Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

He picked crushed little chamomile flowers out of my hair as we continued our hike, and pointed out a matted place among the underbrush where a wolf had slept. We stopped and looked together at the indentation that was the wolf’s bed. There was something tender in seeing where a wild animal slept, the choices it made to seek softness, and I felt a twinge of envy for that wolf, its self-preservation, its solitude. We came out of the woods on a rise above the limonaia that had been planted when Sandro was born. He laughed and said it was an absurdity for the region and that each tree had to be individually wrapped in burlap for the winter season. He put his arms around me as we gazed from our rise over the tops of the lemon trees below us, which had taken root when Sandro had, experienced the same amount of lived time. This is also me, I felt him say, you have to understand that it’s also me. I leaned back, into him. I love this also-you. Even if his mother intimidated me and meant to, and even if their house, if you could call such a place, thirty rooms, a house, was not the least bit inviting. There in the woods, his cashmere scarf wrapped around my neck for extra warmth, I felt like everything was going to be okay. I was with Sandro. It didn’t matter if his mother, when we were introduced, had smiled in a strained way as if I were a disappointment. Or that she had laughed when Sandro told her I spoke Italian, and insisted on speaking to me in English or what she thought was English but was a strange hybrid language that sounded more like German. No matter. In a week his mother would return to Milan and we’d have the villa to ourselves. Soon after, I’d go to Monza. Sandro had said he wanted to come, and for once, he would be tagging along with me, and not the reverse. In the meantime he would be the bridge between me and this odd place, and maybe at some point we could laugh about it together.

Laugh about his mother? How foolish I must have been.

By the time we were returning along the road, in view of the high, stone wall of the villa, flowerless vines spilling over it like concertina wire, I felt relaxed and happy in a way I had not since we’d arrived. Sandro had suggested we use the garden gates and not the main entrance, and we had passed the groundskeeper’s little stone cottage and strolled among the olive trees holding hands, Sandro as my protector from this world of rooms and servants and customs, fortifying me against it as he guided me into it.

* * *

It was very cold in the dining room, almost colder than it had been outside. Later I came to recognize the particular cheapness of the very rich. Sandro’s mother was not concerned with saving money. Rather, she seemed to enjoy creating conditions that were slightly less than hospitable, even a little hostile, with rooms that were fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. And despite all the talk of the diminishing elite of people who knew (or knew to know ) about the right Nebbiolos, wine in a box was mostly what we drank. We would see the same bread at dinner that we’d passed over at breakfast, stale and hard then, in the morning, and by dinnertime tooth-breaking. I thought of Ronnie’s discourse on bread. Ronnie was amused that you could find only whole-grain breads now in New York’s gourmet markets. Not that Ronnie shopped in gourmet markets, but one had opened in SoHo and he perused the aisles to fuel his running commentaries. He said it was an irony that people had decided collectively that whole grains were more desirable than white bread, which, for centuries, had been the bread of the gentry. “Everything’s like this,” he said. Refinement followed a certain course and reverse course. In this case, the literal refining of flour, until super-refined white bread, light and fluffy like only kings and queens had once been able to obtain, was widely available, and so rich people had to go back to eating the crude whole-grain breads they used to leave only for peasants. Now no educated person would be caught dead eating white bread. Not even a middle-class person. Sandro was always amused by these rants of Ronnie’s, but here at the villa every custom was normal to him. He ate the stale brown bread and said nothing about it.

Eventually a servant came and started a fire in the dining room hearth and the room warmed up, but a haze of suffocating smoke hung over the table, a mesh of white tangles that thickened as dinner dragged on, making it difficult to breathe. On the ceiling above us was a fresco of Lake Como. In the lake, a circle of popes or maybe bishops in white gossamer robes. The fabric of their robes hung down below them like tendrils as these religious clerics treaded water. They were jellyfish popes, not unlike the lonely transvestite’s popes floating on clouds, pure and pristine goodness. Or perhaps these men were the mirror image of that: they didn’t seem like they could help anyone, occupied as they were with trying not to drown. As a servant came around to refill our glasses, the old novelist Chesil Jones, who was seated at my left, leaned toward me and said he used to be a drinker but had given up booze. His breath reeked of alcohol. He and I were behind an enormous branched candlestick that blocked my view of Sandro. I asked the old novelist about his books. He narrowed his eyes at me as if I had insulted him. “You’d like to discuss the most recent, wouldn’t you? The Sole of a Whore was what I originally called it — not her spirit but the bottom of her shoe. And what do they come up with? Mrs. Dollface, for godsakes. If you want to revisit the idiotic responses Mrs. Dollface has gotten, we can do that.”

I said I was simply curious about what sorts of things he wrote.

“Oh. Why of course, yes,” he said, suddenly solicitous, realizing that I was not a hostile critic. “There is a small library. I can have them brought to your room. The ones you should start with, in any case.”

Beyond the huge candelabra, the subject of tragic or tragicomic death continued, not that of a relative in Egypt but of an Italian industrialist or the heir of one, who instead of amassing more riches had spent his family’s money publishing pro-Soviet literature and supporting underground groups that wanted to overthrow the government. The man’s name was Feltrinelli — like the chain of well-known bookstores. I remembered them from my time in Florence, but had no idea that Feltrinelli had been electrocuted, as the Count of Bolzano explained it, trying to sabotage Milan’s power supply. He was found dead under a pylon. It had happened five years earlier. I got the feeling these people had discussed it plenty but because of its mysterious circumstances weren’t ready to give up the subject. It wasn’t clear if his death had been an accident, a suicide, or if he’d been murdered. Roberto said it didn’t matter how it happened, that Feltrinelli’s death had been a resounding defeat for the Communists and a victory for anyone who felt it was a mistake for party boys to hemorrhage money to radical causes.

“He was a semiretard, even if he published Pasternak,” Chesil Jones said. “Semiretarded. He got his negative and positive leads mixed up.”

Sandro said that was nonsense and that Feltrinelli wasn’t stupid. What happened had been a terrible tragedy.

“Have it how you want,” Roberto said. “I find him to have been a clown. You find him to have been tragic. Either way he’s dead, and that in itself is neither tragic nor clownish, it simply is. He asked for trouble and found it. What was he doing, for godsakes, on a pylon?”

“He didn’t know negative from positive,” the old novelist said, and put his hands together as if holding two leads, then shook like he was being electrocuted.