Gironimo! Page 29

  ‘Signore, i pneumatici originali sono . . . sono . . .’

  My reedy explanation hit the vocab buffers; his smile broadened and he waddled off into the lift. After it took him away, the manageress turned to me with kind eyes. ‘You are doing a very special thing,’ she said, ‘and I want to do something special for you.’ I do believe I gulped. ‘I want to wash your clothes in my machine.’

  Lugo looked an awful lot better two hours later. I’d spent 1.8 of them poncing about my palatial room in a bath robe, savouring the high-end luxuries of aquatic massage, non-Italian television and not having to thrash dirty wool about in bidet-froth. It simply wasn’t possible to think ill of a town graced with this splendid establishment and its god-like ruling laundress. Bolstering my reappraisal, I discovered that Lugo’s arcaded and passably grand junior piazza was hosting some sort of retro festival, with enthusiastic displays of foxtrot-era ballroom dancing and a market selling vintage clothes and bric-a-brac. I spent a happy half-hour poking around in boxes of shonky old crap, experiencing a heady blurt of déjà vu before a tea chest filled with corroded bicycle parts. As I picked up a buckled and largely orange brake caliper, those distant days of citric acid and wire wool spooled through my mind. How had such a fumbling klutz as I ever managed to make a working thing out of stuff like that? It defied belief, and shall defy it ever more.

  I’m not ashamed to say that I now loved my bicycle. Mine wasn’t the wanky, anthropomorphic love that men of my age tend to nurture for vintage machinery, at least not quite: l hold my hand up to a bit of saddle-patting, and though I’d started talking to the Hirondelle on a regular basis had never referred to it in the feminine third-person. I had certainly developed a weighty respect for the stout mechanical integrity of the – cough – old girl’s frame and forks, an assemblage of ninety-eight-year-old tubing that had uncomplainingly soaked up so much punishment: dropped onto Milanese cobbles and the rocks of Chianti, crashed at awful speed through countless crater-grade potholes, gang-banged by baggage handlers. Three thousand kilometres of juddering, heavily laden abuse without so much as a peep, still less the death-watch creak that Lance McCormack had warned me to listen for, that harbinger of imminent structural collapse. No, almost everything that had gone wrong with the bike, at least since the original saddle broke in half, involved a failure of some new or newish bit – the wheels and spokes, that woeful reproduction bidon rack, the crap-arse fucking Thompson.

  So the frame was magnificent, but I didn’t love the frame, nor the many less commendable components and accessories bolted on to it. No, I loved this bike because it was still going, just about, despite having been put together by me. My admiring affection for bike and self had conflated with every completed mile. This was the bike that Tim built; I loved the bike, because the bike was me. I placed the caliper carefully back and thought: Eat my bike, Pablo. Eat ME. Then I ate a pizza, clapped briefly along to the foxtrot-tango charlies, and lured by its soft, plump hugeness, hastened to bed.

  * * *

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION – STAGE 7

  (L’Aquila–Lugo, 429.1km)

  Alfonso CALZOLARI 118:17:22

  Pierino ALBINI +1:55:31

  Luigi LUCOTTI +2:04:25

  Timothy MOORE +52:17:11

  Stage starters: 12

  Stage finishers: 8

  CHAPTER 23

  LAUNDERED, PRESSED AND daintily sheathed in cellophane, my kit was waiting by the room door when I came up from breakfast the next morning, pockets abulge with artisan bread. What a joyous treat! Gone now was the ear-warming shame with which I’d handed it to the manageress, balled up to conceal all those sweat-sealed blotches of oil and jam.

  I unwrapped my gift with the glee of a child at Christmas, then held shorts and jersey aloft by the 10-foot windows. At once my full beam dipped. I hardly cared that the more stubborn stains lingered on, speckling my jersey’s front and rear with the pale ghosts of loose chippings and Clanger blood. Nor that the rigours of mechanical cleansing had all but detached the chamois pad from my shorts. The headline deficiency, stark even before I forced it over my head and limbs: this kit was now that of a much smaller man. Shrunk tight as a wetsuit, diddy as a playsuit. Those once generous cuffs now clamped my upper forearms so firmly it was as if two doctors were checking my blood pressure at once. Even with all the neck buttons undone I felt discomforted to the point of tongue-waggling suffocation, like Bart being taken to task by Homer. Assessing the other end, I hoped that northern Italians just couldn’t get enough of hairy white midriff. On the plus side, when at herniated length I got the shorts on, it was clear they wouldn’t be falling down again in a hurry.

