Gironimo! Read online

  Frosinone was my destination, and after the usual hill-top finale I made it just before 6 p.m. A good day: 125km, my overall average speed up from 16.4kmh to 16.7, and just the one dalliance with instant death – OK, just the nine if we include that tunnel. I was well off the tourist track now, wheeling the Hirondelle through empty squares crammed with church towers and carpeted in the day’s confetti, up steepling alleys bridged by archways, past a massive municipal building of Fascist aspect, sneering down at the villages sprawled across the plain beneath. So sharply pitched was old Frosinone that my hotel’s rear-facing basement garage, the Hirondelle’s overnight home, opened onto a street 50ft below the one that passed its front door.

  After remembering to change, I hit the empty Sunday streets, and round on the southwestern face of Frosinone’s rearing hilltop located what appeared to be its only restaurant. The outside tables had upside-down chairs on them and all the lights were off, but the door was open and I sidled tentatively in. Calorific desperation lured me towards a dim pool of light at the foot of a staircase; I pushed open a door and found myself sharing a basement with an elderly chef in bottle-bottom glasses, a roaring wood-fired pizza furnace and a tiny, flour-dusted baby asleep in a travel cot beneath a marble work-slab. The old boy was working dough with the showy air of a street-juggler, rolling it, spinning it skywards, slapping it back down on the marble. A shelf by the oven’s chimney was stacked with trophies and with a surge of glee I knew I was now truly in the south of Italy, where the pizza was born and where the pursuit of its perfection is a competitive culinary sport.

  A waitress appeared, ushered me back up into the street, switched the lights on and readied a table. She disappeared without taking my order, then briskly reappeared with a carafe of red, a plate of bruschetta and a smile. This was shortly supplemented with the most toothsome roundel I have folded into my gob: never has an old man’s blistered crust tasted so good.

  I imagined I was having as great a time as you could on a Sunday night in Frosinone, but I was wrong, because in fifteen mad minutes the whole town burst into life like one of those fast-forward, stop-motion film sequences. Three jolly couples commandeered the table next to mine, followed almost at once by a dozen more. The sun went down and a billion lights came on, strung in rows between the palm trees that lined the promenade before me, pulsing in gaudy neon above previously dormant gelaterias and bars, winking out in great constellations across the darkening plain below. The road was abruptly filled with youthmobiles pumping out endearingly improbable tunes – The Lion King’s ‘Circle of Life’ fed through an earth-shaking subwoofer – and in a blink the pavements were aswarm with loud and happy people. I drained my carafe, paid the trifling bill and inveigled myself into the throng, in thrall once more to Italy’s wonderful civic togetherness, its irrepressible urge to do everything en masse and in sync. For an Englishman it was a heady spectacle. For a Londoner, an almost bewilderingly alien one.

  I filed along with the gesticulating gelato-lickers, window-shopping in the land that made it an art. On a Sunday night, the only shop open was the only one I needed: a pharmacy, which I walked into to buy a new deodorant and hone that fantasy of my future life as a small-town Italian chemist. It would certainly be a well-remunerated career: I came out with a roll-on that fulfilled my only stated requirement – saddlebag-ready tininess – at the armpit-watering cost of €14, a euro more than I’d just paid for a huge meal and slightly too much wine. The senior white-coat explained in commendable English that this revolutionary product was to be applied before going to bed, once every four days. Sadly he failed to explain that it didn’t work, at all. It would have been cheaper just to pay off people who complained about the smell.

  While getting pleasantly lost on the way back to the hotel I paused above a public space that at 10.15 p.m. was still crowded with Frosinonians of every age. Unsupervised toddlers were climbing all over the war memorial at one end, cheerfully ignored by elder siblings playing twenty-eight-a-side unisex football, and parents gathered convivially outside the distant opposite bar. The twinkling flatness beyond Frosinone was now fringed with moonlit hillsides, and as I stood there a garish firework display burst forth from some distant settlement. I leaned on the low wall before me, breathing in the scene and lungfuls of warm dusk, feeling very good about what I’d done, where I was and my future progress southwards to the insole of that Italian boot. Then I levered myself upright and found that some joker had switched my legs for concrete bollards. What a strange state I’d ridden myself into, nonchalantly racking up 120 big ones in the saddle, then reduced to a knee-less cripple by half a mile of urban ambling.

