The Snow of Yesteryear

I was six when my parents packed me off to the boarding school in Vellai di Feltre. Such was the fate of the children of ice-cream makers. As a baby, toddler, and pre-schooler you get to join your parents at the ice-cream parlour every season, but after that you have to go to school. In Italy. The advantage was that you got to spend the winter at home and the long summer holidays — three months, in Italy — in the Netherlands. The disadvantage was that you spent the rest of the time in a boarding school run by nuns.

The nuns at my school were conservative and authoritarian, but they taught me reading, writing, and arithmetic. I was one of those children who liked learning, who liked sitting bent over my exercise book, pen in my right hand. And my tongue sticking out of my mouth, if Luca, who often mimicked me, is to be believed. He came to Vellai di Feltre two years after me, but he never took to the nuns’ regime. They were extremely strict and sometimes hit us with the flat of their hands.

‘Don’t you miss Mamma and Papa?’ Luca asked me almost every day.

‘A little,’ was my standard reply. I was trying to be strong.

‘I miss them a lot.’

‘They have to work,’ I said. ‘The ice-cream machines have to keep churning.’

‘Churn, churn, churn,’ Luca said. As my father had put it to us: we had to learn, the ice-cream machines had to churn.

Luca had great trouble reading and writing. Unlike me, he didn’t enjoy it. He hated books, and preferred to run up and down the long corridors of the boarding school whenever the nuns weren’t looking. Every so often he was caught in the act and given a good hiding by the eldest nun, who had a wart on her chin that had sprouted three thick hairs. But that wasn’t the worst of it. She stank, according to Luca.

‘Can’t you smell it?’ he asked me.

I shook my head.

‘When she lifts her hand, her robes go up and you catch the weirdest smells.’

It may have been because I always had my nose stuck in a book, but that’s the boarding school smell that has stayed with me. That wonderful smell of old, damp books. I would put my finger on the paper and plough my way through the lines. It may have been because of the books that some days I missed my parents less than my brother did.

At night Luca often crawled into bed with me. We would each clutch the other’s hand, forging a link of an unbreakable chain. As I whispered a story in his ear, something I had read during the day, I would wait for his breathing to grow calm and regular.

When we switched to scuola media, or secondary school, Grandma Tremonti started looking after us. She had dark-grey hair and crooked hands due to arthritis, but she was proud and strong. Her father had run an ice-cream parlour in Ulm, in Germany. When the British bombed it during the war, the family had sheltered in the cellar. ‘Don’t be scared,’ the father told his daughters. ‘It’s like thunder; it will pass.’ His wife shook her head, but the girls never cried. They lost everything — the ice-cream machine, the refrigerators, the gondola-shaped glass plates — but they survived. They walked away from the rubble and the dust.

On her bedside table, Amalia Tremonti kept a framed photograph of her husband, who had lost his life in an accident on the road from Dobbiaco to Cortina d’Ampezzo. One winter he had tried to overtake a tourist just before a bend. Friends had knocked together a wooden cross and planted it by the roadside, but Amalia had never visited the scene of the accident. As the father had passed on to his daughters: step out of the rubble, brush yourself off, and carry on.

With her bony, bent fingers, Amalia Tremonti sliced onions and tomatoes and made us pasta every day. She was caring, but hard-hearted at times. She rarely allowed us to phone the ice-cream parlour in Rotterdam. I felt responsible for Luca. When he struggled with his homework, I helped him. And sometimes I even did his sums for him, so that we had more time to play outside. In the street he always held my hand. In fact, we walked to school like that. Grandma didn’t like it one bit: two boys holding hands was not appropriate.

Come the summer holidays we took the train to Rotterdam, escorted by my mother’s sister. At that point we hadn’t seen our parents for four months. For the whole of spring, the days when the grass turned a pale green, the dandelions sprang up and lent the meadows a yellow complexion, and the sun began to feel warmer. All this happened at a dizzying pace, as if life was being fast-forwarded, and yet to us time passed like frozen December days. We had been looking forward to the reunion for months.

I remember my mother’s tears, and her arms that enclosed us, not wanting to let go.

‘Can I have a go?’ my father would ask every year. ‘I want to have a go, too.’

