The Flamethrowers Part 7

"I'm here with the Valera team."

It seemed only partly a lie, and the part that was a lie was quickly replaced by truth, because an hour later I was propped on pillows in the Valera mess trailer, and one of the team technicians had gone off to gather my knapsack from the timing officials' shack.

"You can feel this?" Tonino, their team doctor, was tapping the pads of my toes with his fingers in soft Morse code. He held an ice pack to my ankle, gently moving my foot this way and that. The Valera mechanics had already claimed the motorcycle and the pile of destroyed bodywork that went with it, as if picking up the pieces of my accident were part of their job, or some kind of instinctual chivalry I'd triggered. La ragazza, they kept saying. Me, la ragazza.

"I need to go back to the crash," I told Tonino as I pulled my camera from the retrieved knapsack.

"Don't be stupid. You're injured. You have a bad sprain," he said. "You need to keep it elevated."

I explained I was here to take photographs. I stressed this with Tonino, and afterward with all the other Valera people. Not only because without their help, I wouldn't be able to make it over there to take photographs, but because it made me feel like less of an impostor. The truth was I didn't know all that much about land speed trials, and crashing proved this. I had owned one motorcycle, and I always needed Scott and Andy's help to maintain it, unless the task was to change a simple spark plug. There was a whole range of knowledge and experience I lacked, and to these people whose life was motorcycles, I said I wasn't really a motorcyclist, but an artist. I'd come to photograph my tracks as an art project. Which was the opposite of how I'd presented myself to Stretch, as a girl into motorcycles and nothing more.

Tonino felt sorry for me and convinced one of the team technicians to ride me over to the inspection area on a little put-put bike they had for running errands in the pits. With my camera over my shoulder, I rode sidesaddle to the racecourse. Because of my crash the long course was still closed. I took photos at the start, hobbling on my sprain. I was ashamed to see the timing a.s.sociation people, remembering how calm and kind they'd been, imparting crucial information about gusts to someone who could not, it turned out, use their warning to prevent a mishap. But I faced them to get my photographs. I could not go home empty-handed. The Valera tech rode me along the side of the course's oil line. A truck was just ahead of us, dragging a metal grader, probably to repair the surface where I went down. When we arrived at the crash site, I saw that I'd broken through. What seemed like endless perfect white on white was only a very thin crust of salt. Where the crust had been broken by the force of impact, mud seeped up. I photographed all this, a Rorschach of my crash.

For five nights I slept in the Valera trailer, on a daybed in the lounge area next to the kitchen. I was visited by Tonino, ate the spaghetti their team cook brought to me on a paper plate, and practiced the Italian I'd learned on my year abroad, studying in Florence, and had been too embarra.s.sed to use with Sandro (in any case, Sandro was so disinterested in Italy that my competence would not have impressed him). Tonino was amused by the way I spoke, the idioms I'd picked up. He wanted to know how I'd learned to speak such Florentine Italian. Telling him about Florence brought everything back. The biker crowd I had hung around with, who rode Triumphs and emulated a kind of London rocker look, unwashed denim and pompadours, the girls with liquid eyeliner and nests of teased hair. I had managed to meet Italians who weren't all that different from the people I'd grown up with in Reno. I didn't blend well with the other Americans who were there to study art history. They were mostly from the East Coast, from a culture I didn't understand, wealthy girls who seemed to be in Florence to shop for leather goods. We were all housed with local families, and somehow the others were put in rambling homes with maids and had the s.p.a.cious rooms of children who were away at college. I was put in a walk-in closet with a family who owned a fruit stand near the train station. Every morning when I went to use the bathroom it was opaque with the husband's rank cigarette smoke. At dinner, the wife served tiny portions of fried rabbit and eyed me suspiciously to be sure I didn't serve myself seconds. When the wife had gone to bed, the husband got drunk and tried to engage me in conversation about the beauty of women's a.s.ses. I began avoiding dinner with them and instead ate french fries and drank tap beer at a pool hall near the train station called the Blue Angel, which often had British motorcycles parked in front. I started hanging around with the bikers and their girlfriends instead of going to my cla.s.ses at the exchange program in which I was enrolled. We'd stroll the flea market at Le Cascine, drink at bars that seemed identical to the Blue Angel, or I'd go to their apartments, where we smoked hash and listened to records, Faces and Mott the Hoople. I wasn't learning much about Masaccio and Fra Angelico, but my Italian was good by the time I left.

