Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

That I could draw no connection between that world and this one, the people who stank of gasoline in the Piazza del Popolo, and Scott and Andy who loved its smell, made me sad for Scott and Andy in a way I could not explain.

* * *

That night, the second one sleeping in my same clothes, I lay on the couch and thought of those white balloons I’d filmed, retrieving what I could from memory, since the camera was lost. The sight of them, floating, took me to a park in Reno when I was small. Children were gathered, a group of us seated in an open grassy area. Someone had given us each a balloon. We counted down, and then let go of our balloons. I remembered how the sky had looked after we had opened our hands to let them rise. It was late afternoon, and as the balloons went higher they were set alight by the sun’s stronger angle, gold light that only the balloons were high enough to reach. I remembered watching them fade, smaller and smaller, lone voyagers on floating journeys, the sky their ocean, with the ocean’s depth and immensity.

I was lying on the couch in that apartment, riding the vast unknown sea with those untethered balloons, when I heard a soft cry, a woman’s voice from the other room. Then another cry. The knocking of a bed frame against a wall. I tried to relocate the scene of the balloons and to pretend I was not tracking these sounds, a rhythmic thump, a woman’s cries. Durutti was on the couch across from me. I could tell by his breathing that he was deep asleep, and I envied his innocence.

I was awake, waiting for those cries, listening to the thud of the bed frame against the wall. The cries were Bene’s. Bene being made to voice those sounds by, I was sure, Gianni, while I was alone on a couch with my childish memory, a person neither in a movement nor of one.

And, in fact, they weren’t actually cries. Or rather, the first was a cry, but thereafter they were voiced sighs, so faint I’d had to hold my breath to hear them. The truth is, I was listening very carefully.

* * *

The next day, and in the days that followed it, three, four, five — I lost count, surrounded by people who didn’t work or go to school or have any compelling reason to care what day of the week it was — I did not think of myself as someone who needed to make decisions. Decisions about Sandro, about New York. I was, instead, one of the people in that Volsci apartment where so many congregated, who had been in the march, who had not been injured or arrested. And by escaping those two outcomes, injury, arrest, I was part of the rage and celebration. One person at the demonstration had died, hit in the neck by a tear gas canister. Many others were beaten by the celerini or by the Fascist gangs that had surged into the rear segment of the march, swinging lead pipes. The kids with gun in pocket, the Valera workers with their tire irons disguised as banner dowels, were, it turned out, merely protecting themselves.

Demonstrations were temporarily banned by the government. There was to be no loitering, no collecting in groups. People all over the city responded to this. Someone figured out how to trip the traffic lights, and they all turned red and stayed red for an afternoon, causing gridlock. Other acts were coordinated by the radio station that was broadcast from inside the apartment, a soundproofed room next to Bene’s. Durutti went on the air and invited Romans who were hungry to go out, order food, eat it, and refuse to pay. The radio station was a central coordinating voice. Not a government, but a way to speak to each person, a voice addressing each autonomous person. These are the new figures for rent, the voice said. Pay this amount to the electric company. The things Roberto complained about: this was how they were done. The radio pulsed through a network. A network of people who acted in concert against the government, against the factories, against everything that was against them. We’ll take what we can and pay what we want. We’ll pay nothing for what is already ours. Bene and Lidia hosted an hourlong morning show addressed to women. One day it was dedicated to the housewives of Rome; the next, to the working prostitutes of Termini. To the women in the armed struggle. The women inside Rebibbia. To the men who have reduced the world to a pile of trash. To our lesbian comrades. The show was called Everyday Violence .

“Sisters,” Bene said, “men can put you in touch with the world. We see that. Men connect you to the world, but not to your own self.”

“To fight with a gun,” Bene said, “is to take it upon yourself to think for others. So think clearly and well.”

The radio station was jammed repeatedly, the broadcast overtaken by a sudden whistling sound, but Lidia, with Durutti’s help, managed to locate another position on the bandwidth and continued broadcasting.

When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I’d seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week.

Downstairs from the apartment was the one in which the two men lived who were making a film about Anna, the pregnant biondina. They had expanded their project and enlisted a crew that included lighting people, electricians, production assistants. Their door was always open, equipment and cords spilling out into the hallway. Passing by, I heard them yelling at the biondina to get into the shower. The two filmmakers were shouting a word I did not know: “Pidocchi! Pidocchi!” Because the apartment was open and they were always beckoning, I went in.

The girl was naked, being pushed in the shower by the one on whom she’d squirted her milk.

“You stink,” he said. “Come on, it’s time to wash.”

She smiled in her guileless way. “But I’m shy,” she said, trying to hold her hand over her large breasts, the other over her crotch, her full round belly protruding between the two zones of modesty that she was attempting to cover.

She had to be convinced, and finally assented, leaning into the water, soap running over her slippery pregnant form. I remembered suddenly that I was watching, right along with this crew, all male, fixated on her, their subject. I left to go upstairs, ashamed.

Pidocchi were lice, Bene explained. “I hope they get them, too.”

Two days later, the filmmakers and their crew were all scratching like crazy as I passed by their downstairs apartment with Lidia, Bene, Durutti.

We were on our way to the movies. At the box office window there was some discussion of what we should pay, the appropriate price for a movie, and then Durutti said screw it, movies should be free. He bypassed the ticket window and yanked open the doors and we crashed on through. The theater was filled with smoke from cigarettes and hash. The movie was already playing, A Star Is Born, with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. People filed into the dark, yelling the names of friends, hoping to find them. Voices from all over the theater shouted back, “Over here! Over here!” as a prank. Every time Barbra Streisand or Kris Kristofferson opened their mouths to speak, the audience erupted in roars, and the actors’ dubbed voices could not be heard. Barbra Streisand was singing, “Love… soft as an easy chair,” as liquor bottles were dropped, rolling noisily down the sloped theater floor toward the front. “Love fresh as the morning air… ”

I saw a familiar face as we filed out, the soap-flakes model staring down from a poster. The midnight movie: Dietro la porta verde . It and she really traveled, a kind of beckoning. Come find out what.