The Flamethrowers (52 page)

Now Sandro was going back to Italy alone. The flight was boarding.

He was in his window seat, ready for the strange, intermittent sleep he’d have on a jet whistling through the night. Hurtled along in a dark sky, so many thousands of feet up that the Earth was an abstraction, a nothing. The periodic waking—no place, no place, no place, and then the approach, Heathrow. He took off his blazer, the one jacket he owned, rolled it up and placed his cheek against it. Looked out the window, tried to ignore a passing memory, Ronnie’s comment that airplane windows were toilet seats, they were the same shape, which had
led, at the time, to a declaration that the Guggenheim looked like a toilet and everyone knew it but was afraid to say. I won’t hang my work in a toilet, Ronnie had said, and it was that attitude that would get him a show there eventually, Sandro knew.

They were on the runway, in line for takeoff. He pressed his forehead to the glass, the plastic, whatever it was, and looked out at those melancholic yellow signs, glowing and numbered, that indicated runways.

The sad yellow signs clicked off. They were gone, all at once, lost to darkness. The entire disorganized smattering of runway lights was off. Also, the lights from the terminal. And the ones that had flashed in an arc from the control tower.

Everything was off, everything dark. The lights on the plane were on, but it was a plane in a sea of black.

The airport had lost power. They would wait until it came back on. There was no telling, the cabin attendant said. It could be just a few moments. Please be patient. And everyone was. The plane wasn’t hurtling yet, but it was already in the no place they had to pass through to get to where they were going.

L
e Alpi,” he’d said when the subject of skiing came up.

He’d asked if I liked the mountains and I said sure, that I used to ski-race, and he nodded in his grave way like he nodded gravely at everything and I said, “Do you?”

“What?” he said.

“Do you ski?”

“Perhaps.”

Le Alpi, he’d said. We’ll go together.

I hadn’t known he was serious. That he meant sometime soon.

We’ll go to the Alps.

*  *  *

Maybe Gianni himself hadn’t known what he meant. Hadn’t known it would be later that same day, when I’d been snagged on the wrong side of some kind of argument, and Bene had all but forced me to stick with Gianni in an obscure divide between them, between him and Bene.

But he must have known. Because he told me to bring my passport before we left the apartment. I always carried it anyhow. The carabinieri loved to stop me for some reason and you were expected as an American to have it on you even if you were just out for a quick walk.

It wasn’t at all like Bene seemed to think. She had practically steered me into his arms but nothing had ensued. It was all extremely proper and in that I almost, for a moment, wondered why, simply because anything else was so foreclosed by Gianni. He dictated what our association was and it was proper and stayed that way. Just as when he had taken me from the tire factory parking lot, me in tears, the rain pouring, and hadn’t looked at me, said little, I felt from him only privacy and respect.

We were at the trattoria downstairs, where they often ate, that group. The owner is a comrade, they all said.

I was nervous about running into Bene. Maybe it was not a bad idea to go, as he said, to the Alps. Go somewhere.

We saw Durutti just outside the trattoria.

“It’s time,” Durutti told Gianni.

It was evening, already dusk, a flat violet-colored light descending over the ugly buildings of San Lorenzo, with their hatchwork of TV antennas.

Accompanied by Durutti, we got into Gianni’s white Fiat for the second time that day and drove to a bourgeois district that was unfamiliar to me.

We were in a large and beautiful apartment, bookshelves to the ceiling along every wall, glass windows that were double-paned so you didn’t hear any traffic, just the creak of the rambling apartment’s old wood floors, the papers on a desk stirred to rustle by a ceiling fan. The man who’d led us in seemed like a professor type, wire-rimmed glasses, gray hair and sideburns, a certain way of rubbing his cheeks before he spoke.

Durutti said Gianni needed to disappear. The man took Gianni into another room. The door, as soundproofed as the windows, it seemed, was shut behind them.

Durutti had a nervous energy, like a young boy who has been asked to sit but is not physically capable of maintaining that kind of stillness. He bobbed his knee up and down. Whistled. Picked a book up off the coffee table as if he had never read one before, looked at the cover,
looked at the back, whirred the pages under his thumb like it was a flipbook, and then set it back down.

