The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  It struck me as odd that someone could care so intensely about Italian factionalism, someone who was an African-raised Romanian-American, much less a homosexual who, in my eyes at least, would always be disenfranchised by every party, a pariah even among outcasts. “Not so!” Thomas shouted as he explained to me about FUORI, an acronym that meant “outside” and that stood for a coalition of prostitutes, gays, anarchists, ecologists and other “marginals” who’d already elected a senator. I laughed out loud, since compromising with such a band of thieves seemed far less desirable to me than total isolation, our natural state and a splendid one (Lucifer is alone by definition). In any event, unlike me, Thomas saw himself as “bisexual,” although he never spoke of women and seemed to know only one or two; yet certainly he was nothing so disgraceful as a frocio.

  THAT SPRING I drank so much bad white wine that I became bloated and was always tired. Thomas, Anzio and I would eat our pasta and on special days a bit of veal and peas as well, always at the same restaurant, which was across from the Pantheon. If we had cherries or peaches as dessert, the lugubrious waiter would carry the stones on a plate to the majestic cashier, enthroned behind her old bronze cash register, and she’d count these juicy remains to figure out how much we owed her. Once when it was my birthday we celebrated with an extra course and ice cream as well as fruit. When the bill was presented Thomas took violent exception to it. It was much too high.

  There was never a question of challenging the addition, which was impeccable, or the prices, clearly marked on the menu. No, Thomas argued that since we were regular clients and our father was ill at home and all our money went to support him, such robbery was inhuman and even bordered on the illegal. The proprietor descended from her throne and replied that she had a sister at home who was an invalid as well, that taxes were rising and that the rent had shot up so high that soon she’d have to close her doors. Thomas responded with more heart-rending details about our poverty and the tragedies besetting our relatives one after another. He was so convincing that I studied him with genuine sympathy until I remembered his sad story was also supposed to be mine and I hung my head with aching sorrow. Finally the owner of the restaurant drew a vigorous line through our bill and gave us a twenty-percent sconto, which I paid as Thomas shook the hands of the waiter and his boss, a big doggy smile on his lips as he looked shyly around through his shaggy blond eyebrows.

  The first few weeks I lived with him, I had one bad surprise after another—the electricity was turned off, then the phone, then we were served an eviction notice. I paid the six months’ overdue back rent, which was still cheaper than a single month’s rent for my Trastevere tart’s flat. And I paid the phone bill, especially since in those days the waiting list for a new phone was so backed up it could take a full year before a new line could be installed. Thomas had inherited this number from the former tenants, who’d been Communists, which explained why our line was tapped. The tapping equipment was so crude that the moment an eavesdropper joined us the volume dropped and the line sizzled like a frying pan. Thomas wouldn’t let me pay the electricity bill; he was convinced he could get it turned back on by invoking our invalid father, stumbling in the dark, housebound but deprived of his radio, no electric blanket in an unheated apartment to ward off a fatal chill. I went with him to the government office where he made his plea. He succeeded in having the service reinstalled, although never for a moment, I’m sure, did the office clerk who heard him out believe his story. No, Thomas was simply being rewarded for his fine performance. Now, of course, everyone’s mani are pulite in Italy and those bravura arias are no longer heard in public places. In fact all this talk about corruption is just the noise generated by the switch from the old feudal baksheesh system to a rational and impersonal Northern European capitalist system.

  I didn’t mind paying the bills. As the weather became warmer we ate outside at the Piazza Navona or in a square looking across toward the Palazzo Farnese or, around the corner, in a restaurant called La Quercia, which was also the name of the huge tree shading the small square. I’d pick up the check, even when our group grew to include six, eight or ten of Thomas’s friends.

  In June Italy’s soccer team beat Brazil in the Coppa Mondiale. As soon as this victory was announced all Rome went wild. Thomas said that Italians became so excited after a major soccer victory that they could be easily seduced and we should head up to the Via Veneto right away.

