Back Pedal

I looked over to see Juna’s cheeks reddening as she lay slumped in a sunbed with her mouth ajar, a subtle snore seeping out like a waning metronome. I’d wake her and tell her to apply sunscreen or move under the umbrella’s shade, but by now we’d been engaged in a long-running tanning competition, and, if I recommended either, she’d squint one eye open and accuse me of sabotage. Ostensibly, we were on the first day of a two-month bicycle trip, riding from the bottom of Italy to the top, but we weren’t off to a good start.

Words and photos by Max Favetti.

Our problems began at home in Amsterdam, with my inability to disassemble the bikes for the flight to our starting point in Catania, where I was to reassemble them and our journey would commence. It’s important to underscore how foreign such skills are to me. I’m the guy that replaced a broken toilet seat and then told his colleagues about it the next morning over coffee. It had a quick release system. Given this ineptitude, we thought it prudent to enact dry runs before we left, taking our bikes apart, putting them together, packing our panniers and riding through the flat Dutch countryside – testing the integrity of our kit. But summer in Amsterdam is a narco-boog-Bacchanal, so such prudence was hoovered away with everything else travelling through that rolled up Euro note, returning only to be erased again by a laser beam lobotomy, conducted in a crowded basement to fax machine music. The closest we got to actually enacting the plan was yelling “we need to enact the plan” at each other on the dance floor.

By the time the final weekend before our departure came around, the only preparation I’d done was rehearse the preliminary stages of a pulmonary aneurysm. We were to leave on an early morning flight that Monday, so we planned a farewell dinner for Friday; the typical pompous precursor to any holiday I took. This schedule allotted only Saturday and Sunday to achieve what was the bare, required minimum: disassembling the bikes into bags so they could be stowed on the plane. Forty-eight hours seemed an ample amount of time.

Come Friday night, we were running behind, cresting the bell curve of a certain, familiar, cosmopolitan couple-stress that is committing to an Ottolenghi recipe. “Juna, you got the wrong rose harissa,” I hissed, as she blitzed the dried porcini in the coffee blender. “And, I’m concerned your method here will compromise the aromatics.” Juna was by this point well versed in my bitchery and when to ignore it, so instead she answered a phone call from her work while I answered the buzzer. “Come up!” I hollered gaily down the receiver, before stomping to the kitchen to deliver fresh stress to Juna as they ascended the stairs. She held up a hand as I entered, stopping me before I could blame her for the construct of time itself. “Work just asked me to take doubles this weekend. We need the cash, I’m taking it.” I felt a pang of shame and returned to prepping the garnish as our friends’ footsteps grew closer. “Will you be okay to get all our stuff ready?” she asked while spooning dollops of white miso paste. I took a dramatic pause from pestling the cumin seeds and scoffed. “Of course, I will.”

Over the next forty-eight hours, Juna pulled back-to-back doubles and I pulled back-to-back benders.

She’d returned after her first shift on Saturday evening to find me right where she’d left me the previous night: sitting at our dining table with a cigarette in my mouth, workshopping my plan for world peace with an indulging pair of usual suspects. She said goodnight with a courteous reminder of our timeframe and the duties remaining. “Don’t worry darling,” I said, pausing my plan’s provision for the rise of China, “it will all be done tomorrow”.

As Juna set her Sunday morning pre-shift coffee on the stove, she popped her head into the living room to find me in the same position, down to the chair – except I had my helmet, bandana and bike glasses on. I had just got to the part where I concede that my plan for world peace was almost entirely predicated on the demise of American hegemony, whilst paradoxically, still contingent on it remaining a global superpower to check the rise of an increasingly autocratic Chinese state. “Max,” she said on her way out the door, trying to hide the concern in her voice and putting it in her eyes instead, “we leave tomorrow morning.” “Juna,” I sighed, pointing a fingerless bike gloved hand at both our steeds I’d leaned against the living room wall. “It will be done, don’t worry.”

