“What?” he whispered.
Again I shifted towards him, with my back resting on the chair and my legs stretched in front of me.
“They’ve tarred the Rocky Road,” I said, with a complacent half-smile, like a film actor.
Tonino continued taking notes. “Oh.”
I looked at him and shook my head, with the same contempt I would have felt if I’d told him that Giulia Morelli would show her private parts to everyone that afternoon. Giulia Morelli was the blonde, green-eyed daughter of a watchmaker, who had joined the school just a year earlier and would leave again the following year to go to school abroad. A tall, generous girl, she had, in that short time, entertained various young men: her memory and the stories about her would haunt our masturbatory fantasies for years.
During the break, Biagio, Greg and I mostly kept to ourselves, thinking hard about what to do. We had the feeling that everyone was looking at us strangely and, although we didn’t say it, we were convinced that those looks were the prelude to a great and imminent future.
We had told Greg at the main entrance as soon as we arrived. Even after several years, having to go to school in Posta every day had the frustrating taste of defeat. The bitterest moment had been almost six years earlier, on the morning of the first day of the fifth year of primary school. The previous year, the local council had decided that it wasn’t worth refurbishing the old school buildings in San Filippo and had decided to amalgamate them with the schools in Posta. That first morning, as we looked out at the lime trees lining the road to Posta, we realized, reluctantly and unconsciously, what nasty tricks were concealed by the word modernity. And however many years had passed since then, and however many things had changed, having to go down to Posta every day, thus paying tribute to its subtle but unchallenged supremacy, always annoyed us. It was basically unacceptable that we, the historic inhabitants of San Filippo, had to lower ourselves to travelling every day to what until a couple of generations earlier had simply been a place where wayfarers and mail coaches stopped for rest and refreshment, without the inconvenience of having to go up the hill to the village. The full name of Posta was actually Posta di San Filippo—as indicated on the half-rusted sign at the entrance to the village and underlined, in parenthesis, by a superfluous and wonderful “hamlet of San Filippo”. It was our guest room, and that was something that occasionally got us into slanging matches or scraps. The hamlet, however, had rapidly grown in size. Encouraged by its easy access to the plain and its lenient housing policy, Posta had expanded over the course of time, and apart from attracting entrepreneurs from all over had taken away our businesses and our shops and our schools and most of our inhabitants.
A few days after the great disappointment of the fifth year, Biagio and I had decided to mount our little campaign for dignity and austerity by refusing to take the bus the school provided for us. “Thanks—we prefer to walk,” we told the bus driver every morning for more than two months, with heads held high, until we stopped to ask ourselves why the rest of the boys pointed at us and made fun of us. It was now years later, and we were in secondary school, but arriving alone on foot every day still seemed in some absurd way to be a reassertion of our freedom. Greg, on the other hand, more to his embarrassment than ours, continued to arrive in a shiny dark chauffeur-driven car.
“Well?” he said, coming up to us, looking almost peeved.
“It’s happened.”
“What’s happened, Jacopo?”
I looked at him some more. “They’ve tarred the Rocky Road.”
It was a great moment, the kind where you delude yourself that life could be like a beautiful woman, full of surprises.
“What are you talking about?” Greg asked, coming closer and lowering his voice.
“I swear to you, they’ve tarred the Rocky Road.”
“Who has?”
“How should I know who? All I know is that it’s all nice and clean and tarred. Biagio discovered it last night.”
“I was over that way and I saw it,” Biagio said.
“You were on the Rocky Road?”
“Yes.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing, just walking around.”
“I see.” Greg looked at us for another moment and gave a little smile.
Later, back in the classroom after break, after barely ten minutes or so, Mario the Redhead leant towards me from the side opposite Tonino, and continuing to look straight ahead whispered, “They’ve tarred the Rocky Road.”
I stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing, bent forward and banged my head on the desk.
We didn’t go back to the Rocky Road until the afternoon of the next day. From a distance, as we came past the old riverbed and moved on to the road that ran alongside the last field, we could hear the vroom-vroom of mopeds. Marco was there, going backwards and forwards on one wheel of his souped-up Garelli, in front of Giorgia and her friends. On either side of the road, under the trees and on the grass, were various people. After a while, Tino’s brother came round a bend on his Lambretta: he turned for a second, clung to the brakes and, halfway round the bend, a bit shaky but with his body nicely tilted to one side, gunned the engine. As soon as he saw us, he did everything he could to pass as close as possible to us and started laughing. Even Giorgia and her friends laughed and clapped. After a few seconds Giorgia waved to us, then said something to her friends and they burst out laughing.
Marco passed us on one wheel, turned back and approached us. “What are you doing here, wankers?”
Greg and I stood there motionless, not quite sure what to say.
“Nothing,” I ventured.
Marco looked at me, then turned to Greg. “Won’t your mummy buy you a moped?”
“Marco, come on,” Biagio said. Biagio’s brother Graziano had been a schoolmate of Marco, and prided himself on actually having belted him one day, which—surely wrongly—had always made us feel partially protected.
After a few moments, even Tino’s brother Luca came up to us, sitting astride his Lambretta.
