My Brother’s Wedding and My Father’s Songbird

The wedding in Venas took place on a blue day. The sun had risen above the mountains in the morning, setting fire to the sky. The fields were blanketed in a thick layer of snow, covering even the needles of the larch trees, but the roads were clear. My father had come to pick me up from the station in Dobbiaco. I had travelled from New Delhi, where I had visited a poetry festival with Victor Larssen. We had spent most of the time in a minivan. Although poetry was read in locations across the city, there wasn’t much of an audience. Larssen had explained to me that the festival aimed to bring poets together so they could translate one another’s work. ‘The audience comes second,’ he had said. In my hotel room, with its view of Connaught Place, a rat had spent all night trying to find a way out through the air-conditioning unit. I hadn’t slept a wink.

My father looked well: relaxed and in high spirits, an ice-cream maker in winter.

‘How was your trip?’ he asked as we drove out of Dobbiaco. He had come in the white Land Rover. When you accelerated, the engine growled, a sound my father loved. He had bought the four-by-four for the mountains. For the longer distances, such as the annual drive to Rotterdam and back, he had a green, virtually silent Mercedes.

‘Long,’ I replied. I had flown from Delhi to Rome, where I had boarded the night train to Verona before continuing my journey via Bolzano and Fortezza. I felt as if part of me had yet to arrive.

‘Here you go,’ my father said. ‘Your mother made you a piadina.’

I unwrapped the aluminium foil and took a bite, tasting the prosciutto and stracchino. It was better warm, but it would do for now. I couldn’t get it down my throat fast enough.

‘Luca is dead nervous,’ my father said. ‘I can’t remember finding my wedding day that daunting. Your mother had to help him with his cufflinks.’ He laughed while he stepped on the gas. ‘Maybe he’s scared she’ll say no!’

The engine growled like a bear as we zipped through the white winter landscape. I clung to the grab handle whenever we tilted in a hairpin turn. Every now and then my eyes fell shut, but I would jolt awake when my head hit the car door.

As we drove down the main street of Cortina d’Ampezzo, my father started talking again. ‘I’m curious to see if the church will be full,’ he said. ‘When Valentino and Anna got married, some people had to stand.’ He was referring to the wedding of his brother’s son. ‘Practically the entire village turned out.’ Deep down my father was nervous, too.

‘I wouldn’t mind a drink,’ he said as we approached Venas, ‘but I promised to head straight home. Your mother is worried we’ll be late. No surprises there.’ Still, he slowed down when we spied a bar by the side of the road.

‘No, Pappa,’ I admonished him. ‘We have to get there on time.’

‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

‘No.’

‘One beer,’ he pleaded. ‘Una bella bionda.’

‘Beppi!’

‘His mother’s son,’ my father muttered and stepped on the gas. ‘There goes my bionda, there she goes.’

In winter he liked to drink a beer in the morning, something nearly all ice-cream makers did. But most of them didn’t know when to stop. After retirement, their noses tended to get redder and redder. The empty days, the deserted streets — that’s what did for them.

We drove past Sophia’s parents’ big house. Lights were on in every single room. Her father was sitting in the living room, I could see, but I couldn’t see his wife and daughter. Maybe they were in the bathroom at the back of the house. I thought of Sophia’s long, blonde hair, the hair I had never got to brush.

Smoke billowed out of the chimney of our house, the grey dissolving in the cold blue sky. My father parked the Land Rover next to the Mercedes. A cement mixer blocked the entrance to the garage. ‘It’s new,’ he said proudly.

‘I thought you already owned a cement mixer?’

‘A different kind. This one’s got a greater volume and it’s orange.’

My father would never, ever make cement or mortar. Not in this life, anyway.

My mother hugged me and told me how pleased she was with the beautiful weather. She was beaming.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘freshen up and get changed. We’ll talk when we’re in church.’

Just then Luca emerged from the bathroom, wearing a brand-new suit. His hair was slicked back, and it shone like ebony. In order to squeeze past each other in the narrow corridor, we both had to do a quarter turn, and so it happened that for a brief moment we were standing with our backs against the wall, a tiny space between our bellies and noses. I noticed the bags under his eyes, and presumably he saw mine.

‘The big day,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re looking good.’

‘See you later.’

Then he walked on, leaving me, his older brother, his witness, in the corridor. Four words he had spoken to me, four in one year, and they were absolutely meaningless. They were sounds more than words.

The bathroom smelled of him, of his body, the odour I knew from his bedroom, but even more so from the attic in Rotterdam, the sheets he pushed back in the morning, the warm air that spread and reached my nostrils, sometimes in a dream.

