The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  This morning, our second one in the villa, Sandro had slept late and I’d gone to breakfast alone. Signora Valera was there at the table, but it was too late to turn back. We drank our espresso in silence, or what I hoped would remain so, until she asked if I was going to marry her son. Because, she said, she had not been informed of a wedding.

  “We’re not getting married, no.”

  “So what are your plans?” she asked. “I mean, for when you are no longer together. If he has not asked you to marry him, it’s temporary. A temporary arrangement.”

  “I don’t have any plans,” I said.

  There is a certain type of older woman who pretends to be doddering and meek when in fact old age has made her strong and vicious, but signora Valera was not that type. She did not pretend to be meek.

  On our hike, Sandro and I lay in a sun-dappled patch of wild chamomile, resting and gazing up at the sky framed in branches. We ended up entwined, his jeans unbuttoned, mine down around my knees. A kind of urgency was what he liked, and making love in a field, in various sorts of public places, was something Sandro was into. It made the act that much more thrilling and directed. But it had been my idea this time, my cue. The villa was so oppressive, and his mother made me feel so minimized that I had not really wanted to make love to Sandro inside its walls. When I had returned from her breakfast assault, Sandro had grabbed me and I’d said no and pushed him away, his mother’s voice in my head, as if submitting to him were submitting to her idea of my disposable status. Here, I felt a bit more free and probably I thought screwing her son in a clearing in the woods was a way to defend myself, my autonomy, from her judgments. I looked from the sky, the breath of blue that opened above the crosshatch of chestnut trees, to Sandro, in whose face I detected an apology.

  He picked crushed little chamomile flowers out of my hair as we continued our hike, and pointed out a matted place among the underbrush where a wolf had slept. We stopped and looked together at the indentation that was the wolf’s bed. There was something tender in seeing where a wild animal slept, the choices it made to seek softness, and I felt a twinge of envy for that wolf, its self-preservation, its solitude. We came out of the woods on a rise above the limonaia that had been planted when Sandro was born. He laughed and said it was an absurdity for the region and that each tree had to be individually wrapped in burlap for the winter season. He put his arms around me as we gazed from our rise over the tops of the lemon trees below us, which had taken root when Sandro had, experienced the same amount of lived time. This is also me, I felt him say, you have to understand that it’s also me. I leaned back, into him. I love this also-you. Even if his mother intimidated me and meant to, and even if their house, if you could call such a place, thirty rooms, a house, was not the least bit inviting. There in the woods, his cashmere scarf wrapped around my neck for extra warmth, I felt like everything was going to be okay. I was with Sandro. It didn’t matter if his mother, when we were introduced, had smiled in a strained way as if I were a disappointment. Or that she had laughed when Sandro told her I spoke Italian, and insisted on speaking to me in English or what she thought was English but was a strange hybrid language that sounded more like German. No matter. In a week his mother would return to Milan and we’d have the villa to ourselves. Soon after, I’d go to Monza. Sandro had said he wanted to come, and for once, he would be tagging along with me, and not the reverse. In the meantime he would be the bridge between me and this odd place, and maybe at some point we could laugh about it together.

  Laugh about his mother? How foolish I must have been.

  By the time we were returning along the road, in view of the high, stone wall of the villa, flowerless vines spilling over it like concertina wire, I felt relaxed and happy in a way I had not since we’d arrived. Sandro had suggested we use the garden gates and not the main entrance, and we had passed the groundskeeper’s little stone cottage and strolled among the olive trees holding hands, Sandro as my protector from this world of rooms and servants and customs, fortifying me against it as he guided me into it.

