The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  His father said the Glisenti was no good, when he saw Sandro using it to kill an entire regiment of enemies hiding under his bedsheet. No good? It was a meant to be like a German gun, his father said, a Luger. But it was a beggar’s Luger. A bastard’s Luger. A pimp’s Luger and it constantly jammed.

  “But mine doesn’t do that,” Sandro said. “It doesn’t jam.”

  “Well, okay,” his father said. “But I see you have wounded on stretchers.”

  “Yes,” Sandro said, “this one needs a medic.”

  “But they are assault troops.”

  “Yes.”

  “We were on the couple system. There were no medic units or stretcher-bearers. You had to carry your partner if he was wounded, and it was easier if he died. So that was how you helped him, by finishing him off.”

  His father’s insistence on inglorious details. Sandro pushed them aside and focused on the splendid Arditi patches in gold and silver with oak leaf and laurel, the large pocket each Ardito had on the back of his tunic for storing hand grenades. And the privileges they enjoyed, such as hot meals, while the soldiers in the regular battalions ate cold ones. Hot meals and no camp chores, no guard duty, no trench duty. They rode nifty vehicles like the gold motorcycle called Pope. They zipped along with a huge dagger in a leather scabbard and blam-blam weapons, the Bodeo with the folding trigger and the Glisenti, Thevenot grenades they could pull from the pocket on their back and free the pin and toss aside lightly because they themselves were moving, with motors under them. You tossed the grenade, it went off where it landed, and you, you were far ahead at that point. You didn’t toss it and run frantically and duck, you tossed it and rode proud and straight with your hand on the throttle of the gold Pope cycle—zoom and boom. Boom.

  The flamethrowers with their twin tanks and their gas mask were Sandro’s favorite of the assault company dolls. The asbestos sweater and balloon pants and gauntlet gloves you could outfit them with so they would not carbonize when they set a woods on fire. A woods or bunker or enemy machine gun nest, depending. A supply line of trucks or a laddered stack of bodies, depending.

  The flamethrowers could have been from a different century, both brutal and ancient and at the same time horribly modern. The flame oil in the twin tanks they carried was five parts tar oil and one part crude, and they had a little canister of carbon dioxide and an automatic igniter and a belt pouch with spare igniters. The flamethrower was never, ever defensive. He was pure offense, overrunning enemy lines. He surged forth, a hulking creature with huge tanks on his back, a giant nozzle in his hand, hooked to the tanks. He was a harbinger of death. He looked like death, in his asbestos hood with the wide cowl, and he squirted liquid fire from a magnificent range—fifty meters—into the pillboxes and trenches of the enemy and they had no chance.

  But then his father told him the flamethrowers were a hopeless lot. Their tanks were cumbersome and heavy and they were obvious and slow-moving targets and if they were ever caught they were shown no mercy. That’s not a thing you want to be, his father said, after which Sandro continued to love the flamethrowers best, to reserve for them a special fascination, in their eerie, hooded asbestos suit, the long and evil nozzle they aimed at enemy holdouts. But he didn’t know if his interest was reverence or a kind of pity.

  Roberto yelling, “Kaiserschlacht!” and pouring gasoline over his paper men.

  Sandro, eight years old, his face wet with tears, saying, “Why? Why Kaiserschlacht?”

  Because, Roberto said, half of them died in the offensive and the others had to be executed for pillaging. Don’t you know what happened? This is the retreat from the Isonzo to the Piave, after a poison gas attack by German storm troopers. If you want to play Arditi you have to do it properly, how the battles actually went. The Arditi who survived looted and pillaged as they retreated and had to be killed by their commanders, they had to be killed as a punishment, and if you want to play the game you have to do it right.

  An older sibling’s function was to bring in swift and unpleasant justice. Roberto had dumped gas from a bottle he snuck from the garage, and then lit a match. The little dolls and their cardboard tabs. The tiny asbestos sweater. The scabbard for the file-handled dagger, which fitted itself in easily because Sandro had been so careful not to bend or crease it. All carbonized to ash.

