make them laugh, too. His imitation of Joseph Brodsky was brilliant: the same accent, the same sing-song delivery. Even Brodsky himself thought it was funny. Many national and international poets had dined in Heiman’s apartment on Westzeedijk, built in the New Hague School style of the Thirties. Down in the basement were the old servants’ quarters, to which he would retreat occasionally with a stack of poetry books, but in summer he would sit in the large communal garden with roses and snow-white hydrangeas.

‘You must choose,’ he said when I was eighteen. We were sitting at the round iron table on the lawn, a bottle of Soave in the wine cooler. ‘Are you going to devote your life to poetry or are you going to become an ice-cream maker?’

My father was an ice-cream maker, his father had been one, and his grandfather had started it. They all had the same thumb, calloused and strong. At the age of four I had made my first ice. Pear sorbet. It had brought tears to my father’s eyes. ‘Sei un piccolo gelataio,’ he proclaimed proudly. I grew up, got an education, started shaving, and broke a heart, but in his eyes I’ve always remained an ice-cream maker.

‘I want to break with the family tradition,’ I said.

‘I thought you might,’ Heiman said.

He took a sip of his wine and looked at me. Despite his eyes, there was something boyish about him. Perhaps it was his clean-shaven face, the cheeks that flushed when he cycled. His hair retained traces of blond, the yellow of chicory. Every now and then he’d run his hand through it.

Then suddenly, as though he had made up his mind, Heiman said, ‘Congratulations.’ He smiled and raised his glass. With the sun illuminating the golden liquid, we proposed a toast.

‘Fortune favours the bold.’

‘And rejects the fearful.’

Those were the words of the most illustrious of Roman poets. But later that evening in the ice-cream parlour, I didn’t have the guts to tell my family that after the summer I would be embarking on an English Literature degree in Amsterdam. I felt as if I was betraying them all — my father; my brother, Luca; and my mother, who held the spatola in her hand until midnight. She was always hunched over the ice like a farm labourer over potatoes.

In the garden, with the roses and hydrangeas, the decision had felt like freedom, like disentangling myself from a web of history and tradition. The threads appeared to have snapped. But that had been an illusion. Although so thin as to be practically invisible, the gossamer of the threads remained intact. Little did I realise it at the time, but I would never manage to free myself completely. I removed myself further and further from the ice-cream parlour — I went to university, moved to Amsterdam, and worked a part-time job at Tofani’s — and yet the fine familial threads still clung to me.

‘At Tofani’s?!’ my father yelled. ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘I need money.’

‘They’re from Bagni di Lucca. They’re Tuscans!’

Most Dutch ice-cream makers came from Vodo or Venas, from the Cadore Valley. They looked down on the Tuscans, who had originally sold figurines but now made a living selling ice. The Tuscans were seen as copycats, their ice of inferior quality, at least by the ice-cream purveyors from Cadore.

‘They offered you a job to get their hands on our recipes! They’re thieves.’

‘I’m not preparing ice, I’m scooping it.’

‘Are you selling sandwiches too?’ my father asked disparagingly.

Tofani’s sold sandwiches as well as ice-cream. In fact, the family had a second ice-cream parlour in Amsterdam that served chips too. In my father’s view there was nothing worse than an ice-cream parlour that reeked like a chip shop.

‘Whatever next?’ he once asked at the dinner table as he railed against the Tuscans. ‘Soft serve?’

I wasn’t working for the enemy. I was working for barbarians.

Luca no longer talked to me. Whenever I was in the ice-cream parlour, he pretended not to see me, or he refused to leave the kitchen, where the ice-cream was made. Since I wasn’t working, he had to work. He wanted me to see it, to feel it.

Only my mother enquired after my studies and wanted to know what Tofani’s ice-cream was really like.

‘Their fruit flavours aren’t as good as ours,’ I told her, ‘but they’ve got ice-cream made of pine kernels that is irresistible.’

My degree was everything I expected it to be. All my classes were taught in English. In lectures, the academics showed the same dedication to their subject as Heiman; in seminars, we discussed literary texts in small groups — The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s sonnets. It made you feel like an aristocrat from the Elizabethan age. You ended up talking like one, too. All flowery and posh. It wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Some students dropped out after a month, switching to another degree.

