Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Didi was still in captivity, his face on the front page of the newspaper Gianni was reading when we returned from the movies. I had never told them about Didi, about why I was in Italy in the first place. It seemed like a dream. And maybe an indictment. I was fraternizing now with people who made it impossible for me to think of going to Monza, too deep inside an enemy camp to admit my former allegiance, to think of leaving to pursue the original goal. The day I was meant to go to Monza had come and gone. And who from that realm had cared or noticed? If Sandro cared or noticed, he had not tried to find me. More than a week had passed since I’d left for Rome with Gianni. Maybe I was impossible to find. I heard Sandro’s mother’s voice, not what she said but a tone: good riddance. And Talia: good riddance. The Count of Bolzano: a shrug, a shake of the head at my crude American behavior, fleeing as I had.

I was estranged now from that world but I felt, as well, an estrangement from this group of people, who nonetheless included me in everything, or at least many things. There were secrets in that apartment. Gianni was often absent and always aloof, quietly reading his Il Sole 24 Ore on the couch. He and Durutti would retreat into a room, looks exchanged among the others as the door was shut. At one point, Bene seemed to suggest that Gianni had been in prison but had escaped. I could not tell if she was joking. My Italian was good, but nuance and humor were sometimes lost on me.

There were a lot of gray areas with these people. Roberto and Sandro, despite their political differences, both had presented the issues as stark and tidy, as if there were exactly two groups that opposed the state, as distinct from each other as black and white: the Red Brigades — armed, underground militants. And the leftist youths — open, public, more or less nonviolent. But nothing was simple or stark, I was beginning to see. Guns were issued in the apartment on the Via dei Volsci in virtually the same way the jeans were distributed. It was a world apart from Sandro and his guns. One artist at a shooting range in the Catskills, interested, as Sandro was, in manufacture, protocol, history, the weapon as almost a work of art, an industrial thing of beauty. This was something else, a ragtag mob with guns jammed here and there in their pockets, no concern for make or model beyond pragmatics. The gun was a tool like a screwdriver was a tool, and they all carried them.

A television was liberated by Durutti and two others from a neighborhood electronics store, and we watched the news. The Red Brigades had struck again, killing a Fascist. The Fascists had retaliated by killing an anarchist who was not associated with the Red Brigades. The pope made an appeal for an end to the violence, in his Sunday-morning televised address from the Vatican. He stood on a balcony wearing a huge ornamental headdress that looked like a brushed-metal bullet, a large pointed dome with a row of twinkling stones low around its girth, underneath a spiky gold base.

It was true that we had smoked a little hash. Nonetheless also true that the pope made his plea for peace with a giant bullet propped on his head.

The next day Didi Bombonato was set free, after thirteen days in captivity. That marked time for me in a way I could not have marked it on my own. Thirteen days. A lifetime. For me, anyway, because I had thrown my old life away. At this point I might have gone from the Monza track outside Milan to the German track. That is, had Didi not been kidnapped, had Sandro not betrayed me, had I not run away. And after Monza and then Germany, I would have a lot of footage, possibly enough for my film. I’d return with it to New York, and Marvin and Eric would not be mad about my sabbatical from work, because they’d see what I’d made and as arbiters of the medium would be understanding and supportive.

Instead, no longer the owner of a camera, having smashed and lost my Bolex Pro at the demonstration, I was on a couch in Rome, stoned, watching TV, looking at the face of free and waving Didi Bombonato, whom I had known, but now, would not know.

Didi had been let go after he had agreed to write a defense of the Red Brigades, a letter with a distinctly Leninist tone. The Valera Company was suspicious that Didi had possibly contracted Stockholm syndrome, and whether he had or not, he was no longer quite the image they were looking for to represent and promote Valera Tires, and they pulled their sponsorship of him, according to the news report. No one else in the apartment was watching but me.

Later that day I walked downstairs and saw that the filmmakers’ apartment was empty. There was no equipment crowding into the hall. No crew. Just the balding, scraggly one sitting in a chair, smoking.

“Where is the girl?” I asked.

“In a manicomio,” he said.

A manicomio. It took me a moment to remember. Insane asylum.

“What about the baby?” I asked.

“The baby,” he said, scratching his head almost as if trying to remember. “She had it yesterday.”

“So where is it?” I asked.

“Vincenzo has it,” he said.

“Vincenzo?”

“The electrician. He fell in love with her. I stepped aside for that. No one can accuse me. I let Vincenzo have her, even as I could have kept having her myself. Because… hey, American girl, did you ever have a baby? No? Well, I can tell you what you might not know. Some pregnant girls are very sexual.”

He smiled. He had a gap in his teeth like mine. An ugly gap.

“We’re editing the film, hopefully in time for Venice,” he said, filling the empty room with exhaled smoke as he stubbed out his sloppy and limp handrolled cigarette. “Alberto has a festival connection who can get us in, and—”

A manicomio.

Vincenzo has the baby.

They didn’t care about her. The girl who was the center, the cause, the reason for their film.

Venice. They were hoping for Venice.

Vincenzo has the baby.

* * *

Durutti and the boys liked me and fought for my attention. It was a good distraction from the problem of Sandro, of what I could no longer go back to. That was something the biondina and I had in common. I didn’t have lice. I wasn’t going to the manicomio. But like her, I was passing through. A girl who would be around every day for a spell, and then one day be gone.

Gianni did not fight for my attention. He was far too cool, too distant from this whole thing he had brought me to. Bene was his lover, but he showed her no affection in front of others. He was calm, stone-faced, just as he’d been at the villa. Everyone else quieted when he entered the apartment. They lowered the television volume and tracked his movements as he went from room to room, as if they were waiting for him to say something or to make some judgment.

Twice he asked me to take rides with him. On those rides I felt a measure of intimacy between us. He drove, stopped in front of an apartment, parked, asked me to wait. Returned to the car, cool as ever. Once we were stopped at a security checkpoint in Trastevere and Gianni told the traffic officer I was the wife of Sandro Valera, that he worked for the Valera family and was taking me to do my shopping. Hearing this, the officer was eager to wave us on, and I sensed it was my function, for Gianni, to play that role and relieve suspicion. The police were the enemy of the young in Rome, that I understood firsthand, so I didn’t think much of it. It was illegal to even plan a demonstration. Discretion, having the wife of a Valera along, made sense.

The third time I went for a ride with him, we had a beer together before returning to the apartment on the Via dei Volsci. He showed me a skeleton key Durutti had made, to insert in pay phones for free calls.

“Want to call your boyfriend?” he asked.