by John Domini
They think I’m rich, Fond may have muttered now. They don’t understand, our movement isn‘t about money.
The guy had been sending mixed signals since back in dell’Ovo, when Barb had squeezed his hand. The hand itself, she’d thought then, had meant he would die young. But she knew today’s code better.
Still, when Fond took up the camera and punched it on, his movements so loose and easy you thought of a dancer, the obliterating white of the spot had her turning away. The gun was worse, its barrel a hole in the brightness.
“Ow,” said the Jaybird. “Can’t we wait a minute on that? Can’t we talk first?”
Barb gathered herself and faced around again. She put a hand to her throat, showing the worst of her wounds. “Fond,” she said, “be sure to get the blood in the picture. Everyone needs to see how you’ve hurt us.”
When Jay glanced at her, his look showed more than reflected light.
“Everyone needs to see,” the wife went on.
“That Maddalena, hey,” Jay said. “She knows what people want to see. She’ll put the blood front and center.”
Barb couldn’t suppress another smile. “You understand, Fond? We’re saying, what do you want to tell people, when you put your pictures on the web?”
She was quiet, speaking without an echo. Jay was the better negotiator when it came to the office, or a maneuverer like Roebuck. But Fond was another matter.
“We know you don’t want money.” She hoisted her purse, its leather freshly scuffed. “You, your movement, we understand, you want something better.”
“Barb’s right,” Jay said, a bit too hearty.
“You want to change the world. You want to do that with this video, and with us two, right here, and in the next ten minutes.”
By the time she’d finished, Fond had lowered the camera. He spoke with his black second-in-command, using yet another language, something from the far side of the Mediterranean. Barbara couldn’t let that go, not with the fresh audacity she’d come to. After the first exchange between the clandestini she stepped up to stick a finger in Fond’s face. She ignored the other man’s pistol, at the corner of her eye.
“You talk to us,” she snapped. “The people you grabbed off the street.”
Fond’s smell remained wildly out of place, a perfume from a five-star hotel.
Jay closed in too, touching her shoulder. “Owl.”
“I said a rosary over this guy. I said a Hail Mary for his soul.”
This tall and mediagenic blade, this hint of la dolce vita—he’d come a long way from stinking up the security ward in dell’Ovo. And that was his problem, Barbara realized. The man was struggling to get fresh bearings, after spending too long in a scented Jacuzzi, with mint tea and crème brioche by the tub. Fond had become a soul-brother to old Cesare, the priest driven mad in the presence of sybaritic Aurora. But today Cesare had gotten his head on straight again.
“Fond, listen. I’m just saying, this kind of strong-arm business was unnecessary.”
“Playground stuff! All it does it cause a lot of hard feeling.”
She turned to her husband.
“Plus,” Jay added, “remember how you found us here. Hey. Our hands were free.”
Turning back: “Fond, you’ve got our attention. Now what are you trying to say?”
“Except first you’ve got to lose the guns. I mean, guns? Forget about it.”
“I can see,” Barb tried, “how you thought we’d never talk to you. I can see how that was for you. You kept showing up on TV, you kept asking. And, nothing.”
“Talking about emotion, Fond. We feel your pain. We can see you were getting desperate. But guns, forget about it. I mean, today, this, what you’re trying to say, it’s not just for you, it’s for all the brothers out there—”
“Assez, assez,” said Fond.
He set his arms akimbo, calling attention to his rap-star clothing, the plaid boxers bagged over low-slungjeans. He wore his cell phone clipped above his crotch. “Enough, for pity’s sake,” he said.
His eyes were on Barbara. “I want to bring you and your Paul to the Republique du Mali. To the Sahel.”
