*
Up until that afternoon.
About three weeks earlier I had been alone at the end of the Rocky Road waiting for the arrival of two Vespas, and had started to wonder if there might not be a place from which to see a larger section of the course. At the starting point, Luca had had a few problems with his Lambretta and Greg told me to wait a minute. To kill time, I’d clambered up the rocks and discovered a spur from which you could see the Satellite Dish and a stretch immediately before the Dwarf. The spur was quite difficult to reach and I’d only gone back there once or twice, and hadn’t given it much thought. But when the problem of the Marshal arose, I remembered it, got Biagio to give me a lift, and climbed it again. Once I was at the top, out of breath, Greg’s father’s radio suddenly took on an even brighter colour than anticipated.
“I knew it,” I said, smiling and looking further down, beyond the Rocky Road.
Biagio stared at me as he caught his breath, then shook his head and also looked into the distance. Sure that the only reason I’d asked him to follow me was to have a bit of company, he did not seem very happy. “You knew what?”
“There and there,” I said indicating two points in the landscape.
Biagio squinted at the horizon, then gave me a puzzled look. I went closer and put my finger as close to his line of sight as possible.
“There. And there.” I pointed first to the left, then to the right.
“What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’? That’s the exit from the road that leads to Posta and the end of the Rocky Road. The one down there, on the other hand, is the stretch of the provincial highway that goes all the way to San Filippo.”
Squinting again, Biagio stared at both spots. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Do you see that grey thing?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the milestone that Mirco’s brother hit. You can see the broken tree stump next to it.”
Biagio looked for another moment or two. “I think you’re right.”
I stood there, gazing out at the view with a smile on my face and my hands on my hips. “I am. Anyone trying to get to the Rocky Road, we’ll be able to see from here.”
So the races began again more or less as before, but with more care taken. In the end, I was the one who lost out more than anybody else, having to climb up to the spur every time, but I was gradually rewarded with two well-toned legs and a strong spine. On the rare occasions someone decided to go with me, the satisfaction of waiting at the top, as fresh as a daisy, for them to arrive, red-faced and sweaty, was absolutely priceless.
“I’m not going up there,” Francesca said to me one day, visibly irritated and disappointed by this new turn of events, as I was already climbing the spur.
The first time the Marshal’s car decided to turn in the direction of the Rocky Road was a great moment. I had already seen it on a couple of occasions emerging onto the provincial highway, but it had always turned out to be a false alarm. That day, though, only a minute after I’d warned the others, it appeared at the beginning of the road. Greg told me the story, and it was a touching one: all at once, those small groups of boys and girls who spent a lot of their time teasing each other had dropped their bikes and mopeds or thrown them on the kick-stand, and suddenly started chatting and smiling at each other like old friends. The sun was filtering through the trees and shimmering in the pollen raised by the wind, and some had even sat down on the grass to play with green ears of corn. It was like a scene from the Summer of Love.
The Marshal got out of his car and took a few steps along the Rocky Road.
“What are you all doing?”
Silence for a few moments. Then, from one of the groups, a voice cried out, “Making love, Marshal!”
There was a roar of laughter.
The Marshal stood there for a moment or two without saying a word, then simply turned on his heels and went back to his car, and it was as if everyone could hear applause rustling among the trees.
There were only a couple of times that the Marshal managed to get to the Rocky Road without my noticing. The first time, I had gone into the bushes to have a pee, with my back to the view, at the very moment the Marshal’s car turned onto the stretch of the provincial highway that led to the entrance to the Rocky Road. Luckily, though, by the time I got back, the twins had already set off on their Vespas and Marco was checking something on his switched-off Garelli. Greg managed to warn me in time, and as soon as I spotted the twins I rushed down to the road and we had a brainwave and started gathering the blackberries that grew between the brambles on the embankment. By the time the Marshal got to us, the three of us were stuffing blackberries into the T-shirt of one of the twins. He stood there watching us with his hands on his sides.
“For jam,” I said, pleased with myself. “Want some?” And I put one in my mouth.
He stared at us for a few more moments. “I’m keeping my eye on you,” he said at last, then turned and walked away.
I couldn’t resist. “So are we.”
5
SANDRA DIDN’T DO RACES. There was no point arguing about it: she simply had no rivals. A few guys from a nearby village would sometimes show up at the starting line, sitting astride highly coloured objects that you could hear coming from a long way off but never seemed toeard about a motorbike that went fast.
Whoever was there, sitting on the low wall or fixing something on his moped, would say, “Sandra”.
“What?” the guy on his bike would ask.
“Sandra,” the other person would repeat.
Usually the guy on the bike would lose some of his cool and whichever of us was t arrive. They’d give you a serious, fairly nasty look and say they’d hhere would look at him with ill-concealed boredom. “The bike that goes fast. She’s called Sandra.”
The guy would look at him gravely for a moment or two. “Bullshit,” he would say.
