The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  Camille Van de Casteele had taken the lead some 40 minutes earlier and would not relinquish it. The first to the top of this cursed piece of road was afforded a grand prize: lungs burst for this. I couldn’t catch them, hence it would not be mine. I shouted at myself as I climbed. My bones felt the terror of my muscles as they stretched and shrank. Trying to take me up and up, they seemed to bend in the effort. I say this, but we were barely pedalling. And it’s a heavy agony. I thought only to cry when we hit the snowline. The pain was exquisite and I could not comprehend how my body kept working me onwards. It was deep, it was everywhere, surrounding every part of me. I felt myself become damaged; I felt every muscle disintegrating, lungs and heart turning to bloody pulp in my chest. But I went on, and it’s not a case of knowing how, rather it is the case that we did. It’s a miracle that we overcome such pain and no surprise some are chosen as gods. I was amongst five Belgians and a pair of Italians. Frantz just to the rear. We each made queer noises as we sought to hold on to Louvière’s wheel who sought to hold on to de Casteele. The Belgian got to the summit some 10 minutes before us. He stood and watched the rest straining at the pass before changing his gearing and diving into the valley. He would not win the stage, Victor Fontan has that honour, though I suspect he would not have had a chance had Louvière not come such a cropper.

  At the height of the col the group as one leapt from their bikes and flipped their back wheels and hitched the chain to the smallest cog there and set off into the afternoon in a blaze of light and speed. In less than five minutes Louvière had fallen into the valley. We were travelling at over 60 kilometres an hour, according to the chase car. A withered man with driver’s gloves in his shoulder tabs told how he had been falling behind.

  Eventually I took myself from the bike and sat beside the road. Harry arrived a quarter of an hour after the accident and skidded his bike to a stop beside the car that would be Louvière’s ambulance. I went to the Cantabrian and pointed. He looked at me and without any interpretation of my expressions jumped from the track into the clay and scrambled down the 40 or so yards to where the Algerian lay bleeding, a doctor and a stretcher bearer-hunched over his broken body. Signs of bleeding in the discarded towels beside the stream.

  Blood sport.

  Now other teams have become passersby. Discuter slow and watch. I call out to the Spanish lad. Only he looks my way. The rest ride through the scene saying nothing, a car behind them at low revs. A familiar machine, the car I saw Celia approach back in Caen, jutting smoke in Pyrenean air. Though men at the side of the road shout to them Louvière’s name, there’s not a glance from the car nor the riders. Men calling and pointing into the gully.

  Hours later Percy made the statement that he’d known his name, not his face. Though I knew his face well enough, I understood. You never see the face of such a man, just the air that seems thicker about their being. His crash described the end of a legend, it also voiced the beginning of another, more respectful, set of lies:

  The white of the bone stuck through his thigh (read in L’Auto).

  He moaned like dying mutton, blood rendered the dirt red, the grass purple (Le Figaro).

  The sky was black in cloud, the river red with the slither of sunset (L’Auto again), despite it being midday.

  An old man died at the exact moment in a village nearby of a swollen heart, his daughter’s hand in his.

  The riders of the Tour found they rode more freely once his body had been taken from his machine.

  On and on. Shadows to the truth. In the end we all fell: Opperman three times, Harry twice. Harry broke his brakes, sat at the side of the road for almost half an hour fixing them at the snow line. Ernie cracked a wheel. Percy’s head is bandaged and bloodied. Only when your bones splinter do you stop for good.

  Of course Opperman and Harry had discussed Louvière during our planning meetings, but it was Frantz that took most of their talk. They analysed and sought advice. They knew the man would start in the yellow jersey and could be trusted to keep it as long as he or his body could hold out. By the time they were finished with Frantz, there was nobody else to think about. The man was unbeatable, such were the statistics and his team. He had been that way for some time. In Luxembourg he was champion before he was 20, came to the Tour four years later and came second, then fourth behind Ottavio Bottecchia before utterly dominating the race. He never broke down, his body was seemingly resistant to all sour things.