And then he’d squeeze us tight. He placed his bristly cheeks against our smooth boyish ones, but we didn’t mind. At least not until my stubble began to scratch, too.

We helped out in the ice-cream parlour and relished the days, which were longer than those in the mountains. My parents were usually out front, while Luca and I were in the kitchen, making ice-cream. We were trying to improve the recipes.

‘Have you tried the mango ice?’ Luca asked. ‘It doesn’t contain enough sugar, it’s far too hard.’

‘Let’s look at the vanilla ice-cream first,’ I replied. ‘The texture could be a lot smoother, and the vanilla isn’t evenly distributed.’

This was before the discovery of poetry. As in Shelley’s poem, our spirits created just one object: ice-cream.

‘What do you think will happen if we add white chocolate?’

‘Watermelon ice with white chocolate?’

‘Yes,’ my brother replied. ‘Stracciatella, but different. Totally different.’

‘Don’t let Beppi hear it.’

On more than one occasion we had suggested introducing new flavours: banana with caramel, orange-gingerbread, sweet and salty peanut.

‘Our customers aren’t interested,’ my father always said. ‘They want to eat the same ice-cream day in, day out.’

‘Surely we can try?’

‘Later,’ was his answer. ‘Later, once you’ve taken over the ice-cream parlour.’

We swore we would make the weirdest flavours once we were in charge at Venezia.

In the evening, in the attic, in our separate beds, we would anticipate this fantastic future, this science-fiction world of flavours.

‘Honey ice-cream,’ my brother said.

‘Ricotta with pine nuts.’

‘Coconut-cinnamon.’

‘Carrots and walnuts.’

‘Asparagus ice in April!’

‘Cucumber sorbet.’

‘Ice made with blood.’

‘As in blood pudding?’

‘Yes, but frozen.’

Later, when he had taken over the ice-cream parlour and I was flying around the globe like a sardine in a can, my brother, as promised, made all the flavours we had listed that night. And many more besides. My father’s conservatism was no match. Like a curious child, he would take a huge bite whenever he was offered a spoonful. ‘This is amazing,’ he would say with his eyes closed, like the people who had tasted his grandfather’s ice. ‘But what is it?’

‘Blue cheese with apple and pear,’ my brother replied.

‘Unbelievable.’

On one occasion, after I had eaten ice-cream with a couple of young poets outside Venezia and I settled the bill with my father, he said, ‘Are you expected to pay for those scroungers?’

‘They’re poets.’

He gave them a disdainful look. ‘Tell them to look at Luca if they want to see a true artist.’

My brother was always the better ice-cream maker of the two of us. He could separate three hundred and sixty eggs in fifteen minutes, whereas I needed nearly forty minutes to do the same job. But Luca never mentioned it. There was no tension or rivalry. We made ice-cream together, had the same dreams, and would be overcome with longing for our parents at the same time. Before our final day in Rotterdam had even dawned.

The beginning of September marked our return to Venas. The ice-cream parlour would stay open until late October. And so we would spend two months at Grandma’s, breathing her smells, feeling her hands ruffling our hair and trying to emulate her strength, but when winter finally arrived, our strong family roots would prevail. The four of us would once again be sitting in the kitchen in front of the hot stove, each in our usual chair, twisting a fork in a deep plate.

The return of the ice-cream makers galvanised the village, the way spring breathes new life into nature. But unlike the arrival of spring, everything happened within the space of a few days. The slumber in which Venas had rested for eight months was broken quite suddenly. Cars drove around with their engines roaring and horns honking, shutters were opened, heads were stuck out of windows. It was like the arrival of the Allied forces.

The pizzeria was full again, there was a queue at the bakery, and people were gossiping about turnover and who had come back in a new Mercedes. In the morning the butcher couldn’t keep up with demand. The streets were no longer just the reserve of elderly people and little children. In the evening, men would head down to the pub to play cards, staggering home hours later underneath a clear, starry sky. They were blind drunk and blissfully happy — freed from the long working days in Utrecht, Arnhem, or Maastricht. On Sunday the same narrow footpaths would see a procession of families in their finery; all the pews in church would be occupied. Afterwards everybody meandered home, to roast meat served up alongside small glasses of red wine, accompanied by views of the mountains, chit-chat about other families, and finally the gurgling moka pot spreading its familiar aroma.

