The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  With a bit more composure I went down to the taxi rank in the Piazza Barberini. I told the driver to let me off beside the square at Santa Maria in Trastevere; I’d walk the rest of the way home.

  Yet as he was pulling up to our destination he said, “Do you know this woman who’s following us?”

  I said to him, “Here’s a bit of extra money. Could you just wait a moment while I talk to her?”

  He smiled knowingly and suddenly I saw that he thought I was a roguish husband coming to see his Trastevere mistress and Tina was my jealous wife—and I realized that whereas gay life is always aberrant, there’s not a moment of straight life, no matter how bizarre or melodramatic, that isn’t cozily familiar, that can’t be associated with a song lyric or a movie or a poem. Whereas I’d have felt ashamed if my pursuer had been a man, now there was a hint of complicity between the driver and me. Every heterosexual occasion is an institution, every heterosexual sin a source of pride.

  I went directly up to Tina’s car, ducked down and spoke to her through the open window. She was very pale. I said, as a hypnotist might, “You’re tired and you’re going to go home now and we’ll speak in the morning.” She nodded slowly.

  I crossed the square, which was dim and deserted in the midnight rain. The square was closed to cars but I kept expecting to hear Tina’s Cinquecento gunning its motors as she came crashing down on me. By walking confidently away from her I felt like a torero who turns his back on a bull, stunned but angry.

  My mother, who was working in Germany, came to Rome to spend a weekend with me. When she left I bought a big bottle of Chianti and drank it all alone until I passed out. Around three in the morning I was awakened by the smell of what seemed to be burning tar. (In fact it was the nafta heating oil that had been pooling for weeks in the entryway on the floor.) I thought I didn’t care if I burned alive, I still needed a cigarette. I lit up and groggily got dressed. I wondered if Tina had set fire to my building.

  Then I did exactly the wrong thing. I threw open the front door and was knocked back by the billowing black smoke. I ran to the windows that gave onto the street and opened them, thereby creating a draft. Soon the whole apartment was so full of thick, smelly smoke that I couldn’t even see the lights I’d turned on. The alleyway was full of noise and whirring lights. A ladder was extended up to my window and a fireman with a smoke-blackened face and brilliant blue eyes beneath a silver helmet came rushing up, smiling.

  “Non posso,” I said. I can’t. I’m afraid. “Ho paura.”

  “Sì, sì,” he assured me. And he promised he’d be right behind me as we descended, an offer not to be refused. I remembered how as an adolescent I’d walked along the top of a high wall to please Tommy, despite my vertigo. The fireman, small but bristling with bravura, talked me down the ladder, step by step, his voice low and fatherly. Once I was down he rushed back up the ladder to put out the fire but slapped his forehead when he reached the top because he’d forgotten the hose.

  Everyone had a good laugh, as though to say, “That’s an Italian for you—everything is theater.” There was a crowd in the street who treated me with sympathy and I was so glad to be accepted at last by my neighbours, even if as a victim, that I scarcely regretted that all my belongings were burned or covered with tar. A woman from down the street gave me a glass of warm milk, the best cure, she swore, against swallowed smoke.

  For some strange reason my tall blond Venetian waiter appeared out of nowhere; why he’d been on his way to visit me at five in the morning I’ll never know. Someone called the countess, my landlady. I thought of the inventory she’d made me sign, the list of every item down to the last egg cup. When she arrived she was in a state of shock to see her whole apartment—new flocked wallpaper, heavy velvet drapes and ecclesiastical library—covered with an inch of tar. My waiter, whom I’d considered so distinguished till now, tried to speak to her, but he was obviously out of his depth and just talked in a falsely elegant circle. His hollow voice now sounded pretentious, his choice of words meaningless, his manner by turns insolent and humble.

  “Is this your friend?” she asked with a condescending smile and quite genuine curiosity.

  “He’s a friend,” I said sheepishly, which scarcely explained what he was doing here before dawn.

  The fire, in fact, was my salvation. Susie, my English real-estate agent, took me in for a couple of days until she found me a roommate, Thomas, who lived near the Pantheon. When the contessa refused to return my security deposit, the equivalent of three months’ rent, Tina found me a tough woman lawyer who made her pay up the very next day. At last I could make something happen here in Rome.

