The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  Sandro groaned and pushed back his chair. He wandered into the living room.

  If you were one of them, you didn’t have to follow the rules. But I was not one of them and was sure it would have been held against me if I’d left in the middle of dinner. Sandro could not accept that Chesil was, as Sandro put it, his mother’s confidant. He was clearly more than a confidant, but Sandro could not acknowledge it, even as we sometimes saw the old novelist emerging from his mother’s quarters in the morning wearing a robe with the initials of Sandro’s father’s emblazoned on the breast pocket. Sandro said he couldn’t understand how his mother tolerated this ridiculous man in any capacity. I understood that she did tolerate him, and even why. She was lonely, and his ridiculousness was a form of vitality. It brought something to her life. In any case, many men were that way, but I couldn’t tell Sandro that men were ridiculous, and since his mother was not a lesbian they were her only option.

  “I could have been your conqueror, Alba,” Chesil said, “I mean your liberator, right here in Bellagio, but as it is, I can only tell you about the Neapolitan mothers eager to sell their children on the piazzetta of the Cappella Vecchia. The girls bartered on the cheap to the American soldiers and the boys to the Moroccan soldiers, who fought with the women over the price of these ruined little creatures, snot and melted caramel running down their faces, the single caramel each sucked given to them to preserve an effect of innocence. To be fair, I suppose it is simply the destiny of the young the world over to be hawked in the streets. For hunger and desperation, they should be so lucky. Back home in America, what can I say? They’re sold in the streets, too, of course, but not for reasons of hunger or fear. It’s worse. Much worse.”

  “Are you drunk?” Talia asked him. “What’s with you?”

  He took off the hat and turned it in his hands, folded it closed like a flattened envelope and stroked the fur. “What’s with me,” he said, “is, as your aunt points out, a bit of scoliosis. But, oh, had my spine been unkinked! To remind you what cowardly shits you people were. Who was in this place, again?” he asked, rapping his knuckles on the table. “I forgot. Who was living here? You did have to clear out for a German overseer, but which? You are never in the mood to discuss it, dear Alba. Was it Dollmann? Kesselring? Or maybe Reder. Like the most rabid Germans, in fact an Austrian. Was it Reder who used this place as headquarters? That’s the Walter Reder, I mean, who blazed across central Italy, Pisa, Lucca, Caprara, Casaglia, killing almost two thousand people, according to the ‘winners’ who wrote the history books, as you might call them, my ardent Alba. Reder burned men, women, and children alive under gasoline and straw. Strange fellow, Reder. Missing a hand, wore a fake one covered in a black leather glove. Anyhow, the suffering of others must surely serve some purpose, right? But what is that purpose? No one is ever sure of the answer. All I can tell you is that history is a goddamned dangerous place.”

  “You must stop this,” the signora said, “stop it right now.”

  But he didn’t, or couldn’t.

  “At Casolari, one woman attempted to flee Reder with her newborn babe but was caught. After he finished her off, Reder threw the baby in the air and shot it like a clay pigeon. But of course a baby is not a clay pigeon. There is a thud, a lot of bleeding, a bundle of possibility left to rot in a field, covered with horseflies. I’ll end with the little boy of six whose entire family—”

  The signora threw a sugar bowl at Chesil. Its top exploded on impact, and he was coated in white sugar.

  A servant emerged from the kitchen, having heard the noise, but stayed back when she saw the expression on signora Valera’s face. I sat, not sure where to look, resenting Sandro for having been able to get up and leave.

  “I guess the genie,” Chesil said, wiping sugar from his front, “is out of the bottle. Some things have been said. Decanted.”

  Signora Valera’s face was almost translucent with anger.

  “You are the genie,” she said, her voice quavering. “You’re out of your own bottle. You’ve only humiliated yourself. That’s all.”

  He lowered his ruddy face toward the table and nodded slowly with dawning regret. He stood up and brushed himself off. Sugar released itself from the folds of his shirt and slacks and formed a residue around his chair.

