The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  On one of my lonely jaunts I ran into the boy who’d been on the boat. He wasn’t wearing his uniform and I asked him if he was enjoying a day off. He said that he’d been fired.

  “Not enough work?” I asked.

  We were standing on the half-moon bridge over the Rio di Fornaci in front of Josh’s building. If I looked to my right I saw two other small bridges and beyond them a noble one that continued the wide walkway of the Zattere with its pontoons where families ate pizza and ice cream. Nearby was the house where John Ruskin had lived.

  “They let me go,” he said. Apparently he didn’t want to explain why, but at the same time by dwelling on the mournful fact he seemed to be appealing for sympathy.

  “Well, come with me to the Zattere,” I said, “and I’ll buy you a lemon ice.”

  He hesitated, and I thought he might be reluctant to be seen with a foreigner who was also a man twice his age.

  “You live there, don’t you?” he exclaimed, happy for a moment, pointing to the shutters covering the three windows of Josh’s salotto. When I nodded, he said, pointing to the smaller windows under the roof on the opposite side of the rio, “And I live there!” An old woman scuffled past us, a net bag for groceries over her arm; I recognized her as Olga Rudge, the violinist who’d lived for years with Ezra Pound (Joshua had pointed her out to me before).

  When I started to lead Giovanni across the bridge, he stopped, turned twice in place, then spat over his left shoulder. I said nothing, for though I loved to ask unsettling questions of self-assured people I at least knew enough to leave the vulnerable mercifully alone.

  Giovanni and I began to spend every afternoon together. I’d wake in the morning and look across the rio and there his sun-burned kid’s face would be, smiling over the geraniums on the windowsill. Once while we were walking along the Zattere he confided in me that he had a terrible mania. He couldn’t say the numbers “three” or “seven” but had to resort to “two plus one” and “six plus one.” He couldn’t cross a bridge without turning and spitting. He was at all times vulnerable to the attacks of evil spirits unless a friend (and here he turned his huge eyes on me) would take responsibility for him, in that way becoming a sort of spiritual lightning rod.

  I resolved to be Giovanni’s friend and never to touch him. Sex—or so at least he claimed—was no problem for him and he regularly seduced the Swedish girls who stayed in the pensione next door. In every way he seemed touchingly average except for his mania, but it was so severe and obvious that everyone, especially the other kids, made fun of him.

  Once, when we were walking along the Zattere beside the hospital for the incurabili, Giovanni said, “Would you like to see me swim? I’m a great swimmer,” and he instantly stripped down to dark brown shorts and plunged into the water, the wide, choppy Canale della Giudecca where cruise ships sometimes anchored and where the vaporetti crossed back and forth to three churches that Palladio had built—San Giorgio, the Zitelle and the Redentore. I felt a touch of embarrassment as though I was this kid’s uncle and I’d permitted or even encouraged him to do something dangerous. But what I mainly felt was desire for his body—he didn’t even have hair under his arms, the hollows as nacreous as the lips of a nautilus shell, and when he crawled away from me the trapezoids were furled against his back like a scarab’s wings.

  I was determined not to touch him; he already had enough problems. Everyone in the neighborhood avoided him. I saw him only once with another person—his tiny grandmother who just smiled when Giovanni went into his obsessive-compulsive rituals. She came out for the cool of the evening and walked along the Zattere in her black lace-up shoes, each no bigger than a child’s mitten.

  One afternoon Giovanni wanted me to go with him to a kung-fu movie being shown in a desanctified church. If Joshua and I spent long evenings with American art historians, with the English vicar and his boyfriend or with two Venetian aristocratic families he’d somehow encountered, my afternoons were devoted to Giovanni’s adolescent pursuits. When we were seated in the cinema, surrounded by boys who were bopping one another over the head and girls who were dissolving into giggles and slumping even farther down in their chairs, Giovanni looked at me very gravely and said, “If you want to protect me all you have to do is to take my hand and say, ‘You are my responsibility’ (Tu sei la mia responsabilità).” I nodded, a lump in my throat, a lump in my pants.