He looked at me. “It’s mostly just sitting around,” he said.

What is, I asked.

“The life,” he said. “Being underground.”

We sat quietly.

“And trying to stay invisible. Seen, but not noticed. Gianni is visible now, so it’s a good thing he’s got you.”

“Me,” I said.

“I wish I had cover like that. The wife of a Crespi, say. They own the newspapers. Shit. If you want to get things done, you have to find a way to get the police off your back.”

He took a lighter from his pocket and began flicking it lit, flicking it lit, flicking it lit. Then he burned his thumb, because the metal flint wheel had gotten too hot.

“Actually, no. You know what this life mostly is? Not Gianni’s,” he said, “but mine. Gianni is some other thing, no one knows what, really. The rest of us play pinball. A lot of it. Too much. You get very good. It’s insane how good we get at pinball. Racking up eight hundred thousand, nine hundred thousand points. And if you’re top score at the bar on the Volsci, you get to put your name up on the side of the machine. But we can’t put up our names. So all the top scorers, the list there, are made up. None of those people exist.”

He was bobbing his knee and looking at me as if I were meant to respond.

“But Gianni doesn’t play,” I said.

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “Gianni is more like, ah, more like this: Turn the pinball machine on its side. Produce from nowhere, by magic, a bit of plastic explosive. Also by magic, from nowhere, a roll of duct tape. Wire. A timer. And—”

He looked up and began to whistle his tune again. Gianni and the gray-haired professor were emerging from the other room. Durutti sewed his knee up and down, not nervously, just spastically. Maybe he
was eighteen. Maybe he was sixteen. Suddenly I couldn’t tell. I’d lost the ability to know who was a child and who was an adult.

Gianni, though. Gianni was an adult.

The man went to a drawer and began to retrieve things.

“Even if you’re a novice,” he said to Gianni, “you just push along. And watch out for cliffs.” He smiled. “I joke, but you must be very careful about crevasses. And there are seracs, which will be starting to shift and melt since it’s now late March. Don’t stand under one, in other words.”

He had maps that he spread on a table. He showed Gianni and Durutti how Gianni should go. The man was calm but serious, tracing a line over the map with a pencil.

“Here,” he said, “the top, where the tram lets you out. You descend there over the face, but the main way down isn’t steep. Just take big, slow turns. You will come upon a large kidney-shaped rock, and there the trail goes left, down to the Mer de Glace, a glacier like a grooved tongue. The glacier will be soft this time of year. Nothing to worry about. You’ll see a little kiosk at the bottom. Take the trail through the trees, which brings you right into Chamonix.”

He had telephoned a friend who was bringing over gear. It was in the hall as we left, a pair of skis, poles, men’s boots, gloves, a hat, and goggles. The gray-haired professor gave us two warm parkas. We loaded everything into the little white Fiat. The man reminded Gianni to be careful and take it slow because of the crevasses.

Durutti did not come with us. He walked off like he didn’t know us, the sky now dark.

*  *  *

Once again I was on the autostrada with Gianni. I was wearing clothes that Bene had either loaned or given me, a pair of faded green corduroys, a black cotton turtleneck. Clothes that made me look almost Italian, and symbolized to me my acceptance among the group, to be dressed like the women in that apartment on the Via dei Volsci.

Because he had worked for the Valeras probably and because he had taken me to Rome and insinuated me with his group, Gianni was a kind of guardian to me, or at least that was my feeling. So if Bene opened a divide between them—angry at him for something that, I guessed, had to do with his situation and what to do about it—and if she put me on the side of Gianni, what was I to do?

I’d walked past, gone to Gianni. My secret guardian, whose silence had pulled me in. I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men liked to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

*  *  *

We were on our way to the Val d’Aosta and Mont Blanc. I understood that this was about borders, getting Gianni to France before the police picked him up.

“You’re helping me,” he said. “I couldn’t do this without you. You’re a good girl.”

Brava ragazza
.

His cover. A way to get the police off his back. A mistake—not for him but for me, and I knew it, all at once. But it was too late to back out.

The car up- and downshifted through mountain passes. At the coldest point of the night, just before dawn, there were signs for Courmayeur.

