An ordinary morning
We had gone out to buy a 125.
Used, if possible. Reliable, for sure. Something practical to replace my Gilera SP01 — beautiful as few, unlucky as many — which had seized its engine in the most definitive way possible. Nobody’s fault in particular, no drama: these things happen. Life had to go on.
My father didn’t like motorcycles. He had never liked them, didn’t understand them, had never found anything interesting in them. But he had come. That already felt like enough.
We looked around. We browsed. We evaluated used bikes with mileage and scratches and someone else’s history. It was one of those practical mornings, without poetry — the kind of morning where you do what needs to be done and then go home.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened. I only know that at some point we found ourselves in front of her.
A Ducati Monster 600. Red. With a bronze-coloured frame, warm like freshly worked metal. Brand new. 1998 still had that smell — rubber, paint, something clean and full of promise that I have never smelled quite the same way since.
I wasn’t even looking in that direction. It wasn’t what we were looking for. It wasn’t what we could even be looking for.
It was my father who stopped.
The moment reality changes direction
I don’t remember the exact words — whether many were said or few, whether there was a negotiation or a decision made in silence. I remember the effect. That strange feeling when reality changes direction without warning you.
My father, who didn’t understand motorcycles, was buying a Ducati Monster. Brand new. Red. For me.
We had gone out for a used 125.
There are moments in life when all you can do is watch. You don’t have the words, you don’t yet know what you’re living through. You’ll understand later — much later — when you have enough distance to see its shape.
In that moment, I was only watching.
The red could be seen from far away
That Monster became my first real motorcycle — and I used it for everything. For aimless afternoons that autumn, when the light turns horizontal and even the roads seem to think. To learn what it meant to be alone in a new way — not loneliness, but space. To understand, kilometre after kilometre, that you can have a direction without having a destination.
The red could be seen from far away. Sometimes I would stop and turn to look at her — on the edge of a road, outside a bar, parked in the middle of nowhere. I could barely believe she was mine.
My father would sometimes ask how it was going. How is it? He meant the bike, but perhaps he meant something else too. I always answered fine, always fine, and he would nod like someone who understands without needing details.
We never sat down to talk seriously about that day. We didn’t need to. There was an understanding that worked precisely because it was never spoken.
What you only understand later
I understood only later that that gesture had no rational explanation — and that was exactly why it weighed so much. It wasn’t a studied, planned, gift-wrapped present. It was something sudden, disproportionate, almost unreasonable. We were there for a used 125 and he had looked at a red Monster and decided.
I don’t know what he saw. I don’t know if he asked someone for advice, if he let the salesman guide him, if he followed an intuition or simply stopped thinking for a moment. I never asked him.
But every time I think about the bronze of that frame, about the red line parked in the sun of an ordinary morning, I find myself thinking that perhaps he had put more care into it than he wanted to show. Or perhaps not — perhaps it really was an impulse, and sincere impulses are sometimes the highest form of care.
It takes a certain kind of love to do something like that. To go out looking for one thing and come back with something completely different — something you don’t understand, don’t share, can’t inhabit — and give it to your son as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The frequency beneath everything else
Every now and then, even today, I hear the sound of that bike.
It’s not a precise memory — it’s more of a frequency, something that vibrates beneath everything else. I think about it when I start the bike in the morning, in those seconds when the engine warms up and everything else is still. In those seconds I am always also that boy from 1998, with his hands on a brand new handlebar and the whole road ahead.
We had gone out to buy a used 125.
My father didn’t like motorcycles — and he gave me a road.
(The Ducati Monster was produced from 1993 to 2001 — discover the history of the model.)