  “I am sorry. My apologies. Mosquitoes bit me today and I think I’m having a bad reaction. I’m feeling dizzy, actually,” and he excused himself from dinner.

  * * *

  The next day, the rantings and insults that characterized our meals at the villa all but stopped. Bad news had arrived by telephone.

  Workers had gone on strike at the main Valera tire plant outside Milan, blocking the entrances. The scabs the company brought in were dragged from the assembly line and beaten. Even the white-collar scabs, there for accounting and secretarial work, were taken out and beaten. Equipment was sabotaged at other Valera plants, which also experienced strikes.

  Over the next couple of mornings, while Sandro and I drank coffee and chewed stale bread, the newspaper reported that a high-level manager at Fiat had been kidnapped and ransomed, another kneecapped on his way to take his midmorning coffee, and a judge who was trying the case of two Red Brigades members was killed.

  Roberto and the signora spoke a great deal about the possibility of some kind of calamity, which they didn’t name. Sandro felt they were acting hysterical and was, like me, counting the days until they all went back to Milan and we would be alone in the villa. But they weren’t hysterical. They were marked people. I see that now.

  Then, I would not have called them marked, or known how it was that marked people behaved. But the significance of the armed guard newly stationed at the gates adjacent to the groundskeeper’s cottage was not lost on me. The guard, a former paratrooper in stiff, tight jeans, stood around smoking brown cigarettes and alternately touching his mustache and adjusting his balls in the tight jeans. Talia made fun of him, pretending to touch her own mustache, adjust her own balls. “He bleaches the crotch area of those jeans,” she said, “to give it a bulkier look.”

  Neither was the meaning of the armed guard who traveled up and down the short stradina with Roberto in his Alfa Romeo lost on me. Nor the hushed discussions that took place between Roberto and the Count of Bolzano, when the count came to dinner on the evening after the judge presiding over the Red Brigades case was killed.

  By that point I no longer held any hope of liking Sandro’s family, of finding a way to be liked by them. When I had consented to spending a week at the villa with Sandro’s mother, I’d had no real sense of what I was getting into, and somehow a week had been stretched to ten days and was beginning to feel like an eternity. I knew that nothing I said would please his mother, that I would be insulted by Roberto, outshone by Talia, and talked at incessantly by Chesil Jones, who’d had a servant place a stack of his books next to our bed, and I’d even been curious about them and had been reading from his first novel, Summertime, until I attempted to pay him a compliment and he corrected me for mispronouncing the name of his central character and began quizzing me in an unpleasant manner about the salient themes of his own book, as if it were assigned reading.

  I had no sympathy for these people and thought I’d be secretly amused when the calamity Roberto and Sandro’s mother were expecting finally arrived. The company, the family, were under attack. I didn’t much care, and I never would have guessed that any of the bad news would have an impact on me.

  After dinner, just as the Count of Bolzano was leaving, the phone rang. A servant answered and relayed a message to the signora in a whisper.

  “Kidnapped?” the signora asked.

  A foreman at the plant? A company lawyer?

  No. It was Didi Bombonato, who was shopping in the Brera district in Milan, trying on sheepskin coats when he was shoved into a car and driven to an unknown location.

  “But is he . . . ours?” the signora asked Roberto, the first person she called.

  “Then why should
we pay to have him released?” she said after a silence. “Perhaps someone else can pay. His family, or the government. What on earth do they want? The answer is no.”

  The next day it was the headline of Corriere della Sera. A high-profile kidnapping by the Red Brigades. That was why they’d done it. When a company president was kidnapped it was buried in the business section, barely news. Didi was front-page material, a national icon. There was a photo of him taken after his capture, a look on his face of pure, childlike fear.

  I thought of his separate status that week on the salt, the way he’d simmered with hatred of the mechanics upon whom he relied, and they also seemed to waste no love or loyalty on him. I wondered if any of those mechanics could be involved.

  I was supposed to be with them at Monza in a week. I called the team manager but was unable to get through.

