The Flamethrowers (11 page)

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The little gang he’d met at the Caffè Aragno had a leader, Lonzi. If not officially the leader, Lonzi was the most belligerent and original among them. Like Valera, Lonzi was from a rich Milanese family, his own father in timber and real estate, with a big, beautiful house in the Brera, near Valera’s family villa. Like Valera, Lonzi had fled that and
enrolled in the university in Rome. Both were young men who had been told to work hard and claim what would be theirs, to remind the world of their names and behind the names their power and prestige. Lonzi was a dropout, using the name to disgrace it and what it stood for. Though Valera understood this, the call of it, using one’s training in self-importance to turn power on its head, he had no interest in giving up on becoming an engineer. Instead, he added Lonzi to his studies, the world of things that could instruct. Lonzi said inherited wealth and stature meant sloth, comfort, and nostalgia. Lonzi detested sloth and nostalgia and said he had no interest in aristocratic splendor, in rotting under the sun as he was meant to, wallowing like a hog in the thick, warm mud in which the Italian upper classes were trapped, in which all of Italy was trapped, lives structured around tradition, custom, sameness.

Valera pictured Egypt when Lonzi talked like this. His hours upon hours on the balcony, gazing out at the steady blue lid of the Mediterranean, pushing his face against the leaves of a potted date palm, trying to feel some scratch, some sharpness.

Lonzi and the little gang hated tourists, Sundays, torpor. They wanted speed and change. For his own quickness, Valera was becoming known among the motorcycle riders. He had a talent and feel for the two-wheeled machine, for how to corner it, braking as he angled into a turn, jutting his foot out to the side to steady and counterbalance the cycle, and then blasting open his throttle to straighten the bike, accelerating out of a curve as the others were still on their brakes, worried about crashing. He pulled ahead of the other riders without fail. He didn’t yet have his own cycle—he’d asked for the money but the wire had not yet come through from Milan—so he was always having to wait on the curb outside the Caffè Aragno, hoping to grub a ride on someone else’s. Some of the gang were proud to have their cycle ridden by Valera, who would always pull to the front, and others were annoyed by it and tried to avoid him when they saw him on the curb.

When the money arrived, he purchased his first motorcycle, a Pope V-twin, American made, and by far the fastest in the group. Its engine
was 999 cubic centimeters, its tube frame painted a stunning, lurid gold. It was powerful and scary, vibrating his hands and arms numb, its suspension and handling not suited to its speed. It was an unruly thing and he loved it. He was officially part of the little gang, and when they whispered, “Third room,” and headed to the secret back area of the Aragno, they said it also to Valera, and this tiny gesture, a whisper, strengthened his resolve to be like Lonzi, to fill himself with the spirit, the pneuma, as he thought of it, of the group.

“Don’t say words like
pneuma
around here,” Lonzi said to him, embarrassing Valera when he expressed this idea in front of the others. “That’s crap. Ancient Greece. We’re not gazing into the sewer grates of history, Valera.”

They were smashing and crushing every outmoded and traditional idea, Lonzi said, every past thing. Everything old and of good taste, every kind of decadentism and aestheticism. They aimed to destroy czars, popes, kings, professors, “gouty homebodies,” as Lonzi put it, all official culture and its pimps, hawkers, and whores.

Lonzi said the only thing worth loving was what was to come, and since what was to come was unforeseeable—only a cretin or a liar would try to predict the future—the future had to be lived now, in the now, as intensity.

You can’t intuit the future, Lonzi said, even the next moment. He talked about a sect in the Middle Ages who believed that God reinvented the world every moment. Every single moment God reinvented the whole thing, every aspect and cranny, all over again, this sect had believed. All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. This is how we’ll take the future and occupy it like an empty warehouse, Lonzi said. It’s an act of love, pure love. It isn’t prophecy. It’s hope.

The little gang hosted evenings at the Aragno, where Lonzi and others, Copertini, Cabrini, Caccia, Bompiello, Papi, read poems about speed and metal, recipes for soufflés of wire and buckshot, a diet that
was part of the general call to metalize themselves, their bodies turned metal, into machines, their spirits no longer lethargic and fleshily weak, but fast and strong. Lonzi never seemed to be kidding. Valera took him as a kidder anyway. Lonzi was a fabulist. He made clothes out of screws and mesh, books out of sheets of stamped tin. Many among the little gang drew—dream machines and swift-moving men, or they arranged typed words to look like explosions on paper. Valera drew, too, but with his engineer’s training it was hard for him to turn away from the laws of the universe. He drew what he felt was actually possible. Real machines.