I washed my face and put on the suit I had carried with me across more than ten thousand kilometres. The jacket was badly crumpled, but the trousers had retained their sharp crease.

The four of us walked to church, the heels of our shoes tapping on the cobbles. My mother kept glancing at my brother with a smile, and then at me. She looked unbelievably happy, and the wedding ceremony had yet to take place.

There were already quite a few people on the oval square in front of the San Marco Nuovo. They all looked splendid, the men sporting ties and some even hats, their wives smelling of soap and wearing dresses that showed more leg than usual. They looked younger, and their daughters a couple of years older, than their age. Ice-cream makers shook hands and exchanged a few quick words. Little puffs of steam came out of people’s mouths. And then the church bells started ringing and everybody went inside.

I sat in the front row, next to my parents and Sophia’s mother, who was also a witness. The fur stole she wore did little to conceal the fact that she was the only one in church with bare arms and shoulders. Her dark-blue skirt stopped above the knee.

When the organist started playing, all heads turned, practically as one. Sophia walked down the aisle on her father’s arm. She wore white, a long dress with a bodice that gleamed like the inside of an oyster. Her blonde hair was braided in a single plait and wrapped around her head, a golden crown. She all but glided across the church’s smooth flagstones, gorgeous and self-assured, looking straight ahead the whole way. Luca beamed as she came towards him.

Although the church was packed — the pews were all full, with people standing at the back — it was dead quiet when they got to the vows. The priest, in his long robes with gold stitching and purple patches on his shoulders, gave the bride and groom a long, hard look before asking them to rise and hold hands. He started saying the age-old words that Luca and Sophia had to repeat.

I watched, I listened, and I would remember this for the rest of my life, but part of me didn’t want to be here, in these wooden pews in this church, but in India instead, at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, terribly delayed, waiting for a sky-blue plane while an English voice reads out names and a new load of passengers is disgorged.

Everybody appeared to have been holding their breath, and now that the vows were complete, they relaxed and let go. Applause rose from the pews, my mother cried, and Sophia’s mother dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. The bride and groom turned around and looked into the church. My brother’s eyes found those of my parents’, mine found Sophia’s. The winter light illuminated her face and her fairytale dress. Only now did I see the change in Sophia, from a girl who caught snowflakes with her tongue to a woman in her prime. She smiled and I smiled back. It felt as if we touched.

Outside, children threw handfuls of rice at the couple. Sophia bowed her head and closed her eyes. Luca turned towards her and they kissed in the white rain. And as I joined in and threw rice at them too, my memory built a bridge back to that day we threw snowballs at one another and I went down.

They got into the old Alfa Romeo, hired from Belluno, which had driven countless newlyweds to married life. The chauffeur wore a cap and smelled of tobacco, and while his nails were yellow, the old-timer car didn’t have a scratch on it. Standing in front of the church, I watched the car drive off as a castaway on a desert island watches a ship in the distance.

To touch it isn’t necessary for someone to sit close / Even from very far it is possible to touch. It was the voice of the Hindi poet Manglesh Dabral, whom I had heard in Delhi, which now made its way across the sea to me. Rather, touch the way the tall grass appears to caress the moon and stars.

My parents walked towards the car. Others followed. A small procession formed, as it did on Sundays, made up of families dressed in their finest, moving along the narrow footpath.

‘The next wedding will be yours,’ someone said, and I felt a big, strong hand with a calloused thumb on my shoulder.

We met again in spring. I had expected her to be showing, but Sophia was as slender as ever. She looked a little bored behind the ice-cream.

‘Hello, brother-in-law,’ she greeted me with a smile. ‘I’d like to give you a kiss, but I’m not tall enough to lean over the counter.’

‘You can make me just as happy with an espresso.’

I sat down at a table inside and listened to the noises produced by the espresso machine. As the coffee trickled into the cup, I counted the seconds. Twenty-six, not a breath longer. The machine stalled like an engine.

‘It’s been raining all morning,’ Sophia said as she walked towards me with a tray in her hands. ‘It’s going to be a bit warmer this afternoon, but still wet.’

‘Welcome to the Netherlands.’

‘It will remain overcast all week while the wind is set to pick up.’

I thought I heard my mother talking.

They had been open for a week, Sophia told me. But they were off to a bad start. They were selling more coffee than ice-cream.

My parents were out grocery shopping. Luca was in the kitchen; I had glimpsed him through the window, and he me, I would have thought.

I took another good look at Sophia’s apron, but nothing showed. Her face didn’t look any different, either.

