The Flamethrowers (17 page)

For two long days Didi and the crew did test runs in their rocket-engine vehicle, the
Spirit of Italy
. There was a steering issue, which they solved by relenting to a curious handling feature: under two hundred miles an hour, the steering wheel of the
Spirit
was turned right in order to go right. Over two hundred miles an hour, it had to be turned
left
to go right. And over three hundred miles an hour, once again, the wheel was turned right to make it go right.

The moment had finally arrived for Didi to make his run. I was under the Valera awning, my foot propped up. Beyond, spectators packed against a rope. Many of those who had been around for the weekend of various classes of machine had stayed at the salt flats to see this. It was both a private affair, the flats officially closed, and the main event, because Didi Bombonato was favored to beat his own time and set a new world record for land speed. It was late morning, a pleasant day, clouds wind-pushed toward Floating Mountain, their shadows like big weightless vehicles. Soon, heavy rains were expected to arrive—by the middle of next week. The season would end, the salt soaked and mushy and unusable for land speed trials.

Didi put on his deerskin gloves. He performed his hand signals and
then waved at the people who pressed in behind the rope to watch him make his run. He drank his single espresso. Flipped his hair. Put on his helmet and bent low to get into the
Spirit of Italy,
a chrome, white, and teal canister—the same silvery teal as the motorcycle I’d crashed.

His techs were about to attach the bubble canopy when the team manager came running out of his trailer, its door slapping closed behind him, waving his arms over his head in an X. “Stop!” he yelled. “Stop! Hold it!”

Didi turned around in the tight little compartment of the
Spirit
and scrunched his raisin eyes in the direction of the manager, who came toward him with a walkie-talkie to his ear, listening.

“We have a problem,” the manager said.

“What is the problem?” Didi called back.

“A strike,” the manager said. “In Milan.”

The manager called everyone under the awning, around the workbenches. Didi hunched over the steering wheel in the
Spirit of Italy,
scowling, as if impatience alone could get his vehicle powered up and motoring along the flats, while his team decided that as loyal members of the union, which was in contract negotiations and had voted to strike, they were obligated to strike as well.

The mechanics in Milan were conducting something called a work-to-rule strike, so the mechanics on the salt flats conducted their own work-to-rule strike. It was a way of striking without striking, as Tonino explained it to me. They were still getting paid, and not at risk of being fired and replaced. They simply went absolutely by union and company code on every single procedural element of their jobs, and their unions and procedures being Italian and deeply bureaucratic, each task, if accomplished according to code, took much longer than it normally would.

Didi, not in the union, not a company employee, but a celebrity racer with an independent contract, was furious.

“You’ll do your run,” the manager assured him. “But there are a few procedures we have overlooked in the interest of time and efficiency. But really, we should not have skipped them.”

For starters, there was meant to be a fully stocked first aid box or no work could commence. Someone was sent into town to buy iodine and tweezers, which were absent from the first aid box. While this errand was run, the crew waited under an awning on the white salt, in absolutely no hurry, certainly not any hurry that would tempt them to disregard official company procedures or compromise safety. They sat and smoked cigarettes. Someone put the Moka on a butane burner.

With the first aid box finally restocked, they were ready to do a safety check on the
Spirit
. But then it was discovered that another procedural rule had been ignored: each screw from the
Spirit of Italy
was to be labeled upon removal, but not by hand; labels were to be printed on tags in lowercase Garamond with an Olivetti typewriter, which they did not possess, nor did they have any tags, so no screws could be removed from the
Spirit of Italy
. Long discussions commenced on what was to be done in light of this problem. The team manager said he felt they could hand-print the labels, but tidily, “As if our
hands
are machines,” he said. Just make the letters very uniform, he said. But they didn’t have tags, and so someone had to figure out how to make tags.

