Chapter Text
Like most typical adult residents of 1960s Portorosso, you’ve grown up hearing about the legends of the horrible mostri marini that infest the Mar Ligure, especially around Isola del Mare. They’re maneaters, or at least man-killers who snatch people from boats or when swimming and pull them underwater to drown. You’re not sure that you really believe in such things, yet most every day you walk past and see the numerous fresco engravings and the statue in the Piazza Calvino fontanella of Giorgio Giorgioni, famed pasta chef and slayer of mostri marini who founded and was the mascot of the Giorgio Giorgioni Pasta company.
It’s late Agosto, 1968. School starts soon, and as is tradition, your town holds a fun little triathlon for scolari up to age sixteen in the last week before the school year starts: the Portorosso Cup. Since the Giorgio Giorgioni Pasta company sponsors the event, eating a bowl of their pasta is the middle part of the triathlon. Participants are encouraged to form teams of three so that as many children as feasible can participate in one of the events. The pasta-eating event is especially suitable for crippled children so they’d have something to do to participate that didn’t require athletics since the other two events were swimming and riding a bicycle up the long and winding Via Piaggio to the torre antica atop “Mt. Portorosso” and back down the straighter and thus even steeper road back to Piazza Calvino. A small soldi prize of ₤10,000 as well as the Cup itself await the winners.
You know that Signor Marcovaldo, the enormous one-armed pescatore and proprietor of Pescheria Marcovaldo at №10 in the southwestern corner of Piazza Calvino off Via Vernazza, has a young figlia, but since she’s only in town during the summer due to her genitori living apart and her attending a school for the gifted in Liguria’s capital city of Genova, you and most of the town don’t really know that much about her other than that she’s courageous and more than a bit tomboyish. The ragazzi di cità think that she doesn’t really belong so they’d never teamed up with her, causing her to have to race alone. Since that meant riding that grueling course on a bicycle right after eating a large (for a child) bowl of pasta and that right after a lengthy (for bambini) swimming race, she’d generally wound up with gastric distress and have to drop out of the race before the downhill leg. But this year looks to be different. She’s befriended a couple of out-of-towner ragazzi who’re willing to team up with her, and they’ve been training hard for about a week with the younger ragazzo riding her bicycle. Their clothing (especially the older youth’s — a rope for a belt?) looks too poor for them to be the sons of rich tourists or friends from her Genova school, yet they’re definitely not from around here because Portorosso’s a very small town and you know everyone in it by face if not by name, but not these ragazzi. Perhaps they’re from some agrarian villagio from further inland or even some other province, just here for the triathlon?
Maybe this time that blowhard bullo, the Visconti youth Ercole, would lose! Most likely not, but one could hope. You and most of the town dislike him because of how stuck on himself he is (the Viscontis were minor nobility back in the day) and how he pathetically bullies and competes against bambini, and really, isn’t he too old now? But he’d won ½ a decade in a row, with past winnings pooled to purchase himself a nice cherry-red Piaggio® Vespa®.
Many in the town choose to watch from along the bicycle path since they live around there, but most including you and those who have or are friends of famiglie with bambini in the race have gathered in Piazza Calvino near the harbour for the first two events of swimming then pasta, knowing that they can simply walk across the piazza or just turn around where they’re standing to watch the bicyclists cross the tragurardo. Some, including Signor Marcovaldo, are holding hand-written signs cheering on their young friends or membre della famiglia (ah, yes, from Massimo’s sign you now remember his figlia’s name: Giulia [others in the race named on signs that you can see from where you’re standing include Serena, Beatrice, and Marco]).
You see the table (really three of their usual square tables, two of which are normally outside, placed adjacent to each other) for the eating pasta event set up in front of №23Trattoria da Marina covered with three overlapping red checkerboard tablecloths. Five chairs and six bowls of pasta had been set there, with a gap between chairs one space from the right end (from your POV) where you realize that the ragazza wearing orange in a wooden wheelchair will eat once her swimming teammate tags her, so no need for a chair there. Wait, what? Another chair’s being pulled up and the five current chairs moved a bit to make room as a seventh pasta bowl and forchetta are set there. Did another team somehow form and enter at the last minute? Wasn’t the entry deadline and orientation a week ago?
