The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  I developed a strange case of shingles that didn’t produce many bumps or cause me much pain; in fact I would scarcely have noticed it if I hadn’t become so tired. My doctor gave me a treatment and said shingles wasn’t necessarily linked to AIDS, though it could be a “tracer illness.” I slept night and day, as I’d slept so many years ago when I’d come down with hepatitis in Paris. A play of mine was being given a staged reading in London; I pulled myself together and flew over to see it, but I realized they’d got hold of the wrong version, an early draft I’d since extensively revised. I sat there stunned, indifferent, hundreds of years old.

  The next night I was on a street corner in the West End, trying to find a taxi. A group of drunk young people in evening clothes swirled around, laughing wildly, speaking English, which suddenly sounded so foreign. I hated them because I thought they weren’t going to die. They didn’t have AIDS and their bodies were smug with health. They weren’t sneering at me and I suppose if I’d accosted them one by one at a party with my sad story, the women, at least, would have screwed up their eyes and let their mouths open slightly, serious and unsmiling, and they might even have risked squeezing my hand before backing away, thoughtfully; girls like that will take their father figures where they can find them.

  But tonight I hated them, I suppose, because I thought they’d won. They would never, under any circumstances, have thought about my kind very much, yet in the 1970s we might just have seemed if not enviable at least plausible, with our dancing, our music, our haircuts, our gym-built bodies, but now we were dismissed with a shrug of a pretty bare shoulder rising up out of a calyx of ivory silk, as though to say, “Oh, no, not now, when we’re having such fun. Haven’t we done enough for charity?” After gay liberation we’d dared to believe that we might be blazing a new trail; now we saw that our trail had run out, swallowed up by a forest of indifference.

  I listened to one record over and over again back in Paris, one of Mahler’s Rückert songs, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I have lost track of the world”). When I’d be taking the train somewhere, watching the fields opening up before me and a little French village gliding past with its squat Romanesque tower and its few dull stone houses, I’d sing this song with its words at once resigned and joyful: “I am dead to the hurly-burly of the world / And repose in a place of quietness!” (“Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel, / Und ruh’in einem stillen Gebiet!”). For an English speaker who’d been speaking French for so long, that Ich bin gestorben was so much more pungent than Je suis mort and that einem stillen Gebiet so much calmer than the sleek, glib un lieu tranquille. I’d fall asleep, dreaming of a lover who would smell of something burned, of old smoke in heavy green curtains …

  Joshua asked me to come to Venice for the last two weeks of August. When I arrived he told me he was positive and had fewer than a hundred T cells, but his announcement struck me as utterly implausible. Joshua? He who’d made love to no more than twelve men in his whole life? Who’d always been too blind to cruise, too prematurely elderly ever to bed a fast-lane gay man? Of course I was only exposing my ignorant assumptions. AIDS wasn’t cumulative and it didn’t just strike the promiscuous scene-makers.

  “Have you lost a bit of weight?” I asked.

  “Alas,” he laughed, “not enough.”

  He was always dieting and though his skin now was waxy and white and stretched across his cheekbones in that tell-tale way, his lower body was still plump. The changes wrought by AIDS came ten times faster than those imposed by age (five decades’ worth of aging could be squeezed into five years) but still slowly enough that only someone like me who’d lived apart from Joshua and not seen him for a year could notice how his teeth had become more prominent, as though they’d slid forward a fraction, and his eyes had become hollower, as though they’d retreated, and the skin on his arms hung looser, as though it had already died.

  Joshua had come from New York with a new lover, a tall, slender guy between jobs who, like Josh, had gone to Harvard, and, like us, talked opera, food, friends. Although he was twenty years younger than I (and I was ten years younger than Josh) Lionel seemed eager to decode our references and know everything about us. I’d hear Joshua and Lionel discussing that evening’s dinner, not with the sing-song, almost weary dailiness of Sergio, il tesoro, but with an edge of social hysteria. “Do you think we should really mix Peggy with Nica? The unreal with merely real estate?” (Nica rented out apartments in the palace her family had owned for six centuries.) Lionel, too, laughed with us about how Peggy, despairing of ever finding a summer gondolier who didn’t charge the union minimum, had finally engaged a retired funeral gondolier. If given his head, the gondolier would start rowing for San Michele, the island cemetery, and begin to sing dirges in a big bass voice full of wobble.

