The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  * * *

  My one trip to Rome, when I was a student in Florence, was only for two days and it had been a lonely tour of sights: the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, where pickup artists worked on young girls, the Colosseum, a great decaying skull whose grassed-over arena was all but lost in a strange haze of thereness, unreal because it existed, now, without its former use. Tourists watched each other and roamed the crumbling edges, unable to feel the scale as a populated place, a mesh of attentions and shoutings, a looking of thousands upon a ring of human violence. It had been empty when I got there. A gray kitten rolled on its back, inviting me to pet its white, furry loins. I’d bent down. There was no sound but the traffic that banded the exterior of the Colosseum, and the kitten, which had begun to purr.

  You can’t feel a crowd in an emptiness. That had been my thought in the Colosseum.

  But here, in the Piazza Esedra, there were so many bodies massed together that they formed a vast shifting texture, a sea of heads filling the square. Above them, fabric banners rippling. Sound swells rolling across the immense piazza like great sluggish ocean waves, voices shifting directions.

  All these people and their bright banners, which weren’t cheerful exactly, in stoic white, blood red, ink black. A rain-swollen sky pressed down, darkened to slate by the late-afternoon light. The air had an electric feel, as it does when a storm has moved in but has not yet unleashed itself. The electric air and the premature darkness gave those moments, the gathering before this march was to begin, a granular sort of intensity, every color and surface vivid and distinct.

  The shops were closed, their corrugated metal shutters rolled down. The one exception was the Feltrinelli bookstore, which remained open. The clerks were handing out free copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, cheap plastic-coated copies like Gideon Bibles. I thought of Roberto’s insistence that Feltrinelli’s death was necessary and good, and Chesil Jones claiming it was an act of stupidity, a mix-up of positive and negative leads. Fools love to declare that they don’t suffer fools. It was a lusty pleasure for the old novelist to say the word. Fool. Weakness made him say it, even as the word made him feel strong. I didn’t know if Feltrinelli got his positive and negative leads mixed up but I felt he must have been a serious person, as Sandro said. In any case, death was death: it had its own gravity. Watching the shiny red books passed through the crowd I had the thought that Sandro, who sympathized with anyone willing to think some other mode of existence besides rich-man-takes-all, would have appreciated this scene. But he wasn’t here.

  When the Piazza Esedra was completely full, people leaked into the side streets to which the police would allow entry. There were sections. The women’s sections, the high schools, the various representatives from factories—Valera, Fiat, SIT-Siemens, Magneti Marelli, who made wiring harnesses for Moto Valera. There were the students from the university, bespectacled and grave, their faces masked with scarves. The Bologna contingent, here to avenge the death of the young radical who had been gunned down by police yesterday. Another group filed in, their cheeks and eyes painted like mimes with black and white theater makeup, hollering like Indians. “We want nothing!” they chanted. One carried a sign that said, “More work, less pay!” Another: “Down with the people, up with the bosses!” “More shacks, less housing!” They were young, and dressed in the most ragged clothes imaginable, old shoes without laces, pants with huge, sagging knee-rips, elbows jutting through their moth-bitten sweaters. I watched as one of the boys eyed a woman putting out her cigarette, and then he walked over, picked it up, asked her for a light, and sauntered away, puffing on her cigarette butt. They spoke in a dialect I could barely understand, words that were quick and slurred and open like their laceless shoes.

  The types Roberto was probably referring to. Who he claimed had nothing to say but I have long hair. I thought of what Sandro had told me about people setting their own rent, their own bus fare. Kids with no part in bourgeois life. With their perverse messages and ratty clothes, they made Talia’s air of toughness seem like princess toughness, nothing but an upper-class performance.