  The film began. The room was hot and giggly and every time Bruce Lee twirled and delivered a kick to a villain the audience produced the necessary sound effects. The screen was raised high on what had once been the altar in this early Renaissance church. “Say it,” Giovanni hissed in my ear.

  I grabbed his hand, which was bigger than mine, and whispered, “Sei la mia responsabilità.”

  Muddy Waters (which he pronounced “Moody Vahterre”) was his favorite American singer and Giovanni and three other boys practiced every afternoon his group’s repertoire. I was astonished: I thought that Giovanni had no friends and no talents. He begged me to come to the storeroom on the same fondamenta as Joshua’s house but at the other end. The boys had fixed this place up as a clubroom with out-of-date fluorescent posters of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Paolo Conte.

  With sheepish grins the boys thumped and twanged and crooned their way through a Moody Vahterre ballad. They gyrated their bodies. Their feet were too big and in the way. One T-shirt was too short and always hiking up to reveal the baby fat on the stomach of a boy with a cruel face, a boy like Donatello’s David. Their adolescent sexuality took up so much space, was so awkward and charming, that they had to smile, as a mermaid would smile about her inconvenient tail.

  When they’d finished, Giovanni, who’d been singing, said, “Did you understand the words?”

  “Well, no, it sounded like English, but I couldn’t make out the individual words.”

  “Listen to this,” he said, dropping a needle on the well worn record.

  After a few minutes I told him I couldn’t understand the recording, either; which was incomprehensible to an Italian since their singers always articulate clearly.

  “Are you sure you’re not really a German?” Giovanni asked unsmilingly.

  The next day I showed him my American passport but he’d already moved on to other thoughts. We were sitting near the stone cistern in the Campo San Trovaso, looking out at the people moving on the far side of the canal. In other towns people were a distraction from the architectural beauties, but here humanity was the very medium in which the city worked—the flow and direction of people, their dispersal and concentration, the game of herding them up and down steps, of doubling their white shirtwaists or a black nun’s robes with diluted watery reflections, the dense clotting of walkways and then the broad human wash let loose across a vast piazza, the calculus of moving spots of color on the balconies of churches or palaces. People were the notes that rippled across the musical staves laid down by the city, but even the staves weren’t fixed but constantly sunk in fogs or tides, obscuring rains or overpowering sunsets, and on days of acqua alta the old stones under our feet would be replaced by a big new mirror.

  Giovanni held my hand as we sprawled on the grass. He said, “You spend every afternoon with me but I don’t understand how a fine man like you, a professore—”

  “Giovanni, I don’t teach!”

  “How could a professore be fond of someone like me, someone everyone else avoids, a maniaco? I love you, you are my only friend, but what can I offer you?”

  “But you know, Giovanni, I have my own … vice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like men.” I had no idea whether I hoped we’d fall into each other’s arms, or whether I was simply striking a blow for personal honesty (as Maria had so many years ago when she’d told me, so straightforwardly, that she liked women), or whether I thought my candor would show him he was not alone, that the world rejected my kind even more categorically than his, but that I was surviving.

  Giovanni l
ooked puzzled. He released my hand, which was no longer a friend’s. He said, “But have you never tried it with girls? You’re not ugly, you could find a girl, you’re just shy, I’ll find you a girl. There’s one I’m supposed to see at the pensione, a big Swede, Yulla, she’s named Yulla, you can go with her in my place, she’d prefer you to me anyway, I’m sure.”

  “Giovanni, I’ve tried girls.”

  “E allora?”

  “Niente. Nothing. I like them. I especially like big blondes. But I love men. I feel good with men.”

  Which wasn’t true. I never felt good with men; with a gay man I always felt something indefinable was missing, whereas with a woman I knew what was missing: a man.

  Giovanni thought about it, then said, “Che bella coppia siamo, tu con la tua malattia, io con la mia mania”—“What a fine pair we make, you with your sickness, me with my mania.”

  I was even grateful that he was generous enough to put my sickness on a par with his compulsion.

