Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  “I’m the head of the team,” Torcini replied behind us.

  “Ah, hello. No more races, please, until we see how his hand is.”

  “Of course,” Torcini said, cutting him short.

  I saw Biagio bow his head and for a moment I felt annoyingly embarrassed for him.

  Outside, in the car park, Biagio took off the leathers and put on the jeans with which he had arrived in the morning at Mugello. I placed the jacket over his shoulders and took his shirt and sweater.

  “So long, then,” Torcini said and held out his hand. “Now let’s see how to get you back your Vespa.”

  Biagio nodded and quickly shook his hand. It could have been taken for impoliteness, but I knew it was only shame, and that he didn’t want to do anything but leave and go back to his life and forget this business, and probably never again sit on a motorbike.

  Torcini again passed his fingers through my hair, then gave me a pat on the head. “Hey, it’s okay.”

  I simply shook his hand and thanked him.

  We honestly thought it was all over at that point. The whole village never missed an opportunity to pull Biagio’s leg, Betta gave him a good few slaps and grounded him for a week, and we were convinced it would simply remain a great story to tell in the years to come. The fact that I had been present also filled everyone with a great deal of envy, and I gradually learnt, in telling the tale, how to time the pauses in order to get the most laughs.

  Then, one evening a couple of weeks later, the phone rang and my mum came running into my room and told me that Greg was asking for me. That urgency on my mum’s part every time it was Greg always made me uncomfortable.

  “Hi,” I said into the receiver in the hall.

  “Hi. Let’s meet in ten minutes outside Biagio’s house, on the road.”

  “Why?”

  “Just come.” And he hung up.

  “Mum, I’m going out for a moment.”

  Mum came to the door of the kitchen. “Going out? Where?”

  “To Greg’s for a bit. He says he wants to show me something.”

  “All right, then.”

  I left the house and went down towards the end of the village as far as the old houses. I then climbed along the ridge, and even before I got there I saw Greg in front of me, clambering over the low wall and hiding on the other side of the road.

  “Hey!”

  Greg turned, put a finger to his mouth and gestured to me to be quiet, then waved at me to join him behind the wall.

  “Look,” he whispered when I reached him.

  He was crouching behind the wall and pointing to the other side of the road. It was the window of Biagio’s kitchen. Inside, we could see Biagio sitting in silence playing with a napkin, his parents and, with his back to the window, a man in a raincoat.

  “The man in the raincoat,” Greg whispered again.

  “Torcini.”

  “Is that his name?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “What’s he doing here?”

  “How should I know?”

  Then I thought about it for a moment. “How did you find out he was here?”

  “I saw him by chance.”

  Inside, Torcini seemed to be speaking and Biagio’s mum and dad were listening with great attention. Biagio kept twisting the paper napkin. His dad said something, and so did his mum; then they listened some more. After a while they looked at each other, then turned to Biagio, who seemed to nod, even though he was still looking at the napkin. At this point Biagio’s dad stood up and disappeared from the window. After a few seconds he reappeared with a bottle of wine in his hand, poured some for everybody, laughing all the while, and proposed a toast. Biagio’s brother Graziano also appeared: he looked unamused, as he always did, but even he was drawn in. About ten minutes later, Torcini came out of the house and shook hands with Biagio’s parents and Biagio and went away smiling and saying, “All sorted then.” In order not to be seen, Greg and I slid down until we were sitting on the ground, our backs against the wall.

  “What was that all about?”

  “No idea.”

  Nobody ever completely managed to explain the whys and wherefores, but Torcini had gone back to San Filippo to offer to take Biagio with him to Rome. He told his parents that he would put him up in his apartment and enter him for a school in the city and in the meantime try and get him some races. Nothing was certain, he said, but the boy might just have what it took and it would be a pity to see it wasted like that.