  Sandro laughed sadly. “I warned you. And not just about my family, but Italy. The place is in shambles.”

  Sandro said that Roberto had instituted some of the most severe shop-floor policies of any company, and that Roberto was reviled by union leaders and workers, that nothing was going to end well. The workers, he said, came from the south, lived in miserable conditions. Their wives and children put together Moto Valera ignition sets at the kitchen table, working all night because they were paid by the piece, whole families contracted under piecework, which was practically slave labor. Now, poor people all over Italy—in Milan, Bologna, Rome, Naples—were setting their own prices for rent, electricity, bread. The whole structure was unstable, Sandro said, and I understood more clearly, seeing him here, why he kept as far away as he could. Here he was forced to face himself, to be among them. He would go to their board meeting and try to talk sense into his brother and mother, because his would be the only moderate voice in the room.

  Two days into Didi’s captivity, the Valeras were still not paying. Meanwhile, more bad news arrived by telephone: a security guard at one of the Valera Company warehouses was shot in the legs. And that same day, at another plant, a section boss was beaten brutally while workers looked on, none of them stepping in to prevent it.

  With the shadowy presence of our paratrooper security guard and the many recent violent events, Chesil Jones began speaking in alarmed tones about the personal danger he faced. When Sandro’s mother implored him to take another slice of veal at lunch, he accused her of fattening him like a hen for someone to nab.

  “But you arrived here already fat,” she said.

  At which point he accepted the second veal slice and said fatness was a mark of moral health.

  His fantasy of being taken from the villa became a running joke.

  “If it were to happen,” signora Valera said, “he’d run his mouth and they’d do all they could to get rid of him. They’d push him from their getaway car, anything not to have to listen to him anymore!”

  “Is he famous?” Talia asked.

  I hadn’t heard of him or the titles of any of the books he’d sent to our room, but I assumed this was my own shortcoming.

  “He’s famously a pain,” Sandro’s mother said. “But known in England, I think. His books are more popular there than in America.”

  Known in England. It sounded like something he might have told her himself. She made fun of him, but it was clear that she took him seriously in a way the rest of us did not.

  Chesil announced his plan to flee Italy altogether, down at the pool on the third morning of Didi’s kidnapping. It was just the two of us and before he began to speak, I felt a sudden tenderness for him and the burden he bore, of being trapped in his own long-winded narcissism, a burning need for others to listen. But this moment of unexpected tolerance may have bloomed in me because they were all finally scheduled to depart the next day, and it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.

  While it’s true, he said, that the common people don’t run away from death, he himself, not of the common lot, was concerned for his life and would be leaving the country, catching a ride to the airport when the family went to their company meeting in Milan.

  I was distracted, thinking about the Didi situation. The team manager, when I’d finally gotten in touch with him, was curt. I’d had to remind him of who I was, which almost left me in tears. I’d come all the way to Italy, taken a leave of absence from my job, worn a frilly dress every night for ten days to please Sandro’s mother (and had never pleased her once), and now the Valera team manager didn’t remember me or why I was here. And when he did recall, I realized what I was to him, or rather what I was not, and I felt ashamed for asking him to focus momentarily on the least significant of details in the midst of a crisis. Didi had been kidnapped. My own private purpose for being in Italy had been cleaved away.

  “Any public person can be abducted at this point. Even up here, in this little paradise, I smell danger,” Chesil said, lowering his voice because the groundskeeper was near us now, trimming the branches of a magnolia tree that swung too far out over the pool.

  The groundskeeper was on a ladder. He looked at me with what I thought was an upturned lip, the lightest suggestion that he was smiling.

  Did he know how silly this man was, whose company I was forced to keep? Yes, I sensed, he did realize. He kept looking at me. I looked back at him. There was something compelling about the groundskeeper, but I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t imagining it. Silent people can be misleading, suggesting profundity and thoughtfulness where there may be none. He climbed down the ladder and stuffed the trimmed tree branches into a cart and wheeled the cart up the hill toward the gardening shed, abandoning me with Chesil, who was talking about the place he was going to from here, a spa of some kind on a river that fed into the Danube, where Hercules apparently had bathed. I pictured the old novelist seated in a shallow stream, clear waters swirling around his big belly.

