He identified as Rastafarian even though he was white and came from Trastevere. He had not rinsed his dreadlocks in so long that one of them had hardened to the point of breaking off. It was said that he’d found so many lice eggs inside that it looked like a cannoli pastry.
The old black-and-white television in the back of the principal’s office showed images of a city under siege. It was Los Angeles. Alessandro looked at me and nodded his head. “This is where you’re off to.”
News had arrived that the four police officers who were on trial for brutally beating the African American construction worker Rodney King had been acquitted. We had all seen images of the assault on television. It took place on a dark Los Angeles street and was videotaped by chance by a red-haired Argentinian who witnessed it from the balcony of his apartment. It was the first time that police brutality had been caught on tape and the video had gone viral even without the benefit of the Internet. The world expected justice. But justice didn’t come, so half an hour after the acquittal, more than three hundred people started protesting in front of police headquarters. By that evening the protesters outnumbered the police officers. Riots, burning, and looting began.
Sitting around the black-and-white TV in Rome, we felt like we were watching footage from a war.
When I went home the following day I screamed at my parents that we could not move to a country where the police were allowed to beat people with impunity. Serena and Ettore had been politically active radicals in their youth. My father had been part of Autonomia Operaia, the autonomist leftist movement, in the seventies. If I had any sense of political justice ingrained in me, it was because of the stories he told us about workers’ autonomy growing up. I thought I could count on their leftist ethos to change their minds. I was wrong.
The riots went on for six consecutive days. I looked at the flaming streets from our television in Rome and tried to imagine our new home somewhere among those fires. While Los Angeles was facing the largest insurrection in the United States since the sixties, my family was packing boxes for our move. Our grandmother Celeste would come along to help us settle in California. She walked around the house shaking her head at everything we were leaving behind.
“Poveri ragazzi,” she kept saying about my brother and me. “Poor kids.”
Serena turned off the TV and handed me a copy of American Vogue. There was a photo of happy girls on a beach wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and bikinis.
“This could be you. Try to look at the bright side.”
—
The Los Angeles airport was just a few miles from the epicenter of the riots. It was dusk when our airplane drew closer to the landing strip. I could see, amid the streets lined with identical one-story houses, a lack of something. An absence. Fifty-one men and seven women died in the riots—shot, burned, beaten to death, stabbed. That same airport where we were landing had been shut down by violence and then for cleanup. There had been fires, hundreds of buildings and homes burned down. Large parts of the city, famed for its lights, were still obscured. The power cut during the rioting left the south corner of the city in a dark hole. But the gloom I saw from the plane the day we arrived was not caused by lack of power. Order had been restored, but stores and businesses had shut down never to be rebuilt, leaving a sense of permanent dimness, like the bulb of a flashlight whose batteries were beginning to die.
It felt like the city was still burning when we stepped off the airplane. Or maybe I was yet to get used to the incendiary quality of the warm Santa Ana, the “devil winds” that blew in from the desert. The sun set behind the freeway. As we drove toward our house, we saw police choppers in the sky, metallic dragonflies emitting shafts of white beams moving probingly over the concrete below. Our cat, Mao, who had traveled from Rome with us, miaowed inconsolably. Nothing felt welcoming, and my father knew it.
—
It took us a long time to get to the house. My grandmother clutched her purse through the whole cab ride.
“It’s not like you’re going to get mugged in a taxi!” my mother reproached her, but she would not let go.
“Se?ora is right. We’re in Van Nuys, barrio Nuys as the local gangs say,” the cabdriver said with a smirk. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Visto, Serena?” my grandmother sniffed. “Marida was right. Whenever you told her you wanted to move out here, she always said it was the worst place to raise a family.”
Marida was my father’s mother who had died earlier that year at the age of ninety. She had grown up drinking champagne and twirling pearls in her fingers, but a few years before her death, she’d been conned by a Vatican priest who took advantage of her Alzheimer’s and asked her daily to withdraw large sums of money from her bank account to give to the church. She was convinced she could pay her way into heaven. By the time she died, there was very little left of the great inheritance my family was counting on. This, according to my father, was the reason why instead of living in Beverly Hills, like all decent filmmaking families, we had to live in barrio Nuys.
We had smuggled her ashes with us. They’d been divided among her four sons and even though my father was angry at her for leaving him with no patrimony, he was also superstitious and felt that something bad might happen if he left his share of his dead mother in Rome. On the flight over she had come to him in a dream, explicitly telling him to go back to Rome and forget about Los Angeles and filmmaking altogether. In her lifetime she had refused to see most of my father’s films. He invited her to premieres and even asked her to be his date the one time he had been accepted at the Cannes Film Festival, with a Pasolini-inspired story about a homosexual couple, but she bluntly declined. “I don’t like stories about pederasts.”
Ettore was disturbed by his dream and said his mother had ruined his life while she was alive and now she was trying to ruin it in death. He would make films. He didn’t care what she had to say.