  ‘Everyone has a limit,’ said the manageress when I checked out, smiling at me like Buddha. ‘You can be proud to have reached yours.’

  This cryptic assessment didn’t, on the face of it, augur well for the post-limit days ahead, but explaining there were still 429.1km to go required more syllables than I could currently muster.

  ‘Hank-ooh,’ I wheezed tightly. ‘Hank-ooh veh mu.’

  Flat, fast, grey and sultry: the morning picked up where the previous afternoon had left off. My stifling swaddles of extra-tight merino wool began, mercifully, to relax their death-grip on my neck and limbs; I settled into a high-tempo rhythm and continued the business of reacclimatising to the north. Better coffee, worse pizza. Duller scenery, busier people. The welcome return of the risible, fenced-in little yapper, after a month of free-range flyblown wolfhounds with murderous intent in their one remaining eye. Orchard fruits had ripened to maturity since I’d last been in this part of the world, and so too had my Italian. I could have gone up to a farmer and told him how much bigger his plums were since I’d last seen them. Then sprinted away at a previously unthinkable speed when he came at me with a scythe.

  An on-the-go lunch of purloined breakfast was stuffed down, and off I rattled across the fresh-ploughed flatlands. Every delay was now a threat to my crowning glory: riding this final stage in three days demanded a daily average of 143km, further than I’d ever previously managed in even one.

  I redoubled my efforts through the drably industrial outskirts of Ferrara, where kindred slowcoach Mario Marangoni had died three months after I was born. (It transpired that Marangoni was just twenty when he rode the 1914 Giro, and that in the same year he’d finished Milan–San Remo in the main bunch. Despite competing again after the war, it appears this was the only professional race he ever managed to complete.) Have it, Mazza! My AVS clicked up to 17.6 as I caned along past the grubby warehouses. Just 0.2 more and I’d beat him, at least in accordance with those ridiculously contrived and heavily me-weighted rules of engagement. On a more eventful morning my brain would have left it at that, but with nothing else to do it chose this moment to provide me with the crushingly dismal imperial conversion: I was busting my sweaty, woollen guts out to complete this race at an average speed of just over 11mph. Eleven miles per hour.

  I’ve just Googled ‘11mph on a bike’ and here, discounting the torturous imbecilities of Yahoo Answers – ‘If I’m going 11mph on a bike, like how far can I go in two hours?’ – are the top matches, from fatsecret.com and bikeforums.net:

  ‘Bicycling (slow): burn 229 calories by riding at 11mph on a bike for 30 minutes.’

  ‘11mph on a bike would be close to my average speed in deepish snow.’

  If I’d had any pride, I’d have cast aside the entire pathetic business right there, and would never speak of it again. But I don’t, so I didn’t, and I will.

  Re-entering the agrarian flatness outside Ferrara – it was hotter and muggier now, and with the widespread and ongoing application of fertilising ordure, enormously more pungent – I raised a hand to an approaching oldie on a road bike.

  ‘Salve!’

  Having gathered this to be the preferred greeting between men of my age and above, I had of late begun declaiming it to all passing cyclists in that bracket. The word had a pleasing air of archaic fraternity to it, and not
just because I remembered Caecilius and chums busting it out all over my O-level Latin picture books. Its ring of gentlemanly respect seemed a bond with the era of Calzolari, of Coppi, of Gerard Lagrost and the two local cyclists I’d seen commemorated on those mountain-top plaques. In my more emotionally overblown reveries – and by this stage there were plenty – I thought of this simple salutation as more than a hello. Salve was a mutual acknowledgement between fellow keepers of the flame, us men of a certain age who alone grasped the bicycle’s transcendental import. Only we remembered how this perfect, simple machine had liberated our parents and grandparents, rolling back the tight horizons of their lives. Bicycle journeys were to us different and better than all others, because they were all your own work, but not like walking, because walking was rubbish. When my salve was returned, it came with a knowing, weighty glint that said all this and more.