  Two riders, Giuseppe Azzini of Bianchi and Globo’s Pierino Albini, were way out in front when the 1914 Giro crawled up to Frosinone. Calzolari was now almost half an hour back, behind another pair of Bianchis, having suffered a further act of sabotage while signing in at the Avezzano checkpoint: a pin-jabber amongst the crowd of fans, mechanics and journalists dealt him another sly puncture. ‘Someone with large interests at stake did not want Calzolari to win the Giro!’ was Paolo’s uncontroversial conclusion. That someone can only have been Bianchi, as no other team had a rider in reach of the lead; Maino’s Girardengo, having started the day second, cracked horribly on the way up Monte Bove and would end the stage almost three hours in arrears.

  Still, this compared favourably with the four days that was my standard deficit by the end of each stage. I had of late developed a keen interest in covering a full leg of the 1914 Giro in a day less: the Hirondelle and I were hitting our stride, and 400km over three days now seemed within our compass. I laid out my map across yet another deserted breakfast room and realised it wouldn’t be this stage. Frosinone sat almost smack in the centrefold of a region I’d been inching across for half a week, but the next town Paolo referenced – not even the stage finish – was nowhere to be seen.

  Going south gave summer a new lease of life. It was 34 degrees by 10.30, so cloyingly hot that even the lizards grew sluggish: I saw a wiry ginger cat trap one under its paws, looking a little freaked out by this unexpected triumph – crap, now what? The terrain was manageable, but keeping cool meant keeping the speed up. When I slowed down, the breeze died away and a fat blanket of heat was thrown over my shoulders. When I stopped, sweat pooled into every cleft. Only my deceased privates were immune to the conditions, and trundling between the palm-studded vineyards I hummed my way through their funeral playlist: ‘Uncomfortably Numb’; ‘Where Did You Go To, My Lovelies?’; ‘Cock ’n’ Balls Suicide’; ‘Eunuch City Blues’. These days I contemplated their demise with no more than wistful stoicism. I had three kids; maybe their work here was done. Sorry, boys. Let’s remember the good times.

  I stopped to refuel at a small-town grocery, run by another of those motherly signoras. When I put a litre of Coke on the counter and pointed at her pastry cabinet, she waggled a chubby finger and gave me an ‘oh, honestly’ look. The Coke was wordlessly returned to the fridge and replaced by two bottles of beige vegetable juice, along with a packet of quarry tiles. ‘Biscotti biologici,’ she clucked, making a strongman gesture and ringing up €6.45 on the till. I laughed helplessly, paid up and ingested the cardboard slurry on the bench outside. Why couldn’t I have puked up this pointless rubbish instead of all those lovely chocolate calories?

  The afternoon heat was crushing, and my surroundings sombre to the point of eeriness. Villages were full of neglected shacks and every other farmhouse was roofless. I even passed the odd ruined church, which seemed pretty hardcore for rural Catholics. Full-blown, huddled-masses emigration from these parts – to the north of Italy, to the north of Europe, to the States and beyond – continued into the 1960s, and the region remains mired in terrible poverty. If southern Italy was a separate country, it would be by some distance the poorest in Europe.

  Almost inevitably, no other part of the nation suffered more brutally in the war. Passing below Monte Cassino in the dog-day sun, I stopped at a military cemete
ry, one of many honouring the 55,000 Allied troops who died along the eponymous brown ridge above. As a wide-eyed twelve-year-old, my father witnessed the lingering aftermath from the back seat of the US Army Jeep that was his family’s runabout; two years after the war ended, the roads here were still lined with dead Germans, buried under mounds of earth topped with their battered helmets. I wandered leadenly through the cemetery’s display of period military hardware; the tanks and field guns were too hot to touch, though I stopped trying after reading a multi-lingual warning about ‘the eventual presence of deathly serpents’. Instead, I cooled my brain under a gardener’s standpipe, mustering lethargic sympathy for the attritional slaughter, and for those in the 1914 Giro who would never ride another race, laid to rest in places like this all over Europe.

  I find I’m unable to recall in detail my ensuing ride through the drooping scrub. The photographs I took suggest a wandering mind: amongst the usual shots of risible garden statuary and derelict buildings are a dozen blurred studies of snails ascending the leg of a signpost. Perhaps I saw them as kindred spirits, single-mindedly committed to the slow but steady accumulation of distance. In truth, I embraced the onset of auto-pilot oblivion: with my journey almost half done, cycling all day had at last become routine, no more than a mindless duty. I could slip both feet into the toe-clips at the first attempt, hold my rhythm into a headwind or up a hill, grind out the kilometres with my brain on standby. Sometimes whole hours would pass without me asking aloud whose stupid bloody idea this was.

