So I went to Marino’s shed. He was inside a Fiat Uno that had been in an accident, dismantling something under the steering column, with a light attached to the wheel. After a few seconds he turned his head slightly and glanced at me.
“Hi, kid, how’s it going?” he said, resuming his work.
“We have to cover the bike.”
Marino stopped and put his head out, with a frown. “We have to do what?”
“Cover the bike.”
“Cover it?”
“Yes, cover it.” Marino went back under the wheel. “Son, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know racing bikes?”
“Yes…”
“All that stuff that covers it.”
“The fairing?” Marino asked, continuing his work.
“If that’s what it’s called.”
“What about it?”
“How do we make it?”
Marino laughed. “Good Lord, lad, that’s not easy. They’re made of plastic. We’d need the moulds.” He put his arm out. “Pass me the pliers on the seat there.”
On the back seat of the Uno there was a pair of long, thin pliers with blue handles. I grabbed them and put them in Marino’s plump hand. I watched and listened for a moment or two as he moved about under the steering column. He came out holding a big metal ring and sat down on the edge of the car.
“You could try fibreglass.”
“Fibreglass?”
“Yes. I can get you some if you like next time I go to the paint shop. They should have some.”
“And what do I do with fibreglass?”
“Do whatever you like, but it won’t be easy. It’s a bicomponent resin that you soak sheets of glass wool in. Then you let it dry and it becomes very tough and resistant. A couple of years ago, I used it to cover the cracked sink behind the shed.”
Marino got up with a sigh from the edge of the Uno, waddled over to the anvil on the workbench and, after putting the big ring down on it, picked up a hammer and gave it two good blows. Then he stopped.
“But you have to know how to make a fairing.”
A few days later, having taken all the necessary measurements of the bike, Marino and I found ourselves in front of those big cans of resin and hardener and those white sheets of glass wool and started to try figuring out how to mould a resistant base on which to place and dry the soaked parts.
“Chicken wire,” Marino ventured after a while.
“Chicken wire?”
“That’s right, chicken wire.”
“And what do you do with chicken wire?”
“You shape it and put it over the fibreglass. It should work.”
For a moment I looked at Marino, trying to figure out if he was a madman or a genius. I had him lend me his moped and rode over to Testucci’s to get two metres of chicken wire. Within quite a short time, looking at the photographs of a couple of racing bikes and trying to follow the measurements I had taken of ours, I managed to give the wire a vague shape. Marino lent me a pair of overalls and a table and a mask, and the three or four times I managed to find time to go to his shed I covered the wire with the pieces of glass wool soaked in resin. At first we were convinced we could cover the whole bike, just like a real one, but then it seemed a shame to cover the shiny egg of the engine so we decided to limit ourselves to a nice round windscreen, which would give the idea of a racing bike but not conceal it too much. I managed to make a decent base, and once we had the rough parts we found ourselves looking at the result again and wondering how to go forward.
“The only thing to do is fill and smooth everything.”
“What do you mean?”
Marino went to get a big metal can and opened it. Then with a spatula he put part of the contents on a piece of wood, added a little red paste to it from a tube and mixed them together, turning the paste round and round until the red had completely disappeared, merging with the brown of the filler. He then took the windscreen and smeared a fair amount of paste on it, spreading it as much as he could. The irregularities of the fibreglass made the spatula jump, but quite a lot got filled.
“It’s going to be a tough job,” Marino said. “You’ll have to fill everything, get rid of the excess, fill it again, discard the excess again, until it’s completely even.”
It was indeed a tough job. I spent hours rubbing the sandpaper over that damned fairing without ever seeing an end to it. I seemed constantly to be getting there, until I washed down the surface and saw that there were still dozens of frustrating irregularities. From time to time, partly to repay him for the time I was stealing from him and the tools he was lending me—not to mention the quantity of putty I was using and for which he would never ask a lira—I gave Marino a hand with a few little bodywork jobs. There, too, I found myself doing a lot of filling: by now I had acquired such a knack and the fairing was so difficult that the smooth surfaces of the cars were a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t exactly what my parents or I had imagined for my future, but if the worst came to the worst I could always become a bodyworker. All things considered, it didn’t seem a bad way to end up.
