The Flamethrowers (34 page)

“No,” I said. “You look beautiful.”

“I know what beauty is,” she snapped. “I used to be quite good-looking. You wouldn’t understand what it is to have that and then lose it. Every trip to the mirror is a nightmare.”

Talia burst out laughing. It wasn’t clear to me if she was laughing at me or at her aunt.

This inability to interpret was not only unpleasant, it also seemed to perpetuate itself. The less I understood, the less capable I was of understanding the next time someone made a comment that seemed possibly like an insult and someone else laughed. And the signora persisted in forgetting I understood Italian and would turn and say something to Talia, quick, vague, and idiomatic, that I didn’t catch. Talia would look at me. “Zia, she understands.” Sandro’s mother would reply in Italian how inconvenient it was, that usually guests could be discussed openly. I was constantly on alert when Sandro’s mother spoke to anyone but me, and when she spoke to me, even more so. You could say I was growing paranoid, but there were reasons for it.

There were place cards every night, even if there were just the five of us—Talia, Sandro, his mother, the old novelist, and myself. “It’s important to rotate and intermix the guests,” signora Valera said. “If I could, I would have dinners where only some of you were invited, but since you’re all staying here, it’s a bit awkward. But honestly, that’s how I would prefer to do it.” I was never placed next to Sandro. “You are a couple! I mean, how dull, how inane, to sit together!” she said when Sandro protested. “What is there to discuss?” I was always to sit with so-and-so, if not the old novelist, some crumbling viscount or count who would apparently like me. “He’ll be charmed by you.” As if to say, he goes in for that kind of thing (that most of us don’t go in for). She always seemed to seat Sandro next to Talia, free and easy Talia, who reached across the table, joked openly about the stale bread, the bad wine in a box, asked the cook to make her an egg when she didn’t like what was being served, a regional dish called
pizzoccheri,
heavy and rich with cheese and butter. And she did look good in signora Valera’s gowns, of red or purple silk, with her dark hair, which was now a bit longer, wisps of it almost reaching her chin. I imagined that her decision
to cut it short, as it had been when I’d met her, was made under circumstances not unlike the decision to punch herself for Ronnie’s entertainment. A lark, a dare. A why the fuck not. If she had been nicer to me I would have wanted to know Talia Valera. It was always that way with women I found threatening, that there was some unfulfilled longing to be friends. I didn’t know quite why she threatened me. She was full of life and verve and a refreshing bluntness, and yet I wanted her contained instead of celebrated for these qualities I secretly admired.

Her third night at the villa, she appeared at the dinner table wearing what looked like the brown fedora I had given to Ronnie on that secret night long ago. Sandro’s mother smiled at the sight of the hat, and the pleasure in her expression was like the softness of her tone for the Count of Bolzano,
it’s you,
the way she reserved warmth for certain people in certain moments. The way I had dreamed of her.

“That hat,” she said to Talia, “looks absolutely fabulous on you.”

Talia took it off to show her aunt that it was a Borsalino. My Borsalino. So Ronnie and Talia were sleeping together. The girl on the layaway plan flashed into my thoughts. Her hopeful, young face.

How stupid I’d been to give it to Ronnie, even if I had stolen it to begin with. It was a naive generosity, to establish some connection. He had given it to Talia.
See how little you meant?
It was possible she’d simply found it in his apartment and claimed it, the way she claimed her aunt’s ornate gowns. Or that Ronnie had forgotten who had given him the hat to begin with. None of those scenarios consoled me much.

“Are we wearing hats tonight?” Chesil Jones asked. “Because there’s one I’ve frankly had my eye on.”

He got up from the table and reappeared in a curious black fur fez with gold and black tassels that flopped down over one eye.

Signora Valera looked at him sternly.

“Take it off,” she said.

The old novelist smiled and began swinging his arms as if to a brass band, humming some kind of official song that the hat seemed to suggest or summon, the tassels that hung over his face bobbing up and down as he jerked his arms.

“Please remove it.”

A servant came with pork chops on a huge silver platter. At the sight of the chops, the old novelist shot up his right arm in salute, exhaling a gin-scented wind.

“You’ll have to leave this table. I mean it.”