We used to pass rainy days in the ice-cream parlour making cones, but once we got those delivered in boxes we had enough time on our hands to count the rain drops. I read poetry, collections lent to me by Richard Heiman or ones I had bought myself in the bookshop two doors down. The bookshop had a tall window display and a red tomcat traipsing jauntily past the crammed bookcases; the owner was a blonde lady who had written a few books herself, all since long out of print. The reverse of our shop was true for hers: on cold and dark days it was busy, on muggy days people stayed away. But she had come up with a solution. In summer she wore flimsy tops with a plunging neckline. Some men couldn’t take their eyes off as she gift-wrapped a book, prompting her to once ask a customer, ‘Shall I wrap these two as well?’

At the stroke of five, sometimes earlier, she would open a bottle of wine, while the tomcat in the window basked in the sun breaking through the clouds.

Looking back, it was inevitable really, with the World Poetry offices across the street and a bookshop less than ten metres away. The street was a magnetic force field. It was a miracle my parents and my brother didn’t feel it and just stared into space on rainy days. If I ever left a book of poetry on the freezer, nobody picked it up.

Sophia didn’t seem to feel it that week, either. Sometimes she enquired after my work, but more often than not she just wanted to hear about the city I had visited: the footpath cafés, the restaurants, the popular night spots. On the rare occasion when I read out a poem, she quickly turned to something else, as though I was doing something illicit. She was my brother’s wife and she knew that ice-cream and poetry were incompatible. It was one or the other. Those who listened to the song of the Sirens were lost.

The kitchen door swung open. Luca walked over to us with two spoons in his hands. He wanted us to have a taste.

‘Tomato,’ said Sophia.

‘And basil,’ I added.

‘Amazing.’

‘Extraordinary. I wonder what Beppi will say.’

But Luca had already turned round and gone back into the kitchen.

That dreary spring, three things happened that were seemingly unrelated. My father bought two birds, my brother threw himself into making new ice-cream flavours, and I moved to Rotterdam.

Until then I had lived in Amsterdam, where I continued to work at the publisher’s one day a week. Robert Berendsen had made me promise him two things: I would keep a hand in the poetry journal, and I would get as many of his poets as possible onto the World Poetry programme. They were promises made in the pub. I had told him the news after he had taken a sip of his first De Koninck. Many more beers were to follow that evening. As Victor Larssen had predicted, Robert understood my decision. He was happy for me to have the job. ‘I think it’s a great opportunity,’ he said, ‘and I’m really curious about the poets you’ll discover.’

We talked about the festivals he had visited. ‘Liège is very intimate. It’s the oldest festival on the calendar. The poets are practically on your lap,’ he told me. ‘But Medellín beats all the others, hands down. More than a hundred poets are invited and performances take place at lots of different locations: in cafés, in little backrooms, in the street, at the university. It’s as if poetry has taken over the city. You have to see it to believe it. During the opening night, over ten thousand people spend seven hours listening to poets out in the open air. And even if it starts raining they stay seated. It goes on until the early hours.’

His eyes got smaller and smaller. We were among the last to leave the café. ‘I’m really pleased for you,’ he said again as we put our coats on, before adding with a broad smile, ‘And of course for our poets, who will all be invited to Rotterdam now.’

With Victor Larssen’s blessing, I had established a partnership between World Poetry and the poetry journal. Every year we would publish a special festival edition with poems by the performing poets, supplemented with interviews and essays. My first festival as editor had yet to take place, but I was already spending my days reading, translating, phoning, and writing letters. I was assisted by an intern who was studying Russian. She had spent her childhood in St Petersburg and reckoned there was no greater poet than Marina Tsvetaeva.

She would brook no contradiction.

‘Thinking of something, carelessly, something invisible, buried treasure, step by step, poppy by poppy, I beheaded the flowers, at leisure. So someday, in the dry breath of summer, at the edge of the sown, absentmindedly, death will gather a flower — my own!’ she would recite at me.

Xenia, her name was. Platinum blonde hair, pale skin, and bright red lips. Her boyfriend usually picked her up at the end of the day. He had black hands and occasionally even smudges on his face. He worked in a garage, which is where she met him, when she dropped off her Volkswagen. The V-belt was squeaky and needed replacing; she had fallen for him like a brick.

‘Does he read poetry?’ I asked after hearing how they had met.

‘No, of course not. He’s a car mechanic; he likes long-legged blondes.’

‘And you like him?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Are you surprised?’

I didn’t know what to say. I thought it was a curious combination, but I didn’t want to come across as conservative.

