Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  And this love—apart from those surprising occasions when I felt proud of my origins—had been transformed over the years into a subtle and insidious sarcasm about the little village in Lower Tuscany that I came from, with all its unwritten rules and its rituals and its fruit tarts on Sunday and its festivals and all that junk I felt liberated from every day I saw the sun come up between the water tanks on the roofs of Manhattan.

  Suddenly, though, a grey pall had fallen unexpectedly over those water tanks and over Mr Ghon and over all the rest, and without my realizing it I found myself crouching on the ground, my hands covered in blackish sand and an orange metal shovel at my side, planting nasturtiums in my parents’ garden. By now, I had been teaching at Columbia for a couple of years, and overnight a new element had wormed its way into my life, an element whose very existence I had previously dismissed: doubt. At the time, it was nothing but the merest hint of a feeling, but thinking about it now, it was as if all at once that life that had seemed to me so solid and unmistakable had simply become one among the billions of possible lives, and all the others I had never lived were knocking insistently at my door. The rhythm of those knocks rapidly transformed itself into the metre of the old, simple, terrifying question: what’s the point? At the same time, it had seeped out through the cracks in the cocoon of my studies and encroached on the outside world. Gradually, every single event of which I was aware and every one of my actions and every thing I had ever researched became refracted in a sinister way, so that for a few moments they appeared different from what they were. When one morning a chorus of voices in my head asked me what the point of a good coffee was, I realized the moment had probably arrived to run for cover.

  Whenever I went back to San Filippo, the only people I was glad to see were Giorgia and Paolino. At more or less the same time I’d started my relationship with Trisha, Biagio had met Kate, and Greg was—to use his words—exploring the depths of perdition, Giorgia had been walking home alone on the evening of the annual spring festival. I never found out what had happened during the festival, but for some reason the image I’ve always carried with me is that of a young woman who was a bit shaken, a bit scared. As she was walking through the village, she noticed that on the opposite side of the square a light was still on. Paolino was in the doorway of his workshop, adjusting something on the engine of an old three-gear Beta.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Paolino looked up for a moment and gave a little smile. The last time Giorgia had addressed him directly had been two years earlier, when she’d asked him for a cigarette.

  “What are you doing?”

  Paolino again looked up and sighed. “What do you think?”

  The year before, Paolino’s dad had had a stroke and was now confined to a wheelchair. Paolino suddenly had to take care of the workshop alone, and in order not to lose customers and to continue to pay his father’s medical expenses, he often worked after dinner. He told me it wasn’t actually that much of a burden: he liked working with his hands, and he didn’t have much else to do. That evening, it was a good excuse not to take part in the festival.

  “Can I stay?” Giorgia asked.

  Paolino shrugged, and she sat down nearby on a Vespa without an engine. They didn’t say much more to each other, and yet Giorgia stayed there all evening watching him work. There was something hypnotic about those hands moving over the engine and adjusting and fitting parts, something Giorgia could not tear herself away from. All at once—she confessed to me years later, one evening when I was having dinner at their house, while Paolino was gone for a moment—it had seemed to her that those hands could fix anything, and she had suddenly felt safe. At that precise moment she realized that she had been wrong about everything in her life, and that what up until a second earlier she’d thought was beautiful actually wasn’t beautiful at all, and everything that had seemed to her important wasn’t worth a cent. Suddenly it was Paolino who seemed beautiful to her—a bit dirty maybe, but they could do something about that—and the way he worked the most solid thing she’d ever set eyes on. Giorgia had chosen him, and paradoxically had to work quite hard to convince him. Paolino’s incredulity was not so difficult to understand: it was strange, to say the least, to have the prettiest girl in the village hanging around him. Maybe also the most available, although certainly not, until now, for someone like him. And yet in the end she had managed to overcome his suspicions and get him to yield. Apparently, there had been some banter about it, but it hadn’t lasted long. “Welcome to the club,” Mauro said to him with a laugh one day, sitting on the back of a bench as Paolino was coming out of the social club after buying cigarettes. Paolino stopped, turned back and without uttering a word gave Mauro a punch so hard it sent him flying two metres backwards. An hour later Mauro was still babbling incoherently. Nobody ever ventured to say anything again, and six months later Paolino and Giorgia married. I have to admit: no other couple, among all those I’ve known, has ever shown itself to be so well matched. Giorgia’s most unpleasant aspects, her sarcasm and coquettishness, disappeared after she got together with Paolino. And Paolino demonstrated that he had an unpredictable sense of humour, and even—in his way and in his own time—a certain love of gossip. He even started using shampoo. They laughed a lot in their house, and talked without hurry or fuss. They had three children, with barely two years between them. It seemed as if they didn’t want to stop. Two girls, Giulia and Lisa, and a boy, Dario, like Paolino’s dad. Before going back I always take a trip to FAO Schwarz and have fun buying toys I don’t think you can find in Italy, though lately it’s got harder because everything reaches Italy now. But the kids are always happy and when I arrive they run to me and ask for their gifts and call me Uncle Jacopo. Paolino and Giorgia even asked me to be Dario’s godfather. I told them I wasn’t very suitable, but they burst out laughing.

