Gironimo! Page 18

  Just before seven rain began to spot the tarmac; Paul stopped and at length I caught him up. We got the map out and somebody (clue: not Paul) raised the possibility of spending the night at Paul’s villa, now just half an hour’s ride away, on a route that had the advantage of passing through the village of Bastardo. But somebody else had an agenda that looked beyond a free bed, and we shortly found ourselves riding into the delightful if rather lofty town of Montefalco.

  Paul had been there before and made a beeline towards the central piazza, a compact hexagon of arched loveliness. ‘This place is supposed to be superb,’ he said once we’d dismounted, and with something close to horror I saw that the square’s fanciest palazzo was a hotel, towards which Paul was now striding. Flaming torches guarded an extravagantly proportioned entrance, and through the glazed loggia of its attached restaurant I could see sleekly groomed guests perched on the kind of stupid-looking designer chairs that never cost less than a grand a pop: this gaff made my Città della Pieve blowout hotel look like a condemned Travelodge.

  Paul slipped through the panelled doors just as I was about to shout out my taxable income, and emerged moments before I enacted plan B: skipping inside with my jersey off and introducing myself to the reception staff through the medium of the power-yodel.

  ‘Can you believe it? No rooms on a Wednesday night in September.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I said, tucking my jersey back in.

  We found a hotel down one of the steep little streets leading up to the square. Paul judged the rooms dismal and poky, and rather than tell him I’d slept in worse every night but the one before I tutted my world-weary assent. To be fair, it was good to be saved from myself for once: left to my own grimy devices I’d have rooted out yet another back-street pizzeria, instead of washing down inch-thick Fiorentina steaks with local reds from the wine list’s deep end.

  Paul toasted my achievement to date, I toasted his most welcome arrival, and together we toasted Lauro Bordin, who had slogged past Montefalco with his lead on the wane. Bordin had by then been out on his own for an extraordinary 280km, inspiring Paolo Facchinetti into a philosophical exploration of the loneliness of the long-distance cyclist.

  ‘What thoughts sustain a rider in these moments?’ declaimed Paul, after I asked him to translate the relevant passage in the bar we’d repaired to for after-dinner refreshment. ‘His home, his family, the financial reward of this enterprise, his friends, personal pride . . .’ Here Paul stopped to drain his beer and allow us both to dwell on this motivational roll-call. ‘Lauro Bordin, a lively and, er, something or other young man of twenty-four let all these thoughts and more slide through his mind. When they’d passed, he was left with an empty head and heavy legs.’

  Paul restrained a belch; I didn’t. ‘I don’t want to spoil the suspense,’ he said, ‘but from that I’m guessing old Lauro doesn’t make it.’

  It was past midnight – a first – when I fumbled off my bedside light. Too soon afterwards I threw open my shutters with regrettable gusto: the skies had cleared in the night, and a faceful of blinding sun sent the hangover pixies scurrying about in my head, clashing their stupid little cymbals as they went. It was a relief of sorts to open the map over my breakfast table and learn that we would imminently be climbing a bona fide mountain: I knew from previous experience that no hangover is a match for drawn-out, shuddering exhaustion. I thoughtfully strove to communicate this phenomenon to Paul when he appeared looking unusually pallid. ‘It’s all about playing one pain off against the other,’ I explained, running my finger up the cartographic contours of Monte Bibico. ‘Like, I dunno, staving off hunger pangs by punching yourself in the face.’

  Paul considered this briefly, then extracted a very large adjustable wrench from his panniers and slammed it down by my cappuccino.

  ‘Ah!’

  I bullied my features into an approximation of gratitude, abruptly remembering that I’d texted Paul a desperate request for such a tool some days previously. Recall was however far from total: I had absolutely no idea why.

  By the time I was pushing the bike out of the hotel’s store room I had decided it must surely be something to do with the bottom bracket, whose multi-layered sonic output had been entertaining Paul almost as much as my hopalong manner of progress. I put my face down to my movimento centrale and wondered how to usefully apply this great leaden implement to it. Of course! In homage to the sneering Luccan I brought its business end hard down on my cotters, dispatching a crescendo of blacksmith clangs that echoed away down Montefalco’s narrow walls.

