The Flamethrowers (30 page)

It is one hour’s walk with the heavy slop-promising pails,
sloppossible,
back to the man with the scale. Twice a day you go to the scale, at noon and then again at sunset. At noon, a whole day, a day’s life, a reality, has already been lived. Waking at dark, deep down under daylight, hurriedly preparing lunch to eat in the jungle, running to the taps, opening them as quickly as you can. The closer to daybreak the more likely you’ll make quota because the trees flow better at dawn.
You have to know which trees to return to (you can’t tap the same tree two days in a row), running from tree to tree to get the taps open and by the time every one of them is flowing you race back to the first tap of the morning, the one you opened in total darkness, by feel alone, and you return to get your yield, pour it from the cup at the bottom of the tree into your pail, clean the tap, and get to the next tree. That’s how it goes, this zigzagging from tree to tree, coated in sweat and jungle damp, zigzagging until noon, when you are ready to collapse, feeling like your head is in a cloud of ammonia, dizzy, confused, pain shooting up your spine, your muscles twisted into torn rags.

The man who puts your pails on the scale is against you like he was born to hate you in a natural way that won’t be corrected with fuller pails, less slopped on their way to the scales. He was lured by good money, easy money. He’d been told proper housing, electricity, hot meals. You carry his water—sloppossible but not measured like the latex is, just eyeballed, and so less calamitous if slopped. He isn’t so bad off, not at all, in fact, compared to your life, heat and pain and exhaustion, little sleep on dirt floors under canvas tarps, eating cold food when it rains, because the cooking is all outdoor. He is there to mind you. That is his job, and it is your fault. He frowns with hate, weighs the pails of latex, and puts down a number in the booklet. You don’t get paid for the pails. You get a number in his booklet. If the number is under quota you get no credit. If your pail is at quota they say you’re breaking even, and you get another number, for the credit, the amount owed against the amount collected, resulting in a handful of stale manioc flour, for which you must have your own bag, or the flour goes straight in your pockets, or, if you have no bag and no pockets, you run toward camp with your fingers sealed together in a bowl, like a hungry, desperate fool, leaving a trail of powdered manioc behind you. If your pail is over quota, you get the flour, and they say you’ll get something when the job is finished. Rumor has spread that the booklet is a lie. The job is not going to finish in the sense of an accounting and a payment. Someone says,
Let’s burn it.
But then you really won’t get paid.

You and the others had made a four-month journey to a living hell
and the patrãos knew it. All the way from Belém, where you enlisted. They kept their guns pointed so you would not escape. But you tried. The patrão who stood with the man working the scale was distracted, drinking from his canteen and trying not to look at the long line of men holding their pails, waiting. He sat on a cut log. His muzzle-loader hung from a strap on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. The man who weighed the pails was writing in the booklet. Because the jungle made the pages damp, he had to draw out each pencil line slowly. The pencil didn’t like damp. Or the page didn’t like it. You, almost at the end of the line, set down your pails and dove into the brush, off the path that led to the scales. Not sticking to your line, off the page like a pencil that would not write.

And then you were running and looking up through the green fringe of tree ferns. Panting and huffing and feeling your throat go cold with shortness of breath, the green fringe pounding above you as you ran.

How was it, the thought entered your mind as you ran, that God could love you and the patrão and the man who weighed the pails, at one time? How was that possible? Your bare feet had gone numb with running. It was important to try to run lightly to keep quiet, but you could not feel your feet, like you were bobbing on two rubber bounce balls instead of feet, deep in a jungle four months’ journey from your village. Running on feet you could not feel. Bounce balls. And working with the numbness, pulling your legs up to step lightly, because small cracks and rustlings echo in the jungle. Sound travels cleanly, is made louder as it relays through the spaces among the trees, like through those bullhorns they put on the trucks on Sundays to get everyone herded into church, back in your village, which seems not so bad a life now, drought and God and stomachaches from unripe fruit. There was nothing to do but at least there was time. Now you are short on time and running. Weaving among the trees. The trees, thick and strong and sturdy, blocking out the sunlight, but themselves reaching up to it. If you step on a branch by accident the trees give away your secrets. Crack-
crack,
the sound of you sent back through the jungle to
the patrão. The trees, reaching up to the light they blocked, were not part of God’s matrix. They went from their roots to the sky without any part in heavens and hells. The trees just were, and they relayed your secrets if you stepped on a dry branch while trying to escape. Not because they wanted you caught, but because of sound, and the way it traveled. They were no part in God’s matrix. They were the wood His Son was nailed to. That was all. They would not suffer like you did, wondering if God loved you and the patrão at one time. You and the man who weighed the pails. Wondering if God could hate. If He could love. If He could not hate, like the priest said, well, then. He couldn’t love, either. And what help could He offer now? He was as good as the trees (no help at all).

