Gironimo! Page 11

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  1 Incessant pizza bingeing: an apology. In these pages, the reader will encounter nightly scenes of explicit stonebaked-dough consumption. A devastating spoiler, I know, but it seems necessary to explain my gut-numbing one-track diet in advance. It’s all about reliable calories. Replacing the energy expended in cycling all day is not something you want to leave to chance. Order pasta and you might end up with eight twists of fusilli splashed in red water. Meat and two veg could easily mean pushing a couple of florets and a new potato around a lonely chop. But a pizza is, and always is, a hefty open toasted sandwich that packs a generous and predictable calorific punch. Plus, when the manipulation of cutlery proves too much for your trembling, glassy fists at the end of a long, hard day, you can cram it home without tools, which I find isn’t such a great scheme with spag bol.

  CHAPTER 7

  A GALE BANGED shutters all over Susa that night, and by the time it blew itself out near daybreak I’d given up trying to sleep. A 40km climb on a disintegrating antique, with one knee and no gears . . . As the church bells struck up, my mind spooled back through all those previous daft journeys of mine, searching for a more doom-laden night-before. Only once could I recall staring up at a dawn-softened ceiling with such saucer-eyed dread: in a caravan being playfully butted by the donkey I was about to lead 500 miles across northern Spain. It now occurred to me that Number 7 was more animal than machine, wilful and needy, primed to exact revenge if I pushed it too hard.

  The breakfast room was a study in wordless marital loathing, full of French couples gazing coldly through each other. I swung my unbendable right leg under a table and captured the miserable spirit, bitterly loading up on carbs while staring out the Alpine view. The old patrono brought me my coffee with a look of concern, and he was ready with another when I Douglas Badered the Hirondelle past reception.

  ‘Sestriere?’

  ‘The cursed mountain,’ I rasped.

  He filled his red-veined cheeks and let out a long, slow huff of sympathy. ‘Courage, my friend.’

  Good things needed to happen, and did. First, I found that bending my knee for the purpose of pedalling was not only possible, but almost painless. Second, I managed to change gear – a process, remember, that involved removing and rotating the back wheel – in as few as eighteen minutes. Third, I cycled several kilometres up, and then back down, the wrong mountain: an invaluable learning experience that helpfully alerted me to the minuscule benefit of my Femina ‘mountain’ sprocket, and the petrifying uselessness of my brakes. I arrived at the foot of this retraced detour with exhaustion and terror battling it out on my features. When I looked down I saw the brake blocks had been eroded to brittle crescents, smoking gently in the Alpine sun. JOKE: wine corks don’t make great stoppers.

  The right mountain was bigger than the wrong one. Outside Susa the road dusted its hands and ploughed resolutely skywards, tacking up Sestriere’s lower slopes with switchbacks and long, steep ramps. Residual gusts of gale had twice blown my cap off ascending the wrong mountain, but they were long gone now; the sun bore down from a windless hard-blue heaven and swiftly brought my brain to a rolling boil. In between desperate rasping breaths, claggy hunks of the previous night’s Euroshite seeped helplessly from my blistered lips: Ho voglia di dance all night, di dance all night. Creaking through Gravere (820m, 1,000ft, above Susa) I plunged my whole mad head – goggles, cap and all – straight into a mossy old fountain trough outside the village grocery. Then I saw that despite being Sunday it was open, and squelched blankly inside for provisions: a Bible-sized slab of stale, Friday focaccia, and a reckless surfeit of Coca-Cola.

  On the approaches to Susa I’d noticed a growing number of roadside tributes to accident victims; now there were even more, and I was proceeding sluggishly enough to read them. Every single one mourned a young man, and I had a good idea how most had met their end: at irregular intervals, a Day-Glo pack of huge motorcycles would tear deafeningly past, two or three abreast, or four if there was a blind corner ahead. How I came to hate those death-centric, me-scaring weekend nob-rockets, and the demonstrably brainless girlfriends who clung to their sweaty leather backs. It’s now clear to me that the only reason anyone ever buys a massively engined Ducati is to ride it like a stupid shit then die.