  Paul reappeared as I dealt the final blow, swaying red-faced over Number 7 with a wrench in my whitened fist, every inch the recidivist bike-beater. He could have very reasonably asked me what the flaming arse I was doing, or suggested that I might more sensibly have asked him to bring a hammer along. Instead, he stooped down to the cobbles, picked up something extremely small and offered it to me in an open hand.

  I recognised it at once: one of the five tiny bolts that secured my right-hand pedal crank to the chain wheel, evidently shaken free during the assault.

  ‘Jesus shitting Krankies,’ I gasped by way of thanks. ‘That is an extremely vital component.’

  The likelihood of sourcing replacements for century-old precision hardware had seemed so remote that I’d brought along a baby 7mm spanner expressly to keep this crucial quintet safely tightened. I retrieved it now from the ancient toolbag slung from my crossbar, then crouched down to reinsert the errant bolt. An interesting revelation awaited: another two of his hex-headed friends were already absent.

  My commitment to routine maintenance, never exactly fanatical, had over recent mornings ebbed away to a token squeeze of the tyres. What a hopeless fanny I was. It seemed remarkable that the Hirondelle remained rideable with this most fundamental assemblage thus compromised, but Paul’s prognosis was inarguable: lose one more of those bolts and I was shafted. I screwed home the survivors as tight as I dared, and then a little tighter.

  I followed Paul out of Montefalco at a distance, piloting the Hirondelle with exaggerated caution, as if it was made of lolly sticks. We stopped at Spoleto for elevenses, an appealing labyrinth of twisty old streets. Dabbing focaccia crumbs off my face in the shadow of a Romanesque church, I contemplated the bicycle’s clear superiority as a conveyance for urban sightseeing: no parking woes, no mirror-scraping alleyway ordeals, and here in Italy no obligation to obey one-way signs or traffic lights. It was only after a second coffee, and a lingering survey of the medieval aqueduct recalled by Paul from a previous visit, that I sensed the danger: we were beginning to potter.

  The following six hours yanked us brutally free from the embrace of ruminative, point-and-click cyclo-tourism. Bordin’s twenty-five-minute lead at Spoleto was briskly diminished, and as soon as we left the town we found out why. Long before the turn-off to Monte Bibico we were working hard up a remorseless incline; the sun was out and rumbling columns of HGVs strafed us with humid diesel. Our appointed side-road offered smoke-free silence, at the cost of baked perpendicular torment. The sun lasered down and the gradient ramped up, swiftly reaching a pitch more monstrous than anything I’d tackled since Sestriere.

  Looking back at me down the wandering, cracked tarmac, Paul captured my grovelling misery in a series of photographs: front wheel pointed this way then that, woollen shoulders rolling, wet red face caught in a rictus of slow-mo agony and half-formed Paul-centric verbal abuse. The rearing backdrop of pine and granite is probably magnificent, like I gave a shit.

  So it went on, nothing but heat, pain and the odd derelict road-worker’s house. Goal-oriented Paul was manifestly champing at the bit, the sprightly, multi-geared bastard, and in the end I rasped at him to go on ahead and orient his goal, or words to that effect. Watching him disappear at speed round the next hairpin I felt miserably defeated, like a team leader who cracks on a big climb and has to let his top domestique, in Giro-speak his gregario de lusso, off the leash to grab the glory.
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  Ruddle’s away up the road and Moore is in all sorts of trouble, Sean – are we seeing a changing of the guard here? Sean?

  Yes, um, well, he looks to be, uh, majorly suffering here.

  After an hour spent mastering The Wobble in its purest, most ignoble form, I found Paul wandering amongst the clutch of slit-windowed farmhouse-forts that was the village of Montebibico. We were now at 840m, atop a big mountain girdled by even bigger ones. ‘Are you sure we’re supposed to be here?’ he said. ‘The road just seems to peter out.’

  When I’d drained my least warm bidon and got my breath back I told him that couldn’t be right: this section of the route was admittedly poorly detailed and abysmally charted, but as a result I’d spent an entire afternoon Google-mapping it back at home. There was definitely a way down the other side of the mountain, and we would find it.