By afternoon, even my accomplices grew concerned and took their leave. I scoffed at their weakness as the door shut and got to work. I figured it best to start with the easiest tasks first and fob off the more complex tasks to later, especially as my future-fatigued self wasn’t present to protest such a strategy. I got my wheels off in a matter of minutes. “Another successful conquest of quick release technology for the break room,” I thought, and poured myself another pint of six-euro Cab Sav to celebrate. I took a hearty glug and felt warmth hit my temples. “By the time Juna gets home, you’ll be serving Coq au Vin while she gushes at the neat, packed pile of luggage by the door.” It didn’t take long before my bike was bubble wrapped, duct taped and zipped up in its shoddy carry bag. I was so impressed with myself I took a victory line of leftover cocaine and stared out my window into the burnt orange of the August Amsterdam night. “Oh tits!” I gasped, as my reverie was broken by a flash of remembrance: there was a whole other bike left to go.

I strode towards the remaining frame – mechanically-adept erection first – primed to dismantle Juna’s retro road bike. You see, Juna has a proclivity for a seventies aesthetic, of corduroy flares and lampshades and maroon ceramic serving platters with recipes for Quiche Lorraine painted on their face. This penchant for all things vintage extended to her bike, which, with its red trim and ornate steel engraving was, objectively, gorgeous. But aesthetics does not equal practicality, especially when at the whims of a sleepless cream puff that hasn’t conditioned his hair in three days. Whereas my bike was all quick release and ergonomics, Juna’s was all bolt screws and bra burnings. I hunched over her front brake pads, spanner wedged in a crevice between rubber and metal, making miniscule turns of the nut that held them. Blackish beads of sweat fell from my bike greased face and onto the phone screen showing bike schematics from the Whitlam era, pulled from the bowels of the internet.

Juna didn’t return home that evening to a French braised chicken on the stove but a Max breaking down on the floor. “Why did you do this?!” I cried instead of saying hello as she walked into the living room, my hands palm up towards her bike, as if when she bought it two years ago, she was rubbing her hands in menacing glee thinking of this very moment. “Oh no, is it tricky darling? We’ll figure it out together” Juna replied, not missing a beat as she set her bag down and made her way towards me. There was nothing indistinguishable between that sentence being delivered to a child or to me: it was pregnant with patience and devoid of condescension, attributes made starker by my lack of them in kind … so the only option was to respond like a child. “No! Jesus, I’ve nearly got it!” I said, far from getting it. Juna sidestepped my petulance and made practical use of her time packing our bags, while I spent mine cursing the conspiracy between screw and screwdriver. I followed this by hurling a flurry of insults at the inanimate object, incestuous things about it’s mother, followed by taunts of it’s inadequate utility.

As night fell, our home was halved: one of quiet productivity, the other a theatre of war, as each bike component was pried from its frame. By early morning, I let out a final wail as I zipped up the second bike bag, chin wet with spit, cheeks wet with tears. I pushed it along on my hands and knees to the door, next to a pile of bags neatly packed by Juna, who stood above me drying her hair with a towel. “It … is … done” I whimpered at her feet, with all the gravitas of a weary Roman legionnaire.“Get in the shower Max, the cab’s almost here.” “Yes, mistress,” I whispered into the welcome mat as I watched her bare feet turn and walk towards our closet.

A few ungodly hours later, Juna and I held each other, necks wrapped over shoulders as we dozily swayed by the excess luggage carousel in the corner of Catania Airport. It was 10 o’clock on Monday morning and neither of us had slept a wink all night (nor me the previous three, but it’s not a competition). We waited, and a few carousels away from us, the rest of the passengers from Amsterdam waited too. Eventually, even the idea of Italian punctuality was being tested but neither of us could muster the strength to be anxious. And so we watched on silently as a squat man in a hi-vis vest walked over to the fellow passengers, cupped his hands and yelled something at them. Whatever he said sent them turning on a dime, moving in murmuration toward Lost and Found. “Come on!” Juna yelled, yanking my floppy body into action as we tried to beat the crashing wave of stress surging towards the desk. We merged with the mob as it bumped up against the front counter, settling into a seething mound of silent Dutch anger. “What happened?” I asked no one in particular, to which a freckled man in a fedora standing at my shoulder said in his buttery English, “They loaded the wrong plane with our luggage, so it is now in New York!”. I turned toward Juna who was shaking my arm, “What did he say Max?”. “Our acid is in New York darling,” I answered, referring to the ten dose sheet of Amsterdam LSD we had duct taped to the inner tube of my bike tyre. “We’re gonna be here for a while.”

