We Begin Our Ascent

All I could say was that people did watch my sport. It was Liz who came to my defense. She talked about tactics and psychology and the vicarious desires of the fans. Katherine nodded like she appreciated her daughter’s effort.

“She’s not keen on my career?” I asked Liz on the train home that night.

Liz exhaled in a way that signaled disagreement. “She just wants to be told why it consumes you. She wants to be sold on it.”

“Yes?”

“A meaning,” she said. “A sense of the story you tell yourself.”

* *

After our team dinner, I am not in the mood to sit and read or watch TV, and it is not yet late enough to sleep. I risk Rafael’s wrath, then, by walking slowly around the hotel.

In the lounge, I find some of our team sitting between the plastic plants. The lounge is unpleasant—badly decorated and with a view of the hotel car park—and thus a perfect place to congregate. No self-respecting holidaymakers would spend a minute of their vacation here, so it is ours. Johan lies on a pleather sofa. Sebastian sits upright in an armchair leafing through a magazine.

Johan is our sprinter. His job is to compete for wins in flat stages, those in which riders finish en masse. He pulls from the wind shadow of the peloton and thrashes for the line at the last minute. He is trained to ride in others’ tailwinds until the final meters. While the rest of the team work for Fabrice, Johan competes to win individual stages in the sprints, seeking prizes, publicity, and acclaim for the team in this way.

Sebastian is Johan’s minder. As we domestiques tend to Fabrice, he tends to Johan. He offers him shade from the elements and leads him into position for the finish. On days like the one just past, in which Johan has no chance of victory and must simply make it up and down the mountains within the elimination time, Sebastian paces Johan all day. I have seen neither of them much in the past twenty-four hours. While I was trying to help Fabrice, they were grinding along far behind.

“How’s the boss man?” says Johan, meaning Fabrice. Some other teams concentrate fully on their sprinters, ignoring the overall race. Johan would, of course, rather be on such a team.

“Okay,” I say.

“Didn’t quite get the finish he wanted?” says Johan, the pleasure with which he says this ill-disguised.

“Uh-uh,” I say.

“Flat tomorrow,” says Sebastian.

Johan is wearing shorts and I can see him flex his quadriceps in response to mention of the coming stage. He is an abbreviated, muscular man, a different creature from the rest of us. He has longer hair, tied back in a small ponytail, and a goatee beard.

“It’ll be your day,” says Sebastian to Johan. Sebastian is the son of a famous cycling champion. Where his father was well-proportioned, though, he is stringy and awkward. Where his father pedaled with a wonderfully smooth style, Sebastian stamps through his strokes. Where his father was handsome, he has a big caricature of a face, a large nose and heavy jaw. It is hard to carry the diluted genes of a champion, and he probably would have done better avoiding the bike overall, getting a real profession. Theories on the causes of these differences between him and his father have been discussed at length. “It’s the difference in nutrition in the modern age,” Fabrice has said in Sebastian’s absence. “It makes for larger people.”

“His mother must be Amazonian,” Johan has said.

“You know who else rides a bike?” Rafael likes to say. “The postman.”

I take a seat next to Sebastian.

“In twenty hours,” says Johan, breaking a silence, “I’ll be kissing a podium girl.”

“You know they only kiss the winners?” says Sebastian, and then laughs at his own joke.

“What would you know about that anyway?” says Johan. “The only time you’ve ever been on a podium is in your father’s arms.”

“He always used to take my sister, actually,” says Sebastian.

Johan ignores his friend. He sits up and looks at me. “Have you seen the podium girls on this tour?” he says.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “We haven’t had much cause to hang around the podium.”

“Too true,” says Sebastian.

Johan kisses his bunched fingers and lifts that same hand, opening it in appreciation. “Oh,” he says. “Those girls …”

“Really?” I say.

“The best beauty,” says Johan, “has a certain weirdness. Each of these girls is almost ugly. One has a pronounced underbite, another has a long forehead. These things allow you to convince yourself that others see them as unattractive. You feel you are the only one who truly appreciates them, really knows them. In this way, you can imagine such an intimacy without even having exchanged a word.”

As I have said, one must find interests to stuff around one’s days on tour. Johan is, above all, interested in chasing women. “There have been many eras,” he told me once, “in which the things we value—money, politics, war, even cycling—were nonexistent or irrelevant. In no era, though, has sex been unimportant.”