The little gang played amplified noises on these evenings at the café, sounds that had been recorded at Lonzi’s apartment by hitting sledgehammers on anvils, or snipping giant hedge shears attached to pickup microphones, SNIP SNIP, open and closed, which they announced to the audience were the sounds of the pope’s feet being severed at the ankle. The king’s fingers sawed off at the knuckle. The optic nerve of God’s one big eye cut. Lonzi’s shears cutting off the pope’s feet brought Valera to an image of young Marie’s foot, tan, in her little cloth espadrille, dangling over the rear wheel of the motorcycle that Alexandrian afternoon. A delicate feminine foot that had been carried away on a smoke-puffing beast. As Valera became a part of Lonzi’s gang, the image of Marie’s young foot, summoned by Lonzi’s performance of mock amputations, stayed with him. The foot belonged to Valera, an appropriation that had something to do with being virile, metalized, and part of a group of men also virile and metalized. He had not thought of Marie in years, but in the heat and craziness of those nights at the Aragno, she appeared, a vivid image, its colors unfaded, Marie on the rear of a motorcycle, a figure in loose, white flapping cotton, her dangling foot tanned by the African sun, she and the unknown man flying along the seawall like those wooden figures that slide past a painted panorama in a carnival shooting gallery, the sky above them a broad silk banner of blue.

Standing on a chair at the front of the café, Lonzi said that in the future women would be reduced to their most essential part, a thing
a man could carry in his pocket. Valera thought of Marie, how he’d reduced her to her own foot, to a thing he could carry in his mind, like a rabbit’s foot. Not so much a gift as a sacrifice. She’d gone from love lost to something he’d loved but had to cut down. The foot was his. Yes, Lonzi, you understand, thought Valera. Woman reduced to parts. But after various of Lonzi’s digressions, mostly about the Great War—Lonzi felt that joining the war would be the perfect test and triumph of their metalized gang, who would be their ultimate selves in war, vanquish the putrid Austro-Hungarian Empire and wake all of Europe from its slumber—after all that, Lonzi returned to talk of this essential female part, and it turned out he was speaking specifically of a woman’s vulva. A good example of how it was Lonzi had come to be leader. He was willing to think to extremes and name them.

Women will be pocket cunts, Lonzi said. Ideal for battle, for a light infantryman. Transportable, backpackable, and silent. You take a break from machine-gunning, slip them over your member, love them totally, and they don’t say a word.

*  *  *

What had actually been in Valera’s haversack: not a woman’s vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.

The little gang all volunteered for assault regiments, the Arditi, and ended up in motorcycle battalions that engaged in advance-guard trickery along the Isonzo River. Lonzi was shot in the groin and had to return almost immediately from the front. Valera and Copertini ended up in the same squadron, before Copertini struck a tree and died. Valera rode his Pope, which he’d modified for war, welding on a machine gun rack and adding mudguards, a larger gas tank, rear panniers. Due to a shortage of the standard-issue Bianchi 500s, his Pope had been allowed and it was a good thing, because it was a hell of a lot faster than a Bianchi, since Valera had bored the cylinders. Quickness, as he discovered, was vital for remaining alive. War should be mobile, he felt, and it was not. Most soldiers were stuck in the trenches, waiting on death. While the cycle battalions of the Arditi raced along, flashing their white
skull-and-crossbones chest patches as they pulled safety pins from grenades and dropped them. All Arditi, all on cycles, none in trenches. Still, in just two years, 1917 and 1918, half their little gang died.

*  *  *

The war over, one night he and Lonzi, recovered from his battlefront injury, were cruising between the Aqueduct of Nero and the Botanical Gardens when Lonzi hit a stone that must have rolled down from the Neronian ruins. Lonzi wrecked his cycle, shattering his wrist. Afterward, Lonzi felt that dumping his motorcycle because of a chunk of antiquity was a clear enough message that they should vacate Rome. (Despite his insistence on godlessness, Lonzi was always on the lookout for signs and symbols, and once Valera had seen him in the Piazza Navona, sitting at a flimsy card table with a palm reader. Lonzi’s eager posture, his open face, waiting and hoping to receive auspicious news from the woman and her cheap crystal ball, had embarrassed Valera so deeply that he repressed, for years, having witnessed this maudlin scene.)