  * * *

  Ardito! Your name means courage, as their first commandment went. Run into battle! Victory at any cost!

  Switzerland for schooling.

  Holidays at Como. Waiting in short pants. Waiting for a shiny car to come and take him. His father’s driver.

  The occasional weekend in Brera. Trips to Rome with his father, twice visiting Cinecittà to see producers his father knew. Movie stars. Sports cars like wraparound sunglasses. Umbrella pines above the studio café, Sandro unsure how to speak to his own father. Sipping his aranciata as a camera slid past on a dolly—it was a big black heart, with its two film reels, a heart or an upside-down ass, and the cameraman peered through its viewfinder, trailing the slinky steps of a woman in a white dress.

  He never liked his father much, an old, strange man who relished in dampening Sandro’s fun in the same way Roberto did. They were alike, his father and Roberto, in that one way, and unalike in other ways. Roberto did not care how things were made, as their father did. Roberto liked to dominate, and he liked it when other people showed their weakness. Sandro cared how things were made, and what you did with made things. He liked machines. He liked guns. He never loved motorcycles the way his father had, but Sandro’s father was busy running Valera operations and barely rode motorcycles by the time Sandro was born. What Sandro remembered was his father posing for photographs on the new Moto Valera sport models, an old dapper man in his Brioni suit, clutching the handlebar grips.

  His father was cruel to his mother, and this might have been cause for an intimate alliance between mother and son, but he never liked his mother much, either, so he allowed no alliance. Because she was mean. A naturally mean person. Only once did he feel something like sympathy for her. The war had ended and they were back in Milan, at the house in Brera. Sandro was ten. His father, just returned from Brazil, was in the hall removing a woolen scarf that sparkled with raindrops. He looked up at his wife’s open, eager face as she stood on the landing, the geometry of its balustrade, perfect right angles and folds repeating themselves up and up, bending out of view, and her anticipation, her own oppressive need for order and right angles and patterns all there, exposed, as if the landing were a stage. His father had looked at his mother, at the dress she had on, layers of transparent material that altogether were shiny and opaque, the heels and pearls and her hair curled under on each side of her face like two treble clefs, and Sandro’s father had frowned.

  “You should take a lover,” he’d said. Then he went into his study, to the right of the stairs. Shut the door and latched it.

  Sandro’s mother gripped the banister. She was crying and didn’t bother to wipe the tears. That was the only time he ever really felt anything for his mother, who had prepared so intently, with such foolish hope, for her husband’s return and was punished for being eager, in front of her children and the servants. She had gone off to the kitchen after that and yelled at the cooks, really let them have it. As she called them idiot and cretin Sandro felt each insult, not as the recipient but the one who delivered, his mother’s anger like bullets shooting from his own fingertips.

  She never did take a lover as far as he knew. Now she had the American writer, the old blowhard, but Sandro could not imagine they were intimate, it seemed somehow impossible, but he knew the impossibility was in him and not between his mother and the writer. It saddened him to think his mother had gone from an imperial force like his father to a silly man who thought his incessant blather was proof of anything, virility or knowledge. The moment the mouth opened the mind shut down, was Sandro’s feeling. But his mother had power now, which she never did when Sandro’s father was alive, and that was s
omething. To make your own decisions.

  * * *

  He thought a lot about the man who had drowned, or tried to, in the East River. Sandro had saved one man and shot another in the hand and the one he’d saved had not wanted to live. The look on the man’s face, trapped with the living. Lost and alive. The layers and layers of the man’s drenched winter coats, too heavy for Sandro to lift him out. He had weighted himself to guarantee his passage to death. All those coats pulling him down had reminded Sandro of a tribe his father had told him about, deep in the Amazon of Brazil, who weighted themselves with stones so that their souls would not wander away. Sandro had asked more, but his father brushed him off. It became an obsession for him as a boy, this idea of people trying to keep their souls from escaping. He read about other tribes in other parts of the world, Borneo and New Guinea, people for whom the soul was a contingent and skittish thing that could be chased out or lost or worse. It might run away. It had to be kept from leaving you, whether with seduction or stays or hooks or with heavy stones.

