Like Sophia Loren’s Buttocks

The following spring, Sophia stood in the ice-cream parlour. She wore her long, blonde hair in a thick braid down her back and held a spatola in her hand. She served the customers, together with my mother. Beppi made coffee and waited on the tables outside. Luca was in the kitchen, boiling milk and churning scandalously thick ice-cream. There were four again.

It had happened the previous winter, or the one before. Luca never told me. He was still not talking to me. The fact that he had won Sophia and she had taken my place in the ice-cream parlour made no difference to him. Yet he failed to suppress a smile when, in late February, I walked into the parlour and our eyes met. I had already spotted Sophia. I had seen her right away, even before my hand had reached the doorknob, through the glass my mother was cleaning, past her blue apron, behind my father who was polishing the espresso machine with a cloth. There she was. It was unbelievable, yet perfectly natural at the same time. She was holding a mop and greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

‘Hello, brother-in-law,’ she said with a smile.

I spied Luca through the small window in the kitchen door and he too was smiling, but it was a sardonic smile, like that of a boxer who sees his opponent sprawled on the canvas.

They were cleaning, making final preparations before re-opening, perhaps as early as the next day.

‘It will stay dry,’ my mother said, sounding pleased. ‘Sunny spells this afternoon, with temperatures rising later in the week. The wind is moderate, southwest.’

I knew it. Spring was in the air.

My father made me an espresso. ‘Have a taste,’ he said. ‘I connected the machine this morning. The beans are freshly ground.’

I took a sip. It was only warmish because the machine hadn’t heated up properly yet, which made the coffee a touch sour.

‘Nice,’ I said, ‘but there’s so little of it. I can see the bottom of the cup.’

There was no bucket of water for me, but I did get a hug. I could feel his stubble scratching my cheek, and mine his. On the first day of the season, there was no resentment. It would come after a few weeks, when the ice-cream machines were churning non-stop, the espresso machine was wheezing, and my father’s joints were creaking. He would start cursing me as he walked back and forth between terrace and parlour for the umpteenth time, suddenly visualising me in a chair with a book of poetry in my hands — a vision in the blazing sun.

He attached a double portafilter to the espresso machine and pressed the button. Two caramel-coloured jets gushed into the pre-heated cups. It would take exactly twenty-six seconds, not a second shorter and not a breath longer.

For most ice-cream makers, coffee was just a sideline. They sold it in the morning or used it to attract customers on rainy days, and of course it was nice that they could drink proper espresso themselves. But ice-cream was their livelihood. For many it was a passion, or even more than that: some ice-cream makers couldn’t stop talking about their trade. It continued in Italy in winter. Endless conversations in Bar Posta about vertical and horizontal ice-cream makers, about the ideal temperature, about proportions; discussions that often carried over to the kitchen table. It drove some wives to distraction.

My father simply withdrew into his basement in winter, to his treasure trove of screwdrivers and sanders. He rarely talked about ice-cream, but when the subject was coffee he liked to get involved. Other ice-cream makers often talked about smells. They praised the extraordinary aroma of their coffee: chocolate, cinnamon, nutmeg, cedar. One ice-cream maker even claimed that his espresso smelled of the colouring pencils of his childhood.

My father swore by a percolation time of twenty-six seconds. Aromas were unimportant to him, hogwash. ‘A good espresso smells of espresso,’ was his opinion, ‘the way yoghurt ice tastes of yoghurt.’

He tried to convince other ice-cream makers of the ideal percolation time he had established after years of experimentation.

‘Why not twenty-eight seconds?’ an ice-cream maker from Vodo had once asked him teasingly. ‘Or twenty-four?’

‘Twenty-eight seconds is far too long,’ my father replied, deadly serious. ‘It makes the espresso bitter, because the roasting notes are dominant. After twenty-four seconds the espresso is sour and watery. The coffee hasn’t had enough extraction time.’

‘What about twenty-three seconds, Beppi?’

‘At twenty-three seconds there’s a risk of the cup exploding.’

