The Flamethrowers (19 page)

Lonzi turned up in Bellagio, wounded. He was convalescing at a lakeside hotel. He was the same age as Valera—fifty-seven—and still the fool had been with the Alpini, on the Eastern Front.

Valera and Alba went to visit him at the Hotel Splendide. Lonzi, his leg blown off, was packing ice around the remaining stumped mass, but the thing was septic, sending up slow and wretched bubbles, which shone as if blown of mucus. As each bubble of gas-filled ooze on Lonzi’s stump stretched full and popped, it sent a smell of rot and death into the closed hotel room, and Valera wished he hadn’t brought Alba. He nudged her back, and she stood by the door.

“This doesn’t matter,” Lonzi said, gesturing to his leg stump as if it were a maimed dog that needed to be shot. He was wearing his Alpini hat, its feather angled like a crooked fence post. “The real issue is that my heart is still human, that’s the fix I’m in. I want to dig it out. If I can live without a leg, why not this thumper? It’s as bad as hers,” he said, pointing at Alba. “That hideous good-looking woman you brought here. Did you learn nothing, Valera? I don’t want to see women tarted up for sex. I want to fight for my pleasure. Don’t parade that here.”

The sepsis must have gone to Lonzi’s brain. A grisly adventure, and
for what? Valera wondered. There was no future in ground combat, fighting people with daggers and guns, cutting through barbed wire, bleeding and suffering and rolling around in the mud. Mussolini spoke over the radio about a secret weapon of some kind: the Germans would unveil it, whatever it was, and they’d all be saved. And if they lost, Mussolini declared, justice would eventually be served. There would be a grand trial, he said. Mussolini was convinced the Allies would try him in Madison Square Garden—where the world would come to know the truth, and see things as he did. The truth would be revealed, Mussolini said, in Madison Square Garden.

Where is it? Valera wondered. “Alba, where is Madison Square Garden?”

She said England, probably. It sounded English.

Mussolini could do nothing about Valera’s secret little pok-ta-pok, Eugen Dollmann assured him. Dollmann, a liaison for the Germans, had helped Valera set up the Swiss operation, part of an elaborate program of Dollmann’s to undermine Mussolini’s half-witted plan to socialize Italian industry. In truth, Valera’s pok-ta-pok was a major operation. He made the drive regularly through the mountains and into Switzerland to oversee things, wearing, for those drives, an officer’s dress uniform in case he was stopped. The hat, a black fur Colbacco-style fez with gold fasces, and a heavy wool MVSN coat with its patchwork of badges and emblems. Together they kept him warm and gave his missions an official appearance.

One moonless night, descending in elevation on the switchback curves that took him down toward Bellagio from the Swiss border, he saw artificial light of some kind over Lake Como, a marvelous bursting pink, bright as day. It was tracer fire.

*  *  *

A few days later, Mussolini was executed and hung from the girders of an Esso station in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. He was next to his lover and a small coterie, all hung upside down from the gas station’s girders like Parma hams.

Crowds began to maul the bodies. The images in the newspaper showed people with dirt-smeared faces, the particular face of hunger, hollowed and angular with bright, stuperous eyes, this rabble grabbing at the bodies, tearing their clothes, tugging on the corpses, pulling them down from the girders. The bodies dense and inert, the clothes coming off to reveal a curiously inhuman nudity, not like animals and not like people, lacking in any kind of dignity, pale flesh poked and prodded and spilling fluids from inside. Some of the corpses had been tied behind motorcycles—Valera motorcycles!—the Esso signs on the petrol pumps behind them round and bright as lollipops, the bodies dragged down the Corso Buenos Aires like bags of sand.

I did it. I set the record.

I was, improbably, the fastest woman in the world, at 308.506 miles an hour. An official record for 1976, not beaten until the next year.

There was an article in the
Salt Lake Tribune
. I’d been interviewed by a reporter from
Road and Track
who was there to write about Didi. And by a reporter for the Italian television station Rai.