  * * *

  It was very cold in the dining room, almost colder than it had been outside. Later I came to recognize the particular cheapness of the very rich. Sandro’s mother was not concerned with saving money. Rather, she seemed to enjoy creating conditions that were slightly less than hospitable, even a little hostile, with rooms that were fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. And despite all the talk of the diminishing elite of people who knew (or knew to know) about the right Nebbiolos, wine in a box was mostly what we drank. We would see the same bread at dinner that we’d passed over at breakfast, stale and hard then, in the morning, and by dinnertime tooth-breaking. I thought of Ronnie’s discourse on bread. Ronnie was amused that you could find only whole-grain breads now in New York’s gourmet markets. Not that Ronnie shopped in gourmet markets, but one had opened in SoHo and he perused the aisles to fuel his running commentaries. He said it was an irony that people had decided collectively that whole grains were more desirable than white bread, which, for centuries, had been the bread of the gentry. “Everything’s like this,” he said. Refinement followed a certain course and reverse course. In this case, the literal refining of flour, until super-refined white bread, light and fluffy like only kings and queens had once been able to obtain, was widely available, and so rich people had to go back to eating the crude whole-grain breads they used to leave only for peasants. Now no educated person would be caught dead eating white bread. Not even a middle-class person. Sandro was always amused by these rants of Ronnie’s, but here at the villa every custom was normal to him. He ate the stale brown bread and said nothing about it.

  Eventually a servant came and started a fire in the dining room hearth and the room warmed up, but a haze of suffocating smoke hung over the table, a mesh of white tangles that thickened as dinner dragged on, making it difficult to breathe. On the ceiling above us was a fresco of Lake Como. In the lake, a circle of popes or maybe bishops in white gossamer robes. The fabric of their robes hung down below them like tendrils as these religious clerics treaded water. They were jellyfish popes, not unlike the lonely transvestite’s popes floating on clouds, pure and pristine goodness. Or perhaps these men were the mirror image of that: they didn’t seem like they could help anyone, occupied as they were with trying not to drown. As a servant came around to refill our glasses, the old novelist Chesil Jones, who was seated at my left, leaned toward me and said he used to be a drinker but had given up booze. His breath reeked of alcohol. He and I were behind an enormous branched candlestick that blocked my view of Sandro. I asked the old novelist about his books. He narrowed his eyes at me as if I had insulted him. “You’d like to discuss the most recent, wouldn’t you? The Sole of a Whore was what I originally called it—not her spirit but the bottom of her shoe. And what do they come up with? Mrs. Dollface, for godsakes. If you want to revisit the idiotic responses Mrs. Dollface has gotten, we can do that.”

  I said I was simply curious about what sorts of things he wrote.

  “Oh. Why of course, yes,” he said, suddenly solicitous, realizing that I was not a hostile critic. “There is a small library. I can have them brought to your room. The ones you should start with, in any case.”

  Beyond the huge candelabra, the subject of tragic or tragicomic death continued, not that of a relative in Egypt but of an Italian industrialist or the heir of one, who instead of amassing more riches had spent his family’s money publishing pro-Soviet literature and supporting underground groups that wanted to overthrow the government. The man’s name was Feltrinelli—like the chain of well-known bookstores. I remembered them from my time in Florence, but had no idea that Feltrinelli had been electrocuted, as the Count of Bolzano explained it, trying to sabotage Milan’s power supply. He was found dead under a pylon. It had happened five years earlier. I got the feeling these people had discussed it plenty but because of its mysterious circumstances weren’t ready to give up the subject. It wasn’t clear if his death ha
d been an accident, a suicide, or if he’d been murdered. Roberto said it didn’t matter how it happened, that Feltrinelli’s death had been a resounding defeat for the Communists and a victory for anyone who felt it was a mistake for party boys to hemorrhage money to radical causes.

  “He was a semiretard, even if he published Pasternak,” Chesil Jones said. “Semiretarded. He got his negative and positive leads mixed up.”

  Sandro said that was nonsense and that Feltrinelli wasn’t stupid. What happened had been a terrible tragedy.

  “Have it how you want,” Roberto said. “I find him to have been a clown. You find him to have been tragic. Either way he’s dead, and that in itself is neither tragic nor clownish, it simply is. He asked for trouble and found it. What was he doing, for godsakes, on a pylon?”

  “He didn’t know negative from positive,” the old novelist said, and put his hands together as if holding two leads, then shook like he was being electrocuted.

  “So it’s of no consequence,” Sandro said to Roberto, “whether he died by accident or was murdered.”

  Roberto shrugged. “He was a problem. To business. To Italy. To the entire Ministry of the Interior. Not to mention the CIA. A lot of people wanted him dead. And then he managed to die on his own. Anyhow, who grieved over the death of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli?”

