Tom Foran Clark

It was hard for Emery to say goodbye to lovely Grez-sur-Loing and The George Sand, but Walt Lowen said for sure another lousy dough-faced book lover would show up to replace him, not to worry, so Emery didn’t feel so bad. He and Pike shared a bottle of cheap red table wine by the bridge, then walked to the Garé to board a late night train going down to Monaco, a dazzling place of Baroque casinos, palms, and terraced gardens with views all out to the sparkling ocean.

The sky clouded over even as the two moved on, walking eastward along the Cote d’ Azur to the luxurious Ligurian coast of Riviera villas and chateaus. They walked all the way to San Remo, where they got a ride in a Fiat to Genoa. A second lift took them north all the way to Milan, where they were deposited, at sunset, in the gridlock of downtown -- a fogbound madhouse of a million angry honking, gnashing, sideswiping cars.

Pike and Emery, finding themselves at the Romanesque Basilica of San Babila, asked a priest for directions to the Duomo, the central cathedral, a dizzying display of filigree and pinnacles, even in the spare light of just streetlamps, at the center of encroaching mayhem and confusion – streets and cars and human horde. They turned down a side street and went, piazza by piazza, out of the bustling city, through quieting neighborhoods, to the youth hostel.

In the morning, they set out in search of bikes. Pike strolled out and returned with a banged and dented, wobbly, pale blue ten-speed. On a red, embroidered carpet in front of a bike shop on Corso Garibaldi, Emery thought he saw the bike of his dreams, but things just seemed to get better from there.

This shop sold Sergio Rossignoli bicycles -- and more: "Cicli, Moto, Gomme, Accessori, Vendite all’ ingrosso ed al Minuto." The silver-mustachioed proprietor led Emery into his shop, and showed his his glistening array of fine bikes. He’d look from Emery's face to a bike, and frown or smile and grasp his chin in contemplation. Then, suddenly, a look of joy spread into his face as he brought down a stunning Mediterranean blue new Rossignoli bicycle that immediately sent Emery's imagination reeling. And that, indeed, would be Emery's bike -- the bike on which he would set out freewheeling.

With this bike, Emery bought a rack that old Giusseppi the bike-seller bolted on, over the back wheel. To that, Giusseppi strapped Emery's backpack -- then the tent to that. Emery put his other wares in a front pouch attached to the handlebars. He could have got panniers, deluxe twin front and back luggage bags, but he didn’t feel he could afford the additional expense.

Giusseppi was just checking the air pressure in Emery's tires when Pike pulled in on his claptrap, his pack loaded with wine, cheese, canned peaches, and a dozen candles he'd got from area taverns, inns, and restaurants. Thinking Pike had showed up to sell or trade his bike, Giusseppi waved him away, conspicuously irritated. Emery managed to explain that he and Pike were going to be traveling together. The old man first shook his head, sighed heavily, and rolled his eyes. But soon Giusseppi was overcome with stronger emotions, launching the boys on their journey. "It was obvious he was weeping," Pike said later, "but he was trying hard not to show it -- as if he were sending away his own beloved sons."

Pike and Emery rode right into the heart of Milan, where the old men argued and the women shopped, young men everywhere hovering near the bright faced girls. From the Duomo to the Piazza Scala spread a grand, elaborate gallery arcade, indoors, a covered roof arching across the tops of building walls that once were outdoors. It felt, to the two wide-eyed, eager pedlars, like they were passing through a birth canal into the great, wide world.

They passed by the Sforzesco Castle, a dim green-gray, and went to Bramante's Cloister, then to Santa Maria delle Grazie, the monastery where is housed Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Emery was ready for it. He’d done his homework. He remembered art afficionado Bernard Berenson saying how he'd felt repulsion toward this picture. Berenson had found the faces "uncanny" but their expressions "forced." Not Emery. Standing before the "Last Supper" in real time, in the real world, looking up at the real thing, he was really moved by the motion and emotion in the picture, very natural. Da Vinci had made his work look easy.

Leonardo had come to Milan at the age of thirty, playing his flute and doodling designs for bridges, tanks, and catapults. He'd scribbled, in his backwards (mirror-image) handwriting, satires, jests, and foreboding prophecies. Cultural historian Sir Kenneth Clark had called Leonardo "disorganized," putting off "the evil day when he should have to do something with the mass of material he had collected." But Sir Kenneth could see Leonardo was "one of the greatest draftsmen ever" -- but not because he had such special insight into the world and the things themselves: "It is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well."

