French Revolutions Read online

  Something caught my eye near the foot of the col de Vars. Propped against one of those ‘Beware of enormous falling boulders’ signs whose practical purpose always eludes me (‘Attention: one of these might land on your car in a minute, and if it does, you are all going to die’) was a deceased bicycle. I got out to inspect it. The tyres had rotted away, the saddle was a sprung skeleton and every spoke and crank and lever was lavishly ochred with flaking rust. I pulled it upright – an astonishing weight. As the family rushed out to commandeer the machine as chief prop in an extended session of madcap photography that would have graced any early Beatles film, I suddenly felt affronted by its presence. The col’s first hairpin loomed around the corner, backed by a huge retaining wall professionally embellished with the word ‘Hinault’. He flew up there fifteen years ago, said the dead bike, and a lot longer ago than that even I made it this far. And look at you, you old woman, pootling up the hills with your bike in the boot.

  For 11 kilometres the road coiled uncertainly, back-tracking and switch-backing but always going upwards, a disorderly ascent through the trees and into a bare and rather messy wilderness of boulders, sheep crap and wind-whipped tussocks. At the unassuming summit – no wife-worrying precipices here – was a café. ‘You can get a certificate there for cycling up,’ read Birna from a guidebook as we wiped chocolate off our children’s faces in a car park crowded with more of what was an apparently inexhaustible supply of gay German motorcyclists. I gave no audible response to this information. My necessarily curt entry in that day’s training diary simply reads: ‘The shame’.

  You may have gathered by now that the Moore household economy is run very much according to the model sketched out by Jack Sprat and his wife, only with obsessive frugality in the role of lean-eater and the fat-consumption duties assumed by profligate recklessness – oh, and that serendipitous platter-licking denouement substituted with an endless series of ill-tempered debates. Hotel lobbies are the usual battlefield, and a good example of this genre was held in the reception area of Les Barnières, jewel in Guillestre’s tourist-fleecing crown.

  ‘Look,’ said Birna, attempting to drum up some unlikely reinforcements from the starched-linen restaurant’s bill of fare, ‘they’ve got rosé wine from the slopes of Mont Ventoux.’ I pulled the sort of face with which Oliver Hardy delivered his catch-phrase. Birna persevered. ‘It’s the second cheapest on the menu.’

  A small pause; a glance at the sunlit pool outside the window; a sigh of surrender. ‘I’ll unload the car.’

  I was beginning to learn that the dolled-up pensioner is an integral feature of the Alpine summer, and the prominent ubiquity of the medical centre’s telephone number throughout the establishment suggested that Les Barnières, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, might more accurately have styled itself the Hotel for People with a Less Than Fifty Per Cent Chance of Making it Through the Night. Or, in my case, through the next day. But despite the unseemly griping, it was of course a splendid evening. I ponced about the pool in my cycling shorts, flaunting my ludicrous tidemark arm tan before an elderly audience more preoccupied with large-print fiction. The children dive-bombed and screeched; it was very much like the home-movie scenes of Tom Simpson’s family Corsican holidays, only with a hairier-legged Daddy. I stuck away all my supper and half the kids’, and afterwards sat out on our top-floor balcony beneath the chalet eaves, the glass-muffled carousing of infancy behind me and dotage beneath.

  Draining the last pink mouthful of Côtes du Ventoux straight from the bottle I squinted at the darkness, tracing the black outlines of that formidable Gothic backdrop, those murderous granite claws scratching at the stars. ‘Mon mari – avec son bicyclette,’ Birna had joshed the fat wine waiter, or anyway the fat waiter who brought us our wine, pointing at the Giant of Provence’s silhouette on the label. ‘Ah oui,’ he’d winked, in a rather silly way that indicated a forthcoming joke, ‘et demain, l’lzoard!’

