Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

They’re going to make me rich, Valera thought. And in any case after spending his boyhood in Egypt he was not unaccustomed to dark-skinned people. It was backward to hate them. He and Lonzi divided ways on this subject. Lonzi had gone off to participate in the invasion of Abyssinia, in ’35, to “wrestle negroes to the ground.” Lonzi sounded like a missionary, as if he’d forgotten what had been so critical to the spirit of the group: you don’t recruit. You never recruit. You act, and those who want to act as you do simply fall in. Nothing was gained through force. Wrestle away, Valera thought. Your entire battalion will be riding my motorcycles. That year, while Lonzi was off fighting in Abyssinia, the thousand-cc bike Valera had designed won the world land speed record, on the autostrada between Brescia and Bergamo. A simplified, street version was in production at his factory outside Milan.

* * *

He and Lonzi were no longer close, but they had shared something Valera would never forget, a youthful recognition that vital life was change and swiftness, which only revealed itself through violent convulsions. Sameness was a kind of stupor, a state of being in which people thought the world had always been as they knew it and would always stay that way. Cotton laundry and waves. Blue handprints on a wall. Time had worn a mask. It had hidden itself, and he and Lonzi and the others in the little gang would tear off its mask. It was their destiny to do so. To know that life meant cataclysmic change, exceptional and monstrous to most people but not to them. They embraced the monstrosity of it. Like volume to the ancient Egyptians, who depicted everything flat, in two dimensions, because volume was terrifying unknowability. Yes, it was terrifying, Valera agreed with the Egyptians, and that was why he wanted it.

While Lonzi was busy prostrating himself over the map of Ethiopia, fighting the British and buffing the Duce with war poems, Valera was deep into business. Cycles, scooters, a three-wheeled car, and now rubber. Rubber had been coming mostly from Malaysia, until the Japanese overran the place on bicycles. An incredible attack, Japanese on bikes. Italian operations ground to a halt. Valera was not in the rubber business then. It was what got him into it, the rubber shortage that began when the Japanese overran Malaysia, in December 1941. A month later Valera was in Brazil.

In São Paulo, he spent a lot of time waiting in a hotel lobby for men who arrived hours late in creamy linen. They sat in wicker chairs, he and the men in linen, the woven caning of their chairbacks blooming up behind them like gigantic doodled wings. Nearby, something called an umbrella bird crouched inside an enormous cage, a shiny black thing that kept fanning itself out, menacing and ugly. Valera knew that a good business deal is made from patience. From waiting as if you have all the time in the world, your wicker doodle wings creaking, knowing you hate the umbrella bird and that you don’t need a reason to hate it, as you sit in a swamp-climate lobby and fan yourself with a map of northern Brazil. Place was gigantic. Obscenely so. This, Valera had not understood. But no matter, a good business deal had little to do with maps. It was about looking other men in the eye in a way that made them feel they were part of a complicit and elite minority.

The minister of industry said there would be no problem rounding up enough labor to harvest the rubber. Brazil had joined the Allies and was sending men off to the war. Or pretending to, the minister of industry said, to convince these men that harvesting rubber was better than going to fight in the war. Except you don’t have to convince them, he said. Because it’s easier to get a snake to smoke than to get an Indian to enlist. Valera rather liked the image of a snake in the act of smoking, one oblong tube sucking on another, smaller oblong tube. It distracted him momentarily until he realized what the minister of industry meant. A snake would not smoke. An Indian would stay home and harvest rubber. He’d taken it literally, as Roberto had the smoking of rubber — like father, like son.

* * *

Down in South America, they had apparently been the last to know about this thing called the wheel, and yet they were the people who had first discovered rubber, and Valera found poetic excellence in these two tandem facts, the place where they had first known of rubber and last known of the wheel. The stupidity of it gave his new endeavor a bright aura, bringing progress to Brazil, last earthlings to discover the wheel.

What had the Indians there done with this rubber they discovered? They made a game, pok-ta-pok, which sounded like what it was: you bounced the ball back and forth between two players.

They used rubber in torches to make an ominous, greasy smoke. They dipped cloth in rubber to make it waterproof. And for shoes. They used their feet as molds in a straight-over dipping process to form perfect, custom-fit galoshes. The original fit, Valera observed with a certain delight, was custom fit. One size fits all was something that came later, with mechanization. He wasn’t going to have them making the tires. They would harvest raw rubber and mold it into the great big biscotti, which would then be shipped to Switzerland, to a company he’d set up to operate without the interference of Mussolini, whom Valera increasingly considered a bungler and hooligan.

If he could sell enough tires, he could devote all of his own time to motorcycles, which didn’t have the same kind of profit margin. Especially now that Mussolini had requisitioned Valera’s entire stock for the military, and all his factories did was make replacement parts for German troops, who were forever ripping out clutches.

He set things up and returned to Milan, anxious to see his youngest child, Sandro, almost three now. Roberto had been sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and this had made Alba lonely enough that she’d trapped him into creating a second. He was practically an old man and had told himself the younger one wasn’t his, but while he was in Brazil, playing, as he thought of it, pok-ta-pok, he missed the little thing, its sweet, open face. It was his child, he knew this intuitively, but he felt he had surpassed, in seniority, a direct relation to it. He could be more removed, something like a great-uncle, a godfather. His wife had wanted it and he’d consented by not unconsenting. Who was it who said decision was indecision crystallized? He couldn’t recall but in this case it certainly had been.

In those short, intense years of pok-ta-pok, Valera’s rubber business flourished, while his motorcycle factory was flattened by Allied bombs. The family moved up to their villa, on a little hill above Bellagio. Safer, even if the area was overrun by crude and abrupt Germans, with their loud voices and their meat breath. It was only a matter of time until everything changed. Mussolini was just north of them, in the Feltrinelli villa on Lake Garda, where he apparently puttered around, depressed, played scopone, and looked through a viewfinder at the lake. Made incoherent radio broadcasts about the selfish Italian industrialists who were ruining Italy. We’ll see who has ruined Italy, Valera thought at his radio set.

Lonzi turned up in Bellagio, wounded. He was convalescing at a lakeside hotel. He was the same age as Valera — fifty-seven — and still the fool had been with the Alpini, on the Eastern Front.

Valera and Alba went to visit him at the Hotel Splendide. Lonzi, his leg blown off, was packing ice around the remaining stumped mass, but the thing was septic, sending up slow and wretched bubbles, which shone as if blown of mucus. As each bubble of gas-filled ooze on Lonzi’s stump stretched full and popped, it sent a smell of rot and death into the closed hotel room, and Valera wished he hadn’t brought Alba. He nudged her back, and she stood by the door.