  “Neither are we.”

  Sometimes, when they were smaller, to free their hands Giorgia or Paolino would put one of them around my neck. It was funny to see those little animals moving over me like larvae. As soon as they started crying or vomiting I gave them back.

  2

  IT WAS TRUE, Greg had done a lot for Biagio. But never in such a brazen way as six or seven years earlier. We hadn’t heard from Biagio in a while, and we were quite worried. The last person I’d spoken to, an Australian friend of his I’d met on a trip to Sydney, had told me things weren’t going very well for him: he lounged about between the house and the beach, and wasn’t a particularly pleasant sight. One evening this friend had seen him in his dressing gown by the foreshore, as the sun was going down, with a couple of those horrible, gigantic Australian bats hovering over his head. “He looked like some kind of run-down vampire,” he said.

  Biagio’s best year may well have been his debut in the 500cc races. It was a risk that Lucio had taken: he’d become convinced that the one way for Biagio to really make his mark was if he could tame those monsters of two hundred and something horsepower; 250cc bikes were for precise, regular, methodical riders. Once you understood them, they couldn’t surprise you any more, and whoever made the fewest mistakes won. The 500cc were another matter entirely: they were crazed fillies, untameable monsters of engineering, which had defeated dozens of riders. Of course, with them, too, you had to make fewer mistakes to win, but the bikes forced everyone to make a few, and in the end all you had to do to go fast was stay on your bike and be unaware of the speed you were going at. Biagio was as unaware as you could hope for, and Lucio told himself that if he continued to mature and kept his mistakes to a minimum, his good moments would outweigh the bad. Lucio was a perceptive man: in the first championship he rode, Biagio managed to come fourth. There are still those who talk about his skirmishes with Kevin Schwantz, whom he actually managed to beat by two points in the final rankings. They even became good friends, and at the end of every race would do a high five and congratulate each other. That must have meant a lot to Biagio: he always told me that Schwantz was the greatest ride
r of all time, and now they were racing like little boys and laughing together like schoolmates. They were very similar, in fact: both very talented and very undisciplined. When Schwantz announced he was quitting and was asked who he thought his heir was, he declared with a laugh that he didn’t know, but that he saw all his own craziness in Biagio.

  The thing that spread Biagio’s name and face around the world was an advertising campaign. Lucio’s 500cc team was sponsored by Pall Mall, who, halfway through the season, started circulating posters and newspaper ads with a photograph of Biagio barechested in the famous open-armed pose adopted by Jim Morrison. Pall Mall was well known as the cigarette that the Doors singer had smoked. Actually, Biagio’s smooth hair and thin features and blue eyes weren’t very reminiscent of Morrison’s, but despite that you couldn’t help thinking there was something in their eyes that made them very similar. Under the photograph, a caption in scribbled handwriting said: Genius has no rules.

  Apparently it was a very successful campaign, and sales of Pall Mall soared in several countries. Biagio, of course, made a lot of money from it. The slogan turned out to be more revealing than people might have thought: Biagio really didn’t have any rules, although at first that was considered amusing, and everyone was happy. Both he and Kate became celebrities, and they never lost an opportunity to appear in clubs and at parties, often drunk and wearing large sunglasses. But that was fine; that was exactly the kind of personality everybody wanted, and as long as he went like a rocket on the track and battled it out with Kevin Schwantz, everything was perfect. The two or three times he fell or made terrible mistakes, the journalists suggested with a laugh that he might have had a bit too much to drink the night before. And yet nobody said anything: those ridiculous posters circulating around the world claimed he was just one more mad genius, and everyone wanted to believe in that fairy tale.

  At the end of the second season, for reasons that have never been completely clear, Pall Mall decided to abandon Torcini’s team and sponsor a satellite of Suzuki. Obviously they wanted to take with them the rider linked with their biggest and most successful campaign of the last few years. Through his agent, Biagio at first declared that without Torcini he might even quit racing. But then Pall Mall made an incredible offer, and, after a whole day shut up in an office with Lucio, Biagio issued a statement saying he would follow Pall Mall and join that Suzuki satellite. Pall Mall were hoping to plan their campaign for the coming year: Suzuki was the bike that Schwantz had ridden up until then. Going from Team Torcini’s Honda to Suzuki, they hoped to capitalize on the American’s inheritance.

  Things didn’t go exactly as planned. It was harder than anticipated for Biagio to get used to the new bike, and on both occasions when he lost his temper and tried to go faster he fell badly, narrowly escaping serious injury. The campaign stressing that he was Schwantz’s heir was shelved. In the meantime, Biagio and Kate continued their partying and clubbing and weekends on boats. He skipped press conferences and presentations with the sponsors, or else turned up with swollen eyes, speaking even more incoherently than usual. The Jim Morrison comparison had become a burden round his neck, and most importantly, Biagio was no longer battling it out on the track with a former world champion for third place in the race and the rankings. Towards the end of the season, he even talked about making a break from Pall Mall, but then everyone decided to honour the contract. Apparently it was Biagio who wanted to leave, but then had to give up the idea: Lucio told me one day that to have someone like Biagio in your stable you either had to think that he was useful or like him a lot, and nobody, except Pall Mall on one side and he on the other, was willing to take the risk. In the meantime, Lucio had his hands tied with other riders and new sponsors.

