Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

In the stream of bodies, I lost Lidia and Bene almost immediately. The rain was coming hard. I was soaked through, letting the crowd jostle me this way and that, the police moving alongside the women as if they were a threat.

The people marching up ahead started moving backward. Those behind us were trying to move forward. There was no place to go, and then the riot police Bene had warned me about, the celerini, closed in, their faces and bodies clad and hidden behind shields, pushing and clubbing the women who were trapped in their path. I felt my stomach drop. It was that moment on the Ferris wheel when the car sweeps backward and up.

People were screaming, trying to flee from the piazza up ahead, where there was a fire. Smoke filled the street. A bus had been turned on its side and was burning like a giant torch. A building in the piazza also was burning. The celerini herded us into a kind of centerless spiral and began arresting as many women as they could seize, pulling them by limbs or hair or handbag, dragging them.

I worked my way to an open side street by following a small group of young women who seemed to know where to go, how to avoid the row of police vans into which others were being shoved.

The march continued up the Via del Corso but differently now, the orderly procession of groups broken apart and scattered after the fire and arrests. There was a palpable anger. The students with their grim expressions and delicate eyeglasses were pulling paving stones up from the streets, walking with the stones in their hands.

Via del Corso was like the Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, an avenue of chic and expensive boutiques. The shop fronts didn’t have corrugated metal gates. They were like glass dioramas, chalk-white mannequins gazing imperiously.

“Underneath the paving stones, more paving stones!” someone yelled.

I heard the crash of breaking glass.

“Expropriate! Expropriate!”

Three kids with painted faces came running past clutching fur coats, the war paint on their cheeks dripping down, sweat and rain-smeared, stacks of furs over their arms like midtown Manhattan coat-check clerks.

“Furs for the people!” Plastic hangers dropping behind them as they ran.

Windows were methodically smashed as the procession moved down the Via del Corso. Police zigzagged through the crowd in pursuit of the vandals — jeans for the people, handbags for the people, wine for the people, shoes — but there were too many. A shop was on fire, black smoke pouring out from the rectangle of darkness where the door’s glazing had been. There were Molotovs and Moka bombs, as they called them, made the usual way — cotton plus gasoline, add match — but instead of a bottle they used a little stovetop espresso maker. “Better to run with,” it was later explained to me by an eight-year-old, the son of someone in the apartment on the Via dei Volsci. “It even has a handle! With glass, it slips from your fingers and that’s it,” he said. “Buum!”

The shop engulfed in flames was Luisa Spagnoli, the same as the place in Milan where Sandro had bought me the velvet dress. “They use slave labor from the women’s prisons!” a young woman was shouting. It was women throwing the firebombs now. Dress shops. A department store. A lingerie boutique. Up the Corso they moved.

As I heard another window shatter I saw white balloons, a flock of them, rising.

I took out the camera and filmed.

Why this? I couldn’t say. But I watched through the viewfinder as the balloons went up, riding smoothly skyward on invisible elevators. Up, up, passing each floor of a tall building. Balloons pure and drifting, their stretched skin the sheer white of nurses’ stockings.

A feeling of calm settled over the Via del Corso. There was a break in the rain. People were quieting one another. Fingers raised to lips. A young girl was going to sing. An area was cleared around her. I kept my camera going.

She wore theater makeup, red and white bordered in black fanning out in triangles under each eye, curious geometric teardrops, wedges of color pulling her expression downward, her pretty face a pictograph of sadness, but a lovely, strange, and playful sadness. Her face was some kind of counterreality, in which play and tragedy had equal parts, or had traded places.

She looked skyward. She, too, was tracking the balloons. They were from a department store — La Rinascente, it was called, as I saw when one of them floated low, the name printed over the thin, nurse-stocking skin of the balloon.

A sound issued from the girl’s throat, smooth and unmodulated.

“Sixteen years old with a voice like Callas,” someone said.

As she finished her song and we began to clap, a burst of shots erupted, a metallic pop-pop. People screamed, pushed, ran. I saw Gianni. Our eyes met and he came toward me. Where had he been? He never did explain, later, when there was time to do so. There were more shots. The celerini were there, shields up, batons out, men barely human under so much gear. Gianni and I ran. People darted through the crowd in their own “gear,” motorcycle helmets with face shields pulled down. It was the next level of anonymity, from a bandanna over your face. And it protected the head, just as the celerini, too, protected theirs. A man ran next to us in a ski mask, those cartoonish eyeholes like the symbol for infinity. Gianni gripped my arm, yanking me as we fled. When I tripped and should have fallen I skittered along like his teddy bear, until he righted me and I could run again.

That face, with the ski mask, the infinity eyeholes. It was another counterreality, but not like that of the girl who sang. The person in the ski mask: tall, gangly, in a dirty blazer open and flapping. Running with a gun in his gloved hand.

He turned back. Aimed his gun at the police and fired.

Gianni and I ran down a side street. Something whistled through the air. A hissing bloom of smoke filled the street, the air white. My eyes burning, spilling tears, Gianni pulling me. The camera slipped from my hands. I stumbled over it, couldn’t see. I heard people retching. Gianni pulled the neck of my shirt up over my mouth and nose. It was automatic, the way he went to cover my face. He turned away, spit up, pulled his own scarf up to his eyes. Coughs echoed everywhere. The air was white; it was like being in a cloud that had moved down over a mountain, the vertigo of not knowing which direction is falling and which is up. I coughed and coughed, unable to make it through the coughing to its other side, to a place of not coughing. The camera didn’t matter because I could not breathe. Gianni held on to my arm, but his grip was tense and impersonal.

As the smoke thinned, the people around us reappeared, in gas masks of various styles and types, or with scarves tied in complicated ways over their faces, like Gianni. They’d been waiting for this. I had not.

* * *

The demonstration had begun at dusk, under stormy skies. One hundred thousand people, a tenth of them apparently with guns hidden in a pocket. By the time Gianni and I reached the end, at the Piazza del Popolo, it was completely dark. People crowded in and told stories of police beatings, of the thousands who had been arrested. Someone gave out lemon-soaked rags, which we held over our mouths. Bottles of Coca-Cola were passed around. You were meant to dribble some over your eyes, as Gianni showed me, to stop the stinging. Guns were handed out among the people in the Piazza del Popolo, looted from a rifle shop. I was passed one and it was far heavier than I would have expected.

Popolo means crowd or multitude. Popolaccio : rabble or mob.

I left with Gianni just as the police began arresting anyone on the street who was wet. Anyone in possession of lemons. Anyone who smelled of gasoline. That smell was pervasive. The students smelled of it. Some of the women. All of the men. It was something I associated with Reno kids, my cousins and their friends, always smelling of gasoline. Scott and Andy returning from the filling station in the back of Uncle Bobby’s pickup truck with pink gasoline in plastic jugs, or siphoning it from unsuspecting neighbors with a segment of old garden hose, their studious expressions, pulling gasoline, angling the siphoned liquid into a container, sometimes getting a mouthful by mistake. Gasoline was a summertime smell. Long solstice days. The rangy Doppler of a lawn mower. Scott and Andy done with their chores, their dirt bikes up on milk crates, the winding sound of socket wrenches in the suffocating heat of an afternoon garage. Boys who loved the smells of gas and oil and carburetor cleaner, soaking into their hands, soaked into the red shop rags they used to clean engine parts, cleaning these parts in a manner so fastidious it was as if they were cleaning tarnish from expensive jewelry, working the rags over the tiny set-screws of their carburetors. The hands that cleaned carburetor and engine parts, permanently black.