Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Later, when I said this to Sandro, he told me not to feel bad about her. Think of all the anonymous slaves in history, he said. This one has been immortalized. She made her way through an unthinkable chasm of time. We are talking about her now, he said, and that in itself was a rare and special kind of emancipation.

* * *

I spent a lot of time with them looking at art. My tutors, Giddle said condescendingly. Your tutors are here, she’d say, as Ronnie and Sandro hopped on stools at the counter of the Trust E. They started going there and that was perhaps my influence, making the Trust E into a kind of destination.

Giddle treated them with patient indifference. They ordered hamburgers and coffee, always the same thing, and she attended to them last, gave them lousy service. That was yet another thing I misread, Giddle’s indifference to them. I attributed it to her general feelings in regard to the art world — that part of it where people made art, sold the art, got in return money, fame, recognition. Success was highly overrated, according to Giddle. “ Anyone can be a success,” she said. “It’s so much more interesting to not want that.”

As I started to get to know Sandro and Ronnie and their friends, exactly the group of successful artists Giddle considered most compromised, I had her standards in my head. Not as my own standards, just a voice. The voice of a woman who said the three most cowardly acts were to exhibit ambition, to become famous, or to kill yourself.

* * *

By the time Sandro introduced me to Helen Hellenberger on Spring Street, just before I was set to depart for Reno to pick up the Moto Valera, that voice of Giddle’s, my first friend and New York influence, was as quiet as the trees above me. I wanted to make artworks and show them in a gallery. It was what I’d moved to New York to do.

It was through our conversations that I ended up wanting to go to the salt flats, but Sandro had his own ideas about roads and speed and land. He’d written a proposal when he was young, to make paintings by the yard to be laid out over the entire length of the Autostrada del Sole, which connected the north and the south of Italy. Practical and industrial methods in service to something of no use. The autostrada was built by the government with funding and encouragement from the Valera Company. Sandro had a photo of his father and the Italian prime minister standing together to celebrate its inauguration in 1956. Its name, Autostrada del Sole, made it sound hopeful in a fascist kind of way. Anything “of the sun,” Sandro said, was code for fascism. “My family helped ruin Italy,” he said, “by building this superhighway, Milan to Bologna to Florence to Rome to Naples, but it made us rich.” Sandro said highways primed us for a separation from place, from actual life. The autostrada replaced life with road signs and place names. A white background and black lettering. MILANO. A reduction, Sandro said, to nothing but names.

“No different than here,” I said. “You might as well deplore all highways.”

He conceded it was true, but said America was supposed to be a place ruined and homogenized by highways, that that was its unique character, crass and vulgar sameness.

“It’s your destiny,” he said, smiling, his eyes filling with cold light.

“What’s your destiny?” I replied.

“To become an American citizen, of course.”

* * *

Sandro had encouraged the general drift of what I was after, doing something in the landscape relating to speed and movement. But when Ronnie suggested that Sandro should come through for me — use his connections to get me a Moto Valera to ride — Sandro’s enthusiasm all but ceased.

The only legitimate way to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats was to ride something truly fast, Ronnie said. “It has to be like she’s testing out a factory bike.”

Sandro was annoyed at Ronnie. I quietly hoped Ronnie would keep pressing him. I wanted to do a project at Bonneville, but I needed a bike. I didn’t have the money to buy one, nor did I want to ask Sandro myself. I wasn’t sure if Ronnie was advocating for me out of some old affection or if it was about Sandro, ribbing him. A form of competition. Ronnie had Moto Valera calendars tacked up as a kind of joke, the girls with big breasts straddling gleaming machines, an upholstering of flesh over the entire back wall of his studio. He claimed it was in homage to Sandro, but it was also a kind of mockery, to flaunt imagery that Sandro wanted to forget. Or maybe it was a love of something that Sandro himself could not appreciate in such a dumb and direct way. Which wasn’t heckling, exactly, but something else, to fetishize elements of a friend’s life that the friend could not see — Sandro, who pretended to mispronounce Italian dishes on a restaurant menu. Twice I had heard Sandro tell someone he was Romanian when they asked where his accent was from. He felt that Italy was a backwater. He claimed he had almost no connection to it.

When I told him I’d loved Florence, where I had spent my junior year of college, he said, sure, as an American woman it’s fine. But try being an Italian woman. It’s a piggish and abhorrent culture. If a man rapes you but is willing to marry you, the charges are dropped. Rape was not even a criminal offense but merely a “moral” one. He read about the country’s financial woes, some directly relating to Valera, the way my cousins and uncle read the statistics of a baseball team they weren’t rooting for, a team they hoped would lose, reveling in scandals and injuries and poor performances. With Sandro, it was Italy applying for an IMF loan. Inflation, unemployment. Valera getting hit especially hard by the oil crisis. Suffering work stoppages. Sabotage. Wildcat strikes. Sandro claimed that his older brother, Roberto, who ran the tire company, was as unknown to him as any other asshole businessman.

Italy was too provincial, Sandro said, too closed and familiar, almost preordained, for someone like him, from a family like his. He’d been in New York almost twenty years, so long that his Italianness seemed merely a way to be a unique New Yorker, as if he were more that, a New York artist with a faint accent, than he was Italian. His English was perfect, his friends, mostly American. Sandro had left Italy as soon as he could, refused the money that flowed from the faucets of his name, and worked at the Met alongside Ronnie, from whose name no money flowed, since Ronnie came from a working-class family and was estranged from them anyhow, having been separated in his childhood in some mysterious way you weren’t supposed to bring up. Apparently he had worked on boats, but he never spoke about it. When I asked Sandro, he was protective of Ronnie, shook his head mildly, changed the subject.

He and Ronnie shared something in their longing to reinvent themselves as having no provenance, no Pickwick. I, on the other hand, was known to them as being distinctly and precisely a girl from Reno. I was the girl they expected things of. I was meant to find some way to use my origin in an interesting manner. Not like Smithson’s spoof of the “real authentic West Coast artist,” chrome-plating motorcycle parts and refusing to think. I was meant to form a concept that had rigor. I would listen to them, discussing me as if I weren’t present but as a joke, for my amusement. “The girl,” Sandro said. “You mean Reno,” Ronnie replied, as if in direct taunt of the past — see, I can summon it, that’s how little it means. What now, Reno?

Speed Week, when they ran various cars and motorcycles over the salt, was happening in September.

One June morning I woke up to hear Sandro speaking quickly in Italian to someone on the telephone. He’d arranged for me to have a Moto Valera.