Ercole’s taking no chances and is dousing the portly younger henchman of his who’s doing the swimming in olio d'oliva to reduce water resistance. Is that legal? Suddenly you hear a strange clunking sound coming from the top of the stairs. Che sorpressa! The younger out-of-towner ragazzo’s walking down the steps to the quay to participate in the swimming contest rather than waiting his turn to ride Giulia’s bicycle! Instead of a swimsuit, swimming cap and visor like the other swimmers, he’s wearing a deep-sea diving suit, holding its helmet! It looks like he’s no longer teaming up with Giulia since both’re in the swimming portion, she wearing a modest turquoise-colored one-piece swimming suit. Why would they split up their team? They’d trained so hard! Did they have some sort of falling out? You realize that this explains the extra chair and bowl at the pasta table — he’ll be doing that part, too. She shouts something to him that you can barely make out from your distance, but it seems to be about this being a very bad idea. The older ragazzo who’d been seen training with them is nowhere to be found. The poor ragazza’s going to have to do it all again this year, which means more gastric distress for her, and the same’ll almost certainly apply to the tourist ragazzo. Darn it, Ercole’s going to win again! He’s mocking both Giulia (about even her terrible friends not wanting to be friends) and the visitor in the diving suit (something about not being able to afford a proper swimsuit), but both ignore his taunts.
As race officiant and spokeswoman for the sponsoring pasta company, Signora Marsigliese reassures the participants and their families that despite recent seamonster sightings in the harbour, nine abitanti della paese were standing watch on five fishing boats, nets and harpoons in hand, near the buoy that the swimmers were to swim around (usually there’d only be a few acting as judges to verify that the contestants really did go around the buoy before heading back, and as lifeguards in case any of the young swimmers had difficulties). She rings a handbell to start the swimming race and the triathlon as a whole. Most of the participating children dive right in, but Giulia hesitates for several seconds, looking worriedly at her erstwhile teammate in his diving suit who seems to be having a panic attack (no wonder, given what Signora Marsigliese’d just said about seamonster sightings in the harbour — you’d hesitate to swim there now! Maybe he’d already heard about that and that’s why he was wearing what was basically waterproof armor?), then lowers her swim visor and runs in herself. Even with this delay, if it weren’t for Ercole’s minion she’d’ve quickly been in the lead, but despite his build he’s surprisingly good at swimming. The visitor ragazzo hesitates a few seconds more, puts on his helmet, and wades in, apparently planning to walk around the buoy on the floor of the bay (what was he thinking!? You know he can’t really swim in that thing, but could it stand up to a seamonster attack? Do they have claws or fangs or spines that could rip right through it? Wouldn’t it just make it even harder for him to escape? And even without that, it puts him at a terrible competitive disadvantage in addition to the several seconds’ delay of so much as getting into the water thanks to his panic attack). Maybe you’re overthinking it. Maybe he doesn’t know how to swim, and this was the only way he could think of to do this part after their team broke up? You’d seen him before training on Giulia’s bicycle, not swimming.
