The Flamethrowers Part 18

That face, with the ski mask, the infinity eyeholes. It was another counterreality, but not like that of the girl who sang. The person in the ski mask: tall, gangly, in a dirty blazer open and flapping. Running with a gun in his gloved hand.

He turned back. Aimed his gun at the police and fired.

Gianni and I ran down a side street. Something whistled through the air. A hissing bloom of smoke filled the street, the air white. My eyes burning, spilling tears, Gianni pulling me. The camera slipped from my hands. I stumbled over it, couldn't see. I heard people retching. Gianni pulled the neck of my shirt up over my mouth and nose. It was automatic, the way he went to cover my face. He turned away, spit up, pulled his own scarf up to his eyes. Coughs echoed everywhere. The air was white; it was like being in a cloud that had moved down over a mountain, the vertigo of not knowing which direction is falling and which is up. I coughed and coughed, unable to make it through the coughing to its other side, to a place of not coughing. The camera didn't matter because I could not breathe. Gianni held on to my arm, but his grip was tense and impersonal.

As the smoke thinned, the people around us reappeared, in gas masks of various styles and types, or with scarves tied in complicated ways over their faces, like Gianni. They'd been waiting for this. I had not.

The demonstration had begun at dusk, under stormy skies. One hundred thousand people, a tenth of them apparently with guns hidden in a pocket. By the time Gianni and I reached the end, at the Piazza del Popolo, it was completely dark. People crowded in and told stories of police beatings, of the thousands who had been arrested. Someone gave out lemon-soaked rags, which we held over our mouths. Bottles of Coca-Cola were pa.s.sed around. You were meant to dribble some over your eyes, as Gianni showed me, to stop the stinging. Guns were handed out among the people in the Piazza del Popolo, looted from a rifle shop. I was pa.s.sed one and it was far heavier than I would have expected.

Popolo means crowd or mult.i.tude. Popolaccio: rabble or mob.

I left with Gianni just as the police began arresting anyone on the street who was wet. Anyone in possession of lemons. Anyone who smelled of gasoline. That smell was pervasive. The students smelled of it. Some of the women. All of the men. It was something I a.s.sociated with Reno kids, my cousins and their friends, always smelling of gasoline. Scott and Andy returning from the filling station in the back of Uncle Bobby's pickup truck with pink gasoline in plastic jugs, or siphoning it from unsuspecting neighbors with a segment of old garden hose, their studious expressions, pulling gasoline, angling the siphoned liquid into a container, sometimes getting a mouthful by mistake. Gasoline was a summertime smell. Long solstice days. The rangy Doppler of a lawn mower. Scott and Andy done with their ch.o.r.es, their dirt bikes up on milk crates, the winding sound of socket wrenches in the suffocating heat of an afternoon garage. Boys who loved the smells of gas and oil and carburetor cleaner, soaking into their hands, soaked into the red shop rags they used to clean engine parts, cleaning these parts in a manner so fastidious it was as if they were cleaning tarnish from expensive jewelry, working the rags over the tiny set-screws of their carburetors. The hands that cleaned carburetor and engine parts, permanently black.

That I could draw no connection between that world and this one, the people who stank of gasoline in the Piazza del Popolo, and Scott and Andy who loved its smell, made me sad for Scott and Andy in a way I could not explain.

That night, the second one sleeping in my same clothes, I lay on the couch and thought of those white balloons I'd filmed, retrieving what I could from memory, since the camera was lost. The sight of them, floating, took me to a park in Reno when I was small. Children were gathered, a group of us seated in an open gra.s.sy area. Someone had given us each a balloon. We counted down, and then let go of our balloons. I remembered how the sky had looked after we had opened our hands to let them rise. It was late afternoon, and as the balloons went higher they were set alight by the sun's stronger angle, gold light that only the balloons were high enough to reach. I remembered watching them fade, smaller and smaller, lone voyagers on floating journeys, the sky their ocean, with the ocean's depth and immensity.

I was lying on the couch in that apartment, riding the vast unknown sea with those untethered balloons, when I heard a soft cry, a woman's voice from the other room. Then another cry. The knocking of a bed frame against a wall. I tried to relocate the scene of the balloons and to pretend I was not tracking these sounds, a rhythmic thump, a woman's cries. Durutti was on the couch across from me. I could tell by his breathing that he was deep asleep, and I envied his innocence.