“Oh, lighten up, Alba. Why can’t a man have a little fun? I’m not trying to fill his boots. I can promise you that. In any case, they are,
ahem,
too small for me, way too small. And from the look of his closet, he wasn’t much a wearer of boots. What I have seen are mostly pigskin moccasins by Ferragamo and Hermès, and dainty kerchiefs with the good old ‘T. P.’ embroidered in the Venetian style—”

“Stop,” she said. “Stop it right now. Let the dead rest.”

He looked at her in an almost tender way but did not remove the hat. He took a deep breath. I could feel it, the gearing up for a lecture. Stanley was so right about old men. Sandro and I joked about it. “What are you going to do,” Sandro asked me, “when I get to that stage when I won’t shut up?” “I’ll buy you a reel-to-reel tape recorder like Stanley’s,” I replied.

“All of these silly
categories,
” the old novelist said, tsking and moving his head slowly back and forth as if in disapproval, the tassels drooped over one side of his big, ruddy face. “The way people whine, oh, I can’t like
him,
he’s a
Fascist
. Or, he’s a
Communist
. A Trotskyist. A pederast. A this. A that. I couldn’t care less if you’re a
that
. If you wear the official hat of the
that
.”

He walked over to the sideboard and lifted the small, trapezoidal shade from the lamp there. He traded it for his fez and said, “Look, now I’m a Maoist.” When none of us laughed he took it off and put the fez back on.

“
I
care if a person is attentive,” he said, reclaiming his seat. “If they seem to have a brain. If there is a genuine quality to their manner—it’s the only way to judge someone.”

“And if my husband were here,” signora Valera said, “he would judge you an idiot. But I will tolerate your nonsense because you’re American
and you had a crooked spine, could not fight in the war, and have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The spine is not the only part of mine that’s crooked,” Chesil whispered to me, grinning in a salacious way. “But she never complains about
that
.”

He asked the signora if she’d prefer that he’d had a straight spine and might have, who knows, even appeared over Lake Como with the American troops. Could she imagine? Him over Como, under a billowing parachute. “Like an angel,” he said. “I could have been your angel, Alba. But since I wasn’t fit for combat, I was merely a journalist in Naples when the Americans arrived in 1943, and that’s how they came. Softly, on great, white wings. The Italians, what can I say? They were starving, eating boiled cotton, sleeping under rubble. Stepping over their own purple relatives. We didn’t have it much better, just meager rations of fried Spam—”

“What’s that?” Talia asked.

“The innocence of a question. Spam, my child, is . . . ah . . . it’s pig marmalade. It and creamed corn and corpses—these were wartime delicacies. But I should say that we in the press corps did drink wine made from grapes of the Sordo vineyards, and not this bargain-basement rotgut your aunt stocks. But where was I . . . oh, yes, with my crooked spine, stuck merely observing your liberators, these magnificent American soldiers, beautiful blacks who urinated on the king’s throne in the Palazzo Reale. While the Italian mothers called out, ‘Hey, Joe, hey, Joe,’ and attempted to bargain their children on special Allied Forces discount. Conqueror’s credit. Also called rape, but what do I know?”

Sandro groaned and pushed back his chair. He wandered into the living room.

If you were one of them, you didn’t have to follow the rules. But I was not one of them and was sure it would have been held against me if I’d left in the middle of dinner. Sandro could not accept that Chesil was, as Sandro put it, his mother’s confidant. He was clearly more than a confidant, but Sandro could not acknowledge it, even as
we sometimes saw the old novelist emerging from his mother’s quarters in the morning wearing a robe with the initials of Sandro’s father’s emblazoned on the breast pocket. Sandro said he couldn’t understand how his mother tolerated this ridiculous man in any capacity. I understood that she did tolerate him, and even why. She was lonely, and his ridiculousness was a form of vitality. It brought something to her life. In any case, many men were that way, but I couldn’t tell Sandro that men were ridiculous, and since his mother was not a lesbian they were her only option.

“I could have been
your
conqueror, Alba,” Chesil said, “I mean your liberator, right here in Bellagio, but as it is, I can only tell you about the Neapolitan mothers eager to sell their children on the
piazzetta
of the Cappella Vecchia. The girls bartered on the cheap to the American soldiers and the boys to the Moroccan soldiers, who fought with the women over the price of these ruined little creatures, snot and melted caramel running down their faces, the single caramel each sucked given to them to preserve an effect of innocence. To be fair, I suppose it is simply the destiny of the young the world over to be hawked in the streets. For hunger and desperation, they should be so lucky. Back home in America, what can I say? They’re sold in the streets, too, of course, but not for reasons of hunger or fear. It’s worse. Much worse.”