  After 128km I pedalled up to an enormous building of recent construction, marooned amongst the olive groves and lumber yards. A sign identified it as ‘Hotel The Queen’; I swept in past a moss-rimed water feature and dismounted by the dusty glass doors. After a while they parted with a gritty hiss, and a yawning male receptionist beckoned at me across a vast acreage of white tiling studded with excruciating contemporary artworks. ‘Congressi – Sale Meeting – Business Seminar’ read the banner over his desk, detailing some of the many events that had not and would never take place here. This wasn’t so much a white elephant as a high-gloss, vanilla-lacquered albino mammoth, and as such is included in the previously cited reference work on regional aid (see also: Organised-Crime Tax Losses and Why I’m Too Scared to Do More Than Hint at Them in Print).

  The novelty of having a guest to process aroused the receptionist to great feats of hospitality. He insisted on leading the Hirondelle to its overnight quarters, an unfinished ballroom shared with a cement mixer and a dozen scuttling lizards, and then very splendidly presented me with a large glass of chilled lager. I drained it along the parade of echoing corridors that took me to my room. Once inside I pulled up the blind and beheld the giant cone of Vesuvius, nosing up from the smoggy horizon. How very glad I was that my route would now take me away from that smog, and the horn-happy Neapolitan bike-squashers who were whipping it up. Then I opened the minibar, intending to put my bidons inside overnight as was my recent habit, but not doing so after discovering that it had been left unplugged for some time while full of drinking yoghurt.

  I ate at a truck-stop restaurant up the road, just me and a shifty degenerate who drank a litre of Fanta straight from the bottle (also me). On the way back into The Queen, I stopped to take a snarky photo of its mouldy fountains; suddenly the hotel’s façade was bathed in multicoloured light, and jets of stagnant water shot up into the black sky. Peering towards the entrance, I spotted the excited receptionist waving at me with one hand and working a bank of wall switches with the other. And so I trooped to my distant bed feeling like a bit of a wanker.

  CHAPTER 16

  GETTING OUT OF bed in the morning always felt worse after a good day, as if to redress the pain deficit. The trick, I’d discovered, was to hit the road before brain and body had time to compare notes and demand an end to this lunatic endeavour. My legs began to stiffen and throb during the receptionist’s one-man business congresso on farewell paperwork, involving more forms than you might expect to fill in while applying to euthanise a relative. I slapped my credit card on the counter, then stifled many yells of cramped frustration while he explained an obligation to pay the separate €1.50 tourist tax in cash. Handwritten receipts were prepared for each charge, and at length I pushed the Hirondelle out past the fountains in a foot-dragging Igor hunch.

  I headed out onto the SS7 and into a blue-skied, blue-aired nightmare. Lorries crossed each other when there was no room to do so, shunting me into the roadside brush with bow-waves of hot fumes and a dragon-like hiss of hydraulics. I bellowed vitriol into their stinking wake, not caring that at any minute I might attract the interest of a lorry driver who had returned from an English run with an understanding of our potty-mouthed vernacular, and that this minute would therefore be rounded off with an efficient beating.

  Just an hour in the company of this undersized road’s oversized regulars brought on something close to shell shock. The swelling rumble of diesel thunder caused me to twitch and whimper, and the point-blank blast of air-horns melted my very marrow. In the brief gaps of secure silence I cobbled together a detailed revenge fantasy. I would find out where one of these twelve-wheel klaxon-lovers lived, then climb in through an open window in the dead of night. Creeping up to his bedside I would feel for the gas-canister fog horn nestling in its bespoke shoulder-holster, then have a better idea and decapitate him with a hand-axe.

  Presently, as Liverpudlians like to say, my arse went; every time an HGV approached, I wobbled into the undergrowth and waited for it to pass. I counted my blessings as they screamed by: that one might have killed me, or that one, or that one. Finally I cracked completely, and with a craven, juddering finger ordered the sat-nav to Avoid Highways. Biddle-iddle-ip! ‘Route recalculated’. I darted through a gap in the traffic and bounced away up a rustic footpath.