I was awake, waiting for those cries, listening to the thud of the bed frame against the wall. The cries were Bene's. Bene being made to voice those sounds by, I was sure, Gianni, while I was alone on a couch with my childish memory, a person neither in a movement nor of one.

And, in fact, they weren't actually cries. Or rather, the first was a cry, but thereafter they were voiced sighs, so faint I'd had to hold my breath to hear them. The truth is, I was listening very carefully.

The next day, and in the days that followed it, three, four, five-I lost count, surrounded by people who didn't work or go to school or have any compelling reason to care what day of the week it was-I did not think of myself as someone who needed to make decisions. Decisions about Sandro, about New York. I was, instead, one of the people in that Volsci apartment where so many congregated, who had been in the march, who had not been injured or arrested. And by escaping those two outcomes, injury, arrest, I was part of the rage and celebration. One person at the demonstration had died, hit in the neck by a tear gas canister. Many others were beaten by the celerini or by the Fascist gangs that had surged into the rear segment of the march, swinging lead pipes. The kids with gun in pocket, the Valera workers with their tire irons disguised as banner dowels, were, it turned out, merely protecting themselves.

Demonstrations were temporarily banned by the government. There was to be no loitering, no collecting in groups. People all over the city responded to this. Someone figured out how to trip the traffic lights, and they all turned red and stayed red for an afternoon, causing gridlock. Other acts were coordinated by the radio station that was broadcast from inside the apartment, a soundproofed room next to Bene's. Durutti went on the air and invited Romans who were hungry to go out, order food, eat it, and refuse to pay. The radio station was a central coordinating voice. Not a government, but a way to speak to each person, a voice addressing each autonomous person. These are the new figures for rent, the voice said. Pay this amount to the electric company. The things Roberto complained about: this was how they were done. The radio pulsed through a network. A network of people who acted in concert against the government, against the factories, against everything that was against them. We'll take what we can and pay what we want. We'll pay nothing for what is already ours. Bene and Lidia hosted an hourlong morning show addressed to women. One day it was dedicated to the housewives of Rome; the next, to the working prost.i.tutes of Termini. To the women in the armed struggle. The women inside Rebibbia. To the men who have reduced the world to a pile of trash. To our lesbian comrades. The show was called Everyday Violence.

"Sisters," Bene said, "men can put you in touch with the world. We see that. Men connect you to the world, but not to your own self."

"To fight with a gun," Bene said, "is to take it upon yourself to think for others. So think clearly and well."

The radio station was jammed repeatedly, the broadcast overtaken by a sudden whistling sound, but Lidia, with Durutti's help, managed to locate another position on the bandwidth and continued broadcasting.

When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I'd seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week.

Downstairs from the apartment was the one in which the two men lived who were making a film about Anna, the pregnant biondina. They had expanded their project and enlisted a crew that included lighting people, electricians, production a.s.sistants. Their door was always open, equipment and cords spilling out into the hallway. Pa.s.sing by, I heard them yelling at the biondina to get into the shower. The two filmmakers were shouting a word I did not know: "Pidocchi! Pidocchi!" Because the apartment was open and they were always beckoning, I went in.

The girl was naked, being pushed in the shower by the one on whom she'd squirted her milk.

"You stink," he said. "Come on, it's time to wash."

She smiled in her guileless way. "But I'm shy," she said, trying to hold her hand over her large b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the other over her crotch, her full round belly protruding between the two zones of modesty that she was attempting to cover.

She had to be convinced, and finally a.s.sented, leaning into the water, soap running over her slippery pregnant form. I remembered suddenly that I was watching, right along with this crew, all male, fixated on her, their subject. I left to go upstairs, ashamed.

Pidocchi were lice, Bene explained. "I hope they get them, too."

Two days later, the filmmakers and their crew were all scratching like crazy as I pa.s.sed by their downstairs apartment with Lidia, Bene, Durutti.

