by Edmund White
I drank so much wine that I remember the whole evening only as blurred and grotesque. They cavorted intellectually, bantering back and forth tags from Latin and Greek, quoting bits of Cervantes or Rubén Darío, jauntily invoking Roman Jakobson.
I was aching as I saw Sean restored not to health but to an antic gaiety designed to please this chubby guru. They had a bizarre way of calling out, “Ho-ho!” to one another from room to room or even across the same room if one of them was busy brewing coffee or clearing dishes or was trapped into a conversation with boring, stuffy, uninitiated me. “Ho-ho!” they’d call out, and Sean’s eyes sparkled, his vexed gaze at last clarified, his full lips wreathed in a glycerin-bright smile. I wanted to banish Angel, silence Sean, force him to sit still, undress him, make sure that his penis still crooked to the right when erect, that his chest was still Ken-doll smooth and unarticulated, that his tongue was still as fresh and perfumed as a saint’s, miraculously preserved for hundreds of years in a skull turned bomb black. But my desire, always so static and intent on immobilizing the other person, as though I were a tropical female insect, was frustrated that night. Sean used me only as an audience of one, he cast me in the role of an elderly, even rural, relative, before whom he could play out this new romance, so eccentric, so pedantic, so curiously sexual. I sat there sullenly, transfixed by the shuttle of their exchanged glances, smiles, remarks, hoots. Angel touched Sean’s rump, a gesture that evoked a whole chorus of “Ho-ho’s,” as though they were gondoliers approaching each other down adjacent canals in the winter fog. We ate some white rice and black beans, which Sean explained the Puerto Ricans call “Christians and Moors” because of their contrasting colors, although the combination, he added, as given as I to over-elaborated, arthritic conceits, was more a marriage than a conflict since together they turned into the equivalent of a healthy, nourishing protein.
If your vision of love is static, then all you want to do is lie—peaceful but heart racing, ecstatically conscious of that peace—in your lover’s big, tanned hands, hands with guitar-playing calluses and dry, warm, sensitive palms, hands that move ever so slightly, relaxed and taut as an unsounded musical string. You don’t want to hear about metaphor versus metonymy, or La Celestina in comparison with Don Quixote, you don’t want to be jostled from one course to another, the dessert spelling out your imminent departure, the brandy signaling that it’s already past due, or to observe an angelic hand on your lover’s rump or to note that his madness and melancholy have been redefined into an hysteria of Indian love calls.
Now there was nothing holding me in New York. Christa was no longer even my spiritual fiancée and Sean was no longer Sean. In January I would turn thirty and, though I’d written what I thought was an entirely original novel, what was unique was by definition incomparable, off the scale, and might be prized, rejected or ignored according to the world’s whims. I didn’t want to turn into an office drudge. Thirty sounded awfully old for me to be beginning my life.
DURING THE TWO MONTHS before my departure I’d taken private Italian lessons from a young woman freshly arrived in New York from Palermo who’d fallen a bit in love with me. My mannerliness and unavailability made me appear to be both kind and remote, in need and inaccessible, a fatal combination, especially for a lonely girl in a new country. She’d said, as an amorous compliment, that I seemed more European than American. She’d assured me I’d have no trouble communicating with people in Rome, but when I arrived I discovered no one spoke with her accent and no one was willing to let me piece my pauper’s vocabulary together into three-penny sentences. If I should happen to say something vaguely plausible, I then had the problem of a long, laughing, ironic, gesturing reply, entirely incomprehensible. When my interlocutor would see from my stunned expression that I’d understood nothing, he’d walk off with an impertinent, big-city shrug.
I never did learn what some of those gestures meant—the forefinger tugging the cheek down just below the eye, or the slow, appreciative shake of the whole hand, as though casting off drops of water in the wind.