So it was circular, Emery figured. If you wanted to see the beauty that there is, you had to echo it in your own soul, so that your eyes could discern it as you got it down with pencil, pen, or any other apparatus, tool, or means.

In his notebook, Emery doodled swirls based on the movement he perceived enlivened Da Vinci’s nearly disintegrated painting. The combination of Milan’s infamous dampness and Da Vinci’s experiments with paint had done the fresco no good. Adding insult to injury, seventeenth century monks had boldly gone at it with sledgehammers, putting a door smackdab in and under the middle of Leonardo’s painted table, they had thought so little of its lasting power.

Even as Emery pondered these things, a pretty girl in a steel-gray cotton dress came up beside him and gazed, too. She looked over his shoulder at what he was doing and very sweetly giggled. Emery looked at her -- he felt he could love this person with all his heart, forever. She said something very sweet in Italian. Emery blushed. She smiled and gestured toward the magnificent picture before them. Her movement was as gracious, gentle, and affecting as that of any of the disciples in the picture, or of an ocean breeze on a summer evening. Emery was on the verge of either hugging her or crying when Pike walked up, talking to himself, saying, "The dampness in this place! It’s been raining indoors here a thousand years. Oh hi," he said to the girl. "I’m Pike. This is Emery. What-a is-a your-a name-a?"

Again the girl giggled. Pike confessed, "We of course don’t speak a word of Italian, mon cher belladonna mona Madonna." He bowed to her, took Emery by the elbow, and led him out. "Don’t look back," he said.

Bells were peeling. Men were up in the bell tower, pulling ropes. A Fanfare Carabinier -- a police marching band – played Sousa-like rousing tunes, and crowds gathered to listen. After the men had put on their hats with feathers on top and had played their last triumphant piece, the audience applauded and quickly dispersed. A hundred or more pigeons winged in overhead, then swooped down. Pike said afterwards he'd felt they were headed straight for his head but then, at the last possible moment, had changed their minds.

Pike and Emery rode out to the Ospedale Maggiore, an overly ornate, double-tiered fascade with a grand inner square. Columned arcade galleries ran the length of the street, the Via Festa del Perdono. Carabinier officers conducted traffic with the dignity, calm, and grace of Monte Carlo blackjack dealers in beige safari helmets, black suits, and white gloves and armbands.

They rolled over to the Brera Gallery to see the pictures there by Raphael, mainly. Pierro della Francesca’s great Urbino Altarpiece was there, too. They went out through the courtyard, emerging, exhausted, onto the Piazza de la Scala.

"Soulful eyes!" Pike raved, and Emery knew what he meant. He meant the eyes of the Italian girls and women. Their piercing, liquid gaze; sublime poise; soulful eyes.

At the damp, rust-laden Poldi Pezzoli museum was a glut of swords, guns, armor, objects d‘art, ticking gilded clockworks, Murana glass, Dresden china, Persian carpets, and a hundred tiny sculptural pieces showing strong men wrestling mightily or the twin infant founders of ancient Rome, Romulus and Remus, drinking milk from the underbelly of their mother, a she-wolf. Of all he’d yet seen in Milan, Pike found these to be the most fascinating. Though he never took a single photograph of any one of these, he was enamored of them, clearly. They seemed to hold him spellbound. Now Emery took him by the elbow and pulled him away. Pike's attention was wholly diverted from Romulus and Remus, of course, when the two came to stand before Pollaiuolo’s "Portrait of a Young Woman" and Botticelli’s golden girl, the "Madonna of the Book."

Pike and Emery rode down streets with names like Marooni, Diaz, Alovicci, Garibaldi, Verdi, Torino, Stefano, Fulcorina, Magenta, Vercellini, Papiniano, De Amicus, Monte Bianco, Monte Rosa, Corduso, Amendola, Conciliazore, Burchiello. There were bars, grocery stores, pastry shops, and candy stores all over. They loaded up on fresh bread. It was a cold, foggy morning in mid-November when they left Milan, rolling down Route SS-11 into bleak industrial suburbs interspersed with golden cornfields, heading for Brescia.

They were rolling. The sun came out. The elucidating clarity of the vast blue Italian sky, and the wind at their backs, thrilled them. Dogs snapped at their ankles and pedals. Tractors emerged from broad stands of poplars and willows to mow the fields of wheat and maize as clouds collected overhead again, now threatening rain.