A wind swept through the entire valley, from San Vito to Lorenzago di Cadore. It was like Christmas — the same joy and exhilaration, except two months earlier. Everybody was free. This is what they had been working for, this is what they had sacrificed the summer for. The body came to rest, minor ailments vanished, and here and there a baby was conceived. Most children of ice-cream makers come into the world in summer. Luca and I were born on dog days.

Of course there was the never-ending competition. Which ice-cream maker created the most delicious flavours? Who could churn the perfect frozen yogurt? The rivalry tended to be confined to the Netherlands, but some would carry it back to the mountains and insist that their ice-cream was smoother, creamier, or tastier. Sometimes things got out of hand, as the infamous street brawl between the owners of two ice-cream parlours in Zwolle testifies.

‘Your strawberry ice-cream tastes of raspberries,’ one ice-cream producer yelled at his rival across the street.

‘Your banana ice-cream tastes like pear,’ the retort came.

‘Your vanilla ice-cream is indistinguishable from snot!’

‘Your chocolate ice-cream is cow shit.’

And then came the ultimate insult, which nobody could have anticipated and which was not universally understood, either.

‘My apricot ice-cream tastes of your wife!’

The ice-cream makers squared up in the middle of the road and clenched their fists. They fought like teenagers in the schoolyard until they were separated by Guido Zardus, who was as strong as his coin-bending grandfather.

The following day, several ice-cream makers joked about the incident in Bar Posta.

‘My blackcurrant ice-cream is as black as Gregori’s right eye.’

‘My cherry ice-cream is as dark as Belfi’s blood!’

Then there was another controversy. Not as bloody, but almost as fierce. Most of the villages in Cadore — Venas, Vodo, Pieve, Valle, Calalzo, Cibiana — boasted an ice-cream maker who claimed that his grandfather or great-grandfather was the one who had invented ice-cream. Some ice-cream makers joined the debate because it was simply a way to pass the time, but others were dead serious. In our attempt to unravel the mystery together, Luca and I went to visit wrinkly men whose children now ran ice-cream parlours in Austria, Hungary, Germany, or the Netherlands.

Sometimes we were done in less than a minute because the ice-cream maker in question was deaf. Then there were the elderly men we could barely understand. The word ‘gelato’ we could just about make out, but the rest was gobbledygook to us.

Signor Zampieri tried to bribe us.

‘We heard your grandfather invented ice-cream,’ we said the first time we appeared on his doorstep. ‘Do you have proof?’

‘Come in, boys,’ Signor Zampieri said. ‘I’ve got delicious chocolate biscuits.’

In the living room he presented us with a plate of biscuits. We were allowed to take as many as we wanted.

‘My grandfather started out on the market in Dresden,’ Signor Zampieri told us. ‘He churned ice-cream by hand, but nobody was buying it. The people had never had it, had never even heard of it. When it started melting, he began to hand it out to passers-by. “Free ice-cream!” he yelled. My grandmother thought he’d lost his mind, just giving it all away. But once the people had tried it, their ice-cream started selling quite well.’

‘When was this?’ Luca asked.

‘Let me think,’ said Signor Zampieri. ‘Have another biscuit, boys.’

A couple of minutes later he told us another story. ‘Oh, times were hard. My father cycled back to Italy in winter to save money. All the way from the Netherlands. When he arrived in Venas, my mother was furious. He’d worn out three pairs of trousers! They came to about as much as a train ticket.’

‘Mr Zampieri,’ I cut in, ‘my brother asked if you happen to remember when your grandfather sold ice-cream in Dresden.’

‘A long time ago,’ he answered. ‘Before you were born, before I was born.’ He pointed to the view outside, to the Dolomites. ‘Nobody knows exactly when the mountains came into existence.’

I looked at my brother. He snatched another biscuit off the plate.

‘Did you know we’re living on top of gold? We just can’t reach it. It’s too deep down.’

‘Would you mind sticking to the subject?’

‘Oh yes, ice-cream. We used to work with Italian hawkers,’ Signor Zampieri told us. ‘I’d give them bed and board and pay for their return journey. On top of that, they were paid six hundred lira per month plus ten Turmac cigarettes a day.’ He pondered this for a while, perhaps adding things up in his mind. Then he said, ‘If you two were smart, you’d dig a hole. Maybe you’d manage to retrieve that gold.’