  But I, I had studied Louvière. I had studied him from New Zealand, letters sent via spies. English spies. Nimble-fingered, judging by their elegant missives. Envelopes sealed with lipstick and looped signatures.

  A lie and the amour of distance. Cousin Alice.

  I think of those letters and imagine binoculars focused from a mile out. I imagine spy stuff. Men in long coats, great coats, cologne-wearing shadows in the shadows themselves peering out of cracks in the light. But no, you see I call them my spies but they were merely family, cousins holidaying in the south; Marseille during a summer two years passed. I had asked that she send me descriptions of the race as they followed it east from Perpignan to Nice. My dear cousin Alice sent perfumed letters and told me of the ‘piston thighs’ of Louvière. Did I laugh at that? Of course I laughed at that.

  The proposal that I might one day see this man, ride beside him always seemed impossible; even by arriving here in May it seemed impossible. But Henri Desgrange, he had allowed us a chance at divinity, and I have now heard Louvière’s chain, seen those legs like a pacer’s, so metronomic it half seemed he hypnotised challengers into lagging.

  He did not win the previous year, that was the provenance of Frantz. But Frantz is no Louvière.

  Louvière had never won: 3rd to Ottavio Bottecchia in ’26; 20th to Frantz in ’27; 18th in ’25; 4th in ’24. In 1919 he was unable to finish. In 1920 he came 3rd. Luck and destiny. The next year he was hauled from his bike in Malo-les-Bains by five drinking Belgians as he rode into the town’s tentative outskirts. They were there to welcome Philippe Thys, their countryman, the unrelinquishing leader. They saw Louvière in the colours of his home town, they came to the road shouting, their beer frothing. One threw the ale to his face when they saw his swarthy looks. Louvière went crooked on the road and his tyres caught the cobblestones and he went sideways and over the bars. His arm broken, the race finished without him three days hence. He tried to ride with his arm in a sling. He came off again and again and was ordered not to go on.

  Eighth the next year. He has won 15 stages but never worn the yellow shirt. Never stood in the centre of a podium. But, in spite of this, he is the greatest. My cousin whispered she had never seen a man more beautiful to behold as he stood on his pedals and shifted speed so the pack seemed to flounder and shimmer and slow. The way he never smiled, just peered out from blue deep eyes. And from her writing, all this effortless expenditure of immense energies appeared to be made so he could look my cousin in the eye, that he eased across the front of the pack merely to make her stammer.

  I understand her crush, I understand the newspapers’ lust for victory, I understand the men from that border town. He instils spontaneous action in the limbs of those easy to fall in love with beauty, and, it seems, to see its death. Indeed, a victory will never come now, and the man, it seems, will never return to the road. Since we spoke in Hendaye, I have tried to ignore his interest in our presence. We were, I suspect, some oddity. Just as our presence in the war was peculiar to any who thought of it. We were there with Indians, with Africans, with the English and Scots and Welsh. Who knows why.

  Earlier this evening I left my rooms and went to visit the man. I intended to see him in his bedroom to say commiserating words. To see those eyes one last time. Perhaps I was thinking of cousin Alice, perhaps I wanted to have a story for her once I finally met her and knew what she looked like. Whatever the case it never happened. Happily, the will of another diverted me here to this calm room, downy cheeks who would share the topette I have in my top pocket. Thi
s girl, she found me returning from the river and whispered my name as if it were a secret; though it was the only word we could share for I speak only English, and only a few words at a time. They told us to learn as much French as we could leading to the start. I learnt to point and stare. I am a puppet of cloth and straw.

  We lie looking at the ceiling, the girl in the crook of my arm. Quite beautiful, half-naked like in dreams. I have the sense that I should be feeling lucky, as if gifted the moment by strange circumstance or fortune. But I don’t, I feel only a proximity to shame. She kisses me, her tongue and mine. I fear the hole in my row of teeth, that she might feel revolt if she finds it with her soft wet mouth. But perhaps it is only I who can feel it, who is aware of what was there previously.