  The trees thinned, taking those welcome pools of shade with them. Each grimacing crank of the pedals felt like a rev too far. Left leg down . . . and . . . round, right leg, left, right, head and shoulders rolling sluggishly all the while. Anything to stay above wobble speed, when you’re going so slowly that remaining upright involves a desperate and arthritic seesawing of the handlebars. Not the wobble – NEVER the wobble. What a sorry let-down my ladies’ gear was proving to be, the difference between towing a drugged sow up this mountain instead of a drugged sow in a hat. How infuriating to have learned, just before leaving, that multi-sprocket derailleur gears had been patented well before 1914, and weren’t even banned by the Giro authorities: riders only eschewed them for being possibly unreliable and definitely unmanly.

  It was in 1906 that Paul de Vivie, the spiritual father of cyclo-touring, launched a derailleur system that I don’t really understand, but which did offer dependable access to up to four gear speeds. De Vivie trialled his mechanism in the hills behind St Etienne – home of my Hirondelle – and saw it accorded international acclaim after a 200km mountain race between a male pro and a female amateur, won by the latter on a bike with a three-speed derailleur. ‘She never once set foot on the ground over the entire course,’ wrote an astonished journalist, an insight into the age of pushy-up-hillo that I would imminently be reliving. Henri Desgrange, who didn’t allow derailleurs in the Tour until 1937, damned this result with the very faintest of praise: ‘I applaud this test, but isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft. Come on, fellows: let’s say that the test was a fine demonstration – for our grandparents! I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five.’ Quick question, Henri: why don’t you piss off?

  De Vivie, so keen to make cycle touring more accessible that he nobly refused to patent his system, deserves at the very least to have his face tattooed on every adult cyclist’s forehead. How grateful I was to have come of age in the post-Paul era of humane uphill assistance, even as I grovelled miserably through a rerun of the era before. De Vivie later drew up a list of cycling commandments; I’d written these up on the inside cover of my notebook, and consulted them while I cracked off focaccia fragments in the shade of a wooden bus shelter.

  Eat before you are hungry. (My score on this: 2/10. But I bet Paul never tackled a 2,000m mountain on fossilised focaccia.)

  Drink before you are thirsty. (1/10 – been thirsty for ninety-six straight hours.)

  Rest before you are tired. (1/10 – been tired since 1994.)

  Cover up before you are cold. (10/10 – hollow laugh.)

  Peel off before you are hot. (0/10 – ‘Woollen Cyclist’s Nude Shame.’)

  Don’t drink or smoke on tour. (10/10 – evenings don’t count, right, Paul? Paul?)

  Wear yellow and masturbate every four hours. (Sorry, made that up.)

  Never ride just to prove yourself. (-400/10 and a thunderous honk of the Family Fortunes klaxon.)

  Off again, inching upwards. The bipolar sonic landscape was a curious torture: four seconds of heart-punching Ducati scream, then long minutes of huge, hot silence. Lizards scuttling through the sun-crisped roadside brush, the rubbing swish of warped rim on burned cork and a haunting creak from my leather toe-straps, a sound my brain chose to interpret as the groaning timbers of a becalmed slave ship. I’m surprised I didn’t go completely mad, though I clearly did a bit. Every time a Ducati howled past I wanted to blurt out a confession for something terrible that I hadn’t done. ‘HO VOGLIA DI DANCE ALL NIGHT!’ All Coke and no carbs make Tim a strange boy.

  Oulx was the last town before the rocky, treeless final haul to Sestriere.
I stopped at a petrol station for milk and Milka, then checked the sat-nav: 23km to climb 1,000m. The road swung southeast – a direction I’d be getting used to for the next thousand kilometres – and suddenly wind was howling right in my face. There’s an insufferable impertinence about a headwind, shoving you rudely in the chest like some bouncer’s massive hand: and where d’you think you’re going, sunshine? It seemed only right to take this wind to task, and I did so loudly and at length.

  This proved a poor use of my depleted reserves; my speed wound down to a shamefully geriatric 7kmh, and I was overtaken by a butterfly. The wobble was with me, and the only thing that kept my feet on the pedals were the chants of encouragement now echoing down from Franco–Italian holidaymakers barbecueing outside their villas: ‘Allez! Allez!’ ‘Vai, vai, vai!’ From somewhere I found the strength to raise an acknowledging hand, haul myself out of the saddle and force the speed into double figures. Then the final shouts died away, and round the first available corner I dismounted like a Dalek at a rodeo.

