by Amanda Tien

The bike becomes a bike on May 1, 1984, at 3:44pm local time at the Torresini workshop in Padua, Italy. Moments before, it was a lightweight aluminum frame, four seat stays, one chainstay bridge, two wheels, and a handmade leather seat from Tuscany.

A young man named Emilio is the one to usher this bike into life. Many people made the parts of this bike, but only Emilio carefully installs the rivets and screws. Only Emilio takes the care to drop grease onto the hinges, to polish the frame. His father used to tell him every day that he would never become anything, that he was good for nothing, that one day he would die and no one would miss him. But every time Emilio makes a bike, his father is proven wrong. Every day that Emilio saves a few lira in a jar by the door, his father is wrong. Every friend that grabs Emilio by the back of the neck, pressing their foreheads together, smiling, laughing, proves his father wrong.

This particular bike, a Sognatore X2, is a dreamy blue, the color of the sky just as the sun dares to drift north of the equator. The thin layer of paint, the cromovelato, will someday fade. But for now, it glows. Its silver fasteners gleam. It is the bike that will put its maker on the map for a period of time. The company will go from being a small initiative to a factory that employs most of the growing town, selling bikes around the world, especially in Tokyo and in New York City. These are bikes made for speed, for function, for people who need to get to work and need to get there fast.

Emilio would love a bike like this. He does not know how to ride one. Bicycles are for people who have somewhere to go and money to spend. Emilio doesn’t have either. Not yet, anyway. The Torresini workshop was, at first, just a job. Like parts that have become a bike, the job has become a life.

On the day this bike becomes a bike, Emilio runs his fingertips across the handlebars, gently pressuring his thumb at the center fulcrum, known in English as the stem but in Italian as a place of attack. Funny, he thinks, how people are always looking to find humanity in objects.

Then, he wipes his fingerprints away, and rings a bell hanging on the wall, and a man with one arm rolls a cart with a box of red metal parts in and wheels the blue bicycle away.

This Sognatore X2 is sent across the ocean. It rides in steerage on the Aquitania, the first global freight operator for Italia di Navigazione. The sky-colored bike is pulled tight with leather straps with one-hundred-and-forty-seven other bicycles. Some are Sognatore, but there’s also Bertoni, Colnago, Galli, and Ofmega. The Sognatore shudders and shakes when the freighter gets pulled by El Niño. A third of the bicycles will have to be sent back to Italy, their parts having spiraled out because they were not tightened by Emilio.

When the blue bicycle is removed from the shipping container in Hudson Yards, it shimmers in the sunlight. For a few moments, the bike stands alone and free on a harbor, a light mist glazing the leather seat. The kickstand is particularly sturdy, rooting it to the new country. The bike has made to America.

The sailor who rolls the blue Sognatore X2 off the boat, he pauses to put his hands on his hips and smiles. “It’s a good-looking bike,” he says to the client. The other man is the assistant to an owner of a boutique bicycle shop, and he doesn’t respond. Instead, he points at bikes one-by-one, checking them off on a clipboard. These bicycles are wrapped in cloth and rolled into the back of a truck driven by a woman with braids from Harlem; nobody’s better at making the turns on Manhattan streets than her. Her dad used to be a trucker, until the accident; the day he gave her his keys, she promised to make him proud.

The driver hand-carries each bike into Hemmerman’s Road Emporium on 81st and Columbus, the last of which is the sky blue Sognatore. The shop owner shakes her hand, palms her a $20 bill. She’s the best delivery truck he’s had, he tells her, and she beams with pride.

Inside the shop, the sales lead frowns. Due to a clerking error somewhere between Northern Italy and the Upper West Side, it is the only blue bike in a set of pale reds. The shop owner took a risk ordering this unproven brand, and it’ll look ridiculous, the only one of its color. The sales lead sighs; this won’t do, on the floor. So, she puts the solitary blue Sognatore X2 in the window. She imagines it’ll sit there a while. It does not. The very next day, a man buys it for his daughter Leah who has just gotten a job in publishing. She wants to make words come alive. In the 1980s, the New York subway is a dangerous place. And yes, biking will be dangerous but it will be a different kind. No men can touch her or rob her. No, on the bike, Leah will be free. He had just been walking past Hemmerman’s with his softball team from Central Park when he saw the blue bike in the window.. He can imagine Leah flying along Flatbush Avenue, then across the Brooklyn Bridge, up through Union Square, all the way to the glossy high rises in Midtown. The bike costs several paychecks, but it’s worth it. He’s very proud of her. 