We were on our way to the movies. At the box office window there was some discussion of what we should pay, the appropriate price for a movie, and then Durutti said screw it, movies should be free. He bypa.s.sed the ticket window and yanked open the doors and we crashed on through. The theater was filled with smoke from cigarettes and hash. The movie was already playing, A Star Is Born, with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. People filed into the dark, yelling the names of friends, hoping to find them. Voices from all over the theater shouted back, "Over here! Over here!" as a prank. Every time Barbra Streisand or Kris Kristofferson opened their mouths to speak, the audience erupted in roars, and the actors' dubbed voices could not be heard. Barbra Streisand was singing, "Love . . . soft as an easy chair," as liquor bottles were dropped, rolling noisily down the sloped theater floor toward the front. "Love fresh as the morning air . . . "

I saw a familiar face as we filed out, the soap-flakes model staring down from a poster. The midnight movie: Dietro la porta verde. It and she really traveled, a kind of beckoning. Come find out what.

Didi was still in captivity, his face on the front page of the newspaper Gianni was reading when we returned from the movies. I had never told them about Didi, about why I was in Italy in the first place. It seemed like a dream. And maybe an indictment. I was fraternizing now with people who made it impossible for me to think of going to Monza, too deep inside an enemy camp to admit my former allegiance, to think of leaving to pursue the original goal. The day I was meant to go to Monza had come and gone. And who from that realm had cared or noticed? If Sandro cared or noticed, he had not tried to find me. More than a week had pa.s.sed since I'd left for Rome with Gianni. Maybe I was impossible to find. I heard Sandro's mother's voice, not what she said but a tone: good riddance. And Talia: good riddance. The Count of Bolzano: a shrug, a shake of the head at my crude American behavior, fleeing as I had.

I was estranged now from that world but I felt, as well, an estrangement from this group of people, who nonetheless included me in everything, or at least many things. There were secrets in that apartment. Gianni was often absent and always aloof, quietly reading his Il Sole 24 Ore on the couch. He and Durutti would retreat into a room, looks exchanged among the others as the door was shut. At one point, Bene seemed to suggest that Gianni had been in prison but had escaped. I could not tell if she was joking. My Italian was good, but nuance and humor were sometimes lost on me.

There were a lot of gray areas with these people. Roberto and Sandro, despite their political differences, both had presented the issues as stark and tidy, as if there were exactly two groups that opposed the state, as distinct from each other as black and white: the Red Brigades-armed, underground militants. And the leftist youths-open, public, more or less nonviolent. But nothing was simple or stark, I was beginning to see. Guns were issued in the apartment on the Via dei Volsci in virtually the same way the jeans were distributed. It was a world apart from Sandro and his guns. One artist at a shooting range in the Catskills, interested, as Sandro was, in manufacture, protocol, history, the weapon as almost a work of art, an industrial thing of beauty. This was something else, a ragtag mob with guns jammed here and there in their pockets, no concern for make or model beyond pragmatics. The gun was a tool like a screwdriver was a tool, and they all carried them.

A television was liberated by Durutti and two others from a neighborhood electronics store, and we watched the news. The Red Brigades had struck again, killing a Fascist. The Fascists had retaliated by killing an anarchist who was not a.s.sociated with the Red Brigades. The pope made an appeal for an end to the violence, in his Sunday-morning televised address from the Vatican. He stood on a balcony wearing a huge ornamental headdress that looked like a brushed-metal bullet, a large pointed dome with a row of twinkling stones low around its girth, underneath a spiky gold base.

It was true that we had smoked a little hash. Nonetheless also true that the pope made his plea for peace with a giant bullet propped on his head.

The next day Didi Bombonato was set free, after thirteen days in captivity. That marked time for me in a way I could not have marked it on my own. Thirteen days. A lifetime. For me, anyway, because I had thrown my old life away. At this point I might have gone from the Monza track outside Milan to the German track. That is, had Didi not been kidnapped, had Sandro not betrayed me, had I not run away. And after Monza and then Germany, I would have a lot of footage, possibly enough for my film. I'd return with it to New York, and Marvin and Eric would not be mad about my sabbatical from work, because they'd see what I'd made and as arbiters of the medium would be understanding and supportive.

Instead, no longer the owner of a camera, having smashed and lost my Bolex Pro at the demonstration, I was on a couch in Rome, stoned, watching TV, looking at the face of free and waving Didi Bombonato, whom I had known, but now, would not know.

Didi had been let go after he had agreed to write a defense of the Red Brigades, a letter with a distinctly Leninist tone. The Valera Company was suspicious that Didi had possibly contracted Stockholm syndrome, and whether he had or not, he was no longer quite the image they were looking for to represent and promote Valera Tires, and they pulled their sponsorship of him, according to the news report. No one else in the apartment was watching but me.