“Are you drunk?” Talia asked him. “What’s with you?”

He took off the hat and turned it in his hands, folded it closed like a flattened envelope and stroked the fur. “What’s with me,” he said, “is, as your aunt points out, a bit of scoliosis. But, oh, had my spine been unkinked! To remind you what cowardly shits you people were. Who was in this place, again?” he asked, rapping his knuckles on the table. “I forgot. Who was living here? You did have to clear out for a German overseer, but which? You are never in the mood to discuss it, dear Alba. Was it Dollmann? Kesselring? Or maybe Reder. Like the most rabid Germans, in fact an Austrian. Was it Reder who used this place as headquarters? That’s the Walter Reder, I mean, who blazed across central Italy, Pisa, Lucca, Caprara, Casaglia, killing almost two thousand people, according to the ‘winners’ who wrote the history books, as
you might call them, my ardent Alba. Reder burned men, women, and children alive under gasoline and straw. Strange fellow, Reder. Missing a hand, wore a fake one covered in a black leather glove. Anyhow, the suffering of others must surely serve
some
purpose, right? But
what is that purpose
? No one is ever sure of the answer. All I can tell you is that history is a goddamned dangerous place.”

“You must stop this,” the signora said, “stop it right now.”

But he didn’t, or couldn’t.

“At Casolari, one woman attempted to flee Reder with her newborn babe but was caught. After he finished her off, Reder threw the baby in the air and shot it like a clay pigeon. But of course a baby is not a clay pigeon. There is a thud, a lot of bleeding, a bundle of possibility left to rot in a field, covered with horseflies. I’ll end with the little boy of six whose entire family—”

The signora threw a sugar bowl at Chesil. Its top exploded on impact, and he was coated in white sugar.

A servant emerged from the kitchen, having heard the noise, but stayed back when she saw the expression on signora Valera’s face. I sat, not sure where to look, resenting Sandro for having been able to get up and leave.

“I guess the genie,” Chesil said, wiping sugar from his front, “is out of the bottle. Some things have been said. Decanted.”

Signora Valera’s face was almost translucent with anger.

“You are the genie,” she said, her voice quavering. “You’re out of your own bottle. You’ve only humiliated yourself. That’s all.”

He lowered his ruddy face toward the table and nodded slowly with dawning regret. He stood up and brushed himself off. Sugar released itself from the folds of his shirt and slacks and formed a residue around his chair.

“I am sorry. My apologies. Mosquitoes bit me today and I think I’m having a bad reaction. I’m feeling dizzy, actually,” and he excused himself from dinner.

*  *  *

The next day, the rantings and insults that characterized our meals at the villa all but stopped. Bad news had arrived by telephone.

Workers had gone on strike at the main Valera tire plant outside Milan, blocking the entrances. The scabs the company brought in were dragged from the assembly line and beaten. Even the white-collar scabs, there for accounting and secretarial work, were taken out and beaten. Equipment was sabotaged at other Valera plants, which also experienced strikes.

Over the next couple of mornings, while Sandro and I drank coffee and chewed stale bread, the newspaper reported that a high-level manager at Fiat had been kidnapped and ransomed, another kneecapped on his way to take his midmorning coffee, and a judge who was trying the case of two Red Brigades members was killed.

Roberto and the signora spoke a great deal about the possibility of some kind of calamity, which they didn’t name. Sandro felt they were acting hysterical and was, like me, counting the days until they all went back to Milan and we would be alone in the villa. But they weren’t hysterical. They were marked people. I see that now.

Then, I would not have called them marked, or known how it was that marked people behaved. But the significance of the armed guard newly stationed at the gates adjacent to the groundskeeper’s cottage was not lost on me. The guard, a former paratrooper in stiff, tight jeans, stood around smoking brown cigarettes and alternately touching his mustache and adjusting his balls in the tight jeans. Talia made fun of him, pretending to touch her own mustache, adjust her own balls. “He bleaches the crotch area of those jeans,” she said, “to give it a bulkier look.”