Gironimo! Read online

  Anyway, that morning I developed a defensive maxim that would do me proud for the rest of my journey: imagine the most selfish and irresponsible thing that any given road-user might feasibly do next, then watch him do it.

  On and on I went, through an endless, grubby hinterland of flooring superstores and near-death experience. It was so hard to get my speed right: going below 18kmh or so was a sign of weakness that saw me bullied into the gutter, above 24 and I had absolutely no hope of avoiding the next Franco Big Bollocks who pulled straight out in front of me. Ding-ding-ding-ding! In two hours I thumbed the bell more than I had over the previous two weeks, but it seemed such a feeble reproach for attempted murder that I then gave up.

  The road surface decayed further, now strewn with so much glass it was as if someone had spent the night throwing chandeliers out of an airship. And all the while those dunes of roadside rubbish grew ever taller, an encroaching moraine of cans and fag packets topped with the stained hulks of discarded furniture, domestic appliances and sanitary-ware. Also: shoes. How does that happen?

  ‘Know what, Carlo, I’ve gone right off your trainers. Do us a favour and chuck them out the window.’

  ‘Can’t it wait until we get home? I don’t fancy braking in bare feet.’

  ‘You don’t fancy what?’

  The scale was so far beyond casual littering that I began to wonder if the locals made a day of it: ‘OK, kids, we’re going fly-tipping today – last one in the car with a massive load of broken crap is a cissy!’ I suppose it’s just another of those unfortunate retro pastimes that some Italians cling on to, like racism and animal circuses.

  The sat-nav beeped me up a side turning and Rome suddenly ended: no cars or shops, and no people once I’d gone through the prostitute belt, an unusually tragic straggle of black girls who vacantly raised their tiny skirts at me as I toiled past. Two hours of hot and increasingly famished loneliness ensued, just me and my booze-water, crawling up hillsides laid waste by a recent wildfire. Half-melted plastic reflector posts sagged over the charred verges like some hellish Dali landscape, and the whiff of barbecued wildlife hung heavy in the air. I was so desperate for calories it made my stomach growl.

  In a world that my under-nourished brain was ceasing to make much sense of, it didn’t seem entirely surprising to pass a completely naked lady beckoning me from the shadows at the back of a lay-by. I gave her a sleepy wave and creaked on, then noticed a familiar cityscape taking unwelcome shape ahead of me: that was Rome, and I’d just gone back in through its tart belt. An addled whimper escaped my cracked lips, followed by a groan of sickening enlightenment. After the sat-nav directed me into Rome on a six-lane motorway the previous day, I had clicked an option that told it to ‘avoid highways’. Its interpretation of this order, now that I troubled myself to look at the map, was an evidently phobic aversion to anything busy, and thus direct. I had been led away into the untrafficked wilds at the earliest opportunity, and kept there without any concern for the wandering build-up of excess mileage.

  The cliff-top imperial resort of Tivoli, when at last I lurched blankly up to it, should have been a 29km ride from my start point; I had covered well over double that. Happily by this time I was deep in a land beyond caring. In a robotic quest for the stuff of life I dropped my bike onto the pavement outside the first open grocery, bought three bars of Milka Extra Cacao and slid down against a wheelie bin in the full glare of the afternoon sun. I fed one sticky slab into my pallid food-hole, then another. At once I felt markedly better; at twice, markedly worse.

  If I’d done what I now did in a Swiss gutter, I’d be writing these words in a secure unit for the criminally repulsive. As it was, the Saturday strollers squeezed past my doubled, retching form without comment. No one even intervened when, after a brisk sluice with diluted industrial alcohol, I sat back down again and ingested the third bar.

  For three strange hours I pedalled beyond nausea and fatigue and into a state of fallow, druggy detachment. The road snaked ever upwards into whatever stretch of the Appenines this was, but instead of working on my hatred for Italy’s horrible, pointy spine I gave a mental shrug and carried on. There was a railway above and a river beneath; in days gone by I’d have desperately willed my road to bind itself to one or the other, the lazy cyclists’ friends with their promise of modest gradient. That afternoon I just didn’t care. Things were so bad that when I came up to a sign welcoming visitors to the town of Arsoli, my brain had to activate its emergency puerility reflex to save me from going past without taking a photo.