Tonino corralled everyone around to witness this fact that seemed incredible to him, that I spoke Italian. I was something of an instant mascot, although mostly to Tonino, the mechanics, and the team manager, and not Didi Bombonato himself, who had opposed taking me in. Didi Bombonato came across as vain and irritable, but who knows how Flip Farmer would have come across had he answered the door that day in his prefab on the bluffs above Las Vegas.

"Girlfriend of who?" I had heard Didi ask when they first brought me back to their encampment. "One of the brothers," the team manager said. "He lives in New York City."

"Never heard of him," Didi said. "We're not an orphanage." But the team manager made his own decision that I could stay.

Didi and I avoided each other, which was fine. Maybe I didn't like him all that much, either. The main problem being that he was not Flip Farmer. No open American smile, no bright white teeth, no fancy purple script, nothing of whatever it was about Flip Farmer that had moved me when I was young.

Almost as bad as not being Flip, Didi was short, and short men so seldom liked me. I'm relatively tall, which seemed to count against me, and I was once even told by a short man that I was retriggering his youthful nightmares of being ridiculed by tall girls in school, and I sensed he wanted me to apologize for this, for his adolescent trauma, and I didn't, and moreover, I gave up on short men partially if not totally, sometimes even preemptively disliking them, though seldom admitting this to myself.

Each morning, I watched Didi out the window of the trailer as he put on his driving gloves and stretched his fingers, open and fisted, open and fisted, as if he were communicating some kind of cryptic message in units of ten. After his hand stretches, a crew member brought him a little thimble of espresso, which he took between deerskin-gloved finger and thumb, tilted his head back, and drank. He had pocked, sunken cheeks, thin bluish lips, and eyes like raisins, which made him seem angry and also a little dimwitted. Not everyone can be a great beauty, and I'm not exactly a conventional beauty myself. But there was a special tragedy to Didi's looks: his hair, which was l.u.s.trous and full, feathered into elaborate croissant layers. Somehow the glamorous hair brought his homeliness into relief, like those dogs with hair like a woman's. There was that advertis.e.m.e.nt on television where you saw a man and a woman from behind, racing along in an open car. The driver and his companion, her blond hair flying on the wind, the American freedom of a big convertible on the open highway, and so forth. The camera moves up alongside. The pa.s.senger, it turns out, is not a woman. It's one of those dogs with long feathery hair, whatever breed that is. Didi's breed. After drinking his espresso, Didi would flip his hair forward and then resettle it with his fingers, never mind that he was about to mash it under a helmet. It would have been better to skip the vanity and primping and instead use his face as a kind of dare, or weapon: I'm ugly and famous and I drive a rocket-fueled cycle. I'm Didi Bombonato.

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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sports, 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 c.r.a.p," 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 sungla.s.ses, brought them downward with sustained slowness, and cleaned each lens thoroughly with a handkerchief. Then he put his sungla.s.ses 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.

I was propped on a couch as the techs celebrated. I could not dance on my sprained ankle, but since I was the only woman, I danced with each of them by being scooped up and swung around, then delicately placed back on the daybed. We had only an AM radio, tuned to Top Forty-"Hooked on a Feeling" and that song about a woman's brown eyes turning blue, which I'd a.s.sumed meant she was declaring she would make her eyes the blue of the woman who'd replaced her. "I'm gonna make my brown eyes blue." Replace my replacement. That night, I realized it was not I'm gonna, but don't it make them blue, which changed the meaning. It was a stupider song than I'd imagined.

The Valera mechanics and Tonino toasted one another and Didi in absentia and said the Americans could go do a bel culo. Someone said Didi, too, could go do a bel culo, and then their voices hushed and they were, I imagined, talking politics. They were still outside after I went to bed. I heard the dry pop of one or two more champagne bottles uncorking, low voices, and then quiet. Wind whistling across the flats, the snap of canvas awnings, and a periodic light clink of something metal faintly hitting something else metal.

The next morning the team manager came in to speak with me. I was hoping to catch a ride with them to Salt Lake City, and from there fly home to New York. He said of course, and that they had a favor to ask of me as well. It was actually a bigger favor. A magnificent one, in its way, but it would also be a kind of honor, and he wanted me to think carefully before responding.