Shortly after Lonzi’s wipeout, the gang had a meeting at the Aragno and decided to head north. Rome was tumbling into creep and rot, with its mobs of tourists, its piles of garbage, its shabbily constructed slums encroaching from all sides as the economy bottomed out. Food shortages and unemployment and workers’ strikes were rampant. Italy had been all but ruined by its involvement in the war. Rome’s slum inhabitants were overrunning the city, zombie lumpen who seemed, to Valera and Lonzi, as if they were living in the Middle Ages, miserable people in faded black clothes, toothless by age twenty, stirring fires of scrap wood in oil drums to stay warm. For all they knew it was the year 800. The gang would make Milan (where most of them were from anyhow) their headquarters. Milan was not the capital, but it would be the capital of the new.

To the north! Lonzi shouted, raising his mangled, plastered hand. To progress! he added, which is always right. It may be a traitor, thief, murderer, or arsonist, but it is always right.

What had he meant? No one cared. They cheered.

*  *  *

They returned en masse, Valera, too, who vowed privately to out-Pope Pope, whoever he was, the American who had designed Valera’s bike, whose name meant “pope” in English, and Valera found this wonderfully funny, that some guy in America had the name Pope. He, Valera, would design the fastest, most unique and elegant motorcycle yet, and his father had pledged the money to put it into production if his prototype was a success.

Milan was the same city Valera had experienced as a boy arriving from Egypt, but now the trams and their intricate overhead wires seemed beautiful. Neon was electric jewelry on the lithe body of the city, and he and the little gang were the marauders of this body. They zoomed over it, their engines roaring, their horns ricocheting against the high buildings along narrow lanes. The city was theirs, with all its metal and glass and auto traffic, its cranes and diggers and smokestacks. Lonzi talked of a future in which the city would be built to the size and scale of machines and not of men. Houses would be razed to make way for car racing and airplanes. Speed, Lonzi said, gives us, at last, divinity in the form of the straight line. We reject sluggish rivers and zigzagging humans and their flophouse designs! Lonzi said harebrained things about straightening the rivers of Europe, the Rhine, the Danube, the Po. The gang joined a racing club at a track on the wooded outskirts of Milan. They argued over the exact terms for the sensation of cornering, their motorcycles feeling as if they would split in two, accelerating out of turns as speed come to life, a violent but controlled surplus of itself. This was the difference between Valera and his gang. Valera was the only one with the training to conceptualize speed. The only one who truly appreciated the fine lubricated violence of an internal combustion engine, as he understood precisely how one worked. Valera spent his time designing his cycle and made plans to open a factory with his father’s backing. The others went to the track to race their cycles but less and less often, as they were too busy writing poems about motorcycle racing, busy making paintings of the velocity
they’d felt. None was interested in generating actual speed: of putting a motor together, clamping it to a frame, filling its tank with gas, and riding the thing. Lonzi and the others scribbled poems that made the sounds of guns, while Valera was busy designing cycle mounts for actual guns. He himself never wanted to enlist in war again. But he saw money in designing the machines for it.

Valera still pictured Marie on the back of that beastly crude bike built by Hildebrand & Wolfmüller of München. He had recovered from his youthful lust, her rabbit’s foot foot, his haversack keepsake. He was thirty-two years old and had experienced many other women by now, mostly for hire but some for free, and he couldn’t have cared less about Marie, understanding that she was, in any case, surely no longer the person he’d desired. Not burgeoning youth. Probably she’s squeezing out children, he thought, her big breasts heavy with milk. While I am changed only for the better. And still a lover of girls. Ready for Marie’s daughter, soon enough. Women were trapped in time. This was why men had to keep going younger. Marie’s daughter, or someone else’s. Because men, Valera understood, moved at a different velocity. And once they felt this, their velocity, all they had to do was release themselves from the artifice of time. Break free of it to see that it had never held them to begin with.