“Yes,” Biagio said, “I’ve come.”
“On this?” the man asked, putting a hand on the clutch of the Vespa.
“Yes, on this.”
The man laughed and shook his head. “All right, put it somewhere and let’s see what we can do.”
Inside, mechanics dressed in yellow and black T-shirts with lots of writing on them were bustling around three motorbikes mounted on hydraulic hoists. I had never seen bikes like that: so shiny and clean and bright. They looked as if they had never been used. I remember wondering if they were really used in races or were just there for show. The tyres of the bikes had these strange cloth covers on them attached to an electric wire. The mechanics were going backwards and forwards, carrying spanners or sometimes just screws. There was someone checking papers and saying something into a radio. At a table over to the side, two young guys in the same yellow and black T-shirts were marking something on big blocks.
The man who had invited us called a girl and told her to see if they could find something for Biagio to wear. The girl smiled, said, “Of course,” took Biagio by the arm and led him away. As he was going towards the lorry, Biagio turned to look at me, shrugged, then disappeared outside. The man told me to make myself at home and even to look around, and asked me if I wanted anything to eat or drink.
“Maybe a little something,” I said.
The man called to another girl and told her to give me something. She had big red hair and blue eyes, and was one of the few not wearing the same colours and T-shirts as the others.
“Come,” she said. “What would you like?”
Lots of things, I’d have liked to say, but in the end I settled for a coffee. I also had some biscuits filled with honey and fig paste that were really terrific.
I didn’t see him at first, but there was a guy sitting in the corner who looked even younger than me. He was in tight-fitting leathers, again yellow and black and with lots of writing on them. He was talking in a low voice to a man who was sitting next to him, half turned away. The young guy kept sipping something from a big beaker through a straw. When he saw that I was watching him, he raised his eyebrows slightly and gave a little nod with his head to say hello.
The red-haired girl told me she had a couple of things to take care of, and that I could take whatever I wanted and make myself at home. Every time I was told that, I found it hard to associate all that coming and going and those colours and that nervous tension with the silence of my parents’ living room. But I thanked her anyway and grabbed another couple of those delicious fig biscuits, then realized I was exhausted and went and sat down on a canvas chair. Everyone was still working on the bikes, and one of those with covers over the tyres was taken down from its hoist and taken over to the other exit from the pit. Every now and again, beyond the entrance, you could hear the roaring and screaming of engines behind a wall. I thought for a moment of going to see what was happening, but then I told myself to take things easy, and I sat there quietly on my chair. I saw the man with the moustache call one of the mechanics and point at me. He told him we had come from some remote place in the countryside on an old wreck that was parked outside the pit. He also told him to take a good look at it before we left, because he didn’t want us on his conscience. Then he came up to me and asked me who the Vespa belonged to.
“A friend.”
“And he gave it to you to come all the way here?”
“He doesn’t know we came all the way here.”
“I see,” he said. “Good idea.”
When Biagio reappeared, I couldn’t help laughing. It didn’t look like him any more. He was wearing tight leathers, like the young guy sitting in the corner, and they made him look hunchbacked, with twisted legs.
“It could have been made for him,” the girl said to the man with the moustache.
“Excellent,” the man said, putting a hand on Biagio’s shoulder.
Biagio gave me a bewildered, slightly irritated look.
“How can you walk?” I asked him, smiling.
“I don’t know,” he said, stretching his arms a little. “It’s pulling everywhere.”
The man with the moustache laughed and slapped Biagio on the shoulder. “When you’re riding you don’t even notice. Let’s see how the helmet fits.”
The girl handed the man a big brand-new helmet and the man told Biagio to put it on. When Biagio had put it on, the man checked to make sure it was okay, grasping it by the chin strap and tugging at it to try and shift it. Biagio swayed backwards and forwards like a puppet.
“Perfect,” the man said, adjusting the binding under Biagio’s neck. Then he led him over to the bike that had just been taken down from the hoist. “All right, now, take it easy, ride as it comes. Don’t think about going fast, just think about riding and gaining confidence with the bike. It’ll be different, it may seem strange to you, but go on and ride, we have time and petrol. Try and get a good idea of the course. It’s quite a hard track, so take it nice and easy. For now, use only third and fourth gear, go into sixth only on the home straight. Then we’ll see.”
When Biagio and the man were near the bike, one of the mechanics got on it and, pushed by one of the others, went forward a few metres to start it. The bike screamed and belched blue smoke. As he came back to the man and Biagio, the mechanic continued to gun the engine and look at something on the side.
The man was still talking to Biagio, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He was making the gesture of putting his hands on the handlebars, bending his arms and legs, moving as if he were riding. Then he held out his hand and motioned Biagio to get on. Biagio placed his left hand on the handlebars. Just before lifting his leg and getting on, he turned to look at me. He was very serious. I smiled and nodded and raised my thumb. He looked at me for another moment, then also nodded, gave me a little, not very convincing smile and mounted the saddle. It was only a split second: if only they prepared us for this kind of thing, life would be quite different.