  Was the concept of me even tackling such a mountain really so chortlingly improbable? Yes, so I had yet to make it up an HC or even a category one without pushing and, the one-off conquest of the col de Saraillé aside, my climbing experience could be encapsulated as one of hills, pills and bellyaches. But Simpson, Kimmage and Boardman had all implied that one’s worst form often heralds the arrival of one’s best, that after you’ve cracked one day it takes a much harder bonk to break you the next. Certainly I felt infinitely better, even allowing for the rosé-tinted spectacles. A small cluster of lights that I’d initially mistaken for a constellation winked off into blackness. A village? Up there? Jesus. But I’d have to go that high and higher tomorrow. Not much further up, the blinking red dot of a plane moved smoothly across the Alps. That was modern travel: rapid, painless, humdrum.

  Being rather drunk, I found myself tapping into the Tour’s spiritual root. A celebration of mankind’s arduous history, of our forefathers’ heroic efforts to triumph over adversity. The cavemen of Lascaux lanced bulls; we threw javelins. Spear-chucking was no longer a matter of life and death, assuming the stadium officials kept their eyes open, but somehow it seemed important to honour a time when it had been. And though the people of France could now hop on to trains or planes and zip across their nation in an hour, for their grandfathers this hadn’t been an option. The bicycle was originally sold to rural France as ‘the horse that needs no hay’: a means of everyday transport, often the only one in what is still, by European standards, a large and empty land. Farmers would think nothing of pedalling huge distances over huge hills – or, rather, they probably thought plenty, but had no choice. What about that dead bike on the col de Vars? The Tour paid tribute to these men and the tough times they lived through, times when you might fall into an undiscovered gorge the size of Belgium and wait half a century to be found. We didn’t have to do this shit any more, but watching 180 men in funny shorts forcing their punished bodies up hill and down dale gave us a vicarious taste of what we’d all have been doing in days now mercifully gone by.

  In the middle of the night, I drifted gently out of a deep slumber with an inspiring warmth in my chest, a comforting glow that was soon spreading along my arms to caress the scorched flesh of my fingertips. This was it, I pondered dozily, the fire in my belly: this was what it felt like when the good form kicked in. Let the destiny-oscillation commence; I was ready now. Either that or a small girl had just peed all over me in her sleep.

  Twelve

  Vertigo 1, Dysentery 0. ‘I really just can’t,’ announced Birna as I brushed croissant flakes off the maps. My support vehicle would not be following me up the Izoard, owing to the driver being a big girly weed. ‘We’ll take the valley road and meet you at Briançon. I’m sorry.’

  She’d lost her sense of humour, and so had the Alps. Yesterday we’d passed through Les Prats and enjoyed distant views of the col d’Urine, but looking at the intestinal coils through which the route knotted and twisted for the next day and a half was a sombre experience. The Casse Deserte and Terre Rouge on the Izoard; a peak called Crève Tête – Punctured Head – en route to the Tour’s penultimate hors catégorie climb, the col de la Madeleine. It was a cast list that spoke eloquently of the coming challenges, and what it said most clearly was, Don’t fuck with us, bike-boy.

  But the weather was glorious again, and because in both spiritual and alimentary terms I had nothing left to lose I rolled off into another blindingly bright Alpine day with a light heart and a sprightliness of bearing. Where before the sight of huge Flintstone boulders marooned at the foot of a mountain would have unsettled me, I now thought: I wish I’d seen that one fall. Fir trees leaned out from the gorge flanks, tilted at terrifyingly oblique angles towards the omnipotent torrent at the bottom but still clinging to life. ‘No, no, we’re all right,’ they said to me. ‘It looks bad, but you’d be surprised what you can get used to.’ Indeed so. I kept my shades on through the dripping tunnels, oddly exhilarated as I negotiated them blind, and successfully stifled a retch of panic when the road forked,
and there, neatly curtained by the vertical stone flanks around me, stood the preposterous 3,000-metre serrations of the Izoard’s next-door neighbours.

  Unable to take these seriously as sensible adversaries for a bloke on a bike, I fairly whistled up the straight but steepening D902 into Arvieux, last stop before the end of the earth. Here I refuelled sensibly: two Mars Bars with banana chasers from the village shop just as it closed for elevenses, then a gulp from a bidon which eloquently explained why chlorine has never caught on as a fruit-juice preservative. ‘Il fait chaud,’ remarked the shopkeeper, locking up as I swigged reluctantly on her threshold. ‘Bon courage.’

