When he passed under the spur and crossed the finishing line, I decided to wait a few seconds before checking the time.
“Well?” Greg crackled over the radio.
I took a good look at the stopwatch. If I wanted, I could draw that white dial now, and the position of those hands.
“Two minutes, four point eight seconds.”
The radio was silent for a moment or two.
“Oh. And now?”
I thought about it for a moment. “And now it’s a whole other ball game.”
*
When Biagio got back to the starting line and Greg told him the time, he laughed and said, “No way!”
“We thought we’d made a mistake, so we didn’t tell you and made you start again. You went even faster than before.”
Biagio looked at Greg for a moment and smiled. “But I wasn’t even pushing.”
Paolino was standing just behind, looking at Biagio astride Sandra, and for a moment it was as if she was his woman and was being taken away from him. It was just luck, he tried to say, but didn’t persist with the idea.
During the first days when boredom had started to cloud our initial enthusiasm, we too had sat astride Sandra. All except Greg: he only needed to look, he said. Gradually, even I had tried my hand. At first I was scared stiff and rode her straight and slow, like a tricycle. But little by little, Paolino showed me a few tricks, taught me how to relax and, confident that it was hard to go any slower than this, urged me to put on a bit of speed. He showed me how to move up the gears, how to brake before the bends, how to shift my weight towards the inside. However absurd it might seem, as I went into a bend, I had to push the handlebars to the outside. Only years later, when revising the laws of classical physics, did I remember how it felt when I forced myself to push the handlebars in what was apparently the least natural direction and the bike leant to the inside and went round the bend as if on rails. That sense of taking a bend well is perhaps my clearest memory of my few clumsy attempts at riding a motorbike. With a bit of practice I managed to get quite good at it and, from time to time, the way my wrist increased the speed of the bike almost without my noticing it as I came round a bend gave me, at least for a moment, a surprising sensation of harmony. Usually, a bend was a frustrating jumble of things to remember: pull this lever, press that pedal, shift your weight, gun the engine, drop that lever, press that pedal again… and most of the time, all you could manage was something shaky and ridiculous. But then suddenly you saw a bend, you stretched to the outside, you shifted your weight, you pulled the brake, you pushed up two gears, spurred the clutch, gunned the engine, started to bend, pushed the handlebars in the opposite direction, aimed for the inside lane, and in a moment you slipped through. Those few times it worked I convinced myself that, when it came down to it, a bend well taken was like the current of a river: it wasn’t so much how fast you went, but the elegance with which you stayed in the middle.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Biagio,” Greg said. “That’s the time.”
Biagio looked at a vague point on the asphalt in front of him. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Let me try again.”
Greg laughed and lifted the radio. “Hi,” he crackled. “He’s trying again.”
That afternoon, before we all went home to put things back into perspective, Biagio managed to get down to just over two minutes and three seconds. I whistled to him to wait for me, and as we went back together towards the starting line, the countryside seemed to be glowing more than usual. All the others had already gone and just the four of us were left, sitting on the grass next to the bike. The sun had already sunk behind the trees at the top of the embankment and suffused the sky beyond the hills with pink. Half lying, we played with some branches and laughed about the times when, as children, on bikes or in carts, we had sped down along the paths in the grounds of Greg’s villa. One day, Biagio hadn’t braked in time and had ended up in the pond.
I have to admit that since everything had started to fall apart—or perhaps subconsciously, even earlier—aside from wondering where it all began, where it had slipped into that mass of confusion, another question had gradually been gnawing away at me. Was there a moment, a single tiny moment, when my life really was the way it should always have been? It goes without saying that over the course of the years, I’ve learnt to give short shrift to nostalgia: regretting that shrilling of cicadas and those silences and all those hormones has always seemed to me rather ridiculous. But if I have to think of one immaculate, perfect moment, that’s the first useful image that comes to mind: the four of us at the entrance to the Rocky Road, next to our bike, half lying on the grass at sunset on a day at the beginning of August, the lines at the sides of Greg’s eyes as he laughs and Biagio throwing a little piece of wood at him, telling each other stories, unaware that they will remain nothing but memories.
And yet, at the most perfect moment, we already had one foot on the other side. Unfortunately, in the excitement of a great turning point, you never notice what you’re losing and you only think about it when it’s too late. That afternoon, once we had looked beyond the wall of two minutes and six seconds, we had the feeling we could see an extraordinary world full of expectations and adventures. We liked the view so much that we climbed right up to the top without giving it much thought. Only much later, when each of us was already doing the best he could to figure out how to act in this new land, did we realize that there was no turning back and that, in our rush, we had left a lot of things behind the wall. A lot of things which, when you came down to it, could all be called childhood. But more than anything else, what we left behind that wall was the four of us, and the only one who seemed to have noticed was Paolino.
