Sandro and M, his Argentine friend, once had a long conversation about culture and violence. He should call M, he thought. M would understand the position Sandro was in and what happened to his brother. But why have that kind of conversation? While waiting around the villa that week she never returned, he had seen the images in the newspaper of the demonstrations, the tanks in Bologna, the masses of people in Rome, human foam filling the Piazza Esedra, and he felt nothing. Or rather, he did feel something. A reminder that he was born on the wrong side of things. The anger and radical acts of the young people in Rome were a kind of electricity, an act and a refusal and a beauty, something Italian that was, for once, magnificent. But it was against him as long as he occupied his role as a Valera. It was against him and he had no right to take part.
* * *
After that week alone at the villa, he had returned to New York. Resumed his life, but single. Then Roberto was kidnapped, and Ronnie’s castoff had somehow been around in all the right moments, one of those women who had a skill for that, good timing. Ronnie had hurt her and made her cry and was grateful not to have her following him around anymore. Then suddenly Roberto was dead. And his mother caught him and called him out. You don’t love them.
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.
20. HER VELOCITY
Le 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—”