  So the doctor had been a prophet, and that hooked finger on his left hand did indeed become the first mark of Biagio as a motorcycle racer. He ran in a few minor championships, Italian and European, 125cc first, then 250cc, and just two years later Torcini decided to let him make the leap and entered him for the World Championship Grand Prix. Biagio was inconsistent. He fell often, he often screwed up a race completely, but he still managed to attract quite a bit of attention and was much loved by the sponsors. The experts said that it was because of how he rode: yes, it was true that he made lots of mistakes and sometimes seemed to be totally out of it, but when he got it right he was a sensation. He would throw himself into the bends and fast lanes like a young boy on a 125cc, his rear wheel raised every time he pulled hard on the brakes, and you wondered how a human being could get so close to the ground without falling. “Luckily, he often makes mistakes,” a French journalist wrote once, “because otherwise he’d have to race alone.”

  One day, years later, when I was a guest in the pit at a Grand Prix at Laguna Seca, in the United States, I asked Lucio why on earth he had taken such an interest in Biagio, to the extent of taking him with him to Rome.

  “You didn’t seem very enthusiastic at Mugello,” I said, as both of us leant on the low wall, waiting for the bikes to be ready.

  “No. In fact he hadn’t impressed me much.” Lucio moved his mouth forward and made a strange noise. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the accident. Or something in his eyes. I liked him, and every time I thought about him, for some reason I felt kind of bad. A few evenings after the trials I found in the camera the footage that Manuel, one of the boys who worked for the team, had shot at Mugello. When I realized it was footage of Biagio, I felt a strange mixture of affection and pity and decided to take a look at it. To be honest, I found my opinion hadn’t changed much.”

  “But then you went to see him and suggested he come with you.”

  “Yes.” For a moment Lucio played with a little stone from the wall. “Look, I don’t know if I can explain this properly. It was a momentary thing. I got up to go into the kitchen and out of the corner of my eye saw something that aroused my curiosity. If I’d got up two seconds earlier, I’m convinced we wouldn’t be here. Manuel had filmed the exit from the Correntaio, before the Biondetti, the S-bend that leads to the last bend in the circuit. I stopped, went back and rewound the tape for a few seconds. You could see Biagio coming out from the Correntaio, not very well, but then he went into the Biondetti like a cannon and was out in a flash. I remember I went back one more time, to be sure it wasn’t my other rider.”

  He broke off.

  “What of it?”

  “Only a real rider could get through the Biondetti that way. At Mugello, if you ride a bit and have a modicum of talent, sooner or later you learn how to take the bends. I’ve seen riders as thick as stones learn how to come out of the Savelli and climb the Arrabbiata the right way, just by doing it over and over. The Biondetti, though, is another matter. If you take it correctly, you can cut two or three seconds off your time. So I wound back the whole tape and looked at it more closely. It was true, Biagio was making lots of mistakes, but now they seemed more like mistakes of inexperience, the mistakes of somebody who hadn’t raced much, if at all, and it struck me they could gradually be corrected. I don’t know why, but in a moment that sense of unease and pity had vanished, and I decided I wanted to give him a go.”

  The real baptism was in Jerez in ’92. It was the year of the Italians: Cadalora domina
ted from beginning to end on the Honda as he had the previous year, and Reggiani and Chili had taken most of the other victories, both on Aprilias. The Spanish Grand Prix was the fourth race of the season and Biagio, with a fall in the first race, eighth place in the second, and the third abandoned because of a problem with the clutch, had only gained a handful of points. At Jerez he started out fairly well, and by the third lap was fifth, immediately behind Cardus, who was struggling a bit and seemed to slow him down. Behind him, hot on his heels, Alberto Puig. At the sixth lap, at the entrance to the bend going into the home stretch, Puig did a nasty thing: he got on the inside of Biagio and hit him. In order not to fall, Biagio went straight into the sand. I saw him get off his bike, turn it with the help of the commissaires and set off again, making angry movements with his head. It was madness. By the time he got back on the track, he was in thirteenth place. He bent low behind the windshield, braked hard ten metres after anyone else, his rear wheel always a centimetre or two off the ground, and put on speed at least two seconds early. On the bends, there was barely a crack between his body and the ground. He was exploiting every available millimetre of asphalt, and at each bend you prayed he wouldn’t end up on the ground. Lap by lap, position by position, slipping into every gap, he came up again behind Puig, who was fourth behind Reggiani and Cadalora and someone else I can’t remember. He tailed him for a couple of laps, then on the third lap, at the start of the bend after the home straight, got on the inside, touched Puig without making him fall, overtook him, and as he was tackling the second tight bend on the right, already tilting, he raised his left hand and gave him the finger. He then got into third place—it may have been Bradl he overtook—and up until one lap before the finish, battled it out with Cadalora for second place. At that point he must have realized he had given more than enough for one day.

