Gironimo! Page 23

  Having failed to find a single Vietrian who looked likely to have a handle on the postwar guest-accommodation scene, at the exit to the town I stopped by a horseshoe bench tightly packed with half a dozen silent elders.

  ‘Scusi, signore. Hotel?’ Nothing.

  ‘Pensione? Albergo?’ It was the morning TV room all over again: a deadpan wall of corrugated leather.

  ‘Greyhound stadium? Chandlery? Noose and chair?’

  As I rammed a weary foot into the toe-clips a cracked whisper rose from the far end of the bench. ‘Hotel in Potenza.’

  I issued a general thank-you, then rode around the corner to stifle my screams with a bunched fist. Potenza, I knew, was a bona fide city – but I also knew that Vietri’s big brother lived miles away, beyond what was left of daylight and my own physical reserves.

  Every kilometre that followed was acquired at ruinous cost. As the road petered out into gravel through the brown-shrubbed cowboy hills, I began rooting about down the back of my metaphorical sofa for loose change, scrimping up enough to take me to the next brow. Pretty soon I was digging into reserves I didn’t have, buying miles on the never-never, dabbling in the future-calories market. Sorry, this is a bit embarrassing, but I don’t have enough for this climb – would you be prepared to accept the extra breakfast roll I’ll eat tomorrow morning?

  ‘Twelve, fifteen kilometres of ascent up the gravel, without moral support, without a word of comfort, three or four kilometres down, then back up . . . so slow, so painful, so insidious.’

  Tell me about it, Gazzetta dello Sport 1914 Giro correspondent. The sunset was protracted and doubtlessly exquisite, but then it was over, and I found myself crawling across a bleak monochrome highland. Higher than the headlights moving smoothly across a distant motorway viaduct, higher even than the TV masts atop more modest surrounding hills. The sat-nav told me we were at 950m, and then it told me no more. A blank screen; the battery had gone. As I’d been off-map for some time this was a most exciting turn of events.

  A sharp wind began to whip through the twilit thistles and the track reared up once more. Wrapped in my orange jacket I got off and pushed, shoes scrabbling on loose stone. A group of figures took shape in the gloom, and not in a good way; I presently found my path blocked by half a dozen stocky, beetle-browed men. They were shepherds, I decided, having seen a few sheep dotted luminously about, and preferring to imagine these men employing the six-foot staves they toted to prod ruminants rather than cripple foreigners.

  ‘Potenza?’ I said, sounding like Oliver asking for seconds.

  ‘Po-ten-za?’ came the mocking, trilled echo. Sour, gruff laughter broke out, giving way to a garlic-scented chant as I forced my way through a corridor of dark and dirty faces.

  ‘Po-TEN-za! Po-TEN-za! Po-TEN-za!’

  Suddenly the hill seemed much less steep than it had, and I crested it at some speed.

  With daylight down to a two-watt glimmer and that Bad Lieutenant bleat of ultimate despair seeping through my lips, the under-wheel crunch gave way to a slick swish and the grey landscape fell away. Downhill tarmac! Sweet bosoms of mercy. I slalomed madly through the bends, squinting at every sign that flashed by. This road must surely be taking me to Potenza, I reasoned, but speeding into the darkness, unease began to nibble away at relief: no other European nation has such a cat-slappingly capricious approach to the business of keeping the traveller usefully informed.

  Good evening, unfamiliar road-user! So – what do you need to know about the Strada Provinciale 51? Let’s kick off with the basics: no tractors after 4 p.m., keep an eye on those deformed sagomas, this next bridge is 18m long. Please – no horns in built-up areas! Yeah, thought you’d like that one. Road narrows. Rocks roll off cliff. Red car overtakes black one. Tree burns. Priority over oncoming handcarts. You want to know what? All right, calm down: POTENZA 14. What is it now? I just told you: POTENZA 17. Can’t you read? POTENZA 9. This pass is carrabile. Absolutely no sosta. Look, for the last time: POTENZA 21.

  I’d never previously understood why so many rustics go out and shoot road signs in the face.

  It was now past eight and entirely black, my senses tuned into nothing but distant barks and the chirrup of nocturnal insects. I’d already tried out a bus-shelter bench for size when a roadside light drew me onwards. A moment later, Gerard Lagrost’s filthy, clacking shoes were disrupting the solemn gentility of the Bouganville Hill Resort & Wellness Space. It would be thirty-six hours before they clacked back out.

