by André Aciman
It wasn’t Rome itself I was seeing; it was the film, the filter I’d placed on the old city that finally made me love it, the film I went to seek each time I’d go to a bookstore and would come out late in the evening to stroll down my Nevsky Prospekt in search of vague smiles and fellowship in a city I wasn’t even sure existed on the sidewalks. It is the film I can no longer lift off the many books I read back then, the film that reverberates over time and continues to make Rome mine long after I’ve lost it. And perhaps it is the film I go in search of each time I’m back in Rome—not Rome. We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves—the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.
Lucretius says that all objects release films, or “peeled skins” of themselves. These intimations travel from the objects and beings around us and eventually reach our senses. But the opposite is also true: we radiate films of what we have within us and project them onto everything we see—which is how we become aware of the world and, ultimately, why we come to love it. Without these films, these fictions, which are both our alibis and the archive of our innermost life, we have no way to connect to or touch anything.
* * *
I learned to read and to love books much as I learned to know and to love Rome: not only by intuiting undisclosed passageways everywhere but also by seeing more of me in books than there probably was, because everything I read seemed more in me already than on the pages themselves. I knew that my way of reading books might be aberrant, just as I knew that figuring my way around Rome as I did would shock the fussiest of tourists.
I was after something intimate and I learned to spot it in the first alley, in the first verse of a poem, on the first glance of a stranger. Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn’t possibly belong elsewhere but that turn out to be broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours. Never mind that we’ve never seen, felt, or lived through anything remotely similar. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then—never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back.
Suddenly, the insights nursed by strangers belong, against all odds, to us as well. We know what an author desires, what he dissembles; we even know why. The better a writer, the better he erases his footprints—yet the better the writer, the more he wants us to intuit and put back those parts he chose to hide. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author’s soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work.
With the right hunch. Pascal: “Il faut deviner, mais bien deviner.” You have to guess—but guess right.
What I found in the authors I grew to love was precisely the right to assume that I hadn’t misread them at all, that I wasn’t making up what I was seeing, and that I was getting the obvious meaning as well as the one they were not too keen to proclaim and might gainsay if confronted, perhaps because they themselves were not seeing it as clearly as they should, or were pretending not to. I was intuiting something for which there was no proof but that I knew was essential, because without this one unstated thing, their work wouldn’t hold.
It never occurred to me then that insight and intuition, which are the essence, the genius, of all criticism, are born from this intimate fusion of self with something or someone else. To everything—books, places, people—I brought a desire to steal into and intuit something undisclosed, perhaps because I mistrusted all appearances, or because I was so withdrawn that I needed to believe others were as dissembled and withdrawn as I feared I was. Perhaps I loved prying. Perhaps insight was like touching—but without asking, without risk. Perhaps spying was my way of reaching out to the Roman life that was all around me. In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: “We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone’s mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals.” I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone else was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them. The world in my image. All I cared for were streets that bore my name and the trace of my passage there; and all I wanted were novels in which everyone’s soul was laid bare and anatomized, because nothing interested me more than the nether, undisclosed aspects of people and things that were identical to mine. Exposed, everyone would turn out to be just like me. They understood me, I understood them, we were no longer strangers. I dissembled, they dissembled. The more they were like me, the more I’d learn to accept and perhaps grow to like who I was. My hunches, my insights were nothing more than furtive ways of bridging the insuperable distance between me and the world.
In the end, my solitude, my disaffection, my shame on Via Clelia, and my wish to withdraw into an imaginary nineteenth-century bubble were not incidental to the books I was reading. My disaffection was part of what I saw in these books and was essential to my reading of them, just as what I read in Ovid was not unrelated to my tremulous yearnings for the swarthy knees of the Gypsy girl. But they were essential in an altogether strange and undisclosed manner. I wasn’t identifying with Dostoyevsky’s characters because I too was poor or withdrawn, any more than I was identifying with the lusts of Byblis and of Salmacis because I would have given anything to undress the Gypsy girl in my bedroom. What my favorite authors were asking of me was that I read them intimately—not an invitation to read my own pulse on someone else’s work, but to read an author’s pulse as though it were my own, the height of presumption, because it presupposed that by trusting my deepest, most intimate thoughts about a book, I was in fact tapping on, or rather divining, the author’s own. It was an invitation to read not what others had taught me to read, but to see what I, by virtue of the films I brought to everything, was seeing, yet to see things in such a way that the very few who heard me report what I’d seen would agree that they too had always seen things in exactly the same way. The more solipsistic and idiosyncratic my insights were, the more people said they nursed the very same ones themselves.