‘Twenty-six seconds per cup, you say?’ another ice-cream maker remarked, sounding as if he had just made a difficult calculation. ‘I haven’t got that much time.’

‘What’s the rush?’ Beppi replied. ‘Ice doesn’t melt at minus fifteen.’

‘But the customers walk away when they have to wait too long.’

‘Let them walk away.’

The other ice-cream makers frowned at my father.

Perhaps it was an escape, a way of withdrawing every so often. My father could hide behind the Faema E61, behind its gleaming hood, behind the steam taps and manometers. Twenty-six seconds per cup. Atomic time.

As a bitter old man, stranded in Venas di Cadore, my father would admit, ‘At first I only hated the ice-cream, but then I started hating the people buying the ice-cream, too.’

When exactly the loathing had started and when it assumed an extremely rare form of misanthropy is hard to say. My father had never wanted to be an ice-cream maker in the first place; he never had a vocation for it. The fact is that as Luca and I grew older and began to make the ice-cream, Beppi spent less and less time in the kitchen. After I went to university and Luca took over the ice-cream parlour, my father often had to help out, but my brother was the one who was in charge of the ice-cream.

The machine ground to a halt. The espressos were ready.

‘For you and your brother,’ my father said.

I picked up the two cups and took them through to the kitchen.

‘Right,’ was the first thing I said to my brother. ‘So you’re engaged.’

He said nothing. He didn’t even look at me. He looked at the tiled floor and listened to the Cattabriga, to the scraper blade moving back and forth, going slll, slll, slll. A good ice-cream maker doesn’t have to peek inside the cylinder; he can tell by the sound of the machine when his ice is ready. ‘It’s like a marriage,’ an old ice-cream maker from Tai di Cadore had said in Bar Posta once. He was tipsy, but not quite drunk. ‘I know the ice and the ice knows me,’ he said. ‘It talks to me.’ The other ice-cream makers, their eyes equally bloodshot, all nodded.

We were silent and downed our espressos at the same time.

Maybe there was nothing to talk about. What had happened couldn’t have happened any other way. I was the eldest, I was the one who would have inherited the ice-cream parlour had I not renounced it. Luca, on the other hand, had accepted it and had received Sophia as a bonus. It made sense. He needed her. I didn’t. What more was there to say?

There were no other subjects for discussion, and my brother must have realised it. Our lives had become too different. I read, I wrote, I edited. I had meetings, ate baguettes and brie with poets, and attended book launches. He worked sixteen hours a day, churning ice-cream, selling it, cleaning the machines, and then sleeping like a log at night. The ice-cream parlour was his whole world; mine began where it ended.

Slll, slll, slll.

Luca switched off the machine and picked up the spatolone. His thumb closed around the metal handle. He leaned over the open cylinder and straightened up again. The left corner of his mouth was a little higher than the right one — you couldn’t quite call it a smile. It was what he had expected. It was good.

He had made vanilla ice-cream. It dripped off the large spoon and into the metal container like cement.

Luca saw me looking, like my great-grandfather’s brothers and sisters had looked at his ice-cream, like everybody looks at ice-cream. What could be better? Do you know anyone who doesn’t like ice-cream? Who doesn’t feel happy at the sight of an ice-cream parlour? The cone that takes us back to childhood, the cardboard cup we’ve all stirred with a flat plastic spoon until we ended up with a new colour and flavour. Are you ever too old for ice-cream? Outside Venezia stands a giant cone with three scoops: strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. The thing is made of polyester and filled with polystyrene, but I’ve seen plenty of toddlers waddle over to try and lick it. They won’t remember it when they’re older, but the longing will never go away.

Luca approached me with the metal container. The ice-cream didn’t move in sync with his steps. It was soft yet firm.

‘Like Sophia Loren’s buttocks in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,’ my father was to say after tasting it.