To perfect the job, Marino gave me some thick pieces of curved wood on which to lay the sandpaper and apply it uniformly. When at last I found myself faced with those smooth, polished contours, with the muscles of my arm still throbbing under the skin, I felt an unmistakable elation: they seemed the most elegant curves I had ever set eyes on, and it would be a very long time before I felt the same overwhelming satisfaction.
With all the work and the putty and the chicken wire we had used, though, the fairing was far too thick and heavy. So I used it as a mould. I smeared it in grease and covered it with another thick layer of fibreglass. Once dried, I separated the two surfaces and used the new shell as a mould to make the actual fairing.
The work held me spellbound for days. I spent all the hours I could at the bench that Marino had put at my disposal in a corner of the shed, with a mask on my face and wearing his blue overalls, which were too big for me. The resins and the flying particles of glass wool and the solvents made my eyes bloodshot. When I looked at them in the mirror in the evening, they were swollen and bulging, with red veins spreading from the pupils. My head throbbed, I couldn’t breathe well, and at night I would often wake up with my throat dry and painful and couldn’t get back to sleep even with two cups of milk and honey. And yet, every evening, Marino would push me away and force me to go home: I was feverish, feverish and compulsive, but happy in my way, as if every remedy for the world was in the viscous substance of the resins and in the ability of the glass wool to envelop the contours of things and harden and withstand shocks. If only some god had given me the opportunity, I would have covered the earth in fibreglass.
Even Francesca had started looking at me strangely. If I have to think of a word that best describes my relationship with Francesca, that word is predictable. It was predictable that she was my girlfriend, predictable that during the trip to Florence a year earlier, walking by the Arno, I had asked her if we could go out together, predictable that through a friend of hers she had later simply said “all right”, predictable that the whole village thought we would get married one day and start a family and live happily ever after. It was predictable that on Saturday afternoons we’d visit one another’s houses whereas during the week we had to study, and that our parents respected each other and saw our relationship in a very good light. The fact that suddenly my eyes would be bloodshot and that I would prefer the company of epoxy resins to hers was perhaps rather less predictable.
When I finally saw the fairing, right there in front of me, even I didn’t think it was real. For a moment, the hours I had spent on it and my bloodshot eyes and aching arms all vanished: it was as if a courier had just delivered it from a spare parts company. Marino patted me on the back and told me I was stealing his work. In the end we decided to paint it red, with a silver circle in the middle and a piece of transparent plastic to make a tiny windscreen.
When I took it to Paolino’s workshop, to place it over the bike and find the best points to fix it on, the others couldn’t believe it. They particularly couldn’t believe that I was the one who’d made it. Paolino suddenly looked at me with what actually seemed a fair amount of respect, and years later Greg would tell me it was the first time he’d had a clear inkling that I might one day do something in life that would surprise him.
In the meantime they had reassembled a lot of the bike, and Sergio had forged a trumpet exhaust, which Paolino swore would make a great din and above all would help Sandra go like a rocket.
We started Sandra for the first time outside Paolino’s workshop as the sun went down, covered by the canvas so that nobody should see it. Paolino had to hit the pedal about thirty times to get it started. He continued adjusting the air and the tick-over, and for a few moments we were silently overcome with the terror that it could all vanish in a soap bubble. Then Paolino hit the pedal for the umpteenth time, Sandra gave a cough, screamed and started. Without taking one hand off the engine, Paolino yelled and raised his arm to the sky. It was like hearing the baying of the beasts in the forest, the first roars of an animal, and as we stood there, surrounded by these cries and in a big cloud of white smoke, we couldn’t stop laughing and hugging each other.
