The MV was my first real motorcycle, a huge step up from a 50cc moped, a machine capable of a hundred miles an hour and me riding wearing no protective gear at all. Looking back it's a wonder I survived riding this machine. But at that time, the fall of 1975, it was the only transportation I owned.The winter of 1975 was a tough one for me. I lived in a dank lonely home a mile from the nearest store or bar, twenty five minutes from the nearest cinema or newspaper rack, one of my twin older sisters (they were tiwns, not me) lived with me but already the seeds of future discontent were sown and we were barely on speaking terms. My life was such that I missed the camaraderie of life in an English boarding school- but I had graduated that summer and i was now forced to live in the real world, claiming my Italian inheritance left to me by my dead mother and wishing as hard as I could that I were anywhere except where I was. 
Riding a motorcycle in the dead of winter in the Umbrian mountains was one of those life experiences that one looks back upon and wonders how the snot nosed little kid pulled it off. I learned to stuff copies of La Repubblica down the front of my jacket, and to wrap my feet in plastic shopping bags. I learned to ride one handed, tightening down the throttle screw such that I could take my right hand off the handlebar grip and warm it on the cylinder head as I rode. I got used to icy cold thighs that tingled as though pricked by the sharpest of knife points, and to ride with my teeth chattering from the cold was no problem at all I discovered, if only I could wedge my glasses on tight enough that they wouldn't shake and distort my vision. My narrow field of acquaintances got used to me arriving in a blizzard of wet clothing, fingers dyed pale black by my leaky leather gloves and my glasses covered in specks of moisture. They sat me by the fire and fed me home made wine till I thawed out. I was tough, and perhaps not too bright. In summer I was envied for my motorcycle, in winter they pitied me for my stupidity and lack of an automobile. I had no money, my land wasn't making much and I had no preparation for this lonely mountaintop life far from the theoretical life I had lived in school.
Shown on a pleasant summer afternoon with my brother-in-law's Jeep parked in the village square my family home doesn't look as austere as I remember it when I spent many a winter night roaming the long empty corridors listening to the winter wind howling outside. It was a time of intermittent power outages, leaving me reading by candlelight like some Dickensian figure from a previous century. I longed for the bright lights of a city, any city, and the sounds of life that would assure me I wasn't already dead and buried alive.
The provincial capital of Terni was forty minutes from my front door, possibly even thirty minutes if the roads were dry and I concentrated on getting into town in a real hustling hurry on my fire engine red MV. Terni is no one's idea of a bustling medieval village. It's an industrial city manufacturer of Krupps steel and Beretta guns, it's origins go back to Roman times as the city of Interamna, bombed flat by the allies in World war Two as a blow to the Italian war effort and rebuilt in a grid, a small Los Angeles in a valley filled with heat and smog in summer and fog and damp in winter. Terni doesn't sound like much and though it has been prettied up in the intervening decades back then it was no great place to spend time. Except for one thing.It happened that I used to visit the only place in town where I could get a free meal and a bed for the night in the big city away from the dreary monotony of winter in the mountains. My aunt was divorced in an era when divorces were rare and she was loud and brash and lived the life of a single woman who enjoyed her friends and the hell with men, who took pity on her nephew and dragged his sorry ass out shopping or for tea with her friends when he was in town. we played cards at her place and she listened to my lamentations of loneliness in the village and my stories of village girls who bored me and endless agricultural days of tedium. Perhaps I cheered her up because my life was decidedly worse than hers, who knows. She used to take me up to the village of Piediluco for coffee and we'd walk along the lake front and share our lamentations.
My aunt was a member of a club on the shores of the lake, a club supposedly dedicated to outdoor fitness stuff like boating and tennis though I suspect with the wisdom of age and hindsight it was also a place for assignations and casual affairs of bored housewives, co-captains of industry with nothing much to do except lounge around and gossip. My aunt had a nice divorce settlement so she fit in okay. I should point out that these days the Rowing Club is quite the athletic center on the lake with Olympic athletes winning medals but in my memory it was not quite like that. It was where I met the first woman with whom I had something approaching a relationship. She was not a member but was there for some trivial reason I cannot recall. I was there with my motorcycle for some other reason, probably because I had met my aunt at the club. My aunt had an obligation, her friend needed a ride and there we were, my MV and I like white knights to the rescue. So we rescued her, my MV Agusta 350 and I.
