The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Now, apparently, he had a new lover and he was sober and he’d come back to Italy to relaunch his career. I decided I should write him a “vehicle,” a screenplay tailor-made to his age, accent and abilities. Of course I was too shy to tell him about the project and too inexperienced to line up a contract from a producer. My scenario was about the affair I might have had with Tina: an American painter falls in love with an Italian woman in Rome. They can’t communicate but they end up having lots of violent sex. He goes back to America on a brief trip but dies in a car crash. She has almost recovered from his death when a three-month mail strike in Italy finally ends. Every day she receives another passionate love letter from him and she finally decides to make the trip to the States in order to learn what kind of man he was. There she discovers that her lost love—and by extension most educated Americans—are not just chameleons but also masters of deceit; with a sense of relief she returns to the innocence of the Old World.

  Susie, who was still unemployed after being sacked as a real-estate agent, worked for me every afternoon as my secretary. I would scribble bits of dialogue on paper, then dictate them to her and she’d type them, slowly, with lots of muttered commentary. The weather was hot, I was a bit fuzzy after midday lunch and wine consumed in a sunny café and her presence inhibited me from thinking. But I knew I’d become too lazy to work on my own. I needed the waiting taxi, meter ticking, to force me to travel mentally. Anyway, she needed the job.

  And besides I liked her stories about her sexual adventures. Her lover Enzio lived with his mother and, like every single Italian man, twenty or forty, straight or gay, he had to be back home in his bed by the breakfast hour. He could slip into his room at six in the morning and his mother could hear his late arrival and nothing would be said, just so long as he was there for roll call. In return he could shower and change shirts three times a day and Mother, his laundress, his cook, would think nothing of it.

  He’d pick Susie up in a car he’d especially rigged out with a passenger’s seat that at the flick of a lever would flip back so that the passenger would suddenly be flat on her back, legs in the air, as though prepared for an obstetrician. His dandyism, his randiness, his easily wounded pride seemed funny to her, since she was used to British coldness and self-deprecation. I didn’t dare tell her that I preferred a stiff cock to a stiff upper lip, and that Italian strutting delighted me more than English reserve. Perhaps she would have agreed with me.

  When at last she’d typed up the script on stencils and mimeographed it, I sent it off to three producers Lucrezia had done translations for. Two didn’t respond and the third contacted me only because he was so angry at my portrait of Italian men, for if I’d branded Americans as dissemblers, I’d shown Italians as macho brutes. In one of the most dramatic moments in the film the heroine, after learning of her American lover’s death, goes stumbling out into the night. She’s sobbing but around her swirl boys in cars honking and heckling and shouting obscenities and making grotesque sucking noises with their mouths. One even moons her. Because of Maria and Christa I’d thought about feminism more than any other man I knew, although as a writer I was less attracted to the substantial issue of economic equality than to the flashier question of sexual harassment.

  The Italian producer, a bald tycoon in his sixties always in search of vehicles for his wife, a famous actress, spluttered with indignation that Italian men loved women and paid them court as knights had done for centuries, throwing them verbal bouquets. I remembered that Christa, a six-foot Brünnhilde, at least professed to enjoy the excitement she created in the streets, but I also knew that Tina had bought a car because she couldn’t even walk to the corner without being hassled. I knew that Swedish women, bored with their polite but tepid compatriots, reportedly came to Italy for “the phallic cure,” but I’d also heard from Susie that two of her English friends who’d married Italian men had left them after a year of alternate brutality and neglect.

  What complicated my response still more was that I wanted to be treated brutally. Thomas hadn’t resorted to violence only because I’d been so compliant as we’d wallowed for three days in our sty, but the posed threat had only intensified my excitement. Before I ejaculated I was capable of relishing mental images of profound abjection, pictures that repulsed me as soon as the sperm was drying. I liked the idea of being captured by a gang and raped by its members, one after another, all night long, but a minute after I’d finished masturbating I was cross if Thomas so much as asked me to walk Anzio when it wasn’t my turn.