Didi sat under the awning of his trailer, his deerskin gloves drooping from his pocket, his hair losing its feathery loft, his race suit unzipped to the waist, the sleeves tied around his middle. His eyes seemed to be getting smaller, dimmer, more raisinlike, his lips more bloodless and thin, like the edges of a cooked crepe, as if he were becoming uglier as the day stretched toward dusk and he was not allowed to make his run, set his record, be the famous and glorious (if short and ugly) Didi Bombonato.

The next day was similar, time stretching full with long discussions of how to interpret the employee codes and rules, talk that was punctuated by many cigarette and Moka breaks. Hours waiting under their Valera awning while the team manager filled out a series of forms they usually ignored, and then one man was sent into town to notarize the forms, and having forgotten to collect passports, had to return, and then go again, and suddenly it was time for their company-allotted break, and they would all quit working as one of them prepared the
afternoon espresso. Didi was indignant. He fumed. Performed stretches and hand exercises and glared at the others with his opaque raisin eyes.

*  *  *

Morning and evening, Tonino helped me to ice my ankle and dress my road rash, broad lakes of which were drying into big itchy scabs. He asked about Sandro, and said he hadn’t been aware there was another brother.

“Do you know Roberto?” I asked.

“We don’t
know
him,” Tonino said, laughing. “Roberto is the face of the company. The president.”

Outside the trailer window, the techs were discussing some new problem.

I’d tried to relay a message to Sandro through one of the mechanics who’d gone into town, to tell him what had happened. The mechanic had called the loft and said a woman answered and told him Sandro was out. A woman? I figured there was a language barrier, or that he’d dialed the wrong number. Or maybe someone from Sandro’s gallery had come over, not unusual, to photograph artworks or prepare them for shipment.

“Does Sandro Valera tell you about the company situation?” Tonino asked.

“Not really,” I said. “He’s an artist, he’s not involved.”

“Lucky for him, perhaps,” Tonino said. “The company is at war with its factory workers.”

I knew only a little about this war that Tonino referred to. Sandro did not call it that. It wasn’t something he talked about often. The previous spring, an Italian artist he knew from Milan had a gallery show on West Broadway that was about factory actions and the Red Brigades. The show was called
S.p.A.
—a play on words, Sandro explained. In Italy, the acronym meant joint stock company, but literally, “society for actions.” The artist had made huge pencil tracings from newspaper photographs of three Red Brigades victims and one Red Brigades member, Margherita Cagol, killed in a shoot-out with police, slumped
on the ground in tight jeans, a purse strewn at her side, blood leaking from her mouth. Sandro seemed unhappy to confront the material. The press release mentioned that the Red Brigades were Italian militants who got their start in the Valera factories on the industrial outskirts of Milan. Sandro put the sheet down. “Sensationalist crap,” he said.

When I asked Tonino about the Red Brigades he said, “That’s just one group. The most visible one. There are so many groups at this point. Many of them come together only after an action, to give those who committed the action a name, and then they disband, disappear. You can’t know who is part of what. They don’t know, either. They might not know they are
in
a group until the action is done and the group claims it.”

Late on the evening of the second day of the work-to-rule strike, word arrived that the mechanics in Italy had declared theirs over.

The next morning, Didi emerged bright and early from his trailer, fully suited and ready to go. He lifted a leg and did a few sets of athletic lunges, then switched legs and lunged again in taut sets. He flicked his hands into open tens, shut fists, open tens. He jumped up and down in a controlled dribble like a prizefighter.

He was ready to claim his empire, be Didi Bombonato, world land speed champion, break his own record, and—

Wait. What was happening?

The six technicians and their team manager emerged from the tool and equipment trailer with extreme slowness, as if the baking white salt were a kind of thick gel that offered great resistance, as they moved toward the workbench onto which the
Spirit
had been wheeled for a maintenance check. The team manager picked up a drill in curious slow motion.

Didi yelled at them. “What are you doing? What is this? Come on!”

The team manager turned toward Didi and lifted his hand to his face. He removed his sunglasses, brought them downward with sustained slowness, and cleaned each lens thoroughly with a handkerchief. Then he put his sunglasses back on.