Once the former hunger striker went into his appeal, the parents confined their responses to a word here or there. Anyway Fond began by telling them things they knew already. He assured Barb and Jay that he hadn’t ordered the kidnapping in order to hurt anybody or “acquire personal gain of any kind.” Rather all he wanted, today, was a brief statement on-camera. In this the parents would agree to bring Paul and the rest of the family down to equatorial Africa, and then the mother would recite the rosary, as she had when Fond could barely hear her or see her, lying in what he’d believed would be his deathbed. Since then the clandestino leader had been unable to shake his faith in her prayers, even as he’d enjoyed five nights in the penthouse at Hotel Parthenope, the guest of the rock star Sting. How could he forget the Hail Mary of Signora Lulucita, shaky but determined? He believed “the sorrows in the homeland” would begin to heal as soon as Barbara’s recitation was put on the web and streamed worldwide.
At least Fond spared them more than a thumbnail description of how bad things had gotten in his part of Mali. The widening drought and the Saharan gang-war were all over the news. Rather he emphasized that, as soon as Barbara appeared on the first screen down at the desert’s edge, her and her “quite awesome prayer,” his home country “will take a turn towards a betterment.”
Barbara remembered plenty of people around Naples who’d come a lot closer to her praying than that, lately, with no discernible betterment. But she figured she’d soon enough get the opportunity to wipe the stars from this boy’s eyes. Soon enough she’d go to work, especially, on the man’s well-nigh infantile belief in the power of television. For Fond also believed that once he got the agreement on video—plus the prayer, he reiterated—he’d have no trouble with the authorities. Once he got the material onto the internet, multimedia proof of his good intentions, he and the other Shell members could return to street level without consequences. Everything, declared the young West African, would be perfectly fine.
By now Barbara and Jay had settled on the floor at the edge of the flashlight’s halo. Fond remained up and stalking about, from time to time spreading both arms and all ten fingers for emphasis. The rap star, he even had stage lighting, a flashlight on its end at his feet. He assured them he didn’t intend the family’s visit to the South to go on very long. He hoped the trip would save a few lives, to be sure, but more than that he intended to help his country claim “a better place in the Imperial feast.” Nothing could accomplish this, he felt certain, more quickly than decent exposure on television. Once the Republic and its suffering began to play across the dinner tables and living rooms of the United States, not to mention the web broadcasts in their children’s bedrooms, everything would swiftly “take a turn towards a betterment.” Fond was confident that their work would be done by the start of the American school year.
“Your children,” he said then, “they begin school, mm, a Settembre, non?”
Barb nodded, less than enthusiastic. She hoped he was wrapping this up.
“You do intend to return to America, non?” Again his eyes were on her. “You have always intended this, this goodwill visit—it was always to be brief?”
That got her angry. She’d already had this glum epiphany, watching Paul’s face zip into its files, on the oversized screen in the editing booth. The mother had seen the whole Naples trip looking pointless, zipped into a box and deleted. The recollection must’ve started her frowning, because Jay sharply cut off whatever she had in mind to say. Again he brought up the guns.
“I mean, before you go calling us tourists, let’s talk about those guns. Before you go getting insulting. ‘Goodwill visit,’ give me a break.”
The backup with his pistol in his pants, the white man more or less, noticed Jay’s tone and put his hand on the handle of his weapon.
“You walk around packing i
ron, hey. You’re the tourists. Anyone carrying a gun, he’s in and out fast.”
The leader of the crew dropped his arms, looking hurt, struggling to understand. Jay pressed ahead, arguing that so long as Fond kept threatening to “put a bullet” in the two Americans, any statement they made wouldn’t be worth a thing. “I mean, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace?’ How’s that going to come off? Just, for starters, think how it’s going to sound to the cops.”
“But, sans blague, I cannot foresee any significant charge against me.”
Fond smiled, a slim ebony Buddha. “Once the authorities are witness that video, I cannot see how my brothers or I will have any legal charge that will, will stand.”