  I drift into long flights of dream. The girl does the same, she caresses the back of my head as if it is bruised in a fall. Indeed, it might well be, it might be with her fingers she can sense this kind of hurt, the kind that happens when you crash and collect stray agonies but forget them soon after with a fresh fall. Pain is multi-limbed and forgetful. I lie there and I wonder what parts of Louvière’s body are being ignored for the fact of his truly bad injury. That shattered tibia and the flakes of hard bone in his muscle.

  Louvière, I say to myself, almost believing I had gone there to his room. I am sorry for your fall. I’m sorry I can’t take this bone from your thigh.

  He might have replied, he might have said: Go back to your boys and stop pricking me with your apologies. His face bloodless from morphine and pain.

  I am a weakling with a weakling’s inclinations to fail, I say.

  There are no weaklings in the mountains.

  Only me, I reply.

  And he says, I’m sure he says in his morphine gaze, eyes like ice: All fools on the road! All men who pretend; the road will shake you from its course and my God if you aren’t in my way!

  And I say nothing back because I do not speak to him. I didn’t venture into the room with the four-poster bed where they laid him to shake my head at his forlorn figure. Instead I took wine and sat beside the bridge where the stream gurgles its waters like a throat cut towards the valley floor, to the conjoining river that spans and rushes towards the Iberian plains or the Pyrénées-Orientales and then the sea and how many years does it take until it is run through the gates of Gibraltar to the ocean and the shores of countries that come here to spend their men in war and this insane race itself. I drank to kill the pain, to make my thighs sane once more. She came and sat, a seamstress, a milkmaid, a comely one who knew what rested in my top pocket. The thing Celia (Celia, I am yet to say the name aloud) had given in Caen. The girl and I came to this room and we lay still, we finished the bottle and I brought forth the handkerchief and produced the topette.

  We take breaths deep. Her pretty hands.

  ‘Do you know Louvière?’ I say.

  Her pretty smile.

  ‘He is the king. In America they would make a dollar in his image, a line of cars in his name.’

  ‘New York?’ she says.

  ‘New York?’ I say.

  ‘New York, New York?!’

  Soon I realise, soon I surmise: she believes I am American. I laugh and she looks at me with long, long eyelashes that beat like the wings of the languid hawk that scours the mountain walls looking for blooded carrion or an updraft to transport her far away. A beauty indeed, and I place next to her an undeserving simile: that hawk’s pursuit is for necessity and life, she is here only for the hit of this wet rag, and I for certain admire this honesty and precision.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say. You see, I’ll borrow the Yankee formula if it means I will not have to look Louvière in the eye and see the broken sneer of a man who mocks the fact he rides a machine. He flies whilst we crawl in the shallows of his wake, and he knows, he knows not one of us will ever truly win without him behind our shadow. Indeed, tomorrow people will write that the concatenated effects of fate and element have broken the only man worthy of the yellow jersey (despite him never having worn it). They will be lying, of course – but they will sell newspapers, and boys will make paper planes from their pages and we will watch them float and sway and pray for their safe passage away from our spokes and gearing. So to the girl I feel a gratitude, and I wonder if I owe her greater sums than the waking ether dreams I have offered.

  Lie close, I say. Be near.

  I am an Antipodean. No Yank team has ridden this race, no English, no Welsh. This I’m told. We are New Zealand, we are Australia. But I shall be American, I shall be anything.

  14

  Ten days before she died, my sister went white. Her face damp and her legs giving out in the hall. I watched her fall, her hands reaching out for the walls and touching air. The hollow of her cheeks the kind of pale one barely associates with the living. Now we stand waiting for the race to head out from the town and the faces I see by candlelight in the rain flicker thoughts of her. Candle flames unsteady in the hands of the sisters, the habited who floated in from the convent that watches us all from the mountainside. These are the lights by which we see, by which we ride in the cavern, by which our shadows play on medieval constructions, the chapels and homes and barns and businesses. Midnight suns, shadow faces gifting us light to ride by, the white of their skin matching that of my own stricken sister. This is the way we connect things: colour, light, sound.