"We want you to drive the Spirit of Italy," he said.

"But why? In any case, I can barely walk."

"All you need is your right foot, for gas and brake. Didi needs to keep the salt occupied so the Americans don't come back and beat his time; there's a team from Ohio on its way here. It will take a few days to prepare, to train you, and by the time you've done your run, the rains will arrive. We can shut them out for the whole year. A woman's record is easy; the current one is two hundred and ninety miles an hour. That's nothing in the Spirit. If you go three hundred and five you'll feel like you're coasting, then you tap the brakes and that's it."

I had always admired people who had a palpable sense of their own future, who constructed plans and then followed them. That was how Sandro was. He had ambitions and a series of steps he would take to achieve them. The future, for Sandro, was a place, and one that he was capable of guiding himself to. Ronnie Fontaine was like that, too. Ronnie's goals were more perverse and secretive than Sandro's, but there was a sense that nothing was left to chance, that everything Ronnie did was calculated. I was not like either Sandro or Ronnie. Chance, to me, had a kind of absolute logic to it. I revered it more than I did actual logic, the kind that was built from solid materials, from reason and from fact. Anything could be reasoned into being, or reasoned away, with words, desires, rationales. Chance shaped things in a way that words, desires, rationales could not. Chance came blowing in, like a gust of wind.

From zero to two hundred, turn right to go right.

From two hundred to three hundred, turn left to go right.

Faster than three hundred, turn right to go right.

9. IT WAS MILK.

and Valera was learning all about it. Not the kind you drank. There weren't even any cows in this jungly part of Brazil, except for the repulsive sea cows he'd seen in photographs, flopped up on muddy riverbanks. They tapped this milk from trees, a liquid that dried to rubber.

The rules in the Amazon, he learned, were different. You had to wait longer. A tree was damaged if you tapped it before it was fifteen years old. In Asia, where most rubber had come from before World War Two had begun, a year earlier, the trees could be tapped at the tender age of eight or nine, brought directly into service like very young girls, and they withstood it. But the biggest difference was that in Asia you planted trees and harvested them. It was farming, industrial farming. In the Amazon, you cultivated the stuff from the wild. The jungle was like a standing army, a reserve that would summon forth a product, become something other than green, useless, hostile nature, and Valera liked this idea, of conscripting nature into service.

The way it was going to be arranged was a kind of perfection. Like a wooden box put together without any nails, joists, screws, or even glue. Just jigsawed pieces designed to perfectly interlock and hold one another in place. The rubber tappers would work on credit. They would be held in place by the need to be paid. All variety of middlemen, necessary to move the stuff downriver to port, also would work on credit. It was all indebtedness and credit, zero outlay of actual money. Credit came from credo, which was to believe. Cre-do. I believe. He could cite Latin all he wanted, unenc.u.mbered now of Lonzi, no Lonzi correcting him for calling on the root of things. The root of things mattered. Cre-do. The Indians in the jungle were going to work for free.

Harvest and smoke the rubber, send it back to Europe, and make a lot of money. A lot of money. That was the plan when Valera expanded into tires in 1942.

"You smoke it? To make money?" six-year-old Roberto had asked him.

"No, piccolino, you don't smoke it. You smoke it like you'd smoke cheese, or meats. To preserve."

This smoking of rubber: they did it over huge outdoor fires, on enormous paddles, with rags tied over their faces, not only over the nose and mouth but the whole face, to protect their eyes as well. They can see enough, the overseer he'd hired a.s.sured Valera. They see just barely, through the weave of coa.r.s.e cloth. He pictured them moving around the fire, faceless mummies b.u.mping into one another. Men in gray, blank, woven masks, adding rubber to form great b.a.l.l.s. The b.a.l.l.s were called biscuits. Biscotti. Each weighed one hundred pounds. That was the weight unit Valera's overseer set. A good comfortable crushing weight, carried on the head, the maximum. You set it at 150 pounds, the overseer said, and they cannot carry it. A hundred pounds on the top of an Indian's head, they suffer but they manage. Not impossible-that was the idea. He understood that this was the overseer's main skill, to recognize what was within human limits, but just barely. "Within, but just barely" was the optimum calibration, the unit of profit. One-hundred-pound biscuits of smoked rubber, overland, on heads. Big biscuits of rubber, head-crushing but not impossible. Men loading the smoked rubber biscuits on boats that would travel a thousand miles to the river's mouth, the coastal port of Belem. At Belem they would be cleaved in half with hatchets. To judge their quality. Split like brains, and the lighter the shade of the biscuit's insides, the higher its value and price. The darker, the poorer its quality. Dark rubber was less pure. "Like everything dark," said the overseer, laughing in a vigorous way, as if instructing Valera to laugh with him, but Valera didn't.