  On the street all the cars were honking and kids were poking their heads out of the open vents in car roofs and unfurling Italian flags, which streamed and fluttered behind their ecstatic faces. The swerving yellow and white headlights lit the flags from many angles. Usually the streets were so deserted after nightfall, the palazzi so hermetically shuttered, that the city seemed abandoned to its cats and a few night watchmen, who left chalk marks behind on doors to show they’d passed by on their inspection route. But tonight the gloomy buildings—with their massive sooty stones on ground level gouged in “wormlike” patterns or left rough and rusticated—came alive with noise and light. Shutters flew open and revealed behind these majestic Renaissance façades the poverty of apartments lit by a single dangling bulb. Thomas said, “And they live on nothing but spaghettis and they eat them without sauce” (he was so Italianized that even when he wanted to invent an English plural for pasta he habitually added an s, since he could never imagine that spaghetti could be a collective singular in English).

  His prediction that we’d find a willing tifoso was spot-on. We were walking up the slow bend after the Piazza Barberini that marks the beginning of the Via Veneto when a kid all on his own, overflowing with joy, walked between us, put his hands on our shoulders and cantilevered his body up in the air. He swung like the clapper of a bell and made about as much noise.

  Thomas, usually so discreet, even haughty, in public during his daily sorties with Anzio, suddenly asked, with stunning simplicity, if he’d like to come home with us to make love. The young man turned somber, which I thought meant he was going to say no, but in fact he was just coming to terms with our offer. “I’ve never tried homosexuality but I accept your invitation,” he said at last. Perhaps he was most astonished that we had a place to go to, since unmarried men in Italy at that time were forced to live at home. Only foreign bachelors possessed their own apartments.

  Enea, as he was named (Aeneas, I realized with a start, as I glanced at him again, hoping to discern something classical in his face) was a student of what I made out to be hydraulic engineering and he came from Lucca. The Romans he considered to be, one and all, “turds” (stronzi) because all they thought of was making money and showing off. “And they’re all lazy, they never work; either they’re making a new strike or picking their noses and taking a four-hour siesta.” Enea was amused by my American accent and my plucky if hopeless attempts to communicate; he assured me that he liked Mickey Mouse and hamburgers. I might have said something cutting if I’d known how to or if he’d been less sexy.

  He had red cheeks like taffy apples under a flawless permanent tan, very red lips, one clean white canine on the right side that overlapped another tooth and left a little gap, not at all hickish but rather disconcerting, so at odds was it with his quiet good manners and dignified if thrilling smiles. Perhaps because of the gap, the adjoining teeth were always sparkling with saliva as though a celebrity photographer had added highlights. He had a small, pale Adam’s apple raised like a knobby dial to regulate the volume of his husky tenor voice. When his face was immobile it took on a stern condottiere’s expression, cold and disabused beyond his years, as though a boy, after fighting in his first battle, were to lift his visor. I forgot to mention he was tiny.

  When we got home Thomas went into the bathroom for a second. In that same instant Enea was naked and I, still half-dressed, reached down to touch the hard little urgency he was presenting me out of a bush of black, glossy hair strangely pornographic because it was such a neat little plantation in an otherwise creamy-white body: f
lat tummy, hard loins, an ass as hard and round as a soccer ball. He exploded in my hand after a single thrust. I wiped the copious semen on one of Thomas’s dirty T-shirts I found under a chair. I worried about what Thomas would do or say. Enea, perfectly composed or if embarrassed determined not to show it, put on his underpants and said, “Insomma, era un po’ banale” (“It wasn’t all that exciting after all”).

  Thomas, red and peeled and naked as the devil, figured out right away what had happened. He put on his grey plaid robe and poured us all a glass of white wine.

  “Adesso,” Enea said primly, “cominciamo il dialogo.”

  “What’d he say?” I asked Thomas.

  “He said we must begin the dialogue now.”

  “What dialogue, the little wanker!” I wailed.