The up-and-coming editor loves her blue bicycle. Leah attaches a woven basket where she stores parts of books, carefully bonding them with large rubber bands so not a single page goes missing. She rides the bicycle every day, twice a day, Monday through Friday, for seven years. Leah sometimes rides it on the weekends, too, to pick up challah or sufganiyot for her father.

At work, she’s the only person at work with an Italian bike. One day, Leah discovers she’s the only woman who rides a bike in the city at all! So, she starts a meet-up for espresso and lessons where she trains other women how to ride carefully, how to keep their fingers always on the brakes, how to read the micro-pauses of yellow taxicabs, which parks they can trust for clear pathways, how they can vote for bike lanes. She shows them how to replace the brake pads, how to replace the bike chain, things she learned from books at the New York Public Library. They put stickers on their helmets, and when they all leave work at the same time, they ring their bells, letting the city, the world, know that they are here. When the blue begins to fade, the editor does not mind. Leah sees the patches of silver as battle scars, and indeed, some in fact are. There is the scrape where she turned quickly off into the median outside Lincoln Center when a beer truck almost hit her. There are the scratches from where someone tried to steal her back wheel down by the East Village until she chased the thief off with a six-hundred-page-manuscript on medieval politics. There are the worn handlebar grips Leah held
tightly when she got kissed by her future husband. This bike has seen it all.

One day, Leah finds out she is pregnant, and her doctor tells her to stop riding the bicycle. She imagines keeping it in the basement of her building, waiting until she can ride it again, but it makes her sad. No, this bike deserves to be ridden. So, Leah gives it to a friend of a friend from the biking group at the publishing house.

That friend rides it for a few months, before she sells it to a bike shop in Hell’s Kitchen, where it is bought by a line cook who commutes everyday from Washington Heights to the restaurant, where it soon gets stolen and is ridden for some time by the thief’s teenage son who appreciates it but it is just a bike and he takes it for granted and it’s stolen again the night before he starts college, and the new thief keeps it in a garage for a few months until it’s resold to a trendy collective where it is bought by an older man who loves to refurbish older bikes and who powder coat paints it a fresh shade of seafoam blue,
careful to re-stencil the now long-defunct brand name, and then resold again, eventually, on Facebook Marketplace, where it is bought by a young man who has just moved to Brooklyn.

Amari came to New York from New Orleans. New, new, new, the cities’ names cry. We will remind you of a place that you used to love while simultaneously disavowing it; this is the future, always, now, tomorrow. In New Orleans, he could ride leisurely or quickly, the land flat but the air thick and humid. In New York, there are hills, avenues, and alleys which become raceways, mysteries, universes.

The bike has been loved, truly loved, twice before. The young man proves he is the third. Every day, Amari takes it down gently from the wall where he has made a mantle for it. Every day, he gives it a moment in the fresh air, kickstand out, and admires it. Every day, he wipes the bicycle down with a clean cotton rag.

He has ridden bikes for most of his life. But this one is different. At first, it’s a practical affection. This is the first really lightweight bicycle Amari has owned, needing something he can carry up and down subway stairs and to walk-up apartments. Next, there’s a genuine fondness for the color, for the practical comfort of the seat. Then, there’s the mystery. He tries to Google it— Sognatore italy vintage road racing bike—but can find only a few details on specialist hobby forums that haven’t been updated since the early 2000s. Short-lived company. Part of Italy’s economic boom after Fascism. Good quality but nothing special. Sognatore means Dreamer. He posts, but no one answers. 

This is the first bike that has saved his life.

It was a few months after he got the Sognatore X2. Amari had been riding home in the six o’clock rush, as usual. But it had rained, and in the autumn puddles refracted the light of a dying star. A man who is late for his daughter’s ballet recital in Jersey speeds towards the Holland Tunnel. Blinded briefly by the reflecting sunlight, he did not see the young man on the blue bicycle where Canal meets Verrick.

Amari does not even have time to scream. On instinct, his hands flinch, turning away from the speeding sedan. The blue bicycle responds simultaneously, hopping a curb and guiding him to safety outside of Albert Capsouto Park. For several minutes, the young man stands there, his shoes damp with leftover rain, breathing relief, his forehead resting on the handlebars of his blue bicycle. Amari whispers, Thank you. And then, he doesn’t know why, but he says, Grazie, just in case the bike can understand. He should really start wearing a helmet.