  This close, the really high stuff was hidden by foothills, which at least stopped me losing heart before the first hairpin. Even so, it was a brutal 4k up to that, a no-nonsense direct ascent through more scrappy, dandelioned pasture divided by the odd creaking chairlift. I’d noticed a lot of verge-side glints, and on dismounting to inspect the source I found myself examining one of several dozen foil pouches. Neither a condom nor a complimentary toiletry, ‘Speedy Gel’ was, or had been, a ‘concentrated energy product’. The amateurs tackling the Izoard – wherever they’d got to today – did so to emulate their heroes, on look-alike bikes in look-alike strips; I supposed that by squeezing a covert sachet of glucose and amino acids into their mouths they somehow felt they were taking look-alike drugs. Oh, the shallow, deluded imbeciles, I thought, wondering where I could buy some from.

  The road curled up and into the trees. It got steeper, which was bad, but cooler, which was good. I clicked into twenty-six and got on with it. The eye-stinging sweat came on tap, luring flies which could only be dispatched with energy-sapping flails, and there was a new twurrrrr counterpointing the drrr-thwicks, no doubt something to do with a screw that hadn’t been there when I’d tried to adjust the dérailleurs that morning.

  Soon I couldn’t flob without following up with a drowning-man gasp as I tried to suck back that single missed breath. I desperately wanted to click down to twenty-seven but tried everything to avoid doing so, experimenting with the ankle flick that had carried me halfway up the Aubisque until my Achilles tendons sang, then hitting upon the brilliant scheme of going as slowly as possible without quite falling over. No one was going up but there were plenty now going down, and I was surprised to find I had the wherewithal to greet these in the accepted fashion: clicking up a couple of gears as you heard them approach, lifting three fingers in nonchalant greeting and attempting to bully that distraught grimace into a casual vista-surveying gaze.

  Fifteen minutes later the casual gaze was beyond me; the best I could manage now was the ruby-faced preoccupation of a constipated toddler. But I was still holding it together when I gritted round a corner lined with parked cars and rolled up to the surface of Mars. The Casse Deserte: a devil’s quarry of singed scree and rubble, a vulgar, lifeless panorama of rusted ballast. Behind me it was all chalets and Christmas trees; I had just crossed from the Sound of Music to the Sound of Silence.

  Crouching by every other opened boot was a slightly old, slightly fat man assembling an immaculate bicycle, off to tame the Casse Deserte. From here the road surface was smooth and fresh, a black beauty that swept down then across and finally weaved up through the stacks of rubble like a thread stitching the fragile mountain together. One of a pair of grey-haired chaps nodded in restrained comradely greeting as he locked up a Turin-registered Fiat estate and prepared to hoick a tanned leg over a polished silver crossbar; I nodded back and mimed a request for photographic assistance. The elder of the two, he soberly complied, capturing me as I solemnly surveyed the bleak backdrop, and we got into something approaching conversation.

  ‘Torino?’ I panted, and as he slowly nodded I detected an arresting resemblance, from the all-black strip to the well-groomed moustache and stringy, gnarled physique, to Lee Van Cleef in his role as The Bad. What made this particularly compelling was that his colleague, all shifty, stunted mania and overripe nose, paid alarming visual homage to whoever it was who played The Ugly.

  I nodded as The Bad explained, in measured, baritone French that may have been worse than mine, that the Giro – the Tour of Italy – had crossed the Izoard just the day before (like the Tour, it regularly probes into neighbouring countries). He was here with his friend – this prompted a weaselly wink from The Ugly – and together they’d watched the Giro sweat slowly past. Last night they’d slept in his car, and … ‘Maintenant … maintenant …’ He turned to face the toxic slopes behind, nodding slowly at them as he searched for a word to encompass their loathsome bleakness, and having failed to do so sank into a low chuckle.

  ‘Fausto Coppi,’ blurted The Ugly in an unexpectedly camp squeak. ‘Gino Bartali,’ murmured his friend, crossing his black chest and glancing up at an azure sky now mercifully dabbed with clouds. ‘Tom Simpson,’ I said, and never having done so in earnest crossed myself with such dramatic vigour that the undone jersey zip was snagged into the flesh of my craw just below the Adam’s apple.

