The Flamethrowers: A Novel
Page 29
15. THE MARCH ON ROME
All the little snub-trunked Fiats on the autostrada, matchbox cars in white, beige, or yellow, a few of them cherry-red and gleaming in the rain like children’s plastic slickers. I gazed out the windshield, water running down the glass in uneven sheets. I didn’t turn to look at the groundskeeper. He glanced over once or twice, but not in a way that seemed meaningful or sympathetic. Still, his lack of surprise at having found me in his car felt like sympathy. He said nothing.
I wouldn’t have guessed that his silence would be so effective. It grafted me in. To a way of proceeding. Of not knowing where we were going except someplace in Rome, not knowing where I would stay or what I would do. I had my passport, the camera, and the equivalent in lire of ten U.S. dollars.
* * *
In retrospect, it would have been far easier had I not fled straight to his car, outside the tire factory on the industrial outskirts of Milan.
Not gotten inside, once I found it, unlocked, in the parking lot.
Not sat quietly when he got in, started the engine, and pulled out of the lot.
Each of those moments, if taken, would have required less of me than to separate from what he led me to, once I was there. Once I was there, in Rome, it was simply too late.
* * *
It was a long drive, and I let the sound and vibrations of the car motor stun my thought patterns into something uniform and calmed. I wondered if I could still be myself with all context, all my reason for being here left behind, discarded.
We were on the autostrada, nothing but green signs with white letters in a rounded but affectless font. The sulfur lamps that angled high over a divided road not meant for the scale of the human. I thought of Sandro and his youthful idea of making industrial paintings to roll out on the autostrada. On the stairs leading to his mother’s stupidity box chamber was the same photo Sandro had, of T. P. Valera with Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, cutting a ribbon for the groundbreaking ceremony of the autostrada. Behind them a motorcade of Valera cycles. “Gas, tires, and oil,” Sandro said to me. “You would think it’s a reference to a Pontiac muscle car. But no. It’s an incredible trifecta. My father and his cronies conspired to change the face of Italy. They wrecked the place and made piles of money. Brought in the so-called miracle, the postwar miracle, everyone in his own little auto, put-putting around, well enough paid from their jobs at Valera to buy a Valera, and tires for it, and gas.” Here I was on the Autostrada del Sole with a stranger who probably just thought of it as a highway, took it as a given that Italy had a central artery, a car culture, a tire company so large it was practically a public utility.
The groundskeeper and I did not speak until he stopped for fuel, and then only a few words. He showed me where the women’s bathrooms were and asked if I wanted a coffee. I patted cold water on my face, hoping it would shrink the puffiness from crying, and when I realized what I was doing, I laughed sadly at my mirrored self for still caring what I looked like, even now. Taking inventory of my face. Wetting my bangs to get them to lie straight. The groundskeeper and I each drank an espresso at the little bar without speaking. His name was Gianni, but the blank fog of his presence at the villa clung to him and I was hesitant to claim even enough familiarity to call him by his name.
It was night when we entered Rome through narrow streets, everything soaked and shining from rain. Water bubbled along the roadway, carrying leaves and debris. There were metal barricades blocking every side street we passed. Carabinieri in their white bandoliers blowing whistles and directing traffic. I asked what was happening.
Some of the streets were closed, Gianni said, because of the parade tomorrow.
“A parade?”
“A demonstration,” he said.
* * *
“Gianni Ghee-tarrr!” a girl called out as we entered the apartment.
Everyone looked up. At him, and then at me, and I could see that there was a silent but collective decision not to say anything. Not to ask who I was. Gianni nodded at them in affirmation, but affirmation of what I didn’t know.
After many hours of driving through darkness, silence, rain, it was jarring to be in a cramped and brightly lit apartment full of people, mostly men, who lay around on couches, some sprawled on the floor, one strumming an out-of-tune guitar. They weren’t a type I could place. They wore dirty clothes, black leather jackets, black turtlenecks. Their long hair was greasy, carefully parted. Most of them had mustaches. They reminded me of the plainclothes cops in Tompkins Square Park, who were always too severe and ominous despite their efforts to pass for hippies.
The girl who had announced Gianni’s arrival was sitting on the floor against the wall, curly hair spilling over her shoulders, big white teeth, and a large but delicate nose that made her seem friendly and approachable. I found I could only make eye contact with her and none of the others. “È arrivato,” she called out to someone unseen, in another room. A female voice answered back that Gianni was probably working for the CIA now. That was what it sounded like, but it was not spoken in the clearly enunciated Italian I heard at the villa. Everyone laughed but Gianni, who ignored them and asked if I wanted a glass of water.
There was a tiny kitchen filled with cigarette smoke and the sound of frying and of pots being banged around. Gianni went in for the water and then excused himself for a moment, retreated to the room from where the unseen girl had made the CIA comment. One of the men got up from the couch and insisted I sit. I thanked him and asked his name. “Durutti,” he said. “Have you heard of me?” Everyone laughed.
