André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

That night, yet again, an answer did come, though it came in a dream that was itself a dream within a dream. I awoke with an image that told me more than I wanted to know, as though, despite all of my frank admissions to myself about what I wanted from him, and how I’d want it, there were still a few corners I’d avoided. In this dream I finally learned what my body must have known from the very first day. We were in his room, and, contrary to all my fantasies, it was not I who had my back on the bed, but Oliver; I was on top of him, watching, on his face, an expression at once so flushed, so readily acquiescent, that even in my sleep it tore every emotion out of me and told me one thing I could never have known or guessed so far: that not to give what I was dying to give him at whatever price was perhaps the greatest crime I might ever commit in my life. I desperately wanted to give him something. By contrast, taking seemed so bland, so facile, so mechanical. And then I heard it, as I knew by now I would. “You’ll kill me if you stop,” he was gasping, conscious that he’d already spoken these selfsame words to me a few nights before in another dream but that, having said them once, he was also free to repeat them whenever he came into my dreams, even though neither of us seemed to know whether it was his voice that was breaking from inside me or whether my memory of these very words was exploding in him. His face, which seemed both to endure my passion and by doing so to abet it, gave me an image of kindness and fire I had never seen and could never have imagined on anyone’s face before. This very image of him would become like a night-light in my life, keeping vigil on those days when I’d all but given up, rekindling my desire for him when I wanted it dead, stoking the embers of courage when I feared a snub might dispel every semblance of pride. The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag.

These words made me long for things and try things I would never have thought myself capable of.

Regardless of how much he wished to have nothing to do with me, regardless of those he’d befriended and was surely sleeping with each night, anyone who’d revealed his entire humanity to me while lying naked under me, even in my dream, could not be any different in real life. This was who he truly was; the rest was incidental.

No: he was also the other man, the one in the red bathing suit.

It was just that I couldn’t allow myself to hope I’d ever see him wearing no bathing suit at all.

If on our second morning after the piazzetta I found the courage to insist on going to town with him though it was obvious he didn’t even want to speak with me, it was only because as I looked at him and saw him mouthing the words he had just written on his yellow pad, I kept remembering his other, pleading words: “You’ll kill me if you stop.” When I offered him the book in the bookstore, and later even insisted on being the one to pay for our ice cream because buying an ice cream also meant walking our bikes through the narrow, shaded lanes of B. and therefore being together awhile longer, it was also to thank him for giving me “You’ll kill me if you stop.” Even when I ribbed him and promised to make no speeches, it was because I was secretly cradling “You’ll kill me if you stop”—far more precious now than any other admission from him. That morning, I’d written it down in my diary but omitted to say I had dreamt it. I wanted to come back years later and believe, if only for a moment, that he had truly spoken these pleading words to me. What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

As we sped downhill past my spot, past the olive groves and the sunflowers that turned their startled faces to us as we glided past the marine pines, past the two old train cars that had lost their wheels generations ago but still bore the royal insignia of the House of Savoy, past the string of gypsy vendors screaming murder at us for almost grazing their daughters with our bikes, I turned to him and yelled, “Kill me if I stop.”

I had said it to put his words in my mouth, to savor them awhile longer before squirreling them back in my hideaway, the way shepherds take their sheep out uphill when it’s warm but rush them back indoors when the weather cools. By shouting his words I was fleshing them out and giving them longer life, as though they had a life of their own now, a longer and louder life that no one could govern, like the life of echoes once they’ve bounced off the cliffs of B. and gone to dive by the distant shoals where Shelley’s boat slammed into the squall. I was returning to Oliver what was his, giving him back his words with the implicit wish that he repeat them back to me again, as in my dream, because now it was his turn to say them.

At lunch, not a word. After lunch he sat in the shade in the garden doing, as he announced before coffee, two days’ work. No, he wasn’t going to town tonight. Maybe tomorrow. No poker either. Then he went upstairs.

A few days ago his foot was on mine. Now, not even a glance.

Around dinner, he came back down for a drink. “I’ll miss all this, Mrs. P.,” he said, his hair glistening after his late-afternoon shower, the “star” look beaming all over his features. My mother smiled; la muvi star was welcome ennnnni taim. Then he took the usual short walk with Vimini to help her look for her pet chameleon. I never quite understood what the two of them saw in each other, but it felt far more natural and spontaneous than anything he and I shared. Half an hour later, they were back. Vimini had scaled a fig tree and was told by her mother to go wash before dinner.

At dinner not a word. After dinner he disappeared upstairs.

I could have sworn that sometime around ten or so he’d make a quiet getaway and head to town. But I could see the light drifting from his end of the balcony. It cast a faint, oblique orange band toward the landing by my door. From time to time, I heard him moving.

I decided to call a friend to ask if he was headed to town. His mother replied that he’d already left, and yes, had probably gone to the same place as well. I called another. He too had already left. My father said, “Why don’t you call Marzia? Are you avoiding her?” Not avoiding — but she seemed full of complications. “As if you aren’t!” he added. When I called she said she wasn’t going anywhere tonight. There was a dusky chill in her voice. I was calling to apologize. “I heard you were sick.” It was nothing, I replied. I could come and pick her up by bike, and together we’d ride to B. She said she’d join me.

My parents were watching TV when I walked out of the house. I could hear my steps on the gravel. I didn’t mind the noise. It kept me company. He’d hear it too, I thought.

Marzia met me in her garden. She was seated on an old, wrought-iron chair, her legs extended in front of her, with just her heels touching the ground. Her bike was leaning against another chair, its handlebar almost touching the ground. She was wearing a sweater. You made me wait a lot, she said. We left her house via a shortcut that was steeper but that brought us to town in no time. The light and the sound of bustling nightlife from the piazzetta were brimming over into the side alleys. One of the restaurants was in the habit of taking out tiny wooden tables and putting them on the sidewalk whenever its clientele overflowed the allotted space on the square. When we entered the piazza the bustle and commotion filled me with the usual sense of anxiety and inadequacy. Marzia would run into friends, others were bound to tease. Even being with her would challenge me in one way or another. I didn’t want to be challenged.