Through a real-estate agent I found an apartment on the Vicolo del Leopardo in Trastevere, a fakely luxurious floor-through on a decidedly popolare street, really just an alleyway that smelled of backed-up sewage. The building itself smelled of a gluey black heating oil, referred to as nafta, pooling ominously on the floor of the entrance hall. The walls of the salone in my apartment were covered with a red and pink cut velvet in patterns of loose, floating, Louis XVI knots. The street-side wall was festooned in purple velvet hangings as though they concealed generous french doors instead of small, dingy windows looking out on lines of laundry that were eternally being fed out across the narrow street. I sat inside and dully strummed the “book furniture,” as decorators refer to volumes bought for their fine bindings alone. All the titles were theological, examples of nineteenth-century casuistry. Like a child I looked in vain for illustrations.
For some reason I was morbidly afraid of offending my neighbors with my “wealth,” although all I had was the seven thousand dollars I’d taken out of profit-sharing, a sum that with careful husbandry might buy me a year of freedom. I was even more fearful of seeming too American, for if Midwestern parents bray and bellow through Europe, bits of straw still clinging to their bib overalls, their neurotic children dress in black, dart like shadows around corners and order again and again the only item on the menu they can pronounce without too strong an accent.
The apartment required a considerable outlay of three months’ rent as a deposit. The agent, Susie, a young Englishwoman with fat lips and sad eyes and a wonderfully cozy, confiding manner, told me she was so pleased I’d rented the flat, since I was her first “success” and without my acquiescence she would have been sacked. The proprietor, an Italian countess, showed us all the “features” of the furnished flat with a hostessy manner while speaking in a strange British English that sounded comically affected. She then went over a maniacally detailed inventory and I was made to understand I would be responsible for every broken whiskey jigger or misplaced olive oil cruet. Susie kept rolling her eyes, embarrassed by the contessa’s pettiness.
A week later Susie was, in fact, let go, and I took her out for a drink in order to celebrate this melancholy rite of passage. She wept on my shoulder and said she was sure she’d find something better. She dabbed at her eyes and smiled her big, lazy smile, which seemed to expect nothing but appreciate everything.
Perhaps because she was “European,” even if English, Susie was more at home here than I. In 1970 Americans were still sure of their superiority to Europeans—if not culturally, then at least in all the ways that counted: economically, hygienically, militarily. I knew that students back home were protesting the American invasion of Cambodia but I wasn’t sure it was “patriotic” to join a manifestazione in front of the American Embassy. I’d never been active politically back home, since as a homosexual I felt certain no leftist group would knowingly accept me.
I couldn’t understand the Italian press and only bought the English-language Roman paper, the Rome Daily American, a Republican rag imbued with the bigotry and optimism of a town booster’s newsletter. It had been started by three American veterans who hadn’t wanted to go home after the war ended. I picked it up once a week when I walked the two or three miles from my apartment in Trastevere to the Spanish Steps, where I collected my mail and cashed a traveler’s check at American Express. I then treated myself to a hamburger at Babington’s tea room while I read my paper.
Everything was a chore, an intimidating chore. I knew no one and except in Babington’s, where all the customers were English spinsters, I didn’t want to eat alone in a restaurant. Too conspicuous. Besides, I didn’t understand what the waiter was reciting when he reeled off the daily specials. I couldn’t go to a neighborhood delicatessen because I didn’t know the names of the various cheeses and cold cuts nor the words for metric quantities and, if I had, I wouldn’t have been sure what they represented in oun
ces and pounds. I did go to the butcher once, armed with a phrase for four hundred grams of hamburger, but I spoke so softly he couldn’t hear me and after the third time he ordered me to speak up I fled, red-faced, into the street, pursued by the cackles of the other customers waiting their turn. At last I discovered a supermarket and a five-and-dime called Standa where I could select items by sight without knowing their names.