Runaway logic: if you run in the night and sleep by day, you might make it to the river and build yourself a raft. Or you run with no plan but the slim moment, the patrão’s back turned.

Most runaways were caught. The ones who weren’t died alone, among animals, watched by those huge trees that weren’t in God’s matrix. If the Earth is something whole, its wholeness is of no comfort. Some suffer. Others don’t. What is God’s harmony? That you have a gun pointed at you, and the patrão is aiming it. By the laws of harmony, you cannot both have guns.

The green tree ferns pound into and out of view, branches scrape you, your feet are numb. You trip, you fall, you get up, you keep running.

W
e were in low chairs around an outdoor fireplace as dusk settled over the villa, the light tinted pink and made hazy with woodsmoke. Lake Como, far down below us, was a spill of silver. The men were elegantly dressed, in crisply tailored suits and buttery-looking Italian loafers, probably just the kind that Ronnie had coveted when he was driving Saul Oppler’s E-type Jaguar down to Texas with a load of dead rabbits.

There was the gravelly throated Count of Bolzano, a little man whose round belly pressed against his mint-green shirt, which was monogrammed on the lower left, over his spleen. He was an old friend of Sandro’s mother’s. On my other side was a man named Luigi, an industrial designer who peered at me through large, square eyeglasses, looking like a character from a Fellini film. And lastly Sandro’s brother, Roberto, who was as unfriendly as Sandro had warned he would be. Roberto lived down the road from the family villa in a recently built glass-and-steel house. Sandro and I had visited him there two days earlier, on the afternoon we’d arrived in Bellagio. We’d walked down the little road, cicadas surging from the green underbrush that banked the narrow lane. Sandro held my hand, and I’d felt light and strange, partly
from jet lag, but the feeling opened me to this soft, lush place, where everything was so carefully tended.

Roberto had greeted us in his weekend clothes, new designer jeans and a double-breasted blazer, his manner as stiff and guarded as his clothes. I tried to thank him in the awkward moments of our introduction for the Moto Valera I’d gotten from the Reno dealership. At first he seemed to have no idea what I was referring to. Then he remembered and said, “But you crashed it,” and turned to address Sandro about something else before I could respond. Sandro had tried to apologize for him afterward, explaining that Roberto was in a tough position. There was massive upheaval at the Valera plants and though Roberto had worked out deals with the trade union, the workers were now rejecting their own union and striking anyway. Good for them, I thought, and anyway it didn’t excuse his brother from being rude.

Tiny orange lights were beginning to twinkle on the lake’s darkening shore, the lights mirrored in the water, the hills above them spreading out in reverse. The villa was at the top of a steep incline, just a fifteen-minute drive from the lakeside promenade of Bellagio proper, with its double-parked Lamborghinis and its women in furs. Its regal-looking car ferries, which arrived from Varenna, across the sparkling water. And along the waterfront, its white tablecloths, cold prosecco, rich and subdued families gazing off. But in that fifteen minutes traveling uphill from the lakefront to the Villa Valera, one left that world behind, passed horses and cows grazing lazily, handwritten signs advertising farm-made honey and yogurt, and roads choked with blackberry and young chestnut trees.