  Ten minutes of listless shambling turned up nothing more helpful than the only man in Montebibico, a vest-wearing ancient asleep in a camping chair by his back door. Needs must: I roused him with a furious reveille on my bell. He gripped the arms of his seat and looked at me in bleary panic, as if I was a ghost from his youth come to pay him back for Nazi collaboration or scrumping my olives.

  ‘Terni?’ I asked, the next big town along our route. The old man blinked himself properly awake, looked at our bicycles and pointed at the road we’d just come up. Paul explained to him that his friend here reckoned there was a way through down the other side of the mountain. Definitely.

  ‘Per bici?’ His prolonged cackle begat a phlegm-raising cough. After much waggling of raised palms and sucking through pursed lips, he jabbed a thumb at an unkempt garden path that to my mind – and more importantly to Paul’s – seemed to head at least two full compass points away from the desired direction.

  We thanked him and pushed our bikes towards the path. It was a scratchy strada bianca that sported a mohican of calf-high weeds, and wandered away through a desolate vista of sun-bleached crags topped with derelict, windowless hamlets.

  ‘What does your sat-nav say?’

  I wiped speckles of chin-sweat off the screen: the blue cursor showed our current position in the centre of a big, white roadless void. ‘Er, “Don’t look at me, mate, this was your stupid idea.”’

  It was gone two and scorching; we had no food and very little water. The only sensible option was to return to the main road, and follow that round to Terni as per the old man’s initial suggestion. But a pathological abhorrence of retracing steps is a core male weakness, and after a mutual shrug, we wordlessly remounted and scrunched away down the threadbare, fallow gravel.

  I am unlikely to forget the afternoon that now unfolded. Given the choice I’d restrict my memories to the wonderful first half-hour, during which I exploited my recent white-road experience to leave Paul eating beige dust. Then the trees closed in and the path began to disappear under crispy drifts of last autumn’s leaves, and presently we found ourselves inching cautiously through long-forgotten highlands. Wheel to trembling wheel we passed listing, rust-streaked signs to dead villages, a Chernobyl playground reclaimed by nature, the flyblown corpse of a porcupine. It was a relief of sorts to round a corner and encounter a large brown dog standing by the path. But in place of the habitual bark-fest and rabid pursuit, it just tilted its head curiously at us, as if thinking: What strange furless creatures are these?

  Hunger, heatstroke and reedy panic were all well entrenched by the time the track rounded a further mountain and at last began to head in an approximation of the right way. Then there was a house with a roof, another with a front door, and an actual moving car with an actual living man in it. Gravel turned to patchy asphalt, pointed downhill at a valley joyously alive with traffic and the evidence of human cultivation: I aimed a parched roar at the cloudless sky and tipped my entire water supply over my head.

  It was a straight descent, and I rattled down it very much faster than my surviving chain-ring bolts would probably have wanted me to. When the road flattened out Paul and I trundled along side by side, compiling a joint wishlist of the condensation-beaded refreshments we would shortly be enjoying. But events then took a very regrettable turn for the worse; indeed several of them, each one uphill and away from the developed world.

  We weren’t side by side for much longer. Rivulets of sweat gathered along the brim of my cap and dripped onto my cramp-shot thighs. Active settlements gave way to abandoned hovels and pre-war commercial vehicles with trees growing through their roofs. With the brow in sight I made a last stand in the saddle, a creaking tangle of shiny limbs.

  And Moore is all over his machine now, yammered my inner Paul Sherwen. He’s turning himself inside out here, Phil, just hoping to drag his body up to the summit.

  I got there and found it was merely a starter summit, the warm-up act for a much loftier crest that the distant figure of Paul was steadily ascending. Biddle-ip! Once more I suffered the taunting bleat my sat-nav issued whenever I got off to push: the sound of failure, rubbed in with a dread on-screen legend, ‘Movement not detected’. What a disgraceful, repulsive spectacle this is, Phil. We’re watching professional road-race cycling die right here before our very eyes.