  A bale of plump towels in a wenge-wood en suite the size of my garden, veal strips with rocket and parmesan, a full day of heavy rain: just some of the reasons for my extended stay. As an irrelevant aside, the nightly charge was precisely €6 more than I had paid to sleep on incontinence sheets in a careworn rest home. The receptionist had to confirm the price three times before I believed it. She was handing me the registration form when her manager walked out of a side-office and froze in his tracks at the sight of the soiled weirdo slumped against the front desk. He shot her an urgent look and she replied with a tiny, helpless shrug: too late, boss, he’s just signed in.

  That first dinner in the Bouganville’s crystal-chinking, heavy-linen restaurant was a proper head-melter. Sitting there with a bottle of prosecco in the glistening ice bucket beside me, I gazed around at the well-groomed clientele, simply unable to accept that less than two hours before I’d been lost on a dark hilltop, pushing my bike through a gauntlet of cudgel-bearing peasants.

  My fellow guests took a pleasingly traditional approach to the business of spa living, following a wellness regime that crowded every table with expensive carbohydrates and dark green bottles. In this convivial company I savoured an exquisite meal that employed every one of the dozen pieces of cutlery laid before me, then went up and flumped down on my enormous bed with outstretched limbs and a huge dopey smile: the cat who got the cream, then found a tenner under the cream bowl.

  I spent most of the next day holed up in my room, having begun to fear that the Bouganville’s absurdly modest rack-rate must be a loss-leader, and that as soon as I stepped into the corridor two white-coated orderlies would pin me to the floor and mete out an unbidden €400 foot massage. There was plenty to do in there. I watched weather-generals point at animated rain-clouds in 51-inch enormovision, then gazed at the real thing smudging out the world beyond my vast balcony. I scrubbed at least four of the seven shades of shit out of my jersey, carved two pairs of prosecco brake blocks, and opened a new front in the war against bidon-dwelling bacteria with a packet of bicarbonate of soda I’d bought the day before. ‘A thousand uses for a thousand occasions,’ read the label, and I idled away some more time imagining the lower 900s: alchemy, belch roulette, stage dandruff, ‘Jacob paste’.

  And I enjoyed an unusually contemplative Paolo session, soaking up the full awfulness of the 1914 Giro’s fifth stage. Only now did I note that it had taken place in driving rain, which sluiced away all but the heaviest, sharpest stones from the road, and embedded these in a river of mud. The shrunken peloton left Avellino with twice the usual number of spare tyres wrapped round their torsos, but several riders used their last before the first service point, and had to push for miles. Riccardo ‘Cyclops’ Palea didn’t survive long, and nor did Costante Girardengo. The future campionissimo would be Italy’s first cycling superstar, but at twenty-one ‘the relentless effort was just too much for his young body’. He’d never really recovered after winning that epic 430km stage to Rome, and sobbing apologies for letting everyone down, after 35km he crawled into the team car.

  Calzolari was having quite a night of it. At Eboli, just past my old-people’s home, he skidded into a ditch so slippery with mud that he couldn’t haul himself out. The other frontrunners ignored his cries and rode by – anyone left in this race was by default a nasty bastard – and he’d lost long minutes before Clemente Canepari stopped to pull him out. Fonso’s last remaining teammate was dressing his leader’s muddy wounds in the road when one of the press c
ars came steaming round the corner. As it fishtailed towards them, Calzolari recalled the words of that holy prophetess he’d visited near Bologna the week before the race began: ‘You will win the Giro, signore, but must endure much suffering and face death.’ After a great slithering screech, Death stopped with his muddy front wheels resting against Alfonso Calzolari’s left leg.

  Having beasted the previous stage, Bianchi’s Giuseppe Azzini was again tearing it up off the front, taking insane risks on every lethal descent. Fortune favoured the berserk: by Potenza he had taken half an hour out of Calzolari’s overall lead, while back down the road his more cautious rivals repeatedly crashed and punctured. Giovanni Gerbi, warming up for his forthcoming assault on the customs officer, kicked his bike into a buckled mess after suffering six blowouts in short order. He wound up walking it over the stage finish, six hours behind the winner.

