We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo
He jokes that he does everything for us but the pedaling. His is the voice that echoes around my skull, encouraging greater effort, greater power output, greater commitment.
We have done twelve days of the Tour already. We have eleven more days of riding, and two rest days to come. Rafael is acutely conscious of our place in the schedule, in the country, in his plan for things: a knowing beyond knowing, like that of a pianist in the middle of a piece, unreflectively aware of the keys they are touching and will touch next, a perfect form of the music in mind, awaiting realization.
Rafael takes his time to look around the table, to check that all eyes are on him. “I’m not going to tell you how wonderful, how able, how loved by your papas you all are,” he says. “To me, you are each capable of outputting a steady four hundred and fifty watts. I ask you to do that, okay?” His hair is thick, black, and short-cropped. He brushes one hand through it as if seeking to clean his palm. “If you do that, I give you a pat on the head. If you don’t, I think you are a bag of shit and maybe you don’t get a contract next year. All right?”
The bovine slowness of our nodding exemplifies our commitment to conserving energy, maybe also our reluctance to agree. Though he is in his late forties, Rafael is boyish. The perma-tanned skin of his cheeks is smooth. His neck is thin. His hair is still glossy. His dark eyebrows are thick and teased into a monobrow by a causeway of bristles arcing over the bridge of his nose. “Today is a mountain finish,” he says. “Obviously, you are supporting Fabrice. Shield him from the wind, bring him water, give him your bike if he punctures. If it makes you happy, make an inspirational speech about how much you believe in him and slap him on the bottom.” Rafael won eight stages of the Tour when he was a younger man. Once he rode so hard up to a mountaintop finish that medics strapped an oxygen mask to his gasping face as he crossed the line. “I will be more specific in the race briefing,” he tells us. “None of you fuck up. I hate it when you fuck up.”
We pick at the food that remains on our plates, then return to our rooms to rest.
* *
Before we leave the hotel, I call my wife, Liz. I am married, and even though this has been the case for nearly three years, in the midst of racing, this fact still sometimes hits me with a strangeness. We have a boy now also. He arrived last autumn with the simian face of a new human, lying in his crib, clasping at the air with chubby hands, his palms nearly creaseless.
When I am on tour, Liz takes care of our son. She is a research biologist, a postdoc. She breeds and dissects zebra fish relentlessly, looking at their spinal cells, seeking to fathom the workings of specific genes.
She picks up after the fifth ring. She knows it is me, even on our old home phone without a screen telling her so. That is a feature of our third year of marriage and our first of parenthood: it is inevitably the other of our partnership making contact.
“How are you doing?” she says. I can make out the sounds of our kitchen in the background: our son gurgling in his high chair, a kettle coming to boil, the radio on low. I feel a nostalgia for the routine I left behind just weeks before. Yet I know, also, that it is a pleasure I should resist, like a warm bed on a cold morning. The thought of that kitchen is a comfortable one, and I do not want to diminish the leaden-bellied feeling that I have come to associate with proper preparation for a race.
“I’m good,” I say. “Normal. Fine. Ready.”
Our boy is called Barry. This was Liz’s choice. A tribute to a favorite uncle, who died before I ever met her. She had been keen to name our child before he arrived, and so I ceded her this right and accepted a middle-aged man’s name for our new baby. I cannot yet extend myself to think of him as Barry, however, and have called him B in this first year of his life.
I tell Liz that we will leave for the start line soon. There is not much for either of us to say, beyond acknowledgment of our activities, our consciousness of each other in the world. “We’ve got things to do today,” Liz says. “I’m off to the lab, but perhaps we’ll watch you on TV in the afternoon.”
“Or the group,” I say. “My head bobbing among other identically dressed men.”
“I’m like one of those farmers who can recognize specific sheep,” she says. “Somehow I always manage to pick you out of a crowd.”
* *
The silence on the bus is heavy. As we drive to the start line we reflect upon our bodies, conducting an inventory of aches, of tiredness, of places of strength. The curtains are partly drawn. We sit mutely, the same few scenes, concerning or hopeful, vying for supremacy in our minds. It is when one is racing that it is easiest to believe in one’s power: when one is enclosed within the peloton, between those other bodies, part of a mass, rolling amorphously along the road like a drop of water down a pane of glass.
When we park, Tsutomo’s fan is waiting. Tsutomo is Japanese. He is a domestique like me, another man riding in support of Fabrice. He seldom talks and never offers up his dreams for examination.
Shinichi follows Tsutomo around. He wears a battered windbreaker and cycles part of each day’s route himself. He waves a Japanese flag. Tsutomo is entirely uninterested in him.
“Hello, Shinichi,” I say, when I leave the bus. I speak to Shinichi because Tsutomo will not. I wonder if this isn’t a small act of treachery.
“How is Tsutomo?” says Shinichi.
“He is well,” I tell him.
“Not sick?” says Shinichi. “Eating good?” Shinichi is chubby. He has a robust jolliness entirely lacking in his hero. Tsutomo is wiry, slightly distant, handsome, the only asymmetry in his face the slight leftward lilt of his nose, broken in a past race.
“Very fit,” I say.
Shinichi beams. He rubs his hands. He wears replica gloves and, under his windbreaker, the jersey of our cycling team. I wonder what it must cost, what Shinichi must go without, to follow Tsutomo around France each July.
“So,” he says slowly. “Do you think today he will win?”
“Oh,” I say. This is the dirty business of talking to people, of talking to fans. “Tsutomo will do what’s best for the team. Perhaps he will help Fabrice win.”
“Will you win?”
“I will help Tsutomo help Fabrice win.”
That is largely true. We are competing only to get our team leader, Fabrice, across the twenty-one stages of this Tour in as little time as possible. This cumulative time, the criteria on which the winner of the Tour is judged, is all that matters to us. Our own results are not important. We shade him from the wind, pace him, will give him our own bike if he punctures. These measures have just small effects upon his time, yet this is a sport of fine margins—decided by differences of seconds after days and days of riding—and so small advantages, wrung from our fanatical assistance of our strongest rider, offer our team the best chance of victory. We only think of the ever-rising time it takes Fabrice to make his way through this race, how that time compares to his rivals’, how we may act to lessen it.
The mechanics set up a headquarters around the team bus. Our bikes are mounted on stationary trainers to allow us to warm our legs. We are encouraged to drink a mixture of sugar syrup and caffeine. I spin on a trainer next to Fabrice. He is at ease in these mornings. He smells of Tiger Balm and saddle cream. His eyes are shiningly alert.
“A pedestrian steps off the pavement one day,” he says, “and is run down by a cyclist.”
“Right,” I say.
“ ‘You’re lucky,’ says the cyclist to the pedestrian.”
I nod.
“‘Why am I lucky?’ says the pedestrian. ‘That really hurt.’ ” Fabrice raises a finger, holds the pause. “‘Well,’ says the cyclist, ‘I normally drive a bus.’ ”
I smile.
He laughs himself. “It’s a good one,” he says.