Xenia told me about her lecturer who, when she was studying Russian herself, had an affair with her professor for many years. But now she was married to a window cleaner. They had two children and a beautifully furnished house together. She set off for the university every day while he drove to the suburbs, where he leaned his ladder up against the walls of other people’s houses.

‘And do you think they’re happy?’

‘Yes, I think they are,’ she said, before immediately correcting herself: ‘I know they are.’

My father had married a woman who also hailed from an ice-cream-making family. When she was young, my mother vowed never to work in an ice-cream parlour. She wanted to be a nurse or a kindergarten teacher, but things didn’t work out that way; it had been inescapable. Luca had lost his heart to a girl from Modena, the daughter of a factory boss, but she had picked up the spatola like a natural.

Meanwhile I had bought a top-floor studio apartment in Rotterdam. The ceiling had been knocked through to the attic, making the room more than six metres tall. But the place was not very big: the kitchen was part of the living room, and my bedroom just a screened-off area. There was no scope for growth.

The apartment was a five-minute walk from the World Poetry offices, and therefore also from the ice-cream parlour. When I went to work, the doors of Venezia were still closed, but I usually glimpsed someone in the semi-darkness. Occasionally my father would gesture for me to come in and have an espresso. On one of those mornings he showed me a cage with two small birds. He had bought them from a Surinamese customer who came in regularly to eat ice-cream with some buddies.

‘They’re songbirds,’ my father told me. ‘That’s to say, the male is a songbird.’

‘What about the female?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s supposed to sing to her.’

I looked at the birds in the cage. They did nothing, and struck me as rather fearful.

‘The man I bought them off is the chairman of the Surinamese songbird association,’ my father said. ‘They have competitions in the park.’

‘What kind of competitions?’

‘Singing competitions. What else?’

‘Do the birds sing well?’

‘That’s irrelevant. What’s the point of a songbird whistling a Puccini aria? The thing is for them to chirp as much and as often as possible. No matter how shrill or out of tune.’ My father grabbed another cage and put the female in it. ‘The trick is to place them further and further apart,’ he explained, ‘to encourage the male.’ But the male didn’t start singing. Instead he just flapped about in his cage and pecked frantically at the small feeding dish. The seeds ended up on the floor.

I was curious to hear what my mother made of this new hobby. ‘Will you be entering those competitions as well?’ I asked him.

‘I can’t,’ my father said curtly. ‘I have to work. I have to help your brother.’

It was time to cross the road; I could tell from my father’s face, from the look in his eyes. He had all the tools in the world for a major invention, but he didn’t have the time to create it because he had to work in an ice-cream parlour. He owned a songbird, but he couldn’t enter competitions because he had to work in an ice-cream parlour.

‘Come on,’ he urged the male. ‘Sing for your female. Go on, then.’

Those were the exact same words I heard him say a couple of days later, except louder and harsher. My mother was standing behind him.

‘They don’t want to,’ she said.

‘Sing for your female, damn it. Sing! Go on.’

‘If you scream at them, they get scared.’

He moved the female. The distance between the birds was around three metres now, but still the male wouldn’t sing. It fluttered around its cage.

‘Stop fluttering,’ my father yelled. ‘You’re meant to sing, not flutter. You want me to show you how? Well? Tweet! Tweet! It’s not that hard, is it? Tweet! Tweet!’

‘Beppi, please leave those birds alone.’

‘Leave me alone!’ he said. ‘You’re driving me mad. Don’t do this, don’t do that. You’re watching me all day long. Why don’t you leave me alone? I want to be alone with my birds. Go away!’

I had never heard him have a go at my mother like this. There had been plenty of disagreements and discussions over the years, but my father had never yelled at my mother. He had always managed to crack a joke. Some of them were funnier than others, but still.

It turned out to be the opening gambit, the first of many arguments. The beginning of what would become years of vitriol that, strange as it may sound, culminated in an infatuation with a hammer-thrower weighing eighty-three kilos.

‘I want peace and quiet!’ Beppi roared through the ice-cream parlour.

My brother didn’t appear behind the little window in the kitchen door. He was busy weighing sugar, separating eggs, and experimenting with new ingredients. He churned, he listened, he tasted, he improved. He worked even harder than my father had ever done: eighteen-, nineteen-hour days. All for a new flavour. Ice-cream made with gorgonzola, with rosemary and chocolate, with yoghurt and Amarena cherries — a swirling dance of red and white.

