“Hi,” I said.
Paolino raised his eyes from the brake lever on which he was working, glanced at us, and without saying a word resumed his work.
Biagio and I looked at each other for a moment, not sure what to do.
“Listen,” I said, “we need to talk to you about something.”
Paolino continued working on the lever of the Lambretta. I turned towards Biagio, who simply shrugged, then I looked again at Paolino.
“We have a motorbike,” I said after another little while, for a moment feeling taller by at least half a head.
Paolino picked up a spanner from the saddle of the Lambretta and started tightening a nut on the lever, still without saying anything.
I was rather embarrassed, but after a few moments I summoned up a crumb of courage. “Paolo?” I ventured timidly.
Paolino stopped and sighed, then raised his eyes and stared at us. “Listen, you wankers, I don’t have time to waste on your bullshit. I don’t know what you want. You talk to me about a motorbike that isn’t here and—”
“You could come and see it. It’s at Gregorio’s.”
Paolino stood up straight and pointed the spanner he’d just been tightening the nut with at us. “I wouldn’t even go with you lot to see your mothers’ tits. If you have something to show me, bring it here, and if you’re not out of here in three seconds I’ll kick you so hard that when you get home you won’t be able to get through the door, your arses’ll be that swollen.”
“All right.” I raised my hands. “Forget I said it.”
“Okay,” Biagio said.
The day afterwards, at school, Greg asked us how it had gone.
“He wasn’t very keen on the idea.”
It took us more than two hours to drag the motorbike with its deflated tyres from Greg’s shed to Paolino’s workshop. It was even colder than the day before. There were still patches of ice at various points in the grounds of Greg’s house and in the village, and both Biagio and I slipped several times. On a couple of occasions—though to be honest without much enthusiasm—Greg offered to help, but we tacitly agreed that Greg was practically giving us a share in a motorbike, and the least we could do was sweat in his place.
We felt big and tough, and pride prevented us from asking for help: despite the cold we were sweaty, dirty with dust, and in one of the falls I hit my knee against the ignition lever, tearing my trousers and cutting my skin. Muscles I didn’t even know I had were hurting.
I’m convinced that when Paolino saw us appear in the square, dishevelled and bloody, sliding on the frozen slabs of the pavement and steaming in the cold like hot linen, he felt a touch of respect for us for the first time. He leant on the wooden doorpost at the entrance to his workshop and waited for us.
“Here it is,” I said once we were close, as soon as I had recovered my breath.
“What do you want me to do with this?” Paolino asked after a few seconds.
We looked at each other, not sure what to say.
“Make it go, I suppose.”
Paolino looked at the bike for a while and then at us. “And who’s paying?”
A wave of cold went through me, freezing every drop of sweat on my skin and making the cut on my knee throb with pain. How could we not have thought of it? Did we really think that Paolino would go to all the trouble of fixing up a heap of old iron like that, just for fun?
“I’ll pay.”
I turned. Greg was looking Paolino right in the eyes. For the first time, he had a hardness on his face that I’d learn to recognize only much later. Paolino looked at Greg, then again at the bike. He took a few steps forward to get a closer look at it. He crouched on the ground, passed a hand over the chain guard, removing a little dust, and for a few moments went over the bike from top to bottom. Between his teeth he had a small piece of rolled-up paper, which he kept shifting from one side of his mouth to the other. Then he stood up again and went back to the entrance.
“It’ll need a lot of work.”
Greg continued looking at him, as serious and motionless as a statue. “No problem.”
They were like two gunfighters in an American western. Paolino looked at all of us again, trying to work out if he was being swindled or not.
“All right,” he said finally. “In the meantime I’ll take the hose and give it a wash down.”
3
THE ROLES WERE SOON DEFINED. Greg, as the financial backer, asked for accounts and forked out the money as it was needed. Biagio gave Paolino a hand to find replacement parts in the area. Whenever he could, he took his father’s Ape truck and went to Posta or down in the valley to a few car breakers to pick up couplings, levers, bands or gudgeon pins. Occasionally I went with him. I would sit down in the bed of the Ape and look at the countryside speeding past. It would have been good to have music, a saxophone solo, maybe one of those Frank Sinatra records my dad loved listening to. Greg had decided that I was the one with the best taste, so I had been automatically elected the panel beater.
That meant I would take care of repainting and scraping the various parts of the bike. The first part I took to Marino was the fuel tank. It was in a decent condition, but the red paint had turned opaque and in a couple of places was swollen with bubbles of rust.
Marino was perfectly round. When I was smaller, at the annual feast day of the village’s patron saint, he’d amused himself having me with him for the tombola. I remember him standing on the steps of the church, already tipsy and red-faced from the wine: for every number we had, he got me to make a hole in the ticket with a toothpick and laugh. He would say it brought luck. Once we even won the tombola, the prize being a whole ham. So we decided to dine on that instead of the suckling pig, and Marino surreptitiously made me take a couple of swigs from a bottle of red wine.
When I put my head in through the entrance to his shed, Marino was hard at work on a Fiat 128 half covered in light brown patches. He was all dusty and was wearing a mask.