  I’ve no idea why I bothered you with that tripe, though, as this salve was not returned. Only now did I see that the old man had half his face down the front of his jersey, which was zipped tight up over his nose. He shot me a hollowed look, shook his head and rode slowly by. I shrugged – yes, it stank here, but Italy often did – then raised my head and felt something flick my right cheek. Another flick to my left, a frail hum in both ears, a twitch up a nostril . . . in an instant the world was a hell of buzzing dots. Monotony would thereafter prove conspicuously absent from my agenda.

  I emerged from that first midge cloud with my forehead on the bidons and my airways clogged. After a clumsy dismount I cleared each nostril in turn onto the roadside, then dredged up and expelled a great, stringy throatful of frog spawn. With this complete, I filled my lungs and treated the surrounding fields to a long roar of disgust.

  The following three hours were spent either engulfed in midges or flicking, scooping, spitting, snotting and literally weeping them out of and off my person in their dead and dying thousands. In giant, swirling spindrifts they hovered across my path, enmeshing themselves in my leg hairs and face holes, even penetrating the tiny gaps in my goggle side-shields, crawling about on the inside of the round blue lenses like restless specimens under a microscope.

  Pursed, clamped lips were incompatible with the aerobic demands of sustained high speed: I’d been trying all day not to drop below 30kmh. For some time my lungs had to get by on a 50/50 blend of atmospheric gas and winged invertebrate. My jersey was now too small to permit the old man’s method of respiratory-passage protection; in desperation I tied a handkerchief round my face, cowboy dust-bandit style. Teamed with the goggles it was a hugely arrestable look.

  It had felt since morning like one of those soupy, late-summer days, the air heavy with the promise of long-awaited rain. When those first wristy gouts now dashed against my goggles I whimpered in relief, willing it to bucket down and wash the midges out of my life. My wish was granted, at once and with cataclysimic watery violence. Headlights came on and the iron heavens poured forth, then fifth and sixth. ‘OK, that’ll do,’ I shouted, or rather gargled. But it didn’t, and at Legnago – a subdued and almost submerged town 40km short of Verona, where I’d intended to stop – I sloshed to a defeated halt. It was half four but black as night: gutters swelled and churned, every drainpipe was a fire hose and sodden pedestrians huddled in shop doorways, peering glumly out through a cascade of drips.

  The motel room I eventually squelched into was careworn and startlingly cheerless, brown lino scattered with wonky, mismatched furniture. To be fair, it held few real horrors for a veteran of 1980s off-campus student accommodation in Sheffield, but the evening ahead was a bit Eleanor Rigby all the same. After blocking the liver-spotted shower with sluiced insects, I did the same to the blue-veined sink. In doing so I found that the Venus Fly Trap of my front jersey pouch was home to a huge accumulation, the dead piled in drifts at the bottom, a hundred survivors still clambering clumsily through the merino forest in a quest for freedom – a quest that now ended in a froth of travel wash. Two hours later, eating a circular stonebaked food whose name I forget, I opened the map and a dozen mangled corpses fell out into my side salad.

  I was up and out early: breakfast played no part in the Albergo New Touring’s guest experience. Having retrieved the Hirondelle from the back yard, I pushed it to a supermarket up the road. This had yet to open – we’re talking early here – and while waiting for the shutters to clank up I considered the challenge ahead. Finishing the last stage in three days was a big ask that had just got bigger: the storm-shortened 114km I’d managed the day before meant I now faced riding 315km in forty-eight hours. As food for thought, it was a prospect that made my brain retch. And this before the more conventionally nauseating spasms I experienced half an hour later, conducting Number 7’s pre-departure check with a litre of drinking yoghurt and a plastic-boxed pastry assortment sloshing around my insides. Another two rear-wheel spokes failed to respond to the wrench; both had sheared through at the hub end. I was now four spokes short of a pointy metal picnic. All were culled from the same quadrant, with two of them adjacent: an unsupported void I could have put a child’s head through.