  I made an effort to understand that what for me was an idle if persistent fantasy constituted a real danger for women—but the effort failed, since the minute I contemplated, soberly, disapprovingly, the idea (or the image) of rape, I immediately became aroused.

  Of course I mouthed my sympathy to women, as I would for years to come, since the years of the New Left in the sixties, just ending, had so corrupted me that I did not measure my political opinions against my actual beliefs but rather against what I thought I should feel. As a writer I had nothing but feelings to count on, but a conviction, I thought, shouldn’t be simply an amplified sensation; no, it brought together, didn’t it, experience, judgment and a code of morality one had presumably picked over and, somehow, verified.

  Because I wanted to get my scenario read I pushed Jamie and Gerry to introduce me to an Italian film director who’d pursued Gerry for years. I phoned the director and he was eager to see me, believing no doubt that Gerry had sent him another willowy All-American blond. When he met me he was visibly let down. I wasn’t his type—a category of taste I always forgot about and was startled, each time, to rediscover, I who didn’t have a type, any more than I had a set way to take my coffee. I suppose an enemy would have said anyone as sexually driven as I could not afford to have a type: obsession precludes choice. But I prided myself on my whore’s ingenuity. If I found myself sucking a fat, bearded man with an inch-long cock, I convinced myself he was the pasha, I the new girl in the harem and this was my one chance to persuade him of my talent. I never stopped to wonder why I had to please everyone.

  I managed to get a few “important” people to read my scenario, but no one was interested in it. I was a failure in the world but at least I had it all before me. It was withholding its acceptance, which infused me with crimson indignation, nor was I at all certain that approval would ever be granted. I couldn’t even claim I’d prepared myself diligently or worked with great application (in The Paris Review I kept reading interviews with successful writers who maintained banker’s hours, and I would imagine them typing rapidly on an old Remington, gradually building up a mountain of foolscap as they tried a scene first one way, then another, fiddling with point of view, tense and the proportion of reported to quoted dialogue). I needed a full day to summon up the courage to write a paragraph; it would never have occurred to me to strike it out. Words came to me slowly; even slower to materialize was the courage to commit them to paper.

  My father had predicted my failure, and although I’d succeeded in working as a journalist for eight years, I’d failed until now to publish even a single page of fiction. When I quit my job, my boss had predicted I’d fail as a freelance writer, and now it appeared he was right. Just at the moment when New York was entering an era of gay liberation, I was off in repressed, provincial Rome. Butler, my friend from New York, wrote that my letters indicated I was not profiting from a study of “the central city of Western culture,” but rather treating it as “a slightly kickier version of Scranton” (a reference to a particularly blighted and dull town in Pennsylvania).

  Tina and I took the train to Naples. We had dinner there in a restaurant where solemn men toasted one another. “They’re using strange nicknames for each other,” Tina said. “Bear and Wolf—I think they’re in the Camorra.” When we wandered the streets we saw kids everywhere jumping on the backs of trolleys or swarming around us, demanding a coin with irresistible raffishness. “It’s like Rome just after the w
ar,” she said. “I’m amazed this is still going on.” I could see she relished the direct contact with people, the feudal dignity of those toasts, the independence of the kids, the theatricality and danger of Spacca Napoli.

  We took a boat to Procida, an island where we stayed in a Swiss pension on top of a hill. Huge lemons grew on a tree just outside our window. Down by the water, arches of bare light bulbs crossed over the street, and a band from Naples played while people danced in the square. At night Tina lay beside me, an explosive waiting to be detonated. Her passion thrilled me, I who had no lover, but I didn’t want it. She was willing to damp her fires in order not to scare me off, but I knew all along she was after just one thing.

  BUTLER ARRIVED alone in Rome, without Lynne. He was cool, genial, perfect. He took the sun just the right amount of time on our balcony amid the pots of azaleas. The oil he applied to his chest and stomach turned his skin to a lustrous mahogany brown. His shirts were impeccably white and collarless, his forest-green trousers pleated but never creased, a silver chain slid discreetly over his dark chest. His feet looked immense but exquisitely formed in his expensive leather sandals from Greece.