My brother held up a spoon. I looked into his Kalamata eyes. He returned my gaze. Then I opened my mouth and he fed me his ice-cream. The texture was unbelievably fine and smooth, velvety and soft. The millions of tiny ice crystals in the thick cream formed the backbone of the ice-cream, even though they constituted only a fraction of the overall volume. The air bubbles that had been locked in during the churning had produced a lighter consistency, but not a brittle one — you could almost chew the creamy ice. And then it melted and my eyes involuntarily closed. It felt like floating, the way you’re briefly suspended from everything when you kiss a girl. Luca had improved the recipe, perfected it. The structure was creamier, the flavour richer, and the vanilla evenly distributed across the ice-cream. I swallowed and opened my eyes. His gaze had never once left my face. The sardonic smile had gone. Both corners of his mouth were equally high now. He knew what I knew. I had helped him by doing nothing, by being absent, by not coming back. That’s how he had won the most beautiful girl in the village. He couldn’t say it. His ice-cream was tasked with the job.

That afternoon the five of us sat around the dining table on the first floor. My mother had made pasta — spaghetti with tomatoes, garlic, capers, and anchovies. There was a bottle of red wine on the table. It was like a Saturday in the mountains.

Sophia came down from the attic after changing her clothes. We all looked at her and saw a field full of daffodils. She had started wearing her mother’s dresses, the way Luca had stepped into my father’s work gear. I glanced at her tanned legs and wondered whether my brother had touched them this morning. She twirled her fork in the spaghetti and took a bite without splattering her dress.

My mother couldn’t help herself and talked about the weather. On the radio she had heard that it was going to be seventeen degrees tomorrow. ‘It’s never been that warm on the first day,’ she said with a twinkle in her eye.

Beppi told us that one year the temperature had been ten below zero when they arrived back in Rotterdam. ‘The icicles were hanging from the lampposts. You could skate on the Westersingel.’

‘Had Giovanni and Luca already been born?’ Sophia asked.

‘Giovanni, yes,’ my mother replied. ‘But not Luca. He was still in the womb.’

‘We were both born in summer,’ I said. ‘Ice-cream makers only do it in winter.’ It was meant as a joke, but it didn’t elicit a laugh. Everyone fell silent. The only sound was the twirling of my brother’s fork.

Luca didn’t talk — never said a single word during the meal. I wondered if he talked to Sophia at all, whether he had the guts for it now. I hadn’t heard him say anything to her so far.

When the plates were empty and we had all finished our glass of wine, my father started telling us about a hammer drill he had seen in the window of Spijkermand, a hardware shop down the road.

‘It’s a beauty,’ he said.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ my mother warned him.

‘I’ve already bought it.’

Sophia and I laughed.

My brother looked up, his mind already on the ice-cream. I recognised my father’s old nervousness. Back in the day, he could never enjoy a meal, either. Not in Rotterdam, anyway. There was always something to do: separating eggs, mashing pineapple, squeezing oranges. We had two ice-cream machines, but twenty-two flavours. The ice-cream maker was the linchpin; one miscalculation and everything ground to a halt. The worst thing was running out of a flavour — an empty metal container in the display and a child bursting into tears and starting to screech. It meant you never had a moment to yourself. It was all work, work, work. Churn, churn, churn.

‘May I have another glass of wine?’ Sophia asked.

‘Of course,’ Beppi said and emptied the rest of the bottle into her glass. He was delighted with his future daughter-in-law. ‘My wife never drinks more than one small glass.’

‘One of us has to stay level-headed.’

‘I’ve never been drunk in my life,’ Beppi said.

‘When you’re drunk, you think you’re sober.’

Suddenly my father remembered something. ‘Stefano Coletti tried to make ice from his urine once.’

‘Beppi!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘We’re eating.’

‘Everyone’s done.’

‘Those stories aren’t suitable for a young lady.’

In due course she would get to hear all the stories, and the names of all the ice-cream makers, too. We had heard them as well. Stefano Coletti came from Pieve di Cadore, and one night he had emptied his bladder in the cylinder of his ice-cream machine. Drunk as a skunk, he had then switched in on. The resulting sorbet, which he put in the freezer, was hard and grainy. The following morning he had to work as usual, and with a stabbing headache he carried the metal containers to the display counter. He didn’t look properly and put the new flavour where the lemon sorbet was supposed to go, but when his wife tried to stick the spatola into the container ninety minutes later, she couldn’t get through. Without any added sugar, the ice had become as hard as stone at minus eighteen Celsius.

