The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

To be in Italy with Sandro and with the Valera team—it would be the grand tour compared to my time as a student in Florence, when I had no money to travel and lived in the walk-in closet of a fruit seller. Marvin gave me sixteen-millimeter film stock at such a discount it was practically free. There would be a demonstration of the Spirit of Italy at Monza and they were going to have me drive the car. I had an idea for the film, of filming up close, in dilated view, the poster of Flip Farmer. Going close to his face, scanning his body, the flameproof suit, his arm over the helmet. A meditation on that stilled image, the monstrously white, pure smile. And then intermixing myself. The Valera team. My own driving gloves. My helmet.

  * * *

  “He likes me to beat his ass,” Giddle said when I asked how things were going between her and Burdmoore.

  We were at Rudy’s for the usual experience, as well as a final goodbye before Sandro and I left. It was winter, and dirty snow scuffed the curbs.

  “It’s hard to imagine,” I said. “You’re so petite.”

  “Not beat him up. Literally beat it. With a Ping-Pong paddle.”

  “Oh.”

  “He calls me Mama,” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  There was new graffiti in the women’s bathroom at Rudy’s:

  “Whoever talks about love destroys love.”

  Someone had crossed out “love” and written “Ronnie Fontaine.”

  “Whoever talks about Ronnie Fontaine destroys Ronnie Fontaine.”

  The women’s bathroom often became unisex late on a drunken night. I wondered if it was Ronnie who was writing this stuff. Messages to himself.

  Ronnie showed up and slid into the booth as we were talking about Burdmoore. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “that’s still on?”

  Giddle said she was flattered Ronnie was interested, and yes, it was still “on.”

  “I’m not that interested,” Ronnie said. “I just want to know if you tug on his beard. Apparently Brancusi, when he slept with Peggy Guggenheim, which is more than once, as I understand it, he told her not to touch his beard. It was forbidden. Anything else she could touch. Any body part or tuft. Not the beard.”

  But Burdmoore had lost the beard, I saw as he made his way toward us through the crowd at Rudy’s. He’d lost the stringy locks of red hair, too. He’d cut his hair short and was clean-shaven. I found it hard to understand what he looked like now, because in his smooth face, his cropped hair, I saw only an agreement with Giddle, hair removal in exchange for something, unlimited sex maybe, and not a man who had decided to look a particular way.

  Giddle made a toast, and gushed about how fabulous it would be to think of me in a racer’s suit, on a track, how thrilling. Also, she said, how necessary it was to spend time in Italy, that it was part of a gamine’s coming-of-age, a sort of finishing school, and she became her older-sister self with me as young protégée, which was a role she often played, and she was, in fact, probably ten years older. I had spent almost an entire year in Italy as a student, but I didn’t point this out to Giddle. She knew it, or at least I’d told her. She said I should consider coloring my sandy-blond hair red, that Italian women hennaed their hair. Nothing else was fashionable there but dyed red hair. Dyed hair and palazzo pants, she said. We have to get you some palazzo pants.

  At some point she mentioned she’d never actually been to Italy. “But I can imagine it,” she said. “A place where old women scrub stone steps with a stiff brush and a bucket of soapy water. Where someone is always scrubbing stone steps, a widow in mourning clothes. No one does that in America. Scrubs steps. Wears mourning clothes.”

  It was late and dark and smoky at Rudy’s. The booth had broken into several conversations, Ronnie next to Saul Oppler, who had fully forgiven him for killing his rabbits. Ronnie was looking at Saul’s hands. “Saul,” he said, “you have no fingerprints.” Saul looked at his own hands, old and giant and strong, hands that looked like they could pulverize rocks. He examined his smooth fingerpads and shrugged. He said he used his hands. To make paintings. Just worked the prints right off, he said.

  Ronnie said he never knew it could be that easy.

  “What do you mean, easy?” Saul said. “I’ve been in the studio for forty-eight years. You call that easy?”

  “I meant getting rid of your—”

  “I didn’t get my first solo show until I was thirty-seven years old! Easy. To hell with it,” Saul said.