Gianni and the woman in the other room were talking. Were they arguing? Only because I was his charge did I take note that he probably had a girlfriend here. That he was talking to her now. In a moment she would emerge and meet the stray he had dragged into this apartment, and I would try to communicate to her that I wasn’t any threat.
A radio was turned on and everyone quieted. I figured we were just listening to it. I didn’t know it was being broadcast from another room in the apartment. The announcer was talking about the demonstration tomorrow. The parade, as Gianni had called it.
“We’ve received a tip from a comrade in one of the security police battalions, about their preparations for tomorrow’s march.” There was a long list of armored cars and weaponry at various barracks that were being readied. All leave was canceled. Gunners with submachine guns would be stationed on roofs. “I think it is safe to say the carabinieri will be marching alongside us. Thank you to the brave comrade who has provided us with this information. See you tomorrow, seventeen hundred hours, Piazza Esedra.”
Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” came over the radio, familiar bittersweet piano notes. Sandro loved that song, and it had always reminded me of our first date. Now I thought with sadness of Sandro’s departure for the meeting at the factory, the last moment of normalcy. Sandro kissing me. Chesil Jones, stiff and impatient in signora Valera’s Mercedes, ready to get the hell out of Dodge.
I felt lost to all that now. Lost to Sandro and to the humiliations of his fabulous moneyed stupid world. To the project at Monza. Didi had been kidnapped and the team manager had better things to concern himself with than me. And anyway I was here, which was . . . where? Someplace in Rome. In a crowded apartment with graffiti on its walls, young people talking loudly over Lou Reed’s sad, ardent voice, a boy and girl on the floor kissing. I turned away, not wanting to look. The sound of frying from the kitchen, the voices, the texture of energies, it was an enveloping reality. It filled the emptiness of having exiled myself from elsewhere.
A woman emerged from the kitchen and handed out plates of food. “Spaghetti Bolognese,” she said to me and then added in English, “with the meat on them.” Her name was Claudia, and from that moment she always spoke to me in lousy English, while everyone else addressed me in Italian. At first I was offended, until I realized she simply wanted to practice. Roberto had consistently spoken only English to me during my time at the villa, but his English w
as perfect and crisp, accustomed, as he was, to talking to finance people in London and New York. I wasn’t hungry but I accepted the spaghetti with the meat on them. I chatted with the girl with big white teeth, whose name was Lidia. She asked if I’d come to Rome for the demonstration. I said yes without much thinking about it. Gianni brought me. If that was what he was here for, then yes. Yes. I thought of the way he’d carefully avoided looking at me as I’d wiped my tears away, sitting and waiting in his parked car. How decent it had seemed that he’d said nothing, and included me in his plan, whatever that plan was. Gianni in a quilted mechanic’s jacket like my cousins wore. The clink of his tools, such a familiar sound, as he’d tinkered with the little Fiat’s engine that morning at the villa. The only recognizable thing to me here among these young Italians was Gianni—who was essentially a complete stranger, and yet I clung to him, alert to his every movement in that apartment in Rome.
People were coming for the march from all over Italy, Lidia with the big white teeth said. Naples, Sardinia, Milan, Turin. “Maybe they would have come anyway,” she said, “but now that there’s been a murder in Bologna, cold-blooded, they shot him in the back! Now, forget it. Everyone is coming, no? This is a war, no?” She phrased her assertions as questions but they weren’t like Nadine’s. They weren’t shaky ways of having a presence. The questioning tone was as if to say, You better agree with me, no? Of course, right?
Gianni appeared with the woman from the other room. They did not look at each other or touch. She went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of spaghetti for herself. She looked at him. “You’re not hungry?” He shook his head. Maybe she wasn’t his girlfriend. She was petite and blond, but with a dark sexiness, slanted, almost reptilian eyes, and with freckles covering her face, her arms, and her cleavage, visible under a low-necked smock, a kind of faux-medieval hippie dress, but like with the others, there was a toughness I didn’t connect to hippies. Her name was Bene. I’m just along for the ride, I thought at her as she introduced herself. I sensed, in the way she peered at me, that she was reckoning what she saw with what Gianni had said to her about me or my situation, whatever he interpreted it to be.
* * *
A week ago I had been in the swimming pool of a Bellagio mansion, watching Talia tread across the patio, her extra flesh jiggling with each step. Now the weather was cold and damp, the sky promising only more rain. I wore my same clothes as yesterday. I had slept on a dirty couch in an apartment filled with the type of people Roberto hated, involved in what he deplored: the Movement, as they called it.
The people in that apartment had been kind to me the previous night. There was something about them I could only describe as human. Humane. They didn’t ask who I was, why I was there, where I came from, what I did. One didn’t present credentials with these people, like in New York. “She’s with Sandro Valera.” “He shows with Helen Hellenberger.” They asked if I was hungry. They asked if I wanted a beer. They made me a bed to sleep on. They didn’t know anything about me. I was brought by Gianni, and that was all the information they needed. Gianni himself did not stay. He and the kid who had called himself Durutti went out into the black night, into the pouring rain. No one asked them where they were going. I was bothered that he was gone, and wanted to know where, but I tried to push it from my mind.