Luca’s interest seemed piqued, but then he asked, ‘Why do you think your grandfather invented ice-cream?’

‘He was trying to sell it at the market in Dresden,’ he said again. ‘But nobody was buying it, because they didn’t know what it was. Nobody knew what it was! He’d only just invented ice-cream, you see.’

My brother shook his head.

‘Mr Marinello from Pieve claims his grandfather invented ice-cream,’ I said.

‘Marinello is in his nineties. His memory’s like Swiss cheese, full of holes.’

The day before, we had gone to visit the ancient ice-cream maker from Pieve. He had fallen asleep after sitting down in the armchair opposite us. We had been afraid to wake him.

‘If you asked him whether his family invented the hamburger, he’d say yes, too.’ Signor Zampieri got up and pulled a photo album out of the cabinet. ‘This is me,’ he said. ‘Back when I was young and handsome.’ The photo showed a man with a hat in his hand. ‘Do you see that station? It’s in Zuel, close to Cortina. The station doesn’t exist anymore, but it used to be right opposite the place where the ski jump is now.’

‘Do you have a photo of your grandfather, by any chance?’ I asked, but my question was ignored.

‘If you asked Marinello whether he went down the ski jump at the 1956 Olympic Games, he’d say yes, too.’

Then something sprang to mind. ‘The invention of ice-cream came before the invention of photography.’

‘So you can’t prove that your grandfather invented ice-cream,’ Luca noted.

‘Nobody can prove that,’ Signor Zampieri exclaimed, a tad exasperated. ‘Just like nobody can prove that his grandmother invented spaghetti carbonara.’

He showed us his calloused thumb, the same calloused thumb my father had, the thumb my brother would one day have but that would never be mine. No hard skin forms on my thumb, however many poems I read, however many pages of poetry I turn over. It remains sleek and smooth in the light of my reading lamp.

‘Here’s the proof,’ Mr Zampieri said. ‘This rough, rusty thumb and the stories, my father’s three pairs of trousers and the free ice-cream at Dresden market. My grandmother thinking my granddad had gone mad.’

The biscuits were finished, but there was no end to Signor Zampieri’s stories.

‘Will you stop by again soon?’ he asked.

We said goodbye and promised to be back soon. A little later we walked hand-in-hand through the valley of the ice-cream makers. It was something we continued to do, even when our parents were in Venas. Sometimes people would stare at us, thinking we looked funny.

It was a dazzling winter’s day, the air clear and cold, the outlines of the mountains razor-sharp. We hadn’t had any snow yet. It would be another nine days before the first flakes fell, delicate ones, as though made up of only a single ice crystal. They blew through the valley like goose down and struggled to land on the ground. They didn’t melt as they touched the earth — they sublimated, seemingly swallowed up by the roads and the fields. This was in the morning; by noon the snow was as thick as a swarm of locusts. The mountains were invisible.

There was always something magical about the first snow of the season, while at the same time it was quite earthy for the people in the mountains. They had known it, sensed it; some had even smelled the snow. It had been in the air. Three days before the first flakes, they talked about nothing else. It will come soon, the people said. It will come tomorrow or the day after. They all agreed.

And then it came.

We retrieved the sledge from the attic and whizzed down the white sloping meadow. Right through the fresh snow. Me in the front, Luca at the back, our legs stretched out before us, my back on his stomach. We pretended to be on a bobsleigh and tried not to brake. In the Sixties, the brothers Enrico and Italo De Lorenzo from Pieve had become bobsleigh world champions. Now they owned an ice-cream parlour in Utrecht. In our dreams, a similar fate awaited us.

We asked Beppi to make us a sledge with shorter blades, which would enable us to dart across the snow even faster. He retreated into the basement and emerged a couple of days later with a sledge you could actually sit in. It was a kind of cocoon you had to push and then jump into one after the other.

‘Now,’ Luca yelled, and I dove into the cocoon, feeling his body behind mine a split second later. At first we often got it wrong and ended up lying on top of each other and overturning. There was snow everywhere, even in our underpants, and Luca’s red cheeks were barely a centimetre from my laughing mouth. After a while we began to master the technique, and we’d be whizzing down the slopes like proper bobsledders. We shot across bumps, careered around impossible bends, and hurtled ever faster towards the future. But the dream would never come true.