The one of us who was there would look at the guy and give a sarcastic little smile. “I’d wait to say that if I were you.”
At this point, the guy would be told to come back a couple of days later at a particular time.
The first few times they tried to race, but as soon as the challengers got to the end of the Rocky Road and saw Paolino and Sandra already there waiting for them they came up with all kinds of excuses: they didn’t know the route and so on. One even complained that he didn’t have the right gears, a claim greeted with a chorus of laughter. Their voices always sounded shriller when the race was over, and they couldn’t take their eyes off Sandra as they spoke, moving their heads slightly from side to side, as if trying to extract the secret of life from that heap of metal.
Apart from anything else Sandra did indeed go like a cannonball, and after the business with the Marshal’s Vespa we were afraid that some of the sports bikes that came from all over to race would sooner or later plunge down the slope and crash into the trees. After a dark-skinned young man who was in fact going quite fast took a nasty fall on a Cagiva, it was decided to stop letting anyone race Sandra.
The thing that helped us was an old stopwatch with hands which I’d glimpsed once in my dad’s desk drawer a few years earlier when he’d sent me into his study to get his glasses. It struck me that we could time the races, and so I took the stopwatch up on the spur with me, along with the radio. It was a quiet revolution, but a major one, and nobody ever questioned the new system. Everyone had started to suspect that in this world an apparently freer system is simply composed of subtler but much stricter rules.
But it was Biagio who had the final, amazing idea, and perhaps for the first time I felt a touch of greatness. He asked Buti, the son of the cemetery’s monumental mason, if he could drop by the Rocky Road with a few of his chisels. When Buti showed up a few days later, Biagio led him to one of the flat rocks up on the slope.
“Can you carve something on here?”
Buti moved his hand over the greyish stone. “Mmm… maybe, not too deep. I don’t want
my tools getting blunt.”
“No problem,” Biagio replied, pleased with himself.
They talked in low voices for a few minutes and made marks on the rock and took measurements. Then Biagio went back to doing what he’d been doing.
Just an hour later, when Buti had stopped hammering and evening was starting to fall, we all gathered in front of the rock. On the lichen-stippled wall was a lovely, neat inscription.
2’ 10”
Welcome to the Nightmare
We all burst out laughing and shook hands with Biagio and Buti and soon afterwards went home for dinner, convinced that life could be quite amusing.
But the moment when I really seemed to sense what greatness was, and what darkness it concealed, was when, miraculously, someone who had come from forty kilometres away managed to get below the time on the inscription.
From now on, whenever anyone came to ask about Sandra, whoever was on the Rocky Road just pointed at the rock with the time carved on it.
“There it is,” they said.
The other guy would look at the rock without understanding.
“Nobody races Sandra: that’s the time to beat.”
Nobody ever even came close, apart from that fair-haired kid. He appeared on a day like any other, less full of himself than most and better informed: he already knew that you didn’t race Sandra and simply asked if he could do the course a couple of times. He was sitting astride a shiny blue and white Honda. Although nobody wanted to be overly welcoming to this stranger, and they all pretended they weren’t especially interested, they gathered around to watch.
“Go ahead,” Greg said, then grabbed the radio and informed me.
The kid finished in a time that wasn’t even worth considering, but, as he was coming back to the starting point, he did something I had never seen anyone do: he was going quite slowly, looking very carefully at the ground and rubbing the soles of his feet on the asphalt. Then he simply did the course again, a bit faster, thanked us and left.
He came back a few days later and asked if he could try again. This time, he was covered from head to foot in coloured leathers.
“That’s all we needed,” Greg said, then picked up the radio and informed me.
On the second lap the blond kid managed to finish the course in just over two minutes twelve seconds, which to tell the truth was much less than anyone else who had tried. When he got back to the starting line, Greg was almost sorry to tell him he hadn’t made it, but the boy simply thanked him and left.
The story of the mysterious blond boy soon spread, and some swore they had seen him racing back and forth like a madman along a road at the bottom of the valley.
He reappeared a couple of weeks later, which we all immediately took as an event. Now we were all rooting for him. Already on the first lap he managed to get under two minutes eleven seconds, and when, the second time, I stopped the stopwatch at two minutes, nine point three seconds, I communicated it to Greg over the radio with a sudden bitter sense of guilt. The boy, too, must have thought he’d done it, because he took the bends on the way back as if he were dancing.
When he got back to the starting line, Biagio signalled to Greg to wait: he would deal with it. The blond boy stopped and took off his helmet.
“Well?”
“Two minutes, nine point three seconds.”
The boy turned to look at Biagio and smiled. In the previous few weeks, after those words were carved on the rock, we had always imagined this would be a moment of great hilarity, but I have the feeling everyone found it simply cruel.
“Welcome to the Nightmare,” Biagio said after a moment, though with much less enthusiasm than anticipated.