They're going to make me rich, Valera thought. And in any case after spending his boyhood in Egypt he was not unaccustomed to dark-skinned people. It was backward to hate them. He and Lonzi divided ways on this subject. Lonzi had gone off to partic.i.p.ate in the invasion of Abyssinia, in '35, to "wrestle negroes to the ground." Lonzi sounded like a missionary, as if he'd forgotten what had been so critical to the spirit of the group: you don't recruit. You never recruit. You act, and those who want to act as you do simply fall in. Nothing was gained through force. Wrestle away, Valera thought. Your entire battalion will be riding my motorcycles. That year, while Lonzi was off fighting in Abyssinia, the thousand-cc bike Valera had designed won the world land speed record, on the autostrada between Brescia and Bergamo. A simplified, street version was in production at his factory outside Milan.

He and Lonzi were no longer close, but they had shared something Valera would never forget, a youthful recognition that vital life was change and swiftness, which only revealed itself through violent convulsions. Sameness was a kind of stupor, a state of being in which people thought the world had always been as they knew it and would always stay that way. Cotton laundry and waves. Blue handprints on a wall. Time had worn a mask. It had hidden itself, and he and Lonzi and the others in the little gang would tear off its mask. It was their destiny to do so. To know that life meant cataclysmic change, exceptional and monstrous to most people but not to them. They embraced the monstrosity of it. Like volume to the ancient Egyptians, who depicted everything flat, in two dimensions, because volume was terrifying unknowability. Yes, it was terrifying, Valera agreed with the Egyptians, and that was why he wanted it.

While Lonzi was busy prostrating himself over the map of Ethiopia, fighting the British and buffing the Duce with war poems, Valera was deep into business. Cycles, scooters, a three-wheeled car, and now rubber. Rubber had been coming mostly from Malaysia, until the j.a.panese overran the place on bicycles. An incredible attack, j.a.panese on bikes. Italian operations ground to a halt. Valera was not in the rubber business then. It was what got him into it, the rubber shortage that began when the j.a.panese overran Malaysia, in December 1941. A month later Valera was in Brazil.

In So Paulo, he spent a lot of time waiting in a hotel lobby for men who arrived hours late in creamy linen. They sat in wicker chairs, he and the men in linen, the woven caning of their chairbacks blooming up behind them like gigantic doodled wings. Nearby, something called an umbrella bird crouched inside an enormous cage, a shiny black thing that kept fanning itself out, menacing and ugly. Valera knew that a good business deal is made from patience. From waiting as if you have all the time in the world, your wicker doodle wings creaking, knowing you hate the umbrella bird and that you don't need a reason to hate it, as you sit in a swamp-climate lobby and fan yourself with a map of northern Brazil. Place was gigantic. Obscenely so. This, Valera had not understood. But no matter, a good business deal had little to do with maps. It was about looking other men in the eye in a way that made them feel they were part of a complicit and elite minority.

The minister of industry said there would be no problem rounding up enough labor to harvest the rubber. Brazil had joined the Allies and was sending men off to the war. Or pretending to, the minister of industry said, to convince these men that harvesting rubber was better than going to fight in the war. Except you don't have to convince them, he said. Because it's easier to get a snake to smoke than to get an Indian to enlist. Valera rather liked the image of a snake in the act of smoking, one oblong tube sucking on another, smaller oblong tube. It distracted him momentarily until he realized what the minister of industry meant. A snake would not smoke. An Indian would stay home and harvest rubber. He'd taken it literally, as Roberto had the smoking of rubber-like father, like son.