I told him that you could say the same thing about any other aspect of human survival: breathing or eating or shitting.

“I like those things too,” he said primly. “Just not as much.”

* *

I have books in my room awaiting me: a small library carried in my luggage between hotels each day. Many are recommended by Liz, who despite B, despite the busyness of her lab, reads voraciously. I do not want to read now, though, but to be with these other men, in their studied idleness, in this small room, the traffic outside, the little TV above the door whispering the news.

I was struck when I first met Liz by the way her flat was so full of paper. There were the scientific journals she read, and the textbooks, but also piles of novels and newspapers and magazines. They spilled over the small desk in her bedroom, utterly obscuring everything. The third time I visited, I felt that I had to tidy the desk. It was too much to look at. I made four piles: textbooks, scientific papers, popular periodicals, and fiction. “You read all this?” I said. I couldn’t imagine how she had the time, the inclination.

“I will,” said Liz. She felt compelled to keep on top of it. She would do her work, which would occupy many more hours than most people’s jobs, but she would also have an opinion on the books which had made the Booker short list, the artists who had been nominated for the Turner Prize, on contemporary political events and the quality of the coverage of them in the newspapers. She practiced the bassoon, an instrument she had learned to play to a nearly professional level in her teens. All this was certainly encouraged by Katherine, who had taken pains to send her daughter to a prestigious all-female school in the Cots-wolds (sometimes, I suspected, simply so she could have this to hold over Liz forevermore). There was also the shadow of the dead father, who in death had been mythologized as an incomparable polymath.

In the first weeks of knowing her, I became eager to be able to stay with her and her friends in conversation. I read more widely, picked up books and newspapers and worked through them wondering how I would discuss them with Liz. It was hard to learn the dynamics of her group, the popular books they didn’t like, the unpopular ones they did. When I got a handle on this, Liz met my competence with suspicion, however. “That’s what Peter would say,” she told me, when I described the drawbacks of a popular literary novel. She wanted something different from me. Sometimes one of her friends would say something high-flown and impenetrable and she’d laugh and look at me for a reaction, as if sure that it should naturally repulse me. I was awed by her friends though, by the breadth of what they knew, how they could talk.

“They are impressive, at first,” she said. “They want to give you that sense. They think they can do anything, but none of them do.”

“No?”

“Or they would be actually doing it,” she said. She nodded at me, as if to prove her point, as if I embodied this doing.

* *

When I return to the room I am sharing with Tsutomo, he is already in his bed, facing the wall, apparently asleep, his side moving with the rhythm of his breathing. The room is illuminated only by light coming from the half-open bathroom door.

I quietly try to prepare for the night, stumbling in the dimness. When I make it into bed, I take time to think. I do not intend to sleep for these moments but merely to feel my body, to have some sense of my aches and pains. I am not always hopeful, but in this time I try to be. There are other men recovering in other rooms all over the city, thinking as I now am that tomorrow will be a better day than the one just past. The reality for most of us is that this will not be the case, and yet we will be on the start line tomorrow, and so we must disregard this fact. I stare at the ceiling. I try to think of what has gone well since I finished the day’s stage, of the ways in which I feel prepared. I look up, visualizing these points of strength, trying to draw them into a constellation.

Chapter 3

The new day is sheathed in cloud. The light outside is dim, but the air is warm. This muted weather suits the care with which we leave the hotel. We load our bags onto the bus slowly and silently.

The day’s stage will take us out of the mountains. It begins tending lightly downhill and then runs flat across the plains. None of the other team leaders will be able to make time against the fierce efficiency of the peloton in such circumstances, and so the game is to keep Fabrice within the mass of riders, trying to work against the contingencies—the falls, punctures, and miscommunications—which could see him caught out.

On the drive to the start, Rafael stands in the aisle and speaks, working hard for our attention. He does something with eye contact. There are rules, and he is as brazen in the breaking of these as any New Ager: holding gazes longer than should be bearable, really staring into us. “Be ready,” he says. He indicates Fabrice. “Keep him with the other leaders. Be ready every moment.” As he is finishing up, he looks at Johan. “Other than Sebastian,” Rafael says, “we won’t dedicate anyone else to lead you out in the sprint. Fabrice’s place is too precarious. Do what you can. Follow one of the sprint teams’ lead-outs. Get in their space.”

