Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“He’s not himself,” an article headline in Il Sole 24 Ore announced the next day. The quote was from his own mother. Signora Valera said her son deplored any negotiations with terrorists and never, never ever, would have advocated such a thing. “He’s not himself.” The photo of him holding the newspaper the day after his capture appeared next to the article.

Not himself. It seemed a kind of death sentence. If Roberto was killed, it wasn’t the old Roberto. It was some other, who was now begging for negotiations that he hadn’t approved of until it was his own life in question. There was silence the next day, and then an article on the question of where he was. The police in Rome had apparently hired a psychic who held a séance that the investigating team attended. The planchette had produced only the word Cinzano . A dead end. On the seventh day of Roberto’s capture, the chief constable in Rome stated that priority should be given to investigating the organized wing of the autonomist youths in Rome’s San Lorenzo, from which he believed the Red Brigades found support and cover.

I told myself that the question of Roberto’s life had nothing to do with me.

I had been back in New York a month. I was not in contact with Gianni. Not in contact with Sandro, had not seen him since the week after my return, when he walked out of the Kastles’ loft nodding angrily.

My guilt concerning the question of Roberto’s life was a fantasy, I told myself. It was not reality.

If Gianni was involved in Roberto’s kidnapping, that was not related to anything that was related to me. If Gianni had said the family would pay, that was something Gianni had said. I was just a girl who went to a factory to meet her boyfriend and met him by accident with another woman.

If Gianni was keeping tabs, well, that was Gianni. And if the family paid in some form, that could be Gianni. It certainly was not me.

This is what I told myself. And then repeated. And then said again. I ignored the part where I drove Gianni’s getaway car — or maybe it was his hearse.

* * *

“So in the fall of 1967 I went to Los Angeles,” Marvin said. I was on the white divan for a new round of prints, something to do with emulsions, different emulsions.

Roberto had now been in captivity for a week. I kept expecting to run into Sandro, waiting to. Marvin was speaking in the flat, nasal, unmodulated tone of his, almost a drone, indicating that he was going to recount in great detail some aspect of what he considered his critical personal history. I had just said that Sandro’s brother had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It was impulsive, but I figured maybe we could talk about it. It was Marvin who had introduced me to Sandro in the first place.

Marvin said it was terrible news. He shrugged and added something about it being a high-profile family and then there was an anecdote and we were suddenly, it seemed, going to talk about Marvin instead, about his own history.

“The first job I had was as a stock footage researcher. I was employed by a director doing preliminary work for a feature. The script called for documentary scenes of people dying violent deaths. That’s to say, actual people dying. The stock footage vaults where I did my research had the negatives of the Pathé newsreels from beginning to end. I went through, looking for violent deaths. What I found overwhelmingly were executions, almost all of them by firing squad. I gave the director all the scenes I’d had printed. Nothing ever came of the project, and that director disappeared off the face of the Earth, as people tend to do, change their names, become Hare Krishnas, drink themselves to death, whatever. I never heard from him, wouldn’t have thought of him again, but one of the scenes I’d given him was, according to the newsreel caption, the execution of an Italian Fascist by a partisan militia, and when I met Sandro in 1968 or ’69, I had a déjà vu about his name. Was the condemned man in the stock footage also Valera? Because that would be an incredible coincidence. In the summer of 1974 I was back at that same vault and tried to find out. But in the intervening time, things had changed. They used to make a viewing print for just a lab charge. Now they charged a fee for each phase of their service. I didn’t want to find out badly enough to spend a lot of money. Really it had nothing to do with Sandro Valera. It was about something specific becoming stock footage. I always had this feeling there were two worlds. The one we live in, you know, just streaming along, future into present into past, recorded distortedly in people’s minds, and this other world: stock footage. Small integers of life, I mean life in quotes, which represent whatever did take place, whether or not what’s on the stock footage actually occurred. Cropping can make outcomes so ambiguous, but it doesn’t matter, see. It’s stock footage. A reference file to reality. Like you’re a reference file for Caucasian skin tones; it doesn’t matter that you exist. For the technician or projectionist, you’re an index for the existence of woman, flesh, flesh tones. Which brings up the question of race, unaddressed. You, as you, have nothing to do with it.”

Marvin took pictures of me holding the color chart. I began to feel like I was made of lead, heavy enough to sink right through the divan. If he had touched on the subject of Roberto, even in the most glancing way acknowledged the possibility that Roberto could be harmed, he would have helped me out. But he used the subject as a pretext to talk only about himself.

“I tried to explain this idea about two worlds to the people who worked in the vaults. One of them said, ‘If you love stock footage so much, won’t any piece of it do?’ And the thing is, I had to agree with him. Even if they were just trying to get rid of me. He reached into a fireproof safety container and retrieved a role of negative that had started to deteriorate. He gave it to me for free, since they were discarding it anyway. And here is the kicker. It was of… uh, hmm. Actually, I can’t recall. That’s funny. It’s gone, just… poof . I guess it wasn’t that important to the story. The story was about how it doesn’t matter what they ended up giving me. Also that violent deaths are part of stock footage, even if someone had to be killed, I mean originally, to generate the reference. You look different, by the way. Did you dye your hair or something?”

On my way home from work, I ran into Giddle on the Bowery. It was too late to avoid her.

“Want to come drink old overheated coffee and entertain me while I get paid and you sit and listen to me?” she said.

“No,” I said.

We could meet later, she said. She was going to park herself at Rudy’s and drink after her shift was finished.

“That kind of drinking where you make a wilderness,” she said, “and tear a path in. You meet someone else there, deep in the woods. Go home together. Claw your way toward each other through the booze, confusion, misery, horniness.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said, “but no thanks.”

“I bet you’re going to Ronnie’s opening,” she said.

I said yes. It was tonight.

“You know what it is, right? His show? Pictures of beat-up women.”

* * *

Stanley and Gloria would be hosting a dinner for Ronnie after the opening. When I got back to the loft, Gloria had assistants running here and there, moving tables, putting out flowers, preparing food.

“What a mess,” she said. “It’s not the time to entertain but I cannot let Ronnie down. I won’t. But it could not be a worse time.”

I asked why.

“They killed his brother,” she said.

Sandro had called earlier that afternoon to tell them the news. “He says they weren’t close. But he’s in terrible pain. He’s leaving tomorrow for Milan. But he’ll only be gone a few days — just for the funeral. And when he comes back, we need to be there to support him. Stanley wants him around. You can stay until you find a place, but perhaps find a place soon.”