Sophia was still in bed. She was getting up later and later. The ice-cream parlour opened its doors at ten in the morning, but some days she wouldn’t come down before eleven, my mother told me. ‘Maybe it’s the weather,’ she said. ‘She’s bound to feel better again when the sun comes out.’

Her hair had grown darker; it had taken on the dull shade of a gold picture frame. It was the summer spent in the ice-cream parlour, the winter in Italy, and the spring without traipsing through fields of dandelions. The sun’s rays had struggled to get through to her.

And then the female died. My father found the bird early one morning, lying on the bottom of her cage, her beak in the male’s shit, or her own, perhaps. At first he was inconsolable and refused to talk to anyone. ‘Dead,’ he muttered. ‘Dead.’

I made him an espresso, but he didn’t touch it. He just kept staring at the lifeless female in his hands.

‘Dead, dead, dead.’

As if he foresaw his own fate.

‘Beppi, we can buy a new bird.’

He didn’t react to my mother’s suggestion, exceptional though it was — at long last, he was allowed to buy something.

We left him to his grief, but when I shut the World Poetry office to go out for lunch, I saw my father beckoning to me in high spirits. Had the female risen from the dead? Had it just been a fainting fit?

‘The male is singing!’ said my father, happy as a child. ‘He’s singing, whistling, chirping. Listen!’

I had already heard. And so had everybody else in the ice-cream parlour. The male was making the noise of an aviary full of birds. He was singing like nobody’s business, as if all this time there had been a stopper in his throat that had now been removed.

‘He’s elated,’ my father said. ‘His female is dead.’

The bird kept cheeping and chirping, but my mother and Sophia were quiet. They were standing behind the counter, even though there were no customers to serve. They had all the time in the world to stare at the rain.

‘Look how cheerful he is. It’s as if he’s celebrating. Fantastic!’

I observed the male, which looked like a far cry from the bird that had been silent all this time.

‘What did you do with the female?’

‘The female?’ my father replied. ‘Forget about the female, she’s history. Listen to him singing. Like a champion.’

‘Did you bury her?’

‘All this time he was unable to sing because he was unhappy, because he felt oppressed — who knows, perhaps he even suffered from depression.’

The way he said it, you would have thought that he had just made a discovery, the invention of a lifetime. And he had once more linked his fate to a bird, albeit to a living specimen this time.

‘Yes, go on. There’s no need to be sad now,’ my father encouraged the bird.

Suddenly, my mother started sobbing. She didn’t make a sound and I couldn’t see her tears — she had her back to me — but I could tell by the hand Sophia put on her shoulder.

My father was oblivious to her silence. All he heard was his tweeting bird. It was an infernal noise — very rapid, with brief, intermittent pauses. You stopped hearing it at some point, like a ticking clock, but that was really the only point in its favour. It drove the customers who came in for a cup of coffee absolutely insane.

‘He’s cheery,’ my father explained to everyone. ‘His female just died.’

Some customers laughed, others shook their head.

One person said, ‘You ought to cover the cage with a sheet.’

My father replied, ‘He’s been through so much already.’

In the end it was my brother who banished the bird to the first-floor kitchen. The customers would no longer be bothered by him, but it meant my mother was forced to look after and listen to him day after day — my parents’ bedroom was next to the kitchen-diner.

Every time we chatted when I stopped by the ice-cream parlour, she complained about it. ‘He starts singing at five in the morning, and then Beppi jumps out of bed to encourage him. He goes downstairs to fetch a spoonful of sweets. As a reward.’ The sweets my mother referred to were those children liked on their scoops of ice-cream: sprinkles. Mamma, can I have sprinkles? It was a question asked upwards of three hundred times a day.

‘The minute there’s nothing to do he rushes upstairs to listen to the twittering.’

Did she mind the attention given to the little bird more than the dreary weather? The forecast for the next couple of days wasn’t very promising, either. It may well have been the worst start in years. Of course, some people always fancied ice-cream, regardless of the weather. ‘It tastes just as good under an umbrella,’ they would say, or ‘We won’t let a bit of rain get to us.’

The folk of Rotterdam were pragmatic, and yet they all craved the sun and long, lazy days.

One day when I visited, Sophia was wearing a pink dress. The colour had come back: she was wearing lipstick and had put a ribbon in her braid. Just as her mother was an unlikely apparition in the mountains, Sophia stood out in the grey city. She gave me the briefest of smiles, but it wasn’t like touching.

Luca was experimenting with ice-cream in the kitchen, my father was with his bird, and I would shortly go to my apartment and sit down on my second-hand Chesterfield with a book of poetry. All three of us in our own worlds.