Just outside Treriglio, the two stopped at a supermercado for milk, cookies, pickled vegetables, fresh tomatoes, and red Rosso Classico wine. They traveled on to a gravel-bottomed riverbed, roadside, and ate, then went on a ways and pitched their tent under one full tree of dark brown clinging autumn leaves in a long line of such trees along one side of a long and narrow triangular meadow. A thick veil of mist descended even as they laid out their sleeping bags. By candlelight, they spread out and studied their maps, scheming routes. Their sleep was interrupted only by the intermittent clattering and whistles of passing trains.

The chirping of birds awoke them in the cold, cold morning. The fog lay heavy; visibility reached to only about ten feet in any direction. Shivering, they packed, took down the tent, and went back to the main road. Roosters sensed their presence, or departure, and complained, that dim morning, with a muffled cacophony of cock-a-doodling.

They walked along the road carefully, simply to stay on it, and eventually found the way that led to Lago del Gardo, where they rode a while along the lake, and then continued on. Somewhere along that road, Emery's left kneecap suddenly gave way, as if a pin in there had snapped and left the whole unit flapping. Ten or fifteen minutes passed, and the pain lessened, and he figured they could proceed. They did continue, but the pain in Emery's knew grew worse. At a pharmacy in the middle of nowhere, somewhere amid endless cornfields, he bought an ointment and an elastic bandage wrap. Emery's face was twisted up into a toothy, squinting, grinning sneer, his unkempt hair curling out from under his woolen ski cap in contorted knots.

It was a long time before evening came again. Pike and Emery finally spotted a sort of natural stadium that seemed a fine place to stop for the night. About the size of a football field, the yellow dandelion filled meadow was bounded on two sides by bleachers of tree-covered slopes. Grape vineyards were spread out across the upper plateaus. A switchback road led up to a low hill of grape vines at one end of this meadow, and the highway stretched along a cypress-lined knoll at the other. There they camped.

The next morning, the two struggled to resume their journey. It had rained most of the night. The gloomy gray around them now seemed appropriate for the dull throbbing still in Emery's knee -- the pain was no longer a ripping, shredding sensation. It was not so specific as it had been at the initial onset of agony. No blacksmith’s white-hot pincers clasped his patella now. He felt he could grin and bear it.

They made their way in to Verona while it was still morning. The cathedral stood majestically upright in the very horizontal, foggy town. They rode right on through, stopping only to buy bread, butter, orange marmalade, pain relievers, and chianti. Halfway through the afternoon, the pain in Emery's knee again flamed up brightly. But he insisted they sail on. Then his knee just plain gave out. Emery hobbled on with his bike, walking all the way to the outskirts of Vicenza, where the two arrived just after nightfall.

They pitched their tent beside train tracks and, in the morning, went straight downtown to see if they could find a pharmacy having something stronger Emery might acquire to kill the pain. For all he knew, the sweet old lady at the counter gave him a bottle filled with magic beans -- or perhaps morphine. But it did the trick, whatever it was. Emery was lighter hearted after that, the whole day and night, and into the next day, too. The bells rang out, ding dong, ding dong, ding dong, and he sang along, "I’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day; I’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away."

They were in Padua by noon. They rode past the university to the Ruben Gardens, and on to the old Church del’Carmine and the Basilica of S. Giustina. The whole effect of this dizzying architectural phenomenon was to inspire nausea, so the two went on to the Chiesa degli Eremitani to see the glorious Giotto frescoes, then on to Saint Anthony’s. There were nuns and priests all over Padua, blessing them profusely every step of their way, and souvenir stands galore. The vendors covered their stands with tarps when the rain began to fall. Pike and Emery headed right out into the lashing downpour. They pitched their tent in a cornfield in the rain.

In the morning, it was still raining, but they kept on. Emery ran out of morphine, or whatever it was, and the bone shards loose in his kneecap, or whatever they were, again hurt like freshly torched hell. He was trying to put up a good front, but on the inside he was biting the bullet, morbidly supposing he’d need to have serious surgery. Emery had visions of ambulances, emergency rooms, doctors, anesthesia, the big light glaring overhead, and the rest -- the journey ended. This he did not want.

Emery pedaled on, riding with tremendous passion and resolve, matching Pike's fairly manic pace. It wasn't very long before the two arrived in Venice.