4
THE BEST RACES, to be honest, were those between the Vespas and the few Lambrettas in the area. In a hastily called conference, featuring the four of us and another handful of regulars of the Rocky Road, it was decided—for reasons of security: that was the formula we liked to use if anyone asked us—that we would limit the races to three vehicles at a time and everybody had to wear a helmet. For some mysterious reason that didn’t really thrill me, the others decided unanimously that the only person they could trust if there were ever any doubt about a result was yours truly, so on one of the first days I was taken to the end of the course on the saddle of one of the mopeds, and, after drawing a line across the asphalt with a piece of brick, was left there to be the judge. I found a little seat of rock for myself a couple of metres higher up along the embankment, and ended up spending quite a bit of time alone and in silence. Sometimes Francesca came with me but, although she would never have admitted it, I think she found the whole thing rather stupid, and was secretly disconcerted by her sudden low opinion of me, so she often ended up finding some excuse and staying in the village.
One day Greg, thinking to make things easier for me, turned up with those huge radios his father had bought dozens of years earlier for an expedition in Africa. There had been a period when, just to have an opportunity to use them, we had made up games and battles in his garden, but after a while we’d started to get bored and feel stupid. For years Greg had been looking for a good reason to use them and when we saw him with them that day we doubled over with laughter. In the event, I found I liked having one with me when I was on my own at the end of the Rocky Road, and hearing my friend’s voice crackle every now and again from the loudspeaker.
Seeing the Vespas and mopeds coming round the last bend was always a sight. The riders would be well forward, going flat out, the frames twisted, their faces drawn, as if the more they pushed the faster they went. When they were well matched, they even seemed to sway and bump into each other as they made their way through. Then, when the race was over, they always went back to the starting point quite fast, laughing and miming a few turns with their hands. Luca was among the fastest, and bit by bit, with all the victories I had witnessed, he ended up taking a liking to me. One evening he even gave me a lift back to the start of the course. It was like being behind a fierce and unpredictable animal, but getting off his Lambretta while everyone watched and giving each other a high five filled me with great satisfaction.
Gradually most of the bends had been given names. The S-bend just after the starting line had become the Romoli, because the first time Romoli’s son came round it, shouting “I’ll show you!”—having already skidded at the first bend—he had skidded again and ended up in the ditch, to general laughter. The amazing bend that turned sharp left under the embankment became the Dwarf, because you went so close to the overhanging rocks that you had to lower your head, and Paolino had admitted that a dwarf would have gained at least half a metre of trajectory. The downhill exit from the S bend that directly faced the German’s field, in which you could go as fast as you wanted as long as you held on tight, was the Satellite Dish. The next bend had become the Plane, because if you didn’t take it correctly you could well end up wide and go flying straight into the field below. It happened one day to Nicolino, and even after I’d made sure he was fine and hadn’t hurt himself my legs were shaking.
Nicolino was the Marshal’s rather slow-witted son, who had shown up one day as we were adjusting something on Sandra, and told us that he had heard about the races and was a good rider.
When I managed to catch up with Nicolino, he was lying in the middle of the field holding his arm and laughing.
“Did you see how I flew?”
“Yes, I saw. Are you all right?”
“Great, wasn’t it?”
Nicolino seemed excited and happy, as if he had finally done something worthy of respect and admiration. To be honest, I was more worried about the Marshal’s Vespa lying five metres from him, with its handlebars bent and full of bumps. This didn’t bode well, and for the first time I realized that in our great plan we had been unforgivably thoughtless. When Greg had told Paolino that he would pay for Sandra, I’d learnt something fundamental that sooner or later everyone would agree with: you can’t do anything in this life without arms, but nor can you do without sponsors. I would only realize the full wisdom of that intuition much later, and yet already that evening I went home feeling more confident. There was, though, a third element we couldn’t do without, and which in our innocent dreams of independence we had fooled ourselves we could ignore: the law.
