The Flamethrowers (38 page)

In the morning, there was no sign of him. Bene and Lidia, the girl with the big teeth, took me with them around the neighborhood. The apartment was on the Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, an area near the university that was so ugly it almost made me laugh, to think I might have assumed all of Rome looked like the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain. San Lorenzo had been bombed in World War Two and now it was a mass of drab, modern apartment buildings with television antennas jutting from every balcony and roof like hastily stabbed pushpins. Sacks of garbage hung from the windows like colostomy bags. There was graffiti on every building. I was used to graffiti from living in New York, but the graffiti in San Lorenzo was all urgent and angry messages, or ones with a kind of dull malaise, as if the exterior of the buildings were the walls of a prison.

“They throw us in jail and call it freedom.”

“They can’t catch me. I’m moving to Saturn where no one can find me.”

“When shit becomes a commodity the poor will be born without asses.”

Underneath, a crude picture of an ass, and
“What do we want?”

“Everything.”

New York graffiti was not desperate communication. It was an exuberance of style, logo, name, the feat of installing jazzy pseudonyms, a burst of swirled color where the commuter had not thought possible. These were plain, stark messages written in black spray paint, at arm and eye level from the street. There were few pictures, with the exception of the occasional five-pointed star of the Red Brigades, which had appeared above Didi’s frightened face, in the photo of him in
Corriere della Sera.

Why was a badly drawn pentagram so much more menacing than a perfectly drawn one? I wondered as we passed one, no message, just the five-pointed star.

It was the hand’s imperfection that made it menacing, I decided. But why that was, I didn’t know.

Bene didn’t mention Gianni. I asked at one point where he was.

“Doing the same thing he does at the Valera place.
Fixing things,
” she said in English, with a look I could not read.

She took me with her to drop off flyers about the demonstration on the Piazza Navona. As we encountered people she knew, she introduced me as an American who told Roberto Valera to fuck off. I didn’t want to let her down by saying I’d done no such thing. That rather, his brother had broken my heart, and I’d run away like an injured animal.

The Piazza Navona was lined with outdoor café tables, young people seated around them. Bene said it had been more crowded before the sweep. A lot of the people around here were hauled off to prison, she said. When I asked what for, she shrugged and said, knowing someone who was involved in illegal activities. Or having your name on a lease of an apartment where someone later stayed who was in the vicinity of a bombing. Disrespectful to the state. They can get you for anything, she said, now that they’ve changed the laws back to Mussolini’s.

“If you drive near the prison at night,” she said, “you can see torches made of bedsheets hanging through the cell bars. It’s really sad. These lights shining into the blackness, at no one. Half the people from
around here are there, at Rebibbia, where no one can see them. All they are now is something burning from a window.”

I watched a woman who sat with two men who had a movie camera. She was young, a teenager, and beautiful in both a tragic and an unmarked way. It was her smile, dimpled, sweet, and naive, and her patient tolerance of the older men who directed her, that seemed tragic. One of the men filmed while the other spoke to her, asking what her name was, where she was from.

“Anna,” she said, and smiled at them. “From Cagliari.”

“Wait,” the man filming said. “One more time, but slower.”

The first man stepped back and approached her again, just as he had the first time, asking her what her name was and where she was from.

“Cagliari,” she said again, this time enunciating with more care.

“Cagliari,” the man sitting with her repeated.

“Sì,”
she said, and then she explained that her parents were Sardinian but had moved to Paris. And from Paris she had run away, back here, to the Piazza Navona, because, she said, holding out her wrists and showing them the scars there, they put her in a hospital in Paris. Put her somewhere, in any case, as I didn’t know the word they were using—
manicomio,
which I later looked up. Madhouse.

It was clear she knew them already, that they had instructed her to pretend they were strangers for the purpose of the film, but with her dirty clothes, her unbrushed hair, she looked like a runaway living on the Piazza Navona. I had the feeling she was not an actress. That they were directing her to play herself.

“You’ve been sleeping here?” the man asked.

“Yes,” she said, looking up at him with her sweet, open face.

I stared at the young runaway,
la biondina,
they kept calling her. She stood up and put her hands on her belly, which protruded high and round under her poncho. She smiled at me, but in a way that let me know yes, she was pregnant, and that she didn’t much appreciate being stared at.