Suddenly Ercole’s henchman cries out in pain. It seems that olio makes good fish bait, and sardine are biting. You almost feel sorry for him, but this’ll give the younger kids a chance. Giulia swiftly rounds the buoy, swims back to the quay, then walks out of the water and tosses her visor aside, winning this portion of the race, but has to put her street clothes on over her swimsuit (which the other teams’s swimmers don’t have to do — they simply tag their pasta-eaters when done, then can change clothes at their leisure) while dashing as fast as she can towards the pasta table. Even with this delay she’s easily the first to the table and sits in the rightmost seat (from her POV — leftmost from yours). She’s obviously quite pleased with the choice of pasta this year, and heartily digs in, while at about the same time the short ragazzo in red swim trunks (he’s older than his stature implies and has dwarfism) dashes up the stairs to tag his partner in her wheelchair (older ragazza in orange) who then takes the chairless spot set up for her while, on the quay, two more swimmers (both older ragazze) emerge and tag theirs. The stout ragazza in the daisy yellow one-piece swimsuit tags a ragazzo known in town for loving gelato who then runs up to take the spot at the opposite end of the table from Giulia, while the slender ragazza in the chartreuse one-piece tags her partner, a shorter bambina with curly hair, who takes the spot on the other side of the wheelchair ragazza, thus near but not at the middle of the table. The ragazzo in the diving suit, pretty much last of all except for Ercole’s minion (who’s still thrashing wildly in agony) and the ragazzo with the crutch who’s still waiting on his own partner (the youngest, a small bambino in lime green swim trunks), walks out, only to stumble and fall as he walked past Ercole (did that bullo trip him?), causing his helmet to fly off. You see this out of the corner of your eye due to the distraction of the screaming minion’s thrashing, as a brief flash of green where the tourist ragazzo’s head should be grabs your attention, but by the time you shift your gaze to focus on it, you only see the helmetless suit as if the ragazzo’d pulled his head into it like a turtle into its shell.
After standing up and holding his gloved hands over the head opening of his diving suit as he blindly makes his way up the stairs, he kneels down and crawls as quickly as the big bulky suit allows towards the pasta table. Only three empty chairs remain by the time he crawls under the left (from the participants’ POV) end of it and makes his way to the chair two down from Giulia, having doffed the diving suit while under the table. He seems not to know how to use a forchetta! At least not how to twirl pasta on it. Even though he’s now her opponent in this race, Giulia rolls her eyes and quickly shows him how to do it, though she doesn’t seem happy about it. He’s followed by the ragazzo with a crutch who sat between them. Ercole’s swimming henchman finally makes it to shore, still wailing with sardine attached to him. Ercole yanks one off and tosses it into his face, berates him, and makes him tag his other henchman, a ragazzo slightly taller and much slenderer than their swimmer. Ercole frog-marches that minion to the last remaining empty chair in the middle of the table to the tourist ragazzo’s left. By that time Giulia had only a few bites left in her bowl. She finishes them off, shouts “Finito!” and, sure enough, shows obvious signs of gastric distress as she gets on her bicycle and heads north up Via Piaggio on the east side of the north of the piazza past Via Stellina to the east and Alimentari Repetto between those two streets.
Seeing this, Ercole forcibly rams pasta into his smaller henchman’s mouth in violation of the rules (as the bambina competitor to his left points out) but no officiant intervenes. As he does this, the gelato-loving bambino finishes his pasta and tags his bicycling partner. a ragazza in a light-green outfit, who heads towards her own bike and follows after Giulia up Via Piaggio. Ercole force-tags the henchman and heads to his own racing bike (itself an unfair advantage in addition to his age). The next three of the Portorosso competitors finish after that, then the visitor ragazzo finishes last of all (despite Giulia having shown him how to use a forchetta, he was still slower at it than bambini who’d been doing it since they were bambini piccoli), shouts that he’s done, and tags himself as he heads to his own very rusty, decrepit bike. Instead of a proper hard-rubber biking helmet for safety which all other bicycling competitors were wearing, he dons, of all things, a colino, with not so much as a strap to hold it onto his head! That’d be useless if he falls off the bike! He, too, seems to be in gastric distress but then lets out a belch that all can hear, and that seems to resolve it for him (maybe Giulia should’ve thought of that), and he pedals on up Via Piaggio behind all six of the other ragazze e ragazzii on bikes including Ercole himself, but he seems to be making good time, already catching up to other cyclists before he’s no longer in view.
Once he’s out of your sight, that’s all for this part of the competition. You and most of the other observers reposition yourselves to be able to see where the young bicyclists would soon enter the piazza down Via Corniglia at the corner with Via Revello on their way to the traguardo. A few minutes after you get in place it starts to rain, and you and most others there open up umbrellas, while a ragazzo unknown to you runs with a blue café umbrella through the piazza towards Via Corniglia and keeps running up it and out of sight. You figure he must want to watch more of the downhill part of the bike race itself instead of the finish.