Down in South America, they had apparently been the last to know about this thing called the wheel, and yet they were the people who had first discovered rubber, and Valera found poetic excellence in these two tandem facts, the place where they had first known of rubber and last known of the wheel. The stupidity of it gave his new endeavor a bright aura, bringing progress to Brazil, last earthlings to discover the wheel.

What had the Indians there done with this rubber they discovered? They made a game, pok-ta-pok, which sounded like what it was: you bounced the ball back and forth between two players.

They used rubber in torches to make an ominous, greasy smoke. They dipped cloth in rubber to make it waterproof. And for shoes. They used their feet as molds in a straight-over dipping process to form perfect, custom-fit galoshes. The original fit, Valera observed with a certain delight, was custom fit. One size fits all was something that came later, with mechanization. He wasn't going to have them making the tires. They would harvest raw rubber and mold it into the great big biscotti, which would then be shipped to Switzerland, to a company he'd set up to operate without the interference of Mussolini, whom Valera increasingly considered a bungler and hooligan.

If he could sell enough tires, he could devote all of his own time to motorcycles, which didn't have the same kind of profit margin. Especially now that Mussolini had requisitioned Valera's entire stock for the military, and all his factories did was make replacement parts for German troops, who were forever ripping out clutches.

He set things up and returned to Milan, anxious to see his youngest child, Sandro, almost three now. Roberto had been sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and this had made Alba lonely enough that she'd trapped him into creating a second. He was practically an old man and had told himself the younger one wasn't his, but while he was in Brazil, playing, as he thought of it, pok-ta-pok, he missed the little thing, its sweet, open face. It was his child, he knew this intuitively, but he felt he had surpa.s.sed, in seniority, a direct relation to it. He could be more removed, something like a great-uncle, a G.o.dfather. His wife had wanted it and he'd consented by not unconsenting. Who was it who said decision was indecision crystallized? He couldn't recall but in this case it certainly had been.

In those short, intense years of pok-ta-pok, Valera's rubber business flourished, while his motorcycle factory was flattened by Allied bombs. The family moved up to their villa, on a little hill above Bellagio. Safer, even if the area was overrun by crude and abrupt Germans, with their loud voices and their meat breath. It was only a matter of time until everything changed. Mussolini was just north of them, in the Feltrinelli villa on Lake Garda, where he apparently puttered around, depressed, played scopone, and looked through a viewfinder at the lake. Made incoherent radio broadcasts about the selfish Italian industrialists who were ruining Italy. We'll see who has ruined Italy, Valera thought at his radio set.

Lonzi turned up in Bellagio, wounded. He was convalescing at a lakeside hotel. He was the same age as Valera-fifty-seven-and still the fool had been with the Alpini, on the Eastern Front.

Valera and Alba went to visit him at the Hotel Splendide. Lonzi, his leg blown off, was packing ice around the remaining stumped ma.s.s, but the thing was septic, sending up slow and wretched bubbles, which shone as if blown of mucus. As each bubble of gas-filled ooze on Lonzi's stump stretched full and popped, it sent a smell of rot and death into the closed hotel room, and Valera wished he hadn't brought Alba. He nudged her back, and she stood by the door.

"This doesn't matter," Lonzi said, gesturing to his leg stump as if it were a maimed dog that needed to be shot. He was wearing his Alpini hat, its feather angled like a crooked fence post. "The real issue is that my heart is still human, that's the fix I'm in. I want to dig it out. If I can live without a leg, why not this thumper? It's as bad as hers," he said, pointing at Alba. "That hideous good-looking woman you brought here. Did you learn nothing, Valera? I don't want to see women tarted up for s.e.x. I want to fight for my pleasure. Don't parade that here."

The sepsis must have gone to Lonzi's brain. A grisly adventure, and for what? Valera wondered. There was no future in ground combat, fighting people with daggers and guns, cutting through barbed wire, bleeding and suffering and rolling around in the mud. Mussolini spoke over the radio about a secret weapon of some kind: the Germans would unveil it, whatever it was, and they'd all be saved. And if they lost, Mussolini declared, justice would eventually be served. There would be a grand trial, he said. Mussolini was convinced the Allies would try him in Madison Square Garden-where the world would come to know the truth, and see things as he did. The truth would be revealed, Mussolini said, in Madison Square Garden.

Where is it? Valera wondered. "Alba, where is Madison Square Garden?"