6
IT WAS GREG who first noticed the man. He mentioned him as we were walking through the village one day. It was the end of August and we had been back only a few days: Greg from one of his usual study holidays abroad and me from the terrible two weeks my parents insisted on spending in the little house in Viareggio that one of my dad’s old patients let us use every summer. Those hours on the beach, that soupy, opaque water, that boiling hot powdery sand and all those bodies packed together in the sun may be the ghastliest memories I have of my youth. For the first time, Francesca had come to see me there, perhaps in the hope that far from my friends and the Rocky Road we’d finally be able to spend some time alone together. It hadn’t gone exactly as hoped: every morning she’d be desperate to get to the beach and bake in the sun and I would find any excuse to stay at home reading or take a walk on the promenade. She ended up spending more time with my parents than with me.
My mum, who was usually careful to avoid the slightest comment on my life, actually said one morning, “Jacopo, perhaps you should spend a bit more time with Francesca.”
“You may be right,” I replied.
At night, the fact that my parents had obliged us to sleep in separate rooms hadn’t proved much of an imposition.
“Did you see the man in the raincoat?” Greg asked me as we walked through the village.
I looked around. “What man in a raincoat?”
“Not here, idiot. On the Rocky Road.”
“Oh. No, I didn’t see any man in a raincoat.”
Greg took a few more steps without saying anything. “I saw him yesterday, from a distance. He was standing there at the side with his hands in his pockets, not doing anything. Then after a while he went away. He was wearing a hat, too.”
“What kind of hat?”
“How should I know? What’s it to you?”
“No reason. I’ve always liked hats.”
Greg turned to me for a moment, still walking.
“Well?” I said again.
“Well what?”
“The man in the hat.”
“The man in the hat, what?”
“I don’t know. You brought him up.”
“No, nothing. It was just to know if you’d noticed him.”
“No, I didn’t notice him.”
“All right, then.”
A few days later, though, I saw him too. He was standing not far from the Rocky Road in his hat and raincoat with his hands in his pockets.
“Hi,” I said into the radio. “The man in the raincoat is here.”
“Really?” Greg crackled. “What’s he doing?”
“Nothing, just standing there.”
“Can he see you?”
“How should I know?”
“Hide and throw a stone at him.”
“Fuck off.”
“All right, get ready. He’s ready to go.”
The man was still standing there watching as Biagio passed on Sandra. After turning the bike round, Biagio stopped under the spur, raised his visor and looked at me.
“Two minutes, two point four seconds,” I shouted. He moved his head slightly from side to side and set off back to the starting line.
The man in the raincoat glanced towards the spur—to see where the voice was coming from, I suppose. Then he walked away to wherever it was he’d come from.
Towards the end of the afternoon, when we were all ready to go home, he showed up again at the starting line. When we saw him, we fell silent and watched him as he came towards us. He took a quick look round, then his eyes came to rest on Biagio.
“Hello,” he said when he was closer.
“Hi.”
The man held out his hand. “My name’s Lucio Torcini.”
Biagio glanced at him, then shook his hand. “Biagio.”
Nodding a couple of times, the man lowered his eyes and looked at Sandra.
From close up, beneath the shadow cast by the brim of his hat, you could see he had a greyish moustache, a big nose and sunken eyes. He spoke in a low, deep voice.
“Listen,” he said after a while, flicking at Sandra’s handle-bars a couple of times, “how would you feel about riding a real one?”
Greg, Paolino and I moved forward a little and looked him right in the eyes.
“Meaning what?” Greg asked.
The man didn’t turn a hair. “Just what I said: if he’d like to try riding a real bike.”
Biagio waited a few seconds. “Sandra has everything I need.”
We could have kissed him, and to celebrate his repartee we moved a tiny bit closer to him, without taking our eyes off the man. Even Paolino smiled a bit.
“All right,” the man said, raising his eyebrows. He lowered his head, put a hand in his trouser pocket and took out a card. “Next Wednesday we’re holding trials at Mugello. Come if you can. Otherwise call me: here’s my card.”
Biagio took the card and checked it for a moment. There was the man’s name and a logo and some numbers and a few more words I couldn’t make out.
“I don’t think so,” Biagio said.
The man held out his hand and they shook again.
“Do what you like,” the man said. “I’m not coming back here again.” Then he turned to look at us. “Goodbye.”
We simply nodded and watched him walk away, taking his hat and moustache and raincoat with him.
“I don’t know,” Greg said after a few seconds, and we simply all went home without saying anything.
The next day the rain came, washing away the summer as it did every year, and one night I heard something beating against my window again.
At first, in my half-sleep, I couldn’t connect. Then the noise grew louder, and when I turned I once more saw a figure crouching on my window sill, waving at me.
“Shit,” I sighed, throwing aside the blankets and getting up. “Hi,” I said once I’d looked out. I rubbed my eye.
“Hi.”
“Can you tell me why you never manage to do things like other people?”
“Like what?”
“Like in the daytime.”
Biagio gave a not very convincing smile and shrugged.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He started scratching at a piece of the wall with his nail.
“You woke me up in the middle of the night to destroy my house?”
Biagio took his hand away without saying anything and removed a residue of cement from under the nail of his index finger. “Listen,” he said after a while, “I want to go there.”
I looked at him and smiled. “I know. You’re right.”
“Really?”
“Of course. You must.”
He looked at me, surprised—but only for a moment—then looked down again. “What about the others?”
