The Ice-Cream Makers Read Online Free PDF Page A

apart. The house where Luca and I had each had our own room had accommodated my great-grandfather’s family of eight. Giuseppe was the eldest son, but his grandmother was the senior resident, well into her seventies and still sharp. It was a crowded house, filled with the sounds of voices and pots and pans.
    When autumn came around, the father summoned his son. ‘I’ve found you a job,’ he said. ‘Bruno is looking for someone to help him.’
    Giuseppe beamed. Bruno was the lumberjack who travelled to Vienna every year to sell roasted chestnuts. Their aroma filled the streets — the beautiful streets, with their imposing buildings. It was an intoxicating smell that revived memories of winters of yore. People were tempted by it, in the same way that no one can resist the seductive song of the Sirens. They stopped in their tracks and ate chestnuts from paper bags, without noticing their fingertips blackening a bit.
    But Vienna was also the city where ice-cream was sold from copper vats.
    That afternoon, Bruno stopped by to take a look at Giuseppe’s shoulders. They had to carry a stove on which to roast the chestnuts.
    â€˜All right,’ the lumberjack said, slapping him on the back as though he were buying a cow. Giuseppe saw the look on his mother’s face. She was proud, but quiet, too. She wanted to put it off, keep him a little longer: the boy she’d raised, whose hair she’d stroked when he was scared. She thought he was handsome, incredibly handsome, and wanted to say so, whisper it in his ear like she used to, when she’d tell him every day how gorgeous she thought he was.
    They travelled on foot, the way most people did in those days. Distances were greater then; it took you weeks to get from one place to another. Vienna was a three-week walk away. The stove weighed a ton, but they took turns carrying it. During the first few days Bruno carried it for longer. He was a giant, a titan like Atlas. They were put up for the night by farmers with wizened faces and bad teeth. Sometimes there were cows lying right beside them. Before dawn they would wash with cold water from the mountains.
    After a week Giuseppe began to find it easier; the burden appeared to have lightened. In reality, he’d become more muscular. Those first few days he thought he’d never make it all the way to Vienna with a stove on his back. But he arrived in the metropolis with a neck the size of a bull’s.
    They sold chestnuts on the corner of the Volksgarten, not far from the famous Café Landtmann, where artists and politicians met, and where Sigmund Freud drank his coffee. Giuseppe learned the trade in a single day. It wasn’t hard. The main thing was not to burn the chestnuts, and not to scald yourself on the iron. The following day Bruno retrieved a stove he’d stored away the previous year. He set himself up down the road, and so together they filled the neighbourhood with the fumes of fire and chestnuts, and tempted residents and flaneurs alike. They came from all directions, walked up to him, and waited impatiently for their helping. For that magic moment when the blackened skin was peeled open and the sweet aroma was released. An oyster containing amber, yellow amber. The people blew into their hands as they ate.
    Snow came down, large flakes falling on the knitted bonnets of little girls. Young children on sledges were pulled along by their parents. Last winter he had been on a sledge with Maria Grazia and had whooshed down a hill with her. They had fallen off, one foot deep in the snow, her red cheeks only a kiss away from his mouth. But they had been children, a boy and a girl, neighbours, and they had quickly run after the sledge, which had slid further down.
    In Vienna’s white world he thought of the new shape of her body. He spent hours picturing it. During some parts of the day, when the street seemed all but deserted and the snowy silence deafening, there was