The Flamethrowers (51 page)

His father had brought Sandro along because he was in his seventies and in ailing health and needed someone to look after him but could not resist the ribbon cutting. Sandro, eighteen by then, flew from New York to Brasília.

This is what we do, he had thought, holding up his frail father. We cut ribbons. We’re ribbon cutters.

He had both liked and hated Brasília’s stiff white meringues, which perfectly blotted the ugly history that paid for them. His father’s
rubber-harvesting operations in the Amazon had made the Brazilian government enough money to build an all-inclusive concrete utopia, a brand-new capital. The money had poured in. The rubber workers were still there—they were still there
now,
in 1977—and there were many more of them because their children were all tappers as well. Neither Sandro’s father nor the Brazilian overseers and middlemen ever bothered to tell the rubber workers the war was over. They simply kept them going, doing their labor up there in the remote northwestern jungle. The tappers didn’t know. They believed that someday there would be an enormous payment, if not to their children, maybe to their children’s children. “What is time to an Indian?” his father had said to Sandro that night in the hotel, the Palace of Something or Other, another interplanetary meringuelike building for industrialists and diplomats. “What
is
time?” his father asked. “What the hell is it? Who is bound to time, and who isn’t?” Sandro became angry. What am I doing here with this old bastard? “Go tell them, Sandro,” his father had said. “Go on up there. It’s only three thousand kilometers, most of it on dirt roads. Go let them know the war is over and they can all go home, okay?”

It was the last time he saw his father.

Everything a cruel lesson. This, what fathers were for. His father taking Sandro, four years old, to the tire factory gates during a strike. The workers carrying a coffin and Sandro saying, “Papa, is it a funeral?” His father laughing and nodding. For me. I’m dead, right? Holding up his hands, slapping his own cheeks, then holding up his hands again. What do you say, Sandro? Do I look dead to you?

The scene at the gates turned ugly, and next Sandro knew, his father’s driver was clutching him against his fat stomach and then he was pushed back into the car and the car pounded on by fists and other things, rocks, as his father’s driver motored them away from the gates with a bloody face and a lapful of shattered glass.

An argument between his parents when they returned, and he understood that his father had taken him for a purpose, to be caught in what occurred. His father never took Roberto to the gates during a melee. He trained Roberto in the details of profits and losses. Took
only little Sandro to see the workers coming at them with clubs. But why? Sandro asked much later, after Roberto had left for his university studies. Because you are going to be an artist, his father said. And it was important to establish that you aren’t suited to anything else. That’s what artists are, his father said, those who are useless for anything else. That might seem like an insult, he said, but it wasn’t, and someday Sandro would understand. Each child was unique, and destined for something different, so why should they be treated the same?

*  *  *

Roberto. For his death Sandro felt something. For his mother, who would be so alone now. You should take a lover. He had always felt he could never go back there to live. But he would go back. He was going. The flight would board soon, and in a way he was relieved to get it over with, to be banished from his own pathetic tendencies. When he had shown up to the funeral with Ronnie’s castoff, his mother had said to cut it out. Cut what out? And she said, abusing these young women. You don’t love them. You bring them to place between you and your life. That was in May. It was July now and he was officially free of entanglements. Alone.

They would announce boarding at any moment. Going back to Italy would be the death of him, and he was ready for it. Eager, even. His own casket, like the one the factory workers carried for his father. He’d have to occupy a role, be his mother’s adored son now that her firstborn was gone.

Probably that girl, Ronnie’s castoff, was relieved. He couldn’t have been much fun to be around. Moody. Quiet. Domineering. A winning combination. Her curious, catlike autonomy had reminded him in unpleasant ways of his imploded relationship. How badly he’d fucked everything up. The disastrous moment at the tire plant. Even if he had tried to explain himself, explain about Talia, apologize, fix everything, it wouldn’t have worked. He’d wrecked things, and maybe it was intentional, by letting his cousin take him back to the place he’d been so
many times in his youth. She had been his lover and it was like going home. When were people not attracted to cousins? It had been his right to act on it when he was in his twenties, Talia sixteen, but such an old sixteen. He had tried to distance himself when she showed up in New York. Look, he said, I’m living with someone. And Talia had responded with raucous laughter. You think I want to live with you, Sandro? Don’t be an idiot. You’re my cousin, for fuck’s sake. He had managed to stay away. He told her no like you talk to a dog. No, he’d said firmly, and she had smiled, content in her knowledge that the firmness was for him, not for her, a firmness for his own benefit, a reminder of limits he was trying to impose.

