Before Jules can answer on Carlos’s behalf, the waiters arrive with miniature portions of sorbet which everyone samples but, being tomato and basil sorbet (of which, undoubtedly, Django McCabe would have been proud), no one much likes.
Jules raises his glass of Burgundy. ‘Here’s to the jerseys. And they are most definitely plural. The yellow. The green. The polka dot. Fabian. Jesper. Carlos. Here’s to Système Vipère. Salut.’
‘Vive le Tour,’ says Fabian, gulping wine and then tucking into duck.
‘Vive le Tour,’ says Jesper, thinking of Anya, wishing she were here and apprehensive about a certain coldness that will greet him at home that night.
Carlos Jesu Velasquez had no compunction at being absent from the team dinner in France.
‘I am to spend over three weeks in your country so that night I will dine with my wife,’ he had said to Jules previously by telephone.
He must feel special, Jules had reasoned to himself, so I will make it seem a gesture of my respect that he needn’t be present for the dinner. Realistically, he would not add much in the way of scintillating conversation to the evening. In truth, it is not important to the team or the Tour whether he eats escargots with us or paella with his family.
Carlos Jesu Velasquez is nicknamed the Pocket Rocket, like the energy bars of that name which the riders carry with them, on account of his small stature but enormous potency. Carlos Jesu is also known as the Cicada for he speaks little. He speaks no other language than Spanish but even amongst the Spanish riders he is frugal with communication. He uses his tongue and his lips to address the peloton, hissing or clicking at riders to move away, to work with him, to get out of his line. Carlos is also known as the Little Lion, for when the little climber wins at a mountain finish he lets out a guttural roar utterly inconsistent with his diminutive size and quiet mien. His wife, Marie-Christina, however, calls him Jesu with a throatily pronounced ‘h’. His three children call him Papa.
This evening, he walked his three children across the street to his mother-in-law’s. He then went back to his house, closed the door and made love to Marie-Christina. Then he sang to her. Tomorrow, he will travel to Eustace St Pierre.
‘Away on business,’ he whispers soothingly to his wife, ‘but home again soon.’
If I were to meet the inimitable Fabian Ducasse, what exactly would I say? Cat wondered, on her way in to the Guardian office to discuss their requirements and other practicalities.
He’s famed as a womanizer, so should I concede that he might be more willing to talk, to grant me an audience, if I wore a skirt? I’d have to think of a slant – not just ‘Are you going to win the Tour de France, Monsieur Ducasse?’ Perhaps I could ask him about sport and adulation – would he do it if he didn’t get it? I want to tap in to that arrogance to see if it’s a front or genuine. Not that I care which – it has the desired effect on me for one.
Is there time to learn a little Spanish? Mind you, just a grunt from Carlos Jesu Velasquez would suffice. And how about Jesper? Is there anything that comes close to hearing English spoken with a Dutch accent?
I can’t believe I’m soon to be there. In France. With them. What’ll I say?
RACHEL McEWEN AND TEAM ZUCCA MV
‘Jesus!’ cried Massimo Lipari, grasping his left leg and stroking his hamstring tenderly. ‘Holy Mother Mary – you are in one fuck of a bad mood.’
Rachel McEwen looked down on the rider’s prostrate nakedness, his nether regions covered only by a towel, nappy-style; his lanky, lithe frame the colour of mocha ice-cream, which enabled him to skip up mountains like a gazelle, his huge brown eyes regarding her dolefully, full lips puckered into a somewhat theatrical pout. She looked at her hands, bit her lip and apologized.
‘I’m sorry, Mass,’ she said, using her hands more gently and reminding herself that his thighs were flesh and not meat, ‘I have a lot on my mind.’
Shit, poor Vasily – I must have pummelled him to hell and back half an hour ago. And yet I never heard even a wince – just a ‘thank you, Rachel, thank you’. Vasily Jawlensky, the committed and consummate sportsman for whom, no doubt, ‘pain is gain’, a man frugal with words but abundant in his triumphs. And now Massimo, Italy’s heartthrob, the team’s key personality, one who loves to make drama out of the ordinary, let alone a crisis. Was I rough? Did I hurt you? Sorry.
Rachel shook her hands as if they were wet and, despite fingers glistening with massage oil, scrunched her wavy hair into a haphazard pile on top of her head. She returned her hands to the rider’s inner thigh and then moved her fingers as if she was playing the piano.
‘You know,’ said Massimo, ‘when they said we were to have a female soigneur – well, I almost went on strike, I could have left the team, to and fro.’
Rachel laughed. ‘You mean there and then, Mass. I thought you’d have been delighted, being the Casanova that you are.’
Massimo grimaced as Rachel worked at a particularly tight knot near his knee, as if she was making pastry. ‘Well, girl, if they had said we were going to have a, how do you say, female doll?’
‘Mascot?’ Rachel suggested.
‘Si! Mascot – that would have been different. But I never thought the words female and soigneur could really be – how do you say? Married?’
‘What you mean, you nasty man,’ Rachel retorted with no malice, ‘is that you didn’t think a female soigneur would be any good.’
‘Si,’ said Massimo, his eyes still closed, ‘paint and pasta.’
‘Chalk and cheese,’ Rachel corrected. ‘You thought that she’d be too weak to give a good massage.’
‘Si,’ Massimo smiled, looking at the ceiling of Rachel’s office at the team’s Cambiago headquarters while she continued to untie his muscles and unravel his ligaments.
‘That she’d worry more about her fingernails than your welfare?’
‘Si!’ Massimo laughed, remembering how Rachel had stayed up with him during the Giro, the prestigious Tour of Italy, last month, so that he could repeat over and over his anxieties for the next day’s Stage.
‘And that she might shrink all your gear in the wash?’
‘Ha!’ said Massimo, suddenly realizing he didn’t even know what happened to his dirty gear once he had stripped after a race.
‘Moaning about boyfriends the whole time?’
‘That too,’ Massimo agreed, having no idea if Rachel even had a boyfriend, current or past.
‘So,’ said Rachel, lifting Massimo’s leg over her shoulder, pushing against it for the stretch whilst doing something extraordinary to a point just below the buttock, ‘all in all, I suppose I’ve completely let you down then? Utterly destroyed your preconceptions of a female soigneur?’
‘Rachel,’ said Massimo, turning to lie on his front and inadvertently presenting her with a sizeable portion of hairy bottom from behind the slipped towel, ‘you are my soigneur. You are the best soigneur for Massimo. I don’t think of you as a girl at all.’
Well, I suppose that was the definitive compliment, Rachel muses as she washes her hands of oil and changes the towel on the massage table in preparation for the next rider. But odd too. Out of all the soigneurs on the Tour – three or four for each of the twenty-one teams – I’ll be one of only two females. And though it’s nice that Emma and I, in this hugely male-dominated world, are not hassled, it’s a bit bizarre that everyone completely denies us our gender. It’s like, in life there are