  He had an itinerary in Rome, things he needed to visit because he hadn’t seen them the last time: the Michelangelo statue of Moses; the Borromini Church of St. Ivo with its corkscrew tower; the Raphael frescoes in the Farnesina on the other side of the Tiber. He thought Rome might serve as the backdrop for a short story in which every tenth word would rhyme with the name of a place here (“heavy” for “Trevi,” “hollow semen” for “Colosseum”). He took one long look at my life in Rome, and a mercifully quick one at my body (I was at once skinnier and flabbier) and drew me aside and said, “I’m getting you out of here.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “I think I could be ready in a week or ten days.”

  “A week! No, we’ll be leaving tomorrow. I’ve rented a car. We can drive to Paris slowly, stopping in all the important hill towns. I have a very good guidebook. First we’ll go to Assisi, the only city in Italy that does seem holy. No, frankly, you’ve gone to seed, I hope you don’t mind my telling you so directly. Of course that happens to most Americans in Rome, just look at all these losers you’ve surrounded yourself with. I guess we could say la dolce vita has definitely turned amara. Isn’t it funny, you’ve come halfway around the world to create an inferior version of what you left behind: Tina is a less talented, less refined version of Maria, just as Thomas is an uncooked copy of your old lover in college, what’s his name? Lou?—the sex without the brains. And after you wrote that exquisite Fire Island novel you’ve cranked out this vulgar little screenplay, so listless in its language, so obvious in its ironies. You know, it’s really a form of arrogance on your part, this mauvaise fréquentation you seek out, as though you were trying to prove your talent and intelligence are so durable they can resist even the lowering effect of idiots and drunkards. But you know you’re pressing your luck.”

  I saw a sharply etched, despairing truth in his words where I’d intuited only vague cloud shapes of disappointment. “It’s true enough, I’ve gone to seed,” I said, not rejecting the floral imagery, “but I wouldn’t say I was escaping New York or my friends, just my job.” And yet I saw myself as a dandelion gone white, held up to his pursed lips. Trained by so many years in therapy to smile foolishly whenever someone else presumed to know my feelings better than I, I snickered in agreement.

  The last night I was in Rome my English-speaking friends gave me a party. We sat very late at a table outside in the Piazza Navona. In distant streets the last saraceni, those linked metal gates that protect storefronts, were thundering shut. Two aggressive gypsy girls were pushing roses at us; a shy, lean Senegalese in a dashiki passed by, selling electric yo-yos that glowed briefly when set in motion.

  We wandered about all night and at dawn ended up on the Capitoline Hill. The armed forces were rehearsing a huge patriotic parade. From our perch we looked down on the wide boulevard that led from the Colosseum to the Piazza di Spagna. Tanks rolled by, rank after rank of soldiers filed past, fighter planes swooped low. We were the only spectators. We were drunk. Susie’s pale pink gauze skirt was tangled up in her belt, as though she were a can-can dancer clutching at her hem to reveal her legs. An English guy had tears in his eyes, although perhaps the glare of the rising sun was just making his eyes water. He told me he was sad to be going home. As an American I was used to the idea that “home” was superior to everywhere else (richer, more powerful, trend-setting), and it was with a jolt I realized that for this man Rome might be preferable to London.

  Suddenly I saw that for an American travel abroad is always a form of slumming, and the city, under Butler’s microscope, became distasteful to my eyes. For him, as for all New Yorkers, human action was only useful in so far as it produced results. I had to return to New York, and make my mark as a writer, but I was terrified I’d fail. Or rather, that I’d go on failing.