‘Stefano!’ she had yelled. ‘Come here.’

He looked at the sorbet, but failed to make the connection with the night before.

‘What’s this?’ his wife asked.

‘Lemon sorbet.’

‘It’s rock hard.’

‘Strange,’ was all he said.

Only when he tasted some in the kitchen did snippets of the night resurface.

‘He didn’t think it was too bad,’ my father told us. ‘In fact, he took a second bite!’

There were countless stories about ice-cream makers and their machines. The most tragic one of all was the story of Ettore Pravisani, from Valle di Cadore. Pravisani was a true gentleman who was never seen without a tie. He had a shop in The Hague, and one morning in July he was churning strawberry ice-cream, his most popular flavour, as it is in so many other parlours. The machine was going slll, slll, slll, but Signor Pravisani couldn’t tell from the sound when his ice-cream was done. So he leaned over the Cattabriga for a look inside the cylinder. His tie got caught by the driveshaft and he was strangled above the red ice-cream.

Sophia was spared this story for now.

‘I tasted my wee once as a little girl,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t like it at all.’

‘Perhaps it’s better cold than warm,’ my father remarked.

He laughed at his own joke, and we joined in. Only my brother rose to his feet and said, ‘I’m going back to work.’

It was Saturday, the afternoon like a spreading stain, except that we weren’t in the mountains.

It turned out to be a good season — a warm spring, a sizzling summer. On days when the mercury rose above thirty, my thoughts were often with the ice-cream parlour. The window of my office was open and on my desk lay a stack of papers, a pencil beside it. With my sleeves rolled up, I read the latest work from poets on our list. It felt magical to read poems that nobody else had had the privilege to see, like walking through virgin snow. It had something to do with the silence, the complete solitude, and the words, which had been extracted from deep down like gold. But now and again I got lost between two lines and my thoughts would suddenly drift to the ice-cream parlour. I wondered what dress Sophia was wearing and how many men were trying to catch a glimpse of her cleavage as she scooped ice-cream for them.

At the end of the summer, Victor Larssen invited me to Rotterdam. There was something he wanted to discuss with me, but not over the phone. We agreed to meet outside Venezia. It was late afternoon and all the chairs were bathed in sunlight. My brother was helping my father, but it was Beppi who took our order.

‘For me, a cup with vanilla and raspberry,’ I said.

Larssen wanted a cone with hazelnut, mocha, and cinnamon.

‘With whipped cream?’ my father asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. He had served Larssen so many times that he knew he wanted whipped cream on his ice. Likewise, I still remembered what flavours some people wanted. One man had been coming to Venezia for more than ten years and always ordered the same: a five-scoop cup filled completely with pistachio ice-cream. His dog, half-hidden under his chair, was always given a cone, which it devoured in a couple of bites.

I could tell by the way he walked that my father’s joints were aching. How many times had he walked back and forth between the terrace and the parlour today? How many times this season? These had been peak months. He would have to keep walking back and forth, like Sisyphus in the underworld. I knew a snide remark was imminent. He had cursed me on the hottest days this summer, and now I was sitting here on a stiflingly hot afternoon, wearing a goddamn t-shirt no less, and I had the audacity to order an ice-cream from him, a man in his late fifties, a man who had risen at five-thirty to help his younger son peel apples, a man who had started working at the age of fifteen, who hadn’t had a summer for over forty years, who had started hating ice-cream. I made him walk while I sat in the sun.

Sophia was scooping ice-cream. To her left my mother was also serving a customer. A queue snaked around the giant ice-cream cone and the lamppost. I tried to catch Sophia’s eye, but every time I looked she was bent over the ice-cream. Larssen told me that he had liked the most recent editions of our journal, and that he was really impressed with the translations.