I spent most of my time in the library, where I read the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great English poet. The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde. It was indeed a choice for a different life; there was the same silence that surrounds monks, except it came accompanied by young women burying their noses in heavy tomes. Sitting across from me on one occasion was a girl reading Shakespeare’s tragedies. The bard had written the greatest and most powerful within the space of just a few years: Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth. Heiman reckoned these were his best plays. They were tragedies that cut through the soul, but without the frills and the plethora of confusing names you find in history plays such as Richard III. Shakespeare had followed Macbeth with a couple of romances, but none of them achieved the depth of his best work.

The girl had blonde hair and a snub nose and came from a village in Brabant called Wouw. When she woke up the following morning, she said: ‘Gosh, you move a lot in your sleep.’

‘I dreamed about what we did.’

She rubbed her eyes and yawned. It made her look innocent, extremely young. Or maybe it was the snub nose that did it, the freckles on the slightly turned-up tip. She turned into a little girl when she stretched.

I hadn’t been allowed to make any noise. Her housemate was already in bed and the walls were like cardboard. She had taken me home after we’d had wine in a café — glasses to begin with, and then a whole bottle. The plan had been to go for a meal, but by the end of the evening the wine had driven away the hunger. A different hunger had taken its place.

‘You pedal,’ she had said.

I didn’t have a bike in Amsterdam at the time and used to go everywhere on foot. But now I was invited to mount an old-style granny bike that had been painted yellow, with a girl on the back, her legs dangling down the left-hand side. The headlights of the passing cars made her nylon tights shimmer.

And so I lost my virginity underneath a bookshelf that also held a diary somewhere — in between W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to be precise. She pressed her hand on my mouth. She had lost her virginity at fifteen. The person in question had been a bad boy, she told me when we were lying next to each other in the morning. Quite a bit older. He had also slept with her best friend. She had expected it to be a special experience, virginity being something you can only give away once. The second time had been much nicer. It was with another boy, her childhood sweetheart who’d stayed behind in Wouw. He had a spluttering Zündapp and a quiff.

I was afraid to tell her that I had lost my virginity to her. We spent the rest of the morning in bed. We kissed, we had sex again — and then we had it a third time. Her name was Laura. It was Saturday, it was September, it was sunny. In the ice-cream parlour I knew my mother would be leaning over the ice-cream, my father holding a tray with coffee aloft, and my brother filling the Cattabriga cylinder with a mixture of milk, sugar, egg yolks, and ground almonds.

On the train home on Sunday, I couldn’t stop thinking of Laura’s sex. I had kissed it, the urge stronger than myself.

‘What are you doing?’

I had no idea; I couldn’t help myself. My heart was pounding like a fist on a door.

‘It tickles.’

I kissed the whitest part of her body until she said in a firm but velvety whisper, ‘I want you inside me.’

When I got home, Luca could see it, I knew it. Just as I entered the ice-cream parlour, he came out of the kitchen with a tub of virtually white pineapple ice. Our eyes met — his dark, like Kalamata olives — and he knew it. You can tell. Sometimes you can even smell it. A certain glow, pheromones. When I’m on my way to an international poetry festival and too tired to read poems, I play a little game: I try to guess who has just had sex. The early-morning flights are the best. You see the fresh faces, the rosy glow on some cheeks, the recently washed hair of the women. And then you look into their puffy eyes, the bags under them. The alarm clock that woke them from a deep sleep, the alarm deliberately set too early so there would be some time for snoozing. You think about the men having to travel to Shanghai for work, and their wives snuggling up against them, mounting them. You think about stewardesses having to hurry and their boyfriends not wanting to let them go, hitching their skirts up and taking them with their hair still wet. Once, on the train to the airport, I saw a dark-skinned woman in a sky-blue uniform rubbing a stain from her jacket.

For a moment I worried that my brother might drop the container of pineapple ice, but he made his way stoically to the front of the shop, where my mother was serving an elderly lady. He set the tub in the chiller display, turned on his heels, and walked back to the kitchen. This time he avoided my gaze.

My mother asked if I was free to help. It was going to be a warm day. I nodded and walked to the back to fetch an apron.

‘Feeling guilty?’ my father asked when he saw me.

‘No, I’m happy to help.’

‘We started making ice-cream at six this morning.’