Five hours later, we stepped out into the hot sea of choking cigarette smoke that is Catania. Clasped in my hand is a rip of paper with some scribbled serial numbers and a website, the sum total of what was provided by a bronzed lost and found attendant. He rocked back in his swivel chair like a despondent teen as we described our luggage, talking over us to gossip with his colleague who was constructing a mortadella panino atop his keyboard. We asked how long we might expect to wait before reunification with our belongings, to which he shrugged and circled the scrawled website on the form, “Check-a here.” I scrunched the paper into my pocket as we broke free of the mob and hailed a cab outside. While we sat in the backseat, I saw the driver mash the start metre button five times before putting the car in drive, so it was 10 Euros before we’d even moved an inch. I stared out the window, hoping to be distracted enough by the landscape to forget we were being fucked. Half-finished, box-concrete houses riddled with protruding rebar languished in the shimmering heat, while the completed homes marked their occupation with drawn window shutters and drying sheets on the line. The island was experiencing some of the worst wildfires in recent memory and one was making its way through nearby farmhouses and vineyards, sending plumes of black smoke to stain the blue sky. Piles of green rubbish bags lined the highway, bloated by the sun, runoff divots that ran parallel to the road were filled with discarded chairs and broken cradles. I’d been to my ancestral home a few times before, but every time I arrived, the sensory overload of Sicily rushed at me like a thrown punch in a bar fight, one I’d unwittingly been swept into while I was sipping my voddy lime soda. “Quarantacinque per favore,” the cabbie says after a 10-minute drive, marking our arrival to our accommodation in downtown Catania. Juna shoots me a look and I return it with drowsy-eyed defeat as I slide a 50 euro note onto the centre console. The toothless man grins and places the change of coins in my limp, clammy hand.

We had booked a studio apartment in the San Berillo neighbourhood which sat by the sea, but no breeze breached the maze of streets we found ourselves in. We blasted the rickety air-con and opened our laptop on the kitchen bench to look up the website scratched into the mulch paper I pulled from my pocket. It was the first website invented, I’m sure of it: a page of simple text on a pixelated pastel background with a tiny, white search bar at the top. I typed in the serial code we’d be given and a flashing load screen eventually belched out in bold: Non lo sappiamo. We don’t know. It actually just said that, it said: we don't know. There was no other information on the screen, not even the vague, aspirational kind, like “... but we will in 2-9 business days”. “Let’s just get in the fucking ocean,” I said, certain the sea would kickstart the romantic Italian getaway thus far quashed by apathetic Italian administration. If I’d known all that was waiting for us at the beach bar was blaring Black Eyed Peas on a coastline more ciggie butts than sand, I would've opted for my Dolly Alderton novel in the cool comfort of our Airbnb.

Sicily is beautiful and filthy. It’s impossible and intoxicating. Its young boys with thinning hair and Reeboks leaning on scooters, smoking cigarettes and talking past one another. Its church bells, dogs barking, old women yelling and sirens whirring all at once and on repeat. It’s butt sweat and cheap drinks, arguments and wine stained tablecloths and opening your pants after lunch. Those enchanted charms become loud and deplorable obstacles when you’re racing back and forth to the airport for non-answers day after day. By our third visit to the back office, the staff knew us by voice, and at this stage they would usually pull the booth blind up and say “Niente, tomorrow you come.” We steeled ourselves for another rejection, but instead the intercom crackled: “Uno momento.” We waited a series of momento’s others would call an hour, before a door beside the booth opened and our bike bags were slid along the floor by a pot-bellied, over-perfumed attendant. We lifted the heavy, cheap sacks over our shoulders and waddled free of our luggage limbo and out to the cab rank, wiser to rip offs and ready to rest. On the way home, we were of course relieved, but our defeat was not washed away in a wipe – it seeped slowly from our pores like a subtle poison.