At the dinner table we were quizzed on our search for the inventor of ice-cream. ‘You must go and talk to Serafino Dall’Asta,’ my father said. ‘He knows who invented the ice-cream cone. Maybe he also knows who invented the ice-cream itself.’

We no longer believed that we might one day discover the origins of ice-cream. Signor Marinello had been awake throughout our second visit, but his story failed to bring us any closer to the truth.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ he had said while gazing out of the window.

‘What is?’

‘The snow.’

Luca and I said nothing. It had been snowing for days on end. As far as we were concerned, it was about time it stopped.

‘It’s the same snow my grandfather trudged through,’ Signor Marinello said. ‘In winter he’d practised the art of confectionary in the Po Valley, and in Venice he’d learned how to cool a mixture. The necessary salt was brought in from Sicily.’

He didn’t sound like someone who was forgetful and might suddenly claim that his great-aunt had created the hamburger.

‘Round about what time was this?’ Luca asked. ‘When was your grandfather in Venice?’

‘It may have been my grandfather’s father,’ Signor Marinello replied. ‘Or even my great-grandfather’s father.’

Luca’s left eyebrow shot up, but I was prepared to hear the story out.

‘I was born nearly a hundred years ago,’ Signor Marinello elaborated. ‘My great-great-grandfather would have been born another hundred years earlier.’

The distance of time was too great to get our heads round. Hardly anything had been passed down: no photos, no objects; only a story, which had been twisted and turned by each new generation.

‘It’s the snow,’ Signor Marinello explained. ‘Everything gets buried, the tracks erased.’

And yet many could picture their grandfather up in the mountains with his sleeves rolled up and a pick-axe in his hands. Maybe they could picture it because their fathers had followed in his footsteps, and they themselves in their fathers’, and some of them could see even further back, through the snow that was identical to the snow in their own lives. Once upon a time, the very first ice-cream maker must have stood there, shrouded in mist, in that blinding, frozen landscape.

Snow. Snow is unbelievably common in poetry, even more so than falling autumn leaves. The cheerful snow of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the snow of Ted Hughes, which is sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s flakes, descending ‘silent, and soft, and slow’; the hurried flecks of Alexander Pushkin; and of course les neiges d’antan, as envisaged by François Villon. But it was only after reading the English poet Maura Dooley that I began to view snow differently. This was more than thirty years after Luca and I had interviewed Signor Marinello. When I read the poem ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, about ‘a skein of snow’, I was instantly cast back into the past.

Everything drained, thinned
to a blankness, pattern that lost
all pattern, a bleakness that took
Wilson Bentley a lifetime to define.
Snowflake, no two ice flowers alike.

Until then, the name Wilson Bentley had slipped my mind but it had not been lost forever. As my eyes skimmed over the letters, it was as if the sulphurous head of a match was lit, instantly igniting the story.

‘I’d like to show something,’ Signor Marinello said on that day Luca and I interviewed him. He rose from his armchair and walked over to the bookcase. For a moment I thought he was going to take out a photo album, like Mr Zampieri. Not so. The book he removed did contain photos, but not of himself as a handsome young man at a station that had long ceased to exist.

‘This book contains two thousand five hundred photos of snowflakes,’ he said. ‘They were taken by Wilson Alwyn Bentley.’ He told us that Bentley hailed from Jericho, a tiny place in Vermont. As a teenager he became fascinated by snowflakes and tried to draw them with the help of a microscope, but the ice crystals were too complex to copy before they evaporated. A folding camera with bellows offered a solution. Bentley hooked the camera up to the microscope and caught the snowflakes on a velvet cloth. It was exceedingly complicated. Even below freezing, snowflakes evaporate without melting first. But on 15 January 1885, Wilson Alwyn Bentley photographed his very first specimen. Many more were to follow. During his lifetime he photographed more than five thousand snowflakes.

‘He held his breath for each photo,’ Signor Marinello said.

Despite the technical limitations, his photos were so good that for nearly a hundred years hardly anyone else would photograph snowflakes. Later, Bentley would also turn his attentions to measuring the size of raindrops.

‘He died of pneumonia after trudging six miles through a snowstorm,’ said Signor Marinello.