“She’s been here for a week,” Bene said. “Sleeping on the street, hanging out with drug addicts. Those two bums—I don’t know what they’re up to, but I can’t imagine they’ll help her.”

They lived downstairs from Bene and the others, in the same building on the Via dei Volsci.

We watched as the one filming followed the other, who walked alongside the biondina, holding her arm. She turned to him. He put his hand on her forehead.

“I need a bed,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

The one filming said cut, and asked her to repeat it.

“I need a bed. A place to lie down,” she said.

“You have a fever?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re pregnant and you sleep on the streets?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled in a perfectly guileless way.

*  *  *

My one trip to Rome, when I was a student in Florence, was only for two days and it had been a lonely tour of sights: the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, where pickup artists worked on young girls, the Colosseum, a great decaying skull whose grassed-over arena was all but lost in a strange haze of thereness, unreal because it existed, now, without its former use. Tourists watched each other and roamed the crumbling edges, unable to feel the scale as a populated place, a mesh of attentions and shoutings, a looking of thousands upon a ring of human violence. It had been empty when I got there. A gray kitten rolled on its back, inviting me to pet its white, furry loins. I’d bent down. There was no sound but the traffic that banded the exterior of the Colosseum, and the kitten, which had begun to purr.

You can’t feel a crowd in an emptiness. That had been my thought in the Colosseum.

But here, in the Piazza Esedra, there were so many bodies massed together that they formed a vast shifting texture, a sea of heads filling
the square. Above them, fabric banners rippling. Sound swells rolling across the immense piazza like great sluggish ocean waves, voices shifting directions.

All these people and their bright banners, which weren’t cheerful exactly, in stoic white, blood red, ink black. A rain-swollen sky pressed down, darkened to slate by the late-afternoon light. The air had an electric feel, as it does when a storm has moved in but has not yet unleashed itself. The electric air and the premature darkness gave those moments, the gathering before this march was to begin, a granular sort of intensity, every color and surface vivid and distinct.

The shops were closed, their corrugated metal shutters rolled down. The one exception was the Feltrinelli bookstore, which remained open. The clerks were handing out free copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, cheap plastic-coated copies like Gideon Bibles. I thought of Roberto’s insistence that Feltrinelli’s death was necessary and good, and Chesil Jones claiming it was an act of stupidity, a mix-up of positive and negative leads. Fools love to declare that they don’t suffer fools. It was a lusty pleasure for the old novelist to say the word.
Fool.
Weakness made him say it, even as the word made him feel strong. I didn’t know if Feltrinelli got his positive and negative leads mixed up but I felt he must have been a serious person, as Sandro said. In any case, death was death: it had its own gravity. Watching the shiny red books passed through the crowd I had the thought that Sandro, who sympathized with anyone willing to think some other mode of existence besides rich-man-takes-all, would have appreciated this scene. But he wasn’t here.

When the Piazza Esedra was completely full, people leaked into the side streets to which the police would allow entry. There were sections. The women’s sections, the high schools, the various representatives from factories—Valera, Fiat, SIT-Siemens, Magneti Marelli, who made wiring harnesses for Moto Valera. There were the students from the university, bespectacled and grave, their faces masked with scarves. The Bologna contingent, here to avenge the death of the young radical who had been gunned down by police yesterday. Another group filed in, their cheeks and eyes painted like mimes with black and white theater
makeup, hollering like Indians. “We want nothing!” they chanted. One carried a sign that said, “More work, less pay!” Another: “Down with the people, up with the bosses!” “More shacks, less housing!” They were young, and dressed in the most ragged clothes imaginable, old shoes without laces, pants with huge, sagging knee-rips, elbows jutting through their moth-bitten sweaters. I watched as one of the boys eyed a woman putting out her cigarette, and then he walked over, picked it up, asked her for a light, and sauntered away, puffing on her cigarette butt. They spoke in a dialect I could barely understand, words that were quick and slurred and open like their laceless shoes.

The types Roberto was probably referring to. Who he claimed had nothing to say but
I have long hair
. I thought of what Sandro had told me about people setting their own rent, their own bus fare. Kids with no part in bourgeois life. With their perverse messages and ratty clothes, they made Talia’s air of toughness seem like princess toughness, nothing but an upper-class performance.

