André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

I remembered the emptied closet and the packed suitcase next to his bed. Soon I’d sleep in Oliver’s room. I’d sleep with his shirt, lie with it next to me, wear it in my sleep.

After the reading, more applause, more conviviality, more drinks. Soon it was time to close the store. I remembered Marzia when the bookstore in B. was closing. How far, how different. How thoroughly unreal she’d become.

Someone said we should all head out to dinner together. There were about thirty of us. Someone else suggested a restaurant on Lake Albano. A restaurant overlooking a starlit night sprang to my imagination like something out of an illuminated manuscript from the late Middle Ages. No, too far, someone said. Yes, but the lights on the lake at night…The lights on the lake at night will have to wait for another time. Why not somewhere on via Cassia? Yes, but that didn’t solve the problem of the cars: there weren’t enough of them. Sure there were enough cars. And if we had to sit on top of each other for a little while, would anyone mind? Of course not. Especially if I get to sit in between these two beauties. Yes, but what if Falstaff were to sit on the beauties?

There were only five cars, and all were parked in different tiny side alleys not far from the bookstore. Because we could not depart en masse, we were to reconvene somewhere by Ponte Milvio. From there up via Cassia to the trattoria whose precise whereabouts someone, but no one else, knew.

We arrived more than forty-five minutes later — less than the time needed to reach distant Albano, where the lights on the lake at night…The place was a large al fresco trattoria with checkered tablecloths and mosquito candles spread out sparely among the diners. By now it must have been eleven o’clock. The air was still very damp. You could see it on our faces, and on our clothes, we looked limp and soggy. Even the tablecloths felt limp and soggy. But the restaurant was on a hill and occasionally a breathless draft would sough through the trees, signifying that tomorrow it would rain again but that the mugginess would remain unchanged.

The waitress, a woman nearing her sixties, made a quick count of how many we were and asked the help to set the tables in a double-sided horseshoe, which was instantly done. Then she told us what we were going to eat and drink. Thank God we don’t have to decide, because with him deciding what to eat — said the poet’s wife — we’d be here for another hour and by then they’d be out of food in the kitchen. She ran down a long list of antipasti, which materialized no sooner than invoked, followed by bread, wine, mineral water, frizzante and naturale . Simple fare, she explained. Simple is what we want, echoed the publisher. “This year, we’re in the red again.”

Once again a toast to the poet. To the publisher. To the store owner. To the wife, the daughters, who else?

Laughter and good fellowship. Ada made a small improvised speech — well, not so improvised, she conceded. Falstaff and Toucan admitted having had a hand in it.

The tortellini in cream sauce arrived more than half an hour later. By then I had decided not to drink wine because the two scotch whiskeys gulped down in a rush were only now starting to have their full effect. The three sisters were sitting between us and everyone on our bench was sitting pressed together. Heaven.

Second course much later: Pot roast, peas. Salad.

Then cheeses.

One thing led to another, and we began speaking of Bangkok. “Everyone is beautiful, but beautiful in an exceptionally hybrid, crossbred manner, which is why I wanted to go there,” said the poet. “They’re not Asiatic, not Caucasian, and Eurasian is too simple a term. They’re exotic in the purest sense of the word, and yet not alien. We instantly recognize them though we’ve never seen them before, and have no words either for what they stir in us or for what they seem to want from us.

“At first I thought that they thought differently. Then I realized they felt things differently. Then that they were unspeakably sweet, sweet as you can’t imagine anyone being sweet here. Oh, we can be kind and we can be caring and we can be very, very warm in our sunny, passionate Mediterranean way, but they were sweet, selflessly sweet, sweet in their hearts, sweet in their bodies, sweet without a touch of sorrow or malice, sweet like children, without irony or shame. I was ashamed of what I felt for them. This could be paradise, just as I’d fantasized. The twenty-four-year-old night clerk of my rinky-dink hotel, who’s wearing a visorless cap and has seen all types come and go, stares and I stare back. His features are a girl’s. But he looks like a girl who looks like a boy. The girl at the American Express desk stares and I stare back. She looks like a boy who looks like a girl and who’s therefore just a boy. The younger ones, men and women, always giggle when I give them the look. Even the girl at the consulate who speaks fluent Milanese, and the undergraduates who wait at the same hour of each and every morning for the same bus to pick us up, stare at me and I stare back — does all this staring add up to what I think it means, because, like it or not, when it comes to the senses all humans speak the same beastly tongue.”

A second round of grappa and sambuca.

“I wanted to sleep with all of Thailand. And all of Thailand, it turns out, was flirting with me. You couldn’t take a step without almost lurching into someone.”

“Here, take a sip of this grappa and tell me it’s not the work of a witch,” interrupted the bookstore owner. The poet allowed the waiter to pour another glass. This time he sipped it slowly. Falstaff downed it in one gulp. Straordinario-fantastico growled it down her gullet. Oliver smacked his lips. The poet said it made you young again. “I like grappa at night, it reinvigorates me. But you”—he was looking to me now—“wouldn’t understand. At your age, God knows, invigoration is the last thing you need.”

He watched me down part of the glass. “Do you feel it?”

“Feel what?” I asked.

“The invigoration.”

I swilled the drink again. “Not really.”

“Not really,” he repeated with a puzzled, disappointed look.

“That’s because, at his age, it’s already there, the invigoration,” added Lucia.

“True,” said someone, “your ‘invigoration’ works only on those who no longer have it.”

The poet: “Invigoration is not hard to come by in Bangkok. One warm night in my hotel room I thought I would go out of my mind. It was either loneliness, or the sounds of people outside, or the work of the devil. But this is when I began to think of San Clemente. It came to me like an undefined, nebulous feeling, part arousal, part homesickness, part metaphor. You travel to a place because you have this picture of it and you want to couple with the whole country. Then you find that you and its natives haven’t a thing in common. You don’t understand the basic signals which you’d always assumed all humanity shared. You decide it was all a mistake, that it was all in your head. Then you dig a bit deeper and you find that, despite your reasonable suspicions, you still desire them all, but you don’t know what it is exactly you want from them, or what they seem to want from you, because they too, it turns out, are all looking at you with what could only be one thing on their mind. But you tell yourself you’re imagining things. And you’re ready to pack up and go back to Rome because all of these touch-and-go signals are driving you mad. But then something suddenly clicks, like a secret underground passageway, and you realize that, just like you, they are desperate and aching for you as well. And the worst thing is that, with all your experience and your sense of irony and your ability to overcome shyness wherever it threatens to crop up, you feel totally stranded. I didn’t know their language, didn’t know the language of their hearts, didn’t even know my own. I saw veils everywhere: what I wanted, what I didn’t know I wanted, what I didn’t want to know I wanted, what I’d always known I wanted. This is either a miracle. Or it is hell.