Johan nods reluctantly.

* *

Shinichi is once more waiting when we disembark at the start line. He waves a Japanese flag, part-bundled in his fist, when Tsutomo walks past. “Good luck,” he says to me. I nod appreciatively but choose not to stop.

We wear running shoes when not in our cycling cleats: brilliantly colored, with reflective piping and technical flourishes rendered in different polymers. Provided by a sponsor, they’re clumpy and incongruous beneath our tight shorts and shaven legs. We have no need for them, we who do not run or walk any great distance. Like the sneakers of the elderly, of young children, of Americans holidaying abroad, they accentuate our immobility. We cannot run, most of us. Our hamstrings have tightened to the minimal extension cycling requires. Our backs are used to being bent.

I have pictured my inflexibility when B will be bigger, when he will play in our back garden and seek companions in this play: the awkward, loping stride, the hunched way in which I will kick a ball.

Today’s stage begins on cobbled streets, and our rubber soles squeak across the polished bellies of the cobblestones as we congregate outside the bus. The mechanics do final checks on our bikes, working in order. Fabrice’s is looked over first, my own fifth. The Butcher comes by, pressed into another role: exhorting us to drink a concoction of electrolytes and syrup. Stationary cycle-trainers are assembled and we’re summoned one by one to begin warming up. Fabrice and Tsutomo stamp into their cycling shoes and start to pedal. The increasing fluidity of their movements, and the rising zip of the electromagnetic resistance wheels, makes me think of something taking off.

Later, as I stand by the bus inventorying my kit, Fabrice wheels over on his bike. “Two men are in a bar watching the Tour,” he says.

“Right.”

“It’s raining, and the riders are going up a mountain.” Fabrice rubs at his hair and smiles. “Really filthy weather.”

“I know the kind,” I say.

“‘Why do they do that?’ says the first man. He does not understand. He shakes his head. ‘The winner gets half a million euros,’ says the second man.” Fabrice waits. Watches me with a faint smile. “ ‘I know that,’ says the first man, ‘but why do the others do it?’ ”

I laugh. “It’s good,” I say.

“Yes,” he says, chuckling. “It has truth in it.”

“Yes.”

He winks. “Luckily I am the winner.”

Rafael has been chatting with the directeur of the German banking team, over by their bus. He turns, laughing, finishing his own joke. He points at his colleague, smiles. “Be good,” he says. He walks toward Fabrice and me. “Steady,” he says. “No fuck-ups today.” He stands over the front wheel of Fabrice’s bike, slaps Fabrice’s cheek playfully. Rafael has more faith in his team leader than anyone. Rafael discovered Fabrice, so the story goes, on a holiday to Corsica, coming across a skinny twelve-year-old coaxing a rusty mountain bike up a pass as he himself drove to a hunting lodge. He had his mentor, an ancient Italian, visit Fabrice to examine the boy and feel his legs. The mentor sucked his dentures, it is said, and declared Fabrice a future great. On Fabrice rests not just Rafael’s hopes for the Tour, but the validity of Rafael’s judgment and an uncharacteristic sentimentality: his belief in a lineage of talent conferred upon small boys in remote towns, as sure and unpredictable as the rebirth of the Lama.

Riders are making their way toward the start now. Fabrice clicks into his pedals, rolls off toward the line with a little push of encouragement from Rafael. I put on my glasses. I climb onto my bike, and ride off in pursuit of Fabrice, offering my apologies as I cut through the crowds, past vehicles. I stop behind the line among the tight press of other racers. I smell sunscreen, saddle ointment, washing powder. Riders ratchet closed cycling shoes, do up helmet straps, adjust the placement of cycle computers.

It is the period before the starting horn goes when to be still is harder than anything. We shift and fidget: energy spilling over into action, like water from a brimful glass.

* *

When Liz and I had been together for a couple of months, she brought her mother and stepfather to watch a race of mine. It was an evening racing series in London: laps of a small urban circuit on the streets of Bermondsey. Sebastian and I did it without team support. It was nothing, a training session, but I felt as I rode a desire to do well. It was dusk, and there had been rain in the day. The air smelled of wet concrete, and the streets were slick. I pushed hard around the last laps. There were semipros who wanted the victory, for whom beating Sebastian or me would have been a great coup, and they were testing us, taking risks. On the penultimate corner, I went into the bend in first place yet skidded over as my front wheel lost traction. I lay in a crumple under a barrier as riders zipped past me.

