The Leather Moped Couple

For me, the ultimate image of the 1950s is an ostensibly insignificant traffic accident. I think I was eight years old when I saw a couple of indeterminate age approaching on a sputtering Sparta moped, enveloped in a cloud of oil and petrol fumes. Both were clad in awkwardly thick, long leather jackets, topped off, like a dollop of whipped cream, with white pudding-bowl helmets. The man’s face was marked by irregular shifts in the metal industry, while the woman’s was pale and puffy from a strict diet of pork chops. The intersection was sandy, and that’s why I knew what was going to happen. As a child, I often knew what was about to happen; later, those signals came through less clearly, as if there was no longer room for my intuition.

The couple went down in slow motion, accompanied by a heavy creaking of their leather clothing. It wasn’t just a simple fall, but more of a stately collapse. The couple endured their downfall with composure, their faces blank, not even startled, as if from childhood they had been hammered with the notion that their lives wouldn’t get much better than this, and that setbacks belonged to daily routine. The slide across the cobblestones was part of their class. The most exciting thing that would ever happen to them was a day trip to Schiphol. The people around them recognized this; they, too, dealt with daily disappointments, and they watched without any sensationalism or pity, but with a dull sense of resignation.

The couple stood up, the man righted the moped from the grainy cobblestone road. He made a few attempts to get the beast running but then led it away like an unwilling mule. Creaking in their leather casings, they trudged out of the street, on their way to the next disappointment.