I don’t know what came over me the day I bought the bicicletta. When would I have time for bike riding, or stamina to crank up the hills of Spoleto? Why spend money on something destined to spend weeks and months at a time, parked in Marisa’s garden, rooted to the earth as though the vines tangled in the spokes had sprouted from the bike's very wheels? I already have one bike, a good bike, a Raleigh mountain bike I inherited from my daughter when she broke up with the boy who had been into bike stunts, which bike has been parked in one of those climate controlled storage places among books and other things I don’t miss, serving no purpose in anyone’s life, least of all mine. I did not need a bike nor even want one, though now and then, the yearning for the sense of snappy wind-in-your-ears freedom a bike can give would catch me by surprise.
More and more I am sure that my Imp of the Perverse governs my destiny. We talk these days about the power of intention, but what about the power of the thing that one does not intend though it flits around the edges of the mind like some bug of summer night around the terrace light: casting flickering shadows with its wings, disrupting silence with its papery flutter-sounds and buzz, yet still only modestly distracting, not compelling enough to claim full attention let alone intention to get up and turn out the light or shoo the imprisoned creature away from the binding electric halo. Most of my bright ideas hatch from a similar kind of inattention. To hell with the things I really want, the lovers that elude me, the other objects of my longing or goals of earnest self-application. Sheer whimsy is the gift-giver of my delight and the hand that holds the golden compass directing my unchartered passage.
The story itself sounds truly quotidian: I needed to get to Campello, but don’t have a car and the trains no longer stop there. I made a comment to Iolida, who lives there, that I bet it wouldn’t take anytime to ride a bike those 15 k. “They have bikes for 100 euro at the Coop,” she proclaimed. “Why don’t you get one? I can see you on a bike.”
As owner of a Raliegh-I-never-ride, I sneered at the thought of buying a bike in the grocery store. “I’ll look at them, “ I lied. Then thought of the bike shop on the Via Marconi that I see from the window of the “B” bus, men in florescent lycra standing around like creatures from another dimention, space-aged Mercuries with winged sandals, their helmets flashing silver in the sun. I can smell chain-grease just looking at them and hear the smooth mechanical ker-clunk of gears shifting. I would not call what I’ve felt as I pass the store longing exactly, not even attraction, certainly not the tingle tingle of destiny, but merely the kind of curiousity one might have regarding a dream one remembers for no apparent reason. It’s there like an itch, like that bug in the light, flittering its shadows not quite enough to beg real attention.
“Go get the green bike for her,” is the first thing the Bike Man said to his assistent when I walked into the shop. I am sure there were preliminaries, but I don’t remember them. I can’t imagine that I asked to buy a bike or that , if I did, he took me seriously. This was a hard core bikeshop. The bikes within were not even put-together. Hanging from the ceiling were frames without wheels without chains or gears or brakes or seats or even handlebars. The wheels were elsewhere, the handlebars elsewhere , the seats of various cuts and padding were sealed in cellophane sacks. I do recall that he said it possible to rent a bike. I am sure I told him, I wanted one for keeps but didn’t want to spend the 2000 or more euro the bikes he sold cost. He brought out the green Cinelli and told me he would sell it to me for less than the bikes at the Coop cost. I took a spin around Spoleto basso. The bike felt made for me. It felt like destiny. I felt the way Don Quixote must have felt when he first encountered Rocinante: Onward Noble steed to picaresque adventures.
And onward we did in fact go within 15 minutes of my impulsive purchase: Onward to Campello, to Spello, to Assisi, to supermarkets I’d never been able to reach before; onward to the Wonderful Outlet on the outskirts of Trevi, to the Chinese restaurant in Foligno. I became instantly tranformed into a woman known around town as “la Ciclista”: I wore a silver helmet and calculated distance traveled in miles and kilometers. I bought the pants with necessary crotch-padding, bought the shirt with the kind of wicking that doesn’t absorb sweat. With a change of wardrobe came a change in diet. Why diet? How diet? Did you know that 3 hours on a bicycle burns the calories of a full day of sedentary life? Ravenous hunger besieged me. Bring on the long forgotten carbs: Snickers Bars and Coca Cola, all the power bars and carb gels and powdered salt-balancing drinks my new best friend, The Bike Man, sold at his mysterious negotio. I’d stop by nearly daily to hang out with the other enthusiasts so I could learn about new piste/or bike paths. I was a little disturbed that there were no women among them—and why no women? But these creatures in lycra were not really men, or at least their manliness did not count. They were the archetypal pedal-pumpers attached to the bicycle…human agents of movement, human engines, and I was fast becoming one of them, or so I believed.
The rude awakening happened Monday night, when Milena, Cizia and I were at Calder enjoying a gelato. I’d ridden my bike earlier on the pista ciclabile/the bike path between San Nicolo’ and San Giaccomo. I’d chained it to the wrought-iron fence that marks off the Calder garden from the Viale Trento e Trieste. We were sitting there enjoying our cones and the evening breeze when Milena noticed a group of young men standing around admiring my bicycle. “It belongs to her,” she pointed out to them gleefully. “Ma Dai!” they said to me---the English translation “You’ve got to be kidding” cannot quite convey the extent of their incredulity. “This bike is a classic, a true antique. The 1986 Cinelli!”
What? I looked at them confused. My bike an antique! My bike nearly 25 years old? I'd thought maybe last year's model or maybe even the model of five years ago, but 25 years old. An antique?
“People search all over for these old things. And this one is impeccabile—in perfect shape, like new. You don’t find them like this anymore. They are dinosaurs now that Mountain bikes have come on the scene. This belongs in a museum. However did you come to own it?”
I can’t quite sort out the bizarre mix of pride, disappointment, embarrassment, betrayal, irony and delight I felt at that moment. My bike not a mountain bike and yet I am stupid enough to have believed it one?. My bike 25 years old, a dinosaur! . And yet it was the Ferrari of bicycles, a Cinelli, top of the line, one of a kind, impeccable, a collector's item. Can I sell it for a lot of money and then buy a real bike, I even asked them. They looked at me as though I were slightly demented.
I’ve lived two days with the knowledge that I will never quite be the serious biker my bike portended on the day destiny offered it to me. But knowledge of its limitations and of my own have not sapped the joy from my daily ride. The bike suits me—as though my unintended intention had drawn into its mysterious light-filled halo the one and only bike that would truly fit. It is indeed a faithful Rocinante to my ever-romantic Don Quixote. It does indeed get me up the Spoleto hills with gears that rarely clunk, does indeed get me places I’d never before been able to reach. I can visit Iolida on a whim at the Fonti di Clinunno. I can ride out past La Bruna to Terraia, where her mother, Nanda, is spending a brief time in a kind of nursing home. It takes me along the pista ciclabile from Spoleto to Assisi through some of the most beautiful valley landscapes in all of Italy, if not in all the world. I suppose I will never be able to do wheelies or other stunts on riding expeditions through the Alps, but my bike gets me where I need to go and even where I want to go, and we travel together as though we were one beast, both of us grandmothers after all, both of us a little lame, a little doddery, a little deluded, a little too caught in windmills of our own making, but hell—the wind still sings in our ears and my, my, my we’re going strong!
Interesting info on the history of the bike:
http://italiancyclingjournal.blogspot.com/2008/09/cinelli.html
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