  An eternity of shrivelled shuffling took me back up to 800m, almost as high as we’d been at Monte Bibico. At least when I caught up with Paul I was back on the bike, kind of: not so much in the saddle as draped over it, like a dead cowboy brought into town across the back of a horse. It took me a while to register that the scabrous whitewashed structure sheltering Paul from the sun was an ancient communal laundry, servicing the shuttered hamlet behind. There was a packet of Omo next to its mossy trough, and a brass faucet decorously styled as a dragon’s head, which was soon vomiting cold water all over my scalp. Then I drank and drank and burped and drank and hoped Paul couldn’t distinguish dragon-water from tears of relief.

  On any other day, the 40km that followed would have seemed a terrifying ordeal. As it was we breezed gaily from one near disaster to the next, feeding off the immortal insouciance that is the legacy of miraculous survival. Ha, ha: look at us, skittering down a strip of vertical gravel with barbed wire an inch from our elbows! Who’s this heaving their bikes over a railway fence, then shouldering them across the main-line tracks behind? That’s right: it’s us! Hey – and here we are again, racing teenage drivers at 50kmh along the rim of a bottomless gorge! Oooh: they’re overtaking us on a blind corner! And now we’re going at 60 and – wheee! – edging helplessly over onto the wrong side of the bends and buddying up to Mr Oncoming Traffic.

  We’d intended to call it a day at Terni, but it proved an undistinguished and surprisingly industrial place, with a steelworks and everything. Not a fitting location, we agreed, for what was to be (gulp, sigh) our final night together. After a rather irresponsible slalom through Terni’s busy pedestrian zone – oops, scusi, signora – we were swept out of town into the early-evening traffic. Paul shouted a suggestion as we sped along the hard shoulder of a long, flat road full of Fiats: ‘Not far to Narni. Every time I drive past on the motorway it looks so lovely, perched up there on its cliff.’ Up there on its what, now? But with my brain no longer up to formulating an argument I pedalled automatically on.

  I’d been in my ladies’ gear for days now, and trying to hang on in Paul’s slipstream meant spinning the pedals like a pilled-up dervish. After a while he looked round, so briskly I didn’t have time to slip on a mask of effortless nonchalance. ‘Everything OK?’

  Taking a loud oxygen break between syllables, I suggested that perhaps we might take the pace down a notch or two. ‘Got to, you know, marshal my reserves.’ Paul nodded, slowed, and let me slip past to set my own speed.

  I settled into an easy rhythm, watching Narni take gradual shape atop a rearing promontory ahead of us. After a while I looked down and saw Paul’s shadow looming right behind me, indeed overlapping my rear wheel. I suddenly thought: Marshal my reserves for what? The sodding afterlife? And with that I gripped the bars and turn
ed my legs so fast, and for so long, it was a surprise to arrive at the foot of Narni’s cliff with only one of them churned to butter. I survived the climb up to the town’s four-square old gates through an old ruse: yes, Paul, I am captivated by that distant view of Terni’s factory chimneys, and I will keep stopping to photograph it.

  We found a pleasingly odd hotel in the heart of the old town, a mismatched trio of tall, thin medieval houses internally connected with bits of left-over Pompidou Centre. Locating my room meant a dilatory blunder up and down cavernous ventilation shafts and corridors carpeted with rubber polka dots, though in fairness locating my arse would have seemed a tall order: we had celebrated survival by pouring two enormous Baffo d’Oro beers into our empty bodies.

  I fell into the shower, almost literally legless, then sat on the tiles for fifteen minutes gurgling random profanities with a tepid dribble breaking over my head. In Paul’s company I had covered 170km in two days – a fair bit less than I’d been averaging alone of late, yet I was utterly, messily shattered. No real mystery: in trying to keep up with a fitter man on a better bike, I’d been drawn into sustained bursts of red-zone effort. Not many of us can muster the will-power to drive ourselves that hard solo, without a colleague or rival to dangle a carrot or brandish a stick. And that’s why not many of us have villas with heated pools, or embark on record-breaking Grand Tour breakaways.

  I took Paolo Facchinetti out to dinner with us – a wise move, as Paul and I would otherwise have had an entire fancy restaurant and three ingratiating waiters all to ourselves. As a pair of these presented us with jus-swirled steaks on square plates, I established the accidental import of our stopover choice: after 350km out on his own, Lauro Bordin had been finally reeled in at Narni.