As Biagio continued to rev up, the mechanic who’d started the engine leant over the frame to make sure that everything was all right, then placed a hand on the rear tyre and gave a signal: yes, everything was fine.
The man with the moustache moved his head closer to Biagio’s and told him something else. Biagio nodded again, then the man stepped backwards and patted him twice on the back. Biagio raised his foot and got into first. The man smiled and patted him again, then we watched him go in that little cloud of blue smoke.
The man turned and smiled at me. “If you like, you can go up on the roof. You’ll see better from there.”
From the roof of the building you could see the whole of the home straight: it appeared at the end on the left and climbed on the right, towards the top of the slope. As it rose it curved slightly, and at the end seemed to lead to a kind of hairpin bend. I saw Biagio pass a couple of times. He raced past below me, hunched over the bike, which seemed almost to disappear in the middle of all that asphalt.
The man with the moustache was leaning on the low concrete wall with a stopwatch in his hand. He stood there with his elbows on the wall and watched the bikes passing. When Biagio zoomed past he gave an imperceptible jerk with his hand, then raised it to check the stopwatch. After a few laps, one of the young guys with the T-shirts full of writing approached him, carrying a square black instrument. The man with the moustache looked at the young guy and the instrument, then spoke for a moment and the young man went back into the pit.
One lap later, the man signalled to Biagio to come back in. I saw him leave the track and slow down beneath me. As soon as he arrived, the man with the moustache leant towards him. They talked in low voices for a while, then the man mimed something and watched him leave again. After another couple of laps, the man stopped the stopwatch just as the same young guy as before came up behind him. They looked at the time together, then the young man lifted that square instrument again and showed it to the man with the moustache. The man put one hand over it as if
to shelter it from the light and leant forward to get a better look. He stood still for a few moments, perhaps a minute, then again moved away, said something to the young guy, then put his hands back on the low wall.
Once more, he made Biagio come back in. This time, though, he made him get off and take off the helmet and drink a bit of water. Biagio was bathed in sweat, but looked calm, and the leathers now seemed less ridiculous on him. After a few minutes, the man made him get back on and watched him drive away.
A little while later, I was aware of the man joining me. He had come up behind me and put his elbows on the low wall.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
I glanced at him again.
“Yes,” I said, “not bad. And you?”
The man smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Not bad.”
After a couple of seconds Biagio passed below us.
“And how is he?”
The man watched Biagio vanish round the bend at the top of the slope at the end of the home straight.
“He’s not bad,” he said, shaking his head slightly. He didn’t seem very convinced.
I nodded and said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.
“What kind of person is he?” he asked me after a while.
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. Quiet, I’d say.”
Then we looked down again without saying anything. The bikes of the other two teams passed, and so did the young guy who’d been sitting in the pit earlier, sucking from that big beaker.
The man with the moustache looked at his stopwatch another few times, then got to his feet and started looking at the exit from the bend before the home straight.
All at once, from the big square to the left of the circuit, a siren sounded and an ambulance set off.
“Shit,” the man said, running towards the stairs.
TWO
Initiation
1
THE MOMENT we were perhaps closest was also the one at which we were most distant. And what brought us together, as is often the case where men are concerned, was sex.
I was halfway through my second year at the University of Glasgow, and had just recently moved from the Mathematics Department to the Physics Department. I’d ended up in Glasgow in an unexpected way. Everything had started in my last year at the Fermi high school, on an ordinary rainy morning in the middle of February, during a very boring technical drawing class. I’d already finished all the equations in the maths book and was leafing through it to see if I could find an exercise to amuse me for five minutes.
When you came down to it, that had always been my relationship with maths, the same relationship my aunt Giovanna had with crosswords: it was a hobby.
All at once, three quarters of the way through the book, I came across a card. It was green and purple, with a couple of logos I didn’t know in the corners. In the middle, in big letters, the words:
CAN YOU SOLVE IT?
Beneath them was a strange, complex equation that struck me as less obvious than most. I turned the card over: If you think you’ve solved it, send the solution, and how you reached it, to this address, followed by the details of something called the Cirri Foundation, based in Mantua. I spent two whole days on that damned equation, tearing up whole exercise books and sometimes desperately fishing the discarded pages out of the waste paper basket. There was always something that didn’t quite fit. I even went to the little school library to see if I could find a book that might help, but that wasn’t much use.
Then, three evenings later, as I was sitting on my bed, tired and drained, wondering whether or not to clean my teeth before trying to sleep, an element of the equation that had so far eluded me suddenly loomed up in front of my eyes and seemed, if I could twist it around in a different way from how I’d been stubbornly doing it up until then, as if it might lead me in the right direction. Actually, I’d had quite a few of these revelatory moments in the past couple of days, and the intervals at which they were recurring was in inverse proportion to the enthusiasm I felt for them.
