•
Rating: A man.
A man on a bicycle.
A man on a bicycle who races.
A man on a bicycle who races without ever stopping.
A man on a bicycle who races without ever stopping, while in the background, frantic, landscapes, moments, sensations, nostalgias, stories, visions succeed one another. All faster than the cyclist, who nonetheless debuted at fifteen and won a Giro di Lombardia, three Giri del Piemonte, and a Milano-Torino.
In fact, on closer inspection, perhaps that man on the bicycle is standing still. It's the landscape around him, which flows before our eyes, in a valzer di vento e di paglia that seems never to want to end.
And then the things everyone knows.
That that man, during a race, plowed into the midst of a procession and the priest, at that impious rush, burst out with a "Chi a l'è cul lì? Ël Diav?! " (Who is that there, the devil?!).
That that man was so fast he could afford a stop at the bar ("Come here with us to drink an orange soda").
That that man got disqualified from the Giro d'Italia because he was caught being towed by a sidecar.
That that man, at 47 years old, was invited by the organization of the same Giro d'Italia, thus becoming its oldest participant ever. A record still unbeaten.
That man is Giovanni Gerbi and that landscape is the Langhe.
The Langhe, according to the laconic definition of Wikipedia, is "a territory in Piedmont located between the provinces of Cuneo and Asti, bordering with Astesana, Monferrato, and Roero".
For me, however, who am certainly not a langhetto but met Elvira — a delightful woman from Asti with the femininity of a Belarusian discus thrower and a form of acne before which even the makeup artist of Cassano would faint — the Langhe, I said, are an ideal place of the soul located between the provinces of Inconsistency and Remoteness, bordering with Expectation, Resilience, and the Sense of Inadequacy. A place where, as Cesare said, even you are a hill, and paths of stones and play in the reeds, and know the vineyard that is silent at night.
Yet Elvira never spoke to me about Pavese. Much more simply, for me, Elvira was Pavese. And she was Vittorio Alfieri, was Beppe Fenoglio, was Paolo Conte, was all the langhetti together, whom I had only encountered on the pages of a book or in a song. Every morning, upon waking, still warm under the covers, Elvira would ask me, "will you take me to work, neh?". And I, enchanted, would leave her at the entrance of the "Beauty Center Sabrina". Yet, if you asked her "what do you do in life", Elvira wouldn't answer "I'm a beautician". No, too explicit. Elvira would say "I deal with aesthetics". And after many years, I confess I still haven't understood whether her job involved chisel work on the ingrown nails of bored Savoyards or if, instead, leading a double life, she had a chair in the Philosophy of Art at the University of Göttingen. Certainly, she would have deserved it. Because from her, in the few months of acquaintance, I learned everything I know about the beauty of those places.
Elvira might talk to me about permanent hair removal... And I would see Conte there. At other times she would passionately explain the techniques of Nail Art... and I found the realism of Fenoglio. Other times still, in a nearly ecstatic enchantment, she informed me of the most modern techniques of Peeling... and I felt the rhapsodic gait of Pavese (Editor's Note: I copied this from Goffredo Fofi).
And it is from Elvira's cousin that I discovered the existence of the other Giovanni Gerbi, her grandfather: a fifteen-year-old partisan who, like his namesake, roamed the Langhe without ever stopping. And I understood that the two Giovanni Gerbis are the yin and yang of these lands. There isn't a langhetto who doesn't have at least one bicycle and a partisan grandfather.
I did some calculations and, if you take the statements of its inhabitants for good, in 1945 in the Langhe, for every German, there were no less than ten partisans with 3.7 bicycles each, a contingent of 140,000 between men and vehicles, which presumably humiliated the retreating Wehrmacht, pushing it back with heavy losses to the suburbs of Munich in a bell-ringing that reminded many of "Bicycle Race" by Queen.
But let's return to our Giovanni Gerbi.
Because everything around now flutters and dances.
Our man, as they say, is making a breakaway. Because, as is known: cycling is like love: the one who escapes wins.
Actually, no, we were wrong again. We've already said it. He is immobile. It's the landscape that makes the breakaway. And with it mirages, illusions, dazzles, voices from the sun and other voices, from this countryside other abysses of light.
