by André Aciman
When he walked by me, I couldn’t help but extend my hand and shake his and tell him how much I had enjoyed reading his poems. How could I have read his poems, if the book wasn’t even out yet? Someone else overheard his question—were they going to throw me out of the store like an impostor?
“I purchased it in the bookstore in B. a few weeks ago, and you were kind enough to sign it for me.”
He remembered the evening, so he said. “Un vero fan, a real fan, then,” he added loudly, so that the others within hearing distance might hear. In fact, they all turned around. “Maybe not a fan—at his age they’re more likely to be called groupies,” added an elderly woman with a goiter and loud colors that made her look like a toucan.
“Which poem did you like best?”
“Alfredo, you’re behaving like a teacher at an oral exam,” jibed a thirty-something woman.
“I just wanted to know which poem he liked best. There’s no harm in asking, is there?” he whined with quivering mock exasperation in his voice.
For a moment I believed that the woman who had stood up for me had gotten me off the hook. I was mistaken.
“So tell me,” he resumed, “which one.”
“The one comparing life to San Clemente.”
“The one comparing love to San Clemente,” he corrected, as though meditating the profundity of both our statements. “‘The San Clemente Syndrome.’” The poet stared at me. “And why?”
“My God, just leave the poor boy alone, will you? Here,” interrupted another woman who had overheard my other advocate. She grabbed hold of my hand. “I’ll lead you to the food so that you can get away from this monster with an ego the size of his feet—have you seen how big his shoes are? Alfredo, you should really do something about your shoes,” she said from across the crowded bookstore.
“My shoes? What’s wrong with my shoes?” asked the poet.
“They. Are. Too. Big. Don’t they look huge?” she was asking me. “Poets can’t have such big feet.”
“Leave my feet alone.”
Someone else took pity on the poet. “Don’t mock his feet, Lucia. There’s nothing wrong with his feet.”
“A pauper’s feet. Walked barefoot all his life, and still buys shoes a size bigger, in case he grows before next Christmas when the family stocks up for the holidays!” Playing the embittered or forsaken shrew.
But I did not let go of her hand. Nor she of mine. City camaraderie. How nice to hold a woman’s hand, especially when you don’t know a thing about her. Se l’amore, I thought. And all these tanned arms and elbows that belonged to all these women looking down from the gallery. Se l’amore.
The bookstore owner interrupted what could just as easily have been a staged tiff between husband and wife. “Se l’amore,” he shouted. Everyone laughed. It was not clear whether laughter was a sign of relief in having the marital spat broken up or because the use of the words Se l’amore implied, If this is love, then…
But people understood that this was also a signal for the reading to start and everyone found a comfortable corner or a wall against which to lean. Our corner was the best, right on the spiral staircase, each of us sitting on a tread. Still holding hands. The publisher was about to introduce the poet when the door squeaked open. Oliver was trying to squeeze his way in accompanied by two stunning girls who were either flashy models or movie actresses. It felt as though he had snatched them along the way to the bookstore and was bringing one for him and one for me. Se l’amore.
“Oliver! Finally!” shouted the publisher, holding up his glass of scotch. “Welcome, welcome.”
Everyone turned around.
“One of the youngest, most talented American philosophers,” he said, “accompanied by my lovely daughters, without whom Se l’amore would never have seen the light of day.”
The poet agreed. His wife turned to me and whispered, “Such babes, aren’t they?” The publisher came down the little stepladder and hugged Oliver. He took hold of the large X-ray envelope in which Oliver had stuffed his pages. “Manuscript?” “Manuscript,” replied Oliver. In exchange, the publisher handed him tonight’s book. “You gave me one already.” “That’s right.” But Oliver politely admired the cover, then looked around and finally spotted me sitting next to Lucia. He walked up to me, put an arm around my shoulder, and leaned over to kiss her. She looked at me again, looked at Oliver, sized up the situation: “Oliver, sei un dissoluto, you’re debauched.”
“Se l’amore,” he replied, displaying a copy of the book, as if to say that whatever he did in life was already in her husband’s book, and therefore quite permissible.
“Se l’amore yourself.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was being called dissolute because of the two babes he had wandered in with or because of me. Or both.
Oliver introduced me to both girls. Obviously he knew them well, and both cared for him. “Sei l’amico di Oliver, vero? You’re Oliver’s friend, right?” one of them asked. “He spoke about you.”
“Saying?”
“Good things.”
She leaned against the wall next to where I was now standing by the poet’s wife. “He’s never going to let go of my hand, is he?” said Lucia, as though speaking to an absent third party. Perhaps she wanted the two babes to notice.
I did not want to let go of her hand immediately but knew that I must. So I held it in both hands, brought it to my lips, kissed its edge close to the palm, then let it go. It was, I felt, as though I’d had her for an entire afternoon and was now releasing her to her husband as one releases a bird whose broken wing had taken forever to mend.
“Se l’amore,” she said, all the while shaking her head to simulate a reprimand. “No less dissolute than the other, just sweeter. I leave him to you.”
