Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Didi sat under the awning of his trailer, his deerskin gloves drooping from his pocket, his hair losing its feathery loft, his race suit unzipped to the waist, the sleeves tied around his middle. His eyes seemed to be getting smaller, dimmer, more raisinlike, his lips more bloodless and thin, like the edges of a cooked crepe, as if he were becoming uglier as the day stretched toward dusk and he was not allowed to make his run, set his record, be the famous and glorious (if short and ugly) Didi Bombonato.

The next day was similar, time stretching full with long discussions of how to interpret the employee codes and rules, talk that was punctuated by many cigarette and Moka breaks. Hours waiting under their Valera awning while the team manager filled out a series of forms they usually ignored, and then one man was sent into town to notarize the forms, and having forgotten to collect passports, had to return, and then go again, and suddenly it was time for their company-allotted break, and they would all quit working as one of them prepared the afternoon espresso. Didi was indignant. He fumed. Performed stretches and hand exercises and glared at the others with his opaque raisin eyes.

* * *

Morning and evening, Tonino helped me to ice my ankle and dress my road rash, broad lakes of which were drying into big itchy scabs. He asked about Sandro, and said he hadn’t been aware there was another brother.

“Do you know Roberto?” I asked.

“We don’t know him,” Tonino said, laughing. “Roberto is the face of the company. The president.”

Outside the trailer window, the techs were discussing some new problem.

I’d tried to relay a message to Sandro through one of the mechanics who’d gone into town, to tell him what had happened. The mechanic had called the loft and said a woman answered and told him Sandro was out. A woman? I figured there was a language barrier, or that he’d dialed the wrong number. Or maybe someone from Sandro’s gallery had come over, not unusual, to photograph artworks or prepare them for shipment.

“Does Sandro Valera tell you about the company situation?” Tonino asked.

“Not really,” I said. “He’s an artist, he’s not involved.”

“Lucky for him, perhaps,” Tonino said. “The company is at war with its factory workers.”

I knew only a little about this war that Tonino referred to. Sandro did not call it that. It wasn’t something he talked about often. The previous spring, an Italian artist he knew from Milan had a gallery show on West Broadway that was about factory actions and the Red Brigades. The show was called S.p.A. — a play on words, Sandro explained. In Italy, the acronym meant joint stock company, but literally, “society for actions.” The artist had made huge pencil tracings from newspaper photographs of three Red Brigades victims and one Red Brigades member, Margherita Cagol, killed in a shoot-out with police, slumped on the ground in tight jeans, a purse strewn at her side, blood leaking from her mouth. Sandro seemed unhappy to confront the material. The press release mentioned that the Red Brigades were Italian militants who got their start in the Valera factories on the industrial outskirts of Milan. Sandro put the sheet down. “Sensationalist crap,” he said.

When I asked Tonino about the Red Brigades he said, “That’s just one group. The most visible one. There are so many groups at this point. Many of them come together only after an action, to give those who committed the action a name, and then they disband, disappear. You can’t know who is part of what. They don’t know, either. They might not know they are in a group until the action is done and the group claims it.”

Late on the evening of the second day of the work-to-rule strike, word arrived that the mechanics in Italy had declared theirs over.

The next morning, Didi emerged bright and early from his trailer, fully suited and ready to go. He lifted a leg and did a few sets of athletic lunges, then switched legs and lunged again in taut sets. He flicked his hands into open tens, shut fists, open tens. He jumped up and down in a controlled dribble like a prizefighter.

He was ready to claim his empire, be Didi Bombonato, world land speed champion, break his own record, and—

Wait. What was happening?

The six technicians and their team manager emerged from the tool and equipment trailer with extreme slowness, as if the baking white salt were a kind of thick gel that offered great resistance, as they moved toward the workbench onto which the Spirit had been wheeled for a maintenance check. The team manager picked up a drill in curious slow motion.

Didi yelled at them. “What are you doing? What is this? Come on!”

The team manager turned toward Didi and lifted his hand to his face. He removed his sunglasses, brought them downward with sustained slowness, and cleaned each lens thoroughly with a handkerchief. Then he put his sunglasses back on.

“I’m preparing for your run,” the team manager said. He spoke these words very, very slowly.

He and the others moved around underneath the awning, picking up tools and gauges in slow motion. They spoke with big swaths of silence between words.

Didi let out what I can only describe as a roar. He kicked the side of his trailer and seemed to have injured his toe (his driving shoes, like Flip Farmer’s, were of soft leather, not for protection but sensitivity).

* * *

The team was now engaged in something called a slowdown, in solidarity with the Valera workers back in Milan. The mechanics no longer followed the rule book so perversely and exactly but instead distended time, taking longer to perform each task, and punctuating their activities and communications with great pauses. As I watched all of this, I felt both closer to Sandro for all I was seeing of this company crew, and also far away. I still hadn’t talked to him.

That night, lying on the daybed in the trailer, I listened to the wind and felt like a stowaway.

As we had left the gallery on West Broadway, after seeing the drawings of the Red Brigades victims, Sandro had begun to tell me a story about M, an Argentine friend of his, a man I’d only met briefly on a couple of occasions. I immediately sensed from the quiet, serious way he spoke about M that Sandro was trying to tell me something about himself, his family, and those drawings, people slain in the streets of Rome and Milan, the woman killed in a shoot-out with police. Sandro was protective of M, and the particular burdens that M carried because of his father, who was part of the notorious new military dictatorship in Argentina.

“People are always interested in M when they find out his father was part of the junta,” Sandro said, so respectful of his friend’s privacy that he didn’t want to say his name in the context of M’s family. “You hear them practically bragging about it. You know his father is in the dictatorship, right? Everyone excited by their two-degree removal from death squads. They don’t care what M’s relationship to any of it is. They want to know him because he’s connected to corruption and murder, even if M moved to New York City to get away from all that. Away from his family and its tarred name, away from the place where it matters.”

M, Sandro told me, actively avoided friendship with anyone who asked about his father, and at a certain point, anyone who seemed interested in Argentina or Latin American politics generally. Even a vaguely left-wing orientation, Sandro said, could scare off M. And yet M himself was a Marxist, and also gay, and hated his own father and the culture from which he’d come. But he didn’t want to atone for it to anyone else.

“All these people just want to be near him because they’re fascinated by the novelty that a military henchman in a government known for torture and murder has a son in the New York art world,” Sandro said.