  Onwards and upwards I went, through the villages sprinkled atop every big green hill, creaking in and out of the lives of few-toothed rustics keeping their impassive doorstep vigils. Then the landscape opened out into a lofty plateau, and a dramatic cooling of the air began to rouse me from my waking coma. Very gradually, mind: after I stopped at Carsoli, it would be twelve full hours before I appreciated it as the Italian motorist’s spiritual home.

  It was a curious town, a mile-long strip mall of tyre fitters and snack bars that made no sense up here in the mountain-flanked middle of nowhere. Fine by me: at the moment, nothing made sense. Finessing the transatlantic commercial vibe, Carsoli’s final establishment was some kind of budget country-club hotel. I freewheeled to a halt by the empty tennis courts, and stood astride the Hirondelle while my head slowly refilled, mesmerised by the bright yellow balls strewn across the orange clay. I must have looked like Frankenstein’s monster gazing in wonder at his first daisy, just before he drowns that little girl. As I pushed the bike through the reception doors somebody let out a single yowl of drunken laughter: it was me.

  An Alsatian standing guard by the threshold backed silently away at my approach, and before I’d even said anything, the woman at the desk pushed a room key across the Formica with studied deliberation, as if to counteract the urgency with which her other hand was battering a hidden panic button. Having temporarily mislaid my entire Italian vocabulary, I gestured at the Hirondelle and arranged my mouth into what even I could tell was the wrong sort of smile – not so much asking where I might store a bicycle as introducing my teenage mistress. The receptionist’s steady gaze said: ‘Whatever floats your boat, mate. We don’t want any trouble.’ I winked at her and walked the bike straight into the lift.

  Even the generally reliable restorative powers of pizza diavola didn’t make me normal. The restaurant back up the road was another Americanised establishment with bowls of condiment sachets on every table, and surgically overbearing strip-lights that bent me down into a muttering hunch. What a miserable figure I cut amongst the lively Saturday-night families, sagging like a punctured love-doll as I ferried torn wodges of stonebaked dough across the diminishing gap between plate and mouth. When I tried to dress my side salad, the little plastic pillow of olive oil exploded in my clumsy fists. My reaction to this disappointing development caused the family who had just sat down beside me to rise as one and move three tables away.

  What was happening to me? It seemed a week since I’d left Rome that morning: so many sweeping changes of mood and scenery, grumpy tourists, bathing tramps, tarts on a burnt hillside, a gutter of chocolate chunder. I shut my eyes and for a tiny moment sped through every single inch and second of the day in Google StreetView HD, every shard of glass on the blistered tarmac, every death-dealing Fiat, every rasp and squeak and grunt and creak. I blinked my lids open and saw a dozen faces quickly turn away. That and the bead of drool poised to drop from my bottom lip suggested I had just been fast asleep. Had exhaustion and undernourishment driven me into the feral, dead-eyed realm of Fonso la Mort? If so I wanted to get the fuck out of that realm pronto. Definitely out of here, in any case. I slapped an oily hand to my back pocket in search for my wallet. It wasn’t there. And nor indeed was my pocket, because as I now established, looking down at my olive-oiled, chocolate-speckled chest, I had somehow neglected to change out of my kit.

  Eat before you are hungry. It wasn’t the first time I’d fallen
foul of Paul de Vivie’s golden rule of distance cycling, but might have been the most dramatic. The cowboy-shirted restaurant owner was very good about my predicament, nodding sympathetically as I strove to articulate it in the voice of Scooby Doo emerging from general anaesthetic. I stumbled back down the road, lurched into my hotel room and yanked open the Calzolari-embossed frame-bag where my wallet lived. But now didn’t. A deep breath and a systematic search weren’t options that interested me; with unhinged Godzilla abandon, I bestrewed the room with worldly goods and a ticker-tape parade of receipts. I was about to thrash the Hirondelle until it talked when a shapeless snatch of semi-memory caused me to pull open the front pocket of my jersey. The wallet had been there all along. Having returned to the restaurant to pay, I strode back through the sharp night with calm purpose: I was going to punch myself to death.