  “Roberto, eight thousand people were at his funeral,” Sandro said. “It was in the New York Post. And his death helped nothing. If he was killed, whoever killed him can count themselves responsible, at least in part, for the violence since.”

  “What do you know about the violence since, Sandro?” Roberto said. “You’ve been in New York making metal boxes, going to cocktail parties, or whatever it is you do, while Mama and I get phone calls about the latest round of sabotage, the latest work stoppage, the most recent supervisor to be killed. Are you aware of the problems?”

  “I’m saying martyrs give cause. They create sympathy. But you’re right, I don’t get those phone calls. I take my inheritance and give nothing back. I have never denied that. I think I’ll stick to what I know.”

  “What subject is that, Sandro?” his mother asked.

  “Metal boxes, Mama.”

  “I thought you were going to say American girls,” she said, not looking at me. “How many have we met, at this point?”

  Chesil Jones put his two hands together again and shook erratically.

  I felt like hurting this old woman, and I believe she knew it, and that she felt, in reaction, both afraid of my anger and also morally defended against it, against such crude low-class aggression. I never asked about Sandro’s previous girlfriends. He teased me about that, wanted to know why I didn’t ask, which made me sure it was wise not to. Or at least sure that it bothered him that I didn’t, because he wanted to make me jealous, and so I gave him no opening.

  Sandro told her to stop acting rude and then they were arguing, speaking very quickly, and I could no longer follow. It was either about me or about some general failing on Sandro’s part.

  Chesil Jones leaned toward me. “Just ignore it. She’s . . . what can I say? I’m fond of her. Quite fond of her, actually. But late tonight, after the staff retires? She’ll be bent over the open refrigerator, counting slices of ham to be sure the servants haven’t taken more than their allotment. She’s tortured, bless her. Anyway, I can appreciate you. I can tell you’re good folk,” he said, nudging me and laughing. “I’ve been to Reno, by the way. I wasn’t looking at a fucking Bob Avery book like Luigi won’t shut up about. I skied Mount Rose.”

  “My ski team trained there,” I said, assuming Sandro must have told him I’d been a ski racer. “It’s a place I know so well.”

  “Did a bit of racing myself,” he said. “Nothing major. A sort of subpro league. Nastar, it’s called. Actually rather competitive. I have a bronze medal someplace, knocking around in a box of ribbons and whatnot, from various hobbies of mine. I did retain something of a feel for the slalom course. The motion of it. It’s in the knees, like this, see. A bit in the hips as well.” He swiveled back and forth in his chair, holding out his hands as if gripping ski poles.

  “Women have a tough time learning to ski,” he said. “They don’t have the mind for the physics of it. But they can learn by feel. I’ve been a pretty good instructor, I’ve got good form, a perfect stem Christie. Though my last wife got up to the top of the mountain, we were in Chamonix. ‘Sham-o-nicks,’ the nitwit kept calling it. ‘Sham-o-nicks.’ We took the cable car up and at the top, we’re ready to go, boots laced, skis strapped on, and she just freezes, stiff as a corpse.”

  Sandro and his mother had finished arguing. Chesil Jones had everyone’s attention. Noticing this, he cleared his throat, and his delivery changed, became magisterial, as if he were duty-bound to part with some of his profound and cloistered knowledge, for our benefit.

  “The thing about skiing is that it’s suited to men. Partly because it’s a great metaphor for other endeavors. Endeavors of the mind. Martin Heidegger was a skier, did you know? The little hut in Todtnauberg where he wrote was right next to the chairlift. Legend has it that he gave his seminar at Freiburg directly from the slopes, going on about the being for whom being is a question while wearing a parka and boot gators. As a young man, I had a wonderful writing teacher who was a terrific skier. I’ll never forget my first class with him. This was in Hanover, New Hampshire, dead of winter. ‘Your assignment,’ he says, ‘each one of you boys, is to drink a case of beer and ski yourself off a cliff.’ He wanted us to feel the terror. Not of the cold, of the speed, but of our talent. Just . . . do with it what you must. What you will. With my own students, I—”

  * * *

  “Why didn’t you say anything to that bastard?” Sandro asked me later that night as he dove playfully under the covers and grabbed me with his cold hands. There’d been a giant moth in our room, which he’d successfully shooed out a window. He didn’t care about moths. He did it for me. I was the only American girl here, I reminded myself as he chased it around our room in his underwear. The only one.