A couple of years later, in a hotel room in Paris, where I was attending the Marché de la Poésie festival, I was lying naked on the bed, looking at the pink wallpaper. I’d just had a shower and was staring idly at the repeating pattern of poppies and curlicues when I discovered that everything in the room was pink: the carpet, the curtains, the sheets, the bedside tables, the desk, the phone, the ceiling. And to my horror, I noticed that the head of my dick was the same colour. That lonely day in Paris, Sophia’s summer dress came to mind and I disentangled the threads that had got all jumbled up during that miserable spring.

I realised why my brother was trying to make ice-cream out of olive oil, why he mixed melon and mint, why he tinkered with a recipe until the early hours, and why Sophia sometimes stayed in bed until ten-thirty and spent the rest of the day staring at the deep puddles and the little children in rubber boots jumping into them.

Finally summer arrived, in all its glory, and everything that comes with it: pale blue skies, clammy sheets, short skirts, the lingering light followed by seductively twinkling stars, freckles, wasps, hailstones, and sunburnt noses. It was as if the summer was aware of its brief reign and now erupted in all its intensity and eagerness.

A common mantra among ice-cream makers is this: ‘It’s better to have a bad spring than a bad summer.’ But in Bar Posta, late in the evening, you would often hear this profundity: ‘It’s better to be thirsty in winter than in summer.’

With the heat came the new flavours. For the first time in the ice-cream parlour’s history, the display was rearranged. Some regulars were put out. One week, there would be no container of raspberry sorbet next to the chocolate ice-cream, but fig-and-almond ice-cream. The week after, the raspberry sorbet might reappear, while the chocolate was replaced with coffee-cardamom.

‘You’re chasing all of your customers away,’ my father warned Luca.

‘One spoon and they’re sold.’

‘But they’re not brave enough. I’ve been selling ice-cream for over forty years and I know my customers. They don’t want surprises; they want strawberry, vanilla, mango, and chocolate. There’s the odd eccentric who likes cinnamon or After Eight, but nothing too fancy — no weird combinations, and certainly no ingredients they have to look up in a dictionary.’

‘I’ll let them have a taste.’

‘Don’t,’ my father reacted. ‘Don’t give your ice-cream away.’

‘I’m not giving it away. I’m giving people the chance to try flavours they’re not familiar with.’

‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. You know what the Dutch are like. They’ll want to try everything. A spoonful here, a spoonful there, and how about a bite of this and a bite of that. Like in the supermarket. They’re happy to try, but they never buy. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They’ll all wheel their trolleys straight to the stand where a woman is preparing an Asian stir-fry. Would they like a taste? So? What’s it like? Delicious? Yes? But all they take to the checkout is a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, and a pound of green beans.’

‘Have you had a taste yourself?’ my brother asked. He held up a spoon. Fig-and-almond ice-cream.

‘You’ll go bankrupt if you let everybody taste your ice-cream; you don’t have the margins for that sort of thing. I haven’t worked hard all these years to build up a viable business to pass it on and see it go bankrupt within a matter of months.’

‘Open your mouth.’

My brother inserted the spoon, as one does with little children who refuse to eat.

All was quiet for a moment. Then my father smiled. ‘This is terrific,’ he said. ‘This is delicious, this is unbelievably good.’

The news about the wonderful flavours spread across the city like wildfire. People came to have a look and a taste and were instantly sold. The newspapers wrote about them, and new customers joined the queue. People came from all over, even from across the border. It was busier than ever.

I, too, had to join the queue. Every single seat outside was taken. The school holidays had started and it was a glorious day. Mothers held their hyperactive children by the hand. ‘I want strawberry with sprinkles,’ I heard ahead of me, and behind me two little brothers shouted almost but not quite at the same time, ‘Mamma, can we have chocolate with sprinkles?’

My mother and Sophia leaned over the ice-cream and scooped it into cups and cones. I was able to watch them without being seen myself. I was peeping, really, but couldn’t help myself. My mother was faster than Sophia, and moved effortlessly. It was all down to experience, although even her spatola occasionally faltered above the tubs with the new flavours.

‘I want sprinkles,’ I heard a little girl say to Sophia.

‘And what flavour would you like?’

‘Sprinkles.’

‘No, the flavour,’ her mother prompted her. ‘You need to tell her the flavour.’

The little girl thought long and hard before answering, ‘I can’t remember.’

All I could see was her back, the butterfly bows in the blonde, almost shoulder-length plaits. I couldn’t see her small greedy mouth, her golden eyebrows, her deep-blue or grey-green eyes.

‘Vanilla?’ the mother said to her daughter.