  Joshua was keeping two different mental sets of books about the disease. He’d say, “This disease is a dreadful thing. I’ve decided to devote the next few years to raising money to fight it,” but at the same time I could see he was feverishly working to finish his “study of poetic friendship.” He’d always read to me every word he’d written but now he lingered less over alternative versions and seemed determined to press on, despite his natural reticence, so closely allied to his innate elegance. He’d always been slow to commit an idea to paper, just as in conversation he preferred it if one finished his sentence for him, as if in that way it was one’s own fault, not his, if any utterance constituted a slide into vulgarity or error.

  Since so much of his work was based on a close reading of his poets (and of their letters—in some cases he’d been the first person allowed to consult them) he was always happy to read them again out loud. His head (and to a much lesser extent his computer) was full of notes, quotations, projects, comparisons, often followed by a question mark. I think he knew perfectly well that most cases of AIDS involved some dementia, and he must have been terrified that all his knowledge, so painfully acquired after thousands of hours of research in libraries and reading at home, would be lost over the course of a weekend, as though hundreds of pages of metal type, not yet printed, would melt in a big fire. If his favorite novel was Middlemarch and the two or three women he loved he considered to be as “ardent” as Dorothea, by the same token he’d always feared most that he’d turn out to be Casaubon, the scholar unable to lead his research to completion. Already, on certain days, his mind, famous for its total recall, felt like nothing more than a blur, waves of heat rising and warping the view.

  Joshua had never been able to decide whether Sergio was a lover or a servant and in a greedy way he’d wanted him to be both. He’d wanted Sergio to cook for him and tuck him in, then slide in beside him, but disappear when there was work to be done or a princess to be received. Of course I’d always hoped Joshua would elevate Sergio’s status—I believed in fairy-tale endings—but now Lionel had taken that place, accomplishing in six months what “the treasure” had failed to do in six years. I suppose Joshua had wanted to protect his right to go to the ballet, night after night, with one of his Dorotheas, since in his heart the need for friendship was a more powerful appetite than the longing after love, although he complained a lot about the empty-bed syndrome. For years I’d told Joshua that he was “immoral” in the way he was playing with Sergio, “leading him on,” filling him with unfounded expectations, but Joshua answered my sermons with lots of dithering and a cultivated vagueness. Besides, he hadn’t really led Sergio to expect anything.

  Perhaps because he’d lived so long among books and devoted his whole life to literature, all of his friends compared him to characters in classics—to Casaubon, perhaps, but more often to Emma’s lovable yet hypochondriacal father, to Proust’s aunts, so tentative as to be incoherent, too polite to communicate properly, even to Oblomov (Eddie’s devilish contribution, since he constantly teased Joshua for being so lazy).

  Now he wasn’t lazy. I’d find him late at night, when I returned from a party or cruising the Molo, alone in front of his
green, glowing screen. He’d look up and say, “If only there’d been laptops back then. I always found typing so noisy, such a physical effort, so user-hostile, whereas now I can’t wait to come back to my green, glowing Rheingold.” As though his new haste, even desperation, were just a minor matter of technology.

  Because Joshua had never wanted to formalize things with Sergio, he thought nothing of introducing him to Lionel. They even had a three-way and when I saw Sergio next on the beach he said in his high-pitched, slow, almost whiny Venetian accent, “O, come il suo cazzo è grande!” and he held out his hands at river-trout length to indicate the full twenty centimeters, but I could see he was sad and bitter to be superseded by someone who could speak to il professore in his own language, who came from his own social class and was younger and just as well endowed (Joshua and I always came out with the rather sinister “bien pendu,” even though we knew the French actually said, “bien monté” for “well hung”).

  Then suddenly everything went bad. Sergio stopped the owner of the palazzo and said to her, “Principessa, the professore is very ill with AIDS” (which the Italians pronounce as though it were the “ides” of March). “You must get the maids to fumigate everything when he leaves. The Ides is highly contagious.”