  * * *

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION – STAGE 3

  (Lucca–Rome, 430.3km)

  Alfonso CALZOLARI 49:33:01

  Constante GIRARDENGO + 55:07

  Enrico SALA +1:34:49

  Timothy MOORE +23:12:50

  Stage starters: 27

  Stage finishers: 26

  CHAPTER 15

  STAGE FOUR ROLLED out of Rome before a larger crowd than one might reasonably expect at 2.24 a.m.: the citizenry had a local hero to cheer, Calzolari’s Stucchi teammate Dario Beni. In other circumstances Beni wouldn’t have turned up at the start, after suffering multiple fractures in a horrible fall towards the end of the previous stage. As it was, he acknowledged the cheers, pedalled grittily round the corner and promptly retired. There were now just twenty-five riders left, with the Stucchi squad down to its last two: in Paolo’s words, ‘one half-crippled and the other visibly shattered’. Fonso was the invalid, forcing that shrieking knee through every revolution, and Clemente Canepari the frail ghost. Paolo describes Canepari as ‘a tiny man with long limbs, like a spider on a bike’, who had started the Giro as Stucchi’s de facto number one, but was now two hours off the pace, struggling grimly on in support of the unlikely race leader.

  It was a comfort of sorts to discover that Alfonso had suffered his own blighting misfortunes at Tivoli. Halfway up Choc-Vom Hill, pitch darkness and a huge logjam of Rome-bound horse-wagons caused such havoc that Fonso and the other leaders blundered off the road to outflank it, shouldering their bikes through steep undergrowth. With the race almost half-run, the bigger teams were now ready to try anything to reel in the upstart Stucchi rider, and after staggering back out onto the route, Calzolari had to watch his rivals pedal away: at some point in their off-piste diversion, he now discovered, one of the riders behind had stuck a tack in his rear tyre. As Fonso later told Paolo Facchinetti, the one thing you didn’t expect with your bike on your back was a puncture.

  The faithful Canepari helped him with the tyre change, but it was eight long minutes before he got back on the road. Profiting from a race leader’s mechanical misfortune is frowned upon today, but having caused that misfortune Calzolari’s rivals were hardly about to take pity. At once the Bianchi boys steamed off into the night. The box of dirty tricks was open, and from now on Fonso would be having his head slammed in its lid for day after bitter day.

  I pushed the Hirondelle out into a gorgeous country-club morning: the taut ber-dung of yellow ball on fat man’s racquet, a sliced drive launched across the crisp, azure sky. A mile up the sunny road I passed through Carsoli proper, a pleasant stack of old buildings with plenty of spare room for all the tyre-fitters and pizza restaurants laid along its hideous introductory drag. My thoughts on this and the many similar mysteries of urban planning I encountered as I continued southwards are collated in a companion publication, The Hopelessly Corrupt Application of Regional Development Grants.

  A cock crowed, a bike creaked, the road turned a corner and squared up to the squat green bulk of Monte Bove. It was a whopper, a climb that nearly did for Calzolari: he succumbed to ‘a crisis of cold’ that saw him crawl over the summit twenty minutes behind the Bianchis. Even in embarrassingly superior weather it made a stiff challenge, or should have. My eyes kept trying to tell my brain that these winding curves were steep beyond reason, but my legs would have none of it: objection overruled. Instead, I busted out the hotel biscuits, took a throat-bobbing glug of tepid alco-bilge and powered on up the silent Sunday tarmac, taking the high-line through the hairpins and breathing smoothly. Moore’s found something special here, Phil. He’s back in the game! Oh, the enduring enigma of good form. Or perhaps there was no great secret after all: I simply had to spend every afternoon starving myself and doing big brown yawns in the gutter.

  In an hour I climbed almost 2,000ft, and when I did get off it was only to take a snap of the blue-misted valleys beneath. The village of Montebove, clinging to a precipice below the head of the pass, was the most stubbornly ancient timewarp yet, a corridor of cockeyed masonry so narrow that the balconies on one side almost grazed the eaves on the other. A radio-broadcast Sunday mass droned through shutters that had kept out the odd couple of hundred winters, and the only face in town belonged to an extremely old man in Harold Macmillan pinstripes, watching me from his doorstep in the standard inscrutable manner. How was this place less than 50 miles outside the capital city of the world’s eighth largest economy?