  Despite his generosity I could see that something had gone out of the friendship for him. I was no longer the simpatico guy who was also a real man, the sort he wanted to become. Now he must have thought back to that moment in the church when he’d made me take his hand and tell him he was my responsibility; he must have replayed that moment and winced, emptied the church, blown its roof off, exiled me in one kung-fu somersault to the other side of the rio, even the ocean, the big one, the Atlantic, wasn’t that its name?

  I didn’t go back to Venice the next summer, but when I visited Josh there two years later he said that Giovanni and his whole family had moved to the Cannaregio district, to a little house of their own, apparently.

  And then one day I saw a new Giovanni—taller, rump rounder, black shoes heeled in steel—and he was wrapped around a cigarette under the statue of Goldoni near the Rialto. He was hanging out with two other fellows and he looked fine, unexceptional, but just to make sure, I watched as he walked up the inner steps of the Rialto Bridge and never once did he spit over his shoulder or turn and I was certain he could now say “tre” and “sette” without a hitch.

  BUT that first summer in Venice, I met one other guy, a real gay man. We picked each other up by the Molo, that strip of pavement beside the public gardens between the Piazzetta and Harry’s Bar. Men cruised there, although gay Venetians in those days would have been afraid of being seen there. At midnight, people—straight couples, families, sisters, friends—were always hurrying past, arm in arm, from the closing cafés on San Marco to the vaporetto pontoon or to the landing for the powerboat that crossed over to the Cipriani hotel at the tip of the Giudecca. Men, foreign gay men, sat along the railing or perched on the wood backs of benches. They stared at one another. They almost never spoke and usually ended up walking home alone. But sometimes a guy would walk behind one of the shuttered and locked kiosks that sold curios and guidebooks by day. He’d stand between a kiosk and the metal fence that surrounded the public gardens. He’d pretend to piss but would jerk off. A guy doing the same thing behind the next kiosk might, if he were brave, slip over to join him.

  I met Sergio in a more normal way. He just smiled at me with a big, comic smile that was out of phase with his eyes, as though he were wearing a commedia deWarte half-mask. His mouth was very wide, comically wide, with lips as thick as those that women in the 1940s used to paint on. His nose was big and hooked. He had a prominent jaw and his face looked as though it were flooded with blood. Laugh lines flowed away from his eyes like the tails of colliding comets.

  He had that high, childish, gently querulous voice of the Veneto, but of course he spoke to me in Tuscan, not Venetian, and he talked so slowly and with such deliberation that I suspected he must be used to dealing with foreigners.

  I brought him back with me to my stifling little room next to the rio. It was so hot that our bodies were exuding sweat. He was strong, his hands callused, his back just a bit stooped. He fucked me and called me “Amore,” shamelessly, without any of an American’s cheese-paring niggling over accuracy.

  In those days gay men had sex first, before conversation, and only in post-coital chat discovered if they would be friends. Sergio told me that his mother was a peasant and lived in a village in the Veneto. He was a servant and cook and looked after an old bachelor who lived in Vicenza. On his days off he took the train into Venice. Right now he had three days off because his boss was away in Turin visiting his sister.

  As we talked we lay beside each other in the little bed. There was something reassuring, calming, about his slow way of speaking to a foreigner. The water lapped the mossy steps five feet away. Sergio kept pressing his finger to his lips and listening, as though hoping to discover an eavesdropper; I thought of the slot in the wall under the Doge’s Palace where anonymous spies and informers had dropped denunciations of their neighbors.

  I said, “I’ve never known an Italian to be so at ease with his homosexuality.”

  “Many people tell me I’m like an American, although I’ve never traveled abroad. Perhaps because I’m a Communist and have a critical outlook on things, I seem like a foreigner.” He had a huge nose, deeply recessed eyes and that wide, comic mouth—truly the face of a commedia mask. A ray of light cast the shadow of his big nose on the wall.

  He stayed with me. Joshua liked him, I could see, but was jealous of us. The third night I said to Sergio, “Maybe you should spend tonight in the professore’s bed.”

  “Tu sei furbo—you’re crafty,” Sergio said, laughing, and he pressed his finger to the side of his nose.