  The following day, in the Gazzetta, under the photo of the three Italians on the podium, Candido Cannavò began his piece like this: “Call it, if you like, emotion.” I still have the article, framed.

  In my opinion, what grabbed the attention of the sponsors—despite his results, which were patchy to say the least—was partly the way he’d grown his dark hair so that it always covered one of his blue eyes. And also those absurd interviews of his. You kept wondering if he’d understood the question or was actually answering something else, and yet you couldn’t help feeling that there was something magnetic about that vague air and those half laughs, and you ended up thinking that maybe his answers hid more subtle meanings.

  The following year the season began in Australia, at Eastern Creek. The evening before the Grand Prix, the team threw an opening party in the pits, inviting the sponsors and a couple of managers from Honda, who provided the engines. Biagio always told me that these public relations shindigs were probably the things he found hardest to bear. To tell the truth, Lucio didn’t like them much either, but couldn’t do without them. After half an hour Biagio went to the lorries parked behind the pit to smoke what I had always imagined to be a cigarette. A few minutes later, one of the hostesses hired for those three days in Australia came along. She was very tall, with fluffy brown hair and fine, slender features that made her look like someone in a painting. She was wearing a miniskirt and a shirt with the colours of the team.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, hiding something behind her back as soon as she realized she wasn’t alone.

  “It’s pointless your hiding it,” Biagio said, sitting on the metal steps of one of the lorries. He raised the joint and held it vertically between his index finger and middle finger. The girl laughed, then skipped towards him.

  “Then I’ll keep you company,” she said with a smile, snapping her fingers excitedly and taking the joint from him. She sat down and let the smoke out of her mouth, then held out her hand. “Kate,” she said.

  “Biagio,” he replied, holding out his.

  “I know who you are.”

  Biagio laughed. “Good for you.”

  Lucio’s assistant Laura found them an hour later, inside the lorry. He was half lying on a camp bed, red-eyed, and she was standing up telling him something, tears of laughter streaming down her face. For a moment, Laura tried to figure out what they were laughing about, but couldn’t, so she told Biagio that he had to go back to the pit, and that they were all looking for him because they wanted to propose a toast.

  Biagio let his head fall back. “Jesus,” he said. Then he got up with difficulty and gently took Kate by the elbow. “Come,” he whispered, “give me a hand.”

  The next day, before the Grand Prix, Biagio looked for Laura and asked her to find something for Kate to do for the rest of the championship.

  “What do you mean ‘something’, Biagio? Everything’s planned in advance. The hostesses are all provided by the various circuits.”

  “Anything, Laura. My nurse: make her my nurse. I’ll pay. You just have to find an excuse for her to go with us. She’s a good girl.”

  Laura pursed her lips. “I’ll see what I can think up,” she said.

  So Kate was offered a job for the whole season as part of the hospitality for the team. She wasn’t really very keen on work and the few times she was given any responsibility she made a complete mess of it. Biagio, though, seemed calmer, and even raced more consistently at first. “I don’t know what I’d do without her,” he said to me not long after meeting her.

  To tell the truth—I’m not sure why, just something in the way he talked about her—I got the idea that the relationship between Kate and Biagio was more one of friendship than passion. At first, when I told him about Trisha and he told me about Kate, I had the vague feeling that we were united by very similar emotions. But then gradually I told myself that maybe it wasn’t like that at all, and that Biagio didn’t feel that sense of vertigo I felt every time I found myself alone with Trisha and her skin.