Jay looked to Barb, his question so obvious that the lanky radical went on at once, assuring them he wasn’t crazy. The police knew him, he argued; they understood he was no Bin Laden. He apologized again, “de tout mon coeur,” for the extreme measures he’d been forced to take today. And did the Lulucitas realize that before coming to Naples he’d held a fellowship in Philosophy of Cinema at the university in Bamako? Did they understand that the actions of his Shell amounted to a natural extension of his research into the sociopolitical ramifications of Spectacle?
“I know you’re a smart guy,” Jay said. “And movies, hey, I’ll sit and talk about the movies all night. Just as soon as you lose the guns.”
“But you must understand, today is never been an act of violence. Today is a performance and a, a credo.”
During the fifteen months he’d been able to afford at the university, Fond explained, he’d developed a thesis on “the politicization inherent in representations of the Foreign,” as it occurred in the work out of Hollywood. Then later still, after his mother had died of the guinea worm and he’d paid to for a passage to Salerno in a shipping crate—he and a Nigerian who never recovered from the dehydration—Fond had come to see greater metropolitan Naples as a rare opportunity for applied learning. “For are you seeing how the American cinema treats the experience of Italy?”
Jay looked like he was about to erupt, to bark an order like the American Boss, but Barbara held up a finger. There had to be a thread here, glimmering on the labyrinth floor, something she and her husband could pick up and follow.
“Are you seeing what happens to you Americans, their signification in the cinema, whenever a representative character comes to Italy?”
“I’ve—seen the movies,” she tried.
“You Americans,” the young man continued, “you are fascinated with Italy, and cinema provides the signifier for this fascination. The cinema makes spectacle of the secret dreaming, to l’anime of a society at large. Thus what appears as spectacle should be understood as confession. The culture presents its case to God.”
Now there was a possible thread. “Are you saying you believe in God?” she asked. “Because if you believe it’s God at work in our Paul, you don’t understand—”
“Ah, Signora. If you would only have responded to my initial request on the MTV, we could’ve spoken comfortably of everything. Of this God as well.”
“Well, on MTV, in front of fifty million viewers, I would’ve said the same thing. You don’t understand about Paul. You want to talk about a spectacle? I would’ve looked straight into the camera and said, our Paul, when he, when he has an episode—he can’t do it on demand.”
“Barb’s right.”
“Dr. DiPio,” she went on, “he already tried this kind of thing, you know. As much as I let him, he tried it. He put Paul together with a couple of the terremotati.”
“I mean, you must’ve seen it,” Jay said. “Even in dell’Ovo they had a TV We could take Paul down to the desert and, hey, you’d still get nothing.”
Barbara, meantime, let her gaze shift away from their keeper’s sleek face. One of the other clandestini was acting as if he’d heard something, throwing the flashlight beam around the room, but Barb stared elsewhere, into the dark. She didn’t want to think about asking more of her eleven-year-old.
“Ah oui.” The outlaw was saying. “This I do understand, the boy’s visit may come to nothing.” Nevertheless, he went on, he believed he’d detected something about Barbara’s prayers that had eluded everyone else.
“It is been the spectacle, in every case,” he declared.
Barbara faced him, frowning. “Prayers—it’s private. It’s you and God.”
“But when there is the betterment, it is been on the video, in every case. The miracle with the boy, with your Paul, it is beginning on the TV, toujours. His mother is saying her rosary on the TV.”
And Fond squeezed her shoulder. Barbara startled, drawing in a leg. At least he kept it brief, correct, French.
“Are you saying, every healing episode is on account of me?”
The refugee philosophe stepped back again, his subalterns nodding to either side of him. “I am saying, it is beginning with you. You, the spectacular image.”
The man’s perfume had faded; maybe that’s why she hadn’t noticed him bending closer.
Fond waved a hand at the ceiling and walls, his smile the same gleaming business that had worked so well between hip-hop videos. “The prayer on television, what shall we say, it is the image on the walls of the caveman? The painting and the dance, which is bringing good fortune in the hunt?”
Mother of God, who was this guy, to talk crazy one minute and then the next.
“Fond,” Jay said, “hey, maybe you got something there.”
