Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“So it’s of no consequence,” Sandro said to Roberto, “whether he died by accident or was murdered.”

Roberto shrugged. “He was a problem. To business. To Italy. To the entire Ministry of the Interior. Not to mention the CIA. A lot of people wanted him dead. And then he managed to die on his own. Anyhow, who grieved over the death of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli?”

“Roberto, eight thousand people were at his funeral,” Sandro said. “It was in the New York Post . And his death helped nothing. If he was killed, whoever killed him can count themselves responsible, at least in part, for the violence since.”

“What do you know about the violence since, Sandro?” Roberto said. “You’ve been in New York making metal boxes, going to cocktail parties, or whatever it is you do, while Mama and I get phone calls about the latest round of sabotage, the latest work stoppage, the most recent supervisor to be killed. Are you aware of the problems?”

“I’m saying martyrs give cause. They create sympathy. But you’re right, I don’t get those phone calls. I take my inheritance and give nothing back. I have never denied that. I think I’ll stick to what I know.”

“What subject is that, Sandro?” his mother asked.

“Metal boxes, Mama.”

“I thought you were going to say American girls,” she said, not looking at me. “How many have we met, at this point?”

Chesil Jones put his two hands together again and shook erratically.

I felt like hurting this old woman, and I believe she knew it, and that she felt, in reaction, both afraid of my anger and also morally defended against it, against such crude low-class aggression. I never asked about Sandro’s previous girlfriends. He teased me about that, wanted to know why I didn’t ask, which made me sure it was wise not to. Or at least sure that it bothered him that I didn’t, because he wanted to make me jealous, and so I gave him no opening.

Sandro told her to stop acting rude and then they were arguing, speaking very quickly, and I could no longer follow. It was either about me or about some general failing on Sandro’s part.

Chesil Jones leaned toward me. “Just ignore it. She’s… what can I say? I’m fond of her. Quite fond of her, actually. But late tonight, after the staff retires? She’ll be bent over the open refrigerator, counting slices of ham to be sure the servants haven’t taken more than their allotment. She’s tortured, bless her. Anyway, I can appreciate you. I can tell you’re good folk,” he said, nudging me and laughing. “I’ve been to Reno, by the way. I wasn’t looking at a fucking Bob Avery book like Luigi won’t shut up about. I skied Mount Rose.”

“My ski team trained there,” I said, assuming Sandro must have told him I’d been a ski racer. “It’s a place I know so well.”

“Did a bit of racing myself,” he said. “Nothing major. A sort of subpro league. Nastar, it’s called. Actually rather competitive. I have a bronze medal someplace, knocking around in a box of ribbons and whatnot, from various hobbies of mine. I did retain something of a feel for the slalom course. The motion of it. It’s in the knees, like this, see. A bit in the hips as well.” He swiveled back and forth in his chair, holding out his hands as if gripping ski poles.

“Women have a tough time learning to ski,” he said. “They don’t have the mind for the physics of it. But they can learn by feel. I’ve been a pretty good instructor, I’ve got good form, a perfect stem Christie. Though my last wife got up to the top of the mountain, we were in Chamonix. ‘Sham-o-nicks,’ the nitwit kept calling it. ‘Sham-o-nicks.’ We took the cable car up and at the top, we’re ready to go, boots laced, skis strapped on, and she just freezes, stiff as a corpse.”

Sandro and his mother had finished arguing. Chesil Jones had everyone’s attention. Noticing this, he cleared his throat, and his delivery changed, became magisterial, as if he were duty-bound to part with some of his profound and cloistered knowledge, for our benefit.

“The thing about skiing is that it’s suited to men. Partly because it’s a great metaphor for other endeavors. Endeavors of the mind. Martin Heidegger was a skier, did you know? The little hut in Todtnauberg where he wrote was right next to the chairlift. Legend has it that he gave his seminar at Freiburg directly from the slopes, going on about the being for whom being is a question while wearing a parka and boot gators. As a young man, I had a wonderful writing teacher who was a terrific skier. I’ll never forget my first class with him. This was in Hanover, New Hampshire, dead of winter. ‘Your assignment,’ he says, ‘each one of you boys, is to drink a case of beer and ski yourself off a cliff.’ He wanted us to feel the terror. Not of the cold, of the speed, but of our talent. Just… do with it what you must. What you will. With my own students, I—”

* * *

“Why didn’t you say anything to that bastard?” Sandro asked me later that night as he dove playfully under the covers and grabbed me with his cold hands. There’d been a giant moth in our room, which he’d successfully shooed out a window. He didn’t care about moths. He did it for me. I was the only American girl here, I reminded myself as he chased it around our room in his underwear. The only one.

“You were a racer, for Christ’s sake,” he said, shivering under the duvet, his arms around me. “And he’s instructing you on the basics. ‘Ribbons and medals from my hobbies.’ What a moron.”

Sandro didn’t understand why I let this old man go on at length as if I’d never been on skis, but my experience had nothing to do with Chesil Jones. It wouldn’t have interested him one bit. He didn’t bring up skiing to have a conversation, but to lecture and instruct. I’d seen right away he was the type of person who grows deadly bored if disrupted from his plan to talk about himself, and I had no desire to waste my time and energy forcing on him what he would only will away in yawns and distracted looks. And anyhow Chesil Jones probably hadn’t skied in the twenty years since the stem Christie had been a popular technique. What was I to say, we make parallel turns now? The boots have buckles instead of laces? The bindings are quick-release?

After dinner, we retired to the living room. While his mother sneaked off to bed, Sandro put records on the old German phonograph, and more wine was poured. We listened to Stravinsky, harsh but stirring strings, sounds that were like stiff brushes dipped in paint and used to make a geometry of lines in stark black. Signora Valera must have then switched on the television in her room upstairs, because over the strings we heard distortedly loud voices interspersed with a laugh track. Wealthy Italian or Reno pensioner, it didn’t matter, she was like any old person with her TV too loud.

Roberto had gone home. Sandro told me Roberto’s wake time was four thirty a.m. It was one of the reasons his wife stayed in Milan when Roberto came to Bellagio. She couldn’t take his schedule, Sandro said. It was difficult to imagine that Roberto even had a wife, that he would be interested in women, he was so austere and clean and rigid.

There were catalogues of Sandro’s work on the coffee table, and the industrial designer Luigi began flipping through them, looking at Sandro’s spare, aluminum sculptures. Sandro had whispered to me, in a moment alone in the hall, that Luigi also was a soft-core pornographer with a foot and leg fetish, and sold that work in editions of very limited print runs that cost thousands of dollars.

“I am stumped,” Luigi said when he’d looked at every image in the two thick catalogues. “I just don’t get it.”

Sandro was used to this. Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself. I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse that artists such as Sandro wrote long essays about, and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.