Ardito! Your name means courage, as their first commandment went. Run into battle! Victory at any cost!

Switzerland for schooling.

Holidays at Como. Waiting in short pants. Waiting for a shiny car to come and take him. His father’s driver.

The occasional weekend in Brera. Trips to Rome with his father, twice visiting Cinecittà to see producers his father knew. Movie stars. Sports cars like wraparound sunglasses. Umbrella pines above the studio café, Sandro unsure how to speak to his own father. Sipping his aranciata as a camera slid past on a dolly — it was a big black heart, with its two film reels, a heart or an upside-down ass, and the cameraman peered through its viewfinder, trailing the slinky steps of a woman in a white dress.

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?

[...] hat a relief it was. A vacation from the self, to attend to their needs. Like Giddle, the so-called best friend, but a betrayer who barely had a self, who had a sociopathic freedom from any need for relating. He enjoyed that kind of thing. On occasion. Or rather, he let himself be enjoyed by these women who dictated. He needed a break from his devoted girlfriend, who submitted to his generosity and demanded so little. She was like a daughter. Young Reno. She was both innocent and ambitious and looked to Sandro for direction, and fine, but not all the time. Sometimes he just wanted to forget himself. Doesn’t everyone?

His father had said to him, “As you get older, you tolerate less and less well women your own age.” “You mean you do,” Sandro had said. “Yes, I,” his father said. “That’s right. And I used to think it was because I’d escaped time and women didn’t. But that’s not the reason. It’s because I’m stunted. Many men are. If you are that kind of man when you grow up, Sandro, you’ll understand. You’ll go younger in order to tolerate yourself.”

That’s what it was about, at the end of the day. His father was right. It’s what you can stand of yourself.

A boarding announcement for his flight. He stood up from his seat as the blanketing echo of many small conversations ricocheted around the high-ceilinged terminal, Trans World. A great white puff through which sailed both swallows and the underside of modernity. Even if the association was not direct. Because TWA was not Oscar Niemeyer but Saarinen. Still, its melted meringue lines told him Brasília equaled death, a nasty little message, private, from the terminal to Sandro.

“Stupidest people on earth,” his father said of the rubber tappers in the Amazon, who made him rich, whose slavery paid for the stunning paean to modernism like the one he was in, the terminal. So dumb and uncivilized that they had weighted their souls with stones. An act whose grave sophistication still impressed Sandro. It suggested they understood what was at stake, how fragile presence, true and felt and lived presence, really was.