The Flamethrowers

In 1976, Reno successfully sets the world record for fastest woman in the Spirit of Italy. The Valera Sandro set her up with is getting fixed up with parts from Italy. Reno returns to New York with bruises and scabs. Sandro invites her to move in with him, and she accepts because her apartment doesn’t have hot water. Sandro tells her that he’s doing a show with Helen Hellenberger, and Reno feels a touch of envy. When Reno develops the photos from the salt flats, she finds that they’re not as good as she had envisioned or hoped. She is distracted by an offer from the Valera team: a photoshoot in Italy, a press tour for Valera Tires, and access to everything she needs for photographing. Sandro disapproves of the idea, finding it ridiculous, but Reno is privately determined to go.

Ronnie, Sandro, Giddle, and Reno meet at the diner to trade travel stories. Ronnie tells them about driving to Texas to deliver famous artist Saul Oppler’s bunnies to him, only to discover upon his arrival that the bunnies died in transit. Reno tells them about the salt flats, and Sandro gets a little jealous of Stretch, the man who let Reno stay with him in the motel. Coincidentally, Saul Oppler is in the same diner. When Ronnie tries to say hello to him, the famous artist is angry and ignores him.

After the diner, Ronnie brings Sandro and Reno to his studio to see his most recent collection. Along with his art, he has a personal picture of a young woman staring at the picture-taker with close admiration. Ronnie calls her his layaway girl, and Reno feels sorry for the girl in the picture. Sandro says Ronnie dates like he wears clothes; Ronnie owns a lot of clothing and discards them easily, just like the women he circulates through. Reno believes this to be a sign of running away from something, and a way of dealing with his past traumas.

Later that night, Sandro brings Reno to his friends’ dinner party. Stanley and Gloria Kastle live in a beautiful loft and have many famous and sophisticated friends. One of Gloria’s guests is a former anarchist named Burdmoore, who tells Reno about his group, the Motherfuckers. They took over the Lower East Side, fighting with the cops and feeding the neighborhood. He tells her that women had no place in their group, except to prepare the meals. Burdmoore also comments on the gun that Sandro carries, declaring that Reno seems to be the type of woman who would be into that kind of man. Talia Valera, Sandro’s cousin, arrives and Reno immediately feels intimidated. They aren’t introduced to one another, and the group starts talking about Sandro’s gun and playing with it. Another guest, Didier, tells Burdmoore that his anarchist group was nothing more than performance.

Didier, Burdmoore, Talia, Ronnie, Sandro, and Reno go to Times Square after the dinner party. Ronnie and Talia flirt, though Reno still hasn’t spoken to her. Didier goes into one of the pornography theaters and the rest of the group goes back to the diner. Reno can’t help but notice Ronnie and Talia, and she’s pleased when Ronnie doesn’t let Talia sit on his lap like Reno had all those months before. At the diner, they run into a drunk Giddle, who kisses Burdmoore. Talia runs into two friends as well. Ronnie brings up the possibility of Reno going to Italy and encourages Sandro to let it happen. While Sandro and Reno argue about it, they notice that Talia and her two friends are playing a game in which they slap themselves. Talia punches herself hard in the face.

The Motherfuckers believed that police were, in essence, an evil institution. The Motherfuckers wore black and took over the Lower East Side in 1966. They stole a pig and made a barbeque for the neighborhood, were violent, robbed a bank, firebombed a retailer, stole Maury the Slumlord’s whippet for ransom, smashed Thurman’s Cadillac, and murdered Maury, among other activities. Burdmoore left the city for a while with Nadine to avoid arrest. Eventually, he returned to face whatever consequences may come. 

Outside the diner after leaving Talia and Ronnie, a man approaches Sandro and Reno in the dark. He brandishes a knife, then Sandro shoots him in the hand. Reno goes home to call for help but hangs up when the 911 operator asks about the shooter and describes the mugger as the victim. Sandro doesn’t return to the apartment, so Reno stays up late watching a movie while she waits for him. The movie brings back memories for Reno. She recalls the Sears mannequins her mother would dress, then her memories drift to meeting Ronnie’s brother Tim. Tim had been a heroin dealer then a bank robber, and Reno was surprised how different Tim was from Ronnie.

Finally, Sandro returns. He brings Reno to bed, and as he begins to strip her for sex, she realizes that she doesn’t want to encourage this intimacy, as if having sex with Sandro would mean she approved of his actions that night with the gun. Afterward, he tells Reno that he had waited with the mugger, a 14-year-old boy, then when the ambulance appeared he walked away. Sandro walked and walked, waiting to kill time before getting back to Reno. Sandro’s lawyer recommends that he turn himself in because the police will view him as a vigilante hero. Sandro disagrees, and he tells Reno that they should both go to Italy together. Reno is pleased. She thinks, “Sandro supporting it made everything so much easier, even if his sudden support was about him, the mugging, and had little to do with me” (360). Later, Reno tells Marvin and Eric about her trip to Italy, and they tell her she can keep her job if she returns early enough.