Initially, all the men seemed gay, with their silk shirts open to the navel, their gold religious medals buried in chest fur, their blow-dried hair, shiny shoes, tight velvet jackets and pocketless trousers that featured a large mound in front and prominent, soccer-playing buttocks behind. Because their garments left them no space for a wallet or keys, much less for their documenti (the police were always checking everyone’s papers), they carried everything in a small, square necessary dangling from a shoulder strap. As these Guidos would slowly cross a square thronged with people, they’d twirl Maserati keys, though ninety-nine times out of a hundred they didn’t even own a Cinquecento and had just arrived from the suburbs by public bus. When I looked at these men longingly, what only confused me more was that they looked back, smug in my admiration, hostile to the admirer.
The only cruising place I’d heard of was the Colosseum, and on a rainy January night I headed there for the first time. The city appeared empty as I walked toward midnight past the spot-lit churches. When I’d looked at it earlier, my guidebook had explained that every Catholic order had had to build a mother church in Rome, but that many of these orders had died out and accordingly their houses of worship were overgrown with moss, the portals off the hinge, the disaffected altars now just platforms for mice and cats to scamper across. Baroque Rome of grandiose, insincere volutes and illusionistic ceiling paintings was omnipresent, but I kept constantly coming on bits of ancient Rome—an altar to Love, an emperor’s pyramid, the Mouth of Truth, yet another triumphal arch. Wedged between were slivers of the Rome I liked, medieval Rome, exemplified by my favorite church, I Quattro Santi Coronati.
In the rain I was convinced I could smell rotting bones and that all Rome was a cemetery.
I felt that once again I’d been betrayed by the movies. One couldn’t just dance all night with a handsome stranger, throw three coins in the fountain, speed to the shore at dawn in an open car full of an opulent blonde in a tulle gown. No, one couldn’t even speak the language nor order a plate of spaghetti. One was ignored as a poor, unknown, badly dressed foreigner. The Fountain of Trevi, when one finally found it, was an embarrassingly operatic stage set shoe-horned into a run-down little vaudeville house of a square, and at midnight on a Tuesday in January no one was there to see the soot-streaked Tritons emerging out of the pool into the rain except two boys, mudlarks fishing for tourists’ coins.
Cars and sputtering Vespas circled the Colosseum as I attempted to cross the street into the shadowy old building, more a city than a building, more a tall ship than a city, a ship leaning into the watery moon and the racing ermine clouds and with most of the sailors down below in the hold, although two or three were stationed on the upper decks, signaling to one another with glowing cigarettes. A young gypsy crossed my path as I entered the stadium, and I was suddenly grateful I had so little money, just a few thousand lire and my documents. I was also pleased that my trousers had deep pockets.
Whenever I sidled up to someone he fled. I couldn’t tell if he found me undesirable (but what was I in the dark except a slender silhouette of normal height, a man with a face that, if visible, still looked surprisingly young?). Or was he looking for an older man who’d pay him? Or was he—were they all—too horny to leave and too frightened to touch? I longed to touch someone, to have him decide I was desirable, to communicate without these troublesome words intervening, to establish my right to be here by giving a hard-on to just one Roman.
At last I found a young guy drenched in a curious perfume, who revealed, when he cleared his throat, that his voice had never changed, although his sexual organs were of a normal size and shape as I discovered when he pulled me between two columns into—what? The emperor’s box seat?
Afterwards we spoke, each in his halting Italian, and I finally pieced together, from his high-pitched accent, that he was a Romanian refugee waiting to go to the promised land of New Jersey, where he’d been offered a marvelous job as an au pair boy and apprentice butcher with a family he felt certain would be molto simpatica.
I was disappointed that he wasn’t Italian, although I’d initially confused the Italian words for Romanian and Roman and he’d had to clarify the distinction. I was wounded that he was so desultory in making love. As we’d wanked off he’d continued to look around, I feared, for someone better. Now that I’m fat and in my fifties I go to bed only with men I pay or men who love me or fans and all three categories are usually handsome and are ardent or obliging or at least put on a good show, whereas when I was young and handsome myself, I might occasionally awaken a profound, anonymous desire but more often than not I was treated all too casually, as just one more interchangeable insect milling around the entrance to the average hive.