  They were from remote slums on the outskirts of Rome, Bene explained. There’s nothing to do out there, she said. They’re young and it’s like they’re left for dead. Ronnie would have appreciated them. I had that thought, anyway. But when I tried to sustain the idea amid the waves of sound rolling across the square, the banners rippling, the crowd becoming more and more dense, I decided that this context was too massive for Ronnie. I could not have guessed what he would say about these kids and the feeling they gave off, of life lived in the present moment, an air of nothing to lose. I thought of Ronnie’s personal ad, his joke, printed in Sharpie on the bathroom wall at Rudy’s. “Looking for an enemy.” Really he meant friend. And the scrawled question under it, “But how do we find each other?” Which was probably also Ronnie, something he wrote himself. He loved to talk about the ways in which people were processed and accounted for in the modern world. Numbered street addresses, he said, were relatively new. In the Old World, there was a natural vetting process, according to Ronnie. A stranger enters a village and declares who it is he is looking for. He is either turned away or assisted, depending.

  How do we find each other?

  It repeated in my head as more and more people packed into the enormous square. The “we” of it: people lost in the vast thickets of the world. People lost among people, since there wasn’t anything else. The world was people, which made the prospect of two finding each other more desolate. It was like finding a lover, pure chance and missed connections. It was finding a lover.

  The pregnant girl, Anna, the biondina, wove through the crowd in her poncho, her same guileless smile, which said, “I have nothing to protest. I’m here to be here.”

  The two men making a movie about her followed with camera and microphone.

  “I’m hungry,” she said to them. “Let’s go eat.”

  “Say it again,” the one with the camera said.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, and smiled shyly at them.

  The one with the microphone leaned in toward the biondina and placed his hand on her breast.

  She looked at him with a child’s mischievous delight.

  “There’s milk,” she said, holding her breasts up for him.

  “Milk,” he said, leaning to see down into her poncho. He was in his midforties, I guessed. Balding and scraggly.

  She pushed with her hands, squirting a fine light stream up at him.

  He took off his glasses, wiped his face, and laughed.

  The kids with the painted faces had formed a circle and were doing an improvised rain dance.

  “Rain! Rain! Rain!” they yelled. “We want it to rain! Kill the sun! Kill the sun! Harpoon it out of the sky!”

  A long row of carabinieri pushed into the square, forming a perimeter. The diagonal white slashes of their bandoliers converged into a vast mesh, as if they were part of a performance. Each held out his right arm, right hand covered in a huge black gauntlet glove, pushing people out of the way as they sealed off the exits to the square.

  “Arrest us!” the kids with painted faces yelled at the carabinieri.

  “We want to go to jail! Come on—take us to prison! Rebibbia! Rebibbia! Rebibbia! Rebibbia!”

  They chanted it louder and louder, some of them banging on upturned pots and buckets. Rain started to fall. The carabinieri moved in with their black gauntlet gloves and grabbed the loudest of the kids and dragged him, screaming, to a paddy wagon, wrenched his hands behind his back, kicked him in the ribs, and shoved him inside. The rest of them opened their mouths and hollered in an eerie cacophony. Eerie because it wasn’t a cheer and it wasn’t a lament. It was ambiguous, or it was both mixed together, an ecstatic warning.

  The carabinieri blocked off the large boulevard where the march was meant to take place, using barricades and a row of armored vehicles. Behind the barricades and in front of the vehicles riot police stood shoulder to shoulder, black h
elmets, visors up. The carabinieri didn’t have helmets like the riot police. They wore hats with shiny visors like beat cops in New York City, and like beat cops out in the rain, they had fitted elasticized plastic covers over their hats. The carabinieri blew their whistles, while the riot police—celerini, Bene said they were called—tried to move people away from the barricades, pushing them in the direction of Termini, the train station. The celerini were complete bastards, Bene said. I began to film the crowd, scanning across the groups. “But those guys,” she said, pointing, “can fight back. Untie the fabric, and wham.” It was the Valera contingent, raising their banner, a huge white cloth with red letters. The banner, I saw, was supported on each end by tire irons.

  Thinking Sandro would have appreciated the free copies of Mao’s Little Red Book was naive, I knew. If he were here, he would have wished to be gone and, like his Argentine friend M, to not have to discuss the matter, which both did and did not concern him. But he was elsewhere. I was alone and rootless. I had fallen through a hole and landed in a massive crowd of strangers, this stream of faces, a pointillism of them. Face after face after face. If someone wanted to turn Ronnie’s fake mandate to photograph every living person into a sincere proposition, I thought, panning the camera across the piazza, this would be a place to start.