She was the epitome of luscious older, that Older Woman, she was in her late 30's with a crinkly smile and long brown hair and sparkly blue eyes, self assured descisive and determined to get what she wanted. In an era when divorces were not common she was another one of those lovely single women and what she saw in juvenile me I cannot begin to imagine. I was immature, not well trained and prickly as a result. I expect I was better than being alone and god knows I was easy. I had no expectations from life and I was exotic, living alone in the mountains, well read through loneliness and sensitive in ways 20 year olds aren't supposed to be. Plus did I mention she liked motorcycles? I wasn't used to having a passenger but I made the best of it on the ride back to town from the club. I think I rode rather too fast, a habit of mine in those spectacularly ill prepared days of my youth. We neither of us wore helmets and she squealed like a girl (she was a girl dammit! Just a bit older than average) as we took the curves in the road with perhaps a little too much panache.
She asked me back to take her for a ride some other time, and she meant it, and so it happened the next time I was alone at home and at a loose end instead of looking up my aunt I looked up the Older Woman. I found her home and we took off for a ride on my spectacularly uncomfortable roadster with the ridiculously low handlebars and the stupidly loud exhausts. It took me a long time to figure it out but when a woman wants a thing to happen, it does. It's like magic, you can plot and plan and lick your hair into shape, and she will turn away without a second glance. Or you can show up with your shirt tails hanging out and breath that would kill a parrot but she has you in mind and with a toothbrush and some patience she will take the time to whip you into shape and bend you to her will and make it all seem preordained as though by the gods or Fate that you two should be together.
It was a great summer, and my MV and I lived it up as long and as hard as we could. I worked and ran off to the city to seek out the love of my life. This was it, I ready to settle down with a woman almost twice my age. She was, I rather think, a little more clear about my long term prospects than was I and I don't think she took me very seriously at all. She taught me a lot about stuff that adults do in private, knowledge that stood me in good stead later in life. I was a blank canvas in all respects and she did a good job of filling in the very blank canvas of my nascent love life. Looking back it seems obvious she was enjoying an interlude between husbands perhaps having one last fling before settling down to being a grandmother or something in later life. She was unusual in that she had no children and never acted very maternal that I can recall. Our relationship however was rather more carnal than ethereal, and we did not spend a great deal of time discussing the meaning of life, rather in acting it out. It was rather businesslike as I recall though at the time I got what I wanted so all was well.
Summer was at it's peak but the affair died a death a little early. I think my aunt was rather miffed that I developed another interest and my regular visits to her home dried up at the same time as the Older Woman sat me down and said it was over. She had found a better prospect than me and I was devastated. She was kind but brisk and quite too firm to brook any argument. I was astonished that prospects of marriage and happiness were now dashed forever. That's where a motorcycle comes in handy. I loaded some saddlebags and took off across Europe to see my family in England. Looking back I have no idea how I travelled bent double over clip-on handlebar stubs but I was young and I had spent the preceding months bending myself into a pretzel indoors and out with the Older Woman. Riding the MV through Germany and Belgium bent double was a piece of cake, though riding alone without the Older Woman on the back was a disappointment. Plus I slept alone when I stopped for the night and rolled myself up in a sleeping bag. The MV Agusta was never designed as a tourer but I made it work, and riding the little rocket cheered me up no end.
And that was the first time I rode a motorcycle as a means to a seduction. I never told anyone the story of the Older Woman and we never spoke again so what happened to her is hard for me to say. I have not spoken to my aunt in decades, my sisters say she got mad at the family and wanted nothing more to do with any of us. I think there is a story there but as usual they tell me nothing.
Months ago riepe asked me to tell the story of a motorcycle related affair, and nowadays he is too distracted trying to make a living by writing, so it seemed like a good time to try to slip the story past him unseen.
Photos from the Internet.
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