  Our number is 78. We cram into the street. Some have slept, some are in mourning for the lost hours that await them; it seems fear smells of liniment and coffee and milk. Each looks a kind of puppet, barely brave and foolhardy. Fooled by the promise of glory. Though, at times, it is the fool who has the clearest view. Marya once said that as we sat atop Egmont, the world we knew spread out in front of us. When men were here on the continent fighting, Marya and I climbed the mountain twice with our father. Clambered over the fields of volcanic rock and broad patches of snow and watched the world and pretended we knew all about it. She had a habit, my sister, of getting into my head with such words. She stays there still, unmoving, and now I feel her watching as we prepare to move out into the snow-capped hills. I want to reach for one of the nuns and pull her in near and ask why it is we have come here to fight. I’d expect no answer, just the sound of surprise and delight.

  I try to recall the surrounds of the town from the day before. I know the place is hedged in, I know mountains range overhead, but so it is for all towns in the Pyrénées. I only remember that the road out was lined with trees separating the footpath and traffic. The shape of the mountains, the burden of snow and their precise proximity, I cannot recall. I look around and if there are a thousand people in this town, they are all out of bed awaiting our grim departure.

  Percy and Bainbridge play leapfrog to keep warm until Bruce shouts out and the men return to their bikes. Monsieur France is somewhere. 3:30 and we are ready in the dark, between the walls of the dark.

  We go. Stopwatches are set whirring as the torque of the mainspring is let loose and cogs fly unseen. We crawl out with the pack, a funeral run of shivering men. Yes, it is cold and the children who have gathered with the parents are draped in blankets. Morning faces. No play, no smart remarks. This is a solemn beginning.

  I hear Opperman say quiet words. He intends to take to the front early and stay there as long as possible. The same tactic as two days ago out of Hendaye. Which worked until elbow-tight corners and the speed at which his pursuers took them sent him into the dirt: he crashed and crashed again, unused to the speed, unacquainted with the manoeuvres needed to survive on the course. He is determined to fight them off, all the men who wish to ride at him, to unseat him and see him fail before their lesser desires.

  We ride, we pass through into the countryside. The sisters quiet in the wake.

  The climb sees the peloton fall to pieces and spread out across the hill. I pick riders off one by one. The first climb is steep. One in six gradient, many walk. Harry walks, Ernie and Osborne. I ride past a man pissing in his shorts, the smell and s
ight of it. I’ll soon do the same, I’m sure. The gradient tilts towards the sky and I find myself at the front of fragmented teams split by the confusion of the start. It’s dark, still and cold. As with the Tuesday when we set off as one from Hendaye, we ride from Luchon en masse. These days are no time trials, they are the place we ride as a true peloton and show our frailties as our bodies buckle and strain.

  We lose one another as the long length of the peloton stretches so it’s inevitable it will snap. Minutes don’t pass in the dark, nor do seconds. We can’t gauge speed, nor can we mark distance. But then it seems we have merged once more, as if drawn back together by the inevitable fact of us. I ride with Harry, but he doesn’t talk. He’s sullen. As if his temper was bruised, knocked about in the lead-up to the stage. We sit behind Percy and Opperman. We are riding in a bleak half-light as if half blinded and I find my thoughts drift to a night. Another night and a colder night in a winter hard with the presence of men near the brink. A hotel public bar and the sight of my brother throwing haymakers at the black air in the lightless space out the back used by the brewery truck to deliver the beer.

  It was a quarter past six in early August, I know that for it was the time I had told him I would be outside to fetch him for dinner. He might have been home for a week, two. Whichever, in that time he’d obviously lost his ability to hit well and flung drunk arms at whoever wanted a piece of his story. I know this because I learnt by observation that this was how these fights came about. Questions of time and place, they quickly turned to questions of valour. I was a boy when I threw my first punch, twelve. It came from my legs, my hips, then through my shoulders so force was at the end of my knuckle. My brother took the punch and looked stunned for a moment and quickly put me in a headlock and roughed up my hair. He said over and over, ‘Where’d you learn that, boy? Where’d you learn that?’ I’d learnt it from him of course and, hence, as I put the car to a stop with the headlamps pushing their way into the melange, I was a small bit deflated. Though he was short, a half-back for the seniors in his short career, he could wallop and do it with timing and performed none of this floundering, none of this flapping about.