  Sandro was at the bar, ordering more drinks. Burdmoore was next to Giddle, mutely watching her with a kind of wonder as she and I spoke. He seemed to feel no need to win her, to make her smitten with him. He just watched her with a steady gaze, like he was already thinking about later, what he and she would do later. I looked up as Sandro appeared with more drinks. Behind him, in the middle of the room, a girl stood alone facing our booth. Young and pale and thin and straw-blond, with a large face, a large head like a child. She stared at Ronnie, who was talking to Saul Oppler and didn’t look up, didn’t notice her. It was the girl on layaway.

  “I’m so excited for your trip,” Giddle continued. She gazed into the glass of slivovitz that Sandro passed to her, turning it in her hands.

  “I see octogenarian transvestites who are devoutly Catholic and may invite you over for tea,” she said. “You’ll go, wearing your palazzo pants. We have to get you some at Goodwill.” She took a sip of her slivovitz, and then peered back into the glass. “The old trannies will have curious furniture stuffed with horsehair, lace doilies draped over everything to cover the black mold.”

  She’d known an Italian transvestite, she said, a player of chess and turn-of-the-century German opera recordings who had once told Giddle that every night she dreamed about popes. Popes in pure dazzling white, floating on clouds. And Giddle had asked which pope, the pope? Was it Paul VI? And the transvestite became disgusted and said no, certainly not! Not the one in the Vatican. Just popes. All in white, she’d said to Giddle, restoring her dreamy reverie. Beautiful popes, floating on clouds. Giddle thought that was really great. “Her vision was not molested by actual power,” she said. “It was just men floating on clouds.”

  The girl on layaway was standing in the middle of the room, facing us.

  I wondered if I should say something to Ronnie. I decided not to. If she were ready to alert him to her presence, she would do it herself. Instead, she stared at him with narrowed eyes, training her sadness on him.

  Ronnie didn’t notice and kept entertaining Saul.

  She turned to go. I watched her move toward the exit, taking her sadness with her.

  13. THE TREMBLING OF THE LEAVES

  said as much about what would happen, according to the Brazilian overseer Valera hired. The overseer said you could not predict. You would not know, by guessing, which of the tappers would come in at quota, which of them would come in under quota, and which of them would die.

  Yellow fever, the patrão said, they die of yellow fever.

  A rubber worker with a .22-caliber hole in his head:

  Yellow fever, it’s written in the booklet.

  Another with a hole in his back:

  Yellow fever.

  A third with an ice pick pushed through his neck, because the patrão’s flimsy muzzle-loader, with its cheap wire-wound barrel, unraveled:

  Y.f.

  The Valera Company guns the patrão was given were good for fifty shots and then they fell apart. He wrote to the company’s contact in São Paulo about the faulty equipment but was told there was nothing to be done about it.

  It was important to keep these Indians on edge, so the patrão had to find ways. The Indians needed threats. They needed to be afraid. They might run away. Or sell the rubber to rubber pirates who roamed the edges of the encampment, and then the patrão would lose his profit share. You could hear these bandits, their cracks and rustlings in the jungle. The patrão’s job was to keep the Indians in line. His tools were the cheap muzzle-loaders, mock drownings with water poured over a facecloth, and various furth
er entrenchments of the Indians’ peon status. They owed a fee for having been brought to the Amazon. They owed for their purchase on credit of goods at the company store. They were forbidden subsistence activities. No collecting Brazil nuts. No growing of crops (anyone caught farming: y.f.).

  * * *

  This life, the tapper’s, rushing, sweating, exhaustion, waiting. Rushing, sweating, exhaustion. You wait while the patrão inspects your taps to be sure they’re clean, inspects your trunk incisions to be sure they’re correct (not too shallow and not too deep, in order not to damage the tree’s soft part, the cambium, and not circular—rather, you make a half spiral in the trunk, from lower right to upper left, tracing with your gouge the latex tunnels inside the tree). If the patrão is busy, you set down the milk-loaded pails while you wait. If you run with pails full of latex and spill some, you are said to skedaddle it. If you carry the latex pails uphill and because of the titubation of your gait, you slop some from the pails, you are said to skedaddle it. Slop it from your pail and the day’s work, so unmatched to the scale of the body and its limits, is wasted. It isn’t just a loss down to zero but below it. You didn’t know how low a person could get below zero, down under the roots of it, until you found this life, or it found you.