  I returned to my old apartment to see if anything could be salvaged. It was like visiting Pompeii if one were a Pompeiian. In the bedroom I found a very young workman in a blue uniform who was scrubbing down the walls. He told me his name was Decimo. He seemed worried that his boss (il mio principale) would come back and catch him idling. I stood uncomfortably close to him, smiling into his handsome young face, feeling the crazy confidence that desire sometimes conferred on me. Perhaps this all-black version of my once red and purple apartment excited me, or perhaps the smell of coal smoke awakened in me memories of melancholy Chicago winters, memories that were horny because they brought back a sharp recollection of loneliness, a lack, an emptiness I wanted to fill as soon as possible.

  I reached out and touched his erection under his uniform, which was the sort of single garment that zips down the front. I pulled his zipper down. He had nothing on underneath except a hard-on. He murmured something again about his principale but I pulled back the bedclothes. Where the sheet had been exposed it was pitch black, but where it had been covered it was startlingly white and I pushed him gently back onto that pure surface as I knelt between his legs. I could barely fit it all into my mouth, so thick was it, so rigid and smelly with youth. He exploded with anxious alacrity and I swallowed it all down like a cat licking its bowl clean.

  The next day, when I told Lucrezia about the fire and my subsequent visit to the scene of the crime, she was convinced I must be lying about my sexual encounter, except as proof to the contrary there were two bits of evidence that seemed incontrovertible, more to her than to me—the fact he was called “Decimo,” the “tenth” child in a huge peasant family, usually the name of someone from the South; and the fact he called his boss principale, an elegant working-class word substituted for the more casual capo.

  That she was so shocked proved to me what a gulf separated us, woman and man, straight and gay, Italian and American. I suppose if I’d been Italian I wouldn’t have told her. Or if I hadn’t been a student with a language tutor in search of a topic I might not have brought back these curious vocabulary items. Or perhaps I quite simply wanted to give Lucrezia proof that I really was a faggot, evidence she could pass on to the still brooding and unconvinced Tina.

  THOMAS, the roommate Susie had found for me, had a sunny three-room apartment and terrace. From the kitchen window I could look out at a pure white marble horse, four times life size, on a tiered wedding cake, the Monument to Victor Emmanuel. In reality it was one of four horses pulling a chariot in which a goddess stood upright, but from our window only this single horse was visible. Seen as an entity from the Piazza di Venezia, the monument was no doubt frightful kitsch, but this single horse, poised against the blue sky and racing clouds, struck me as the very image of romantic audacity.

  On the terrace a fountain ran night and day, although sometimes the flow was so copious and forceful it spilled over onto the flagstones and a neighborhood cat would tiptoe through the water, shaking its paw as it lifted each leg like a dancer doing a tentative battement. Most of the dirty cats belonged to no one and jumped from terrace to terrace; they made me think of skinny, dirty burglars, their faces pointy and triangular from hunger. They were not the sleek, haughty pets I’d known in America, who sniffed at their food with a disdain bordering on impertinence. No, if I put some uneaten spaghetti (e
ven cold, gummy, meatless spaghetti) in a bowl on the terrace, no sooner did I pass through the doorway than a grey, smoky swirl of cats coalesced out of nowhere and began prowling at my feet, weaving rapid figure eights, growling menacingly and hissing at one another, like pressure cookers releasing steam. I’d have to put the food down and pull back in a flash or else my hand was in danger; a shriek, a slashing claw, a leap in the air, glinting teeth, convulsive necks—and it was all over, the plate licked clean, and a moment later the whole team of robbers was bounding away across the rooftops, each pair of skinny, lusterless flanks mobile as two fingers playing a trill.

  I had joined a gym, the Roma, near the Piazza Barberini, and went three times a week to lift weights and take an exercise class. At regular intervals the professore would stop our workout and spray the air with a perfume atomizer. No one wore the smelly, ratty clothes I’d grown used to at the Sheridan Square Gym in the Village, nor did Italians prize the “good, clean smell of sweat,” as we Americans had put it, always linking the words together. I can remember that the Italian word for “jumping jack” was farfalla, “butterfly.” (I can just hear the jeers of the Village jocks.) I grew used to the idea of washing my newly acquired designer gym clothes after each use. Shorts were frowned on, as though they were less hygienic than long pants.