‘Oh, yes, vanilla with sprinkles,’ she exclaimed in delight.

But Sophia’s left hand didn’t stir to pick up a cone. Her right hand didn’t reach for the ice-cream with the spatola. Nobody in the queue noticed — they were all discussing the ice-cream, the flavours they were going for — but I saw my mother putting her hand on Sophia’s shoulder.

‘And for me, a cup with pineapple-grapefruit and fromage frais with prunes,’ the mother said. ‘I’m really curious to see what it’s like.’

The news even made it as far as Venas di Cadore. Serafino Dall’Asta had written a piece in L’Amico del Popolo, the local paper. The journalist had phoned Luca and asked him whether he had come up with all the flavours himself. My brother told him that he spent hours on end experimenting with combinations, but that he liked to take inspiration from customers as well. Just as once upon a time people brought fruits to my great-grandfather, they now came up with suggestions for new flavours. Cherry and chocolate, banana and coconut, blackberry and vanilla.

And just like my great-grandfather, Luca kept creating new ice-cream varieties. He introduced a flavour of the week and a board advertising special combinations. A second display was built into the counter for yet more tubs. And so the summer went by, with long queues and bare legs on the terrace, with gleeful noises and beaming faces around midnight.

Together with Victor Larssen I travelled to poetry festivals across Europe and, at the end of July, as fat raindrops hissed on the runway, to Medellín for the first time. The festival’s opening night took place in a theatre hewn from rocks halfway up Mount Nutibara. We drove there in large buses, travelling across one of South America’s biggest cities. Cars, scooters, and minivans were everywhere. Larssen told me that not so long ago Medellín was the most criminal city in the world. People were afraid to leave their homes. The newspapers were full of political assassinations; the streets were the scene of massacres. There were fatalities every single day, most of the victims young and anonymous, but the puddles of blood also spread around gang leaders, FARC members, and senior military figures. ‘The festival is a response to the evil,’ Larssen said. ‘It was set up by the poets and editors of the Latin American poetry magazine Prometeo. They wanted to offer an alternative to the corruption, the violence, the brutal murders in broad daylight, and they’ve pulled it off. What was once South America’s capital of crime has now become the city with the world’s biggest poetry festival.’

I looked at the mountain range in front of us. Medellín was situated in a bowl, at the bottom of a basin. The city was surrounded by mountains, and one of those was Mount Nutibara. As the road became steeper, the engine of the bus struggled with the gears at times. We drove through a jungle, flanked by trees with dark green leaves. The scratching sound of insects and the occasional loud screech of a bird came in through the open windows.

On the bus were poets from Italy, Somalia, Mexico, Canada, Norway. A total of seventy poets would be reading on opening night. I had heard stories about the thousands of visitors, the seats hewn from rock, the applause that rose up to heaven. ‘You won’t believe your eyes,’ Robert Berendsen had said.

The bus came to a halt on a widened verge, the kind of spot where a couple of years back corpses might have been thrown out of a car. I heard some poets wonder whether we were in the right place. Surely this couldn’t be it? The Parnassus: a ghastly place in the forest.

One after the other, we got out and started going down a steep stone staircase. The oldest poets crept down slowly, like beetles, their younger colleagues hot on their heels. Every now and then the procession halted and a poet would stare down, but the theatre was nowhere to be seen. At the bottom of the staircase was a small hut you had to walk around. And that’s when you saw it: a gigantic amphitheatre with ascending stone rows, an arena in the jungle. Here and there people were already seated, as the audience poured in via gates on either side.

‘It’s possible to approach the theatre from below,’ I heard Larssen say above me. ‘There’s a car park at the foot of the mountain from where you take a very steep staircase up. But this is the best way, with the theatre suddenly looming up ahead.’ Like a square in Rome, after navigating numerous narrow alleyways — unexpected and grandiose.

I walked further down until I reached the stage. It was around forty metres wide and covered by a roof. Enormous rows of speakers were suspended from grids on either side. Although not on yet, the spotlights were trained on some seventy white plastic bucket seats on stage. We had the same chairs on Venezia’s terrace. My father put them out every morning and stacked them up again at night. There were two lecterns with a microphone each: one for the poet, one for the translator.

Seats had been reserved for us in the front row, but Larssen wanted to sit higher up, among the general audience. At other festivals, too, he rarely sat in the seats with the white ‘reserved’ slips. At the World Poetry Festival he always stood to the side of the stands because he was too nervous to sit down.

