28th May, Melide
The hot-air balloon and all the children that go around holding the balloons with their hands. I don’t know why but when I was little often hot-air balloons went by my house. At a certain time they disappeared, they never came back. I don’t know why.
I know that today I forgot the battery of my camera. Later or before it had to happen. I always remember it at the last moment, I knew that one time or the other I would have found the camera’s body too slight. With the order and the memory I don’t really get along. Nevertheless I feel like this is a little sign. Feeling the cycling’s soul that flows, this is the important. And then the words. Those are my negatives, even if is not used anymore. Maybe we have to look at them back lit, sometimes you have to look for them in the unsaid spots.
So I stay so. Without too many things in the hands, without hurry to not to loose a moment. I look at the guys pouring towards the start line. Simone Stortoni and Alan Marangoni mutter together. I take a photo with my phone, more as a fan than else, they smile.
Alan jokes and apologizes if those smiles are a bit tired and even disappointed. Almost three weeks accomplished and that close victory, already his. He tells me something about those moments. Things you see live but that you don’t really see. Because you’re not in it. Somehow, a lot of thing change. I’ve always known it, and is this, maybe, the big teaching of today: stay inside. From outside the risk is to feel expert audience. And this kills the cycling, its spontaneity, even its right angers. No frills for a sport that doesn’t have them and that sometimes is evil like few. Nevertheless is loved. How is it possible? All is clearer when you stay here in the middle. Guys who smile after the kilometres they have swallowed with everything else: dreams, delusions, tiredness, efforts, bitterness. Guys that bear this entire external world where sometimes hungry sharks go around, just for the deep and inexplicable passion who bond them with their bike. In silence. You have to stay balanced.
Here, those are my today’s invisible negatives. I look at them back lit, against that sun that makes sparkles on the lake, that calm strokes the banks of Verbania.
Gilbert won, Bongiorno hits a hand on the handlebars, he run away disappointed and tired, bringing with him that second place till the bus, the others come and some more time passes. Someone looks at the prizegiving stage to know who is going to stand there if they still don’t know it. Two bidons roll, one goes under the barriers, a child picks it up: he will be happy tonight. Someone asks if that is Aru. No, he’s Landa, new star, surrounded by ten microphones and three video cameras.
Then there is Ryder that never gives up and reflects on his “mirror” poc the profiles of two journalists that ask him question for fifteen minutes.
There would need hundred eyes to see everything that happens here, at every corner where cycling stops. But maybe be alert is enough.
Joseph Conrad said: “How can I explain to my wife that when I look out from the window I’m working?”
It can’t be explained. A writer is judged for what he writes. But nobody will ever know deeply what is really behind that story. And that’s right. Everybody has his own secrets and maybe, if they would have been disclosed they would haven’t been understood. Someone can look from the window and follow the thread of an entire plot. Someone can look a bike and draw on it the character of the one who drives it. Everything depends on the prospective we chose to use to see things.
Translated by Martina Meroni.
Original version here → #GIORNIDIGIRO | MELIDE-VERBANIA
E mi alzo sui pedali 