We were interrupted by my father, who was holding a tray in his hands. He put down my cup and handed Larssen his cone. And then he stayed put for a while. Not that it would have been immediately apparent to an outsider, a customer, who probably just saw a middle-aged man dragging his feet. Larssen didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, either, but I knew what was coming. The hard feelings, the accumulated resentment.

‘Would you believe this weather?’ my father said. ‘It’s a good thing we’ve got some outside space so you can sit and enjoy the sun.’

I nodded, hoping he would leave it at this. But he remained beside our table.

‘You’d better eat your ice-cream quickly or it’ll melt.’ He was only addressing me now.

Larssen had already taken a bite. Cinnamon with whipped cream. I was afraid to touch mine.

‘Or would you like me to spoon-feed you, Giovanni?’

Perhaps he had already started hating the people who bought ice-cream; perhaps he hated me at that moment.

I decided to risk it and dug my flat plastic spoon into the vanilla.

‘Good?’ my father asked.

I had been looking forward to my brother’s ice-cream, the way you long for a flavour or an aroma from childhood. In Amsterdam I had ordered a cup at Tofani’s, and later I had also joined the queue at Gamba and Verona Gelati, but their vanilla ice-cream was no match for my brother’s.

I felt my eyes involuntarily closing, but I immediately opened them again. It was just as soft and firm as it had been on that early spring day when my brother had held up a spoon for me in the kitchen. Unbelievably creamy. It was as if time stood still during the transition from solid to fluid.

‘It’s like Sophia Loren’s buttocks in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,’ my father said. This time he was addressing Larssen too. ‘Luca is a genius.’

‘My brother,’ I clarified.

‘My other son,’ my father added. ‘He makes vanilla ice-cream that is just as firm and irresistible as Sophia Loren’s buttocks in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.’

Larssen looked at him. At first he seemed shocked, but then he said, ‘Now I know where your son gets his love for poetry.’

We both laughed, my father and I. Except that he turned red in the face and nearly choked. The idea! It brought back memories of the old man who’d claimed ice-cream was a Chinese invention. He’d had an ice-cream cone flung at his head and had been forced to run for his life.

Victor Larssen was allowed to remain seated and finish his cone. After turning round, my father walked back to the ice-cream parlour, slowly and laboriously, pushing the invisible rock before him.

‘Where’s Hardy?’ I had looked at Larssen’s handmade shoes and then under his chair, but the pug with the sad face wasn’t sleeping by his feet.

‘He’s at the office,’ Larssen replied. ‘He’s doing the honours.’

‘What happens when you travel?’

‘My wife looks after Hardy.’

She wasn’t his wife — they weren’t married — but he wouldn’t reveal this to me until later. Victor Larssen didn’t wear a wedding band. He used to have one, which he had put next to his toothbrush every evening for twenty-two years. He had children, too; a grandchild, even. After his divorce — they had separated when their youngest daughter moved out, the documents signed before her boxes were unpacked — he had met a French woman who worked at the embassy. Her name was Valérie and they now lived together, and despite a great deal of respect for each other they also lived very separate lives. Not so much when it came to tastes — in composers, wine, literature — but definitely when it came to their jobs. She worked long hours, he travelled a lot, but it never caused any friction. They were inseparable only in summer, when they spent a month sailing the Mediterranean, sleeping side by side in the fore-cabin.

His youngest daughter was my age. She was a civil servant in Utrecht, where she worked for the Executive Councillor for Finance. ‘She has no truck with poetry,’ Larssen told me.

‘Nor does my father,’ I said. ‘And my brother even less so, if that’s possible. It’s a miracle we share the same genes.’

‘I used to wonder whether she was my daughter at all.’ He laughed. ‘Unfortunately she’s got my nose.’

His wasn’t a big nose, but a distinctive one. It had a strong curve, a proper hook.

‘I used to fantasise that I’d been adopted and that one day my real parents would turn up on the doorstep. A Brazilian man with a white hat, a father like Carlos Drummond de Andrade.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘Antjie Krog.’

‘Why?’