We looked at the photo book, at all the pictures of snowflakes, the dazzling ice crystals. To Bentley each specimen was a masterpiece in itself, whereas we leafed through the book the way we walked through the white streets — young and indifferent.

‘He looked right through the snow,’ Signor Marinello told us. ‘And when he did, he saw miracles of beauty. That’s what he called his snowflakes: miracles of beauty.’

We had gradually begun to give up hope. It may well have had something to do with the new girl who had moved into our village. There was no direct correlation, but it wasn’t a complete coincidence either that the end of our search for the original ice-cream maker of Cadore coincided with our first infatuation.

We had spotted her in the snow. She had her head tilted back and her mouth wide open. She must have noticed us staring, because at some point she said, ‘It’s funny to see you’re holding hands.’ Then she walked off and disappeared among the riot of flakes.

Luca had immediately wrenched his hand from mine.

We wouldn’t see the girl again until several days later, when we also saw just what a long tongue she had. She could easily touch the tip of her nose with it.

‘You mean you can’t do that?’ she asked, baffled. Her eyes were grey-green, I noticed.

Luca was the first to try, then me. But neither of us managed to pull it off.

‘Again,’ the girl said, and pulled Luca’s nose without warning. ‘You’re nearly there now,’ she said. ‘You’re just a hair’s breadth away.’

I was up next. I felt her cold fingers around the wings of my nose. I stuck out my tongue as far as possible and she pulled as hard as she could. It hurt. Luca must have felt it too, but he never let on.

She shook her head. ‘You can’t do it either.’

‘I’m Sophia,’ she said then.

We introduced ourselves and told her where we lived. She came from the south, from Modena. Her parents weren’t ice-cream makers. Her father was the new boss of one of the glasses factories in the region.

‘I can catch two snowflakes at once.’

We gazed at her long, narrow tongue, which appeared to hover in the cold air, and at the masterpieces landing on it. We held our breath.

That evening in bed, Luca asked, ‘What’s on your mind?’

I was thinking of Sophia’s tongue, but replied instead, ‘A new jump for our sledge.’

‘Same here.’

She was thirteen, a year younger than me, a year older than Luca. We had the tacit agreement that boys his age were his friends and boys my age my friends. But with Sophia being in between the two of us, the question was who she belonged to.

The following morning we rang her doorbell. Her mother answered. Like her daughter, she had blonde hair and a wide mouth. But she also had long and smooth tanned legs sticking out from under a yellow dressing-gown. We were too young for them, just as we were for the buttocks she clothed in tight skirts when she was out and about. The men in the village were all exactly the right age, but they couldn’t believe their eyes the first time they saw her. A mirage, a summery woman in the middle of winter. Everybody wondered what she was doing here, this big-city beauty.

The same was true for her daughter. She turned our world upside-down.

Luca, who was usually so chatty, had been rendered speechless. I had to do all the talking. ‘We’ve got a sledge,’ I said. ‘Do you fancy coming with us?’

‘I’d like to stay in for a bit,’ Sophia replied.

‘All right.’

And so we stayed in, but we had no idea what to play with.

‘You can take your coats off if you like,’ Sophia said after a while.

Her mother brought us all a cup of tea and then must have left to get changed, because shortly afterwards she re-entered the living room in a purple dress with flowers on it. There was July in that dress, the sun high in the sky. Sophia smiled when she saw her mother.

Meanwhile Luca and I hadn’t said a word, just taken turns sipping the hot tea.

Eventually Sophia said, ‘Who’d like to brush my hair?’

Suddenly it was Luca who was the quickest off the mark.

He was handed a brush and set to work on Sophia’s blonde hair. It gleamed like the halos of the statues in church. My mother had strong black hair with a blue tinge to it. We had often brushed it when we were little, so we knew how to move the brush through and how to get the tangles out without hurting. Still, every now and then I could see Sophia grimacing with pain, but that may well have been feigned. Perhaps she didn’t want to let on that she was enjoying it. I used to brush one half of my mother’s hair and Luca the other, but this time he didn’t hand the brush over to me.

‘Have you been practising?’ Sophia asked me.

I didn’t know what she meant until she stuck out her tongue and brought the tip to her nose.

