by André Aciman
This was much worse. I didn’t even know what to call this.
On second thought, I didn’t even know what to call last night’s jitters either.
I had taken a giant step last night. Yet here I was, no wiser and no more sure of things than I’d been before feeling him all over me. We might as well not even have slept together.
At least last night there was the fear of failing, the fear of being thrown out or called the very name I had used on others. Now that I had overcome that fear, had this anxiety been present all along, though latent, like a presage and a warning of killer reefs beyond the squall?
And why did I care where he was? Wasn’t this what I wanted for both of us—butchers and bakers and all that? Why feel so unhinged just because he wasn’t there or because he’d given me the slip, why sense that all I was doing now was waiting for him—waiting, waiting, waiting?
What was it about waiting that was beginning to feel like torture?
If you are with someone, Oliver, it is time to come home. No questions asked, I promise, just don’t keep me waiting.
If he doesn’t show up in ten minutes, I’ll do something.
Ten minutes later, feeling helpless and hating myself for feeling helpless, I resolved to wait another this-time-for-real ten minutes.
Twenty minutes later, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put on a sweater, walked off the balcony, and came downstairs. I’d go to B., if I had to, and check for myself. I was on my way to the bike shed, already debating whether to head out to N. first, where people tended to stay up and party much later than in B., and was cursing myself for not putting air in the tires earlier this morning, when suddenly something told me I should stop dead in my tracks and try not to disturb Anchise, who slept in the hut nearby. Sinister Anchise—everyone said he was sinister. Had I suspected it all along? I must have. The fall from the bike, Anchise’s peasant ointment, the kindness with which he took care of him and cleaned up the scrape.
But down below along the rocky shore, in the moonlight, I caught sight of him. He was sitting on one of the higher rocks, wearing his sailor’s white-and-blue-striped sweater with the buttons always undone along his shoulder which he’d purchased in Sicily earlier in the summer. He was doing nothing, just hugging his knees, listening to the ripples lap against the rocks below him. Looking at him now from the balustrade, I felt something so tender for him that it reminded me how eagerly I had rushed to B. to catch him before he’d even made it into the post office. This was the best person I’d ever known in my life. I had chosen him well. I opened the gate and skipped down the several rocks and reached him.
“I was waiting for you,” I said.
“I thought you’d gone to sleep. I even thought you didn’t want to.”
“No. Waiting. I just turned the lights off.”
I looked up to our house. The window shutters were all closed. I bent down and kissed him on his neck. It was the first time I had kissed him with feeling, not just desire. He put his arm around me. Harmless, if anyone saw.
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“Thinking.”
“About?”
“Things. Going back to the States. The courses I have to teach this fall. The book. You.”
“Me?”
“Me?” He was mimicking my modesty.
“No one else?”
“No one else.” He was silent for a while. “I come here every night and just sit here. Sometimes I spend hours.”
“All by yourself?”
He nodded.
“I never knew. I thought—”
“I know what you thought.”
The news couldn’t have made me happier. It had obviously been shadowing everything between us. I decided not to press the matter.
“This spot is probably what I’ll miss the most.” Then, upon reflection: “I’ve been happy in B.”
It sounded like a preamble to farewells.
“I was looking out towards there,” he continued, pointing to the horizon, “and thinking that in two weeks I’ll be back at Columbia.”
He was right. I had made a point never to count the days. At first because I didn’t want to think how long he’d stay with us; later because I didn’t want to face how few were his remaining days.
“All this means is that in ten days when I look out to this spot, you won’t be here. I don’t know what I’ll do then. At least you’ll be elsewhere, where there are no memories.”
He squeezed my shoulder to him. “The way you think sometimes…You’ll be fine.”
“I might. But then I might not. We wasted so many days—so many weeks.”
“Wasted? I don’t know. Perhaps we just needed time to figure out if this is what we wanted.”
“Some of us made things purposely difficult.”
“Me?”
I nodded. “You know what we were doing exactly one night ago.”
He smiled. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“I’m not sure either. But I am glad we did.”
“Will you be okay?”
“I’ll be okay.” I slipped a hand into his pants. “I do love being here with you.”