  That the soul was not a fact, a simple thing you were, and possessed, had seemed to Sandro so reasonable. Still he believed it. That reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering.

  People weighted themselves, Sandro knew, if not with stones.

  A movie, a lover. Friends. Complicities. A certain amount of success. These were decent crutches, provided they could be changed up often enough. And art, of course. Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

  As a child, his soul felt airy and evanescent, something that was filled only with longings and boredom he knew to be Italian and Catholic. Church with his mother and brother. Women sweeping the sacristy steps with sorghum brooms. Lifeless Madonnas in their blue shawls, always that same shade of blue: piety, sky, forgetting. The hope that comes of mystery and emptiness (hollow plaster). The organ’s resounding pipes as the congregation sang the “Stabat Mater,” which overflowed its subject, the sorrows of Mary, her suffering an image all men could look to, the tear-streaked face. The music surged in and widened the space of his little soul. It made him light. It filled him with something, sadness and jubilation for experiences that were not his own. Or they were his own, but they had transmutated to sweet and overwhelming song.

  Fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum.

  Make my heart burn with love for Christ.

  But the translation sheet said “soul.” “Make my soul glow and melt.” For young Sandro mouthing these words in his high voice it was enough to want to burn ardently, not a secular plea, but neither a plea to merge with a mother’s suffering, even the wife of God. To make the heart burn. With something.

  FAC UT ARDEAT. A phrase his father put above the hearth. A clever command, To make burn. And wood was deposited there. But probably it was not merely a joke, and related to his father’s own past as an Ardito. An ardent one. Who had burned with the ardor that made him dash into war, toward death, and then toward money and power. The phrase could not be reduced to its imprisonment in the literal, above the hearth. The burning of. The soul, glowing and melting—there or gone, lost or escaped—was what mattered.

  But if you let your soul go? Let it wander? Would it eventually come home to you? Was it like love in that sense? A thing you had to set free to experience? Even to encounter? Whoever encountered love was so lucky. He meant encountered it not as a might have been but as it was. There was maybe no such thing. His father said history was always late for its date with itself. It was late, it was early, it was before and after its own time. Italy was always missing its rendezvous with itself. The timing of its becoming a nation had not worked, and no one believed in the Risorgimento. The North and the South were never in sync. People had their revelations too early or too late. They were always missing their appointments with themselves. Well. With each other, too. Ronnie was the only appointment Sandro had managed to keep, a friendship he’d recognized the moment they met. He had maintained it all along, it was a connection that happened in time. Not in fantasy, not in hindsight. But he hadn’t exactly managed anything, it was just luck, like love was luck. It was chance. They knew when they saw each other what they were each looking at. He and Ronnie were almost mirror images, meaning opposites. It was love at some wry distance. Rivalry. It would outlast actual love, he knew that, there was no question of it.

  * * *

  He was at the TWA terminal.

  Trans World, Ronnie would have said, hypervigilant to words and branding.

  New York to Milan via London.

  Sandro both loved and hated that terminal.

  He had promised his mother six months. She had only one son now, and he could not turn away from her. He could not. His mother had begged him to come home, and he was doing it and fully—not partially, by bringing a buffer, a girl. He felt like he was both reentering the womb, against all instinct, and also, finally, and way too late, growing up and facing himself.

  He wondered about her, what she would do with her life. He never asked his friends about her, even as he knew they were in contact. Discretion was a mode of survival. It was his history, his loss, and none of anyone else’s concern.