  ‘I have no gears and they pushed it up here in 1914.’ This, I decided, would be the optimum wording on a placard to be waved at vocally disdainful vehicle passengers, below the headline: ‘BUTTON IT, WANKERS.’ In the saddle I’d been at worst a silly-goggled figure of fun; out of it I was a hateful, pathetic failure. Cars and motorbikes shot past at aggressively close quarters, strafing me with jeers and whistles. The act of walking reactivated my knee condition, forcing me into a theatrical rolling limp that did nothing to appease my tormentors.

  I toiled up unwelcoming, lumpy highlands set in a blue-skied bowl of craggy peaks, the stiff wind and steadily accumulating altitude at least taking the edge off the heat. The gradient was a git but never a total bastard; I could see why Hannibal had chosen this route to lead his elephants over the Alps. My mind wandered, and my gaze settled wearily on the tarmac at my feet. There’s nothing an Italian likes more than despoiling a scenic roadside, and extended exposure to discarded packaging presented the opportunity to enhance my stunted vocabulary. After scanning a few kilometres of litter I could picture myself holding court at a bar, intriguing drinkers with gnomic mash-ups of phrases old and new.

  ‘My bicycle is one hundred years old and made with twenty per cent real fruit pulp.’ ‘Wheels of wood? Enjoy responsibly.’ ‘The most difficult race of all time causes fatal lung cancer and may diminish fertility.’ ‘Ribbed for maximum pleasure – I want to dance all night in your cursed mountain!’

  When my knee hurt too much to walk I climbed back on the bike, grinding out a couple of hundred metres until progress congealed and the handlebars began to shimmy and twitch. And so the ascent of Sestriere took its place amongst the most dreadfully protracted ordeals of my life: double maths, the Archers Omnibus, my late forties. It’s no exaggeration to say that it was literally the worst thing anyone has ever had to do.

  When the 1914 frontrunners reached Sestriere at midday, they expected to find nothing but a signalman’s cabin and an obelisk erected to mark the recent centenary of Napoleon’s crossing. The team cars were floundering distantly up the slopes, but astoundingly, a group of diehard fans had braved the conditions and stood in wait for their heroes with hot water and dry clothes.

  Back then, as Paolo says, ‘nobody ever went up to Sestriere’. They didn’t until the 1930s, when the Fiat-owning Agnelli family built a winter resort at the top. The cylindrical hotel towers they put up still dominate the town, and indeed the lengthy video footage I took during my final approach, hoping to persuade all the Sunday strollers that I had a valid reason to be walking. The showpiece hotels and cafés at the head of the pass were aswarm with the wrong kind of bikes; I remounted and trundled through the hinterland of 1970s ski-lodge apartment blocks. Most betrayed the dark and shuttered look of seasonal mothballing, but I found one that didn’t. Its front desk was manned by an Eastern European lady who spoke just enough English to bring a bad day to a dispiriting close.

  ‘So you are lonely man, without friends?’

  I agreed that I was.

  ‘I have only big apartment, but is no problem. You complete register here. Not this section, is for family, and you are lonely man.’

  She led me and the Hirondelle to a three-roomed self-catering suite fit for seven skiers, at the building’s furthest, gloomiest extremity. I had to make my own bed with a pile of provided sheets, and the absence of toiletries meant a shower with concentrated detergent, washing my kit underfoot like an aged peasant stamping on wine grapes. My first pee since breakfast bore grim tribute to a hot, hard day: a painfully extruded dribble of Tizer.

  I hobbled out to see what kind of people take their summer holiday in a ski resort. Answer: people who go to bed at 7 p.m. Plazas that were teeming when I’d rolled through an hour before now lay bleakly deserted, and as soon as the sun went down the temperature followed it like a stone. I dully mused that this tends to be the case at 2,035m. The only other diners in the only open restaurant were a French mother and her son, a boy of about ten. She droned away into her phone for the entire duration of my meal, and way beyond the duration of her son’s, who finished his gelato just as my pizza arrived. At length he tired of staring listlessly out at the chilly, unpeopled street, and directed his attention to her untouched glass of lager. The first sip was nervously surreptitious, but success and its alcoholic bounty soon led to disinhibited, chugging draughts. He drained his mother’s beer before I was halfway through mine; I raised it in appreciation, which he acknowledged with a glassy wink. Walking past the window after I left I saw Maman still yammering on, and her son’s chin sinking to his chest.