This was a different Italy from what I had experienced during my two semesters in Florence, hanging out with Italian bikers in a bar near the train station. The Valera villa was of such a grand scale it suggested a life that was more like I’d seen depicted in paintings at the Uffizi than on the narrow and chaotic streets of Florence. The villa was nestled in the high wilds above Bellagio, but its grounds, on a broad, flat promontory overlooking the lake, were landscaped and formal, all geometric
lines and classical motifs. The iron entrance gates were abutted on either side by tall cypress trees, their tips ending in perfect points like obelisks. The long private drive up to the villa was lined with more cypress, and classical statues, nymphs and satyrs, pieces of roman ruins or what looked like them, and huge urns engraved with cryptic Latin phrases. On the flat expanse at the top was a vast carpet of green grass bordered by color-shifting beds of rhododendrons. Various patios and arbors were covered by trellises of grape and climbing roses, and underneath, marble furniture and patio swings with striped seat cushions. Sandro said his mother had done all this landscaping, brought in the classical statues and ruins and urns after his father died, that old Valera had loathed this sort of thing.

A warm wind rustled through the pines that bordered our view of the lake, their tender green pinecones bouncing up and down as the limbs moved. Above the hearth around which these men and I gathered was a statue of Pan playing his flute. Something about his posture, the way he lifted the pipes to his mouth, made him look as if he were wetting the glue on a Zig-Zag in order to seal a joint.

“Of course you should recognize Luigi’s name,” Roberto said as he introduced me to the others, “he’s the most famous industrial designer in Italy.”

“Yes, I should—”

“If you
haven’t
heard of him, you might wonder what they taught you in art school,” Roberto said.

“So you’re from the West,” Luigi said to me, the firelight bouncing from his eyeglasses. His tone was kinder than Roberto’s, although I didn’t sense in it that he was offering himself as an ally. “I have a few friends out in Hollywood,” he said. “I try to make it there once a year or so. A strange place, but magical in its way. I take a mud bath at the Bel-Air Hotel.”

All I knew of Hollywood was Marvin mutilating Paramount films with meat cleavers, Nadine inhaling Freon from old refrigerators. Having been to a fake McDonald’s in the City of Industry didn’t seem like it would count. I said I was from Reno, Nevada.

“The real West, in other words,” Luigi said. “Ranchers. Drifters. Divorcées. A poetic dignity there.”

“You’ve been to Reno?”

“No, no,” he said, as if I had misunderstood. “I saw
The Misfits
. And I have a wonderful book of photographs by Bob Avery. Do you know it?”

The Count of Bolzano turned to Luigi and told him that I was into car racing. That I was going to be doing something with Didi Bombonato. Hearing the Count of Bolzano speak of the publicity tour to Luigi, it sounded like a silly novelty, something kitsch.

“Ah, there you are.” It was Sandro’s mother, coming toward us in the dim light.

Her voice was friendlier, softer than I expected, from the interactions I’d had with her so far. I realized she was looking at the Count of Bolzano. The “you” was he, the softness for him. She had been at a beauty salon in Bellagio in the afternoon, and I could see that her hair was sprung a bit too tightly. She wore a long, brocaded tunic like something purchased from a Turkish bazaar, with espadrilles whose constricting ties crisscrossed up her ankles, as if the ribbons were meant to compensate for the swollen and blotchy appearance of her old legs. She seated herself, touching the curls that clung to her scalp like Mongolian lamb’s wool. It was obvious she had been beautiful when she was young, with eyes that were the splendid gold-green of muscat grapes. She was in her seventies now, her complexion like wet flour, clammy and pale, with the exception of her nose, which had a curiously dark cast to it, a shadow of black under the thin tarp of skin, as if her nose had trapped the toxins from a lifetime of rich food and heavy wines. Her French bulldog, Gorgonzola, scampered after her and plopped itself at her feet, licking its tummy, its body in the shape of an egg cup, and whimpering the way little dogs did, with needs that could not be met simply, with food and company, which was all that larger dogs seemed to need. Actually this was Gorgonzola II, the Count of Bolzano said as I addressed the dog. Gorgonzola I, the Count of Bolzano told me, was buried near the swimming pavilion, in the family plot.

Sandro had shown me his father’s headstone.
T. P. VALERA, ARDITO,
FUTURISTA, PADRE, MARITO.
He’d died in 1958, just after work was begun on his dream project, the Autostrada del Sole. He’d been through two wars, had been a member of the Fascist Party, and had risen from the ashes of that disastrous era to become a huge postwar success. Ardent or not, he was buried next to Gorgonzola the First, who, I saw the next morning when we were down at the swimming pool, had a pink marble headstone that was as grand and ornate as T. P. Valera’s.