  I’ve always said I was a Buddhist, but now I know I’m no longer one. Perhaps I’ve never been one. Immediately after Brice’s death I wanted to die, yet not out of a philosophical indifference to this illusory world. I went to church every day, the Catholic church of St.-Merri just across the street from where I live in Paris. I lit candles in front of a saccharine painting of the Virgin and Child. I imagined that the Virgin was Brice’s mother, who’d committed suicide ten years earlier, and the wise, dry-eyed baby was Brice himself. I liked the way disembodied angels’ heads, propelled by wings, hovered around the holy couple. I lit my candles before a modern polychrome statue of an adult Jesus pointing with unsurprised fatuity at his own heart.

  I cried a lot. I said, “Why did you leave me?” I sang, over and over, the first line of an old pop song, the only line I knew, “Where are you? You went away without me, I thought you cared about me.”

  Brice, I was so focused on you for our five years together that when you died I felt an enormous silence descend all around me. At the time I said, “It’s as though I’ve been in a totally absorbing play for years and then once, by chance, I wandered out to the edge of the stage, the apron, and then the asbestos fire curtain came ringing down, thud, and there I was, alone, in an immense, echoing theater, separated from everything I cared about.” I suppose it was just my fancy way of saying something that a book review I was reading the other day said was the “greatest banality: we want to share our mourning with the dead.”

  My Catholicism has no Pope and no God and only a few, rather helpless saints (I pray to St. Anthony of Padua when I lose something and in Prague I said a prayer to St. Vitus against the shakes and excessive weeping). My Catholicism centers on the Virgin and Child, who don’t do anything for anyone except themselves; their love is a wonderful example, a closed circuit, a thing of beauty to contemplate: Brice and his mother. My Catholicism is a home-made cult given over to lighting candles and making the sign of the cross and genuflecting with embarrassment, a child’s animism quarried out of the grown-up Church and its ruins, a primitive superstition inferior to the solitary splendor of monotheism. There’s no morality in my Catholicism and no hell except the one we’re living in, this fiery posthumous existence I’m inventing.

  After Brice died I discovered that all my clothes were rumpled and stained with food. I threw out some of them and took the rest off to the dry cleaner’s. I’d neglected my appearance completely during the last two years of Brice’s illness.

  Just a month after Brice’s death I went to Easter mass at St. Eustache and—while contemplating the gold and white altar under the pale clarity of the spring light pulsing in through the unstained-glass windows and transecting the incense—I listened to the intimate words of the Resurrection, all the more striking because filtered through the unfamiliar suavities of the French language. Distanced in this way, the words reached right inside me, words that said, Do not mourn me. I have come back, I am here beside you, I live. I live.

  I called my friend Brad and told him I was t
erribly lonely but couldn’t bear to be with friends, not all the time, because then all we’d do was discuss Brice. Maybe I didn’t like my familiar self looked at by old friends. I wanted to discover someone new and be someone new to him. I wanted Brad to find me a nice hustler, someone who’d come in the afternoon or at midnight or whenever I needed him, someone who’d hold me in his arms and watch old movies with me or tell me the story of his life.

  He found me Olivier, a disillusioned sweetheart, a thirty-something guy as disabused as a man my age but someone who just five years earlier had still probably had lots of hopes. I told him about Brice and he said he understood, he’d lost his mother, she looked so young everyone had assumed she was his sister, they went out to dance in the clubs together, and then she’d died—and suddenly he was Brice, my Brice who’d lived through his twenties and until his death at thirty-two in the shadow of his mother’s death. Olivier was the sort of boy who shrugs a lot, whose handsome full lips are always turned down, who expects nothing more out of life, the sort who’d be hopeless as a lover since he’d have no enthusiasm to offer, but who, as a rent boy, can kiss you sadly, professionally, and make you feel good because that’s his job.

  For so long I’d lived a life disciplined by Brice’s crises; like a mother who awakens when her baby cries, I’d fly to his side whenever he’d need me in the middle of the night. I was like one of those mothers whose milk spurts out of her breast when her baby cries in another room. Now I had vast, empty hectares of time to fill. Olivier was ideal because I could summon him whenever I needed him and send him off with a polite, “Gee, I’m awfully tired.” I liked the sinfulness of drawing the curtains in the middle of the day and getting stoned.