  The rain clattered my balcony windows as I read, a complementary soundtrack that the generals reckoned would be tapping out its rhythm on my skull for much of the following day. That should have given me pause for thought, but instead I found myself more interested in nurturing the spoiled pickiness that comes with prolonged exposure to luxury. Is anyone seriously expected to blow-dry their bidet laundry with a one-speed Remington? What does a guy have to do round here to get his complimentary fruit bowl replenished? And really, how am I going to enjoy my third siesta of the day with that smoke-alarm LED blinking away on the ceiling? It’s like club night on the flight deck of the Starship sodding Enterprise.

  It was dark when the phone call I’d been expecting came through. Afterwards I walked out of my room, keeping the waiting gang of wellness therapists at bay with a stool, and went down to the Bouganville’s restaurant. Here I dispatched two courses of wondrous fare in a state of ratcheting anticipation. The third – a cannonball stack of truffle ice-cream boules – had just been placed before me when I saw two familiar figures walk up to the reception desk and receive a rather warmer welcome than I had twenty-four hours earlier. This was the moment that sustains every endurance athlete throughout those hours and days of long and lonely toil: my mummy and my daddy had come to make everything all better.

  CHAPTER 18

  AS SOON AS I’d booked my flight to Milan, my father had expressed an interest in turning up at some point to see how I was getting along: any excuse, frankly, for a hopeless Italoholic. My mother’s agenda was framed during our weekly phone calls, the most recent of which I had enlivened with many pithy appraisals of Italian driving and geography, and their exciting interface with hundred-year-old bicycle braking systems.

  ‘I’m just so, so happy to see you alive,’ she said, embracing me in a way that made me feel every one of my nine years. My parents were both seventy-seven and had just driven from Naples airport; I resisted an impulse to reply with the same words. They had texted an intention to accompany me for a few days just forty-eight hours before, and I may now disclose that their impending arrival offered further justification for staying an extra night at the Bouganville Hill Resort & Wellness Space. Better safe than sorry in this region: how awkward if I’d ‘accidentally’ checked them into an old-people’s home.

  Irresponsible flights of young-hearted fancy appear to be rather a tradition amongst Moores of a certain age. When my grandfather was seventy-two he went all the way to India and back in a Land Rover, before rolling it over coming home through France. When my parents were seventy they paid £280 for a Transit van without a starter motor and drove it across a swathe of western Europe, before dumping it in the passenger drop-off zone at Genoa airport. When I was forty-eight I rode a hundred-year-old bike all round Italy, before dying of embarrassment in my mother’s arms at a wellness space in Basilicata.

  But as weird as it felt to greet my parents under such improbable circumstances, it was also utterly wonderful, and I made an especial effort to prolong our damp-eyed embraces just long enough to oblige the watching manager to upgrade me from filth-faced, cheapskate scum of the earth to honorary Italian mummy’s boy. Any lingering fears that my quest might henceforth seem a little less flinty-eyed were soon banished by the welcome discovery that Alfonso Calzolari’s mother rode beside him on a penny-farthing for lengthy sections of the 1914 Giro, beating hostile fans with an umbrella and feeding her grateful son spoonfuls of his favourite cinnamon porridge. ‘No sporting spectacle was more noble or impressively masculine,’ declared the Gazzetta dello Sport. It’s all there in the appendix to Paolo Facchinetti’s book that I just wrote in my head.

  Other than Paul, no one I knew had yet seen me in my ‘welding pervert’ get-up. The last time I felt so self-consciously costumed before my parents was probably at the 1977 Silver Jubilee Swerford Flower Show Fancy Dress parade, just after the judges asked me to go and stand with all the other little girls. ‘Oh dear,’ said my father when I turned up fully goggled at the breakfast table. ‘No wonder they keep trying to run you over.’

  And yet my parents hadn’t just come to dispense emotional succour. On a purely practical level, my father spoke fluent Italian, and could call on much youthful experience of rubbish old bikes – (his initial assessment of mine: ‘Does it always sound like that?’). Their hired Fiat Punto would, gloriously, be accommodating the anti-matter deadweight of my saddlebag for the next four days. I also rather enjoyed setting off each morning with a no-nonsense and irreversible commitment to a stage finish. My father had booked us into a pair of apartments in Matera, and before they drove off we agreed to meet in this town’s main square at 8 p.m.