  “You were a racer, for Christ’s sake,” he said, shivering under the duvet, his arms around me. “And he’s instructing you on the basics. ‘Ribbons and medals from my hobbies.’ What a moron.”

  Sandro didn’t understand why I let this old man go on at length as if I’d never been on skis, but my experience had nothing to do with Chesil Jones. It wouldn’t have interested him one bit. He didn’t bring up skiing to have a conversation, but to lecture and instruct. I’d seen right away he was the type of person who grows deadly bored if disrupted from his plan to talk about himself, and I had no desire to waste my time and energy forcing on him what he would only will away in yawns and distracted looks. And anyhow Chesil Jones probably hadn’t skied in the twenty years since the stem Christie had been a popular technique. What was I to say, we make parallel turns now? The boots have buckles instead of laces? The bindings are quick-release?

  After dinner, we retired to the living room. While his mother sneaked off to bed, Sandro put records on the old German phonograph, and more wine was poured. We listened to Stravinsky, harsh but stirring strings, sounds that were like stiff brushes dipped in paint and used to make a geometry of lines in stark black. Signora Valera must have then switched on the television in her room upstairs, because over the strings we heard distortedly loud voices interspersed with a laugh track. Wealthy Italian or Reno pensioner, it didn’t matter, she was like any old person with her TV too loud.

  Roberto had gone home. Sandro told me Roberto’s wake time was four thirty a.m. It was one of the reasons his wife stayed in Milan when Roberto came to Bellagio. She couldn’t take his schedule, Sandro said. It was difficult to imagine that Roberto even had a wife, that he would be interested in women, he was so austere and clean and rigid.

  There were catalogues of Sandro’s work on the coffee table, and the industrial designer Luigi began flipping through them, looking at Sandro’s spare, aluminum sculptures.
Sandro had whispered to me, in a moment alone in the hall, that Luigi also was a soft-core pornographer with a foot and leg fetish, and sold that work in editions of very limited print runs that cost thousands of dollars.

  “I am stumped,” Luigi said when he’d looked at every image in the two thick catalogues. “I just don’t get it.”

  Sandro was used to this. Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself. I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse that artists such as Sandro wrote long essays about, and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.

  “I’m going to just come out and ask you, Sandro,” Luigi said, “since I cannot infer from the work alone: Are you an ass man or a leg man? Which is it?”

  I could tell from Sandro’s slow, quaking smile that this would be immediately assimilated as a favorite story. There needn’t be an answer. There need only be the story itself, archived in the asking. Although later that night, after the matter of shooing out the moth and diving under the covers, Sandro declared that he was both an ass and a leg man, a breast man, also. Interested in knees, the lower back, the neck, the little place where the collarbones meet. The mouth. “Your mouth,” he said, pressing his fingertips to my lips. Sandro said it was limited to think in terms of such metonymy. Didier’s word, plucked like a ghost from our life in New York.

  The next day was quiet and serene and unseasonably warm. The groundskeeper had cleaned out the swimming pool at signora Valera’s request, because Sandro loved to swim. He’d heated it to eighty degrees, and with the air about seventy, steam rose from the water’s surface in periodic light drifts, ghostly apparitions veiled in gauze. Chesil Jones was already down at the pool when Sandro and I arrived. He was lying on the stones next to the edge, nude except for a hand towel that was folded into a small square and balanced over his privates, his eyes closed as though he were encased in a tomb of sunlight. Sandro flashed me a look of amusement and tugged me toward the open pavilion next to the pool, a raised platform with couches. He picked me up and tossed me into a pile of throw pillows on the couch. When I giggled a bit too loudly, the old novelist sat up and glanced at us, squinting against the sun and holding his inadequate hand towel over his crotch like a tiny curtain. He began gathering his things. Leaving the young to their privacy, I felt him think. Although Sandro wasn’t all that young, which made his departure a generosity. The young drive out the old. He was leaving by choice. But before doing so, he stood in front of the pavilion, preparing, I sensed, to deliver one of his minor speeches.