One of the daughters gave a forced giggle. “We’ll see what we can do with him.”
I was in heaven.
She knew my name. Hers was Amanda. Her sister’s Adele. “There’s a third one too,” said Amanda, making light of their number. “She should already be around here somewhere.”
The poet cleared his throat. The usual words of thanks to everyone. Last but not least, to the light of his eyes, Lucia. Why she puts up with him? Why ever does she? hissed the wife with a loving smile aimed at the poet.
“Because of his shoes,” he said.
“There.”
“Get on with it, Alfredo,” said the goitered toucan.
“Se l’amore. Se l’amore is a collection of poems based on a season in Thailand teaching Dante. As many of you know, I loved Thailand before going and hated it as soon as I arrived. Let me rephrase: I hated it once I was there and loved it as soon as I left.”
Laughter.
Drinks were being passed around.
“In Bangkok I kept thinking of Rome—what else?—of this little roadside shop here, and of the surrounding streets just before sunset, and of the sound of church bells on Easter Sunday, and on rainy days, which last forever in Bangkok, I could almost cry. Lucia, Lucia, Lucia, why didn’t you ever say no when you knew how much I’d miss you on these days that made me feel more hollow than Ovid when they sent him to that misbegotten outpost where he died? I left a fool and came back no wiser. The people of Thailand are beautiful—so loneliness can be a cruel thing when you’ve had a bit to drink and are on the verge of touching the first stranger that comes your way—they’re all beautiful there, but you pay for a smile by the shot glass.” He stopped as though to collect his thoughts. “I called these poems ‘Tristia.’”
“Tristia” took up the better part of twenty minutes. Then came the applause. The word one of the two girls used was forte. Molto forte. The goitered toucan turned to another woman who had never stopped nodding at almost every syllable spoken by the poet and who now kept repeating, Straordinario-fantastico. The poet stepped down, took a glass of water, and held his breath for a while—to get rid of a bad case of hiccups. I had mistaken his hiccups for suppressed sobs. The poet, looking into
all the pockets of his sports jacket and coming out empty, joined his index and middle fingers tightly together and, waving both fingers next to his mouth, signaled to the bookstore owner that he wanted to smoke and maybe mingle for a couple of minutes. Straordinario-fantastico, who intercepted his signal, instantly produced her cigarette case. “Stasera non dormo, tonight I won’t be able to sleep, the wages of poetry,” she said, blaming his poetry for what was sure to be a night of throbbing insomnia.
By now everyone was sweating, and the greenhouse atmosphere both inside and outside the bookstore had become unbearably sticky.
“For the love of God, open the door,” cried the poet to the owner of the bookstore. “We’re suffocating in here.” Mr. Venga took out a tiny wedge of wood, opened the door, and prodded it in between the wall and the bronze frame.
“Better?” he asked deferentially.
“No. But at least we know the door is open.”
Oliver looked at me, meaning, Did you like it? I shrugged my shoulders, like someone reserving judgment for later. But I was not being sincere; I liked it a lot.
Perhaps what I liked far more was the evening. Everything about it thrilled me. Every glance that crossed my own came like a compliment, or like an asking and a promise that simply lingered in midair between me and the world around me. I was electrified—by the chaffing, the irony, the glances, the smiles that seemed pleased I existed, by the buoyant air in the shop that graced everything from the glass door to the petits fours, to the golden ochre spell of plastic glasses filled with scotch whiskey, to Mr. Venga’s rolled-up sleeves, to the poet himself, down to the spiral staircase where we had congregated with the babe sisters—all seemed to glow with a luster at once spellbound and aroused.
I envied these lives and thought back to the thoroughly delibidinized lives of my parents with their stultifying lunches and dinner drudges, our dollhouse lives in our dollhouse home, and of my senior year looming ahead. Everything appeared like child’s play compared to this. Why go away to America in a year when I could just as easily spend the rest of my four years away coming to readings like this and sit and talk as some were already doing right now? There was more to learn in this tiny crammed bookstore than in any of the mighty institutions across the Atlantic.
An older man with a scraggly large beard and Falstaff’s paunch brought me a glass of scotch.
“Ecco.”
“For me?”
“Of course for you. Did you like the poems?”
“Very much,” I said, trying to look ironic and insincere, I don’t know why.
“I’m his godfather and I respect your opinion,” he said, as though he’d seen through my first bluff and gone no further. “But I respect your youth more.”
“In a few years I promise you there won’t be much youth left,” I said, trying to assume the resigned irony of men who’ve been around and know themselves.
“Yes, but by then I won’t be around to notice.”
Was he hitting on me?
“So take it,” he said, offering me the plastic cup. I hesitated before accepting. It was the same brand of scotch my father drank at home.
Lucia, who had caught the exchange, said: “Tanto, one scotch more or less won’t make you any less dissolute than you already are.”
“I wish I were dissolute,” I said, turning to her and ignoring Falstaff.
“Why, what’s missing in your life?”
“What’s missing in my life?” I was going to say Everything, but corrected myself. “Friends—the way everyone seems to be fast friends in this place—I wish I had friends like yours, like you.”
