The Icecream Man

The Ice Cream Man

by George Trialonis

 When I was eleven years old, my perception of the world changed completely, when one summer morning I overheard my mother say to Katina, a neighbor, "Poor Papamoros is dead; he died in his sleep last night." I almost choked on the ice cube I had just picked from our first electric refrigerator. I slammed the kitchen door, spat the ice cube into one of the flowerpots lining our small patio and rushed out on the street. I felt as if I were breaking into pieces. My arms and legs felt so strange to me. Had the world suddenly shattered into tiny fragments, including my own insignificant existence? 

“Papamoros is dead,” I gasped to Nikos and Menas playing a game of marbles on a stone bench next door.  They didn’t even look up.  They were absorbed in their game, but they did invite me to join them.  “The ice cream man is dead,” I shouted at them.

“Does that mean that he won’t be making his rounds today?”  Menas asked, as he was about to throw his shot.

In retrospect, I should not have expected more of those ten-year-old companions of my childhood.  The game of marbles, the sunshine and the main elements of our world were there while more fun was unconsciously anticipated as the day wore on.  However, I knew that Papamoros, an essential element of our universe, was gone forever, just like my grandfather two years earlier.

For weeks after my grandfather had died his house furniture seemed so alien to me; they had shrugged off their mysterious mantle.  The wicker chair between his bed and the wooden, oblong kitchen table was cold and hopelessly inhospitable.  When he was alive he would take me on his lap and share his breakfast with me.  He would break chunks of hard, whole grain bread and dip them in a glass of warm sage tea, and I would suck the juice and pick black olives from a cup at arms length and spit the stones on the table aiming at a ‘constellation’ of breadcrumbs on the wooden expanse.  He would tell me stories of brave local fighters who, although outnumbered, fought the enemy on the mountains and plains of Crete and won glorious victories.  He would recount in detail the lives and legends of holy men, hermits, who had renounced worldly affairs to spend the rest of their lives in caves around the island.  As much as I did not enjoy the latter stories, I loved my grandfather, in spite of the fact that his furrowed face and callous hands reminded me of those hermits who, to my mind, were tormenting themselves for no reason, wasting their time in damp and dark hollows and missing all the fun under the brilliant and warm rays of the sun, not to mention countless games of marbles.  My grandfather was tall and thin, an ascetic man, much like those desiccated figures on his icon-stand above his bed.  Forty days after my grandfather had died, my mother laid a white, embroidered tablecloth on that table and removed the icon stand.  My father hired a construction worker to hammer out a window on the wall against which my grandfather’s bed stood.  I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as soon as the first lances of sunlight rammed through the opening.  My grandfather’s world was slowly, but inexorably, dissipating in my memory, pushing deep into the remote recesses of my unconscious.

However, Papamoros was so much unlike my grandfather, both in terms of physical appearance and dress.  He was a short stout, middle-aged man with red hair and a round, sleek and smiling face.  His sky blue eyes—rings detached from the azure canopy of the heavens—captured our tottering reflections as we besieged him for his wares.  There were no ridges or knolls on his plump hands which handled the scoop with such artistry.  His milk white skin was dotted with imperceptible, tiny reddish spots, which gave me the impression that this man was made entirely of candy.  His professional attire consisted of a doctor’s white coat and a white painter’s cap with a visor.  His love for children he channeled into his art of making the most delicious ice cream in the world, our world.  Also, he was a one-man band, with nasal and vocal sounds of cymbals and drums.

As much as my grandfather represented the lore of darkness, with its bloodstained heroes and skeletal hermits, Papamoros represented the sensation of warm and comforting light and the simple pleasures of life that provided nourishment to our young minds and green taste.

Papamoros pushed a white, closed cart, more like an oversized cube on wheels with a trap door on top.  The insides of the pushcart were lined with sheet-metal and filled with crushed ice keeping cold the ice cream in two large tin cylinders.  As the ice melted, it drained from the bottom rear left corner of the cart through a short spout fitted snuggly into a longer piece of garden hose.  The continuous flow of melting ice marked Papamoros’ rounds, with little pools of water designating stops.  The pushcart moved on three wheels, two in front and one fixed on a swivel in the rear for turns.  The front right wheel wobbled with an intermittent sound which, to my mind, sounded yet another call, “child-ren, child-ren.”

“Paaagotooo!” the call of the ice cream man would echo through my old neighborhood, mobilizing troops of children at play in the streets to a wild campaign for half a drachma, the price of an ice cream cone.  Scores of little feet stormed indoors to return just as fast in the tow of one hand extended to a fist closed tight over the precious ‘token’ for a scoop of vanilla or strawberry ice cream.  Naturally, there were ‘casualties’:  despondency or frustration nested both in children’s limbs and wet rosy cheeks.

I took my eyes away from my friends’ game and scanned the neighborhood, as if nudged by a mysterious urge swelling inside me.  The little, white-washed houses were bathed in the morning light as usual, the film of shadow from the only three-storey building to the west was receding imperceptibly, and the rustle from inside the low houses was the same, albeit more acute.  It was as if my ears were propped up and my entire senses on alert.  I knew something was wrong, in spite of the apparent familiarity of the morning stage.  Papamoros is dead, I repeated to myself.  I know something is wrong, I thought.  It’s in the air.  I sniffed to my left; I sniffed to my right, but stopped only when I noticed that Nikos was staring at me with his mouth gapping open.

“What are you doing, Giorgos?” Nikos asked.

“Nothing, I can smell bacon.  Takis will be coming out soon to join us,” I lied.

I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, so I wandered off with both hands in my pockets and head down.  Following the slightly sloping road was better suited to the melancholy which had taken hold of my limbs.  It was not so much a feeling of personal loss, as was the case with my grandfather, but a sense of emptiness, a loss of orientation, of a significant landmark or point of reference in my psyche.  I felt a growing urge to pass by Papamoros’ house, perhaps nursing the hope that my mother was wrong, that Papamoros was simply late or sick in bed.

The dark brown cover of a casket was leaning heavily against the lime-washed wall of Papamoros’ house.  The sign of death, I thought.  Death is a guest in this house.  The cover is his calling card, the words of uncle Minas churned in my mind.  Next to the cover was a large, round wreath of white carnations.  The wreath was fixed to a long and narrow floorboard and had a white ribbon inscribed as follows:  “In Memory of Our Father and Grandfather:  his children and grandchildren.”  I bent down and pinched a wall-lettuce making an insipid appearance through a crack at the lower end of the wall, to the left of the doorstep.  I wiped the dust off against my left sleeve and stuck the flower between the thick arrangement of white carnations, adding a nice touch of green to the lower, left circumference of the wreath.  In Memory of the Ice Cream Man:  the children of  the Saint Trinity district, I murmured.

Shortlisted in toowrite.com competition

also appeared in  ken*again

Author E-Mail: gtrialonis(at)gmail.com