I shook my head. ‘Does practising make a difference?’

‘It did for my father,’ she replied. ‘He can do it now.’

We hadn’t seen her father yet. He was the boss of one of the bigger glasses factories, or so we had heard at the kitchen table. ‘They hired him to outwit the Chinese,’ my father had said. ‘To crush them.’

‘Ouch,’ Sophia said with a smile as Luca finished brushing.

She looked prettier when Luca put the hairbrush down on the table.

‘What next?’

I glanced at the bristles, at the spool of golden hair caught in them. I had to stop myself from pulling it out and slipping it into my pocket.

Since Luca wouldn’t say it, I did. ‘Let’s go outside.’

The sledge’s cocoon wouldn’t hold all three of us, so we took turns going downhill with Sophia. I had no idea whether Luca talked when he was alone with her, whether he held her, and what the exact distance between his mouth and her cheeks was when they lay in the snow after a tumble. I only knew what happened when I slid down the white meadow with her and hurtled across the bumps. I ended up with her hair in my mouth when we veered off the track. She pulled it out with her index finger and thumb. Her eyes darted from my lips to my eyes and back again. I had no idea a moment could last that long.

That evening Luca and I lay awake again.

‘What’s on your mind?’ Luca asked.

Every single thought seemed to evaporate instantly, assuming the shape of a girl’s face instead. ‘Signor Zampieri,’ I lied. ‘His biscuits.’

‘I’m thinking about Sophia.’

All was quiet for a moment.

‘I’m thinking about her hair. I want to brush it again.’

My brother had decided to be honest with me, seeing as we had always shared everything. He opened up his heart, while mine remained closed.

‘You’re in love,’ I said.

‘Aren’t you?’ He sounded as though he couldn’t quite believe it.

‘No,’ I said, but I couldn’t quite believe it myself. And that’s why I took it one step further, so there was no way back. ‘You can have her.’

Luca was silent, and it took a while before he said, ‘You’ve got to help me. I don’t know what to do.’

‘I’ll help you,’ I said. I made him a promise. I was his older brother; I would always help him.

The promise meant that every single time Luca went to her house I had to come along. I told him it would be better if I stayed at home and he went on his own, but he didn’t have the guts.

‘That way you’ll have to talk to her,’ I said.

‘What am I supposed to say?’

‘How would I know?’ I replied. ‘Why don’t you tell her you dreamed about her?’

But he didn’t speak the language of love. At least he wasn’t as bad as our great-grandfather, who had actively fled from love. When Luca saw Sophia he just said, ‘Hello.’ And when he left, ‘Bye.’ Or ‘See you.’ But in between he remained eerily quiet, and I had to make sure we didn’t come across as two socially challenged idiots.

Sophia didn’t make things any easier for us. One morning, when she was catching snowflakes again, she asked, ‘Do the two of you taste the same as well?’

She simply held her head tilted back and waited for a response while the occasional flake whirled down onto her tongue.

‘Well?’ she demanded after neither of us answered. Now she actually looked at us: first at Luca, then at me. She took a step towards us, and then another one. I knew I had to say something.

‘I taste of broccoli,’ I said, ‘and Luca of strawberry mousse.’

‘Broccoli’s my favourite vegetable,’ Sophia said at once, ‘but I quite like strawberry desserts as well.’

Either Luca hadn’t heard the latter half of the response, or it felt like second-best to him, because when we were in bed that evening he was livid. ‘You should have said you tasted of horse piss.’

‘Who tastes of horse piss?’

‘Who tastes of broccoli?’

It goes without saying that I was just as ignorant about love as Luca, but I wasn’t shy or scared. That’s how it started. Maybe Sophia was perfectly aware of Luca’s debilitating love, but equally aware of something else — of me, trying to swallow my love, hiding it deep inside.

We both played ‘hard to get’ to an absurd degree. It was a question of waiting until another would walk away with our bone. But it never came to that; there would never be another.

In bed I assumed the role of Cyrano de Bergerac, whispering useful lines into Luca’s ear. ‘Tell her you want to know what she tastes of’; ‘Tell her you want to touch the tip of her nose with your tongue’; ‘Tell her you’d like to be a snowflake on her tongue.’

But he didn’t say any of this.

