The Flamethrowers (6 page)

*  *  *

One late afternoon on his way home from rugby practice, Valera saw a strange machine parked on the seawall, a cycle with odd compartments, painted black. He supposed it was technically a bicycle—two wheels, a seat, handlebars. But it had a motor like an industrial machine. Its surfaces gleamed, showing none of Alexandria’s pervasive dust, road dust, brick dust, lime dust. As if it had just been transported from a trade show or museum, and yet it ticked with life, metal expanding as the cycle cooled: someone had just ridden it. Over its solid black rear wheel was sprung an odd upside-down sluiceway or gutter with interior machinery. German names were lettered in gold on its rear, “Hildebrand & Wolfmüller, München,” in fussy and old-fashioned cursive stencil like on the Prussian War–era sewing machine his mother kept for the seamstress. The place name, München, made him think of workmen whose lives were organized around haptic knowledge and early wake times, tinkering away as the Bavarian sun rose over narrow cobblestone streets. The cycle’s frame was thick and looked made of iron, to which a giant canister was bolted, a sort of metal keg that must have been the engine. There were no pedals, just two rigid pegs. The
front wheel was spoked, the rear an opaque black disc like a factory flywheel. A young man came around the corner, and by the tap and click of hard-soled, well-made city shoes, Valera understood that he was the owner of this weird cycle. The sun was already low over the sea. The man’s hair was slicked and wet with the possibilities of evening. Valera had never seen him—a Frenchman, he guessed. The man got on the contraption. There was nothing athletic in the attitude of his body, as if he would get the cycle going without physical effort, as a horseman swings his leg over, settles in the saddle and digs his spurs. He compressed a crank with one of his fancy shoes, to start the motor. After a few tries, it caught with a rumbling bub-bub-bub, coughing smoke, banging and backfiring, almost sputtering out, but then it seemed to find itself, and idled evenly again. Oh, but what happened next. Above the din of the engine Valera had not heard the broad, heavy door of the convent sing shut on its hinges. Had not heard the soft slap of a young woman’s espadrilles. Marie, walking along the seawall. She was glancing nervously at the convent’s open casement windows, moving quickly as if to avoid detection. She did not notice Valera. She approached the man on the bubbing cycle, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him. Is this real? Valera asked himself. Or am I dreaming this absurd betrayal? Marie hopped onto the seat of the cycle behind the man, her legs wrapped around his, her arms clutching his waist, the side of her face pressed against his back, her skirt bunched up around her knees. Off they went on the black machine, a thin looping trail of white smoke unfurling behind them.

Marie, were you not a virgin after all? Did you refuse me because you were taken, and not because you were pure? Or was I not good enough?

They rode along the seawall, Marie’s skirt and the man’s jacket flapping erratically in the warm wind. The cycle picked up speed until they seemed to be darting into the horizon, an orthogonal razor across Valera’s eye. Valera shouted. He used everything he had. He knew they could not hear him. He needed to enter the space of air, too, as that machine had, as that man had, taking Marie with him, man and bike
and Marie making an obscene double-humped centaur’s profile that moved along the seawall.

Watching its smug glide, Valera was in pain, but he felt a strange exhilaration around the edges of his pain. “The world is unknown to me,” he said out loud. “It is unknown.”

The cycle quieted to a distant throgging whine and then he could no longer hear it or see it. He was abandoned to his own sudden urge. He felt like a baby snake with too much venom. Afraid he would do something rash if he went inside his family’s apartment just then—defiling melons smuggled from the pantry was only half-pleasurable and led to an empty and disgusted sentiment, not worth the momentary joy—he instead descended the crumbling stairs along the seawall. Above the railing were smudged blue handprints, placed there by superstitious Egyptians to ward off the evil eye. No one was around, and he could have attended to the matter discreetly but decided against it. This erection, he felt, meant something. He wanted to use it, somehow. He disrobed, and with the calm thrill of entering a woman, he entered the ocean.

The sun was already half-melted, its redness spilling like cassis over the horizon. Valera pumped his legs in the water and composed. Composed! He made a poem, his first, to commemorate the black machine and to condemn the man who rode it.