  Back in the lonely man’s apartment I thought of my own family, and the substance abuse that its neglected juveniles might be seeking solace in during my absence. They would all have returned from Iceland that day, I realised, and when a text bleeped in I grabbed my phone and stared at it with desperate, reddened eyes. ‘Hello,’ I read, ‘we think you may be entitled to compensation for an accident that was not your fault.’

  The radiators were now roasting hot – for the first and only time I would hit the road with a bone-dry gusset – but I shivered all the same. The entire day had been an accident that was all my fault, from the sat-nav defying navigational stupidity that began it to the woeful lack of physical conditioning exposed thereafter. Those hours up in the loft might have readied my legs for the flat miles, but as soon as the steep stuff pitched up I’d died on my wet woollen arse. I’d managed just 54km that day, and my average speed had sunk to an ignominious 15.4kmh. Alfonso was now 6 hours 17 minutes up the road, and whereas I was about to collapse into my fourth bed since Milan, he had yet to stop. For the 1914 boys, a bad day was four punctures in a blizzard. For me it was walking up a hill and having to make my own bed. I clicked off the light and once again shook my head in Butch Cassidy-pattern disbelief: Who were those guys?

  ‘Look, bicycle has bedroom also!’ joked the receptionist the night before, but tough love meant the Hirondelle had slept in the kitchen. I looked him up and down while breakfasting on a packet of Tuc biscuits some skier had left in a cupboard above the fridge. Many a clumsy leg has been hoisted over that rust-blistered top tube, I thought, but I bet in all his ninety-eight years he’s never been as high as this. High enough for frosted windows in August, and for the altitude-based throb belabouring my skull. ‘Chin up, Gramps,’ I said, to myself as much as the bike. ‘All downhill from here.’ At this a mouthful of Tuc lodged in my throat: Sestriere was the roof of my route, and I was about to ride off that roof with only four slivers of singed wine cork to slow me down.

  Operation Corky McBrake-o-Carve was always going to be a rum affair, and the decision to leave my kit warming on the radiators rummed it up to the max: I executed the procedure entirely naked. The six corks I’d collected en route should have been enough for twelve replacement brake blocks, but a heavy touch with the apartment’s bread knife procured just five. Out with the old, in with the new: the poking, jabby work of an ho
ur made a terrible mess of my hands, chest, thighs and the kitchen floor. When it was done I pushed the bike out of the door, then pushed it back in again and got dressed.

  ‘Goodbye to the lonely man,’ said the receptionist as she handed back my passport. ‘Only the nature is his friend.’

  I silently begged to differ: glorious as the crisp and cloudless mountainscape outside undeniably was, it would soon be doing its un-level best to kill me.

  Seeing the road fall precipitiously away just beyond the apartment complex, I took the opportunity to pre-test my overhauled brakes in an adjoining car park. No point in dainty half-measures: I got up a decent head of steam and slammed the anchors on. The emergency stop that ensued jerked the back wheel off the ground and smacked my sternum into the bar bidons. That should have been perfect, but the cacophony of scrapes, shrieks and rending twangs that accompanied it suggested otherwise. I looked down, then at the gravelled skidmark behind me, and established that I had just broken every single component of my braking system.

  The cable-restraint mechanism that had pulled through its slot in the lever on my first ever ride had done so again, but more dramatically, flanging the metal inside out. Three of my new cork blocks had been wrenched from their carriers; one lay in two halves. All the springs had sprung. Most dramatically, the front right-hand caliper was bent almost double. Its cork-less block carrier now sat jammed between fork and rim, garnished with a neat coil of shaved beech wood that explained the suddenness of my halt.

  I retrieved the blocks and propped the stricken Hirondelle against a wooden Christmas tree, one of several stacked up at the side of the car park for off-season storage. The caption to this pathetic scene: ‘Festive Greetings from the Lonely Man and his Dead Friend’.