So I got up lazily from the bed, collapsed like a sack onto the wicker chair by my desk, reached out my hand and pulled the waste paper basket, decorated with English hunting scenes, towards me and slowly started to unfold and flatten the screwed-up pages as best I could and then drop them on the floor. When I recognized the right page I didn’t feel any particular quiver of excitement: I simply turned towards the green desktop, picked up a couple of books that lay open on it, threw them on the floor, adjusted the beam of light from the lamp, opened a large exercise book at random, tore off what I didn’t need from that page of scrap paper and stuck the rest to the top of the blank page of the exercise book with a piece of Scotch tape. At the point at which the idea I’d just had, sitting on the edge of the bed, connected to the previous draft, I simply continued writing as if I’d never stopped. It was as if the way to go on came all by itself, every step a natural consequence of the previous one, and was being transferred automatically to my hand and from there to the tip of my blue ballpoint pen. It was like looking from the outside at someone solving an equation, but that someone was me.
After a while I started to feel excited, as if instead of simply watching myself work, I had finally decided to participate. I got into a better position at the table, leaning well forward, getting through pages at a frenzied rate. Yes, sometimes I had to tear off a page and roll it into a ball, but these were only small hitches, brief oversights or moments of creative madness, which actually made me smile for a moment. At 1:20 in the morning I finally arrived at a fairly elegant solution. I stretched and finally leant back in my chair. My face felt shrivelled, my neck and back were stiff, and yet those few letters remaining on the page were like the beautiful view you see at the end of a long hard climb in bad weather.
I took more than an hour to copy out the solution so as to make it presentable, slipped it, along with my details, into an envelope taken furtively from my father’s study and finally wrote on it the address indicated on the card found in the book. The next morning, before going to school, by arrangement with Ada, the postmistress, I decided to send it by recorded delivery.
A month and a half later, at the beginning of April, my mother told me when I came back from school that an envelope had arrived for me from abroad.
“What is it?” my father asked me as he served himself a plate of pasta and I sat down at the table lost in thought, reading the letter.
“I’ve been invited to Glasgow to compete for a scholarship.”
“A scholarship? In Glasgow?”
“Yes, they’ve even included the plane tickets.” I showed him one of those old blocks of red carbon paper. There were, in fact, several letters in the envelope. One was from the University of Glasgow, in which they informed me that they had the honour to have selected me to compete for one of their most prestigious scholarships, promoted by something called SETEC. The second letter was from SETEC itself, in which I was again informed that—through the Cirri Foundation of Mantua, to which I had sent the card—my name had been selected as the Italian representative. A third letter was signed by somebody named Kinda Lowell, director of student relations for the University, and explained how to get to Glasgow and how to orientate myself once I reached the campus. Attached were a number of maps and leaflets, full of stone spires and smiling young people.
“That’s nice, that’s really nice,” my father kept saying. Ten days later, at Fiumicino airport, before I joined the long queue waiting to go through security, he simply wished me good luck, then added perhaps the only useful thing you can say to an eighteen-year-old who’s leaving to face one of the most important challenges of his life: “Don’t worry.”
As they kept telling us the evening of our arrival in Glasgow, shut up in an old wood-panelled room that smelt of wax and mildew, the scholarship was promoted by SETEC, an international association based in Munich which had been providing the best opportunities to the best talents in Europe for more th
an sixty years. The organization promoted scholarships for all the main courses of study, and in each case the system was the same: about fifteen countries were chosen, then for each country and each course the competitors were selected, often through affiliated local foundations. Finally, the various candidates were put through a number of tests and a shortlist was drawn up, from which only the first three were selected. These three were offered complete scholarships, which included accommodation and monthly expenses for food and books. A member of the staff from the department—in our case the Department of Mathematics and Statistics—was then appointed as guarantor: he would be the person the chosen students would turn to if there was anything they needed, and at the same time would have the task of establishing whether the students continued to deserve the scholarship.
Those three days were killing, and even now they are still a bit of a blur to me. I shared a bare room near the university with a rather grumpy young German. We were given a decent breakfast, and at lunch we had time to go somewhere for a quick sandwich. The rest of the day we spent closed up in two or three different rooms, together or alone, solving equations, answering questionnaires of various kinds and being subjected to long interviews. Some of these were quite strange. Not knowing the level of our English, a student from our country had been assigned to each of us, to act as interpreter and help us out any time we were at a loss. Mine was named Tommaso. He was a kind but standoffish boy from Parma in his third year of mathematics, who seemed not to have any clear idea of where Tuscany was. The selection board, on the other hand, were all too interested in my native region. Unlike in the first interview, where we did actually talk just about mathematics, in the two that followed they seemed more interested in finding out about my life in the village. Signora Rossi, our teacher, hadn’t done a good job with our English and, even though she loved to give everyone good marks, I had never before realized quite how poor the results of her teaching were. The Scottish accent, although fairly refined and moderate, obviously didn’t help. So when they asked me about Italy and San Filippo and country life and agriculture and olives and summer heat and the right time to plough or harvest, I kept turning to Tommaso to make sure I had understood correctly. The third interview did not improve matters all that much: luckily, the board seemed to have lost interest in my personal life, but the questions became even stranger.
Enchantment Page 8