  Everything blew up the following year, two days before the Italian Grand Prix, again at Mugello. On the Thursday just before the weekend of trials and races, a magazine published photographs of Biagio bathed in sweat and with an idiotic grin on his face, his arms around Kate and two transvestites. The headline was Jim’s Sunset, and the article claimed that the photographs had been taken in a club in Torremolinos on the night before the Spanish Grand Prix two weeks earlier. In Jerez, Biagio had got everything wrong: he had committed stupid mistakes in the trials and then, having started out eleventh, had skidded badly in his attempt to catch up, bringing down two other riders and injuring his calf. By an ironic twist of fate, the Grand Prix was won by the same Alberto Puig he had been hit by five years earlier right there in Jerez.

  The photographs caused a great stink. Pall Mall and the team said they were indignant and that if Biagio didn’t clean up his act and demonstrate, if nothing else, a bit of professionalism, their relationship had to be considered at an end. On his side, Biagio issued a communiqué stating that the photographs were definitely not from two weeks earlier, but from the previous winter, and had not been taken in Torremolinos, but in a club in London. Not many people believed him, but as someone wrote in the Gazzetta, it didn’t really make much difference. Biagio avoided TV cameras and reporters the whole weekend. In the trials, surprisingly, he came fifth, and the race itself was perhaps the best of his life. In four laps he managed to move up into second place, right behind Mick Doohan. Nobody could believe it, but he actually looked as if he might be able to overtake him. He threw himself into the Casanova-Savelli like a diver and climbed the Arrabbiata like a rocket, on Doohan’s tail all the time. Sitting in an Italian restaurant in Baltimore where I went to watch the races and the occasional football match, I touched my heart from time to time to make sure it wasn’t bursting. When I heard a couple near me laughing and wondering who this sensation was, I couldn’t hold back. I turned and told them his name was Biagio, and he was my oldest friend. They nodded and said, “Great,” but they didn’t sound convinced. I don’t think they believed me.

  Five laps from the end, at the entrance to the Bucine, the downhill bend before the finishing line, Biagio got on the inside of Doohan and overtook him. On the home straight, though, Doohan’s Honda seemed to have something in reserve and at the San Donato he managed to pull away first. At the same point in every lap, at the entrance to the Bucine, Biagio would gain a few metres and overtake Doohan with ever greater fluidity. It was as if he were taking the measurements of the track. At the last entrance to the Bucine he went in so fast that I let out a cry: he passed Doohan with his rear wheel off the ground, and at the exit, I don’t know how he was still on his bike, he was going faster still, taking advantage of every centimetre. His front wheel glided for about forty or fifty metres, and I told myself he would end up on the grass and against the wall, but he managed to keep the bike on the track and pass the finishing line first. Even before getting to the end of the home straight, Doohan came to him and shook his hand and raised his fist and shouted to him that he was one of the greats.

  Later, on the podium, once the national anthems were finished, and while Doohan and Cadalora were spraying him with champagne, Biagio picked up his magnum and started drinking it all in one go without his lips touching the bottle. There was something miraculous about seeing that big bottle being emptied into that tiny body, and everyone stopped to watch. After almost a minute Biagio angrily threw the Magnum aside, raised his head, puffed out his cheeks, raised two fingers to the sky, and sprayed out a gigantic cloud of champagne. Even today, in those bars with Ducati shields and photos of motorcycle racers on the walls, I sometimes see the image of Biagio on that podium, in the blue Pall Mall leathers, with his fingers raised and a big cloud of champagne over his head.

  At the subsequent press conference, he was visibly drunk. He was greeted with a roar of applause, and after the attacks of the previous days even I, who was completely uninvolved, found it hard to hold back a shudder of irritation. Once he sat down and silence fell, he declared that this had been his last race and that he wasn’t enjoying it any more and had no more desire to race and they could all go fuck themselves. There was an icy silence. Then a few journalists screamed no, it
wasn’t right, he couldn’t just go. He looked at them, muttered that they were a bunch of clowns, again told them to fuck themselves and left the room. They all started laughing, obviously thinking he was drunk and this was just another of his acts of bravado. But they were wrong, and his career stopped right there at Mugello, where it had started.

  He withdrew with Kate to the house by the sea he had bought in Sydney, near Bondi Beach. News about him started to arrive in fragments, and it wasn’t good news. After a couple of years Kate disappeared too, and nobody ever discovered what became of her.

  Lucio wasn’t in a very good way either. The team had been through two or three difficult years and he no longer had the funds to carry on and had only managed to cope by finding collaborators and organizing driving courses. Greg heard about it and had one of his assistants call him and arrange a meeting. So Lucio found himself at the window of an elegant building overlooking the Tiber and the Palace of Justice, in the conference room of one of the biggest companies in the country. A young woman in a grey tailored suit led him in and asked him if he would like something to drink.

  “No, thanks,” he said.