The boy looked at Biagio, smiled for another moment or two, then hoped the black veil he could feel falling over him was only an impression. “Meaning what?”
I think that for a moment Biagio wished he had never asked Buti to carve that thing on the rock.
“Sandra’s time is two minutes six seconds.”
There may be nothing worse in life than cursing and sweating and suffering to get to a finishing line—only to discover that it’s just the point of departure. The boy looked at Biagio for another moment or two, as if in suspense, then nodded slightly, again said thank you, and left.
Claudio is ready to swear that he met him years later on holiday: he wasn’t a boy any more, he was an engineer, with a beautiful dark-skinned wife and two children. When it emerged that Claudio was from San Filippo, they got talking about the story of the bike and the Rocky Road. Apparently the engineer told Claudio that when he got home that day he had parked the bike in the garage and never started it up again. He had never sold it, in fact he even cleaned and polished it from time to time, and it had for ever become the representation of the things we don’t achieve in life. I don’t know if it’s true: Claudio has always talked a lot of nonsense, but the story always seemed amusing to me, and I ended up believing it.
In the long run, we all paid in our own ways for Biagio’s great idea. The boy and his bike and his disappointment had somewhat reduced our enthusiasm. The fact that our bike had no rivals hadn’t turned out to be as exciting as we thought and, without anyone daring to say so, we were all starting to be convinced that Sandra too would become a story like any other, to be remembered from time to time to while away five minutes. Even the little races between the Vespas and the Lambrettas had lost their flavour, and after a while I even got fed up climbing to the top of the spur every time.
It was during this time that the Marshal managed to get on the Rocky Road without our noticing. He came on his Vespa and I didn’t even see him. Two guys from Posta had just started off and you could hear the noise of the engines in the distance.
“You’re holding races,” the Marshal said in that funny accent of his as he got off his Vespa.
Tino looked at him with the same bored air as everyone else and spat out a blade of grass. “Marshal,” he said, pointing his thumb at the inscription on the rock behind him, “if you get below two twenty on that old wreck, I’ll give you a salami and half a mortadella.”
A big roar of laughter. The Marshal made a big fuss as usual, but after seeing the boys from Posta coming back at walking pace he went away, and that was the last time we ever saw him on the Rocky Road.
Everything seemed to have taken the kind of turn typical of youthful enthusiasms, which fade as quickly as they appear.
Then came that afternoon at the beginning of August. The heat seemed to rise from the ground like steam from a teapot, and I was sitting on the spur breaking off dry blades of grass and wiping the sweat off me. I looked again at the stopwatch and casually reset it.
“Hi,” I said into the radio, lying back.
“Hi,” Greg’s voice crackled.
“You’re a prick.”
The radio was silent for a moment or two. “Why?”
“You gave me the wrong start,” I said, tearing off another blade of grass to suck.
The radio was silent again for a few moments.
“No, I didn’t.”
“What do you mean, ‘No, I didn’t’?”
“I didn’t give you the wrong start.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why?”
“Because it was too fast.”
“Then you’re the prick.”
“No,” I said.
“I know it’s hard,” Greg crackled. “But it’s just something you have to accept.”
“I’m telling you no.”
Silence.
“You have to get used to it.”
“Idiot, I’m telling you I started the stopwatch when you said go.”
Silence.
“Well?”
“I don’t know.”
“But how much does it show?”
“I don’t know. I immediately reset it, but it was about two-five.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“That’s what I told you.”
“So
what do we do?”
“I don’t know. Let him do it again.”
“All right,” the radio crackled after a moment or two.
“Don’t tell him anything about the time, though. Or he’ll crash into a tree.”
“All right.”
“Maybe tell him the stopwatch wouldn’t start.”
“You screwed up, I understand,” crackled Greg on the radio.
I smiled and sat down again on the spur and nibbled my blade of grass. I had butterflies in my stomach, but all the same, I was convinced I’d a mistake and that very soon I’d stop the watch on a reasonable time and the world would go back within its borders.
“Are you there?” the radio crackled.
I spat out the blade of grass and checked again that the stopwatch was properly wound and was working.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Good. He’s about to start.”
The radio fell silent and it struck me that it had been some days now since I’d felt so excited about the start of a race.
“He’s ready…” Greg’s voice crackled, with Sandra’s engine revving up in the background. “Go!”
I started the stopwatch, and as the radio fell silent I watched the hands move to make sure that everything was all right.
“Hey. Everything okay?”
“Yes, seems to be.”
“Well, let’s see.”
Part of me, the sane part I think, immediately realized it was all true. All you had to do was see him come out through the Dwarf and take the S-bend. He came round the bend like a swallow, barely stirring the sand from the verge, and went like a bullet on the following lane, grazing a few blades of grass and raising a handful of leaves. The sound wasn’t even like the scream of an engine, more like a cello sonata.
Enchantment Page 5