  Pedalling the de-bagged Hirondelle around the hotel car park felt like a taste of zero gravity, a magical floaty weightlessness. For almost 2,000km I’d been giving a plump toddler a backie, and now my parents had bundled him into the boot of their car and sped away. So long, Fatty! I swished down the rain-blotted valley road from the Bouganville with a liberated whoop, flying feather-footed up the other side with almost laughable ease. We’d made a late start and Matera was 120km off, but at this rate I’d be there in . . . ow. Ooh. No, please, not that. Not now. OW!

  All men of my age and above have a duty to carry at least one chronic, long-term malaise, and mine is syphilis. No, hang on – it’s kidney stones. These cheeky little renal calcifications have visited me half a dozen times over the last couple of decades, though I hadn’t experienced that ominous, preludial lower-back twinge for some years. OW, SHIT OW OW OW. No mistaking those vicious clamps of agony: self-diagnosis complete. I stumbled off the bike and bent double over the crossbar, pressing my right hand to the offside small of my back like some parody of a stricken ancient.

  The intense sensations associated with passing a kidney stone are supposedly the closest a man can get to empathising with the joy of giving birth, and extruding this devil spawn through my man-pipes generally involves forty-eight hours of blanched writhing. If I acted at once, though, there was at least hope of sluicing myself clear sooner. And so, still hunched at 45 degrees, I unenthusiastically took aboard two full litres of bidon grog-water.

  The morning congealed into a fog of sloth and torment. Hill begat hill begat hill and I pushed up most, treating the tarmac to my Christ-on-the-cross face. Martyred forbearance was a tough look to pull off in this outfit: I caught my reflection in a bus shelter and saw some whinging oaf in a flat cap. Just a twat and his will to survive.

  A headwind picked up and the sullen sky spat at me. I weaved horribly, too distracted by those blinding pulses of neat pain to focus on such trifles as oncoming heavy-goods traffic. At length I laboured through Potenza, an appalling wasteland of abandoned factories and kidney-battering potholes, each one another step on the road to dialysis. On the way out of town I hobbled into a grocery, bought three more litres of acqua minerale and waterboarded myself on the pavement outside. Then it was back up into the sturdy, rolling highlands that defined this whole ghastly stage.

  MATERA 93

  At 1.30 p.m., what a potent mettle-drainer that fingerpost was. I had sometimes managed less o
ver a whole day, in good health and on flat terrain. Gigantic carrion birds circled overhead. Knowing I’d never make it I phoned my father’s mobile; knowing he has only twice in his life successfully answered it I heard it ring and ring before a computerised Italian lady told me I was wasting my time. By now I’d brimmed myself, and was pulling over every half-hour to flush my kidneys out across Basilicata, into a glove-speckling, bike-spattering wind. On the map, the town of Tolve looked like mankind’s last stand before a chasm of nothing; I stopped at a bar there to arduously wash down a pizza slice with a further half-hogshead of water. My only fellow customers were a middle-aged Asian couple, feeding the fruit machine with parallel enthusiasm.

  Those after-lunch hours fulfilled the map’s empty promise, delivering me through an eerie void of sandy humps and hollows. I crawled for long kilometres alongside a narrow-gauge railway decorated with ruined stations, their platforms sprouting water gantries and other rusted trappings of the steam age. Ghost farms; bare, mustard-coloured hills; a wind so fierce it blew every half-formed thought clean out of my head. When the rain came back I gazed along the weed-decked tracks beside me, understanding how very hard it would have been for the 1914 riders to resist cadging a crafty locomotive lift through this miserable landscape. Only now did I remember that Paolo had twice cited kidney pain as the cause of a weeping abandonment. At once my heart soared. Look, Mum: I’m placing personal experience in a historical context! I’m contemplating my surroundings! My brain is no longer completely preoccupied with physical agony!

  The pain had indeed receded to no more than a bruised throb; I had evidently expelled one or more mineral granules somewhere into the dun emptiness behind, though once again without the satisfying pop-gun report I always hope for. Praise be to those frothing roadside gallons! It was 4.20 and I had 61km to go: I belted out the cat-piss tarp song and pedalled madly on through the bald hills.