Beyond it was Entrèves and then La Palud, where we arrived at first light. A red-and-white tram went steeply up a mountain cable. The first ride would be at eight a.m.

We drank coffee together in the lodge as old men in wool ski knickers did their stretches, waxed skis, looked out the large windows at the mountain, wind whipping the snow that had settled in its rocky creases, the snow like smoke, drifting and resettling. The sky was an opaque white with a certain brightness to it. A storm was coming in.

Passamontagna,
the balaclava was called in Italian, and in this case,
Gianni needed it not to obscure his face like the people at the demonstration in Rome but to protect it from frostbite.

The tram would take him in three stages up to Punta Helbronner. From there he would ski the Vallée Blanche down into Chamonix. No passport checks, no police, no one. A no-man’s-land of snow, wind, steeps. The crevasses the gentle man with the nice apartment had warned of. The precarious chunks of ice. Gianni would pass from Italy into France, to some kind of exile.

I had the keys to the Fiat in the pocket of the down parka the man had loaned me, a curious sort of lending, never meant to be returned. The clothes under it also borrowed, their faint lavender smell from her soap a reminder of Bene.

The wind was picking up, blowing snow sideways. Before Gianni got on the tram, I asked if he really knew how to ski.

The question was a joke, but I had wondered it for part of the drive, up and up in elevation. A guy who had worked on the assembly line at a tire plant might possibly not ski.

“Good enough, I hope,” he said, and smiled.

*  *  *

I followed the signs toward the tunnel that went under Mont Blanc and through the border.

The signs were in French, the border guards, in their black leather gloves, puffing little gasps of steam from their mouths as they spoke to me. One of them flipped through my passport, stamped it, waved me on.

As I entered the Mont Blanc tunnel, under its perforated stream of white lights, I already sensed what would happen. I felt cut free, under the glare of those runny lights, in a tunnel through the bottom of a high peak. The lanes, one in each direction, were so narrow that each time an oncoming car passed I thought we would collide.

Fifteen minutes later I exited. I was in France. It was snowing.

*  *  *

At Chamonix, I parked where the man in Rome who’d helped us, or helped Gianni, had told me to, near the little Montenvers train station, a sign that said
MER DE GLACE
, the train’s scenic destination.

I got out of the car and tipped my face up into the blank white sky. There had always seemed something miraculous to me in the way snowflakes formed. As if they simply materialized about twenty feet above the earth, into these falling lacy clusters. The snow came toward my upturned face in a continuous symphony. Big dry flakes. There was no wind. Snow fell and collected in drifts. I was supposed to meet Gianni at the bottom of Les Planards. I asked a man scraping a walkway with the blunt end of a flat shovel. I spoke no French, just “Les Planards?” He pointed. It was a bunny slope, trees on both sides. Mont Blanc, high above it, was shrouded in clouds.

It would be hours, given the tram rides, the skiing. I walked to a little bar next to the train station. Heard only French. Chamonix, with its hotels, mountaineering shops, bakeries, was so different from the tiny station past Entrèves, on the Italian side, where I had waited with Gianni for the tram to open. I felt again what I’d experienced as I entered that tunnel through the mountain, a sense of being cut free, plunged into the unknown.

I ordered a coffee with milk. Sat at a table and waited. All the time spent in ski lodges growing up, the dreamy feeling of a crowded open room when you’re little and tired, people clomping up and down metal stairs in ski boots. Our coach buying us hot chocolate that I let burn my tongue, too impatient to wait until it properly cooled. Trapped inside lodges during a whiteout. When our race was rained out. Or when I’d crashed, did not finish and wasn’t getting a second run. Disqualified and wasn’t getting a second run.

Gianni and I had been awake all night. I let myself sleep, my face in my arms, there at an empty table in the bar next to the little train station.

I woke up to an enveloping din. The lunch crowd. A man and woman came and sat at my table, speaking something Scandinavian. I zipped the parka and went out to wait where I was meant to, at the bottom
of Les Planards, where Gianni would ski down. I stared up at the mountain, blearily visible through the wet mist of snow-loaded clouds. I walked back and forth to keep warm. Gianni did not appear.