Later that day I walked downstairs and saw that the filmmakers' apartment was empty. There was no equipment crowding into the hall. No crew. Just the balding, scraggly one sitting in a chair, smoking.

"Where is the girl?" I asked.

"In a manicomio," he said.

A manicomio. It took me a moment to remember. Insane asylum.

"What about the baby?" I asked.

"The baby," he said, scratching his head almost as if trying to remember. "She had it yesterday."

"So where is it?" I asked.

"Vincenzo has it," he said.

"Vincenzo?"

"The electrician. He fell in love with her. I stepped aside for that. No one can accuse me. I let Vincenzo have her, even as I could have kept having her myself. Because . . . hey, American girl, did you ever have a baby? No? Well, I can tell you what you might not know. Some pregnant girls are very s.e.xual."

He smiled. He had a gap in his teeth like mine. An ugly gap.

"We're editing the film, hopefully in time for Venice," he said, filling the empty room with exhaled smoke as he stubbed out his sloppy and limp handrolled cigarette. "Alberto has a festival connection who can get us in, and-"

A manicomio.

Vincenzo has the baby.

They didn't care about her. The girl who was the center, the cause, the reason for their film.

Venice. They were hoping for Venice.

Vincenzo has the baby.

Durutti and the boys liked me and fought for my attention. It was a good distraction from the problem of Sandro, of what I could no longer go back to. That was something the biondina and I had in common. I didn't have lice. I wasn't going to the manicomio. But like her, I was pa.s.sing through. A girl who would be around every day for a spell, and then one day be gone.

Gianni did not fight for my attention. He was far too cool, too distant from this whole thing he had brought me to. Bene was his lover, but he showed her no affection in front of others. He was calm, stone-faced, just as he'd been at the villa. Everyone else quieted when he entered the apartment. They lowered the television volume and tracked his movements as he went from room to room, as if they were waiting for him to say something or to make some judgment.

Twice he asked me to take rides with him. On those rides I felt a measure of intimacy between us. He drove, stopped in front of an apartment, parked, asked me to wait. Returned to the car, cool as ever. Once we were stopped at a security checkpoint in Trastevere and Gianni told the traffic officer I was the wife of Sandro Valera, that he worked for the Valera family and was taking me to do my shopping. Hearing this, the officer was eager to wave us on, and I sensed it was my function, for Gianni, to play that role and relieve suspicion. The police were the enemy of the young in Rome, that I understood firsthand, so I didn't think much of it. It was illegal to even plan a demonstration. Discretion, having the wife of a Valera along, made sense.

The third time I went for a ride with him, we had a beer together before returning to the apartment on the Via dei Volsci. He showed me a skeleton key Durutti had made, to insert in pay phones for free calls.

"Want to call your boyfriend?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"Right," he said. "He cheated on you. And right there at the factory, in public . . . "

I felt ashamed to be reminded of it.

"I think Sandro Valera is an a.s.shole for doing that," he said. "You shouldn't feel any shame about it. He should be ashamed."

"What were you doing there?" I asked. "Why were you working for her?"

He looked at me. For some reason, we both started to laugh. A strange laughter, airy and heady and off-centering. My face felt red. His wasn't. He stopped laughing and answered me.

"I was looking after them."

"Looking after them," I repeated.

"Keeping tabs."

Of course he was. And why had I not realized? Even when he brought me into that apartment on the Volsci, the heart of the Movement, as I came to see. Why had I not realized that Gianni would have some actual purpose in working for the Valeras? In hovering near their dinner table chatter. Their poolside conversations. The intimacy of the house.

"That family is going to pay," he said. "You'll see. They'll get their justice."

Which was the thing Sandro had promised when he had invited me to his loft for the first time. He'd promised justice, and what I found instead was Ronnie Fontaine. Did Sandro know I'd slept with Ronnie? Did he place him there on the couch as a joke of some kind? I doubted it. But I also knew their friendship wasn't simple. And that when Ronnie chided Sandro about not blocking my way to Monza, it wasn't really about me. Even as it seemed to be. It was between them, a link between them I didn't penetrate. Just as Gianni's threats about the Valera family weren't about me, either. But I was comforted by them. Did I want Sandro to pay? Sure I did.

We returned to the apartment. Gianni and Bene fought. I heard only her, just as when I had listened to them have s.e.x, her voice behind a closed bedroom door, this time loud and upset, righteous.