  I crested the col – 1,220m, suckers – then plunged into Tagliacozzo, a busy little place full of multicoloured Sunday bikers in both flavours: leather and Lycra. On the pan-flat plateau outside town a steady stream of club pelotons filed past, hailing me with a 50/50 blend of jeers and cheers. The most enthusiastic of the latter was issued by the last rider in a line of six, who then shouted something to his Bike Sport Fortunato colleagues and dropped back to join me.

  He gave the Hirondelle an appreciative once-over through his orange wraparounds, nodding all the while and finishing off with a huge grin and a thumbs-up.

  ‘Giuseppe,’ he said, patting his chest.

  ‘Tim.’

  ‘OK, Jim – andiamo!’

  Let’s go! My new friend stood up in the saddle and beckoned me into his slipstream, then slowly built speed. Soon he was pulling me across the plateau at one hell of a lick, absorbing a fierce headwind that flapped at his jersey sleeves. I inched as close as I dared to Giuseppe’s rear wheel, my face indecently near to those rolling buttocks. For a glorious half-hour the world before me was filled by this tremendous man’s hot lycra and incredibly hairy forearms, which he periodically flapped down to warn me of potholes and draincovers. It felt just like being in a real breakaway – in fact, even better than that, because the one arm-signal I never received was that elbow-flicked command to take my turn at the front.

  Giuseppe sucked me hard into Avezzano, swishing slickly through the busy junctions and roundabouts. What an enjoyable revelation to witness his furious response to motoring negligence: it wasn’t just me, then, things really were that awful. Then he turned his tanned face to mine, said a lot of things in an encouraging tone, and with a final wave swept away down a side-road. I shouted out a heartfelt grazie for those 20 free kilometres, then unerringly steered myself out of Avezzano and onto the one road I’d been trying to avoid, a dual carriageway that pierced a lofty mountain ridge with the busiest, darkest, most petrifying tunnel to date. Part of me died in that deafening, glass-strewn hell, and I could only hope it was the part in charge of navigation.

  Even the right road, when I found it, went wrong: freewheeling down the Liri valley with a gut full of crisps, I almost Starsky & Hutched it straight through a substantial barrier laid across the tarmac. In any other European country, I’d have stopped, booted that no-entry sign right in its fat white slot, shouted terrible things at the cloudless sky and pedalled back up the way I’d come. That’s because in any other European country, round the corner the road would have been blocked by several hundred cubic metres of collapsed hillside, or a smouldering diesel locomotive, or a dozen escaped leopards. But in Italy I figured there was at least an even chance of encounte
ring nothing worse than some knocked-over traffic cones and a long-idle steamroller. I squeezed the Hirondelle through the barrier, slalomed past the drifts of leaves and ran plumb into a pack of shuffling zombies. I’m one of them now, but it’s actually a lot more fun than you might think: we’re off to a water-park next weekend. I’m joking, of course! It’s actually a petting zoo.

  Having negotiated the predicted scatter of recumbent cones I rattled up to 60kmh, using the full width of the vacant downhill tarmac and restricting myself to snatched glances of the heat-hazed valley beside. I should have known better than to expect a matching barrier at the other end of the closed section: I only gathered the road was now an open one when I leaned through a left-hander on the British side of the white line and found myself sharing five foot of road with an oncoming coach. In a reflexive act of perverse brilliance I leaned further left and swept past him on the inside; the driver didn’t even have time to blast his horn, which must have upset him for the rest of the day. I had cheated death, but careering through flyblown villages the episode swiftly faded: it was as if sheer speed was fast-tracking the flash-frame present into a distant past.

  I stopped at Sora for my first gelato of the trip – I had been denying myself the world’s finest ice cream as a stand against The Holiday Tendency – then enjoyed a steady and uneventful ride through an almost continuous straggle of low-density towns. Boredom set in amongst the mid-rise apartment blocks, and how I savoured it: the luxury of an empty mind no longer crammed with pain and hunger. For the first time, now that it could make itself heard above more strident complaints, my bottom started to make a bit of a fuss. Extraordinary to think it had held out this far, having straddled a leather house-brick for 1,600km. Why couldn’t my legs and lungs take a leaf out of my arse’s book? It’s quite the page-turner.