  But now I wondered if my pumped-up body wasn’t what scared off Roman gay men. Thomas had a skinny Sardinian lover who looked at me in a T-shirt and jeans and said, “Povero ragazzo, è doppio corpato.” (“Poor guy, he’s double-bodied.”) Embarrassed, Thomas later explained to me that Italians were still so close to the soil and just a generation away from poverty, that they perceived a big body as a shameful sign of peasant origins and physical toil; city dwellers had to be stylishly slim. “Anyway,” Thomas said, “Emilio is a bit jealous of you since you moved in.”

  Thomas and I slept in twin beds in the bedroom separated by an aisle, although he often fell asleep on the couch in the living room. I never saw him naked at first. He seldom changed his Jockey shorts, which were stained yellow across the Y-front from piss. He was my age, but his life had been entirely different. His father was a baron from Bukovina, his mother an American from Virginia. He’d been raised and educated in South Africa and had given the valedictory address for his graduating class, but now, just twelve years later, he could scarcely remember a word of Afrikäans. He enjoyed speaking English, which he spoke with an unexceptionable American accent except that his o was too resonant, too rounded and too far back in the throat. But though he sounded like any other American, thanks to his mother, his English vocabulary was very sketchy. He’d say, “Put my shirt on the, you know, on the place where we eat.”

  “The table?”

  “Yeah. Table. Tavola.”

  From him I learned how to take a bus, how to make a lunch out of tiny, crustless sandwiches (tramezzini), how to conceal one’s groceries in a suitcase (since a man out shopping for food was considered a disgrace), how to repress my big goofy American smile and regard everything with a certain disdain or sprezzatura.

  I was fascinated by his survival skills. He had just one good jacket, close fitting, cut out of black velvet, which he was constantly brushing. His hair was wavy and reddish blond and he combed it straight back to emphasize his widow’s peak. His teeth were large and yellow and when he smiled he resembled an old, friendly dog that comes padding up to you, trusting, limping slightly, expecting to be petted and babied. Except there was also something crafty and observing in his eye. With his big relaxed smile and tight, scheming eyes he gave the impression of someone basically kind, even downtrodden, who’d had to maneuver cunningly in a hostile world of poor, handsome young men on the lookout for a free meal or ten thousand lire.

  He was an extra in the movies, he said, but I never saw him go for an audition or a day’s shoot. He had plenty of stories to tell about the cinema, however, and his dog, a cross between a beagle and a mutt, he’d found on the set of The Battle of Anzio, and he’d named her Anzio, not only after the city but after the word for “anxiety.” He’d awaken at nine or ten, be dressed and coiffed and brushed-down if not exactly bathed by eleven and then he’d descend the four flights with Anzio and me clattering along behind him. He’d walk, erect and proud, his Titian-blond hair resplendent where it crested over his black velvet collar, with Anzio straining at the leash. Old Italian men would stop him and ask if Anzio was an English hunting dog and instead of saying with an ironic smile, “No, she’s just a mutt,” Thomas would go into a long, serious and entirely fabricated explanation of her genealogy, which amounted to an invitation to a discussion of past dogs the stranger had known and his long-lost hunting days in the Abruzzi. Only after several such encounters would we finally arrive at a bar where we’d order (and I’d pay for) tall glasses of caffelatte and three cornetti, one each for Thomas and me and one for Anzio, who’d wait for it with a humble, pleading look on her pretty face with its moist, black nose and liquid eyes all black iris and brown pupil, devoid of whites; she’d swallow it in one bite and then, nonchalantly, fastidiously, lie down on the mosaic floor and lick her chops once before balancing her chin on her outstretched paw.

