Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Bene didn’t mention Gianni. I asked at one point where he was.

“Doing the same thing he does at the Valera place. Fixing things, ” she said in English, with a look I could not read.

She took me with her to drop off flyers about the demonstration on the Piazza Navona. As we encountered people she knew, she introduced me as an American who told Roberto Valera to fuck off. I didn’t want to let her down by saying I’d done no such thing. That rather, his brother had broken my heart, and I’d run away like an injured animal.

The Piazza Navona was lined with outdoor café tables, young people seated around them. Bene said it had been more crowded before the sweep. A lot of the people around here were hauled off to prison, she said. When I asked what for, she shrugged and said, knowing someone who was involved in illegal activities. Or having your name on a lease of an apartment where someone later stayed who was in the vicinity of a bombing. Disrespectful to the state. They can get you for anything, she said, now that they’ve changed the laws back to Mussolini’s.

“If you drive near the prison at night,” she said, “you can see torches made of bedsheets hanging through the cell bars. It’s really sad. These lights shining into the blackness, at no one. Half the people from around here are there, at Rebibbia, where no one can see them. All they are now is something burning from a window.”

I watched a woman who sat with two men who had a movie camera. She was young, a teenager, and beautiful in both a tragic and an unmarked way. It was her smile, dimpled, sweet, and naive, and her patient tolerance of the older men who directed her, that seemed tragic. One of the men filmed while the other spoke to her, asking what her name was, where she was from.

“Anna,” she said, and smiled at them. “From Cagliari.”

“Wait,” the man filming said. “One more time, but slower.”

The first man stepped back and approached her again, just as he had the first time, asking her what her name was and where she was from.

“Cagliari,” she said again, this time enunciating with more care.

“Cagliari,” the man sitting with her repeated.

“Sì,” she said, and then she explained that her parents were Sardinian but had moved to Paris. And from Paris she had run away, back here, to the Piazza Navona, because, she said, holding out her wrists and showing them the scars there, they put her in a hospital in Paris. Put her somewhere, in any case, as I didn’t know the word they were using— manicomio, which I later looked up. Madhouse.

It was clear she knew them already, that they had instructed her to pretend they were strangers for the purpose of the film, but with her dirty clothes, her unbrushed hair, she looked like a runaway living on the Piazza Navona. I had the feeling she was not an actress. That they were directing her to play herself.

“You’ve been sleeping here?” the man asked.

“Yes,” she said, looking up at him with her sweet, open face.

I stared at the young runaway, la biondina, they kept calling her. She stood up and put her hands on her belly, which protruded high and round under her poncho. She smiled at me, but in a way that let me know yes, she was pregnant, and that she didn’t much appreciate being stared at.

“She’s been here for a week,” Bene said. “Sleeping on the street, hanging out with drug addicts. Those two bums — I don’t know what they’re up to, but I can’t imagine they’ll help her.”

They lived downstairs from Bene and the others, in the same building on the Via dei Volsci.

We watched as the one filming followed the other, who walked alongside the biondina, holding her arm. She turned to him. He put his hand on her forehead.

“I need a bed,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

The one filming said cut, and asked her to repeat it.

“I need a bed. A place to lie down,” she said.

“You have a fever?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re pregnant and you sleep on the streets?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled in a perfectly guileless way.

* * *

My one trip to Rome, when I was a student in Florence, was only for two days and it had been a lonely tour of sights: the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, where pickup artists worked on young girls, the Colosseum, a great decaying skull whose grassed-over arena was all but lost in a strange haze of thereness, unreal because it existed, now, without its former use. Tourists watched each other and roamed the crumbling edges, unable to feel the scale as a populated place, a mesh of attentions and shoutings, a looking of thousands upon a ring of human violence. It had been empty when I got there. A gray kitten rolled on its back, inviting me to pet its white, furry loins. I’d bent down. There was no sound but the traffic that banded the exterior of the Colosseum, and the kitten, which had begun to purr.

You can’t feel a crowd in an emptiness. That had been my thought in the Colosseum.

But here, in the Piazza Esedra, there were so many bodies massed together that they formed a vast shifting texture, a sea of heads filling the square. Above them, fabric banners rippling. Sound swells rolling across the immense piazza like great sluggish ocean waves, voices shifting directions.

All these people and their bright banners, which weren’t cheerful exactly, in stoic white, blood red, ink black. A rain-swollen sky pressed down, darkened to slate by the late-afternoon light. The air had an electric feel, as it does when a storm has moved in but has not yet unleashed itself. The electric air and the premature darkness gave those moments, the gathering before this march was to begin, a granular sort of intensity, every color and surface vivid and distinct.

The shops were closed, their corrugated metal shutters rolled down. The one exception was the Feltrinelli bookstore, which remained open. The clerks were handing out free copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, cheap plastic-coated copies like Gideon Bibles. I thought of Roberto’s insistence that Feltrinelli’s death was necessary and good, and Chesil Jones claiming it was an act of stupidity, a mix-up of positive and negative leads. Fools love to declare that they don’t suffer fools. It was a lusty pleasure for the old novelist to say the word. Fool. Weakness made him say it, even as the word made him feel strong. I didn’t know if Feltrinelli got his positive and negative leads mixed up but I felt he must have been a serious person, as Sandro said. In any case, death was death: it had its own gravity. Watching the shiny red books passed through the crowd I had the thought that Sandro, who sympathized with anyone willing to think some other mode of existence besides rich-man-takes-all, would have appreciated this scene. But he wasn’t here.

When the Piazza Esedra was completely full, people leaked into the side streets to which the police would allow entry. There were sections. The women’s sections, the high schools, the various representatives from factories — Valera, Fiat, SIT-Siemens, Magneti Marelli, who made wiring harnesses for Moto Valera. There were the students from the university, bespectacled and grave, their faces masked with scarves. The Bologna contingent, here to avenge the death of the young radical who had been gunned down by police yesterday. Another group filed in, their cheeks and eyes painted like mimes with black and white theater makeup, hollering like Indians. “We want nothing!” they chanted. One carried a sign that said, “More work, less pay!” Another: “Down with the people, up with the bosses!” “More shacks, less housing!” They were young, and dressed in the most ragged clothes imaginable, old shoes without laces, pants with huge, sagging knee-rips, elbows jutting through their moth-bitten sweaters. I watched as one of the boys eyed a woman putting out her cigarette, and then he walked over, picked it up, asked her for a light, and sauntered away, puffing on her cigarette butt. They spoke in a dialect I could barely understand, words that were quick and slurred and open like their laceless shoes.