Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

I heard the little Fiat approaching from behind. I moved to the side of the road. The groundskeeper slowed. He said they had forgotten a file of important papers and that he was bringing it to the factory. He’d left the gate open, for me to get back in.

I thanked him.

The reason to stay home, to avoid riding in a car with his mother, had already fallen away. If I went with him, I could film at the factory, the one reason to have gone. I asked if he could take me along.

He nodded and shrugged, as if to say, Sure. What difference does it make?

“You can return with him,” he said.

Him. He meant Sandro.

“You’re not coming back?” I asked.

“No.”

I got in and he took me back up the road so I could get my knapsack, camera, and my passport, because he said I’d have to have proper identification to get inside the factory.

As I grabbed my things, I was thinking how much I’d fallen into a kind of ditch, how eager I was for contact with anyone outside Sandro’s mother’s loyal little circle.

When I got back in the car, the groundskeeper looked at me as if he knew what I was thinking, but he could not have.

* * *

Gray concrete and puffing smoke from huge vertical towers. Concrete-block buildings under clouds that pressed low and dark, promising rain. Those shades of gray: sky, concrete, and smoke were the first impressions as the groundskeeper motored his little Fiat along the perimeter.

At the factory gates was a large group of men with signs. They swarmed around a car that was attempting to pass through the gates. I expected some kind of conflict, but they only handed flyers to the men in the car. The groundskeeper unrolled his window and called to one of the picketing men by name. He and the groundskeeper spoke briefly.

“You know them,” I said.

“I worked here.”

I looked at the flyer he’d handed the groundskeeper. The strike was tomorrow.

“Sandro said it was today.”

“Sandro? That’s his name?”

That he didn’t know the names of the family members came as a surprise. Sandro was Michele Alessandro, properly speaking, and the groundskeeper probably only knew his full name and not what he went by. I realized the Valeras were nothing to him. Of no consequence. He was as free of them as that wolf that slept in matted briars.

“He told you the strike is today? Workers decide when the strike is,” he said.

Factory guards checked the car, the trunk, the groundskeeper’s papers, my passport, the camera and knapsack, and let us through.

“They won’t let you film, you know,” the groundskeeper said.

If I were with Sandro, different rules would apply. I nodded and kept the camera in my knapsack.

Beyond the guard station was a city of tires. Stacks and stacks of them, gleaming like black doughnuts. Shuddering, deafening noises, heavy, bitter air, and repeating rows of textured black O’s. The workers had on white coveralls like Didi Bombonato’s race techs at the salt flats had worn, “Valera” in red script over the breast pocket, as they operated forklifts that moved these giant doughnuts around. We kept driving. A train yard, cars filled with carbon black, and men, their faces and their white coveralls grimed in it, unloading the carbon black with shovels, silos towering behind them.

We parked and made our way toward a set of interior offices, the groundskeeper carrying the leather valise that Sandro’s mother had forgotten. I had my knapsack but didn’t want to disrespect the groundskeeper’s word by pulling out the camera. I’d wait until we found Sandro.

“Is that how you know signora Valera,” I asked him, “from working here?”

“You don’t meet the family dynasty when you work on the assembly line,” he said.

We walked for a bit in silence.

“I was passing through the area,” he said. “A neighbor said she could use me at the villa. That’s all. No connection to the factory.”

“Do you like working for her?”

“She’s a fine person.”

As he said it, I realized I’d hoped he would say something negative.

“Everyone respects her,” he added.

She wasn’t to be messed with. You didn’t try to talk about her to her own staff, who, whether they hated her or not, were not going to expose hidden resentments to her son’s American girlfriend.

We walked along the exterior of a building. Crossed through an area of parked forklifts and beyond them a series of giant spools, “Valera” printed on them, the letters gone slightly blurry on the rough plywood of the spools. We got to another building, where the groundskeeper had been told they were, but the entrance was locked. He said to wait here, that he’d go around to the other side.

I sat on the steps of the building and waited. I could hear the echo of loud things being dropped from forklifts, the whine of engines in reverse gear. There was no one around, and I decided to film the smokestacks, which erupted with bursts of steam every few minutes. There was another smokestack that sent out a volley of yellow flames intermittently. The length of a single roll of film was three minutes. Short enough that it was worth trying to capture something while he was gone. I panned from one smokestack to another. I was experimenting. If I wanted to make a film of a factory, I would first need to see how a factory looked on film. I wandered along, filming the building’s exterior. When I got to the corner, I filmed a desolate alleyway between warehouses. Although not entirely desolate. There were two people down at the far end, leaning against a wall. Two people, face-to-face, as I saw through the viewfinder. A man and woman, and I thought it was odd to see a woman here, because I had only seen men in their white work coveralls. I kept the camera on the two people, watching them through the viewfinder. The man pulled the woman toward him, and then I wondered if I should be filming them. That was my thought. Should I be filming this? My first thought was not that the man was Sandro and the woman was Talia, although there was no mistaking. If there would have been a way of mistaking, I would have done so. They were face-to-face, leaned against the wall. He was kissing her, his body pressed to hers. I put the camera down and hit stop.

As I walked hurriedly down the alleyway toward them I heard a voice.

“Don’t interrupt them!” An old man in company coveralls, laughing.

I grabbed Sandro by the back of his shirt. The worst part of it, of everything, was the look on his face in that moment he turned around and saw me. Talia stood there, impassive. I went to hit her. Sandro grabbed my hands and held them firmly. He was holding my hands down so I wouldn’t hurt her. He was protecting her. Against me.

I pulled away from him and ran. Sandro did not come after me. He did not come after me.

* * *

The checkpoints seemed unconcerned with a crying American woman. No one stopped me as I reversed my route and tried to find my way back to the entrance.

I was not thinking, as I moved toward the parking lot, through the blur of the factory grounds, about what I might lose, was losing. There was just flight. Hurt and flight propelling me to the groundskeeper’s car.

I sat in the passenger seat watching smoke rise from a chimney and darken the undersides of rain clouds. A simple existence, moving up and out, joining the clouds, dirtying them. Another smokestack emitted a forceful burst of steam, which cauliflowered outward and upward. I remembered that Sandro said the company made petrochemicals for the tires now, that it was much cheaper than natural rubber and more durable.

Rain began to fall. At first lightly, and then it surged, running down the windshield, encasing the car in its noise, and I had the quick thought that the whole world was against me. But the rain, I knew, was not against me. It was indifferent, not the same as the hurtful indifference of Sandro, the look on his face when he realized I was there. His expression showed the fatigue of someone who was only wary of a mess. Not pained. And then holding my arms down — not to touch me but to contain me. Having seen Talia naked, and that she had an awkward body and heavy legs, added in a surprising way to the pain I felt, sitting in a stranger’s car in the parking lot of a tire factory thousands of miles from home. Sandro cared about bodies. He liked tall, lean women. He always said so. All of his attention to me, physically, was focused on my body and his praise of it, his gratitude for its proportions. Given that Talia’s body was awkward, there must have been real desire there. What he liked was not for me to see or know. In the first few months we were together, I could feel him running his hands over me all night long, even in his sleep. Slender bodies, but not too slender, with a waist, was what he loved. Talia was chunky and short, and yet he had pulled her toward him outside the plant office as if he wanted something. Pressed her against him, and I knew where this led. To quick passion in a public place, which was his taste. His taste whether with me or with someone else.