“Forget the others, Biagio. You can’t not go.”
He looked at me again, a bit uncertain. “You think so?”
“Of course I do. What’s the big deal anyway? It’s just a trial. Go there and see what happens.”
Biagio nodded slightly two or three times and threw me a couple of glances. “And listen, I don’t feel like going on my own.”
“And?”
He suddenly started scratching at the plaster again. “Will you go with me?”
I wasn’t sure I’d understood him correctly. “Go with you where?”
“What do you mean ‘where’? Mugello.”
“I don’t even know where Mugello is.”
“Maybe we can find it between the two of us. I’ve heard it’s the other side of Florence.”
The other side of Florence. Sitting there on my window sill in the middle of the night, I felt it could have been another continent.
“And how are we getting there?”
“I thought of asking Martino for his Vespa. He owes me a favour.”
“But wouldn’t we get there quicker by bus or something?”
“Maybe by Christmas.”
I gave a little laugh. “All right, let’s go on the Vespa.”
Over the next two days, taking care not to be seen by anyone, we tried to figure out how to get to Mugello.
After a while Biagio exploded behind me. “Fuck this. Mugello isn’t just one place.”
I continued sitting with my head on my hand at one of the tables in the little municipal library, reading the encyclopaedia. “They mention a circuit here.”
“Really? Where?”
“Here.”
Biagio leant over and I showed him two lines in the encyclopaedia, but he didn’t seem very interested in reading them. “What about it?”
I continued reading and shrugged. “They mention it, that’s all,” I said in a low voice.
Biagio continued standing over me, pretending to read.
“Anyway, it’s not huge,” I said after a while.
Biagio turned, came back towards me and leant over my shoulder. “Isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not huge. If I’ve got it right, Mugello goes from here to here, more or less, along this river and up into the mountains as far as the passes.”
“It’s not that small.”
“No, it’s not small. But look.” I picked up a pencil from the table, went to the bottom of the map, and held the pencil against the scale measurement. “This is ten kilometres, right?”
“Okay.”
“From here to here is more or less thirty,” I said, transferring the measurement three times across the map, from right to left.
“Is that all?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course, that’s as the crow flies: it must be longer on the road. But it could have been worse.”
“Of course,” Biagio said, nodding gravely, then looked at the map again. “But what are we talking about? Been worse for what?”
“What do you mean, for what? For going there and seeing.”
Biagio looked at me for a moment without saying anything. “What the hell are you talking about? To see what? To go up there in the mountains or to the banks of the… What’s this river called?”
I looked down at the map. “The Sieve.”
“… the banks of the Sieve and listen out for the sound of bikes?”
“Biagio, I don’t know what to say. We
can’t ask anybody, because then they’ll rumble us, and you don’t want to call the man and tell him you’re going. So I don’t know: the only thing to do is go to this damned Mugello and ask someone there.”
Biagio was silent for a few moments. “All right. We’ll do that.”
The following Tuesday evening I told Biagio to pick me up no later than four the next morning. I advised him to park Martino’s Vespa not too close to the house, to prevent anyone hearing us, and to take Enzo’s ladder before he called to me.
I went to bed fully dressed, so that I could get as much sleep as possible. When he came, all I’d have to do would be to get up and put on a jacket and cap and stagger outside and go back to sleep on the Vespa, resting against Biagio’s back.
Actually, the coolness of the night was quite pleasant, and as I perched there, with the Vespa vroom-vrooming down through the bends, everything seemed thrilling.
“What did you tell your parents?” Biagio asked me after a while, barely turning his head towards me.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Like, nothing.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I didn’t know what excuse to make up. So I left them a note saying I’d be back tonight and not to worry. I’ll sort it out when we get back.”
Biagio smiled. “Great,” he said.
After a couple of hours I took over and, as we were climbing a winding road, Biagio told me I rode well.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling proud of myself.
Biagio, though, was really something else. The most natural reaction on that afternoon just a few weeks earlier, when we had taken Biagio’s time as a joke, would have been to say that it was incredible, a miracle. And yet after our initial surprise, we had accepted those extraordinary times as something absolutely normal. I had been the first to accept both the times and the fact that it was Biagio who had reached them. Then, a few days later, as I was watching Biagio coming back along the Rocky Road after I’d just informed him that his new time was less than the previous one, I at last found myself wondering how the hell Biagio had learnt to ride like that, and where. And all at once a host of buried memories surged up before my eyes, memories of the thousands of times we’d raced on bicycles or in carts or on Graziano’s moped around the bends of the old river bed or along the paths in the grounds of Greg’s house. Greg and I were always behind, struggling to catch up, and by some strange witchcraft we never gave any thought to the fact that Biagio would be waiting for us at the end of the course every time. I’m not sure what it was: more recently, riding a beat-up old Vespa in the dark, Biagio would throw himself into the bends like a fish into the sea, and it was almost as if it weren’t the Vespa that was moving, but the road. He seemed to be motionless on a pedestal, simply tilting the Vespa to one side or the other, in an almost musical rhythm, while the strip of asphalt shifted beneath the wheels.
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