  Wind-assisted flatness sped me to Verona in two bearably wobblesome hours: a decent start. It was long years since I’d last passed through the alluring backdrop of Shakespeare’s best-loved double suicide, but I slalomed through the tourists and out of the city walls without even slowing down. The road beyond it was another tarmac ruler, but it wasn’t quiet and by mid-afternoon nor was the bike. A painful twin scraping chafe from below – thwickity-shickita, thwackity-shuckata – announced that the rear wheel’s ratcheting warp and weft were now causing it to scuff both sides of the frame, as well the cork brake pads, during each revolution. It sounded awful, felt bad and plainly didn’t look great, either. Just past Roverbella, two riders in local-club jerseys rode up from behind, pointing urgently at my wheel and gabbling their consternation. ‘Mi manca quattro raggi,’ I shouted above the racket: I’d been waiting all day to christen this rehearsed assessment of my spoke crisis. Their expressions as they rode away suggested I’d said something else, perhaps that my bidons were filled with cat’s blood.

  Thwickity-shickita, thwackity-shuckata-rackita-nockita. It occurred to me, watching this pair disappear into the traffic, that with a few different words I could probably have secured a full-wheel overhaul in their club workshop. But what would Fonso have done? Though his final stage was unfolding as an incident-free procession, events of the previous fortnight had proven that even a huge lead could be whittled to nought by roadside repairs. ‘Clemente! Listen up, my back wheel’s going a bit wonky: let’s stop and get some new spokes and have it all trued up and stuff. There we go – all done! Hey, that feels so much better. Really round. Right, where’s everyone else? Milan? Bummer.’

  No, Calzolari would have wobbled on, and so would I. A blue sky, a following wind, and nary a hill from here to the finish: hit it! The rationale seemed obvious now. My bike was slowly falling apart, so if I went really fast, I’d get to Milan before it did completely. And if I went really, really fast, I’d get there before the toiling ghost of Mario Marangoni.

  The Alps poked hazily up on my right-hand horizon, and presented with hard geographical evidence that my circle was nearing completion I kicked on hard. Truly terrible things resulted down below almost at once. I stole a juddery glance: it was like an unfolding collapse on the Generation Game potter’s wheel.

  I bucked to a halt, propped the Hirondelle against a tree and dug out the spoke wrench. The rim was all over the place. No point just winding the spokes tight, as I’d been doing for the past few mornings: I needed to cajole the wheel back into shape with those judicious tweakings of yore. How did it go again? Righty-tighty, left-hand down, three and in, port out, starboard home. Bollocks. In the twenty wrist-burning minutes that now followed I somehow contorted the side-on profile into an onion dome, with an obvious flat spot and an opposing peak. Final score: Ride Quality 0, Onlooker Hilarity 4.

  What would happen if t
he wheel collapsed? The many precedents of 1914 suggested a crash with a decent risk of race-ending injury, and back then they didn’t have articulated lorries to slide under. But my nerve held. Indeed, I even picked up the pace after establishing that the faster I went, the more bearable it seemed – the worst jolts and shudders sort of cancelled each other out. As I barrelled through Cremona’s early-evening rush hour, my AVS clicked up to 17.7.

  ‘Italy – land of contrasts’: sweeping daily shifts in mood and milieu were a defining feature of this journey, and of all those shifts, few had been sweepier. From breakfast in a puddled supermarket car park to dinner in one of the world’s most glorious shadows, from a lino-floored truck-stop to a duplex awash with thick towels and flat screens. Cremona had been described to me, by an English bowmaker who once plied his trade there, as the snob capital of Italy; with a record 151km in my legs and the end so tantalisingly nigh, I felt fully entitled to snob myself silly.

  I breezed into the warm night aglow with complimentary lotions and home-straight portent, and almost at once found myself stepping across the wondrous penumbra referenced above: the façade of Cremona cathedral, a soaring chevron of marble, glass and brick that paid extravagant tribute to three centuries of wealth and gifted architectural whimsy. Its adjacent campanile, a huge pillar of brick I could see from my room if I stood on the bed, is over seven hundred years old but still looks down on all but a dozen modern buildings across Italy; its western face is graced with an only slightly younger astronomical clock that remains the world’s largest. I peered up at it: crab past lion already!