Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

The types Roberto was probably referring to. Who he claimed had nothing to say but I have long hair . I thought of what Sandro had told me about people setting their own rent, their own bus fare. Kids with no part in bourgeois life. With their perverse messages and ratty clothes, they made Talia’s air of toughness seem like princess toughness, nothing but an upper-class performance.

They were from remote slums on the outskirts of Rome, Bene explained. There’s nothing to do out there, she said. They’re young and it’s like they’re left for dead. Ronnie would have appreciated them. I had that thought, anyway. But when I tried to sustain the idea amid the waves of sound rolling across the square, the banners rippling, the crowd becoming more and more dense, I decided that this context was too massive for Ronnie. I could not have guessed what he would say about these kids and the feeling they gave off, of life lived in the present moment, an air of nothing to lose. I thought of Ronnie’s personal ad, his joke, printed in Sharpie on the bathroom wall at Rudy’s. “Looking for an enemy.” Really he meant friend. And the scrawled question under it, “But how do we find each other?” Which was probably also Ronnie, something he wrote himself. He loved to talk about the ways in which people were processed and accounted for in the modern world. Numbered street addresses, he said, were relatively new. In the Old World, there was a natural vetting process, according to Ronnie. A stranger enters a village and declares who it is he is looking for. He is either turned away or assisted, depending.

How do we find each other?

It repeated in my head as more and more people packed into the enormous square. The “we” of it: people lost in the vast thickets of the world. People lost among people, since there wasn’t anything else. The world was people, which made the prospect of two finding each other more desolate. It was like finding a lover, pure chance and missed connections. It was finding a lover.

The pregnant girl, Anna, the biondina, wove through the crowd in her poncho, her same guileless smile, which said, “I have nothing to protest. I’m here to be here.”

The two men making a movie about her followed with camera and microphone.

“I’m hungry,” she said to them. “Let’s go eat.”

“Say it again,” the one with the camera said.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and smiled shyly at them.

The one with the microphone leaned in toward the biondina and placed his hand on her breast.

She looked at him with a child’s mischievous delight.

“There’s milk,” she said, holding her breasts up for him.

“Milk,” he said, leaning to see down into her poncho. He was in his midforties, I guessed. Balding and scraggly.

She pushed with her hands, squirting a fine light stream up at him.

He took off his glasses, wiped his face, and laughed.

The kids with the painted faces had formed a circle and were doing an improvised rain dance.

“Rain! Rain! Rain!” they yelled. “We want it to rain! Kill the sun! Kill the sun! Harpoon it out of the sky!”

A long row of carabinieri pushed into the square, forming a perimeter. The diagonal white slashes of their bandoliers converged into a vast mesh, as if they were part of a performance. Each held out his right arm, right hand covered in a huge black gauntlet glove, pushing people out of the way as they sealed off the exits to the square.

“Arrest us!” the kids with painted faces yelled at the carabinieri.

“We want to go to jail! Come on — take us to prison! Rebibbia! Rebibbia! Rebibbia! Rebibbia! ”

They chanted it louder and louder, some of them banging on upturned pots and buckets. Rain started to fall. The carabinieri moved in with their black gauntlet gloves and grabbed the loudest of the kids and dragged him, screaming, to a paddy wagon, wrenched his hands behind his back, kicked him in the ribs, and shoved him inside. The rest of them opened their mouths and hollered in an eerie cacophony. Eerie because it wasn’t a cheer and it wasn’t a lament. It was ambiguous, or it was both mixed together, an ecstatic warning.

The carabinieri blocked off the large boulevard where the march was meant to take place, using barricades and a row of armored vehicles. Behind the barricades and in front of the vehicles riot police stood shoulder to shoulder, black helmets, visors up. The carabinieri didn’t have helmets like the riot police. They wore hats with shiny visors like beat cops in New York City, and like beat cops out in the rain, they had fitted elasticized plastic covers over their hats. The carabinieri blew their whistles, while the riot police— celerini, Bene said they were called — tried to move people away from the barricades, pushing them in the direction of Termini, the train station. The celerini were complete bastards, Bene said. I began to film the crowd, scanning across the groups. “But those guys,” she said, pointing, “can fight back. Untie the fabric, and wham.” It was the Valera contingent, raising their banner, a huge white cloth with red letters. The banner, I saw, was supported on each end by tire irons.

Thinking Sandro would have appreciated the free copies of Mao’s Little Red Book was naive, I knew. If he were here, he would have wished to be gone and, like his Argentine friend M, to not have to discuss the matter, which both did and did not concern him. But he was elsewhere. I was alone and rootless. I had fallen through a hole and landed in a massive crowd of strangers, this stream of faces, a pointillism of them. Face after face after face. If someone wanted to turn Ronnie’s fake mandate to photograph every living person into a sincere proposition, I thought, panning the camera across the piazza, this would be a place to start.

* * *

We were moving out of the piazza, down a narrow lane closed to auto traffic, the whistles of the carabinieri echoing in the wet and empty street ahead of us, people chanting and shouting. The women’s groups were marching first.

Italy was backward in its treatment of women. Divorce had become legal in 1974. Abortion was illegal. A lot of the women’s banners were about rape. That I knew about these issues through Sandro, who would go on at length, made my chest tighten. Sandro, interested in feminism. A sympathizer. A man who apparently loved women so much he had cheated on me the moment it was convenient to do so. And possibly he had been doing it all along. Helen. Gloria. Talia. And for what logical reason did Giddle dump a drink over his head? Did he think I was stupid? Yes, he did. And I was that stupid. Or rather, I willed myself to that state. Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don’t look carefully at what isn’t acceptable to you. Gloria had come to the loft to collect a box of personal effects in the wake of my move to Sandro’s. She looked directly at me, the box in her hands, offered no explanation, and I knew, and she knew that I knew, but what would have been the point of making a scene about it with Sandro? She was leaving with her stuff. I was replacing her, and whatever secret complexity Sandro maintained with the wives of his friends was something I preferred not to think about. I took him as he was, not as something perfect that he wasn’t. But that tacit acceptance, too, had a kind of good faith in it that he’d trampled. Now, Gloria’s direct stare, the box in her hands, it was all one insult. Sandro’s insult. Watching these women with their bullhorns, shouting, “You’ll pay for everything!” I took their rage and negotiated myself into its fabric. I fused my sadness over something private to the chorus of their public lament.