  It is one hour’s walk with the heavy slop-promising pails, sloppossible, back to the man with the scale. Twice a day you go to the scale, at noon and then again at sunset. At noon, a whole day, a day’s life, a reality, has already been lived. Waking at dark, deep down under daylight, hurriedly preparing lunch to eat in the jungle, running to the taps, opening them as quickly as you can. The closer to daybreak the more likely you’ll make quota because the trees flow better at dawn. You have to know which trees to return to (you can’t tap the same tree two days in a row), running from tree to tree to get the taps open and by the time every one of them is flowing you race back to the first tap of the morning, the one you opened in total darkness, by feel alone, and you return to get your yield, pour it from the cup at the bottom of the tree into your pail, clean the tap, and get to the next tree. That’s how it goes, this zigzagging from tree to tree, coated in sweat and jungle damp, zigzagging until noon, when you are ready to collapse, feeling like your head is in a cloud of ammonia, dizzy, confused, pain shooting up your spine, your muscles twisted into torn rags.

  The man who puts your pails on the scale is against you like he was born to hate you in a natural way that won’t be corrected with fuller pails, less slopped on their way to the scales. He was lured by good money, easy money. He’d been told proper housing, electricity, hot meals. You carry his water—sloppossible but not measured like the latex is, just eyeballed, and so less calamitous if slopped. He isn’t so bad off, not at all, in fact, compared to your life, heat and pain and exhaustion, little sleep on dirt floors under canvas tarps, eating cold food when it rains, because the cooking is all outdoor. He is there to mind you. That is his job, and it is your fault. He frowns with hate, weighs the pails of latex, and puts down a number in the booklet. You don’t get paid for the pails. You get a number in his booklet. If the number is under quota you get no credit. If your pail is at quota they say you’re breaking even, and you get another number, for the credit, the amount owed against the amount collected, resulting in a handful of stale manioc flour, for which you must have your own bag, or the flour goes straight in your pockets, or, if you have no bag and no pockets, you run toward camp with your fingers sealed together in a bowl, like a hungry, desperate fool, leaving a trail of powdered manioc behind you. If your pail is over quota, you get the flour, and they say you’ll get something when the job is finished. Rumor has spread that the booklet is a lie. The job is not going to finish in the sense of an accounting and a payment. Someone says, Let’s burn it. But then you really won’t get paid.

  You and the others had made a four-month journey to a living hell and the patrãos knew it. All the way from Belém, where you enlisted. They kept their guns pointed so you would not escape. But you tried. The patrão who stood with the man working the scale was distracted, drinking from his canteen and trying not to look at the long line of men holding their pails, waiting. He sat on a cut log. His muzzle-loader hung from a strap on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. The man who weighed the pails was writing in the booklet. Because the jungle made the pages damp, he had to draw out each pencil line slowly. The pencil didn’t like damp. Or the page didn’t like it. You, almost at the end of the line, set down your pails and dove into the brush, off the path that led to the scales. Not sticking to your line, off the page like a pencil that would not write.

  And then you were running and looking up through the green fringe of tree ferns. Panting and huffing and feeling your throat go cold with shortness of breath, the green fringe pounding above you as you ran.