When the sun had sunken completely under the horizon, the whole of the ocean’s visible surface turned an opaque silver. His body disappeared at the waterline and he felt bifurcated. Two halves, above the water and below it. He could hear everything acutely, as if the silvery light were fine-tuning all his senses. He was aware of tiny nuance in the lap and slurp of water against his body as he was raised and lowered in the swell.

He wrote a very fine poem in that swell. But with no pencil, no paper, he had only his memory to commit it to. He practiced it viva voce in the waves. But dazed by the awful truth that young Marie had a secret life, that someone else was holding and squeezing her perfect water balloon breasts, and stunned by the silver surface of his sea—his,
where he’d swum every day of his childhood and yet had never seen it turn this . . . not quite a color, but the colorless shine of mercury—the reverie was a crucible of forgetting. An hour later he could not recall his poem. Only a few fragments, like broken seashells caught in a dragnet. OIL OF POSSIBILITY and REMORSELESS, SPEEDING SHADOW BELOW BLUE UNBROKEN SKY, and LOVE AND HATE THE SAME, FORGED IN YOUR FLYWHEEL / BLACK AS MELTED PRUSSIAN CANNONS / NO TAINT OF DEFEAT. Strung together, they were not a poem. The unity and cadence were lost. Later this happened to him repeatedly, not in the ocean but in sleep. He would wake up with an understanding that he had just generated, in the final crepe-thin layers of active dreaming, the greatest poem of his life—objectively great—and that it was lost forever, sacrificed to the process of waking.

As Valera swam toward shore this occurred to him: If Marie was getting on strange cycles and spreading her legs for strange men, it meant Valera, too, had a chance with her.

Don’t despair, he told himself. Be patient. And get a cycle with a combustive engine.

*  *  *

When his family left Alexandria for Milan, six years after he’d composed his poem and then lost it to the ocean, motorcycles were becoming common. It was 1906. His father, who had quickly built a vast construction empire in the newly industrial Milan, would have gladly purchased him one if he’d asked, but Valera expressed little interest. French-made, German-made, even American-made, the cycles in Milan were newer, sleeker designs than the one from München with its giant metal-keg engine, but none gave him the same thrill. At first he knew why. Later he forgot. The reason was in his own fragment: unbroken sky.

Valera had grown up in a world of long and empty afternoons in the African heat, and he succumbed to Milan’s noise, chaos, and frenetic schedules poorly. The city was overrun with screeching electric trams, shuddering violently to their scheduled stops as though their rigid
wheels were being forced over piles of lumber and debris. The trams were chained to one another like bulky oxen, with a gripman whose only choice was to pull the lever or to jam it shut and stop the tram. The dour gripman. Pull the lever, jam it shut. Pull the lever, jam it shut. Lunch break. Dry ham panino and scalded espresso thimble. Pull the lever, jam it shut. The trams were powered from overhead by electricity, via a wand that attached magnetically to a wire strung above each route. Wires crisscrossed the sky like a great ventilator through which the city exhaled its polluted breath. The explosions and smoke from automobiles and motorcycles were a war fought on his nerves. The electric lights, burn holes in his vision. Most depressing were the rush hour masses, darting like rats down numbered trackways, clutching sacks that contained mass-produced snacks they would eat without pleasure as they were conveyed to their outer-rung apartment blocks.

The cycles that putted along coughing their blue smoke took people to work in street-level shops and upper-level offices, not into the bosom of pink sunset, into Marie’s arms. It was discord that had struck him so many years earlier. Cycle against honking and crowds and wires was nothing. Girl against pale laundry and waves, well, something, but a lust doomed to boredom. It had been the frisson of the two, cracked limestone wall and gleaming motor parts, Marie’s skirts fluttering, her knees wrapped around the back of some asshole Frenchman, the loud machine farting a trail of exhaust into the calm, vast blue, that had made its impression.