I remounted and came home in the middle of the pack. I wheeled my bike over to where Liz, Thomas, and Katherine stood. I felt the burn of having wanted that small race too much. “You were close,” said Katherine.

“It was just a silly thing,” I said.

She nodded. “Of course.”

“It was the cobblestones,” I said. “They’re lethal in the wet.”

“Technically,” said Thomas, “those are sett stones. They’re worked stones. Granite. A nice job, I must say.” Liz frowned at her stepfather. She studied the bike as I leaned on it; it was undamaged but for some of the handlebar tape, which was torn and uncurling, hanging like ringlets from the bars. She shook her head. She knew that it was just a small race, an insignificant thing, and yet I saw that she had been seduced, as I had, by the thought that it was a chance to show her mother the seriousness of what I did.

It was a consolation, actually, to realize that Liz had felt the stakes too. I thought of something she had said about my career before: “It must be nice to be able to succeed so clearly,” she said. “To have such definite parameters. Clear successes. No one is cheering me in my lab.” That night, however, demonstrated the drawbacks of performing one’s profession so publicly: the way in which expertise and preparation could be occluded by bad luck, the way that an expected success can buckle under the weight one has put upon it.

* *

Less than a kilometer after we begin, a handful of riders from opposing teams sprint away from the front. The peloton does not react to this but instead grinds along. Most of us are still finding what the day will be, trying to conserve and gauge our energies. We compete on each of the twenty-one days of the race, but there are unwritten rules, expectations and traditions which reach back to the men with their steel bikes, bad teeth, and muddy visages, to the stutter and shimmy of old newsreel footage. Not every minute of every day is heedless competition. There are truces and lulls, and moments of peace. Some of Liz’s friends were disappointed to hear this, I remember, as if I were telling them that my sport was nothing more than professional wrestling. That is not the case though. The conventions observed among us riders do not contain the competition but channel it. They are flexible rules, liable to be shifted by resentments, disagreements, and alterations in fortune. We are governed by the will of the peloton, the mood of the mass, which is as changeable as that of any small village. On mornings such as this, on flat stages, we usually agree to make some progress before competition breaks out fully. We are content to sit together, to allow a few young men, back markers, to spend some time leading, in view of the cameras, taking the first applause of the fans. That is, as long as the men are sufficiently far down in the overall classification to pose no threat to any of the leaders, and providing that they have done nothing to offend the mass. The publicly outspoken, the gratingly showy will be chased down with pleasure. Local boys may be allowed down the road to enjoy the adoration of their home fans, until their lead gets too great and they will be brought back, swallowed up.

Today the seven men out ahead are adjudged unthreatening and inoffensive enough to be left to ride ahead. The peloton churns along steadily.

Tsutomo and I collect team lunch bags from helpers at the side of the road. We ride between our teammates, distributing them. Because he is the team leader, Fabrice is supplied, as is his wont, with a peeled boiled egg each lunchtime. He eats it like an indulged child. Though we’re moving at forty kilometers per hour, he sits up on his bike and rides one-handed. He seeks to eat off the white first, until he has only the dusty yellow ball of yoke left. Then he squeezes this with his greasy fingers, exposed by his fingerless gloves. The yoke breaks up and, depending on the duration of the egg’s boiling, either oozes or crumbles. The state of the yoke of each egg seems, to Fabrice, to constitute an important omen.

* *

Sometimes, I suppose, I have had too much faith in the arcana of my sport to engage and elevate me. The days before Liz had been smaller days, I now know. I had been racing, and thinking only about that. I was getting better, but I was also feeling the limits of what I did. I had assumed, when I became a professional, that things would be more intense, somehow, more vivid and real. The reality, though, was that my life had become smaller. I prohibited myself from many things, set myself in a limited pattern of thinking. It is perhaps obvious in hindsight, but obsession does not give you more, but less. I had the routines and the inflexibility of someone already old.

