André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

“The translator,” my father’s voice would resound as he nursed an after-dinner cognac.

“ Traduttrice , my eye,” Mafalda would intone.

Sometimes we’d run into each other in town.

Sitting at the caffè where several of us would gather at night after the movies or before heading to the disco, I saw Chiara and Oliver walking out of a side alley together, talking. He was eating an ice cream, while she was hanging on his free arm with both of hers. When had they found the time to become so intimate? Their conversation seemed serious.

“What are you doing here?” he said when he spotted me. Banter was both how he took cover and tried to conceal we’d altogether stopped talking. A cheap ploy, I thought.

“Hanging out.”

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“My father doesn’t believe in bedtimes,” I parried.

Chiara was still deep in thought. She was avoiding my eyes.

Had he told her the nice things I’d been saying about her? She seemed upset. Did she mind my sudden intrusion into their little world? I remembered her tone of voice on the morning when she’d lost it with Mafalda. A smirk hovered on her face; she was about to say something cruel.

“Never a bedtime in their house, no rules, no supervision, nothing. That’s why he’s such a well-behaved boy. Don’t you see? Nothing to rebel against.”

“Is that true?”

“I suppose,” I answered, trying to make light of it before they went any further. “We all have our ways of rebelling.”

“We do?” he asked.

“Name one,” chimed in Chiara.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“He reads Paul Celan,” Oliver broke in, trying to change the subject but also perhaps to come to my rescue and show, without quite seeming to, that he had not forgotten our previous conversation. Was he trying to rehabilitate me after that little jab about my late hours, or was this the beginnings of yet another joke at my expense? A steely, neutral glance sat on his face.

“E chi è?” She’d never heard of Paul Celan.

I shot him a complicit glance. He intercepted it, but there was no hint of mischief in his eyes when he finally returned my glance. Whose side was he on?

“A poet,” he whispered as they started ambling out into the heart of the piazzetta, and he threw me a casual Later!

I watched them look for an empty table at one of the adjoining caffès.

My friends asked me if he was hitting on her.

I don’t know, I replied.

Are they doing it, then?

Didn’t know that either.

I’d love to be in his shoes.

Who wouldn’t?

But I was in heaven. That he hadn’t forgotten our conversation about Celan gave me a shot of tonic I hadn’t experienced in many, many days. It spilled over everything I touched. Just a word, a gaze, and I was in heaven. To be happy like this maybe wasn’t so difficult after all. All I had to do was find the source of happiness in me and not rely on others to supply it the next time.

I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Celan Jewish, Oliver Jewish — we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away from such intimacy is galut , the Hebrew word for exile and dispersal. Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.

It never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn’t want to be unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well.

But on that same night I used the heady elation of the moment to speak to Marzia. We danced past midnight, then I walked her back by way of the shore. Then we stopped. I said I was tempted to take a quick swim, expecting she would hold me back. But she said she too loved swimming at night. Our clothes were off in a second. “You’re not with me because you’re angry with Chiara?”

“Why am I angry with Chiara?”

“Because of him.”

I shook my head, feigning a puzzled look meant to show that I couldn’t begin to guess where she’d fished such a notion from.

She asked me to turn around and not stare while she used her sweater to towel her body dry. I pretended to sneak a clandestine glance, but was too obedient not to do as I was told. I didn’t dare ask her not to look when I put my clothes on but was glad she looked the other way. When we were no longer naked, I took her hand and kissed her on the palm, then kissed the space between her fingers, then her mouth. She was slow to kiss me back, but then she didn’t want to stop.

We were to meet at the same spot on the beach the following evening. I’d be there before her, I said.

“Just don’t tell anyone,” she said.

I motioned that my mouth was zipped shut.

“We almost did it,” I told both my father and Oliver the next morning as we were having breakfast.

“And why didn’t you?” asked my father.

“Dunno.”

“Better to have tried and failed…” Oliver was half mocking and half comforting me with that oft-rehashed saw. “All I had to do was find the courage to reach out and touch, she would have said yes,” I said, partly to parry further criticism from either of them but also to show that when it came to self-mockery, I could administer my own dose, thank you very much. I was showing off.

“Try again later,” said Oliver. This was what people who were okay with themselves did. But I could also sense he was onto something and wasn’t coming out with it, perhaps because there was something mildly disquieting behind his fatuous though well-intentioned try again later . He was criticizing me. Or making fun of me. Or seeing through me.

It stung me when he finally came out with it. Only someone who had completely figured me out would have said it. “If not later, when?”

My father liked it. “If not later, when?” It echoed Rabbi Hillel’s famous injunction, “If not now, when?”

Oliver instantly tried to take back his stinging remark. “I’d definitely try again. And again after that,” came the watered-down version. But try again later was the veil he’d drawn over If not later, when?

I repeated his phrase as if it were a prophetic mantra meant to reflect how he lived his life and how I was attempting to live mine. By repeating this mantra that had come straight from his mouth, I might trip on a secret passageway to some nether truth that had hitherto eluded me, about me, about life, about others, about me with others.

Try again later were the last words I’d spoken to myself every night when I’d sworn to do something to bring Oliver closer to me. Try again later meant, I haven’t the courage now. Things weren’t ready just yet. Where I’d find the will and the courage to try again later I didn’t know. But resolving to do something rather than sit passively made me feel that I was already doing something, like reaping a profit on money I hadn’t invested, much less earned yet.

But I also knew that I was circling wagons around my life with try again later s, and that months, seasons, entire years, a lifetime could go by with nothing but Saint Try-again-later stamped on every day. Try again later worked for people like Oliver. If not later, when? was my shibboleth.