And yet it was the beginning of the end for me, some kind of end, although I didn’t see things that way at the time.

*  *  *

I returned to New York triumphant. I had crashed going 140 miles an hour and more or less walked away unharmed, mostly because of the helmet and the leather racing suit I’d had on. Just a sprain, bruises, and road rash of which I was secretly proud. I’d been allowed to drive the
Spirit of Italy
. I had been in the cockpit, which held the faint residue of Didi Bombonato’s aftershave. I had breathed his aftershave and pretended it was Flip Farmer’s, or that I was Flip Farmer. The speed had felt right, even if I had been afraid: to go fast was to conform to the
logic of the steering, the speedometer, the gas pedal. I knew the world, now, from inside the
Spirit of Italy
.

I knew that feeling. To be the driver. To watch the mechanics in their white jumpsuits leap over the blinding salt toward the vehicle, faces jubilant. Toward me, behind the wheel.

*  *  *

Fall had arrived, and a feeling of hope and freshness suffused the city. The sky was a vivid, seersucker blue. I was finished with my first day back working with Marvin and Eric at Bowery Film, strolling under a canopy of green leaves that were big and floppy, a few gold or ruby-red around the edges, one twirling downward as I crossed Washington Square Park. The light cut a sharp shadow instead of summer’s fuzzy outlines. Autumn had brought in definition, a sense of gravity returning to a place where it had been chased out by the sun, by the diffuse rule of humidity. There was a late-September crispness in the air. I thought of smashed horse chestnuts on the sidewalks of Reno. The feel of new corduroy. Of course I had a great story to report, and the hopefulness I sensed from the gold-edged leaves above me could have been my own.

I had run an errand for Marvin, dropping off processed film to an address on lower Fifth, and was on my way to meet Sandro. The NYU students loafing around the empty fountain in the park were trying out the fall fashions, the boys in sweaters of wholesome colors, orange, brown, and green. The girls in pleated, brushed-cotton coats and suede clogs or those oxfords with the wavy soles. Lace knee socks and hand-tooled leather purses with a long strap worn crosswise between the breasts. A few berets. In light, dry gusts, the air riffled the leaves, yellow as wax beans, and a few floated softly downward. In such hopefulness, even a beret seemed like a good idea.

“Did you ever notice that three-quarters of China girls have a widow’s peak?” Marvin had asked me that afternoon, as he was setting up the lights to take my picture holding the color chart. Mostly I helped customers and ran errands, but twice a year or so they needed new pictures for different emulsions and densities of film.

“I mean a pronounced one,” he said. “But you—you have no widow’s peak.”

It was true. For some reason many of them had a widow’s peak.

I have no widow’s peak.

I liked the little brushed-cotton coats, very retro-1940s, but soon I would have the Moto Valera, which was being repaired at the dealer in Reno and would be shipped back to New York, all at Sandro’s expense. (Did I care? No, I didn’t. The money was practically nothing to him.) It might take months for it to be repaired, because they had to order parts and bodywork from Italy since it was a 1977 model, not yet released, but eventually I’d have it, at which point the dainty cotton jacket would be useless. I would need leather. And not just leather but tight leather. Since my crash, I understood its use, which had nothing to do with the kids in leather who packed into Rudy’s Bar after midnight. The leathers I had worn on the salt flats were too big, and where they sagged they rubbed my skin off as I rolled and skidded. The scabs were just now beginning to fall off, revealing pink skin, not ready for the world. As the bruises on my legs and hip healed, dead matter just under the skin drained downward in blackish streaks, sedimenting around my ankles like coffee grounds. I hadn’t known the body’s methods were so crude. The streaks itched terribly. Sandro liked them. He said they looked like paint pours on a Morris Louis canvas. I heard him telling people about my trip to Bonneville, the crash, the ride in Didi’s jet car. Neither of us acknowledged that had it not been for Ronnie’s taunts, Sandro never would have made the trip possible for me.