“I’m preparing for your run,” the team manager said. He spoke these words very, very slowly.

He and the others moved around underneath the awning, picking up tools and gauges in slow motion. They spoke with big swaths of silence between words.

Didi let out what I can only describe as a roar. He kicked the side of his trailer and seemed to have injured his toe (his driving shoes, like Flip Farmer’s, were of soft leather, not for protection but sensitivity).

*  *  *

The team was now engaged in something called a slowdown, in solidarity with the Valera workers back in Milan. The mechanics no longer followed the rule book so perversely and exactly but instead distended time, taking longer to perform each task, and punctuating their activities and communications with great pauses. As I watched all of this, I felt both closer to Sandro for all I was seeing of this company crew, and also far away. I still hadn’t talked to him.

That night, lying on the daybed in the trailer, I listened to the wind and felt like a stowaway.

As we had left the gallery on West Broadway, after seeing the drawings of the Red Brigades victims, Sandro had begun to tell me a story about M, an Argentine friend of his, a man I’d only met briefly on a couple of occasions. I immediately sensed from the quiet, serious way he spoke about M that Sandro was trying to tell me something about himself, his family, and those drawings, people slain in the streets of Rome and Milan, the woman killed in a shoot-out with police. Sandro was protective of M, and the particular burdens that M carried because of his father, who was part of the notorious new military dictatorship in Argentina.

“People are always interested in M when they find out his father was part of the junta,” Sandro said, so respectful of his friend’s privacy that he didn’t want to say his name in the context of M’s family. “You hear them practically bragging about it.
You know his father is in the dictatorship, right?
Everyone excited by their two-degree removal from death
squads. They don’t care what M’s relationship to any of it is. They want to know him because he’s connected to corruption and murder, even if M moved to New York City to get away from all that. Away from his family and its tarred name, away from the place where it matters.”

M, Sandro told me, actively avoided friendship with anyone who asked about his father, and at a certain point, anyone who seemed interested in Argentina or Latin American politics generally. Even a vaguely left-wing orientation, Sandro said, could scare off M. And yet M himself was a Marxist, and also gay, and hated his own father and the culture from which he’d come. But he didn’t want to atone for it to anyone else.

“All these people just want to be near him because they’re fascinated by the novelty that a military henchman in a government known for torture and murder has a son in the New York art world,” Sandro said.

Having suffered the complicated weight of guilt for his father’s sordid power, M felt it was his right not to discuss it with anyone, not to explain it or apologize for it. M had to be his father’s son, and wasn’t that enough, Sandro said, as we’d turned up Spring Street, heading to Rudy’s for a drink. “He doesn’t have to explain his background to onlookers, or worse, the self-declared morally outraged.”

M and Sandro had a very particular bond over these things. M’s father’s enemies, the leftist guerrillas, had even torched a Valera plant outside of Buenos Aires, which Sandro and M had laughed about together, on one of the two occasions when I met M. It was one of the few times I saw Sandro find anything humorous about being a Valera.

*  *  *

The next morning, the slowdown was over. Everyone was ready. It was finally time.

But Didi did not emerge from his trailer suited up, limbering himself to set records in the
Spirit of Italy,
as he had done each previous morning. At about noon he finally appeared, wearing street clothes, his hair oily and uncombed, a bored and deadened expression on his face. It seemed the spirit of Didi had been maimed or stalled by all the waiting.
But a couple of hours later, the vehicle ready to go, he recaptured his Didi fire, suited up, and did two runs, setting a new record at 721 miles an hour.

Because the strikes had dragged on for four days, by this time there were no longer any spectators. Just the six techs, Tonino, me, and a few reporters. There was a formal toast, a press conference with the reporters, and then Didi was taken to the airport in Salt Lake City, to depart for a European tour to promote Valera tires. He didn’t stick around for the impromptu party that night, when the mechanics whooped and drank and hugged one another.