  Slowly I saw that his day was made up of promenading his dog, window shopping, drinking a cheap grappa in the Piazza Navona, banging the piano, debating politics back home with unemployed friends who dropped by and smoked the cheap national brand of cigarettes, MS, listening to absurdly passionate pop songs sung by hoarse-voiced guys, songs that sounded shockingly out-dated to my trendy American ears but that I quickly came to adore because they expressed the vein-bursting adolescent male love that I longed to be the object of. Thomas and I went to the apartment of one of his friends who owned a television in order to watch the San Remo Festival, a pop song contest that seemed at once innocent and vulgar, the lyrics so unabashedly sentimental, inevitably ending on a wailed “Piangerò” (“I’ll weep”), whereas the women’s dresses (and hair!) struck me as more suitable to prostitutes than to entertainers, admittedly a fine distinction in that part of the world.

  Tina came up to inspect Thomas and the apartment. She liked the terrace with its big stone planters and its endlessly flowing fountain, which a neighbor lady had told me was fed by an ancient Roman aqueduct. “Almeno” she said, “at least no one pays for it and sometimes the water is a flood, all very mysterious, unless it’s the snow melting far away in the mountains.”

  Tina told me that Thomas was a leech who’d suck all my blood from my veins and then cast me aside. “You don’t know these boys, so charming and smiling, but lazy, they never work, they prefer sucking the blood of innocent Americans. I don’t think he’s even homosexual. He just wants to excite you. Pay attention!” With her forefinger she pulled her cheek down below her eye. “I’m sure he’s not homosexual. He was looking at me like all these neighborhood Romeos do.”

  Tina must have liked the simplicity of the apartment—the plain, rug-less red tile floor, the battered straight-back wood chairs, the table with its blue-and-white checked oilcloth cover, the sagging old couch, the witless bullfight posters. The only luxury was an upright piano and the only expense I ever saw Thomas go to was hiring a piano tuner who spent four hours inspecting his invalid, for he was like a doctor listening to respiration and pulses, palpating organs, inspecting cavities and hammering out reflexes.

  And to what avail? Thomas simply banged out big chords relentlessly, leaned with his elbows and forearms on half the keyboard at a time and played a noisy “Chopsticks” designed to remind the neighbors that the piano is a percussive instrument. I never met a homosexual who was so violent, so indifferent to nuance, so majestically sure of himself. No wonder Tina had her doubts about him.

  Nor any foreigner who’d so thoroughly Italianized himself. Living internationally as an expatriate invariably promotes a double vision, a queasy sense of the arbitrariness of all conventions, and makes one wince at the vulgarity of one’s compatriots and mock the humorless provinciality of one’s h
osts. Thomas, uniquely, had forgotten his past, nearly even forgotten his first languages (German, Afrikäans and English) and had embraced everything Roman with a big sweaty hug. He spoke with the falling querulousness and mushy consonants of a fruit vendor on the Campo dei Fiori. He followed the soccer scores with the gimlet-eyed fanaticism of those paunchy tifosi whose only connection to sports is in the decibel level of their jubilation or anger.

  He could start out lying, oh, about anything at all, his eyes squirming with inventions, and within five minutes he’d be staring at me, self-hypnotized and round-eyed with conviction. He’d lounge around the apartment in his stained underwear and a formerly white T-shirt, his hair on end, but by the time he went out he was impeccable, even imperious, and at the café he’d toss back his thimble-full of sugared black coffee with the requisite briskness, rather than nursing it with the mild-eyed panda-bear innocence and unfocused amiability of American tourists.

  He’d talk politics for hours with the same passion if a bit more nuance than he’d devote to soccer squabbles. Like other Italians he saw conspiracies everywhere and dismissed everyone who disagreed with him as corrupted by the Mafia or the Americans—or as even more shamefully simpleminded. I paid no attention to Italian politics and dismissed the whole activity as opera buffa but Thomas shouted at me, red-faced, a vein popping out of his forehead, “Italy is the battleground. As Italy goes, so goes the West.” I was never sure what he meant, but I suppose he was referring to the battle between Communism and Capitalism. Like other political cognoscenti he was so fascinated by lawmakers jockeying for position, by signs of secret deals, by evidence of shifting alliances, that he never came right out and said what he was for or against. Was he a Communist? I never found out (and perhaps he never knew); he preferred to pooh-pooh other people’s gullibility and unmask Byzantine scheming than to state clearly what cause he espoused.