He told me of the one gay bar in town, the Saint James at the top of the Via Veneto, and there I headed the next night. Instead of raucous New Yorkers in jeans swilling beers in a bar with sawdust on the floor and rock and roll in the air, here I found decorous Romans in velvet suits and satin shirts sipping Prosecco from stemware while standing under spotlights or sitting on half-hidden settees and listening to Milva crooning heart-sick ballads. Each drink cost a small fortune and everyone nursed his glass during the entire evening. I started talking to a soldier in uniform. At first he attracted me because I’d made up a fantasy that he was a contadino from Calabria, a “peasant” (the very word makes Americans laugh). But soon enough I learned that if he continued to speak to me in his stilted English he did so because he wanted to practice and indulge in cultural chat at the same time. He was a baronino from Florence whose research into William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience had been tragically interrupted by two and a half years of national service; as he primly explained, unfortunately he’d neglected to enlist in an officers’ training corps at university, more appropriate to his aristocratic status, and now he was, alas, a common soldier. I said I thought a common soldier was sexier, a remark that eluded him and, when he grasped it, miffed him.
Guglielmo was taller than I and six years younger, but thanks to my youthful looks and American Innocence as contrasted to his European Experience, we came out roughly as contemporaries.
“I’m delighted to meet you,” Guglielmo said with his vagrant vowels and odd lilt, as he stared down at me through his tinted glasses, which gave his eyes a sickly, jaundiced look.
“Me, too,” I whispered. “I’ve just been here two weeks but it’s hard—”
“It is what?”
“It’s difficult to start off, to begin, in a new city.”
“Even for me. Also for me?”
“Even.”
“Even for me. I’m from Florence. We call it Firenze. Are you art historian?”
“No.”
“Journalist?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing. I’m nothing. I don’t work. But I’d like to be a novelist—romanziere.”
“You does not work? Millionaire?” There was a hint of playfulness in his question, the first sign that he might really be an aristocrat.
I smiled mysteriously.
Although Guglielmo could speak English, on our subsequent dates he insisted we communicate in Italian, but instead of complimenting me on my little achievements in threading together three or four words, he criticized me for neglecting to use the pluperfect subjunctive; soon my mental nickname for him became Fossero Fui, two of the forms I could never master. His new family name I mentally spelled as Phooey. When we went to bed he took a shower first and sprinkled talcum powder on his feet, then he mounted me as he smiled a beatific smile of Fra Angelico gentleness, a million miles away from the I’m-go
ing-to-fuck-you-until-I-take-out-your-tonsils New York attitude I’d been conditioned to find exciting. He had lots of manie that I considered tiresome probably because I wasn’t in love with him. For instance, he’d decided that he detested newspapers and refused even to read one. He thought that Italians wasted all their time in cafés talking politics and shuffling through several morning and afternoon papers. Like Blake he was an aesthete and a visionary above current events. (But wasn’t Blake a printer? I wondered.) Guglielmo had also made a cult out of promptness, to distinguish himself from all these lazy southern Italians (the south begins at Rome). I felt certain that Blake had not been punctual and could see nothing visionary about so much fussiness. And I thought bitterly that only a son doted on by his family would have had the encouragement necessary to elaborate all these caprices. In my family I’d remained underdeveloped because unnoticed—a neglect, however, I’d come to like, since it permitted me to invent a simple, all-purpose personality.
He wanted to reprimand me for my boorish American manners and teach me the fine points of Italian cultural history, which he tried to make more accessible by drawing analogies with similar moments in William Blake’s life, a personal trajectory I knew no more about than Leopardi’s or Alfieri’s. Two men together search for a style—brothers, best friends, father and son, mother and son, husband and wife, rivals—and one pairing slips over another like those successive lenses at the eye doctor’s that finally bring the smallest and lowest line of print into focus. Guglielmo’s choice was to be a long-suffering father with a lazy and disobedient son who was adorable simply because he was an only child. I thought he’d never have become my lover in New York, but in Rome I didn’t know how to maneuver, I was lonely and no one seemed to like my looks.