Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“Are we wearing hats tonight?” Chesil Jones asked. “Because there’s one I’ve frankly had my eye on.”

He got up from the table and reappeared in a curious black fur fez with gold and black tassels that flopped down over one eye.

Signora Valera looked at him sternly.

“Take it off,” she said.

The old novelist smiled and began swinging his arms as if to a brass band, humming some kind of official song that the hat seemed to suggest or summon, the tassels that hung over his face bobbing up and down as he jerked his arms.

“Please remove it.”

A servant came with pork chops on a huge silver platter. At the sight of the chops, the old novelist shot up his right arm in salute, exhaling a gin-scented wind.

“You’ll have to leave this table. I mean it.”

“Oh, lighten up, Alba. Why can’t a man have a little fun? I’m not trying to fill his boots. I can promise you that. In any case, they are, ahem, too small for me, way too small. And from the look of his closet, he wasn’t much a wearer of boots. What I have seen are mostly pigskin moccasins by Ferragamo and Hermès, and dainty kerchiefs with the good old ‘T. P.’ embroidered in the Venetian style—”

“Stop,” she said. “Stop it right now. Let the dead rest.”

He looked at her in an almost tender way but did not remove the hat. He took a deep breath. I could feel it, the gearing up for a lecture. Stanley was so right about old men. Sandro and I joked about it. “What are you going to do,” Sandro asked me, “when I get to that stage when I won’t shut up?” “I’ll buy you a reel-to-reel tape recorder like Stanley’s,” I replied.

“All of these silly categories, ” the old novelist said, tsking and moving his head slowly back and forth as if in disapproval, the tassels drooped over one side of his big, ruddy face. “The way people whine, oh, I can’t like him, he’s a Fascist . Or, he’s a Communist . A Trotskyist. A pederast. A this. A that. I couldn’t care less if you’re a that . If you wear the official hat of the that .”

He walked over to the sideboard and lifted the small, trapezoidal shade from the lamp there. He traded it for his fez and said, “Look, now I’m a Maoist.” When none of us laughed he took it off and put the fez back on.

“ I care if a person is attentive,” he said, reclaiming his seat. “If they seem to have a brain. If there is a genuine quality to their manner — it’s the only way to judge someone.”

“And if my husband were here,” signora Valera said, “he would judge you an idiot. But I will tolerate your nonsense because you’re American and you had a crooked spine, could not fight in the war, and have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The spine is not the only part of mine that’s crooked,” Chesil whispered to me, grinning in a salacious way. “But she never complains about that .”

He asked the signora if she’d prefer that he’d had a straight spine and might have, who knows, even appeared over Lake Como with the American troops. Could she imagine? Him over Como, under a billowing parachute. “Like an angel,” he said. “I could have been your angel, Alba. But since I wasn’t fit for combat, I was merely a journalist in Naples when the Americans arrived in 1943, and that’s how they came. Softly, on great, white wings. The Italians, what can I say? They were starving, eating boiled cotton, sleeping under rubble. Stepping over their own purple relatives. We didn’t have it much better, just meager rations of fried Spam—”

“What’s that?” Talia asked.

“The innocence of a question. Spam, my child, is… ah… it’s pig marmalade. It and creamed corn and corpses — these were wartime delicacies. But I should say that we in the press corps did drink wine made from grapes of the Sordo vineyards, and not this bargain-basement rotgut your aunt stocks. But where was I… oh, yes, with my crooked spine, stuck merely observing your liberators, these magnificent American soldiers, beautiful blacks who urinated on the king’s throne in the Palazzo Reale. While the Italian mothers called out, ‘Hey, Joe, hey, Joe,’ and attempted to bargain their children on special Allied Forces discount. Conqueror’s credit. Also called rape, but what do I know?”

Sandro groaned and pushed back his chair. He wandered into the living room.

If you were one of them, you didn’t have to follow the rules. But I was not one of them and was sure it would have been held against me if I’d left in the middle of dinner. Sandro could not accept that Chesil was, as Sandro put it, his mother’s confidant. He was clearly more than a confidant, but Sandro could not acknowledge it, even as we sometimes saw the old novelist emerging from his mother’s quarters in the morning wearing a robe with the initials of Sandro’s father’s emblazoned on the breast pocket. Sandro said he couldn’t understand how his mother tolerated this ridiculous man in any capacity. I understood that she did tolerate him, and even why. She was lonely, and his ridiculousness was a form of vitality. It brought something to her life. In any case, many men were that way, but I couldn’t tell Sandro that men were ridiculous, and since his mother was not a lesbian they were her only option.

“I could have been your conqueror, Alba,” Chesil said, “I mean your liberator, right here in Bellagio, but as it is, I can only tell you about the Neapolitan mothers eager to sell their children on the piazzetta of the Cappella Vecchia. The girls bartered on the cheap to the American soldiers and the boys to the Moroccan soldiers, who fought with the women over the price of these ruined little creatures, snot and melted caramel running down their faces, the single caramel each sucked given to them to preserve an effect of innocence. To be fair, I suppose it is simply the destiny of the young the world over to be hawked in the streets. For hunger and desperation, they should be so lucky. Back home in America, what can I say? They’re sold in the streets, too, of course, but not for reasons of hunger or fear. It’s worse. Much worse.”

“Are you drunk?” Talia asked him. “What’s with you?”

He took off the hat and turned it in his hands, folded it closed like a flattened envelope and stroked the fur. “What’s with me,” he said, “is, as your aunt points out, a bit of scoliosis. But, oh, had my spine been unkinked! To remind you what cowardly shits you people were. Who was in this place, again?” he asked, rapping his knuckles on the table. “I forgot. Who was living here? You did have to clear out for a German overseer, but which? You are never in the mood to discuss it, dear Alba. Was it Dollmann? Kesselring? Or maybe Reder. Like the most rabid Germans, in fact an Austrian. Was it Reder who used this place as headquarters? That’s the Walter Reder, I mean, who blazed across central Italy, Pisa, Lucca, Caprara, Casaglia, killing almost two thousand people, according to the ‘winners’ who wrote the history books, as you might call them, my ardent Alba. Reder burned men, women, and children alive under gasoline and straw. Strange fellow, Reder. Missing a hand, wore a fake one covered in a black leather glove. Anyhow, the suffering of others must surely serve some purpose, right? But what is that purpose ? No one is ever sure of the answer. All I can tell you is that history is a goddamned dangerous place.”

“You must stop this,” the signora said, “stop it right now.”

But he didn’t, or couldn’t.

“At Casolari, one woman attempted to flee Reder with her newborn babe but was caught. After he finished her off, Reder threw the baby in the air and shot it like a clay pigeon. But of course a baby is not a clay pigeon. There is a thud, a lot of bleeding, a bundle of possibility left to rot in a field, covered with horseflies. I’ll end with the little boy of six whose entire family—”