CYCLING | FREEDOM

Around the World in 80 Bicycles

I don’t believe in Peter Pan, Frankenstein or Superman

Finlay O’Keefe is a metropolitan guy. Train station close to my home. My picture.

In theory, living in the Netherlands, the kingdom of bicycles, I should be writing an ode to how wonderful it is to live here and get around everywhere on two wheels. That’s true. But before I ever moved here, I already had a symbiotic relationship with the bicycle.

At nine, my nonno gave me my first one. Green with white wheels. I would spend hours on weekends riding up and down my street. Hours. The bicycle is freedom. The perfect excuse to be outside, or rather, not to be inside a home full of tension. So saying: “ I’m going for a bike ride”, was always great, always accepted.

At twelve, I got a bigger one, and at fourteen came the big leap: a racing bike. A 26-inch, light as a feather, sky blue, with a ladies’ frame. My best friend from the neighborhood had a similar one, same color but a men’s frame. With that bicycle, she and I, and I think she did too, for a while, decided we were going to be cyclists.

Again, the need to not be at home pushed me toward that goal: training. On weekends I’d go to another neighborhood and do laps. Thousands of laps, training. In that neighborhood there was a square and a lot of boys my age. When I showed up, they’d look at me like something interesting had arrived.

Years later, one of them, who went to secondary school with me, asked why I never stopped to talk to them. I think it was shyness. I had a big crush on this boy for a while. He had, and probably still has, large sky-blue eyes and black hair. For years, he visited me at home a lot. He had a motocross bike.

A few years ago, on one of my many returns to Argentina, I found out that in that very square where I did my laps, there had been a crime of passion. And by chance, my high school friend appeared at my mom’s house, like Aladdin, to tell me that his father had shot his mother in the living room and then killed himself. His brother found their parents dead and the blood everywhere. A while later, the house was put up for sale. He lost all the money, gambling.

That’s when I understood: just as I enjoyed my bicycle life in the street to spend hours away from home, my friend did the same, exponentially, on his motocross. He’d escape to the mountains and casinos.

Don’t drink and bike. 100 Euros fine in Amsterdam. Red light district. My photo dedicated to Vincent Croos

My beloved life on bicycles has given me two accidents.

One in my teens, when I lost a front tooth crashing into a car while carrying a basket of empanadas in my right hand on the handlebar.

And eight screws in my left wrist with a very beautiful scar I earned two months after arriving in the Netherlands. I wanted to be a “proper” Dutch woman and had a basket mounted on the front to carry my dog.

My Nepali dog, lovely as she is, did not appreciate sitting in a basket. She was also a bit too big for it, but I insisted. So one summer afternoon, on a curve with a light breeze, following my kids through Rotterdam, my dog decided to make contact with another dog, jumped out of the basket, and launched me onto the ground, not before the front wheel got lodged in the tram tracks and I went flying, without any elegance whatsoever, across the pavement.

The Dutch hospital put a bandage on me and told me it’ll be fine for two months. Meanwhile I was trying to move my hand like a flamenco dancer to heal the wound. But the pain wouldn’t go away. They kept asking for patience, till one night I rode my bike with the other hand to pick up my X-rays.

This is me biking and selfing.. not very safe either. My photo.

Generally, they don’t give those X-rays out, they belong to the hospital. But the night receptionist, bless her charitable soul, let me take a photo. I sent that X-ray to a radiologist friend in Chubut. That’s Patagonia, Argentina. I still had Facebook back then. My friend looked at the photo and said: “You have a broken arm! Those Dutch are made of wood. The fracture is crystal clear”.

Two days later I had emergency surgery. My kids and my dog were left with the neighbors I ambushed for help until I came back. The four of us were living alone in Rotterdam in the middle of nowhere. My husband was in Nepal, and my in-laws were near the Dutch-German border but had a lot on their plates.

Since I was fourteen, I’ve had a crown on my front tooth and thanks to that, I made a global dental tour. The latest crown was the best, put in by an excellent dentist in Brazil about twenty-one years ago. Muito bom!

It’s a shame that a blog I had on WordPress no longer exists from my time in Bangladesh; I deleted it. There was a photo of me with my green Made-in-India bicycle that I bought in Dhaka a week after arriving. “Madam… bicycle?” Yes. No bideshi (foreigner) rides a bicycle in Dhaka, and I never saw women doing it either.

For me, those things are never a reason not to have a bicycle. In Old Dhaka I bought my bike. A year later, I took from Germany a pair of bicycle bags made from recycled Mexican tortilla packaging. That bicycle was gold. It saved me hours in traffic jams, helped me get to know the rickshaw drivers who always greeted me and kept an eye on my bike; I rode into every men’s bicycle parking lot without a second thought. Did I breathe polluted air? Yes, a lot. But I was free. You cannot have it all.

In Kathmandu, I bought a Jomsom, a locally made mountain bike. The city demanded something different. The terrain was another level entirely, and so was the cycling culture: in Nepal, foreigners on bikes were a bit more common sight, and there were even organized rides to promote urban cycling. I eventually brought the Jomsom to the Netherlands with us in the container, though by then it was fairly rusted. The Jomsom ended its days in Maastricht with my son, who used it for a while before growing tired of greasy fingers every time the chain jumped.

When I saw the prompt topic, many stories flooded my mind.

Mine and my kids’. Even the one about a senile woman in Berlin who hated children and lived above us, and one day, apparently in a rush of wonderful thoughts, she decided to cut the brakes on my kids’ bicycles. Every morning, my sons rode to school on those bikes. She couldn’t stand us. My kids left for school and halfway there, realized the brakes weren’t working. Months later, other neighbors confirmed they’d seen the woman with a pair of pliers cutting cables.

Bengali delivery boys in Pescara. My photo.

There’s a film I keep coming back to: Vittorio De Sica’s **Ladri di biciclette* ***(Bicycle Thieves)from 1948. A poor father combing through post-war Rome for his stolen bicycle, the one thing standing between his family and ruin. I’ve seen it several times, and I always end up crying. Not out of pity, exactly. More out of recognition, that particular desperation of being trapped, of having no mobility, no work, no way to feed your family, the whole weight of circumstances pressing down on you because of one simple bicycle. I know something about that logic.

Ladri di biciclette (1948) — Vittorio De Sica

Last week I had to go hand in my car. It’s not mine, it’s a company lease car, and the lease ran out. A big car that for the past year has been parked more than it’s been driven. I’m in a Dutch government work reintegration program, and the car… I don’t know; at the company, they didn’t ask for it back, they forgot, honestly I have no idea. I took it in and felt relief wash over me. Finally gone, the thing.

Yesterday I had to go out, and just as I opened the door, a torrential downpour started, the kind we haven’t had in months. Exactly, exactly at the moment I needed to leave for a medical appointment. Damn, I thought, right now when I don’t have the car but I have the bike. In the back pocket: my rain poncho.

Street selfie at arrival.

I left. I arrived at the doctor with my sneakers full of water, like suction cups. Halfway down the street, glasses completely fogged up, I thought:

I want to ride my bicycle.

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Thanks for reading my story.

June is moving, rolling… join us and Adrienne Beaumont, chief on wheels editor with all the prompts!

[embed]June is Bustin’ Out all Over Writing prompts coming out the yin-yangmedium.com

This is the story I started last week during the Writers Circle, where I was co-host. Thanks to Words by Egypt 𓇢𓆸, Ayesha Qureshi, Jennifer DellaZanna and Amanda LaMorre and many others… who joined my group.