I knew. I could tell by his puffy eyes, the bags underneath. That was all I saw, that was all I wanted to see. I went outside and walked over to a couple sitting in the sun. The woman had to tell me her order twice. It was a late summer’s day that felt like spring. ‘The heart is pounding and not here,’ the poet J.C. Bloem wrote in ‘First Day of Spring’. I thought of Laura, of the freckles on her nose and of her sex.

Every time I entered the ice-cream parlour that day I could see my brother through the small window in the kitchen door. He held the ice ladle in his right hand like a gigantic phallus. He had never had sex. 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.

‘Where are you off to?’ my father wanted to know.

‘I’m going out for dinner.’

‘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.

‘I have to go,’ I said.

‘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.

‘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.

‘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.

‘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 when I have a difficult decision to make. What would he do? Would he think it was worthwhile?

‘Have you had a look at the menu?’ he asked. ‘They’ve got scallop carpaccio. Have you ever had that?’

I’d never had scallops.

‘They’re a kind of oyster,’ Heiman said. ‘Or have you never tried oysters either?’

‘No.’

‘Let’s order some oysters first then, because knowing how to eat oysters is almost as important as learning to read.’

It’s possible that people saw a father and son at the wooden table with the starched linen, and it’s possible that my father was not only jealous of me, but also of my bond with Heiman.

We talked about my degree. He actually knew some of my lecturers.

‘Paul Delissen!’ he exclaimed. ‘He’s the son of a shipping magnate — did you know that? The father was a filthy rich man who commissioned monumental sculptures and paintings from artists, which he then donated to museums. All the nobility went to Paul. His younger brother owns a factory in Hungary that produces spreadable cheese in all kinds of flavours: paprika, tomato, herb. They’re disgusting, but they sell like crazy.’

Which brother was the happier one, I wondered? What was the flipside of their lives?

Heiman took a sip of the white wine he had ordered. ‘Paul’s wife is called Beppie Blum. What a name! I wonder if they’re still together.’

He was always curious about those things, or might point to a couple in the crowd. ‘That man’s wife,’ he would whisper, ‘is familiar with the colour of many poets’ eyes.’

I told him about the writers I was reading, the poets he knew better than his neighbours, and finally also about Laura, the girl with the snub nose.

‘So you’re in love?’ Heiman asked.

‘No idea.’

‘Would you like to see her again?’

‘Of course!’

He laughed. ‘Have you read her any poetry yet?’

‘We haven’t had time for that.’

The waiter served the intermediate course. A small morsel of grey mullet, a brackish fish. It was served with lamb’s lettuce and a sauce made with butter, lemon, and tarragon. The waiter listed it all without stumbling. It was, like the dishes to follow, absolutely delicious. This was Richard Heiman’s world. Flickering block candles, exquisite dishes, a humidor on wheels, and in the middle of the restaurant a pedestal with an extravagant bouquet of flowers.

At the end of the evening, the waiter helped us into our coats. ‘Good evening, Mr Heiman,’ he said.

‘Bye, Marcel.’

We were standing on the footpath. I was in high spirits, but that may have been the wine. Heiman was on foot; I had my bike. I wanted to give him a hug, but I noticed the waiter standing in the doorway and looking at us.

It would be many years before we hugged, and by then it was too late really. It had started with a hoarse voice and a sore throat, but it took another eighteen months for the diagnosis to be made: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS. That’s when the cramp and involuntary muscle spasms kicked in. Suddenly Heiman would clutch his calf, his face distorted with pain. He was injected with muscle relaxants, but little else could be done. He was given three years, maximum, minus the time it had taken for the diagnosis to be made.

I can still picture him in his apartment, in front of the large window overlooking the garden and the tall trees. He is sitting in a wheelchair, bemoaning the words he can no longer pronounce properly. Swallowing was becoming more and more difficult.

As soon as he received the diagnosis he stepped down from his post. I was one of the first he told the news. ‘The illness is terminal and its nature progressive.’ Perhaps he found the latter harder to come to terms with than the fact that it would kill him.

The winter of his life arrived like a blizzard. His muscles withered, as the signals from his brain could no longer reach them. First his legs became paralysed; then his arms. He became completely dependent. I saw him without a tie for the first time. He was nursed by a Surinamese woman, but perhaps she didn’t know how to knot a tie, or she wasn’t aware that he had always worn one. He could no longer tell her.