Liz accompanied me to a race in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. It took some time to arrange: the time off for Liz, the travel, the permission from Rafael. When we arrived, I recced the course, then rested and made sure I was hydrated and properly fed. It was a minor race, a preparation for the real season. Rafael would not have contemplated allowing Liz to stay in my room otherwise. The four of us racing—myself, Sebastian, Tsutomo, and Fabrice—sought to maintain our good habits. We sat in the hotel café for most of the day preceding the race. We talked, when we did at all, about racing. Liz was there for much of the time. She was exasperated but also slightly in awe at how limited a day we could live, as if she were finding out that there were men who could subsist on only air. She wanted to stroll along the seafront promenade, but I couldn’t bear to. I told her I didn’t want to walk anywhere the day before a race.

After lunch she disappeared and then reappeared in the hotel café, wheeling an empty wheelchair. “You don’t want to walk,” she said. Fabrice and Tsutomo laughed at me, shook their heads. Liz kept looking at me, daring me. I climbed into the chair. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” she said to my companions. Normally, I would have been mortified to be wheeled around, but that day I chose not to be. Liz cackled delightedly. “I told you we could do it,” she said.

It was spring. The air was warm but there was a breeze coming off the sea. There were sailing boats out on the water, tacking against the wind. Other tourists were stopping to take photos of the view, but we glided past them. I was silent for much of the time. I just listened to Liz speak. She had been reading her guidebook. She leaned down behind me to tell me the history of the docks, to point out the town hall, an old palace on a hill. I smelled her perfume and felt her breath on the back of my neck.

Rafael was in the lobby when Liz wheeled me back into the hotel. His presence struck me with a sense of foreboding. He looked at me steadily, as if deciding upon a response. As I waited for this, Liz walked around the chair and toward him. “You must be Rafael,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Something about her approach—not the words but her firm assurance that he would greet her reasonably—seemed to weight the scales in our favor.

Rafael smiled at Liz. He was shorter than her, even in his special shoes. He looked up at her, put out a hand. “I have heard a great deal about you too,” he lied. I rose from the wheelchair, treating others in the lobby to an apparent miracle, and walked over to stand behind Liz.

She gestured at the chair. “We were trying to have a good afternoon without exerting him too much.”

Rafael laughed. “Wonderful,” he said. I felt for a moment the boyish silliness of my fear of him. It was an eerie moment. He touched my elbow. “Why have you been keeping this wonderful woman from us for so long?” he said.

That night Liz and I had sex, utterly silently, the slow creak of the mattress merging with the whispering of a window pulled back and forth on its hinges by the night wind, my teammates asleep in adjacent rooms. There is a prohibition on sex before racing. Rafael believes that intercourse diminishes the body in critical respects, despite Johan’s marshaling of scientific articles that apparently refute this claim. The thought that what we did was prohibited intensified it.

The race went well. I spent time out ahead on a break. I was in the leading pack when we went up the small winding ascent on which Liz was waiting. I came home in eighteenth place.

* *

We are close to halfway through the stage when the pace begins to ramp up. The cadence of the group rises. The feeling, emergent among us, is that competition may be put off no longer. We breathe. We sweat. Heat rises from us as from stock animals penned tightly.

We hear the time advantage of the leaders come down in increments as we exert ourselves.

I am taking my turn at the head of the peloton when we catch the men. We’re on one half of a closed-off highway, which curves through the landscape. We come over a very gentle rise and I see the breakers strung into a short line, turning their heads as we approach. Warnings over radios and the passing of the motorcycle outriders who precede the peloton have already informed them that they are being caught, and there is something in their resignation that almost makes me sorry for the ruthlessness of the group I tow behind me. The peloton, really, is the thing: the center of the bell curve. We riders are defined by our presence within it or apart from it. The very best, the likes of Fabrice, desire to leave the peloton behind. Their dreams are rendered in opposition to the machine. The rest of us worry each morning that this might be the day that we can’t keep pace. Our nightmares see us left in the wake, among the team cars, the journalists, the riders fixing punctures. If ever there was one, I am a peloton man. I am happiest within the mass. I do not flatter myself that I can kick away and do without it. It has been enough for me to get here, to find a small place in such a famous event. Only, occasionally, as when we pass these eager, exhausted young men, can I see it any differently: as an aggressor rather than as an ally.