‘Imagine her sitting at the foot of your bed, reading you a bedtime story,’ I replied. ‘In that beautiful language, in that gentle, charming voice: ‘I dearly want to make you happy / I would write verse for you / sober and supple as you are / I would sing for you / each night while you sleep.’

Larssen commented, ‘Didn’t she write that for her husband?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said.

That’s when I finally caught Sophia’s eye, as the spatola in her hand went from the ice-cream to the cup in her other hand. Somewhere halfway, for a split second, our eyes met.

‘I wanted to see you,’ Larssen said, ‘because I want to ask you something. Or make you a proposal, rather.’ He shifted in his seat and straightened his back. He carried on talking, but I missed a bit, the essential bit.

She had smiled, and I must have done the same, because Larssen asked me, ‘Does that smile mean you’ll accept the job?’

When I didn’t respond straightaway, he added, ‘It’s a great job. As an editor you get to travel the globe. Zagreb, Havana, Quebec City.’

I was familiar with the magical list of cities. Struga, Istanbul, Michoacán. I had hung on Richard Heiman’s every word whenever he returned, tanned, from a festival on the other side of the world.

‘I work for a publisher,’ I stammered. ‘I already have a job.’

‘Robert Berendsen would understand your choice. He’d be happy for you.’

I looked over to Sophia again. She continued to return my gaze, her mouth a little open, the lips parted slightly.

‘Would you like the job?’

‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘Of course I want to be an editor of the finest poetry festival in the world.’

I thought of Heiman, of the lighthouse of Alexandria to which he used to compare the World Poetry Festival. He had piloted me to this harbour; now it was time to go ashore.

‘In that case, we’ve got something to celebrate,’ Larssen said. ‘Do they have champagne here?’

I shook my head. The most festive dish on the menu was the Coupe Gondola with fruit, ice-cream, and whipped cream. But if I were to order that, my brother was sure to kill me. What was I thinking? Sit outside in twenty-eight degrees and order a large coupe to boot! As if he didn’t have enough work to do!

I tried to establish eye contact with Luca, but he avoided my gaze. He looked tired, an ice-cream maker in summer. Six more weeks, the tail end of September and October, and they would head back to Venas. And then he would finally get to sit in an easy chair, watch television, nap after lunch, and in the evening, after popping into Bar Posta, make a baby. Un piccolo gelataio who would one day have a calloused thumb, like his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather before him. That was the order of things. And this new offshoot of the Talamini family tree would one day take over the ice-cream parlour and beget yet another child who would churn ice-cream.

This winter I was due to travel to Italy, too. In December Luca and Sophia would be getting married in the new San Marco church. He hadn’t yet asked me to be his witness, but he was going to, according to my mother.

‘Let’s go to the Veerhaven and have a drink over there,’ Larssen suggested. He settled the bill with my father. A note was handed over, coins were given back. No words were spoken. The silence was as bad as a snide remark.

While Larssen retrieved his dog from the office, I waited outside on the footpath and observed the ice-cream parlour. Our seats had already been taken by other people. My brother took their order with a friendly smile. Children were running around in high spirits. A breeze had got up and the edge of the awning was flapping. Thunder was imminent. My father retreated behind the espresso machine.

The door to the office opened. Larssen came out first, the pug traipsing after him. ‘Hardy fancies a drink too,’ he said.

I saw my mother waving at me with her free hand, the one without a spatola. Sophia waved too, over the heads of the children, the fathers, the mothers, the tourists, the senior citizens, the lovers, the lonely, the well-to-do, the skint — all those wanting an ice-cream on this muggy day.

I would see them again the following day. It had rained in the night, a summer thunderstorm. The footpaths were dotted with large puddles, but the asphalt was already drying. I was with a woman I had met the night before. Kitty. She worked for a communications agency downtown and had woken me at seven in the morning because that’s when she got up during the week.

‘Oh look, it’s one of our regulars,’ my father said as he approached our table.

I was asking for trouble, of course, but Kitty had insisted on going for a cappuccino at Venezia. I had bumped into her in the café in the harbour where Larssen and I had gone to drink a glass of champagne. At some point both of us got talking to other people: he to an architect friend, me to an unknown woman whose bare back was sunburnt. If you pressed it, your hand briefly left a white mark.