Maybe this is why I liked every French roman d’analyse. Everyone was after intimacy in those novels, yet everyone dissembled and knew that everyone else did so as well. Over and above every plot their authors spun and every grand idea they jiggled before their readers, the one thrilling moment in these novels always came when their authors bored through that amorphous landfill of inhibition called the psyche and wrote something like: Her lover knew, by the way she showed every conceivable proof of love for him, that she was determined to say no to him. Or: Her future husband could tell, by the way she blushed whenever they were alone together, that she felt neither love, nor passion, nor desire for him; her blushes came from exaggerated modesty, which in her coy, girlish way she was pleased to mistake for love. The very means meant to conceal her blushes is precisely what gave them away. Her husband guessed by how happy his wife was when she heard that their friend was not going to join them on their trip to Spain that he was the one with whom she’d have betrayed him if only she had the courage. Or: The frown with which she seemed to dismiss the man she wished she didn’t love told him everything he longed to know. Even the abrupt, rude manner with which she snapped at him as soon
as they were alone was a good sign: she was more in love with him than he had ever hoped.
* * *
Then, one summer evening, a sentence suddenly pops up and seems to determine the course of my life.
Je crus que si quelque chose pouvait rallumer les sentiments que vous aviez eus pour moi, c’était de vous faire voir que les miens étaient changés; mais de vous le faire voir en feignant de vous le cacher, et comme si je n’eusse pas eu la force de vous l’avouer.
[I thought that if anything could rekindle your feelings for me, it was to let you see that mine too had changed, but to let you see this by feigning to wish to conceal it from you, as if I lacked the courage to acknowledge it to you.]
This sentence was me. I reread this sentence from La Princesse de Clèves many times over. The letter of a woman who wins back the man who jilted her was no less intimate and dissembled than I was in my days and nights. If she succeeds in rekindling his love, it’s not by feigning indifference for him—he would have seen through this feint easily enough—but merely by pretending to want to conceal a budding indifference that seizes her almost against her will. There was so much guile and so much insight in her letter that for the first time in my life I knew that what I needed to navigate the multiple removes of La Fayette’s prose was nothing more than the courage to think that I had lived this sentence, that I was this sentence more than this sentence was La Fayette’s.
By coincidence—and if it wasn’t a coincidence, what was it?—the evening I discovered this sentence fell on a Wednesday on the number 85 bus. As I walked with my Princesse de Clèves on my way home, the girl at the small supermarket was sweeping the floor by the sidewalk wearing her light-blue tunic. She caught me walking by and gave me her usual ill-tempered stare. I looked away. When, fifteen minutes later, I went to redeem our bottles, she emptied the bag, lined the bottles on the glass counter as she always did, and, after dropping the coins into the change plate, leaned over toward me and, extending her right hand, elbow touching elbow, rubbed her index finger the length of my bare forearm, quietly, softly, slowly. I felt my lungs choke, as I fought the impulse to withdraw my arm, something at once spellbound and illicit racing through my chest. Her touch might have been a sibling’s sympathy caress, or anything ranging from a don’t-forget-your-change-now, to a let’s-test-if-you’re-ticklish, or a you’re-sweet, I-like-you, relax!, or just simply stay-well, be-happy. Then, for the first time, and perhaps because she seemed less busy than usual, she smiled. I smiled back, diffidently, barely hearing what she said. We’d exchanged no more than four sentences.
I had wanted smiles and fellowship. And smiles and fellowship I’d gotten. Someone, a stranger, had read me through and through—down to my jitters, my wants, my second thoughts. She knew I knew she knew. Was it possible that I spoke the same language as everybody else?
It took weeks to screw up the courage to pass by the store again. Trying not to look nervous, trying to seem mildly distracted as well, trying to show that I was capable of bandying a joke or two if prompted, trying to find safe ways to retreat in case she stared me down again—with all these feelings sparring in my mind, I heard her remember my name while I had all but forgotten hers.
I tried to cover up my mistake. Blushes, shortness of breath, more blushes. How paradoxical, that I, the most innocent boy on Via Clelia, should turn out to seem no better than a cad who forgets names—and should be tormented both for being so hopelessly enamored and for suggesting the very opposite. I decided to milk this newfound roguery by overdoing and showing I was overdoing my apologies, hoping she’d disbelieve them. “One of these days we should go to the movies,” she said. I nodded a breathless and sheepish yes. It took me forever to realize that “one of these days” meant this very evening—last row, dark, empty weekday movie theater. “I can’t,” I said, trying to sound abstract, meaning never. It didn’t seem to faze her at all. “Whenever you want, then.”
That same Saturday evening, while coming back from bookstores downtown, I saw her standing with her beau at the bus stop across the way. They were headed downtown. They weren’t even touching, but you could tell they were together. He was older. Figures. She had washed her hair and was wearing flashy, party clothes. Why wasn’t I surprised? I felt rage coursing up my body, around my temples. I hated everything—the street, her, me.