“Hey, Jacopino, what are you doing with that?” he greeted me, barely taking his eyes off his work.
“I have to repaint it.”
Marino glanced at me, then went back to working on the 128. After a moment he straightened up, lowered his mask and approached. In his blue overalls, he seemed even rounder than usual: a blue ball with a head stuck on it.
“Whose is it?”
“Ours.”
“No, I mean, from what bike?”
“An old Gilera.”
“Yes, I see that, but where did you get it?”
“We found it at Gregorio’s, next to the greenhouse. But please, Marino, don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.”
Marino raised his eyes for a moment and stared at me, then looked again at the fuel tank. “I think it was the old estate manager’s,” he said in a warm tone and with a look in his eyes I couldn’t recall ever seeing before.
“What estate manager?”
“You weren’t even born,” he smiled, taking the fuel tank from my hand.
“Are you saying he wants it back?”
“I doubt it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Fairly sure: he’s dead.” Marino turned the fuel tank and studied the bottom. “It’ll need sandblasting. Then we have to see if it’s in good condition, and maybe repaint it. If not, it’ll have to be replaced.”
“What about the emblem?”
“It’d be better to find a new one. Then we’ll give it a bit of a polish. How’s the rest?”
“The rest of what?”
“My grandmother. The bike, arsehole.”
“Oh. Well, it’s quite rusty but I’d say it’s okay.”
“The rest will need sandblasting too.”
I had no idea what sandblasting was, but all this renewed intimacy with Marino filled me with joy and I had no desire to ruin it.
“Do you want to do it?” he said at last.
“Do what?”
“The work. Sandblasting and all that.”
; “I don’t know.”
“You might enjoy it.”
So I found myself a couple of days after that, late in the afternoon, at the back of Marino’s shed, with a tube in my hand spreading sand at pressure on the fuel tank of our bike. The ease with which the paint came away was staggering. It was like rubbing out pencil marks with an eraser. I could have carried on for hours. I’d have liked to sandblast the whole village, and when I was already finished after barely half an hour I was visibly disappointed.
“It’s come up well,” Marino said, picking the fuel tank up from the floor and turning it this way and that. “Luckily the rust was only on the surface.”
“Do you want me to sandblast anything else for you?”
“No, thanks, it doesn’t matter.”
“I could have a go at the Renault.”
“No, son, thanks.”
“How about those old scraps over there?”
“Jacopo, go home. Tomorrow we’ll choose a shade of red for the paint.”
Everything took an unexpected turn one Saturday afternoon. We got to Paolino’s workshop and found him on the ground, his back propped against the entrance, staring at the bike. So as not to show the bike to anyone, we had decided to always work indoors, and on the couple of occasions when Paolino—afflicted by splitting headaches caused by the gas and petrol fumes—had been forced to go outside, we had concealed it carefully under an old sheet.
We approached without saying anything and also started looking at the bike in silence. Nothing remained now but the frame, with dozens of nuts and bolts around it and the wheels laid on their sides. The shiny egg of the engine was lying on its side by itself, on three folded sheets of newspaper. It looked like an aluminium heart. Unsure what to do, we also stood there in silence for a few minutes.
Greg looked round at everyone, then shrugged. “Well?”
For a moment, Paolino continued to look at the bike, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
Biagio and Greg and I looked at each other without quite understanding.
“What do you mean ‘what are we going to do’?”
Paolino raised his head, a distant look in his eyes. “With this. What are we going to do with this?”
I stared at Greg and Biagio and all three of us shrugged again. “I’m not sure what you mean, Paolino,” I said.
“Right now we’re fixing the bike,” he began. “If we’re lucky and find all the parts we may even manage to get it up and running. And then?”
“I don’t know, Paolino. Then we go for a ride.”
“But where do you want to go? It doesn’t even have a licence plate. Take it out of San Filippo and the first carabiniere who sees you will make you put it back in the garage at the very least, and could even confiscate it.”
“So what do we do?”
“We really get it to run.”
I looked again at the other two without understanding. Paolino seemed different, all his hardness transformed into something unusually soft and dreamy.
“We fix it, we change it, we improve it. We turn this heap of iron into a racer. If we’re going to do something illegal anyway, let’s go for it.”
We all looked at that eviscerated frame and those rusty parts. From the first, we had neglected to think about what we would do with the bike. The thought hadn’t even crossed our minds. It was our bike, and that was enough for us. The fact that it was a bike was secondary: it was simply something of ours, something that was only ours, a first thrilling step into the magical world of emancipation, and it really didn’t matter all that much if it was a vehicle on two wheels or a sleigh or some other object. But now we saw it all at once for what it actually was: a motorcycle, a complex mechanism with a very specific purpose.
Maybe, in a hidden place in our consciousness, we’d been thinking that once we’d fixed it we would ride it along the gravel paths in the grounds of Greg’s house. But that bike wasn’t made for gravel: in the now distant times when its lines had been drawn, its designers hadn’t been thinking of stones and earth, but rough asphalt. In the meantime, though, years had passed, years in which the bike had remained in that shed gathering dust, while the world and technology had advanced and progressed. That was why Paolino’s vision suddenly rose in front of our eyes in all its grandeur: to make that old bike even better than it was, to obliterate the years that separated it from us or, if not all of them, at the very least, a fair number. We immediately thought it was an excellent idea.