  * * *

  We were moving out of the piazza, down a narrow lane closed to auto traffic, the whistles of the carabinieri echoing in the wet and empty street ahead of us, people chanting and shouting. The women’s groups were marching first.

  Italy was backward in its treatment of women. Divorce had become legal in 1974. Abortion was illegal. A lot of the women’s banners were about rape. That I knew about these issues through Sandro, who would go on at length, made my chest tighten. Sandro, interested in feminism. A sympathizer. A man who apparently loved women so much he had cheated on me the moment it was convenient to do so. And possibly he had been doing it all along. Helen. Gloria. Talia. And for what logical reason did Giddle dump a drink over his head? Did he think I was stupid? Yes, he did. And I was that stupid. Or rather, I willed myself to that state. Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don’t look carefully at what isn’t acceptable to you. Gloria had come to the loft to collect a box of personal effects in the wake of my move to Sandro’s. She looked directly at me, the box in her hands, offered no explanation, and I knew, and she knew that I knew, but what would have been the point of making a scene about it with Sandro? She was leaving with her stuff. I was replacing her, and whatever secret complexity Sandro maintained with the wives of his friends was something I preferred not to think about. I took him as he was, not as something perfect that he wasn’t. But that tacit acceptance, too, had a kind of good faith in it that he’d trampled. Now, Gloria’s direct stare, the box in her hands, it was all one insult. Sandro’s insult. Watching these women with their bullhorns, shouting, “You’ll pay for everything!” I took their rage and negotiated myself into its fabric. I fused my sadness over something private to the chorus of their public lament.

  In the stream of bodies, I lost Lidia and Bene almost immediately. The rain was coming hard. I was soaked through, letting the crowd jostle me this way and that, the police moving alongside the women as if they were a threat.

  The people marching up ahead started moving backward. Those behind us were trying to move forward. There was no place to go, and then the riot police Bene had warned me about, the celerini, closed in, their faces and bodies clad and hidden behind shields, pushing and clubbing the women who were trapped in their path. I felt my stomach drop. It was that moment on the Ferris wheel when the car sweeps backward and up.

  People were screaming, trying to flee from the piazza up ahead, where there was a fire. Smoke filled the street. A bus had been turned on its side and was burning like a giant torch. A building in the piazza also was burning. The celerini herded us into a kind of centerless spiral and began arresting as many women as they could seize, pulling them by limbs or hair or handbag, dragging them.

  I worked my way to an open side street by following a small group of young women who seemed to know where to go, how to avoid the row of police vans into which others were being shoved.

  The march continued up the Via del Corso but differently now, the orderly procession of groups broken apart and scattered after the fire and arrests. There was a palpable anger. The students with their grim expressions and delicate eyeglasses were pulling paving stones up from the streets, walking with the stones in their hands.

  Via del Corso was like the Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, an avenue of chic and expensive boutiques. The shop fronts didn’t have corrugated metal gates. They were like glass dioramas, chalk-white mannequins gazing imperiously.

  “Underneath the paving stones, more paving stones!” someone yelled.

  I heard the crash of breaking glass.

  “Expropriate! Expropriate!”

  Three kids with painted faces came running past clutching fur coats, the war paint on their cheeks dripping down, sweat and rain-smeared, stacks of furs over their arms like midtown Manhattan coat-check clerks.

  “Furs for the people!” Plastic hangers dropping behind them as they ran.

  Windows were methodically smashed as the procession moved down the Via del Corso. Police zigzagged through the crowd in pursuit of the vandals—jeans for the people, handbags for the people, wine for the people, shoes—but there were too many. A shop was on fire, black smoke pouring out from the rectangle of darkness where the door’s glazing had been. There were Molotovs and Moka bombs, as they called them, made the usual way—cotton plus gasoline, add match—but instead of a bottle they used a little stovetop espresso maker. “Better to run with,” it was later explained to me by an eight-year-old, the son of someone in the apartment on the Via dei Volsci. “It even has a handle! With glass, it slips from your fingers and that’s it,” he said. “Buum!”