*  *  *

The horror of that day, of having to be in the car with the novelist, that old faggot, not actually gay, so be it, who dared to place his hand on Sandro’s mother’s thigh and right in front of him. Sandro and Roberto and Talia in the back. Good God. Like children, sibling warfare all over again. Roberto ducking, convinced he was going to be gunned down in his mother’s Mercedes. Sandro had said, you’re being ridiculous. No one gives a shit about you, he wanted to say but didn’t. It would have justified Roberto’s fears, that no one cared much if he lived.

Driving in through the gates. Valeras at Valera, and everything he had left Italy to escape was on offer for him. The only thing that wasn’t from that Milanese world was Talia. Because she had an English father and had gone to boarding school in the States, and spoke with a slight English accent that reminded him of a recording he’d once heard of the poet Sylvia Plath reading a short, cunning thing that began,

First, are you our sort of person?

The lilt of Sylvia Plath’s voice. A question she repeated that became the poem’s refrain, Will you marry it? intoned in a way that was gentle and severe and knowing. Will you marry it? He’d fused that stern, sexy voice with Talia’s, and this was later, after they’d already been lovers and the combination made her almost a part of him.

How about this suit—

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof.

Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

Talia became a thing he could not reject when it arrived periodically on offer. She talked like Sylvia Plath and looked a bit like her. And her pushy and insistent sexuality—he liked that, too. It became a habit he relied on. Her pale skin and moon face and the hair, black like an Ardito’s cockerel feathers. She didn’t offer the kind of wretched devotion Italian girls didn’t know better than to supply, they wanted to win your heart by adoring you, cooking you a meal, sleeping with you as maternal care. It was a nightmare. I don’t want maternal care. I can care for myself, and in New York he met these . . . viragos, who wanted servicing, like Stanley’s wife, and what a relief it was. A vacation from the self, to attend to their needs. Like Giddle, the so-called best friend, but a betrayer who barely had a self, who had a sociopathic freedom from any need for relating. He enjoyed that kind of thing. On occasion. Or rather, he let himself be enjoyed by these women who dictated. He needed a break from his devoted girlfriend, who submitted to his generosity and demanded so little. She was like a daughter. Young Reno. She was both innocent and ambitious and looked to Sandro for direction, and fine, but not all the time. Sometimes he just wanted to forget himself. Doesn’t everyone? Talia was something different, not like an American girl, either. Proof against fire and bombs through the roof. They went out together that afternoon at the factory for air, that was what she said, “for air.” And once outside, with no one around, she had taken the opportunity. Gone right for the zipper. Reached in with such forthright disregard that it made him sad for his sweet young girlfriend who did not know you just reach in and grab it and it’s not cheap or crass, it just is, a hand on a cock, that’s all it was and some women knew what to do, his own black-haired cousin among them. If young Reno,
unlike his mean mother and cruel extended family, if she’d known to be rude on occasion, to just take, he might not have strayed. But that was a lie, too, because the truth was that he had liked her as she was, the way she had looked up at him so wide-eyed, searching for some sense of herself, a cue.

He wasn’t worth looking up to. Talia understood this, Talia, who didn’t look to anyone for anything. She was unafraid. She didn’t need to please others. She didn’t love herself or anyone else. She knew better than that. She was an evolved human, a Shrapnel. And he understood it. He liked people who didn’t give a shit but you can’t surround yourself with that, it was only for sometimes. Like a day when he was exactly where he didn’t want to be, a Valera at Valera, and Talia had unzipped his trousers and put her hand on his cock and she, it, had promised escape.