  I’ve had a pretty good run with zips over the years, and plucking tentatively at the trapped skin I accepted it could have been a lot worse. My brother once travelled home from Paris on a coach next to a young man wearing the ghostly mien of recent bereavement, and whose agonised under-coat lap probings implied virological fallout from a drunken indelicacy at the wake. Only when they stopped at Calais did he tug bleakly at my brother’s arm and, with self-revulsion wobbling over his blanched features, silently raise the coat to reveal a complicated enmeshment of metal teeth and intimate flesh. A moment of complacency at the urinal was all it had taken to bring about this grisly spectacle, but what could my brother now do to remedy it? Following Princess Diana’s death we are all aware of France’s ‘Good Samaritan’ law that compels passers-by to assist at the scene of an accident. This, though, was long before that, so history should not be too hard on my brother for striding away up the aisle with a disgusted glare, having elected to interpret the situation as an obscure act of indecency, albeit one whose questionable erogenous dividends had left the perpetrator six budgies short of an Oscar Plattner.

  My brother is a decent man who may still feel a lingering burden of guilt recalling this incident, but I am here to urge him to banish any such feelings. When he hears of the brief but intense masculine manipulation I endured in the back seat of that Fiat, and in particular of an exotic finale involving the carefree application of sun-melted butter, he can only have cause to rejoice at his course of action.

  Still, when it’s only your Adam’s apple that’s being greased up, a bond of sorts forms, and when lubricants had been dabbed away daintily – both appliers claimed to have worked in hospitals during their military service – we rolled off together across the orange crush, ZR and I sandwiched between The Bad and The Ugly. Down the slope, round the next corner – I was quite looking forward to seeing how I’d cope against them when the road started to rise again for the last, long haul to the top.

  ‘Ecco là,’ yelped The Ugly from behind; ‘Ici!’ boomed The Bad from in front. The Bad slowed and pulled over, I uncleated in confusion, stopped behind him and looked about in bewilderment. ‘Here?’

  ‘Si … ’ere. Voilà.’

  I looked to the left; set high into a rock was a modest plaque. ‘Coppi e Bobet,’ said The Bad, paraphrasing the inscription that paid tribute to the two Fifties’ legends and a monumental battle they had fought over here in 1951. ‘In Giro,’ piped The Ugly mischievously, ‘no in Tour.’ There was a long silence here, during which I began to get restless and The Bad began to cry. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the tear lodge in a crow’s foot before running down a brown cheek, and The Ugly must have seen it too, because he clicked up the top of his bidon, raised it at the plaque and chirped, ‘Fausto Coppi.’ He then took a nip of what, judging by the alarmed exhalation he delivered following its ingestion, was probably not a soft drink; having been offered and having accepted a throat-torching memorial tot of my own, I can report
that it was in fact the very hardest drink I have ever successfully swallowed. ‘A la Tour,’ I wheezed, commemorating once more the Tower. ‘Al Giro,’ reciprocated The Ugly, taking another formidable swig.

  As pilgrimages go, theirs was a brief one. After an awkward wait I slung a leg over ZR, mumbled some attention-attracting sound and nodded queryingly up the mountain; The Ugly wrinkled his considerable nose and shimmied a hand in polite rejection. We shook hands, I dabbed a digit at my tender neck flesh with an awkward ‘Grazie’ and then, leaving them nodding and sighing in the cool shadow of the stele, gingerly proceeded. Onward and upwards.

  This last stretch of plaited hairpins and scorched earth was where the Italian fans had gathered for yesterday’s stage. Pink pages of the Gazzetta dello Sport flapped limply at the edge of the road, occasionally wedged under empty litre bottles of Moretti beer, the Tyrolean-hatted fat man on the label beaming at me through his stein-froth. They’ve never needed a Seventies revival in Italy: along with fare-dodging, drink-driving and sexual molestation, littering is just another in the nation’s impressive roll-call of lingering period pastimes.