The Flamethrowers (18 page)

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 assumed 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.

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, unencumbered 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 assured Valera. They see just barely, through the weave of coarse cloth. He pictured them moving around the fire, faceless mummies bumping into one another. Men in gray, blank, woven masks, adding rubber to form great balls. The balls 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 Belém. At Belém 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 participate 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 Japanese overran the place on bicycles. An incredible attack, Japanese 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 Japanese overran Malaysia, in December 1941. A month later Valera was in Brazil.

In São 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 surpassed, in seniority, a direct relation to it. He could be
more removed, something like a great-uncle, a godfather. 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.