“There’ll be plenty of time for these friendships. Would friends save you from being dissoluto?” The word kept coming back like an accusation of a deep and ugly fault in my character.
“I wish I had one friend I wasn’t destined to lose.”
She looked at me with a pensive smile.
“You’re speaking volumes, my friend, and tonight we’re doing short poems only.”
She kept looking at me. “I feel for you.” She brought her palm in a sad and lingering caress to my face, as if I had suddenly become her child.
I loved that too.
“You’re too young to know what I’m saying—but one day soon, I hope we’ll speak again, and then we’ll see if I’m big enough to take back the word I used tonight. Scherzavo, I was only joking.” A kiss to my cheek.
What a world this was. She was more than twice my age but I could have made love to her this minute and wept with her.
“Are we toasting or what?” shouted someone in another corner of the shop.
There was a mêlée of sounds.
And then it came. A hand on my shoulder. It was Amanda’s. And another on my waist. Oh, I knew that other hand so well. May it never let go of me tonight. I worship every finger on that hand, every nail you bite on every one of your fingers, my dear, dear Oliver—don’t let go of me yet, for I need that hand there. A shudder ran down my spine.
“And I’m Ada,” someone said almost by way of apology, as though aware she’d taken far too long to work her way to our end of the store and was now making it up to us by letting everyone in our corner know that she was the Ada everyone had surely been speaking about. Something raucous and rakish in her voice, or in the way she took her time saying Ada, or in the way she seemed to make light of everything—book parties, introductions, even friendship—suddenly told me that, without a doubt, this evening I’d stepped into a spellbound world indeed.
I’d never traveled in this world. But I loved this world. And I would love it even more once I learned how to speak its language—for it was my language, a form of address where our deepest longings are smuggled in banter, not because it is safer to put a smile on what we fear may shock, but because the inflections of desire, of all desire in this new world I’d stepped into, could only be conveyed in play.
Everyone was available, lived availably—like the city—and assumed everyone else wished to be so as well. I longed to be like them.
The bookstore owner chimed a bell by the cash register and everyone was quiet.
The poet spoke. “I was not going to read this poem tonight, but because someone”—here, he altered his voice—“someone mentioned it, I could not resist. It’s entitled ‘The San Clemente Syndrome.’ It is, I must admit, i.e., if a versifier is allowed to say this about his own work, my favorite.” (I later found out that he never referred to himself as a poet or his work as poetry.) “Because it was the most difficult, because it made me terribly, terribly homesick, because it saved me in Thailand, because it explained my entire life to me. I counted my days, my nights, with San Clemente in mind. The idea of coming back to Rome without finishing this long poem scared me more than being stranded at Bangkok’s airport for another week. And yet, it was in Rome, where we live not two hundred meters away from the Basilica of San Clemente, that I put the finishing touches to a poem which, ironically enough, I had started eons ago in Bangkok precisely because Rome felt galaxies away.”
As he read the long poem, I began thinking that, unlike him, I had always found a way to avoid counting the days. We were leaving in three days—and then whatever I had with Oliver was destined to go up in thin air. We had talked about meeting in the States, and we had talked of writing and speaking by phone—but the whole thing had a mysteriously surreal quality kept intentionally opaque by both of us—not because we wanted to allow events to catch us unprepared so that we might blame circumstances and not ourselves, but because by not planning to keep things alive, we were avoiding the prospect that they might ever die. We had come to Rome in the same spirit of avoidance: Rome was a final bash before school and travel took us away, just a way of putting things off and extending the party long past closing time. Perhaps, without thinking, we had taken more than a brief vacation; we were eloping together with return-trip tickets to separate destinations.
Perhaps it was his gift to me.
Perhaps it was my
father’s gift to the two of us.
Would I be able to live without his hand on my tummy or around my hips? Without kissing and licking a wound on his hip that would take weeks to heal, but away from me now? Whom else would I ever be able to call by my name?
There would be others, of course, and others after others, but calling them by my name in a moment of passion would feel like a derived thrill, an affectation.
I remembered the emptied closet and the packed suitcase next to his bed. Soon I’d sleep in Oliver’s room. I’d sleep with his shirt, lie with it next to me, wear it in my sleep.
After the reading, more applause, more conviviality, more drinks. Soon it was time to close the store. I remembered Marzia when the bookstore in B. was closing. How far, how different. How thoroughly unreal she’d become.
Someone said we should all head out to dinner together. There were about thirty of us. Someone else suggested a restaurant on Lake Albano. A restaurant overlooking a starlit night sprang to my imagination like something out of an illuminated manuscript from the late Middle Ages. No, too far, someone said. Yes, but the lights on the lake at night…The lights on the lake at night will have to wait for another time. Why not somewhere on via Cassia? Yes, but that didn’t solve the problem of the cars: there weren’t enough of them. Sure there were enough cars. And if we had to sit on top of each other for a little while, would anyone mind? Of course not. Especially if I get to sit in between these two beauties. Yes, but what if Falstaff were to sit on the beauties?