  The next morning they were a couple. Within a week, when Sergio was back for a night off, they’d become thoroughly domestic. They went shopping together. We gave dinner to Peggy Guggenheim and a few other friends and Sergio chopped up all the fruit for the dessert and put Josh’s tomato sauce for the pasta through the blender, which infuriated Joshua: “I don’t want it to look like something in a restaurant. It’s lost its peasant character.”

  Sergio never lost his. Josh forced him to sit at the table with us, but Sergio called Peggy “Principessa” and occupied his chair only for a second at a time, as though nervously exercising a new-won right that made him uncomfortable. Peggy, always so vague, scarcely noticed, although in her own house she was severe with the servants, gave them food to eat that was different from her own and counted the number of apples they’d taken out of the fridge.

  Italian friends suspected that Sergio must be working Joshua for money, but the only thing Sergio wanted Josh to buy him were huge silk lampshades dripping fringe for his mother’s house in the village, shades worthy of the Nile Hilton. Otherwise he was happy to spend his days off with Josh, to iron Josh’s clothes, over-water his plants and in the evenings, to dress up in tight white trousers, a lightweight blue blazer, yellow shirt and silk ascot and saunter forth with us to one of the half dozen restaurants we frequented. He opposed expensive places, criticized a stingy antipasto, wanted Josh to tip generously but treated other waiters with seigneurial disdain. One evening, when Josh discovered he had no cash, Sergio said, calmly, grandly, “Andiamo in plastico” (“Let’s go with plastic,” by which he meant Josh’s credit card).

  At home Sergio spared his clothes from wear and tear by walking around in his underpants. His toes and fingers were stiff and swollen, as though he’d had to work for years in cold water, say, cleaning fish. Whereas Josh and I were always reading, writing or talking and generally lounging about in the pretzel shapes of thought, Sergio could never sit still and was scouring the kitchen sink or emptying the fridge of the moldy bits in clingwrap that Joshua never wanted to throw away, or dusting the cornice with a rag tied to the end of a broomstick. He seemed to have no other friends. His mother had recently put in a phone and when Sergio called her he shouted, spoke to her harshly and never stayed on the line longer than three minutes.

  He showered three times a day. When he passed me wrapped in a towel I’m ashamed to say I half-expected he’d wink at me or even embrace
me rapidly while Josh was out of the room, but he never flirted with me again, not once after he moved upstairs. Josh’s name was hard for him to say but each time he tried it with a new, experimental pronunciation he added, “amore mio”

  Several times Joshua said to me, “No one ever gave me such a marvelous present as you did.” I envied the lovers on their weekends together although I recognized I wouldn’t have known how to create the easy, chattering domesticity they had together which even their spats made more intimate.

  Sergio became “the treasure”—il tesoro, and soon everyone referred to him that way, even Eddie, who was delighted by my matchmaking. Eddie was the one who’d convinced Joshua to buy contact lenses, style his hair differently and to be dressed by Eddie’s own Venetian tailor. But only now had I found Joshua a lover who if he wasn’t a scholar was at least a sexual athlete and who, if he couldn’t discuss contemporary poetry, was still sufficiently exotic as an Italian servant to fascinate Joshua for years to come. Sergio had shrewd political opinions and large, naïve lapses of the most basic information. Like the peasant he was he attributed the pettiest possible motives to strangers and was entirely gullible with friends. He thought that he, too, was crafty, but his life went nowhere. Year after year Joshua thought of inviting il tesoro to live in New York and I, ever the romantic, urged him to do so. But Josh had read too many Henry James novels to risk the transplant.

  Perhaps Josh feared his New York friends would disapprove of Sergio as an absurdly strutting Italian male and a kept boy. Joshua knew that Sergio was a lot more complicated than that and if he was always the aggressor in bed (which Joshua liked), everywhere else he was flexible or at least unpredictable—needle and thread in his mouth, dustcloth in hand, off in the kitchen soaking something in vinegar, polishing the pavimenti with a rag under his big, deformed feet. Josh may have been the adored amore who got screwed every night, but he was also the great professore who must not be disturbed while he was writing his capolavoro.