“What’s up?” he asked Marco, raising his head slightly. His eyes were a strange opaque yellow colour, and his voice was so harsh it gave you a sore throat just to hear it. His long, unkempt ponytail and the scar on his cheek had always struck me as quite alarming, and ever since I was small I had tried my best to stay away from him, especially as years earlier he had amused himself beating us up. It was at least two years since I had last seen Luca, and during that time people had been telling all kinds of stories about him: they said he had been in prison, that he had done a robbery, that he was on heroin, that he was a drug dealer. They said a whole lot of things about Luca, things that might not have been true at all but that contributed to making him a sinister and legendary character.
“Nothing,” Marco said. “I was asking these cissies what they’re doing here.”
Marco was the good-looking bully of the village, the one who, among other things, was always the first to use his fists in feuds with Posta. Next to Luca, he was like a puppy wagging its tail.
“Come on, boys, leave them alone,” Giorgia shouted from the distance with a smile on her lips.
“You don’t own this place,” Greg whispered. I turned and looked at him with a mixture of admiration and disquiet: half of me wondered where he had suddenly acquired all that initiative, the other half wanted to hide my head in my hands.
Marco pulled the Garelli back a couple of paces and leant towards us, scowling. “What did you say?”
Greg stared straight in front of him and I could sense an inexorable slide towards one of those situations that was bound to end in some kind of pain.
But thank heaven, at that moment the sound of an engine echoed through the countryside. Marco stopped and looked towards the village. Luca also turned and, as we listened to the sound and after a while saw that red and silver animal approaching, the sense of gratitude to a god I didn’t know, plus a wave of excitement, swept through my stomach
like melted chocolate. The shiny red animal was carrying on its back a large figure in tight black leathers and an old white helmet with two green stripes. Arriving at the entrance to the Rocky Road, the animal roared again a few times and went up a couple of gears, then slipped between the verge and the guardrail and came towards us.
Marco and Luca stood there motionless, watching that thing come closer. Luckily, they seemed to have lost interest in us and what we had to say.
“What’s this?” Luca asked in bewilderment, shouting over the scream of the engine, when the animal and its rider came to a halt right next to him.
The rider took off the two snap-fasteners of the half-scratched visor and from under it appeared the squinting face of Paolino. The sides of the old helmet had creased the skin around his eyes and squeezed his cheeks.
“This is Sandra,” Biagio said with a smile.
It had started on a day like any other, a few months earlier, an ordinary cold morning at the beginning of February. Greg had come up to us during the break and after saying hello told us to come to his house after lunch, because he had something to show us. Biagio said he had to give his dad a hand with something, and it wasn’t an ideal day for me either: I had promised to go and study at Francesca’s. Francesca was the quiet, well-brought-up daughter of the owner of the general store, and I had been going out with her for more than a year. Greg looked at us seriously for a second and said it was important, and it wouldn’t take long. We weren’t used to Greg being that intense, and we thought it might be best to go.
By five to three, we were already at the gates. When we got to the end of the long avenue of cedars, the butler was there as usual waiting for us at the front door, at the top of the stone steps. He greeted us with an imperceptible nod and led us into the small room filled with rugs and leather-bound books, which they called “the small drawing-room”.
“The young master will be here in a minute,” the butler said. “Can I get you anything?”
Biagio collapsed into a huge blue velvet armchair, which greeted him with a big snort.
“I don’t know. You fancy anything?” I asked him, feeling a bit awkward. He played with a fold of the armchair and shrugged.
The butler stared at us for a moment or two, unable entirely to conceal his annoyance.
Greg appeared at the door. “Come on, let’s go,” he said, motioning to us slightly irritably.
“Remember the appointment with your mother,” the butler said as Biagio and I slid past him and followed Greg towards the front door.
“Yes, Franco, yes,” Greg sighed. “I’ll be back in a minute. I promise I won’t run away.”
Once through the door, we went down the steps and walked around the outside of the villa.
“Do you wind that guy up in the morning,” I asked, “or is he always like that?”
“I don’t know,” Greg said. “He belongs to my mum. I found him already assembled.”
For a while now, a few weeks at the most, Greg’s impeccable politeness had started to turn into something more obscure and elusive. He was brisker, more distracted, and sometimes his sense of humour took on a slightly bitter tone. Thinking about it now, I can’t help seeing in those little signs the real beginning of everything, but at the time it was simply something strange I happened to notice, nothing but a slight deviation from a person who even at the age of seven had greeted my mother with a kiss of the hand and always let us through a door first.
We walked along one side of the villa, then down a little stone drive, and entered the grounds. We went around the pond, which was half covered with the flat leaves of water lilies. On the edges, a slight crust of ice had formed. Three years earlier, during the great frost, we had even run on it and had some spectacular falls.
We descended some steps covered in lichen and came to the big, white-painted glass and metal greenhouses. Next to them was a long wooden shed full of mowers and agricultural machines that we had often sneaked into and played in as children. There was also a dark old car covered in dust, which for some reason had always scared us.
