RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK
The Black Jersey is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Translation copyright © 2019 by Achy Obejas
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in Spanish by Planeta, Barcelona in 2018, copyright © 2018 by Jorge Zepeda Patterson.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Zepeda Patterson, Jorge, author. | Obejas, Achy, translator.
Title: The black jersey: a novel / Jorge Zepeda Patterson; translated by Achy Obejas.
Other titles: Maillot negro. English
Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043386| ISBN 9781984801067 (hardback) | ISBN 9781984801074 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Sports. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction
Classification: LCC PQ7298.436.E65 M3513 2019 | DDC 863/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043386
Ebook ISBN 9781984801074
randomhousebooks.com
Title-page image: © iStockphoto.com
Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover illustration: Andy Bridge
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Cast
A Tour de France Glossary
Prologue
2006
Today
Stage 7
Stage 8
2005–2016
Stage 9
Stage 10
Stage 11
2010
Stage 12
Stage 13
2014
Stage 14
Stage 15
Stage 16
Rest
Stage 17
Stage 18
Stage 19
Stage 20
Stage 21
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Jorge Zepeda Patterson
About the Author
Cast
THE SUPERSTAR: Steve Panata
THE DOMESTIQUE: Marc Moreau
THE COACH: Robert Giraud
THE RIVALS: Alessio Matosas, Pablo Medel, Milenko Paniuk
THE MECHANIC: Fiona Crowley
THE MENTOR: Colonel Bruno Lombard
THE JOURNALIST: Ray Lumiere
THE COP: Commissioner Favre
A Tour de France Glossary
Who
Peloton—From French, meaning “little ball” or “platoon.” This is the main cluster of riders in a race. It’s an ever-shifting mass, alive in its own right. Riding in a tight group provides protection from the elements, but can sometimes lead to spectacular crashes. The peloton can absorb a rider who’s broken away just as easily as it can spit one out the back. Stay with the pack.
Domestique—From the French for “servant.” Though the wearer of the yellow jersey may cross the finish line alone, it’s not without the help of a team. Each team has eight or nine riders with one leader, whom the rest of the team works to advance and protect, like a quarterback. Domestiques—the nonleader members of the team—shield their champion from wind, ensure he rides in the safest position (toward the front), and give spare wheels or even their own bike if needed. The primary domestique is as crucial as the leader himself, though is not above the humble task of ferrying supplies back and forth to the team.
DS (directeur sportif)—French for “sport director” or coach. As it sounds, this is the person in charge of the entire team’s sporting efforts, including team selection, rider strategy, and training.
Soigneur—French for “caretaker.” Overseeing practically everything but the bikes, these staff members are like the camp counselors of a team: They provide daily massage treatments and physical therapy, make supply runs, shuttle riders to and fro, and feed them during the race as they cling to the side of the team car. Prepared for anything, soigneurs may even administer first aid.
What
Stage—A section of a race. The Tour de France is usually made up of about twenty-one legs of competition, comprised of both flat and mountain terrain, as well as time trials.
Time trial—It’s you against the clock in this stage. Unlike a group race where you can trail another rider, it’s much harder to gauge where you are in the standings when riding alone. Best bet is to put your head down and book it, as a good time trial could boost your standing in the general classification.
Time limit—All riders must finish every stage within a certain range of the stage winner’s time. If not, they face being eliminated from the race.
Yellow jersey—The color of a rider’s jersey—such as yellow, green, white, or polka-dot—designates a particular standing or distinction in the race. The yellow jersey goes to the rider with the best standing at the end of each stage. Each rider who wins a stage of the race receives from the race organizers both a jersey to wear the next morning in the race and one to keep for the memories.
How
Drafting—Also called slipstreaming. Riding in the back of the paceline—a line of bikers—in order to reduce wind resistance and therefore effort. Riders rotate through the line so that each gets a chance to rest at the back.
Crosswind—The kind of wind that plasters your hair to the side of your face and knocks you off your bike, a crosswind can be downright deadly and is commonly found on flat stages of the Tour, where bucolic expanses provide little blockage from the wind. Teams often plan for attacks on windy parts of the course to catch rivals off guard.
Breakaway—Also known as an attack or a jump, this is a move made by one or more riders in an attempt to get ahead, tire out the pack, or break it apart. Generally, the peloton won’t allow a main competitor to get far ahead of the pack, but riders who pose no threat in general classification may be permitted to escape.
Blocking—When riders set a relatively slow pace at the front of a group to control the speed, often to the advantage of one of their teammates who may be in a breakaway.