With Sognatore, Amari can weave in and out of traffic jams that stop Manhattan. He imagines that this is the way that some people feel about horses. The bicycle feels like an extension of his limbs, and when he cruises through the boroughs, he feels they are in their own bubble, protected. When he has the bike, he is alone, but not lonely.

The bike is the only mode of transportation he can trust to always get him to his destination, no matter the borough, on time. It’s one of the few things he can trust, period, to be exactly what it says it is. On the bike, he is just himself. And that’s not to say he isn’t himself other times. But it’s that he’s really, truly, just him, rather than try so hard to be a certain kind of cool or safe.

In New York, one is always vulnerable. Someone is always trying to get your money, your mind, or your body. There is no protection, not like with a car, where you are surrounded by a giant metal shell. In a car, there’s a seatbelt, and airbags. On the subway, there’s safety poles and chairs and windows and air conditioning. Growing up in North Carolina, biking was a fun hobby to ride around rich people’s
golf courses. A bike in the suburbs is endearingly safe, and, frankly, lame. But in this city, it’s just him and his bike. His mother is worried about his safety, and Amari tries to explain to her that, with Sognatore, he is protected.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the bicycle is the only thing that keeps him sane, riding, riding, riding away and towards. He goes on avenue after avenue, through each park on the map, to the corners of the rivers, to the top of the boroughs. While others stay inside, he, at least, has a way to move.

When the bike breaks, as all things must, Amari is devastated, but he assumes it can be fixed, because this is America in 2024.

First, there is the local bike shop in Crown Heights. Second, a mountaineering collective. Third, a feminist punk place. Fourth, the most expensive shop he can find in Manhattan. But they all tell him the same thing.

The bike needs a new part that is no longer manufactured. The factory in Italy closed decades ago. Each mechanic admires it—no one makes bikes like this any more—and mourns it, but they do not help him fix it. At the last spot, they offer to buy it for $20 so they can scrap it for parts.

Each time, Amari carries it out of the shop. The bicycle grows heavy.

On a spring day, the young man rolls the blue bicycle through the streets of Brooklyn. Amari has one last option to try. This place has no online reviews—a rarity in this day and age—but it had a listing in the Yellow Pages that his apartment building keeps as a door stop to let the weekly pest control guy in.

The shop is dusty and empty. When the young man rings a bell on the table, an old man exits from the back. He looks over his glasses at the young man and frowns. But when he sees the blue bike, he smiles.

Amari talks quickly, sharing how much he likes this bike, no, how much he loves this bike. How, even if it never works again, he will keep it, even if it takes up precious space in his small apartment, even if it’d make his girlfriend furious with the wasted space. But, please, if there’s any chance it could work again…

The mechanic waves his words away. “We can do it,” he says, in one of those old school Italian New Yorker accents. There is no one else in the shop, and Amari understands that we means him and the Sognatore.

Next year, when Amari leaves New York and the girlfriend behind, this bike will be one of the few things he makes space for in the miraculously still functional 2001 Honda Civic he buys from his friend’s cousin’s neighbor. With this bike, he is always home. And someday, there will be someone else who loves this bike, who needs it, treasures it, cares for it.

This day, it is the mechanic, for a day. He is familiar with this brand, with the workshop it came from, the factory where it was built. He and the bicycle have crossed oceans. They have made new lives.

People come and go, they age. But the bike, all things considered, stays the same.

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Amanda Tien (she/her) grew up on the move as the daughter of an Army officer and a teacher with a love for travel, community, service, and stories. She is a writer, visual artist, and nonprofit marketing strategist. Her writing has been published in Salt Hill Journal, Litro Magazine, Poets.org, Public Books, Call Me [Brackets], Columbia College Today, and Unwinnable Monthly. She is the Senior Editor Managing Editor of Aster(ix), a transnational feminist literary journal, and an Editor for The Punished Backlog, a video games journalism site. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in Summer 2024. She teaches writing at T emple University. She is currently working on a novel about the relationships between people and objects, and what happens to those memories. She recently moved to Wilmington, Delaware. Learn more and get in touch at http://www.amandatien.com