I had interrogated her, and she me, in the unashamedly curious way of people who have just met. Heiman told me once that Isaak Babel wanted to know everything about beautiful women. He even asked to look in their handbags. ‘Did Babel write poetry?’ I asked, surprised.

‘No,’ Heiman answered. ‘But he loved a lot of women.’

I found out that Kitty had been the mistress of a plastic surgeon for almost a year, she that I came from a family of ice-cream makers.

‘Is that your brother?’ she asked after a sip of her cappuccino. I looked up from my espresso and spotted Luca in the ice-cream parlour with tubs of ice in both hands. My mother took them from him. Sophia was probably upstairs. It was early and not all that warm yet. The first ice-cream of the day had yet to be sold.

‘He looks a lot like you,’ Kitty noted. ‘He’s got the same build and the same posture.’

‘I’m more than an inch taller.’

‘He’s got the same nose, too.’

‘Other than that we’re completely different.’

‘Your skin’s a bit darker, I grant you that,’ Kitty said. ‘You’ve spent more time in the sun.’

‘My brother works the whole summer.’

‘He’s more muscular, too.’

Luca came out, not looking at me but at Kitty’s legs. She was wearing a short skirt and pale blue lace knickers underneath, but I was hoping those weren’t visible.

‘You’ve got the same ears,’ Kitty said.

‘Now you’re teasing me.’

‘Such cute little ears.’

She took another sip of her cappuccino.

‘And I bet he’s got the same buttocks too, but to be sure of that he’d have to turn round and show us his other side.’

‘Shall I ask him to?’

She turned towards me and kissed me on the mouth. I could taste the milky cappuccino on her lips. ‘But I suspect he doesn’t have your beautiful long lashes,’ she whispered.

Sophia had come down. From behind the ice-cream she looked at Kitty’s legs, just as my brother had done. Judging by the look on her face I was all but sure that she could tell what colour the lace was. Then our eyes met, but this time I got no smile, no nod, no wave.

‘Who’s she?’ Kitty asked.

‘My brother’s fiancé. They’re getting married in winter.’

‘What a beautiful girl.’

Sophia turned her back on us.

‘Is she Italian?’

‘Yes, she’s from Modena. She was thirteen when she moved to our village.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Didn’t you fall in love with her?’

‘She’s my brother’s future wife.’

‘Not in those days.’

Luca had gone back in. And as he made his way to the kitchen I suddenly felt a stab of longing, nostalgia for the ice-cream machines. I couldn’t help it. It was there, the wish to be beside him in the kitchen right now. To prepare fruit, grind nuts, fill the cylinder of the Cattabriga. To listen to the scraper blade together.

‘Yes, even in those days,’ I replied.

Kitty looked at Sophia, at the blonde braid between her shoulders. ‘Do you know how the plastic surgeon’s wife found out?’ she asked then.

‘Did she catch you in the act?’

‘No, that would have been painful.’ She briefly touched her back, which was still sunburnt. ‘His wife could tell just by looking at him. That’s what she said to him, one morning, over breakfast. Nothing had triggered it. She could tell simply by looking at him.’

‘Would you like to order anything else?’ It was my father, standing behind us. He wasn’t feeling the new day in his legs yet. The resentment was there, but it wasn’t that acute yet. ‘Maybe you’d like another cup of coffee?’

‘I kind of fancy an ice-cream, actually,’ Kitty said. ‘Shall we share a cup?’

‘One cup for the two of you?’ my father said. ‘How many flavours?’

‘You decide.’ Kitty smiled at me. She had a small mouth with thin but supple lips.

‘What would you like?’ Beppi said. He smiled at me as well. He took pleasure in his role. He had all the time in the world and didn’t require me to play along. I was a customer. I was sitting outside their parlour, after all.

‘Three flavours,’ I replied.

‘And which will they be?’

There was no way back now. ‘Vanilla, mango, and blueberry,’ I said, ordering the first ice-cream of the day.