I put off going to the small supermarket. With the visa approaching, part of me had left that store behind long before I stopped going there. Soon, I’d be in New York, where another me, who wasn’t even born yet, might never remember any of this. By next winter when it snows there, I’d never think back on this corner.
It would never have occurred to me that this other me one day would give anything to run into the shadow me trapped under Via Clelia.
* * *
So on my return visit with my family, I looked for the tiny supermarket, hoping not to find it, or, rather, saving it for last. When we reached the end of Via Clelia I realized that the store was gone. Perhaps I’d forgotten where it was. But a second look, and another across the street, even—as though the shop might have shifted to the other side, or had always been across the way—told me there was no doubt about it. It was gone. All I’d hoped was to recapture the thrill, the fear, the thumping in my chest each time I caught her eyes on those evenings when I’d go to redeem our bottles. Perhaps I longed to walk back into that same store and see for myself—my way of closing the circle, settling the score, having the last word. I’d have walked in, leaned against the glass counter, and just waited awhile, just waited, see what comes up, who turns up, see if the ritual had changed, see if I’d be the same person on the same errand on the same street.
To make light of my disappointment and draw their laughter, I told my sons all that happened in the tiny supermarket: woman rubbing her finger on Dad’s forearm, body touching body—was ever a come-on more explicit?—Dad running for cover under Grandma’s kitchen apron, and as always scampering back to his books, never daring to go back, while skulking and prowling the streets for days and weeks afterward—for years, I should have said—for decades and a lifetime. “Were you in love with her?” one of my sons finally asked. I didn’t think so; love had nothing to do with it. “So you never spoke again,” said another. No, we never did.
But I hadn’t told them the truth, the whole truth. I might as well have been lying. Would they know? Would they dust for the footprints I had erased in the hope they’d ask the right question, knowing that, if they asked the right question, they’d have guessed the answer already, and that if they’d guessed it, they’d be reading my pulse as if it were their own?
Writing—as I did later that day—is intended to dig out the fault lines where truth and dissembling shift places. Or is it meant to bury them even deeper?
Before leaving, I took one last look at Via Clelia. All those rides on the bus, the walks through Rome, the books, the faces, the waiting for visas that I sometimes wished might never come because I had grown to like this place, the vitamin shots, the conversations at the kitchen table, Gina who almost seemed to rush out in tears sometimes, and the dream launched like a desperate call on a winter night when I finished reading “The Dead” and thought to myself, I must head west and leave this town and seek a world where snow falls “softly” “into the dark mutinous Shannon waves”—all, all of it no more than a film, the aura of my love for Rome that was perhaps no more than my love for a might-be life born from a story Joyce had penned during his hapless stay in Rome, thinking of his half-real, half-remembered Dublin. The cold nights staring out my window as rain fell obliquely against the lamplight; the evening I came so close to another body that I knew I could no longer live like this; the sense that life could have started or just turned on this improbable three-block stretch—all of it a film, perhaps the best and most enduring part of me, but a film all the same. All I’d encountered here were half-truths. Rome, a half-truth, Via Clelia, a half-truth, the adolescent who ran errands after school, his books, t
he Gypsy girl, the girl from the supermarket, half-truths as well, even my return trip now, a muddle of half-truths veiling the numbing thought that, if I never really wanted to come back here and had been putting it off for years, it was also because, much as I thought I hated it, I wished I’d never left at all.
Did I know what this numbness was? I blamed it on my fictions, my films, my impulse to deflect the here and now by proposing elsewheres and otherwises. But perhaps numbness had a more troubling side. And as I neared the Furio Camillo Metro station and could no longer see Via Clelia, something did begin to come to me, distantly at first, then, as we were about to enter the station, with a fierceness I’d never expected: Via Clelia was not just littered with the many books I’d read there, but what it harbored unchanged, untouched after forty years, were chilling premonitions of the city across the Atlantic for which I knew I’d have to abandon Rome some day soon, a city that terrified me and which I hadn’t seen yet and feared I might never learn to fathom, much less love. That city had been dogging me during my three years in Rome. I’d have to learn to like another city all over again—wouldn’t I?—learn to put new books on the face of yet another place, learn to unlove this one, learn to forget, learn not to look back, learn new habits, learn a new idiom, learn a new me all over again. I remember exactly the spot where this discovery had filled me with disquieting premonitions: in a used bookstore on Via Camilla where I’d found by pure chance a tattered old copy of Miss Lonelyhearts and simply hated it, hated the thought of moving to a country where people liked and read such books. And on that spot it had finally dawned on me that, if I had never wanted to live in Rome, still I would have given everything to stay here, on this street, with these people, with their language, their yelps, their seedy movie theaters, the girl from the supermarket, and eventually become as surly and kindhearted as each and every one of them had been to me.