The Flamethrowers (40 page)

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 prostitutes 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 assistants. Their door was always open, equipment and cords spilling out into the hallway. Passing 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 breasts, 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 assented, 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 passed 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 bypassed 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 passed 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 associated 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 sexual.”

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 passing 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 asshole 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.