  “The Roman emperor Trajan conquered that place,” he said, “called Dacia, and at that time—”

  Lately I had developed a curious habit when Chesil went into these monologues. I closed my eyes and pretended I was skiing. A deep-snow day, the snow coming down, the light dim, and that kind of socked-in, windless quiet when you can hear mostly the fabric of your parka hood as you move your head left or right. I would start to make turns in the dry, light powder. Bouncy, sailing curves in the deep snow, swinging left, then right, floating, shaping my rhythm around the snow-laden trees, deep in the back-and-forth float of fresh snow, and not at all listening to this old man. It was surprising how well it worked. He was still talking.

  “—so the King of Dacia slit his own throat, and his head was carried west, to Rome. But east dribbled a trail of Latin, like blood, into Romania, and it’s there that I’ll go to soak my—”

  * * *

  Roberto postponed their big factory meeting to go to Rome to speak with government ministers about the labor situation. Which meant four extra days with Sandro’s mother. The ten days would now be two full weeks. Workers were planning to strike in every sector. A general strike, all across Italy. Roberto didn’t want to go, he said. Rome was a mess. The university had been taken over by students, turned into a city within a city. We had been reading about it in the paper. It wasn’t just students, Roberto complained. It was people from the slum districts, along with hippies and queers, all occupying the place, eating in the mess halls, doing their laundry in the faculty bathrooms, burning files of documents in big metal trash barrels for warmth.

  The evening Roberto was expected back from Rome was a Sunday, which was the staff’s day off. Signora Valera complained bitterly that the staff hid from her on Sundays.

  “It isn’t how things used to be. When you have a staff and they live on the grounds, you don’t pretend you don’t see them on Sundays! If they are there and something needs to get done, it used to be they would simply do it. They certainly wouldn’t claim arbitrarily that because it was Sunday, they could not. Or worse, pretend not to see me, or think they don’t have to answer when I ring the
m. Everyone is counting their hours and overtime now. They want to buy a stupidity box,” she said, meaning a television, like the one she watched many hours of each night. That was when I had sympathy for Sandro’s mother, imagining that it was a relief to be upstairs and alone. Where she could safely feel herself to be what she was, a counter of ham slices. There would be no pretending in her private quarters. She could be done with the constricting ribbons of her stacked espadrilles, which caused her swollen ankles to bulge in a crisscross waffle pattern, off duty from the vigilance of meting out her venom in controlled little gasps. Her bedroom television at an obscene volume, in that cell of noise she could be the kind of person who enjoyed her stupidity box. Every night I heard the familiar harmonica wail, loud and distorted, of Sanford and Son leak through the closed door that led up the stairs, the voice of an Italian-dubbed Lamont, Babbo, ma dai! Smettila, Babbo!

  With the staff off duty, Talia wanted to go down into Bellagio to pick up some things for dinner—cheeses, cold cuts, and rolls. Signora Valera insisted that Sandro go with her. The new safety precautions made all Valeras precious and vulnerable. Although Talia, I’d learned, wasn’t a Valera. Talia’s mother was a Valera, while Talia’s own last name was Shrapnel. She had changed it to Valera because she didn’t want the stigma of her great-great-great-grandfather’s invention, the shrapnel shell, a thing that was far more famous than the man it was named for. The shrapnel shell came before the name Shrapnel, and not the reverse, and Talia didn’t want a name that suggested mutilation and killing.

  After they left, Sandro’s mother invited me to come and sit with her on the terrace and have a drink. Like the sudden curious tenderness I had experienced for the old novelist, I felt I’d been at the villa long enough to speak comfortably to her, to try to convey something respectful, and be respected in turn. I said it must be nice for her to have Sandro around, that I guessed she missed him when he was so far away, in New York.