We entered the shed and, taking care where we put our feet in the gloom, went all the way to the back, where we couldn’t remember ever having been before.
“The other day,” Greg said, clambering with some difficulty over a plough and two rusty carts, “I came here to take a look and… shit, I just caught my trousers on a nail… and as I was looking around I discovered this.”
Abruptly, he pulled away a thick greyish tarpaulin, raising a cloud of dust as he did so to reveal what, to all appearances, was a motorcycle.
Biagio and I finished climbing over the plough and, taking care not to catch ourselves on any spikes, got past the first cart. We stopped before the second, but close enough to get a better look at what Greg was showing us. It was indeed an old motorcycle, covered in dust, its short handlebars, red fuel tank and thin leather saddle forming a single line. Under the fuel tank and the thin plates of the cylinder was what looked like a kind of metal egg and on the front mudguard an iron tag that resembled a flipper. The engine seemed oxidized, and the chrome plating was spotted with rust. And yet, despite everything, it was still a beautiful sight.
“Well?” Biagio said.
“What do you mean, ‘well’?” Greg replied, visibly disappointed.
“Can’t you see how beautiful she is?”
“Greg, it’s a heap of rust.”
“Who cares? We can fix her.”
“But whose is it?”
“How should I know? Nobody’s. I asked, but they didn’t even know it was here.”
“Incredible,” I said. “I don’t even know what to ask for this Christmas, and he finds a motorbike in his garden.”
Biagio let out a laugh. Greg gave us both a surprising look, as if from a long way away, both enthusiastic and desperate. “But don’t you understand? This is our bike.”
He seemed really terrified, and his tone was imploring. Our bike. All at once, driven by Greg’s sudden urgency, those simple words sounded like the last footholds we had before we sank into a crevasse. It was as if a cloud of diamonds had fallen from on high and that heap of old iron had suddenly coughed and come back to life. As if that bike had been ours for ever, hidden somewhere in our memories by some trivial trick of the mind.
We stood there a while longer looking at it. Then Greg carefully covered it up again and we left the shed. Once outside, in a ray of sunlight, the frozen grass crunching beneath our feet, we formed a kind of circle, facing each other. Greg took from the breast pocket of his shirt one of those cigarettes he had always loved smoking, home-made and tied up with sewing thread. He always rolled the leaves in a kind of fern which he found in the garden, tied them with the thread, and left them to dry for a few days on a slice of apple or an orange peel.
“Well, what do we do?”
“Good question,” Biagio said. “Give me a drag.”
Greg took a puff of the cigarette and passed it to Biagio. Biagio took it between his thumb and index finger and, keeping an eye on it, took a big drag.
“I don’t know anything about engines,” I said.
Biagio let out the smoke slowly, then continued looking at the cigarette. “These are good, Greg,” he said, his voice half furred by smoke. “Really good.”
“They are, aren’t they?” Greg said, really pleased, taking back his cigarette.
“Yes, really good.”
They both nodded.
“Hey,” I said.
They looked at me. “Huh?”
“Well?”
“Well what?” Greg said, letting the smoke out of his mouth and screwing up his eyes a bit.
“The bike.”
“Oh, right, the bike.”
Biagio turned to Greg. “Give me another drag.”
Greg handed him the cigarette again and looked at me thoughtfully. “The bike, right. It’s quite a problem.” He nodded again, and stroked his chin. Biagio looked at him and burst out laughing. Greg, w
ho had turned serious, now glanced at the hand he was massaging his chin with and also burst out laughing. I stood there listening to them laugh and watching him stroke his chin theatrically for at least two minutes until, fortunately, they pulled themselves together.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Greg said, laughing again with Biagio and passing his hands over his eyes, “everything’s fine.”
“Well?”
“Well, the only thing to do is talk to Paolino,” Biagio said.
Paolino had been our classmate for one year in secondary school, before he took the wise decision that school was not for him and left to work in his father’s workshop. Every day there were fists flying. He was like a caged animal. Outside school, he was fairly quiet: touchy perhaps, and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted to tease him, but all things considered, he minded his own business. In class, though, stuck between those desks, you could almost see his nerves throbbing beneath his skin, and after a while he would blow up like a pressure cooker with whatever he had within reach.
“I can’t go, boys,” Greg said. “You heard the tailor’s dummy: I have to see Mum.”
Biagio looked at him gravely for a moment, then dismissed that hint of scorn with a slight shake of the head.
When we got to Paolino’s, he was bent over the handlebars of a Lambretta. He still occupied the old workshop in the corner of the square: it was narrow and greasy and stank of petrol and stale oil, with motorbikes and mopeds stacked one on top of the other any old how. The glass panes in the front door were held in somehow by rickety frames with their blue paint peeling, and on days when the north wind blew a draught came in that could blow out a match at a distance of a metre. The inside of the workshop was so narrow and smelly that Paolino always preferred working outside, even on really cold days, as long as it didn’t rain. I had seen him there on the pavement even when it was snowing. As we came close, Biagio gave me a glance and a nod, motioning me to go forward. I looked up, wondering when all these roles had been assigned.
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