Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Sandro had shown me his father’s headstone. T. P. VALERA, ARDITO, FUTURISTA, PADRE, MARITO. He’d died in 1958, just after work was begun on his dream project, the Autostrada del Sole. He’d been through two wars, had been a member of the Fascist Party, and had risen from the ashes of that disastrous era to become a huge postwar success. Ardent or not, he was buried next to Gorgonzola the First, who, I saw the next morning when we were down at the swimming pool, had a pink marble headstone that was as grand and ornate as T. P. Valera’s.

There was a toast all around the fireplace with what the Count of Bolzano commented was a very good Trentino wine, which solicited from signora Valera a lament about how it had been difficult recently to locate Trentino wine, and about all that was wrong with the situations in which one found oneself, where people didn’t know about it or about the best Nebbiolos, such as Barbaresco and Barolo. I understood most of what she said, but she spoke quickly and her words were punctuated by the echoed pock-pocking from the battle that was taking place under the huge sycamore tree down the lawn, where Sandro and the old American novelist were slamming a Ping-Pong ball back and forth. The old novelist had arrived that morning. “Chesil Jones,” he’d said, and extended his hand to me, “but you can call me Chevalier.” Sandro’s mother had held a pretend bugle to her lips and then they both laughed. Was I really to call him Chevalier? I was getting used to proceeding without answers, unsure if I was the butt of jokes.

I could hear the old chevalier grunting and heaving as he leaped to whack the little ball. Sandro was going to defeat him at Ping-Pong, and Chesil Jones had decided to make Sandro’s win as difficult as he could. I’m better at Ping-Pong than Sandro. At least I’ve beaten him at it. And yet I was left to discuss Trentino wine, which I knew nothing about, while Sandro played my game.

“She looks lovely,” signora Valera said, and looked me up and down.

“Yes, she does,” Luigi said, glancing at me. Not in a salacious way, more as if he was taking inventory of what I had on, in the same way she had. These people cared about clothing and appearance. I understood this was a cliché of the Milanesi, but it also was true. In Milan, it had bordered to me on comedy, women riding bicycles through a downpour in platform heels and tight skirts, holding huge black umbrellas. Florence had been similar, except that the women in Milan seemed more like women in New York — hard and professional, exuding capability. Also, in Florence they dressed well but all women dressed alike, in minor variations on the same theme, and I’d had the feeling they owned only one or two outfits and wore them every day. While we were in Milan, strolling the Corso Buenos Aires, Sandro had stopped in front of a shopwindow and pointed to a dress of pinkish-beige velvet. He said it would look good with my hair, and began carefully brushing my hair away from my neck and looking at me and at the dress. “Why don’t you try it,” he said. It was a very expensive-looking boutique, Luisa Spagnoli. I had wondered if he was momentarily confused about women, about what they want or think they want. I said it was beautiful but seemed formal for a stay in the country, a place he had told me so much about, the meadows and muddy streams and hiking. He said his mother liked everyone to “dress” for dinner. It was an old-fashioned rule, he admitted, but perhaps I could just try it on. In New York Sandro would never submit to a social rule of how anyone should dress. But we were not in New York anymore. We went in. A salesgirl fetched the correct size. The fine silk velvet fell in a lovely way, as only very expensive cloth, cut correctly, does. And it did look good, the rose-beige making my dirty-blond hair more honey in shade, closer to that of the dress. Now I was in it, sleeves to the elbow and little velvet-covered buttons that fastened there.

“You look lovely as well,” I said to Sandro’s mother, unsure if I were meant to respond to the compliment, since she had referred to me in the third person.

“Me?” she asked in a surprised tone. “I am hardly dressed up. This is what I normally wear. You’ve made an occasion of it, I can see that.”

“The dress was a gift from Sandro.”

She turned to the Count of Bolzano. “But of course it was a gift from Sandro,” she said to him. “A last-minute refurbishment before he brought her here.” She had forgotten, once again, that I understood Italian, although she only seemed to forget, and to say something cruel, when Sandro was not around.

My eyes had begun to tear from the cruelty of her remark. The man who maintained the grounds was putting more wood on our fire. I focused on him, on his hands, the wood, the flames, and the strange phrase chiseled into the flagstone above the hearth: FAC UT ARDEAT. “Made to burn,” the old novelist later told me. The wood popped as it caught fire. I gazed into the flames and told myself not to say anything, not to be angry. The groundskeeper silently arranged the logs with an iron poker and then he turned and looked at me. I looked away but could feel his stare. In the two days we had been at the villa I’d caught him staring at Sandro and me several times, not in a friendly way. There was something about his gaze, an intensity, that made me nervous. The entire staff of the villa seemed to harbor a kind of collective hostility toward us. At first I thought it was due to their resentment of Sandro’s mother. But the reason was actually the opposite. We were not deserving of the same treatment as the lady of the villa, to whom they were deeply loyal. We were in some sense freeloaders, especially me, an unpedigreed American they were meant to serve as if I were a Valera, when they knew that I was nothing of the kind.

The cook set out a cutting board loaded with various cheeses, tall, soft wedges that listed this way and that. Did you use the cheese knife to spread what you cut onto your cracker, or were you meant to deposit a dollop onto one of the little plates, and use some other knife to spread? I hadn’t eaten all day, because Sandro and I had gone on a long hike and we had forgotten to bring the picnic lunch the cook had prepared for us, but I was afraid the cook would reprimand me if I went about serving myself the wrong way. With the encouragement of the Count of Bolzano, I helped myself to the cheese. I used the common knife to spread it on the crackers. I thought of something Ronnie had said, that rich people didn’t follow the letter of the law. Only strivers did that, Ronnie said. Doggedly following rules emphasized that one did not belong, according to Ronnie. It sounded right. Although there was some way of following them, while not submitting to them, but it required a mysterious touch, and you had to be from that class to possess the special touch. Like me in that Luisa Spagnoli dress. Even it was beautiful, and such a flattering cut: by wearing it I was submitting. “You’ve made an occasion of it.” While Roberto and Luigi and the Count of Bolzano were not dogged in their finery, but natural. And what did the dress have to do with me? Nothing, while the clothes of these men had everything to do with them.

Signora Valera asked if our room was suitable for me.

“Yes, certainly,” I said. She had already asked me this question two or three times.

“You’re in the company of Ettore Valera,” she said, “Sandro’s grandfather.”

I said yes, and that Sandro had explained this to me.

“It was commissioned,” she went on as if I had not spoken, “by King Fuad of Egypt, in appreciation of Ettore’s work on the Suez Canal. King Fuad whispered, ” she said, suddenly whispering hoarsely herself, “because he had a hole in his neck. From a bullet. My husband remembered that very clearly, from when he was a boy. The way the king whispered.”