Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

The signora threw a sugar bowl at Chesil. Its top exploded on impact, and he was coated in white sugar.

A servant emerged from the kitchen, having heard the noise, but stayed back when she saw the expression on signora Valera’s face. I sat, not sure where to look, resenting Sandro for having been able to get up and leave.

“I guess the genie,” Chesil said, wiping sugar from his front, “is out of the bottle. Some things have been said. Decanted.”

Signora Valera’s face was almost translucent with anger.

“You are the genie,” she said, her voice quavering. “You’re out of your own bottle. You’ve only humiliated yourself. That’s all.”

He lowered his ruddy face toward the table and nodded slowly with dawning regret. He stood up and brushed himself off. Sugar released itself from the folds of his shirt and slacks and formed a residue around his chair.

“I am sorry. My apologies. Mosquitoes bit me today and I think I’m having a bad reaction. I’m feeling dizzy, actually,” and he excused himself from dinner.

* * *

The next day, the rantings and insults that characterized our meals at the villa all but stopped. Bad news had arrived by telephone.

Workers had gone on strike at the main Valera tire plant outside Milan, blocking the entrances. The scabs the company brought in were dragged from the assembly line and beaten. Even the white-collar scabs, there for accounting and secretarial work, were taken out and beaten. Equipment was sabotaged at other Valera plants, which also experienced strikes.

Over the next couple of mornings, while Sandro and I drank coffee and chewed stale bread, the newspaper reported that a high-level manager at Fiat had been kidnapped and ransomed, another kneecapped on his way to take his midmorning coffee, and a judge who was trying the case of two Red Brigades members was killed.

Roberto and the signora spoke a great deal about the possibility of some kind of calamity, which they didn’t name. Sandro felt they were acting hysterical and was, like me, counting the days until they all went back to Milan and we would be alone in the villa. But they weren’t hysterical. They were marked people. I see that now.

Then, I would not have called them marked, or known how it was that marked people behaved. But the significance of the armed guard newly stationed at the gates adjacent to the groundskeeper’s cottage was not lost on me. The guard, a former paratrooper in stiff, tight jeans, stood around smoking brown cigarettes and alternately touching his mustache and adjusting his balls in the tight jeans. Talia made fun of him, pretending to touch her own mustache, adjust her own balls. “He bleaches the crotch area of those jeans,” she said, “to give it a bulkier look.”

Neither was the meaning of the armed guard who traveled up and down the short stradina with Roberto in his Alfa Romeo lost on me. Nor the hushed discussions that took place between Roberto and the Count of Bolzano, when the count came to dinner on the evening after the judge presiding over the Red Brigades case was killed.

By that point I no longer held any hope of liking Sandro’s family, of finding a way to be liked by them. When I had consented to spending a week at the villa with Sandro’s mother, I’d had no real sense of what I was getting into, and somehow a week had been stretched to ten days and was beginning to feel like an eternity. I knew that nothing I said would please his mother, that I would be insulted by Roberto, outshone by Talia, and talked at incessantly by Chesil Jones, who’d had a servant place a stack of his books next to our bed, and I’d even been curious about them and had been reading from his first novel, Summertime, until I attempted to pay him a compliment and he corrected me for mispronouncing the name of his central character and began quizzing me in an unpleasant manner about the salient themes of his own book, as if it were assigned reading.

I had no sympathy for these people and thought I’d be secretly amused when the calamity Roberto and Sandro’s mother were expecting finally arrived. The company, the family, were under attack. I didn’t much care, and I never would have guessed that any of the bad news would have an impact on me.

After dinner, just as the Count of Bolzano was leaving, the phone rang. A servant answered and relayed a message to the signora in a whisper.

“Kidnapped?” the signora asked.

A foreman at the plant? A company lawyer?

No. It was Didi Bombonato, who was shopping in the Brera district in Milan, trying on sheepskin coats when he was shoved into a car and driven to an unknown location.

“But is he… ours ?” the signora asked Roberto, the first person she called.

“Then why should we pay to have him released?” she said after a silence. “Perhaps someone else can pay. His family, or the government. What on earth do they want? The answer is no.”

The next day it was the headline of Corriere della Sera . A high-profile kidnapping by the Red Brigades. That was why they’d done it. When a company president was kidnapped it was buried in the business section, barely news. Didi was front-page material, a national icon. There was a photo of him taken after his capture, a look on his face of pure, childlike fear.

I thought of his separate status that week on the salt, the way he’d simmered with hatred of the mechanics upon whom he relied, and they also seemed to waste no love or loyalty on him. I wondered if any of those mechanics could be involved.

I was supposed to be with them at Monza in a week. I called the team manager but was unable to get through.

Sandro laughed sadly. “I warned you. And not just about my family, but Italy. The place is in shambles.”

Sandro said that Roberto had instituted some of the most severe shop-floor policies of any company, and that Roberto was reviled by union leaders and workers, that nothing was going to end well. The workers, he said, came from the south, lived in miserable conditions. Their wives and children put together Moto Valera ignition sets at the kitchen table, working all night because they were paid by the piece, whole families contracted under piecework, which was practically slave labor. Now, poor people all over Italy — in Milan, Bologna, Rome, Naples — were setting their own prices for rent, electricity, bread. The whole structure was unstable, Sandro said, and I understood more clearly, seeing him here, why he kept as far away as he could. Here he was forced to face himself, to be among them. He would go to their board meeting and try to talk sense into his brother and mother, because his would be the only moderate voice in the room.

Two days into Didi’s captivity, the Valeras were still not paying. Meanwhile, more bad news arrived by telephone: a security guard at one of the Valera Company warehouses was shot in the legs. And that same day, at another plant, a section boss was beaten brutally while workers looked on, none of them stepping in to prevent it.

With the shadowy presence of our paratrooper security guard and the many recent violent events, Chesil Jones began speaking in alarmed tones about the personal danger he faced. When Sandro’s mother implored him to take another slice of veal at lunch, he accused her of fattening him like a hen for someone to nab.

“But you arrived here already fat,” she said.

At which point he accepted the second veal slice and said fatness was a mark of moral health.

His fantasy of being taken from the villa became a running joke.

“If it were to happen,” signora Valera said, “he’d run his mouth and they’d do all they could to get rid of him. They’d push him from their getaway car, anything not to have to listen to him anymore!”