I heard the other Vespas and mopeds coming up behind me, then people running down the cliff and into the field.
“Shit,” Greg said when he came level with me. “What now?”
I was still looking at the Marshal’s Vespa, lying broken in the middle of the stubble.
“Now we’re in for it.”
The Marshal came striding across the square just twenty minutes after we got back to Paolino’s workshop. We were all sitting on the pavement, the Vespa propped against the wall next to the entrance. Apart from a few scratches on the front shield and the engine guard, one tyre had been torn off and the rim twisted, which had made pushing it all the way to the village rather laborious. It was a hot afternoon in June, and school had been over for at least a week.
When Nicolino saw his dad enter the square he leapt to his feet and ran to meet him.
“Don’t worry, Dad, I’m fine.”
“Not for long,” the Marshal said, walking straight past him without even looking at him and carrying on towards us. Paolino and Biagio and I got to our feet. Greg, as usual, had already found an excuse to go, leaving us to push the Vespa.
The Marshal was now less than half a metre away and had started staring at his Vespa behind us. For more than two minutes, he stood stock still and looked at it gravely. We even had time to exchange glances and gestures, asking each other what on earth he was doing. The Marshal then lowered his head and looked all three of us in the eyes, one after the other. His gaze came to rest on Paolino.
“Let’s say my Vespa was making a strange noise, and let’s even say that for some incomprehensible reason I decided to take it to an idiot like you to get it repaired. Let’s say also that I have the bad luck to have broken a part that’s hard to find. I’ll be back here in five days, and if my Vespa isn’t the way I saw it this morning when I left home I’ll arrest you all for theft, damage to property and circumvention of an incapable. Is that all right with you?”
“Of course, Marshal, perfectly all right.”
“Excellent, goodbye then,” the Marshal concluded. He turned,
took a few steps, then stopped and looked at us again.
“Oh, and if I see any vehicle on wheels, even a wheelbarrow, going at more than ten kilometres an hour along the old road, I’ll take that damned bike you put back together and any others and send them to a friend of mine to make them into a container. Is that clear?”
“Of course, Marshal,” Paolino replied, although with much less enthusiasm, perhaps with even a touch of ill-concealed resentment.
When the Marshal turned his back on us, Nicolino got into step behind him, following him at a distance of a metre.
“It’s better for you if you go to Giorgio and have him make you up a bed in the barracks, because if you come home tonight I’ll give you all the bruises you didn’t get with the Vespa.”
Paolino worked every evening until late fixing the Marshal’s Vespa and in order to finish it in time I promised Marino I’d help him out in the body shop until September. When the Marshal came back, his Vespa was already there on the pavement waiting for him, like a prize. He walked around it and looked it over from top to bottom, then got on it and gave a sharp tug to the lever. It came on immediately and the engine seemed to throb like an athlete’s heart. Paolino had dismantled it and cleaned and polished it well. While he was about it, he had also sorted out the carburettor. The Marshal insisted on revving for at least a minute to make sure that everything was in working order, then pulled it out of the kick-stand and put it in first.
“Thanks,” he said gravely but unconvincingly.
“You’re welcome,” Paolino said, shaking his head and spitting on the ground as he watched him leave.
Our relations with the authorities were compromised in any case. In one go we had played all the cards in our hands, and the thought of our bikes and mopeds being confiscated scared everyone. Overnight, the summer seemed to revert to the same lazy rhythm of previous years. Those who had cars waited for Saturday to go to the sea, and we wandered through the village, kicking stones, each of us wondering without saying it how we were going to fill the weeks to come. Francesca was pleased to have me to herself again, and demonstrated it with a new and unexpected pride. We’d be out for a walk and all at once she’d be clinging to me like a true fiancée. Even in bed, when her parents weren’t there and we started on that mechanical exercise we had the effrontery to call love, for the first time she actually gave a few barely perceptible moans.
Enchantment Page 4