The Movement. I knew little to nothing about it, but it showed itself that night as their kindness to me, a stranger. Whether Gianni was in the Movement was unclear. He did not look like the rest of them, working-class handsome in his mechanic’s jacket. He was clean-cut, quiet and reserved, almost emotionless, or so he seemed. Before he and Durutti left, he sat reading the dusty-pink pages of Il Sole 24 Ore, and I had smiled privately because it was the same newspaper that Roberto read religiously, Italy’s version of the Wall Street Journal. I think the Valera family even owned part of it, or was part of the conglomerate of industries that owned it. The rest of them moved around Gianni, reading the business news in their free-form bedlam, as if this were precisely his role.
In the morning, there was no sign of him. Bene and Lidia, the girl with the big teeth, took me with them around the neighborhood. The apartment was on the Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, an area near the university that was so ugly it almost made me laugh, to think I might have assumed all of Rome looked like the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain. San Lorenzo had been bombed in World War Two and now it was a mass of drab, modern apartment buildings with television antennas jutting from every balcony and roof like hastily stabbed pushpins. Sacks of garbage hung from the windows like colostomy bags. There was graffiti on every building. I was used to graffiti from living in New York, but the graffiti in San Lorenzo was all urgent and angry messages, or ones with a kind of dull malaise, as if the exterior of the buildings were the walls of a prison.
“They throw us in jail and call it freedom.”
“They can’t catch me. I’m moving to Saturn where no one can find me.”
“When shit becomes a commodity the poor will be born without asses.”
Underneath, a crude picture of an ass, and “What do we want?”
“Everything.”
New York graffiti was not desperate communication. It was an exuberance of style, logo, name, the feat of installing jazzy pseudonyms, a burst of swirled color where the commuter had not thought possible. These were plain, stark messages written in black spray paint, at arm and eye level from the street. There were few pictures, with the exception of the occasional five-pointed star of the Red Brigades, which had appeared above Didi’s frightened face, in the photo of him in Corriere della Sera.
Why was a badly drawn pentagram so much more menacing than a perfectly drawn one? I wondered as we passed one, no message, just the five-pointed star.
It was the hand’s imperfection that made it menacing, I decided. But why that was, I didn’t know.
Bene didn’t mention Gianni. I asked at one point where he was.
“Doing the same thing he does at the Valera place. Fixing things,” she said in English, with a look I could not read.
She took me with her to drop off flyers about the demonstration on the Piazza Navona. As we encountered people she knew, she introduced me as an American who told Roberto Valera to fuck off. I didn’t want to let her down by saying I’d done no such thing. That rather, his brother had broken my heart, and I’d run away like an injured animal.
The Piazza Navona was lined with outdoor café tables, young people seated around them. Bene said it had been more crowded before the sweep. A lot of the people around here were hauled off to prison, she said. When I asked what for, she shrugged and said, knowing someone who was involved in illegal activities. Or having your name on a lease of an apartment where someone later stayed who was in the vicinity of a bombing. Disrespectful to the state. They can get you for anything, she said, now that they’ve changed the laws back to Mussolini’s.
“If you drive near the prison at night,” she said, “you can see torches made of bedsheets hanging through the cell bars. It’s really sad. These lights shining into the blackness, at no one. Half the people from around here are there, at Rebibbia, where no one can see them. All they are now is something burning from a window.”
I watched a woman who sat with two men who had a movie camera. She was young, a teenager, and beautiful in both a tragic and an unmarked way. It was her smile, dimpled, sweet, and naive, and her patient tolerance of the older men who directed her, that seemed tragic. One of the men filmed while the other spoke to her, asking what her name was, where she was from.
“Anna,” she said, and smiled at them. “From Cagliari.”
“Wait,” the man filming said. “One more time, but slower.”
The first man stepped back and approached her again, just as he had the first time, asking her what her name was and where she was from.
“Cagliari,” she said again, this time enunciating with more care.
“Cagliari,” the man sitting with her repeated.
It was clear she knew them already, that they had instructed her to pretend they were strangers for the purpose of the film, but with her dirty clothes, her unbrushed hair, she looked like a runaway living on the Piazza Navona. I had the feeling she was not an actress. That they were directing her to play herself.
“You’ve been sleeping here?” the man asked.
“Yes,” she said, looking up at him with her sweet, open face.
I stared at the young runaway, la biondina, they kept calling her. She stood up and put her hands on her belly, which protruded high and round under her poncho. She smiled at me, but in a way that let me know yes, she was pregnant, and that she didn’t much appreciate being stared at.
“She’s been here for a week,” Bene said. “Sleeping on the street, hanging out with drug addicts. Those two bums—I don’t know what they’re up to, but I can’t imagine they’ll help her.”
They lived downstairs from Bene and the others, in the same building on the Via dei Volsci.
We watched as the one filming followed the other, who walked alongside the biondina, holding her arm. She turned to him. He put his hand on her forehead.
“I need a bed,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
The one filming said cut, and asked her to repeat it.
“I need a bed. A place to lie down,” she said.
“You have a fever?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re pregnant and you sleep on the streets?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled in a perfectly guileless way.