Ventoux. Bert Wagendorp
He still had that slight Amsterdam accent.
I didn’t say that three days before our date, I was due to go cycling with André.
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II
In 1970, Eddy Merckx won his second Tour de France. I was 6, watching TV with my father, and saw Merckx, the cycling marvel. ‘The cannibal,’ said my father. ‘So young and already so good. He’s going to sweep the board. No one can compete with him.’
I reversed the handlebars on my bike and did a circuit through the neighbourhood. I imagined that I was Merckx on the Tourmalet. I looked back: no one! I’d left them all for dead. I stopped outside André’s house.
He was lying on the sofa reading a Billy’s Boots comic.
‘André, let’s be racing cyclists.’
‘Huh?’
‘Let’s be racing cyclists like Eddy Merckx. You know, from the Tour. We’ll reverse your handlebars, too.’
‘My father’s already a racing cyclist. I’m going to be a footballer.’
It was the first time that one of us didn’t immediately jump aboard the other’s fantasy.
‘Shame.’ If André didn’t want to know about cycling, there was no point in my getting involved. ‘Swim?’
‘Right.’
But that summer the seed was sown. From that moment on, cycling catered for years to my need for heroes.
The urge to sit on a racing bike again came back later. That was after I had read The Rider by Tim Krabbé. I was fifteen, read it in one sitting, and knew instantly what I had to do. True, it would have been better if I had pursued the sport from the age of six, but Merckx was a late starter, too.
I took my savings out of the bank, borrowed another two hundred guilders from my mother, and bought a Batavus from Van Spankeren’s cycle shop. Joost and André looked at me pityingly. Cycling was still a sport for thickos who shouted unintelligibly into the microphone. But I didn’t care. I joined a training group that left from the Zaadmarkt every Sunday morning for a ride of about eighty kilometres. The guys gave me some funny looks the first time. They immediately commented on my unshaven legs and my football shorts, but they accepted it for this once.
Then they started riding me into the ground. I had kept up for about ten kilometres when I saw them pulling away from me. They didn’t look back; of course they knew it would happen, it was an initiation ritual. During the following week I rode out a couple of times by myself, hoping that it would go better the next Sunday. I actually could keep up for a little longer in my new cycling shorts, but not that much longer.
On the fifth Sunday we went to the Montferland. On the way, Kees Nales told me that he had climbed Mont Ventoux. Mont Ventoux! I knew the mountain from the stories about Tommy Simpson, the Jesus of cycling, who suffered for all doping sinners and died on the Bare Mountain.
But Kees Nales had survived. I was deeply impressed and resolved there and then, as our wheels whooshed towards Montferland, that I must also climb Mont Ventoux.
‘How was it,’ I asked, ‘Mont Ventoux?’
‘Tough.’
‘Had you trained a lot for it?’
‘Nah.’ I didn’t yet know that cyclists always say that they’ve done scarcely any training.
‘Do you think I could do it?’
Kees looked at my legs, which still weren’t shaven. ‘You don’t look like a climber. More of a sprinter, if you ask me.’
We got to Beek. Just outside the village, in the Peeskesweg, was a steep length of asphalt. The lads immediately stood out of their saddles and started sprinting up. Only Kees Nales looked around one more time to see whether I wasn’t perhaps a sprinter, after all. But I knew after the first hundred metres. I felt the strength draining out of my legs.
‘I’m not a climber, dammit,’ I shouted, as a kind of indictment of the Creator. No one heard.
At the top, the lads stood waiting until I arrived. They looked at me pityingly. Couldn’t climb, poor fucker.
‘I thought so,’ said Kees Nales. ‘Too heavy and no climbing muscles.’
A little further on they went up the Eltenberg. It was a bit steeper and longer than the Peeske. They didn’t even wait for me at the top. I decided to cycle alone from then on. I tried to get André onto his father’s old bike, but failed.
Cycling is a sport of the imagination. On my own, I was the talented one, and my unshaven legs didn’t matter. Others rode me and my fantasy to pieces.
I celebrated my 45th birthday alone, since I was divorced a few months earlier. One day, after everything was settled, I bought a Pinarello Angliru, blue with red and grey highlights. As a consolation, I told myself, but actually it was more of a reward.
Then Ventoux came back into my head.
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III
The first time we heard Joost say anything, immediately after he had entered our classroom, he made us laugh. It was because of his accent. It was 1969, October or November, I suspect, as we were making dolls of chestnuts and matches.
Miss Hospes introduced him. ‘This is Joost,’ she said, with those nice Eastern os.
‘What a small class’, said Joost. ‘In Amsterdam the class is much bigger. And we have an aquarium, too. Our teacher is called Miss Prins.’
‘Joost’s father is a doctor,’ said Miss Hospes. Joost nodded. ‘First Joost’s father was a doctor in Amsterdam, now he’s a doctor here. Perhaps you will be able to go to Joost’s father sometime, if you’re ill.’
‘Or if you die.’ Joost laughed out loud, but we were shocked and Cora Berg started crying.
‘Don’t say those funny things, Joost,’ said Miss Hospes.
‘And my mother plays the saxophone.’ No one knew what a saxophone was.
‘Really, that’s nice. So tell the class what nice songs she plays.’
‘No songs. Mummy plays jazz.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Hospes, who knew more about psalms.
‘She puts on records by Charlie Parker and she plays along. It drives Daddy crazy. “Can’t you stop that tooting,” he shouts. “It’s just like a cow.” Then she shouts, “Prick.”’ Joost must have found that very funny, because he almost got the giggles.
‘Do you have any brothers and sisters?’ asked Miss Hospes, with a blush on her cheeks.
‘I have sisters. One is called Louise and the other Sandra. Louise is seven and Sandra is seven, too. They’re twins. I can’t tell them apart, they’re so alike. But I like Sandra better than Louise.’
‘Right, Joost,’ said Miss Hospes, ‘go and sit next to Bart. Bart is that boy with the red sweater. Can you see him?’
‘Yes, he looks like a leprechaun.’
He came over to me and said we were going to the clay tray. He paid scarcely any attention to the other children. I beckoned André, who was sitting opposite me at our table. ‘We’re going to the clay tray, come on.’
‘This is clay,’ said Joost at the clay tray, as if he were giving a commentary. ‘When I pick up a piece of clay, I can make something out of it. For example, a little man. But when I throw the man back in the clay tray and I give him a thump, he becomes clay again.’ He sounded really surprised, as if he himself were listening to something new. André looked at him open-mouthed.
Within a day we were inseparable. AndréJoostandBart.
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