Wordlessly, but grunting, we sandwiched our stuff into the studio apartment. It was clear that we were both very much near the end of our tethers, one defeat away from unconditional surrender. It was up to me to hold the line. “I’ll put the bikes together darling and we’ll get some sleep,” I said. “I can help,” Juna replied. “No, no, it’s all good,” I rebuffed, unwilling to risk my role with a dextrous usurper, “I took them apart, I’ll put them back together.” I was already moving around the furniture to make work space, so Juna said nothing and got to packing our panniers.

I tried to learn my lesson and complete the harder tasks first, so I attacked the antique model. Thirty minutes in and with one wheel half on, me and the bike chain were at an impasse. As the thingy kept slipping off the other thingy and the sticky bike grease turned sandy and spread all over my hands and forearms, I was making the sighing sounds that can only elicit offers of assistance. “No, I’ve got it!” I yelled at Juna’s third bid to help. Burning silence, punctuated by my muttered expletives, filled the studio. Soon, there was no reason to my method; I was just pulling at pieces of firmly affixed machinery with my fingers while tensing pressure into my head, hoping it would burst and spray wet chunks of brain and matted hair all over her gorgeous fucking bike.

“I’m gonna go buy groceries for lunch tomorrow!” I said, vigorously wiping my face and flipping up from my hunched position. My abrupt movement and announcement took Juna aback as she was clasping shut the last pannier, and stared at me blankly. “Okay …” she replied. I burst out of the stuffy studio and into the cool night air, taking the low, wide sandstone steps that led to the grocer two at a time. Once inside, I tried to calm down by giving myself little language tests, trying to name the fruits and vegetables on display. I stepped nervously to the deli counter, where an old man with grey hazel eyes and a hairnet engaged me before I’d had time to rehearse the right words in my head. I stuttered trying to find them, before I pointed through the glass into the mountain of produce that lay within it. “Ahh” he said, “melanzane sott'olio, deliziose” as he reached over and grabbed the marinated eggplant and portioned some into a container, gesturing to the green digits on the scale to make sure I was happy. “Grazie, grazie,” I said, feeling a smile stretch across my face and my cheeks tingle. We repeated this process for the cheeses and stuffed tomatoes and cured meats for my lunch hamper. His patience and apparent enthusiasm for this culinary language lesson melted my heart and cleared my mind.

I strode gleefully through the exit of the grocer, arms full of produce, and headed back to the studio, completely sure of what was to happen next. “Juna! Darling!” I said as I turned the key and opened the front door, bursting through only to stop in my tracks. Juna was sitting in a chair and looked up to meet my gaze. In front of her, upside down on their saddles with their wheels turning, were both of our bikes completely assembled. She smiled at me before we both burst out laughing. “I’m so sorry,” I said, once our giggles subsided. “I know how we need to move forward: you’re the mechanic who will save us when we break down in the middle of nowhere and I’ll be in charge of groceries!” “I think it's for the best,” Juna said with a wry grin, tapping both our bikes with a spanner. “You’re the biggest little bitch I know.” We chuckled at my worthiness of the title. “I love you,” Juna said. “I love you too.”

The next morning we arose to the sound of seagulls, puttering vespas and fishmongers flogging their wares in the nearby square. We’re finally recovered from the weekend, fully committed to our roles and fucking ready to get on the road. Juna oiled the bike chains, aligned the brake pads and tightened the saddles. I placed frozen water bottles in the sandwich bags to keep them from spoiling in the heat, padded the hard boiled eggs with toilet paper to ensure they travel and placed the suncream in an accessible location. Our panniers are loaded over our back wheels and we walk our bikes out onto the street, pointing them north down the long coastal road that leads to the mainland. We look at each other as we clasp on our helmets, eyes vibrating with excitement. “You ready!?” I squeal. “I’m ready!” Juna yells back. We swing our legs over our frames in unison and I punch Positano into my handlebar GPS. “Lets Gooooo!” I shout, turning the heads of morning commuters, as we both take our first pedal of the cross-country journey. Within seconds, I hear an ungodly screech of metal crunch then snap and feel the back half of my bike become twenty kilos lighter. I pull to the kerb and look back to see my pannier frame mangled and further along the road, the panniers themselves, ripped and gutted, glistening melanzane splattered across the hot ground, stuffed tomatoes rolling down the cobblestone, leaving a dark, wet tail of olive oil in their wake.