Prologue
On Sunday, when the multicolored column of cyclists glides under the Arc de Triomphe and conquers Paris after twenty-one days and 3,350 kilometers, I could be either in a drawer in the morgue or wrapped in a yellow jersey. I’ve never stepped up on that winner’s podium, I’ve never even won a stage, but now I’m a few seconds behind Steve Panata, my teammate and brother for the past eleven years. In order to wear the yellow jersey, I’ll have to betray him at the last minute.
There are cyclists willing to die to win a single stage of the Tour, taking suicidal descents at more than 90 kilometers an hour; but now I know there are cyclists willing to kill for it too. There’s a killer among us, and the police have tasked me with finding out who it is. A criminal has divided the peloton and must be stopped before he deals the final blow. I could be his next victim. But I al
so know that, thanks to his interventions, I could become the next champion of the Tour de France.
2006
Everyone hated him the minute they laid eyes on him, except for me.
He was chewing gum nonstop, and every three seconds he would push back a lock of hair as if it were an extension he was afraid of losing. But even without those tics, he would’ve provoked the group’s ill will. He arrived at camp driving a limited-edition Land Rover and unloaded an aerodynamic bike that the rest of us had only seen ridden by the most elite professionals. It didn’t help that he was American, that he had a face like a Hollywood actor, and that he flaunted the smile of somebody who always gets his way.
But I welcomed him with open arms. A new guy was the only way the others would leave me in peace. Ever since I had arrived at training camp two weeks prior, my teammates had made me the butt of their practical jokes, the hazing a product of the excess of anxiety and testosterone that you might expect from our vigorous training sessions. They had turned my first few weeks as a professional—if getting paid fifty euros a week had made me that—into a kind of lonely purgatory, so I was grateful for the chance to not be the solitary victim of their abuse.
Maybe that’s what brought us together. We took the torments the others inflicted on us philosophically and chose to treat them as some kind of initiation ritual directed at newbies. Although, to be more accurate, Steve took it philosophically and I just went along with him.
“Don’t eat the oatmeal,” he said the first time he ever spoke to me. “I think they spit in it.” And then he offered me a protein bar. He seemed more pleased than upset, as if the fact that he’d figured it out made him cleverer than the others.
After a few days, we understood it wasn’t an initiation ritual. Simply put: Our new teammates were scared of us. Of the forty-six racers who had started out at training camp for the Belgian team Ventoux, the legendary breeding ground of professional cyclists, only twenty-seven would be kept, and only the best nine would make it onto the first team, the one they take to the trials that really matter.
A month later, when the training became more demanding and the races turned into 160-kilometer journeys that included steep expanses, we understood their fear was justified. We were better. Steve Panata raced with a natural rhythm and elegance I’d never seen before and never would again. He devoured kilometers effortlessly, at a speed that would have forced anyone else to bend over the wheel. I balanced him with a physiological anomaly that in other circumstances would have made me a circus freak. My father was a native of the French Alps, and his DNA must have had a very good time with the Colombian genes from my mother’s Andean ancestors because they ended up gifting me a third lung. Not literally, but the levels of oxygen in my blood are such that, for all practical purposes, I’m high when I’m racing.
Once we were actually on the road, Steve and I began to take revenge for all the affronts we had suffered. We did it almost without thinking. When we got within twenty or thirty kilometers of the goal set by our coaches, he’d smile slyly at me; I’d give a gesture of complicity, and we’d pick up the pace. We’d do it subtly at first so the others wouldn’t immediately surrender and would make more of an effort. Ten kilometers later, when we sensed the group had hit its limit, we’d speed up again and leave them definitively behind. But not before Steve put in his final touch: He’d start talking in a very calm voice about the last movie he saw, like someone who’s chatting in a bar instead of climbing a slope that had taken everybody else’s breath away. Resentment soon mingled with the fear we inspired in our teammates. Now and again I thought that, stuck up on those mountain retreats in Catalonia among dozens of spiteful contenders determined to become professionals at any cost, we might be vulnerable to the kind of beating that would put our own careers at risk. For a lot of those guys, myself included, making the cut and being on the Ventoux team was the only thing keeping us from having to endure a mediocre job at a farm or a factory. To be honest, a couple of them looked like they had nowhere to go but jail. That wasn’t the case with Steve, for whom professional cycling was just one option among many, in a lavish and generous future. Yet another reason to hate him.
It also didn’t help that he could be irresistibly charming when he wanted to be, especially when it came to women, directors, and coaches. Charming in a way that provoked more than one brawl with the locals on the few occasions the group would go out to a local bar, even if it was just to have root beer. A passing flirtation or an exchange of napkins with scrawled telephone numbers was enough to unleash a fracas that would often end in blows.