  Ordinarily, if the matter had been less serious, the princess might have slipped a note into his mailbox or accosted Joshua at the Cipriani pool, but he’d stopped swimming this summer, which only confirmed her suspicions, and she was too upset to wait for his letter—nor did her stock of polite written formulas include a way of tackling this subject. Her solution was to phone him very early, to assure him in a tiny, shaken voice how much she’d always respected him—and finally to blurt out Sergio’s accusation. She ended by sobbing and saying that she had a “historic palace to consider,” as though that concern were of any relevance.

  Joshua hotly denied what Sergio had said: “He’s just a peasant, cara, and gets everything mixed up. I’m afraid he found himself less welcome here than he used to be and he simply lashed out with a paranoid mishmash of all these horror stories on television. I’m mortified that he subjected you to these stories; naturally you’re upset. But please don’t believe a word of it—you know how these boys from the Veneto can’t put two thoughts together and always get everything wrong.” The princess was from Turin and had nothing but contempt for the locals, which Joshua was shrewdly counting on.

  The confrontation rattled Joshua. Because he was so brilliant he’d never felt discriminated against, neither as a Jew nor as a gay man. Once, in the early 1970s, when we were thoroughly drunk, I’d asked him if, because he was Jewish, he felt superior to me and he’d admitted he did—a remark that had so shocked me that it revealed to me that I myself nursed a faint sense of racial superiority invisible until then even to me. Twenty-five years ago he’d moved from Harvard, where he’d come out uneventfully, to New Jersey, where he taught in a department headed by another gay man, a doting classmate from Harvard, and on to New York. Most of his life had been divided between the downtown New York world of curators, professors, agents, critics and fawning students and a Venice of expatriates and aristocrats; in New York his Jewishness and homosexuality were assumed, in Venice never perceived or if detected not mentioned. Aristocrats, at least on the Continent, liked artists and intellectuals if they wore decent clothes and had good manners and acted crazy enough to be “amusing.” The constant aristocratic need for amusement could take on the proportions of bulimia. Other people’s bloodlines or morals would have been questioned only if they’d attempted to marry into the family—and even then money outweighed birth and birth was more important than morals.

  The principessa’s panic over a mysterious question of hygiene, however, revealed that her ten years’ friendship for Joshua had all along been extended only provisionally. After all, he’d never been an intimate, neither a relative nor a childhood friend, the only two categories to whom one owed lasting loyalty.

  Venice was both stone and water, permanence and transience, the fluid element shaping but never wholly dissolving the solid, and this very ambiguity had always vouchsafed that no matter how much Joshua submitted to time’s corrosives he would endure. One of his favorite books—and one of the crucial texts for his poets—was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and from it he’d learned to see life as both mutable and miraculous, but now every change that was happening to his body was frightening, monstrous. Now he rethought everything and realized that when Daphne had turned into a laurel tree, her fingers ramifying, her thighs becoming cortical, the transformation couldn’t have been altogether comfortable.

  As the summer came to a stormy, suddenly chilly end, Joshua began to hand over most of his possessions to the two maids, mother and daughter, who cleaned the acres of marble floors twice a week and who spoke in their gentle, caressing tones to each other. He gave one of his two fans to the maids as an offering to the cruel god of realism, then stored some summer clothes in order to propitiate the smiling, infant god of hope, for hope is the youngest of the deities, the one who has all his life before him.

  We never took speedboats, which could easily cost a hundred dollars a ride, but at the end of every summer Joshua indulged himself, and the same sunburned, middle-aged man, dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt with dark blue epaulettes and pleated white trousers, backed his speedboat-taxi into the little rio beside the palace. Given the narrowness of the rio and the backwash from the passing vaporetti, the maneuver was tricky, but the captain never looked the least ruffled. He was just another Venetian, these calm, incurious, handsome people who spoke to one another in their unintelligible dialect, who criticized their compatriots for the smallest eccentricity but simply shrugged at the shenanigans of foreigners. The Venetians never read a book (never had) but they knew they inhabited the most beautiful city in the world. They crammed their small apartments with the latest furniture from Milan, made of smoked glass and chrome, of molded Plexiglas and aubergine-colored leather, but outside everything looked and smelled as it had for centuries and nothing could be changed or improved; even the wood bridge built across the Grand Canal for the Feast of the Redeemer had to be entirely dismantled every year after the holiday. We were these foreign impostors who came from our new countries, spent all our money in order to inhabit their palaces for a summer or two, then we vanished, never to return, whereas they, the Venetians, complained of their rheumatism, the incursions of acqua alta, the influx of non-paying German backpackers, but they remained, the prosaic machinery rumbling under and animating these poetic illusions.