  The shop engulfed in flames was Luisa Spagnoli, the same as the place in Milan where Sandro had bought me the velvet dress. “They use slave labor from the women’s prisons!” a young woman was shouting. It was women throwing the firebombs now. Dress shops. A department store. A lingerie boutique. Up the Corso they moved.

  As I heard another window shatter I saw white balloons, a flock of them, rising.

  I took out the camera and filmed.

  Why this? I couldn’t say. But I watched through the viewfinder as the balloons went up, riding smoothly skyward on invisible elevators. Up, up, passing each floor of a tall building. Balloons pure and drifting, their stretched skin the sheer white of nurses’ stockings.

  A feeling of calm settled over the Via del Corso. There was a break in the rain. People were quieting one another. Fingers raised to lips. A young girl was going to sing. An area was cleared around her. I kept my camera going.

  She wore theater makeup, red and white bordered in black fanning out in triangles under each eye, curious geometric teardrops, wedges of color pulling her expression downward, her pretty face a pictograph of sadness, but a lovely, strange, and playful sadness. Her face was some kind of counterreality, in which play and tragedy had equal parts, or had traded places.

  She looked skyward. She, too, was tracking the balloons. They were from a department store—La Rinascente, it was called, as I saw when one of them floated low, the name printed over the thin, nurse-stocking skin of the balloon.

  A sound issued from the girl’s throat, smooth and unmodulated.

  “Sixteen years old with a voice like Callas,” someone said.

  As she finished her song and we began to clap, a burst of shots erupted, a metallic pop-pop. People screamed, pushed, ran. I saw Gianni. Our eyes met and he came toward me. Where had he been? He never did explain, later, when there was time to do so. There were more shots. The celerini were there, shields up, batons out, men barely human under so much gear. Gianni and I ran. People darted through the crowd in their
own “gear,” motorcycle helmets with face shields pulled down. It was the next level of anonymity, from a bandanna over your face. And it protected the head, just as the celerini, too, protected theirs. A man ran next to us in a ski mask, those cartoonish eyeholes like the symbol for infinity. Gianni gripped my arm, yanking me as we fled. When I tripped and should have fallen I skittered along like his teddy bear, until he righted me and I could run again.

  That face, with the ski mask, the infinity eyeholes. It was another counterreality, but not like that of the girl who sang. The person in the ski mask: tall, gangly, in a dirty blazer open and flapping. Running with a gun in his gloved hand.

  He turned back. Aimed his gun at the police and fired.

  Gianni and I ran down a side street. Something whistled through the air. A hissing bloom of smoke filled the street, the air white. My eyes burning, spilling tears, Gianni pulling me. The camera slipped from my hands. I stumbled over it, couldn’t see. I heard people retching. Gianni pulled the neck of my shirt up over my mouth and nose. It was automatic, the way he went to cover my face. He turned away, spit up, pulled his own scarf up to his eyes. Coughs echoed everywhere. The air was white; it was like being in a cloud that had moved down over a mountain, the vertigo of not knowing which direction is falling and which is up. I coughed and coughed, unable to make it through the coughing to its other side, to a place of not coughing. The camera didn’t matter because I could not breathe. Gianni held on to my arm, but his grip was tense and impersonal.

  As the smoke thinned, the people around us reappeared, in gas masks of various styles and types, or with scarves tied in complicated ways over their faces, like Gianni. They’d been waiting for this. I had not.

  * * *

  The demonstration had begun at dusk, under stormy skies. One hundred thousand people, a tenth of them apparently with guns hidden in a pocket. By the time Gianni and I reached the end, at the Piazza del Popolo, it was completely dark. People crowded in and told stories of police beatings, of the thousands who had been arrested. Someone gave out lemon-soaked rags, which we held over our mouths. Bottles of Coca-Cola were passed around. You were meant to dribble some over your eyes, as Gianni showed me, to stop the stinging. Guns were handed out among the people in the Piazza del Popolo, looted from a rifle shop. I was passed one and it was far heavier than I would have expected.