  He looked up at the sailing white arc of the terminal, lines sinuous as Ingres, the swallows flying through, lost inside, and he thought about Brasília. Which was conceived of by a different architect entirely, and yet the TWA terminal always reminded him of Brasília. Same white concrete parabolas and huge glass bays and they were born of the same idea, a proscriptive lie about progress and utopias and born the same year, too—1956. When, as well, the Autostrada del Sole was born. What a year, 1956. Brasília was surely worse than an airline terminal. It was not to human scale and you could see one wretched Indian walking some godawful distance in dire heat with a basket of grain or laundry on her head, casting a shadow on a blank and baking concrete wall two hundred feet high, no shade, no trees, no people. Brasília was not to any human scale, and the inclusion of a Formula One racetrack, in the wake of a generous bid from Sandro’s father and Valera Tires, was one more insult to the Indian with a basket on her head.

  His father had brought Sandro along because he was in his seventies and in ailing health and needed someone to look after him but could not resist the ribbon cutting. Sandro, eighteen by then, flew from New York to Brasília.

  This is what we do, he had thought, holding up his frail father. We cut ribbons. We’re ribbon cutters.

  He had both liked and hated Brasília’s stiff white meringues, which perfectly blotted the ugly history that paid for them. His father’s rubber-harvesting operations in the Amazon had made the Brazilian government enough money to build an all-inclusive concrete utopia, a brand-new capital. The money had poured in. The rubber workers were still there—they were still there now, in 1977—and there were many more of them because their children were all tappers as well. Neither Sandro’s father nor the Brazilian overseers and middlemen ever bothered to tell the rubber workers the war was over. They simply kept them going, doing their labor up there in the remote northwestern jungle. The tappers didn’t know. They believed that someday there would be an enormous payment, if not to their children, maybe to their children’s children. “What is time to an Indian?” his father had said to Sandro that night in the hotel, the Palace of Something or Other, another interplanetary meringuelike building for industrialists and diplomats. “What is time?” his father asked. “What the hell is it? Who is bound to time, and who isn’t?” Sandro became angry. What am I doing here with this old bastard? “Go tell them, Sandro,” his father had said. “Go on up there. It’s only three thousand kilometers, most of it on dirt roads. Go let them know the war is over and t
hey can all go home, okay?”

  It was the last time he saw his father.

  Everything a cruel lesson. This, what fathers were for. His father taking Sandro, four years old, to the tire factory gates during a strike. The workers carrying a coffin and Sandro saying, “Papa, is it a funeral?” His father laughing and nodding. For me. I’m dead, right? Holding up his hands, slapping his own cheeks, then holding up his hands again. What do you say, Sandro? Do I look dead to you?

  The scene at the gates turned ugly, and next Sandro knew, his father’s driver was clutching him against his fat stomach and then he was pushed back into the car and the car pounded on by fists and other things, rocks, as his father’s driver motored them away from the gates with a bloody face and a lapful of shattered glass.

  An argument between his parents when they returned, and he understood that his father had taken him for a purpose, to be caught in what occurred. His father never took Roberto to the gates during a melee. He trained Roberto in the details of profits and losses. Took only little Sandro to see the workers coming at them with clubs. But why? Sandro asked much later, after Roberto had left for his university studies. Because you are going to be an artist, his father said. And it was important to establish that you aren’t suited to anything else. That’s what artists are, his father said, those who are useless for anything else. That might seem like an insult, he said, but it wasn’t, and someday Sandro would understand. Each child was unique, and destined for something different, so why should they be treated the same?

  * * *

  Roberto. For his death Sandro felt something. For his mother, who would be so alone now. You should take a lover. He had always felt he could never go back there to live. But he would go back. He was going. The flight would board soon, and in a way he was relieved to get it over with, to be banished from his own pathetic tendencies. When he had shown up to the funeral with Ronnie’s castoff, his mother had said to cut it out. Cut what out? And she said, abusing these young women. You don’t love them. You bring them to place between you and your life. That was in May. It was July now and he was officially free of entanglements. Alone.