  The first time I met Kate, in London, the year Biagio made his debut in the 500cc, I couldn’t help thinking she was the devil incarnate. At first glance, everything would have suggested the opposite: her smile, her blue eyes, that sprinkling of freckles over her nose, her laugh. Even her amusing inability to keep still for more than ten seconds. And yet, without any apparent reason, I told myself that the devil, if ever he had to disguise himself as a woman, would have donned her clothes.

  “What about you?” I finally asked Greg, as I sat at the pale blue table in the hall of residence.

  “What about me?”

  “Women.”

  Greg paused for a moment, as if wondering what to reply. “Two days ago I was in Tokyo, being completely oiled and massaged and penetrated by three Japanese men as fat as sumo wrestlers.”

  The image of Greg’s tiny body, naked and oiled, surrounded by three sumo wrestlers, in a completely white room—not quite sure why I thought the room had to be white—made me feel dizzy for a moment.

  “I’m exploring the depths of perdition, Skinny,” Greg went on. “I don’t think Don Gianni would be very proud of me.”

  If anyone else, at any other time, had mentioned a scene like that, I think I would have fallen out of my chair. Instead of which it didn’t strike me as odd at all. All I felt for a few seconds was the sensation of unknown pieces grinding into place.

  “Well, I did tell you.”

  “What?” asked Greg.

  “That with your character you’d get it up the arse sooner or later.”

  Greg—maybe for the second time in his life, and one of the very few—exploded with laughter over the phone.

  THREE

  Doubt

  1

  “TO HELL WITH YOU AND YOUR CULT OF THE DEAD. I already did all I could for Biagio. Now it’s up to you.”

  There it was: that damned sentence, those simple words which, like an earthquake, would gradually bring down everything that up until that moment I believed I’d built with my own hands.

  I’d already been in San Filippo for a month, which was something that hadn’t happened in a while. Over the p
ast few days I’d spent most of my time planting nasturtiums. Nasturtiums don’t require too much attention and can take root in any kind of soil. They should be watered often and, when they bud, helped from time to time with a high-nitrogen fertilizer. When they flower, though, it’s best to use a fertilizer with more potassium. They require sun, but not too much: the ideal would be in the shelter of a tree that isn’t too thick. In the shade they produce a lot of leaves, but not many flowers. Excessive sunlight, on the other hand, strips them at the base and makes them wilt. That was why my mum had chosen to plant a fine patch of them to the right of the front door of our house, in that flower bed she’d amused herself adapting from part of the lawn, together with Enzo. She had designed several of those flowerbeds, surrounding them with chipped grey stones and old bricks. In one—at the back, beyond the kitchen—she’d planted herbs, in another, rambling roses. When Enzo had died a couple of years earlier, struck down one morning in September by a heart attack, Mum had decided, in agreement with Dad, not to hire anybody else and that they would tend to the garden themselves. Dad would take care of cutting the lawn and the heavier work, and Mum would deal with the flowers. For that year, in the two or three free beds, Mum had decided to concentrate on small, colourful flowers: nasturtiums, petunias and pansies. She had planted the nasturtiums at the end of February in small black pots, to protect them while the nights were still cold. She’d left them in Enzo’s old shed at the bottom of the garden and took them out every morning to put them in the sun. She should have planted them in April in the flower bed to the right of the front door, but then she’d come down with that strange illness, and when I arrived she had asked me if I could see to it.

  It had begun as a simple little cough, apparently. Dad had first given Mum syrup, then antibiotics, but it had persisted and he’d started to get worried. He’d taken her to get various tests, but neither he with his specialization in geriatrics nor the professor at the Fatebenefratelli hospital in Rome had been able to figure out what exactly was wrong with her. The professor had even asked Mum if she had been in a tropical country. Both Dad and Mum had thought this a somewhat curious question, and for a moment the image of them dressed in little straw skirts with garlands round their necks must have silently amused them.