Prologue
Times New Roman
Uno
It bothers me that everything I write is really nothing at all. I can’t even aspire to the relevance of Giovanni, the ice-cream vendor, who takes in euros with one hand, and gives back giant cones of ice-cream with the other. People pay money for things. But what do I offer? Words. Which is fine when words are printed in ink and stamped onto paper. And when this paper’s cut, bound, and presented to the world in a book. As if you’d actually done something.
But now paper’s almost impossible to find. Who carries a pen these days? Book shops have become curiosity shops, with feathered three-legged chairs in one corner and The Complete Works of Charles Dickens in the next.
Imagine, Dickens pressed words with a goose quill pen right into paper! Dyes plucked from the blood of plants, combined with resins and solvents, flowed through the quill and into the paper. Then some monstrous machine straight out of the Industrial Revolution hammered black letters into more flattened trees. Then everyone ran into the street to get that month’s instalment of The Pickwick Papers. Papers! I can hardly believe it, but here it is on my iPhone, straight from Wikipedia.
And now it’s gone. My BBC app is telling me about the latest slaughter in the eastern Congo. How can inky scribblings compete with that?
Giovanni hands a boy an enormous cherry ice-cream, which makes the boy’s eyes twice as big as they already were. The cherry juices circle into the cream, leaving thin streaks along the surface of the white mountaintops. The swirling colours remind the boy of a spinning top, the one he plays with for hours on the floor of their kitchen. He concentrates on the colours and on the sound of it spinning, to drown out the sound of his mom and dad shouting at each other. He waits with bated breath for it to crash to the ground, and for everything to spin out of control.
After five minutes, the ice cream is gone. All that’s left of it is the words.
Due
A tourist is fighting with his angry wife. She barks at him, Haven’t you two had enough ice-cream today? Do I always have to be the disciplinarian? The tourist and his daughter Julie step up to the counter all the same. To record their triumph, he films the whole thing on his iPhone. He documents Julie’s interest in pronouncing the Italian names. She’s been practising on Duolingo for the last four months, so she’s very proud of herself when she can master difficult words, like nocciola and ciliegia, hazelnut and cherry. Her dad then gets a close-up of her conviction: each of the two dozen flavours is exactly the one she wants. Her eyes are bigger than cherries.
The tourist digitalizes the whole thing: the way Julie finally decides, the way she confidently says ciliegia per favore, and the way Giovanni breaks into a beaming smile. What the iPhone doesn’t catch is the way Giovanni remembers the look on his own little girl’s face. Alessandra’s sunny disposition. Her big dark eyes alive to everything around her — until she was run over by a cab half a block from their apartment. He remembers Alessandra’s love of cherry ice-cream.
Giovanni remembers her smile as a composite of the smiles of all the little girls who ask for cherry ice-cream. When Julie says grat say, rolling the r just like they do in Scotland, Giovanni thinks he hears Alessandra’s voice, even through the foreign accent. The timbre, tone, and clarity are the same, as if one girl had disappeared into thin air and then three years later reappeared right there, where he last saw Alessandra standing in front of the mountains of colourful ice cream.
The iPhone has no way of recording Giovanni’s thoughts and feelings. All that’s left are the words.
Due to the meticulous operations of her delicate tongue, Julie’s cherry ice-cream lasts nine full minutes. But what’s going on in her head is another story.
Tre
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