She came out, entered the kitchen, and ranted to the women gathered there, who were soldering radio parts. She called Gianni various names. The women all laughed.

I stood outside the kitchen, awkward, his accomplice, perhaps the reason she was angry. Bene looked at me. Her face broke into a tight, unfriendly smile.

"Go ahead. Just go with him," she said. "Go on."

I'd spent a few innocent hours with Gianni, and she was shutting me out.

Bene put her hand out, gesturing in the direction of the bedroom where Gianni was. "Go with him," she said.

The other women kept soldering. Not a single one looked up at me. I was being shunned because of Bene. Because of Gianni. Because of something that possibly had nothing to do with me.

It seemed ridiculous, a joke, but it wasn't a joke. They had turned against me in the few hours I was gone.

Bewildered, I walked past the kitchen to the bedroom and opened the door.

Gianni looked up at me.

The rest of it I wish I could erase.

16. HOOKERS AND CHILDREN.

John Dogg and Nadine were quite the couple now. John Dogg was showing with Helen h.e.l.lenberger. Helen was wild about him. All the important critics were at his debut opening at her gallery. There were slide projections of blank white light. And patterned light from shallow zinc rectangles of water he'd placed strategically on the floor. He'd aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.

John Dogg wore a well-cut linen suit and laughed easily and occupied the role of feted artist with perfected naturalism, no sign of the pushy tactics I'd seen at the Kastles'. He moved through the room confident that he was universally adored, and it seemed that he was. I'd met him the previous September and now it was late April, almost May, and he had been reinvented. This happened in New York, and you could never point to the precise turn of events, the moment when the change in human currency took place, when it surged upward or plummeted. There was only the before and the after. In the after, no one was allowed to say, hey, remember when everyone rolled their eyes about John Dogg? Shunned him, thought he was an idiot? I understood all this now. Sandro disapproved of that kind of ambition, said there was no hurry, but it was a lie, a thing successful people said, having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had been in a rush.

I watched as Didier de Louridier pumped John Dogg's hand eagerly and congratulated him on the show.

Nadine stood at John Dogg's side. She, too, was transmitting and receiving on a new frequency. She was sleek and composed, all sheen and stillness. She wore a black, high-collared dress and stiletto heels of black patent leather. Her hair had been cut into one of those waferlike constructions you saw in fashion magazines, a wedge of it, hardened with aerosol lacquer, fanning over one eye. She gleamed like an obelisk, standing next to John Dogg as he shook hands with the people who surrounded them. The concentration of smooth, flattened energy in that wafer of hair, which shaded one eye like an upside-down poker hand. She was nothing like the woman I remembered, sunburned, drunk, crying, something starkly provisional about her enjoyments, Thurman's goodwill, the sense that she would be on hard luck whenever he was bored with her, done escapading, and wanted to go back to Blossom.

I was at the opening with Gloria and Stanley Kastle. Since my return, two weeks earlier, I had been staying with them, in the same spare room where Burdmoore Model had camped out in his fugitive days. I was their current adoptee, and my photographs from the salt flats, at Gloria's insistence, went above the shelf where Burdmoore's sculptures had been displayed. I showed Gloria my short films, which I a.s.sociated with a naive era, before I'd met Sandro, tracking the row of limousines and drivers on Mulberry Street, a dark walk through neon-lit Chinatown, but Gloria liked them. I was a fresh cause for her and Stanley. They disapproved of how Sandro had treated me. But I understood that they would remain friends with Sandro permanently. I was temporary and Sandro was permanent. They claimed to be angry at him and said if he made an appearance here at John Dogg's opening they would protect me, but there was no risk of running into Sandro. I still knew him, even after discovering that I didn't quite know him. He would feel it was beneath him to come to the opening of John Dogg, so recently scorned and ignored.

Spring had arrived and it was a mild, windless night, the pear trees on West Broadway covered with white flossy blossoms as I had parked the bike and waited for the Kastles outside the gallery.

"She's sleeping with her a.n.a.lyst," Stanley said to me as they approached.

"The couch is there for a reason," Gloria replied. "You are flat, horizontal, frontal. They are vertical. The session can either be inert or it can be activated, in which case, Dr. Butz is active."

"She pays him," Stanley said, "a hundred bucks."

"I pay a negotiated fee of eighty-five, Stanley."