  “A, you know, discussion about homosexuality and what it means. Now that we’ve had sex—”

  “You mean he’s had—”

  “Anyway,” Thomas interrupted, generously brushing aside my nasty precision, “he feels he’s at least earned the right to a discussion—”

  “—Marxist, no doubt,” I grumbled. “Anyway, I’m bushed. I’m going to bed.”

  I shook Enea’s hand rather stiffly; he looked shocked by my rudeness.

  Once I was in bed I could hear their voices through the closed door rumbling on and on, punctuated by all those rhetorical markers that are always more noticeable in a language other than one’s own and that in any case are strikingly efficient in Italian. “Anzi,” Thomas kept crying, which means “On the contrary.” “Cioè,” they’d both interject (“That is to say”) by way of piling up new explanations. “Dai!” Thomas would shout murderously, a word that means no more than “Get off it!” “Dunque,” Enea would say from time to time, a word that may signify “therefore,” but which Italians use to suggest a verbal sponging down of the blackboard and a vain aspiration toward order. “Magari,” each of them would mumble after any hopeful remark, to mean “Would that it might be so,” much as an Arab might say “Inshallah.” Lucrezia would be proud of my knack at making sense of it all, just as sleep overcame me and nothing made sense any more.

  ———

  ONE DAY as I was waiting on a street corner a block from the Fountain of Trevi, three soldiers started chatting me up. They were bersaglieri, Garibaldi’s crack troops, and they wore feathers in their caps. Thomas had told me that a soldier received only three feathers with his kit and if he had more that meant he’d paid for the extra plumage and might be worth pursuing. These bersaglieri, I noticed sadly, had only the regulation three feathers, but one of them talked to me with masterful assurance. “We’re in a crack company,” he said in Italian, “and we have to run several kilometers every morning. We have beautiful bodies, our bodies are wonderfully fit, unfortunately we earn only a few pennies every day, not even enough for cigarettes, so we’re always on the lookout for a bit of extra change, besides we have lots of free time and nowhere to go, you’d be surprised what good shape we’re in, our bodies are really beautiful.” At last Thomas came up and I ducked away with him; I was afraid to invite three tough heterosexuals home (they might rob me) although to this day I wish I’d done so. By the time I’d explained the situation to Thomas the soldiers had vanished into the crowds. He was angry we’d missed what he said was a rare opportunity—“Nice Calabrese boys,” he said, “with no hang-ups.”

  Thomas had an American friend named Bill (so often pronounced “Beal” by the Italians that to this day I can hear it in no other way). “Beal” had a lanky, boyish figure, a wonderful full head of hair that was glossy and straight, long on top and short on the sides, which made me think of Prince Hal’s tonsure, a winningly lopsided smile, fine hands boned like Indian wickerwork and an intellectual seriousness that seemed unusually becoming in one so beautiful. He was very tall but always standing, as though embarrassed, in contrapposto, like a tall woman in flats, a beautiful hand on his hip—or in the air as he grasped after a point he’d just sighted. The Italians couldn’t get enough of him. He was the slender American boy, rangy and just a bit gawky or rather coltish, and his serious, distracted way of smiling up through his glossy hair, then flicking it aside as his smile faded, conformed to their ideal of how an American should look and manage his looks. He was healthy, naive, available and yet a bit mysterious.

  Just about when I’d decided no one in Rome was really gay I met “Beal” and watched him bring them out of the woodwork. Around him every Italian man seemed to be at least bisexual. I wasn’t ugly (in fact I was never cuter) but the Italians didn’t like me, possibly because I was “double-bodied” or at once too serious about art and too frivolous about politics. No, that wasn’t it. Their reasoned disappointment came only after knowing me a bit and merely confirmed their bad first impression, based as it was on an allergy to my earnestness—my efforts to learn Italian, catch the drift, win a place.

  Nor did “Beal” like me. He made a careless little effort at first to ingratiate himself by having me listen to a record of “Switched-On Bach” he’d just received from the States, a precious harbinger of a new American trend. It was a speeded-up rendition for chipmunks of the great Toccata and Fugue played on twittering electronic instruments, excited gibberish that struck him and Thomas as terribly contemporary, yet another of the horrors that people back then were always announcing as about to replace traditional art forms.