The stone rows of the theatre filled up. The festival was to open at seven o’clock, but a full thirty minutes prior to the official start all the seats were occupied. You could see men and women climbing trees and sitting on branches, and in a field higher up, a clearing in the forest, there were people too.

The scale of it, the crowds: it all felt like a concert. They were ordinary city folk — labourers, bus drivers, market traders, as well as families with children. They had brought food (deep-fried empanadas with chorizo and grilled corn on the cob) and beverages (Coca-Cola, Águila beer, cheap whisky). The sky was clear. We would have no rain tonight, unlike that time when Robert Berendsen was here and everybody simply stayed put under a poncho or an umbrella, listening to poetry.

Meanwhile all the poets had taken their seats on stage. I spotted Lars Gustafsson and Breyten Breytenbach, as well as poets I didn’t recognise.

As they do at concerts, the audience sensed that the programme was about to begin. People wolf-whistled and clapped their hands. Children stood up and joined in. ‘Not long now,’ Larssen said. It was like Cadore before it snowed — when the snow was in the air and the people could smell it. Everybody knew it could be any moment now.

No lights came on. In fact, they wouldn’t be switched on until several hours later, when the sky had turned a deep blue. The festival director walked on and welcomed the audience and the poets. He clenched his fist and whipped up the crowd. It sounded as if he was chanting battle cries. ‘This is nothing,’ Larssen said. ‘Wait till he starts speechifying.’

Every poet read ten poems, with each poem followed by the Spanish translation. Again and again, a man or a woman got up from one of the white chairs and walked to the front, to the microphone. Seven hundred poems in a single night. It was a marathon session, but the poets did everything in their power to retain the audience’s attention. They would start with a declaration of love to Medellín, for example, or bow deeply to the audience. ‘This is the most beautiful day of my life,’ a poet from the Congo said. The applause was a tsunami crashing from the top row down.

At one o’clock in the morning we were still listening to poems, with frequent revolutionary speeches from the festival director thrown in. He roared into the microphone that poetry could save humankind from capitalism and imperialism. The people whooped and clapped under the stars. And then another poet would rise to his feet and read his work to more than ten thousand listeners. I forgot all about the poetry readings in badly lit library rooms. I forgot the presentations drowned out by noise in pubs and cafés. I forgot the dismal literary afternoons where people felt obliged to clap after each poem, sometimes even when the poet merely paused between stanzas. I tilted my head and tried to make out a falling star, while poetry poured into my ears. This is what it must have been like to stand atop the Parnassus and be enchanted by poetry. This is what it must be all about.

After the opening night, Medellín itself was taken over. For eight days, the poets were driven around the city of millions in minivans. Huge audiences turned up wherever they were: in theatres, in the open air, at the university. Larssen and I immersed ourselves in this city of poetry only to resurface a week later in Parque Lleras, where we came up for air and drank a glass of ice-cold Águila.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, my brother created ever more unusual flavours: herring ice-cream; rose ice-cream; ice-cream made of fennel, with pear and basil notes. Very rarely was there a flavour that didn’t work out, or a result that wasn’t quite what he had in mind. An Italian man had asked Luca if he could make ice-cream from prosciutto crudo, dry-cured ham. Luca set to work, juggling ingredients and listening to the sound of the scraper blade. A quick glance told him that the ice-cream had come out right, but when he took a bite the flavour disgusted him. It was revolting. Ham ice-cream simply didn’t work. Even the most committed carnivore wouldn’t like it.

Ice-cream made of alcoholic beverages was difficult to prepare, too. Luca had made ice with Moscato d’Asti, a dessert wine, and he was experimenting with the combination of prosecco and red currant. He wasn’t happy with the result, and the tubs never made it into the display. But Luca refused to give up. He kept tinkering with the recipe; he kept retreating into the kitchen.

This experimentation went on for two more years — two short winters and two long ice-cream maker’s summers; two years during which Sophia’s hair became duller and duller and my father’s songbird chirped louder and louder; two years during which I flew around the globe from festival to festival and I felt like a stranger in my own apartment. Two years chock-full of poetry and ice-cream, and then my brother started talking to me again. He took me aside in the kitchen. I noticed that he had a new system for the dry ingredients, and that the freezer had been replaced, too. He had bought a third ice-cream machine, a smaller, horizontal model. The white tiles on the wall were pristine; the worktop gleamed like never before. Or was it new, too? As we hadn’t spoken in years, the silence had become familiar, however uncomfortable and painful it was.

Two years on top of ten years. That’s how long he had been silent.

‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said then, and looked at me with the same dark eyes I had. ‘You’ve got to get Sophia pregnant.’