*  *  *

Valera with his elegant leather satchel, a student in Rome, was not part of any Bohemian rabble. It was 1912 and he was just about to finish his university degree and move back to Milan, to work for his father. But he nursed a secret interest in this rabble, young men who gathered at the Caffè Aragno on the Via del Corso, arguing and penning manifestos instead of going to their classes at the university. He spied on them daily, lurking at one of the Aragno’s outdoor tables, pretending to read, scribbling silly poems, or openly staring at these little clusters
of subversives who spoke to one another in low tones. To spy and to participate are separate worlds, and when the little group had something important to discuss, they retreated to a back room of the café, which the proprietor let them use. They’d glance at one another and say, “Third room,” and as they filtered inside the secret back room, Valera, the sole voyeur, was left with no group on which to eavesdrop. He longed to be among them.

One night, motorcycles converged on the corner beyond the café, motors revving, goggled grins exchanged among the cyclists. No one had clued him in.

What was happening?

“A race, pal.”

The young people smoking at the outdoor café tables cheered. Someone threw a full bottle of Peroni, which smashed in the paved intersection, leaving a great wet stain that glittered with broken glass.

The drivers all backed out simultaneously and squealed off down the Corso.

Two men crossing the avenue with evening newspapers under their arms and a woman in a black toque carrying packages were all sent diving for the curb. A tram came, and the brakeman had to pull the lever and let the gang of motorbikes pass. Pedestrians and vehicles halted for these renegades, their cycles growling like a convoy of hornets. The atmosphere had changed. The quick looks, the retreats to the secret meeting room, there was none of that. This was an open celebration, and Valera, too, was lifted by the festive spirit. He felt that he was part of it, even as he wasn’t sure what they were celebrating.

Twenty minutes later he heard the far-off noise of cycles accelerating in sync. The racers, returning.

The motorbikes came streaming down the Corso, their light beams diffused by fog into iridescent halos, each a perfect miniature of the colored ring that appeared around the moon on rare occasions, an effect of ice crystals in the clouds. Scores of moon rings laced and interlaced. Valera knew they were cycles with riders, but all he saw was glowing
rings. They sent a seditious crackle through the air, those headlights, promising that something would happen.

The drivers collected along the curb near the café, some popping up onto the sidewalk, spoked wheels and hot exhaust pipes in one tangled mass under the orange neon letters
CINZANO
. The shiny metal of gas tanks, fenders, carburetor covers, headlamp rings, and wheel rims sent the orange neon skidding over chrome and steel and suffusing everything—the atmosphere and the charge in the atmosphere, this feeling of sedition—in ember orange. For the first time in his life he found the neon, and the way it bathed those shiny machines parked below it, dazzling. Something was coalescing, an energy transfer from the cyclists to his own spirit. Life is here, he thought. It is happening now.

People were trading cycles, letting others take turns.

Valera stood.

“You want to give it a go?” A chrome pudding-bowl helmet was placed in his hands by a rider who had just dismounted.

Valera put on the helmet, looping the chin strap. He climbed onto the cycle with what he hoped was the élan of Marie’s companion on the seawall in Alexandria, with his wet hair and those hard-click shoes, who had seemed completed by his machine, as if together they made one thing.

You start it like this, see? It’s in neutral. Pull the compression lever. A downward thrust of the body’s weight on the kick-starter, and release compression. Bub-bub-bub-bub. Careful not to pop the clutch. Ease off it gently. First is down. Second, third, and fourth are up. Here’s your hand brake and there’s your foot brake. Don’t pull the hand brake alone without your foot brake, or you’ll be over the handlebars like a pole vaulter.

Valera stalled the motor trying to shift from neutral into first. His face went red.

It’s okay, just put it back in neutral and give it another kick start. . . . Yes, good. . . . Now into first. Pull in the clutch so you’ll be ready—

The cycles began to move and thin. They were off!

Go! That’s it—go!

The cycles were dispersing. Valera pushed on the shifter with the sole of his shoe, gave the throttle gas, and eased off the clutch, understanding, this time, that it was a two-part invention: the gas flows and the clutch releases as one movement, but each part is controlled independently, the two meeting at a fluid halfway point.

The cycle burped forward, not at all gracefully, but he felt the essence of what was required, control with the wrists. After a few erratic lunges, learning the stiff springs of clutch and throttle, he was able to go along more smoothly and to follow the movements of his fellow riders, each reacting to the next as fish do, swimming in a school, auto-choreographed in one undulation, fish to fish, rider to rider, as they threaded the narrow streets beyond the Corso.