And everyone behind desperately trying to chase, that landscape, each as they can, whirling in the vortex where towns and cities disappear.
That landscape is him, the gentleman with the mustache and gestures of a tamer, before whom an excited and nymphomaniac orchestra dances, enclosed in the pit, seething with storms and freedom.
Voices from the sun and other voices
from this countryside other abysses of lights
and of land and soul nothing
more than the horse and the quinine
and voices and hotel whispers
plain lovers
bus queens and milestones
their, their ancient discretion
is water and honey
The first to break away from the group and try to follow that landscape is a clarinetist, the meek air of the domestique used to losing himself in a sea of bums ahead of him, or the attending who says "You take two tablets of Augmentin after meals".
And instead, calmly calmly, he starts and makes you jump on the couch when you hear him start with the incipit of Brahms's Third Adagio (Listen here, at minute 17:30...). You widen eyes and ears. "What's the choleric Hamburg man doing in the Langhe?" you ask yourself... He's doing what he always did: the domestique. The eternal second, eating the dust of Beethoven, then Wagner, then Mahler. And he, impassive, firm in his Classicism, while around him, like our Giovanni Gerbi, the world of music grinds and spins.
And then Brahms slowly disappears, floundering, groping, swirling in the whirlpool of the imponderable appearance of a klezmer tune, like a turd when you flush.
To close, the last handful of pedal strokes: a distant reminder of a 1920 piece by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, that "Palesteena", already boiling with klezmer references.
The country doctor with the clarinet, flushed in face, almost confusedly closes his attempt, uncertainly seeking the object of his reverence, and falls back sucked into the group.
Yet alone, as only cycling can make you feel.
If in my step you perceived an unease
and a great bow,
I was near a distant city,
all of mother of pearl, silver, wind, iron, fire,
and found no one here to talk about it a little.
But the "Winter Journey" of the gentleman with the mustache knows no stops, and it's time for the man with the accordion, "Der Leiermann", the man with the hurdy-gurdy Schubert tells us about in the last Lied of his Winterreise, when he crystallizes the Wanderer's wandering into a chilling stasis, in a disintegration where every category of space and time seems to be lost. And everything becomes landscape, indeed.
The man with the accordion, after an introduction with a more or less classical flavor, exchanges a glance of understanding with the man with the guitar.
Those two knew by heart where they wanted to go.
And they reach a modulation from which the landscape emerges as if after a tornado. The man with the hurdy-gurdy falls into what is evidently a state of trance, the orchestra providing the background to what has become a sort of round dance, in the delirium of those simple and usual ones who reach that far.
The landscape dances to the notes of the man with the accordion, in a nocturnal and rural sabbath, at whose center alternate the Langhe, Stradella, Broni, Casteggio, Voghera, Marquez's Macondo, Bulgakov's Moscow, Dostoevsky's Demons, Boito's Mefistofele, Pape Satàn Aleppe, Father Amorth, Giucas Casella hypnotizing a chicken, Luca Giurato walking on hot coals...
That music continued, it was a song that said and didn't say
The orchestra swayed like a palm tree in front of a revered sea.
"And the rest of the group?" you will say... The guitarists one with the ceiling and the floor, only the drummer, in the shadows, looked with evil glances.
Right. The guitarists...
There would actually be three.
But only one is The Man With The Guitar. The Alpha and the Omega of this hymn to the landscape, from whose fingers the first and last chords take shape. Everything begins with him and everything closes with him, after twelve interminable minutes during which, without making a breakaway, he climbs the peak of "Diavolo rosso", called "The Mont Ventoux of guitarists".
At the end, in a deceleration that smacks of fatigue and something that finally finds its completion, he, The Man With The Guitar has no bows for the man with the mustache, but a look that invokes mercy, seemingly saying "Paolo, Paolo... Why do you persecute me?".
And the orchestra closes clattering, like the trains when they arrive at the station, in a puff of steam in which everything seems to have been a mirage and in which everyone seems to verdianly sing Master, it was an oversight... Have a care for your guitarist.
PS I thank @lector, whom I do not know. But who, with a comment, made me want to write something again.
Loading comments slowly