They were from remote slums on the outskirts of Rome, Bene explained. There’s nothing to do out there, she said. They’re young and it’s like they’re left for dead. Ronnie would have appreciated them. I had that thought, anyway. But when I tried to sustain the idea amid the waves of sound rolling across the square, the banners rippling, the crowd becoming more and more dense, I decided that this context was too massive for Ronnie. I could not have guessed what he would say about these kids and the feeling they gave off, of life lived in the present moment, an air of nothing to lose. I thought of Ronnie’s personal ad, his joke, printed in Sharpie on the bathroom wall at Rudy’s. “Looking for an enemy.” Really he meant friend. And the scrawled question under it, “But how do we find each other?” Which was probably also Ronnie, something he wrote himself. He loved to talk about the ways in which people were processed and accounted for in the modern world. Numbered street addresses, he said, were relatively new. In the Old World, there was a natural vetting process, according to Ronnie. A stranger enters a village and declares who it is he is looking for. He is either turned away or assisted, depending.

How do we find each other?

It repeated in my head as more and more people packed into the enormous square. The “we” of it: people lost in the vast thickets of the world. People lost among people, since there wasn’t anything else.
The world was people,
which made the prospect of two finding each other more desolate. It was like finding a lover, pure chance and missed connections. It
was
finding a lover.

The pregnant girl, Anna, the biondina, wove through the crowd in her poncho, her same guileless smile, which said, “I have nothing to protest. I’m here to be here.”

The two men making a movie about her followed with camera and microphone.

“I’m hungry,” she said to them. “Let’s go eat.”

“Say it again,” the one with the camera said.

“I’m hungry,” she said, and smiled shyly at them.

The one with the microphone leaned in toward the biondina and placed his hand on her breast.

She looked at him with a child’s mischievous delight.

“There’s milk,” she said, holding her breasts up for him.

“Milk,” he said, leaning to see down into her poncho. He was in his midforties, I guessed. Balding and scraggly.

She pushed with her hands, squirting a fine light stream up at him.

He took off his glasses, wiped his face, and laughed.

The kids with the painted faces had formed a circle and were doing an improvised rain dance.

“Rain! Rain! Rain!” they yelled. “We want it to rain! Kill the sun! Kill the sun! Harpoon it out of the sky!”

A long row of carabinieri pushed into the square, forming a perimeter. The diagonal white slashes of their bandoliers converged into a vast mesh, as if they were part of a performance. Each held out his right arm, right hand covered in a huge black gauntlet glove, pushing people out of the way as they sealed off the exits to the square.

“Arrest us!” the kids with painted faces yelled at the carabinieri.

“We want to go to jail! Come on—take us to prison!
Rebibbia! Rebibbia! Rebibbia! Rebibbia!
”

They chanted it louder and louder, some of them banging on upturned pots and buckets. Rain started to fall. The carabinieri moved in with their black gauntlet gloves and grabbed the loudest of the kids and dragged him, screaming, to a paddy wagon, wrenched his hands behind his back, kicked him in the ribs, and shoved him inside. The rest of them opened their mouths and hollered in an eerie cacophony. Eerie because it wasn’t a cheer and it wasn’t a lament. It was ambiguous, or it was both mixed together, an ecstatic warning.

The carabinieri blocked off the large boulevard where the march was meant to take place, using barricades and a row of armored vehicles. Behind the barricades and in front of the vehicles riot police stood shoulder to shoulder, black helmets, visors up. The carabinieri didn’t have helmets like the riot police. They wore hats with shiny visors like beat cops in New York City, and like beat cops out in the rain, they had fitted elasticized plastic covers over their hats. The carabinieri blew their whistles, while the riot police—
celerini,
Bene said they were called—tried to move people away from the barricades, pushing them in the direction of Termini, the train station. The celerini were complete bastards, Bene said. I began to film the crowd, scanning across the groups. “But
those
guys,” she said, pointing, “can fight back. Untie the fabric, and wham.” It was the Valera contingent, raising their banner, a huge white cloth with red letters. The banner, I saw, was supported on each end by tire irons.