Giddle and Burdmoore’s relationship grows into a deeply sexual one. Burdmoore has interests in kinks, and Giddle convinces him to become more cleanshaven. At the diner one night, saying some goodbyes, Reno spots a young girl looking at Ronnie with longing. Ronnie ignores her, and the girl leaves. Reno can feel her sadness.

In Brazil, Valera begins to see the implications of the abuses in the rubber business. Rubber workers with a bullet in their back or an ice pick in their neck end up categorized as dead by yellow fever. The ethos of the industry is to keep the Indigenous workers constantly afraid and therefore tied to the brutal work of rubber. There is an existential crisis in this dynamic between worker and overseer, one that is heightened by the colonization of religion in South America. From the point of view of the abused Indigenous people, there is no way out and no way to exist within their lives.

Reno and Sandro arrive in Italy. Sandro’s brother Roberto is as standoffish as Sandro warned, but Reno relishes the atmosphere of Bellagio. Sandro’s mother is glamorous and sophisticated. The family is connected to the aristocracy and famous creative types. In Milan, Sandro buys Reno a beautiful dress that is nevertheless uncharacteristic for her; his mother prefers people to dress up for dinner. Sandro’s mother forgets or ignores that Reno can understand Italian, and Reno overhears her speaking cruelly about Reno when Sandro isn’t around. His mother asks Reno if she plans to marry Sandro, and this combined with all the careful looks from the domestic help makes Reno nervous. She and Sandro escape the villa on their hikes, and Reno prefers to have sex with Sandro in nature instead of in the confines of his mother’s tense home. As much as she has been weary of some of her differences with Sandro, Reno gets along with “Sandro as my protector from this world of rooms and servants and customs, fortifying me against it as he guided me into it” (468). 

Sandro defends Reno to his rude family. But when Chesil Jones, an older American author and Sandro’s mother’s boyfriend, goes on a tirade about how women aren’t good at skiing and racing because the physics are beyond them, Sandro grows frustrated with Reno for not speaking up against him. Despite some of the tensions, Reno loves the villa and imagines herself happy there, after she gets accustomed to the snobby brusqueness of Sandro’s family. At the pool, Reno is surprised when Sandro’s cousin Talia abruptly arrives and strips down to jump into the water. Talia gets along famously with Sandro’s mother, but she and Reno continue not to connect. Reno is secretly upset when Talia shows up to dinner with the Borsalino hat Reno gave Ronnie that night when they were strangers in her apartment.

One day, Reno notices that the tense back-and-forth dynamics of the family are replaced by a bigger crisis. Valera workers have gone on strike in Milan, beating the white-collar bosses and closing down roads. Reno doesn’t much care about the strike, but it becomes more real for her when one of the kidnapped turns out to be Didi Bombonato. When Reno calls the Moto Valera team to check up on Didi, she is saddened to find out that they don’t remember who she is. The strike and ripple of violence means that instead of only one week with Sandro’s mother, Reno will spend two weeks. Reno learns more about the family; for example, Talia’s last name is actually Shrapnel, but she uses the Valera name to avoid the stigma of her ancestor who invented the shrapnel shell. Reno also learns that Sandro’s mother prefers Roberto to Sandro unequivocally and publicly. The day of the large, emergency company meeting, Sandro privately suggests to Reno that she make film and art out of the chaos of his family’s abusive company. Reno is surprised, but later she regrets not joining them to watch and document the meeting.

Since her arrival, Reno has been nervous about the groundskeeper, a handsome man around her age who stares at her often, intuiting how out of place she is in this bourgeois world. The groundskeeper brings Reno to a Valera factory while Sandro and the family are away at the company meeting. The groundskeeper used to work in the factory, and though he is tied to the Valera family he doesn’t know their names. Reno “realized the Valeras were nothing to him. Of no consequence. He was as free of them as that wolf that slept in matted briars” (528). He tells Reno that she won’t be able to film; Reno is made aware that if he were there with Sandro things would be different. He doesn’t give Reno any details about working for Sandro’s mother and simply says that she’s a highly respected person. Reno walks around the factory, then sees a man kissing a woman against a wall in an alley. She thinks she needs to film them, then realizes it’s Sandro kissing Talia. Reno grabs Sandro from behind, and Sandro holds Reno back as she tries to hit Talia. Reno hurries back to the groundskeeper’s car and reevaluates the nature of Sandro’s desire for her. When the groundskeeper comes back an hour later, he tells her he’s going to Rome. She nods and they pull off into the rain.