He wasn’t choosing to wreck his relationship. He couldn’t have known his American girlfriend would have found her way to the drab industrial outskirts of Milan, and be there at the factory, right
there
. How could he have? He never could have predicted her appearance. Just as she surely had no idea what it felt like to be him in that moment.

He had hurt the person he did not hate. A person he might have loved. He didn’t want to say he loved her, because is that how you treat someone you love? He might have loved her. Leave it at that. Something that might have been but was not, that he could have sustained but didn’t.

*  *  *

His father had said to him, “As you get older, you tolerate less and less well women your own age.” “You mean
you
do,” Sandro had said. “Yes, I,” his father said. “That’s right. And I used to think it was because I’d escaped time and women didn’t. But that’s not the reason. It’s because I’m stunted. Many men are. If you are that kind of man when you grow up, Sandro, you’ll understand. You’ll go younger in order to tolerate yourself.”

That’s what it was about, at the end of the day. His father was right. It’s what you can stand of yourself.

He’d grown up to be at times an asshole, he supposed. And it was so much easier to call yourself that after you’d acted like one, rather than to trot out a lot of remorse and do all the work needed to distance yourself from the acts that defined you. In that way, he and Ronnie were perhaps not opposites but twins, or becoming so.

He’d looked at her face, so sad and angry. And he had thought, I’m an asshole. Which was a kind of remorse, but not the kind with any hope in it.

Maybe the way she had insinuated herself—by accident, he understood—with the company, staying with them in Utah, or Nevada, wherever it was, had not been much to his liking. And then the publicity tour, derailed, so be it. She’d disappeared, he didn’t know where. One of his mother’s employees, the groundskeeper, had gone off to look for her that day at the factory. He said he’d take her back to the villa in Bellagio, but he had not. Probably she’d insisted on going elsewhere. She and the groundskeeper had not been there when he returned. Sandro hung around the villa for a week, alone with the servants and the thump of giant moths against the windows at night. Where was she? She never came back. He telephoned Ronnie in New York, who told him
Time
magazine’s cover that week was a plate of spaghetti with a gun in it and the words “Visit Italy.”

*  *  *

A boarding announcement for his flight. He stood up from his seat as the blanketing echo of many small conversations ricocheted around the high-ceilinged terminal, Trans World. A great white puff through which sailed both swallows and the underside of modernity. Even if the association was not direct. Because TWA was not Oscar Niemeyer but Saarinen. Still, its melted meringue lines told him Brasília equaled death, a nasty little message, private, from the terminal to Sandro.

“Stupidest people on earth,” his father said of the rubber tappers in the Amazon, who made him rich, whose slavery paid for the stunning paean to modernism like the one he was in, the terminal. So dumb and uncivilized that they had weighted their souls with stones. An act
whose grave sophistication still impressed Sandro. It suggested they understood what was at stake, how fragile presence, true and felt and lived presence, really was.

Sandro and M, his Argentine friend, once had a long conversation about culture and violence. He should call M, he thought. M would understand the position Sandro was in and what happened to his brother. But why have that kind of conversation? While waiting around the villa that week she never returned, he had seen the images in the newspaper of the demonstrations, the tanks in Bologna, the masses of people in Rome, human foam filling the Piazza Esedra, and he felt nothing. Or rather, he did feel something. A reminder that he was born on the wrong side of things. The anger and radical acts of the young people in Rome were a kind of electricity, an act and a refusal and a beauty, something Italian that was, for once, magnificent. But it was against him as long as he occupied his role as a Valera. It was against him and he had no right to take part.

*  *  *

After that week alone at the villa, he had returned to New York. Resumed his life, but single. Then Roberto was kidnapped, and Ronnie’s castoff had somehow been around in all the right moments, one of those women who had a skill for that, good timing. Ronnie had hurt her and made her cry and was grateful not to have her following him around anymore. Then suddenly Roberto was dead. And his mother caught him and called him out. You don’t love them.