“Seulement le logique.”
The next minute, the guy came up with an idea no one else had thought of. Barbara, looking for a hole in Fond’s theory, realized the clandestino leader couldn’t have known about Cesare—but then again, she and her rosary had gone on-camera with the old Jesuit Dominican, too. Her last favor for Maddalena.
Jay appeared to be going through the same thought process, taking a while before speaking again. “It’s like we said before: with you, we know we can talk.”
But why shouldn’t this hand-to-mouth intellectual have come up with a decent idea? Above his bright smile his eyes were wedges, as they’d been a couple of weeks ago, packed in cotton. He’d seen a lot worse than either of the Americans, no denying. And when Barbara pictured her and her priest bent over a string of beads, their camel-backed shadow cast across thousands of screens, she realized that she couldn’t begin to say what her prayers might be capable of. Hadn’t they gone jaywalking, those prayers? Darting about in heavy traffic?
“Fond, I mean, I’m impressed. Me and Barbara both. It’s a plan.”
The husband eased forward as he spoke, leaning into the inverted cone of light. You couldn’t help but notice how he’d begun to bruise.
“You’re a smart guy,” the Jaybird said, “that’s obvious, very smart.”
The worst, purple already, was under the eyes. Fond couldn’t help but notice. As he stared he went from the head of the class to boy who always got picked on.
“You, you get it. Smart guy like you. Talk about making a spectacle…”
Fond used a local gesture, nothing like a rap star, pressing together his flat hands and waggling them before his chest. A pleading gesture.
“Lose the guns, Fond. This isn’t you. I mean, whacking people around.”
The young skin-and-bones looked to his African sub-commander, then dropped his eyes. In a different voice, halting, he admitted that (“just as le père is saying”) lately he hadn’t been himself. “After your son is made me well, for some several days, I am thinking I am signed onto another social contract altogether.” He’d soaked in two separate bathtubs, both in a single suite; he’d stroked the endless silken hair of a blonde. “I am thinking I am moved into this new paradise, to which all the hetero-glottic world is coming.” In the hotel penthouse, with every pleasure of the North at his fingertips, the former clandestino had seemed to vanquish divisions of faith, skin color, or “the nation-state.” So long as the expense account held up, he’d lost his bearings.
“
Yet there came a morning I came down from this paradise,” he went on. “When I did, I found my brothers and sisters living still in the inferno. An inferno where we are sleeping still in the boxes, the boxes of durable paper. Like the hermit crab, we live. Always we must be finding another shell!”
He stamped the floor, setting off an echo. “What God is it that excludes my brothers, when He is so sweetly embracing me?”
Barbara wobbled in an undertow of Samaritan impulse. Maria Elena came again to mind, shrieking to split the roof the day that Children’s Services took her away. The mother tugged at an armpit, glad for the Jaybird beside her, refusing to go soft and distracted. He argued that any man who could set up today’s kidnapping knew perfectly well what God watched over Naples these days.
“Hey, this city, it’s still about the nation-state. Nation-state even with the United Nations in town. They’ve all got laws, the UN too, and you broke the laws.”
When Fond met the father’s look, Barbara could see that she wasn’t the only one wobbling. “Today is a performance,” said the Hermit Crab leader. “An enactment of violence, only, today will bring into being, down in the South, a turn towards—”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s nice.” The way Jay shook his head, you’d think he was showing off his bruises. ‘“Turn to the better,’ very nice, except it’s a broken record. Broken record, Fond, you know—repeating and repeating and getting nowhere.”
“I mean,” Jay went on, “you’re way too smart to go on kidding yourself, about what’s going to happen upstairs.”
Briskly the former VP summarized what was in store for the remaining Shell of the Hermit Crab. It wouldn’t matter what their captured Americans said on the video. When Jay mentioned “deportation,” the eyes of the other African grew bigger than they’d been all afternoon. He scowled up at his boss. The Jaybird didn’t miss it, and he switched to simpler English.