Despite so frequently provoking envy and resentment among others, Steve was notoriously incapable of defending himself. All the poise he displayed on a bike or on the dance floor would turn into ineptitude the instant punches flew. We managed to get out more or less unharmed anyway, thanks to my military police training and some army experiences dealing with hotheaded drunks in dive bars.
Locals were one thing. But in the end, I had to neutralize the damn bullies on our own team, starting with the group’s bruiser, a hard and rough Briton with the thighs and face of a bulldog. He weighed about twenty-five pounds more than I did, but he hadn’t grown up in a slum in Medellín or spent three years in the army barracks in Perpignan. I’d developed a survival strategy that was, in essence, conflict avoidance, which fit my temperament perfectly. But it’s a strategy that only works if you’re willing to commit to violence on the rare occasions when conflict is inevitable. Such as the time I had to defend Steve from Iván, the bruiser.
Iván had punctured my friend’s bike tires a few times during the night, which forced us to make frantic repairs in order to report on time to the coaches. One morning, we discovered Steve’s bike had disappeared altogether, and the smirk on Iván’s face made it obvious he was the responsible party. I supposed he assumed Steve would finally have to confront him. He never saw me coming. I threw my forearm with all my strength and hit him in the face with my elbow: right between his jaw and temple. That imbecile fell like a rock while his minions looked on, astonished by my inconceivable aggression. And they certainly weren’t expecting what happened next. I kicked up a storm as the goon’s body curled up into a ball, not stopping until he confessed where he’d hidden the bike. After that incident, they left us in peace.
It also helped that Steve began to extend certain courtesies to the other racers. He would generously distribute the contents of packages he received from the U.S.: gels, protein bars, sports shoes, and T-shirts. A subtle kind of bribery that soon produced dividends. By the time the training season was over, our teammates were treating us as if we were kings of the road.
Sometimes I ask myself if our deep friendship, which would end up defining both our lives, was forged by the mutual protection of that initial alliance. At least in my case, it was. Even considering what happened years later, I’m convinced there was something genuine and profound in that unconditional and absolutely loyal brotherhood we forged from the very first.
But beyond that, the two of us fascinated each other. When we met, he was twenty-one and I was twenty-three. Steve had grown up in privilege, the spoiled only son of prominent lawyers from Santa Fe, New Mexico. His parents supported his racing obsession and paid for semiprofessional coaches when he decided to participate in his country’s junior competitions. He ended up taking them all by storm, although always surrounded and protected by a small troop of supporters, first financed by his family and then by his sponsors, all of them attracted to the potential oozing from the golden boy.
Now, in northern Spain, he found himself in hostile territory for the first time in his life. His coaches had concluded he could never reach the top heights of racing without first going through the toughening offered by the European teams and their impeccable training.
Steve seemed hypnotized by my ability to survive in scenarios he considered exotic and fascinating and that I co
nsidered the norm. I became what I am because of circumstances, which is the case for everybody not named Panata. I ended up a cyclist the way others become office workers or salespeople: because that’s what I found to hold on to when I was trying to stay afloat in the midst of a raging current. Steve, on the other hand, was one of those human beings whose future is a consequence of inevitable design.
He interpreted the abandonment in which I grew up as a kind of wasted freedom. I hadn’t even turned nine when my father, a French military man attached to several Latin American embassies for many years, separated from my mother, a woman from Bogotá of Peruvian origin whose family had fallen on hard times. From that moment on, I spent my summers in a cabin in the Alps where my father had decided to retire, and the rest of the year in a redbrick house on the outskirts of Medellín. I was more or less neglected during my childhood, because of the exhausting nursing shifts my mother worked at two different hospitals. In time, I understood a part of her was also looking for an excuse to keep her distance from me, the product of an unhappy marriage that came about only because of an unwanted pregnancy. In my adolescence, I became convinced she was hoping I wouldn’t come back from one of those summer trips to France. I would’ve been happy to comply except that my father was just as urgently trying to get rid of me every time I visited. Paying for my plane ticket and welcoming me for five weeks was a duty Colonel Moreau strictly complied with though without the slightest enthusiasm.
It’s quite likely I would’ve ended up recruited by one of the youth gangs that terrorized our neighborhood if bike racing hadn’t come to the rescue. It was my mother who was inadvertently responsible. Her many extra shifts allowed us to move from San Cristóbal, on the city outskirts, to San Javier, a more central neighborhood in Medellín. Although it was a step up socially, it was a literal step down because it forced me to walk almost seven kilometers uphill to get to school. I had to get up at four-thirty in the morning to make it on time to my first class. She must’ve taken pity on me at some point because one day she showed up with a big, heavy secondhand bike that was most likely stolen. We used to call it the bricklayers’ bike, but it changed my life.
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