His voice was gone. That beautiful, deep voice with which he had recited the many poems he knew by heart. Memorising poems wasn’t just a gift he had, it was also a matter of principle, a conviction. The time when children memorised poems in school was a thing of the past. He thought it was deplorable. All those writers, all their lines — to him they were the bedrock of his life. He could no longer recite the poems now, but his mind hadn’t been affected by the illness, so they were likely still in his head. As he looked out, they must have been passing by, one by one: the words of the Lake Poets, John Keats, Emily Dickinson. The unction of their words and those of many, many others. Neruda, Miłosz, Rilke — yes, the ineffable solace of Rilke. Lord, it is time.

A life without poetry was a life less beautiful.

I visited Heiman nearly every day and told him about my doctoral thesis. After graduating I had specialised in the work of anonymous poets, writers whose name and image had never been passed down, but I was stuck and no longer knew what I was hoping to uncover. I had stopped going to university and hadn’t done any work on my thesis for two months.

Heiman looked at me with his watery eyes, the eyes of the old man he would never be. What might he have said had he been able to speak? What might he have advised me? He would have made a brilliant suggestion, no doubt, or a remark that put everything into perspective. Perhaps he would have told me that everything was going to be all right, that the years would work their magic. I had to make do with a wink, a nod of the head, and a tear welling up — spilling over the rim and finally, slowly and haphazardly, finding its way down to his mouth.

There were other visitors, too. Mostly women. They brought flowers, which they arranged in vases. They combed his hair, knotted his tie, and pushed him in his wheelchair around the park or along the quay, where large ships kept their engines idling. They were well-dressed women, some in their forties, others noticeably younger. In many cases, I was unsure of the nature of their relationship with Heiman. I had often been tempted to ask him, in restaurants or cafés late at night, ‘How many?’ But he never talked about it, and I doubt he’d have wanted to disclose it.

A couple of months after his death I spotted a woman walking down the street who had combed his hair when he had become completely helpless. She approached a small group of children and opened her hand. It held chestnuts, glossy trinkets. The children chose the biggest one. She offered them to grown-ups too, women she may have thought were lonely, men with an air of mystery about them, like herself. Her tights were an intense blue, ultramarine. Had she been a lover? Had Heiman adored this woman? Her hair was wavy and grey, but her dark complexion exuded warmth and even something youthful. I tried to picture them together, in his house, in his bedroom. He sitting up straight, a pillow against the small of his back, reading to her — the most beautiful poem he had read that day.

I wanted to buy her an espresso but felt it wouldn’t be right. It would have violated an unwritten law. We mustn’t try to retrieve what has been carried over to the other side. The woman with the blue legs pressed a chestnut into my hands when she saw me watching her. This would have to do.

Heiman’s last few days had been the worst of his life. He was emaciated and completely exhausted. He had conceded defeat and yet he was forced to stay in the ring. The hours were beating him about. Those long, quiet hours, the hours in which everything passes before one’s eyes. His life had been exceptionally glorious, a charmed string of encounters, of poets and women, of art and endless evenings. All this had shaped him, like a fine wine matured to perfection. But the bottle had fallen, its contents spilled. The end was unlike anything that had gone before, like a chapter from a different book altogether.

I had held his hand, which was limp and likely no longer felt anything. Some women had stroked his head, had run their fingers through his grey hair. The nurse never showed any sign of affection. She washed him and gave him clean clothes. Perhaps, during those last few days, he thought of Edward Arlington Robinson, the American poet who had asked his family to carry his bed outside so he could die underneath the brilliance of the stars. I took him into my arms, finally gave him that hug, and held him tight. I wanted the moment to last forever, but at the same time I wanted it not to be true.

Two days later he had suffered a stroke, and then it was over. Finis. An end to both his splendid life and the terrible suffering. His sister, whom I had never met, inherited his house and his effects. My name was also included in his will. Heiman had left me all of his books. I hired a minivan and one dark and dreary Monday I took his most treasured possessions to the attic of the ice-cream parlour.

My father and my brother helped me carry the heavy boxes.

‘Only because it’s raining,’ my father said.

Luca was silent. He carried the boxes up, two at a time, showing me how strong he was. Or how insubstantial poetry.

I saw the man once more, years later, on his bike. He came towards me and passed me by at great speed, on his way to an appointment or a woman. The resemblance, which I had noticed from a distance, only increased. As we approached one another, the cyclist merged with Richard Heiman, in his late forties, with red cheeks and grey-blond hair, oblivious to the fate that would one day befall him.