* * *
He was at the TWA terminal.
Trans World, Ronnie would have said, hypervigilant to words and branding.
New York to Milan via London.
Sandro both loved and hated that terminal.
He had promised his mother six months. She had only one son now, and he could not turn away from her. He could not. His mother had begged him to come home, and he was doing it and fully — not partially, by bringing a buffer, a girl. He felt like he was both reentering the womb, against all instinct, and also, finally, and way too late, growing up and facing himself.
He wondered about her, what she would do with her life. He never asked his friends about her, even as he knew they were in contact. Discretion was a mode of survival. It was his history, his loss, and none of anyone else’s concern.
He looked up at the sailing white arc of the terminal, lines sinuous as Ingres, the swallows flying through, lost inside, and he thought about Brasília. Which was conceived of by a different architect entirely, and yet the TWA terminal always reminded him of Brasília. Same white concrete parabolas and huge glass bays and they were born of the same idea, a proscriptive lie about progress and utopias and born the same year, too—1956. When, as well, the Autostrada del Sole was born. What a year, 1956. Brasília was surely worse than an airline terminal. It was not to human scale and you could see one wretched Indian walking some godawful distance in dire heat with a basket of grain or laundry on her head, casting a shadow on a blank and baking concrete wall two hundred feet high, no shade, no trees, no people. Brasília was not to any human scale, and the inclusion of a Formula One racetrack, in the wake of a generous bid from Sandro’s father and Valera Tires, was one more insult to the Indian with a basket on her head.
His father had brought Sandro along because he was in his seventies and in ailing health and needed someone to look after him but could not resist the ribbon cutting. Sandro, eighteen by then, flew from New York to Brasília.
This is what we do, he had thought, holding up his frail father. We cut ribbons. We’re ribbon cutters.
He had both liked and hated Brasília’s stiff white meringues, which perfectly blotted the ugly history that paid for them. His father’s rubber-harvesting operations in the Amazon had made the Brazilian government enough money to build an all-inclusive concrete utopia, a brand-new capital. The money had poured in. The rubber workers were still there — they were still there now, in 1977—and there were many more of them because their children were all tappers as well. Neither Sandro’s father nor the Brazilian overseers and middlemen ever bothered to tell the rubber workers the war was over. They simply kept them going, doing their labor up there in the remote northwestern jungle. The tappers didn’t know. They believed that someday there would be an enormous payment, if not to their children, maybe to their children’s children. “What is time to an Indian?” his father had said to Sandro that night in the hotel, the Palace of Something or Other, another interplanetary meringuelike building for industrialists and diplomats. “What is time?” his father asked. “What the hell is it? Who is bound to time, and who isn’t?” Sandro became angry. What am I doing here with this old bastard? “Go tell them, Sandro,” his father had said. “Go on up there. It’s only three thousand kilometers, most of it on dirt roads. Go let them know the war is over and they can all go home, okay?”
It was the last time he saw his father.
Everything a cruel lesson. This, what fathers were for. His father taking Sandro, four years old, to the tire factory gates during a strike. The workers carrying a coffin and Sandro saying, “Papa, is it a funeral?” His father laughing and nodding. For me. I’m dead, right? Holding up his hands, slapping his own cheeks, then holding up his hands again. What do you say, Sandro? Do I look dead to you?
The scene at the gates turned ugly, and next Sandro knew, his father’s driver was clutching him against his fat stomach and then he was pushed back into the car and the car pounded on by fists and other things, rocks, as his father’s driver motored them away from the gates with a bloody face and a lapful of shattered glass.
An argument between his parents when they returned, and he understood that his father had taken him for a purpose, to be caught in what occurred. His father never took Roberto to the gates during a melee. He trained Roberto in the details of profits and losses. Took only little Sandro to see the workers coming at them with clubs. But why? Sandro asked much later, after Roberto had left for his university studies. Because you are going to be an artist, his father said. And it was important to establish that you aren’t suited to anything else. That’s what artists are, his father said, those who are useless for anything else. That might seem like an insult, he said, but it wasn’t, and someday Sandro would understand. Each child was unique, and destined for something different, so why should they be treated the same?
* * *
Roberto. For his death Sandro felt something. For his mother, who would be so alone now. You should take a lover. He had always felt he could never go back there to live. But he would go back. He was going. The flight would board soon, and in a way he was relieved to get it over with, to be banished from his own pathetic tendencies. When he had shown up to the funeral with Ronnie’s castoff, his mother had said to cut it out. Cut what out? And she said, abusing these young women. You don’t love them. You bring them to place between you and your life. That was in May. It was July now and he was officially free of entanglements. Alone.
They would announce boarding at any moment. Going back to Italy would be the death of him, and he was ready for it. Eager, even. His own casket, like the one the factory workers carried for his father. He’d have to occupy a role, be his mother’s adored son now that her firstborn was gone.
Probably that girl, Ronnie’s castoff, was relieved. He couldn’t have been much fun to be around. Moody. Quiet. Domineering. A winning combination. Her curious, catlike autonomy had reminded him in unpleasant ways of his imploded relationship. How badly he’d fucked everything up. The disastrous moment at the tire plant. Even if he had tried to explain himself, explain about Talia, apologize, fix everything, it wouldn’t have worked. He’d wrecked things, and maybe it was intentional, by letting his cousin take him back to the place he’d been so many times in his youth. She had been his lover and it was like going home. When were people not attracted to cousins? It had been his right to act on it when he was in his twenties, Talia sixteen, but such an old sixteen. He had tried to distance himself when she showed up in New York. Look, he said, I’m living with someone. And Talia had responded with raucous laughter. You think I want to live with you, Sandro? Don’t be an idiot. You’re my cousin, for fuck’s sake. He had managed to stay away. He told her no like you talk to a dog. No, he’d said firmly, and she had smiled, content in her knowledge that the firmness was for him, not for her, a firmness for his own benefit, a reminder of limits he was trying to impose.