Greg, Biagio and I suddenly smiled, and although we didn’t say it, the three of us understood for the first time that behind Paolino’s tough exterior, his bulk and his silences, was a person capable of looking at the world.
“So what do we do?”
“We need to start again from square one.”
“Meaning what?”
“We have to enlarge the tyres, the engine, the brakes, the carburettor. We have to make it lighter, throw out the useless parts, open the exhaust… we have to do a lot of things.”
Paolino was speaking for the first time with a drive we had never seen in him before, and for a few seconds I thought I could hear particles vibrating at higher frequencies all around me.
“And you’ll have to spend a lot more money on it,” he concluded, though without his usual bullying tone, in fact dropping his voice slightly.
So we all turned to Greg, with the terrible sense that the whole vision might abruptly disintegrate in front of our eyes.
“No problem,” Greg said.
Paolino was unable to hold back a smile and for the first time, although without getting up off the ground, he shook our hands one by one.
Paolino and Biagio started scouring all the wrecking yards on the plain, in search of parts they could use. The bike was completely dismantled.
The wheels and the lights and the brakes and the whole exhaust ended up in a cardboard box, gathering dust, while the engine was opened and disembowelled. For a while, Paolino wondered if it might not be a good idea to find a new engine that could be adapted. But he was unable to find one, and in any case he’d fallen in love with the dry clutch, which he said was a rarity. So he rebored and polished the cylinder thoroughly and from a mysterious character in Viterbo got a brand new piston with a double ring. He managed to recover and adapt a Dell’Orto 36 carburettor and he had a friend of his remodel and lighten the piston rod. Once the frame was sandblasted, we had it strengthened by Sergio, the locksmith, with four steel plates, and we had two new arms soldered on for the rear swingarm, on which, instead of the Gilera’s narrow rings, Paolino managed to adapt those of a Ducati Mark 3.
Finally opening that package with the Swedish postage stamps was like turning the key in the lock of a safe. Through yet another of his contacts, Paolino had managed to get sent from Öhlins—and this time the money involved had made even Greg hesitate for a moment—two rear shock absorbers and an entire front swingarm composed of plates. They were all gilded, the springs canary yellow, and in the dim light of evening we really felt as if we were looking at a treasure. Paolino’s eyes were shining like a junkie’s over a load of heroin, and as we listened to him telling us that it was with shock absorbers like these that Eddie Lawson had won the 500cc world championship road race four years earlier, we felt as if were already surrounded by laurel wreaths and people in leathers.
Now Biagio put his hands on the bike as if it were his, and I started to feel useless and jealous. The new version of the bike had fewer parts than before on the bodywork, and it was quite a while now since Marino and I had finished sandblasting and painting what remained. Even though the painting had taken longer than anticipated—drops still formed, which I worked hard to get rid of, and Marino had stubbornly refused to help me—the whole matter had been resolved rather quickly. Moreover, the enthusiasm with which I brought back those shiny, refurbished parts had been greeted with a certain indifference.
I would drop by Paolino’s workshop and find
both him and Biagio dirty and bent over the bike, talking—as if they had always done so—about things I didn’t know and that would have been too difficult to explain to me. Or else—and this was even more frustrating—in total silence, each at work by himself and yet perfectly coordinated: Paolino’s hand appearing, Biagio lowering a spanner, then at the right moment a nut and a pair of pliers, then maybe a simple “go on” and Biagio holding a hose steady and Paolino tightening a bolt.
I tried at first to ask what this or that part was and if they needed a hand, but each time they told me they didn’t, and the explanations between one job and the next were always vague. So I’d end up just sitting on a Vespa or some old wreck watching them work. It was during this time that the whole Sandra thing started. When Greg put his head in through the front door of the workshop one day, Biagio and Paolino were fiddling with a few parts at the work bench, under the light, and I was on my own, playing with a piece of inner tube.
“So, how’s Sandra?” Greg asked.
I looked at him, bored, not understanding. “Who?”
“That, the bike.”
“Oh, they’re just fixing something on the engine. Paolino has found a new part.”
Greg watched the others working for a minute. “All right,” he said without even coming in. “See you.”
The others did not even turn round, and the thing seemed to have passed without notice. But then we all gradually started calling the bike Sandra, and for some reason it always made us smile.
One afternoon I happened to glance at the photograph of Randy Mamola hanging on the back wall of the shop. He was coming round a bend, his knee almost on the ground and his head tilted the other way, astride his red and white Yamaha covered in inscriptions, with the yellow patch and the number 3 on the front. I saw that photo every day, and always went on to something else, as if indifferent to it. This time, though, I looked at it in another way: harbouring absurd ambitions in my boredom, it struck me that our bike could be like that, almost horizontal, defying the laws of physics. And I suddenly realized that there was something I stupidly hadn’t thought of before.
Enchantment Page 3