  How was it, the thought entered your mind as you ran, that God could love you and the patrão and the man who weighed the pails, at one time? How was that possible? Your bare feet had gone numb with running. It was important to try to run lightly to keep quiet, but you could not feel your feet, like you were bobbing on two rubber bounce balls instead of feet, deep in a jungle four months’ journey from your village. Running on feet you could not feel. Bounce balls. And working with the numbness, pulling your legs up to step lightly, because small cracks and rustlings echo in the jungle. Sound travels cleanly, is made louder as it relays through the spaces among the trees, like through those bullhorns they put on the trucks on Sundays to get everyone herded into church, back in your village, which seems not so bad a life now, drought and God and stomachaches from unripe fruit. There was nothing to do but at least there was time. Now you are short on time and running. Weaving among the trees. The trees, thick and strong and sturdy, blocking out the sunlight, but themselves reaching up to it. If you step on a branch by accident the trees give away your secrets. Crack-crack, the sound of you sent back through the jungle to the patrão. The trees, reaching up to the light they blocked, were not part of God’s matrix. They went from their roots to the sky without any part in heavens and hells. The trees just were, and they relayed your secrets if you stepped on a dry branch while trying to escape. Not because they wanted you caught, but because of sound, and the way it traveled. They were no part in God’s matrix. They were the wood His Son was nailed to. That was all. They would not suffer like you did, wondering if God loved you and the patrão at one time. You and the man who weighed the pails. Wondering if God could hate. If He could love. If He could not hate, like the priest said, well, then. He couldn’t love, either. And what help could He offer now? He was as good as the trees (no help at all).

  Runaway logic: if you run in the night and sleep by day, you might make it to the river and build yourself a raft. Or you run with no plan but the slim moment, the patrão’s back turned.

  Most runaways were caught. The ones who weren’t died alone, among animals, watched by those huge trees that weren’t in God’s matrix. If the Earth is something whole, its wholeness is of no comfort. Some suffer. Others don’t. What is God’s harmony? That you have a gun pointed at you, and the patrão is aiming it. By the laws of harmony, you cannot both have guns.

  The green tree ferns pound into and out of view, branches scrape you, your feet are numb. You trip, you fall, you get up, you keep running.

  14. THE RULES OF VIOLENCE

  We were in low chairs around an outdoor fireplace as dusk settled over the villa, the light tinted pink and made hazy with woodsmoke. Lake Como, far down below us, was a spill of silver. The men were elegantly dressed, in crisply tailored suits and buttery-looking Italian loafers, probably just the kind that Ronnie had coveted when he was driving Saul Oppler’s E-type Jaguar down to Texas with a load of dead rabbits.

  There was the gravelly throated Count of Bolzano, a little man whose round belly pressed against his mint-green shirt, which was monogrammed on the lower left, over his spleen. He was an old friend of Sandro’s mother’s. On my other side was a man named Luigi, an
industrial designer who peered at me through large, square eyeglasses, looking like a character from a Fellini film. And lastly Sandro’s brother, Roberto, who was as unfriendly as Sandro had warned he would be. Roberto lived down the road from the family villa in a recently built glass-and-steel house. Sandro and I had visited him there two days earlier, on the afternoon we’d arrived in Bellagio. We’d walked down the little road, cicadas surging from the green underbrush that banked the narrow lane. Sandro held my hand, and I’d felt light and strange, partly from jet lag, but the feeling opened me to this soft, lush place, where everything was so carefully tended.

  Roberto had greeted us in his weekend clothes, new designer jeans and a double-breasted blazer, his manner as stiff and guarded as his clothes. I tried to thank him in the awkward moments of our introduction for the Moto Valera I’d gotten from the Reno dealership. At first he seemed to have no idea what I was referring to. Then he remembered and said, “But you crashed it,” and turned to address Sandro about something else before I could respond. Sandro had tried to apologize for him afterward, explaining that Roberto was in a tough position. There was massive upheaval at the Valera plants and though Roberto had worked out deals with the trade union, the workers were now rejecting their own union and striking anyway. Good for them, I thought, and anyway it didn’t excuse his brother from being rude.

  Tiny orange lights were beginning to twinkle on the lake’s darkening shore, the lights mirrored in the water, the hills above them spreading out in reverse. The villa was at the top of a steep incline, just a fifteen-minute drive from the lakeside promenade of Bellagio proper, with its double-parked Lamborghinis and its women in furs. Its regal-looking car ferries, which arrived from Varenna, across the sparkling water. And along the waterfront, its white tablecloths, cold prosecco, rich and subdued families gazing off. But in that fifteen minutes traveling uphill from the lakefront to the Villa Valera, one left that world behind, passed horses and cows grazing lazily, handwritten signs advertising farm-made honey and yogurt, and roads choked with blackberry and young chestnut trees.