The night I’d returned, Sandro said, “Did I tell you I’m doing a show with Helen Hellenberger?” He smiled happily.

“You are?”

“I’ve been with Erwin too long. I think it’s time for a change. He doesn’t really get the work anymore. He can’t take me to the next level at this point in my career.”

I sensed he was repeating Helen’s argument to him. I’d seen how persuasive she could be. We were in the kitchen, which always felt like Sandro’s kitchen, because I’d lived there all of five months, in a place
that had been his for several years, where he had his own finicky way of arranging things and where all the things were his and I felt more like a guest, one who navigated her domestic surroundings with only partial knowledge. Over the course of the first six months we were dating, the boiler in my building broke and was not fixed. “Why stay there when there is heat and hot water at my place?” Sandro said, and soon I was practically living with him, and then the question was why pay rent on my apartment when legally I probably had a right not to, since the place was overrun by roaches and there wasn’t hot water? Why not just move in with him? It was hard to argue with. Sandro’s place was never homey to me, but it was a lot nicer than mine.

As he and I spoke about his move to Helen’s gallery, my eyes drifted to the sideboard, where two dirty wineglasses and several empty wine bottles stood. I had been gone two weeks, and I assumed he’d had a friend over, Ronnie or Stanley, maybe Morton Feldman. When I’d first walked in, he’d looked directly at the glasses, the empty bottles, and said he’d missed me terribly. Now I understood that Helen had been here.

“I’m really happy about this move,” he said. “I think it’s a bold change. An important one.”

If I had expressed jealousy over him having invited Helen to the loft for drinks, our loft, I sensed he would have become the wise father, attributing jealousy to youth, which was how he spoke of jealousy in others, as a kind of fretting that Sandro, the elder, wouldn’t indulge.

*  *  *

A couple of days after returning, I’d taken my film to be developed. Sandro had given me part of a huge room to use as my studio, where I spread out photos on a long table. They weren’t at all spectacular. They were the detritus of an experience, ambiguous marks in the white expanse of the salt flats.

Ronnie came over and looked at the photographs. He said I should keep the bike as it was when I crashed it. Wheel it into a gallery and place it in the middle of the room, with the photographs of my tracks on the walls.

I’d rather have the bike, I said, to ride it. And he said that was a choice I’d have to make. I agreed with him that the photographs by themselves were too ephemeral. But I was on, now, to the next thing, what the crash had given way to, which was my new and curious association with the Valera team. They had contacted me through Sandro, and had invited me to come to Italy the next spring for a photo shoot at Monza, Didi and I on the famous racetrack outside of Milan. And after Monza, a publicity tour for the tire company. It was, I felt, way beyond what I’d hoped for with the attempted film on Flip Farmer. I would have total access, and they said I could film and take my own pictures.

Sandro had acted as if it were a ridiculous proposal that I go to Italy under the auspices of his family’s company. And not only that, but to end up reduced to the ignominy, he said, of a calendar girl. He scoffed at the idea that the company actually thought his own girlfriend would agree to such a thing.

“But calendar girls don’t drive race vehicles,” I said. This was something else. I’d actually gone fast enough. And he had to consent that yes, it was true, but promoting his family’s company was too far. I tried to keep my attitude casual. I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to go to Italy and tour with the Valera team, but I didn’t push things with Sandro. I simply knew privately that I was going, and hoped he would eventually see things my way.

I was on the trail of land speed racers, as if everything—my childhood with Scott and Andy, my early attempt to interview Flip Farmer—had all been logical training.

Except I was no kind of racer myself. Flip and Didi were actual racers, with actual talent. And the truth was that in participating in some kind of promotional tour, I would be more like what Sandro said, a calendar girl. But if I were an actual racer it wouldn’t be art. It would be sport. This, the infiltration, as I thought of it, was a way of drawing upon myself, my life, just as Sandro had encouraged. You lived your art if you were serious, according to Giddle.