Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” came over the radio, familiar bittersweet piano notes. Sandro loved that song, and it had always reminded me of our first date. Now I thought with sadness of Sandro’s departure for the meeting at the factory, the last moment of normalcy. Sandro kissing me. Chesil Jones, stiff and impatient in signora Valera’s Mercedes, ready to get the hell out of Dodge.

I felt lost to all that now. Lost to Sandro and to the humiliations of his fabulous moneyed stupid world. To the project at Monza. Didi had been kidnapped and the team manager had better things to concern himself with than me. And anyway I was here, which was… where? Someplace in Rome. In a crowded apartment with graffiti on its walls, young people talking loudly over Lou Reed’s sad, ardent voice, a boy and girl on the floor kissing. I turned away, not wanting to look. The sound of frying from the kitchen, the voices, the texture of energies, it was an enveloping reality. It filled the emptiness of having exiled myself from elsewhere.

A woman emerged from the kitchen and handed out plates of food. “Spaghetti Bolognese,” she said to me and then added in English, “with the meat on them.” Her name was Claudia, and from that moment she always spoke to me in lousy English, while everyone else addressed me in Italian. At first I was offended, until I realized she simply wanted to practice. Roberto had consistently spoken only English to me during my time at the villa, but his English was perfect and crisp, accustomed, as he was, to talking to finance people in London and New York. I wasn’t hungry but I accepted the spaghetti with the meat on them. I chatted with the girl with big white teeth, whose name was Lidia. She asked if I’d come to Rome for the demonstration. I said yes without much thinking about it. Gianni brought me. If that was what he was here for, then yes. Yes. I thought of the way he’d carefully avoided looking at me as I’d wiped my tears away, sitting and waiting in his parked car. How decent it had seemed that he’d said nothing, and included me in his plan, whatever that plan was. Gianni in a quilted mechanic’s jacket like my cousins wore. The clink of his tools, such a familiar sound, as he’d tinkered with the little Fiat’s engine that morning at the villa. The only recognizable thing to me here among these young Italians was Gianni — who was essentially a complete stranger, and yet I clung to him, alert to his every movement in that apartment in Rome.

People were coming for the march from all over Italy, Lidia with the big white teeth said. Naples, Sardinia, Milan, Turin. “Maybe they would have come anyway,” she said, “but now that there’s been a murder in Bologna, cold-blooded, they shot him in the back! Now, forget it. Everyone is coming, no? This is a war, no?” She phrased her assertions as questions but they weren’t like Nadine’s. They weren’t shaky ways of having a presence. The questioning tone was as if to say, You better agree with me, no? Of course, right?

Gianni appeared with the woman from the other room. They did not look at each other or touch. She went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of spaghetti for herself. She looked at him. “You’re not hungry?” He shook his head. Maybe she wasn’t his girlfriend. She was petite and blond, but with a dark sexiness, slanted, almost reptilian eyes, and with freckles covering her face, her arms, and her cleavage, visible under a low-necked smock, a kind of faux-medieval hippie dress, but like with the others, there was a toughness I didn’t connect to hippies. Her name was Bene. I’m just along for the ride, I thought at her as she introduced herself. I sensed, in the way she peered at me, that she was reckoning what she saw with what Gianni had said to her about me or my situation, whatever he interpreted it to be.

* * *

A week ago I had been in the swimming pool of a Bellagio mansion, watching Talia tread across the patio, her extra flesh jiggling with each step. Now the weather was cold and damp, the sky promising only more rain. I wore my same clothes as yesterday. I had slept on a dirty couch in an apartment filled with the type of people Roberto hated, involved in what he deplored: the Movement, as they called it.

The people in that apartment had been kind to me the previous night. There was something about them I could only describe as human. Humane. They didn’t ask who I was, why I was there, where I came from, what I did. One didn’t present credentials with these people, like in New York. “She’s with Sandro Valera.” “He shows with Helen Hellenberger.” They asked if I was hungry. They asked if I wanted a beer. They made me a bed to sleep on. They didn’t know anything about me. I was brought by Gianni, and that was all the information they needed. Gianni himself did not stay. He and the kid who had called himself Durutti went out into the black night, into the pouring rain. No one asked them where they were going. I was bothered that he was gone, and wanted to know where, but I tried to push it from my mind.

The Movement. I knew little to nothing about it, but it showed itself that night as their kindness to me, a stranger. Whether Gianni was in the Movement was unclear. He did not look like the rest of them, working-class handsome in his mechanic’s jacket. He was clean-cut, quiet and reserved, almost emotionless, or so he seemed. Before he and Durutti left, he sat reading the dusty-pink pages of Il Sole 24 Ore, and I had smiled privately because it was the same newspaper that Roberto read religiously, Italy’s version of the Wall Street Journal . I think the Valera family even owned part of it, or was part of the conglomerate of industries that owned it. The rest of them moved around Gianni, reading the business news in their free-form bedlam, as if this were precisely his role.

In the morning, there was no sign of him. Bene and Lidia, the girl with the big teeth, took me with them around the neighborhood. The apartment was on the Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, an area near the university that was so ugly it almost made me laugh, to think I might have assumed all of Rome looked like the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain. San Lorenzo had been bombed in World War Two and now it was a mass of drab, modern apartment buildings with television antennas jutting from every balcony and roof like hastily stabbed pushpins. Sacks of garbage hung from the windows like colostomy bags. There was graffiti on every building. I was used to graffiti from living in New York, but the graffiti in San Lorenzo was all urgent and angry messages, or ones with a kind of dull malaise, as if the exterior of the buildings were the walls of a prison.

“They throw us in jail and call it freedom.”

“They can’t catch me. I’m moving to Saturn where no one can find me.”

“When shit becomes a commodity the poor will be born without asses.”

Underneath, a crude picture of an ass, and “What do we want?”

“Everything.”

New York graffiti was not desperate communication. It was an exuberance of style, logo, name, the feat of installing jazzy pseudonyms, a burst of swirled color where the commuter had not thought possible. These were plain, stark messages written in black spray paint, at arm and eye level from the street. There were few pictures, with the exception of the occasional five-pointed star of the Red Brigades, which had appeared above Didi’s frightened face, in the photo of him in Corriere della Sera.

Why was a badly drawn pentagram so much more menacing than a perfectly drawn one? I wondered as we passed one, no message, just the five-pointed star.

It was the hand’s imperfection that made it menacing, I decided. But why that was, I didn’t know.