‘Tell her you want to brush her hair for ever and ever. Tell her you can’t hold your breath much longer, that you’re suffocating and dying without her love.’

He never said a word.

Of course, there’s no knowing what might have happened had he actually said all of this. They say love is a chemical reaction in the brain, but I reckon it’s a mechanism that lacks any logic. Try too hard and you put the other off. Do nothing and the other will want you — although there’s also a chance they may never even notice you. What do we know about the workings of a heart? How to make it beat faster, how to conquer it and make it yours forever?

On the day it stopped snowing, Sophia suddenly said, ‘My mother claims the two of you are in love with me.’

We were at her house, sipping our tea. Tiny sips, but Luca still managed to swallow the wrong way.

‘She says I have to choose.’ She looked at both of us in turn. Even though I didn’t feel entirely at ease, I did meet her gaze. Luca couldn’t stop coughing; he had tears in his eyes.

I decided to slap him on the back, and after a couple of slaps he was doing better and we returned to our tea as if nothing had happened.

I waited a bit, during which time all three of us took two sips of tea, and then I said, ‘I’m not in love with you.’

And what did my brother say? The twit, the oaf, the tongue-tied idiot said, ‘Neither am I.’

Of course Sophia had to follow suit. ‘I’m not in love with you two, either.’

I should have drained my glass, put on my coat, and left them to it — the two of them, in the spacious front room. But I was afraid that Sophia would come after me, and if not, that Luca would finish his tea and run off to catch up with me.

So the three of us just sat there and drank the herbal tea Sophia’s mother had made for us. I was the one who finally said, ‘Shall we go outside?’

There were some clouds in the sky, a veil the sun was trying to pierce. No more snowflakes were coming out.

Sophia bent down and used both hands to scoop snow off the ground and fling it in the air. It was like a haze descending on us. We followed suit, shovelling up snow and throwing it high up in the sky.

Needless to say, Sophia opened her mouth and tried to catch the powdery snow with her tongue. But the flakes also ended up in her hair and inside her collar. Before long, we were caught up in a snow fight. We did fashion balls of a kind, but we didn’t take enough time with them. While still in flight they turned into an ever-growing flurry. At first Luca only threw at me, me at him, and Sophia at us, but at some point we began to throw back. Together. She got completely inundated by snow. It landed in her collar and in her neck, and she felt it between her shoulders and on her arms and her yet-to-develop breasts and her stomach — just about everywhere. I threw and scooped and tipped snow all over Sophia.

She begged for mercy. ‘Stop!’ she yelled. ‘No more!’

But I carried on. I felt like shouting: You have to choose. You have to choose one of us. Go on, choose!

Then she fell over and took a direct hit on the head. It was one of my balls. She refused to give in and scooped up as much snow as possible with her small hands and hurled it at me with all the strength she could muster.

It was cheerful snow and hurried snow, it was masculine and feminine snow, and it was also the snow of yesteryear, the same snow Signor Marinello’s grandfather had trudged through, in which my grandfather had stood, and my great-grandfather, too. It was a flurry that stretched from the distant past into the future. Into now. And it is now that I see that no two flakes are alike, as Maura Dooley writes in her poem, and it is now that I too look through the snow and finally see the miracle.

Luca threw a snowball at me, a ball he had taken pains to shape: rock-hard, unexpected, it was like a slap in the face. I felt the cold burst on my forehead before it trickled down into my neck. And when the snow slid further down to my chest, I felt the betrayal. Luca was standing up for Sophia; he was protecting her. He threw again, a ball that turned into a mist that briefly obstructed my view. It was the miracle I wasn’t aware of at the time — I didn’t realise the incomparable mechanism that had been set in motion. Luca had done not too much, not too little. He had done exactly the right thing.

I stumbled and fell and got showered with snow. Four hands at once. Snow in my eyes, snow in my mouth, snow in my nose. I didn’t get it, and I wouldn’t get it for a long time to come. But now I get it, now I know that he couldn’t have done it any other way. This had been the only way for my brother: without words, without tenderness, issuing a blow so hard it knocked me down.

Years later, when I had already turned my back on the ice-cream parlour, my brother and Sophia got together and she became his wife. But it was decided back then. Back then, in the snow, while I lay on the ground and the final few flakes fell down on me, silent, soft, and slow.