  When I said I liked my Bach switched off, he and Thomas looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt, even dislike, and after that I felt I’d lost Thomas’s friendship forever. He and “Beal” were always cooking up schemes in whispers behind my back. They’d go silent when I came into the room. “Beal” himself was a composer who lived in a maid’s room and worked up new sonatas on an electric keyboard he’d plug in, play and listen to with earphones, the only sound that was audible to visitors being the click of his fingernails on the plastic keys. Thomas admired “Beal’s” self-discipline and up-to-date “American” tendencies; he was half proud parent, half sponsor, though in fact he was penniless and incapable of sponsoring even Anzio with a daily cornetto.

  If mentally I put American in inverted commas I did so to mark a shift in my feelings. Until that time I’d never thought of my country as having a national character. When I’d lived in it I’d experienced it as vaguely coterminous with all cultural possibilities; only now, here in Italy, could America be praised for its energy or efficiency or youthful audacity or damned for its capitalist greed or colonialism. When Thomas was with his Italian friends he’d routinely characterize America as a country that had passed directly from puritanism to decadence and that was in the thrall of the “military-industrial complex.” But now with “Beal” he let on that he might admire American culture for its teenage vitality and saucy irreverence.

  One night Thomas took me out cruising with him. Just as I’d given up on him he squandered a sudden if short-lived interest on me. We went to the Janiculum Hill, a very long trek by foot for us, though just a five-minute ride for all the others, the car owners. Lights advanced, bobbed and swerved, then went dead as the drivers parked in their extinct but still creaking automobiles. No one got out. All these men were eyeing each other from their parked cars—another Italian stalemate.

  Thomas and I brought someone home with us, a Chilean millionaire in an English cashmere turtleneck and Gucci moccasins with gilded bits decorating the uppers. He drove us back in style in his sky-blue Mercedes. He brought a quart of gin up with him but after Thomas started humping his leg, Juan abruptly changed his mind, mumbled an apology—and left the bottle behind.

  We drank it down, drank deeply right from the bottle, without a glass or an ice cube, much less a lemon slice, and we sat under our bare light bulb on the couch and then somehow the light was off and we were on the floor.

  Thomas pulled my clothes off with his hot hands. There was a smile on his open lips but his eyes had lost consciousness; all he knew to do was to keep medicating himself from the bottle a
nd tapping my anus with his right middle finger. I was just a Johnny One-Note, but that one note he wanted to play.

  Whereas the gin sickened me and made me want to sleep, it excited him. He didn’t talk, he just leaned his face into me, his face with its slack smile, pulsing vein in the forehead and big, nutcracker nose. His body was scrawny and appeared unhatched, but his urgency made him a real man, a lot more real than all those Greenwich Village gays with their bored indecisiveness (indecision lowers sperm counts). His cock tasted of tarama.

  His face might have been dazed but his body pounded into mine, as though the gin-stunned loss of cortical control had left the big red setter with just two automatic responses, positioning and grasping with the powerful forepaws and a strong thrust with the pelvis. For two months day in and day out I’d studied Thomas across the corridor between our twin beds or across the oilcloth-covered table or across the colander of steaming spaghetti in the sink. Now I was so happy to wrap my legs around his waist and surrender to this canine excitement. I could even feel the head of his penis, dog-like, swelling inside me. He whispered dirty things in Italian into my ear.

  He moved the mattress from his bed out into the living room and there we grappled with ever greater fierceness. Thomas’s violent, relentless sexual style was all of a piece with his political harangues and long arguments vaunting the superiority of Verdi to Wagner or of Fellini to Bergman. Just as he was an idle, unfocused man capable of working up unflagging enthusiasm in a dispute with the first comer over a subject neither of them knew anything about (argument as recreation), in the same way once he started fucking me, the double-bodied roommate he’d taken on only to pay the bills, he made my asshole the object of his abusive lust and convinced himself of his sincerity as he went along.