  The enormity of my relief made everything in the very different Italy I now entered seem wonderful, even the bits that definitely weren’t. Between the gnarled olives and plump, dark grapes, my path was overhung by sheaves of bamboo and steer-clear cascades of prickly pears – a tropical vibe enhanced by the sun-bleached shanty towns I passed through, full of unruly dogs and barefoot, bare-headed children bucking over potholes on ancient mopeds. Briquettes of horse-crap scattered the dusty track; there was a marked absence of four-wheeled traffic and roadside litter, presumably because the locals couldn’t afford to buy a car or throw anything away. Presently there weren’t any locals, and I was into a great swathe of moribund cultivation, all haunted farmhouses and overgrown orchards hung with rotten fruit.

  Approaching Caserta, tarmac and acceptably small vehicles returned; as the road began to haul itself upwards I heard the rearward approach of whirring chains. Cyclo-chums! I turned to hail a mini-peloton of four senior clubmen: as with everything else in Italy there’s a north–south bike divide, and these were the first fellow rouleurs I’d seen since Giuseppe. When the leader pedalled up to my side I helplessly blurted out my entire repertoire: brakes of cork, wheels of wood, the 1914 Giro d’Italia, Milan to Milan, 3,162km.

  Having blankly absorbed this information as his colleagues filed past us, he fixed me with a challenging look and said, in Italian: ‘Right. How old are you?’

  Oh, OK. I told him.

  An unappealing smile. ‘Forty-eight, eh? So how old do you think I am?’

  I gave him a shufti: grizzled Super Mario ’tache, plenty of crinkles, probably sixty-five. ‘Fifty-five?’

  ‘Ha! I’m sixty-five. Ciao!’

  With a huge grin he levered his bony brown frame up in the saddle and set off after his friends. I watched them disappear into the trees round the next steep bend, then thought: Bollocks, I’m not having that. And I didn’t. I got my head down and my dander up, mashing the pedals until the bottom bracket shrieked for mercy. Two bends later I wordlessly dispatched the paunchy struggler, then with the crest in sight picked off the rest one by one. Super Mario was back in the lead and I caught him just as the road flattened ou
t.

  ‘Ciao!’ I trilled, looking straight ahead, then hurtling down into Caserta without any respect for my well-being. It was a lively old town with much to detain the visitor, including a 1,200-room Bourbon palace and several red lights. I resisted them all and steamed out the other side without slowing down or looking round, waiting in vain to be overtaken by old cyclists or the sense of shame my antics merited. When I finally freewheeled to a halt at Maddaloni, my legs were basted in shiny pain and the Hirondelle sounded like a honeymoon can-dragger.

  Coke, carbs, coffee: after the usual bar-raid splash-and-dash I went back out to do battle with the swelling hills and the midday sun. Horse-carts trundled through fields of tobacco, and every cottage garden seemed blessed with a tree full of cricket-ball pomegranates and another of ripening figs (bleargh – give them another couple of weeks). Stinking bin-bags were slung high over railings awaiting collection, out of reach of the rats whose flattened husks lined the gutters.

  The towns grew steadily more traditional. High streets were lined with butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, along with the ‘I Buy Gold’ pawnbroker’s shops that seemed a ubiquitous expression of Italy’s micro-level economic plight. Long gone were the pet-grooming salons I’d encountered in even the tiniest settlements up north, always given English names like My Good Snoopy or Super-Smart Dog Town or some other incitement to arson. Down here almost every commercial concern seemed principally interested in deterring potential customers:

  ‘Pepe Pizza – CLOSED EVERY THURSDAY AND THROUGHOUT AUGUST.’

  ‘Electrical appliance spares – NO GERMAN MACHINES, NO SERVICE 12–4 p.m. OR ALL DAY FRIDAY.’

  On the outskirts of one town I passed an old chap in a boiler suit tinkering with an upside-down kid’s bike on the pavement. ‘BICYCLE AND SCOOTER REPAIRS’ read the sign above the roller-shuttered entrance behind him. ‘NO CREDIT CARDS’ read a larger one beside it. After a wobbly U-turn, I squeaked up to him and dismounted, raising the back wheel and rotating the pedals to showcase my predicament. I watched his casual nodding morph into an open-faced shake of the head: Yep, I know exactly what to do about that, mate, but – pfff – I just don’t fancy doing it. With a private smile he returned his attention to the little pink bicycle before him; with a mirthless laugh I remounted and rode away.