The Virago

“Homo sum. A me nil alienum puto” [“I’m a man. Nothing human is foreign to me”]

Terence, Heautontimoroumenos

Some drivers just can’t stand motorcyclists. But there are also some ornery bikers who can stand up to them. There’s no way they’re going to let anyone push them around when they’re willing to take their lives in their hands at 125 miles an hour! Once you can handle fifty horsepower, tame a twentieth-century monster by holding it between your thighs, raise a machine that weighs over 300 pounds with your bare hands after it tipped over accidentally on the curve of a slippery pavement: you’re no wimp; you’re a modern-day centaur. There are those who are seated and then there are bikers, whose bodies are one with their machines. That is, if we share their point of view, when they’re perched on a Honda or a Harley Davidson, exposed to the bad weather, so vulnerable, without any metal armor, seat belt, seat back, or headrest. You don’t belong with the ones who are seated. You’re geared for risk, you roar, you weave in and out. You’re not a sheep anymore; you’ve turned into a wild animal.

At least that’s what you’d like to think when the cold air nips your face and you laugh without flinching.

I’m only saying what I assume since I don’t ride a motorcycle. I’ve never even tried. From time to time I’ll ride on the back, gripping the waist of the person holding the handlebars. It may be the same everywhere, but at least in Martinique you’re considered different if you get a kick out of climbing hill after hill with the engine throbbing, out of charging down gullies and ravines, wearing a helmet like a warrior of yesteryear, a remote yesteryear! You’re not just anybody with these pounds of steel between your legs, stuffed into a biker’s suit rather than comfortably settled into a little air-conditioned chamber. You’re not an ordinary person at that moment when your motorcycle takes off like a shot on the island’s only expressway, so short you see the end of it as soon as you’ve gotten up to speed and gone beyond the perpetual traffic jams near the airport on the Lamentin plain, our only large plain!

Intoxication, a feeling of power, even of superiority? a sense of independence, of being unrestrained, unbridled? I really can’t say.

Anyway it was under rather strange circumstances that I made the acquaintance of a spectacular specimen, a biker and a Virago model Yamaha fused into one.

I couldn’t overlook the brand inscribed in gigantic letters on the scarlet curves of the machine. Nor could I fail to notice the model, Virago, written in more stylized and unobtrusive letters. But the name made me smile: doesn’t it call to mind the Latin word for “man” in the masculine sense—“vir” as opposed to “homo”—but in the pejorative sense of a kind of mannish woman? I don’t know whether the unknown person perched atop the Virago was aware of all that. Dressed in leather from the toes of the boots to the tips of the gloves, the creature leaped off the metal mount. It was impossible to catch a glimpse of flesh, and it was out of the question to see the face, completely masked beneath an all-encompassing helmet shining in the sunlight. I couldn’t even see the eyes. Nor was anything visible behind the black visor, as opaque as a darkened television screen.

As for me, I was just an ordinary motorist parking my car not far from my new high school. I had just recently returned to Martinique. Hardly realizing what was happening, having arrived after things had already started, I was astonished to see the biker leap onto the front of a car that had presumably triggered his anger. He started jumping, stomping on the hood, while the dumbfounded driver of...