  This year we loaded Josh’s things into the taxi and checked our air tickets once more. Joshua talked bravely about next summer. He said he wanted to go to Istanbul for two weeks in August on the boat the Orient Express operated out of Venice. But obviously he was looking around for the last time at these many-storied palaces with their green and burgundy rosettes and their stone balconies. “Oh, look, the Duc Decazes must be in residence,” Joshua declared bravely, “since there’s a book on the stone lectern, look, there, on the piano nobile, that’s how you know—that’s the palace where Mr. Tissot lived, that dear man who designed avant-garde glass, the one who told Henry McIlhenny he should go ahead and rent Count Volpe’s place for a thousand dollars a day since, as Mr. Tissot put it, “There are no pockets in the shroud.’ Now they’re both dead. Henry had to sell a Cézanne to pay the rent, but he never got to live there.”

  As Joshua’s words come echoing across the water and down the years to me, I can’t help thinking that his life was not just his finest thoughts about poetry and friendship, expressed in a style that rejected forcefulness in favor of sympathy, but it was also comprised of his long mornings in his dressing gown with the telephone, newspapers, the Hu Kwa smoked tea and the little sterling-silver strainer that sat in its drip cup when it wasn’t straddled across a cup catching leaves. His life was made up of his pleasure in the morning glories as well as his hilarity when he learned that one could be friends with th
e Franchin or the Franchetti family, not both, and his relief when he realized the choice was easily made since Christina Franchetti was the most interesting woman in Venice, she who read everything from Hume to Hedda Gabler to Calvino till dawn, slept late into the afternoon, ate lunch at five at Harry’s before rushing over to the Cipriani, hoping to catch a glimpse of a few friends still dozing or chatting by the pool. She sent her laundry to London every week. She talked late into the night about her childhood in Cuba and her girlhood in Spain. She spoke French, Spanish, English and Italian with equal headlong rapidity and if, after a long Italian dinner, one begged her to switch back to more restful English, she’d look startled and ask in her low, gravelly voice, “But aren’t we speaking English? Oh …”

  I RETURNED to Paris, Joshua to New York. As the autumn came on and every newspaper was crowded with news about Rock Hudson’s celebrity AIDS, Joshua told me over the phone he was sickened by the subject, disgusted by the media blaze lighting up Hudson’s sickbed, then his panicky flight from America to Paris in a private plane in search of a miracle treatment. Joshua was just as tired of seeing the before and after photos of the once handsome movie star.

  I seldom went out. I lived at home on the Ile St.-Louis in my small apartment looking out on the stone volutes that supported the church roof as giant snails pry up the earth. It seemed to be raining every day and I darted out only long enough to buy food and mail letters.

  I spent hours and hours on the gay party line, a number I’d dial (it was usually busy) until I’d be connected with seven or eight other men, all shouting out their home numbers or their dimensions or sexual tastes or just listening, breathing heavily. I called out my own number; everyone on the line laughed at my American accent. One man phoned me and talked me through to an orgasm.

  After that he’d phone me every night at midnight and he became my demon lover, my secret sharer, a heartbeat in my ear, the drying liquid in my fist. He’d tell me how much he loved me, and I told him the same: it was the purest affair of my life, nothing but love, desire and fantasy No face was there to mock, no body to find too gross, no demands to resent, no sex to make sure was safe. I never knew his number, but he called me every night at twelve. If, as happened only once or twice, someone else was there, I simply raised an eyebrow, let it ring and sighed, proudly, complainingly, “Men …” But usually I was in bed, reading French and looking up words and listening to the radio, dreading the moment when the Catholic music station—remote, classical, consoling—would come to an end and be replaced by the ghastly Protestant program with its guitar music, its pious folk songs and peppy homilies.