Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

They had once gone back to Egypt together, she and Sandro’s father, T. P. Valera, but all signora Valera could recollect of it now, she said, was the overwhelming stench of urine in the tombs and temples at Luxor. They were there to visit her husband’s mother, Ettore’s wife, who was living back in Alexandria, having fled Italy in protest when the king was dethroned at the end of the war. “She was a monarchist,” signora Valera said, “and now I can’t say that her view seems unreasonable, though yelling, ‘Save the king,’ from the window of a Rolls-Royce probably wouldn’t go over well now, either. What a mess things were. Actually my husband made a lot of money, but you couldn’t buy much. We were eating cold polenta while my mother-in-law lay stretched out in her African compound, Negroes around her holding torches. That’s another thing my husband loved to tell about Egypt, the way electric lamps were for those who could not afford a full staff. If you could afford it, you had Negroes with torches, not lamps, not electricity.”

After Egypt, there was talk of other relatives, an uncle of T. P. Valera’s who had kept a bear as a pet, which one afternoon mauled him viciously, leading to this uncle’s morphine addiction and eventual death. Another relative of some kind who slipped on wet tile and fell into a sulfur bath in Lourdes, the bath having been accidentally heated to boiling. Someone else who was killed in Capri, when picnickers dropped a canned ham from a high cliff to the beach below, rather than carrying the thing down a switchback trail. A cousin who went to sub-Saharan Africa and was bitten by a tsetse fly and got elephantiasis in his buttocks. He’d had to purchase special-order trousers with a gigantic seat, Sandro’s mother said, and he slept with a platform extension at the side of the bed, to support his ass.

She narrated all of this with no hint of irony, but she must have known it was funny. I smiled at her.

She looked at me coldly. “You’re amused only because you’re American,” she said, “where people die of old age, or in car accidents.” She turned to the Count of Bolzano. “They don’t have histories there. They barely know what history is!”

Again I stared at the fire, as if to hypnotize myself and melt her words to nothing. Fac ut ardeat. I could hear the little Ping-Pong ball being knocked and slapped back and forth in the near dark down the lawn. The edges of the lake below us glittered. The moon, white and full, was rising over the olive grove beyond the patio, twisted little trees spaced apart in such a way that they looked like dancers on a dark stage, each holding its pose, waiting for the music to commence.

* * *

When Sandro had suggested a hike that morning, I’d jumped at the idea of leaving the villa for the day. I was feeling stifled inside its walls, ancient and clammy and six feet thick. For keeping out intruders when it was built, in the seventeenth century. Some kind of lord had lived there and the pleasures of it — those shaggy, towering pines, their branches sweeping the dense carpet of grass, their huge pistachio-colored pinecones, and the acacia, which were covered with blooms, little white bells bobbling against the windows where Sandro and I slept, green leaves pressing the glass like decoupage — all this beauty led me back to a sense of cruelty, to the people kept out, and those kept in, in the kitchen, the washing shed, the servants’ little stone cottages. As a guest, you weren’t allowed to do anything for yourself. Our first morning, we waited for the maid to bring us coffee on a silver tray, with a basket of chewy, coarse bread I assumed was baked somewhere on the property, probably in an elaborate outdoor oven and by a method peasants had developed over hundreds of years. The breakfast room was sunny and beautiful, but I could not relax the way Sandro did, casually flipping through his Corriere della Sera as though it were normal to wait in your own house for a servant in uniform not just to bring your coffee but also to pour it. Sandro seemed unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge how different this place was. Servants pour the coffee and you act like that’s normal, I thought at him, but all he did was rustle his pages, his posture asking or instructing that I not acknowledge the change, or his comfort and familiarity with this alien place, where it was typical to hear no people but to understand that they were everywhere, watching you eat, waiting for the moment you might put down your cup, in order to appear suddenly and refill it. There was always someone nearby, the strange groundskeeper, or a maid or cook or some other household employee quietly moving about. There was one servant, a woman who wore a huge wig of grayish-lavender curls that seemed like a practical joke, whose only purpose that I could detect was to cut flowers from the garden, make little arrangements and place them here and there, and then to scurry around managing these arrangements, clearing away dispensed petals and replacing drooping flowers. She and the others moved through rooms with no hesitation, whether they were occupied or not. They didn’t knock, or announce themselves, but instead, in their noiseless corduroy servants’ slippers, they acted invisible, meant to dust or replace dead blooms as if they themselves were of no consequence to the privacy of others. I asked Sandro about this, after the woman in the lavender wig came into the bathroom while I was bathing. She had begun stocking a cabinet with soaps and toilet tissue and never once looked at me. “They’re used to people,” he said. “They’re domestics. It’s not a big deal.” Later I realized they weren’t a big deal to Sandro because he didn’t register their presence as judgment. Only I did, which, as his mother might have pointed out, was a problem of class, of being from the wrong one, too low for a servant to feel I was an appropriate object of their attentions, for their flower arrangements and ironed sheets, and that was my problem, not hers or her servants’, and she was probably right. It was my problem. The groundskeeper was the one who unnerved me most. He said nothing as he went about his business, up on a ladder, pruning the wisteria that wrapped up and around the cypress trees, or fumigating a wasps’ nest. He watched us and glowered, while the others didn’t look at us at all. He would stare at me, a certain wryness in his face that I couldn’t decipher. I might have stared back had he not been handsome. He was, if in a plain and obvious way, and it was that — his looks — that unnerved me, made me look away whenever we crossed paths.

This morning, our second one in the villa, Sandro had slept late and I’d gone to breakfast alone. Signora Valera was there at the table, but it was too late to turn back. We drank our espresso in silence, or what I hoped would remain so, until she asked if I was going to marry her son. Because, she said, she had not been informed of a wedding.

“We’re not getting married, no.”

“So what are your plans?” she asked. “I mean, for when you are no longer together. If he has not asked you to marry him, it’s temporary. A temporary arrangement.”

“I don’t have any plans,” I said.

There is a certain type of older woman who pretends to be doddering and meek when in fact old age has made her strong and vicious, but signora Valera was not that type. She did not pretend to be meek.

On our hike, Sandro and I lay in a sun-dappled patch of wild chamomile, resting and gazing up at the sky framed in branches. We ended up entwined, his jeans unbuttoned, mine down around my knees. A kind of urgency was what he liked, and making love in a field, in various sorts of public places, was something Sandro was into. It made the act that much more thrilling and directed. But it had been my idea this time, my cue. The villa was so oppressive, and his mother made me feel so minimized that I had not really wanted to make love to Sandro inside its walls. When I had returned from her breakfast assault, Sandro had grabbed me and I’d said no and pushed him away, his mother’s voice in my head, as if submitting to him were submitting to her idea of my disposable status. Here, I felt a bit more free and probably I thought screwing her son in a clearing in the woods was a way to defend myself, my autonomy, from her judgments. I looked from the sky, the breath of blue that opened above the crosshatch of chestnut trees, to Sandro, in whose face I detected an apology.