It was my way of saying, I’ve been happy here as well. I tried to picture what happy here meant to him: happy once he got here after imagining what the place might look like, happy doing his work on those scorching mornings in heaven, happy biking back and forth from the translator, happy disappearing into town every night and coming back so late, happy with my parents and dinner drudgery, happy with his poker friends and all the other friends he had made in town and about whom I knew nothing whatsoever? One day he might tell me. I wondered what part I played in the overall happiness package.
Meanwhile, tomorrow, if we went for an early morning swim, I might be overcome again with this surfeit of self-loathing. I wondered if one got used to that. Or does one accrue a deficit of malaise so large that one learns to find ways to consolidate it in one lump feeling with its own amnesties and grace periods? Or does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like an intruder, become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell—so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who’ll relieve it at night?
The next morning we went swimming together. It was scarcely past six o’clock, and the fact that it was so early gave an energized quality to our exercise. Later, as he performed his own version of the dead-man’s float, I wanted to hold him, as swimming instructors do when they hold your body so lightly that they seem to keep you afloat with barely a touch of their fingers. Why did I feel older than he was at that moment? I wanted to protect him from everything this morning, from the rocks, from the jellyfish, now that jellyfish season was upon us, from Anchise, whose sinister leer, as he’d trundle into the garden to turn on the sprinklers, constantly pulling out weeds wherever he turned, even when it rained, even when he spoke to you, even when he threatened to leave us, seemed to tease out every secret you thought you’d neatly buried from his gaze.
“How are you?” I asked, mimicking his question to me yesterday morning.
“You should know.”
At breakfast, I couldn’t believe what seized me, but I found myself cutting the top of his soft-boiled egg before Mafalda intervened or before he had smashed it with his spoon. I had never done this for anyone else in my life, and yet here I was, making certain that not a speck of the shell fell into his egg. He was happy with his egg. When Mafalda brought him his daily polpo, I was happy for him. Domestic bliss. Just because he’d let me be his top last night.
I caught my father staring at me as I finished slicing off the tip of his second soft-boiled egg.
“Americans never know how to do it,” I said.
“I am sure they have their way…,” he said.
The foot that came to rest on mine under the table told me that perhaps I should let it go and assume my father was onto something. “He’s no fool,” he said to me later that morning as
he was getting ready to head up to B.
“Want me to come with?”
“No, better keep a low profile. You should work on your Haydn today. Later.”
“Later.”
Marzia called that morning while he was getting ready to leave. He almost winked when he handed me the telephone. There was no hint of irony, nothing that didn’t remind me, unless I was mistaken—and I don’t think I was—that what we had between us was the total transparency that exists among friends only.
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
When I think back to our last ten days together, I see an early-morning swim, our lazy breakfasts, the ride up to town, work in the garden, lunches, our afternoon naps, more work in the afternoon, tennis maybe, after-dinners in the piazzetta, and every night the kind of lovemaking that can run circles around time. Looking back to these days, I don’t think there was ever a minute, other than the half hour or so he spent with his translator, or when I managed to steal a few hours with Marzia, when we weren’t together.
“When did you know about me?” I asked him one day. I was hoping he’d say, When I squeezed your shoulder and you almost wilted in my arms. Or, When you got wet under your bathing suit that one afternoon when we chatted in your room. Something along those lines. “When you blushed,” he said. “Me?” We had been talking about translating poetry; it was early in the morning, during his very first week with us. We had started working earlier than usual that day, probably because we already enjoyed our spontaneous conversations while the breakfast table was being laid out under the linden tree and were eager to spend some time together. He’d asked me if I’d ever translated poetry. I said I had. Why, had he? Yes. He was reading Leopardi and had landed on a few verses that were impossible to translate. We had been speaking back and forth, neither of us realizing how far a conversation started on the fly could go, because all the while delving deeper into Leopardi’s world, we were also finding occasional side alleys where our natural sense of humor and our love for clowning were given free play. We translated the passage into English, then from English to ancient Greek, then back to gobbledygenglish to gobbledygitalian. Leopardi’s closing lines of “To the Moon” were so warped that it brought bursts of laughter as we kept repeating the nonsense lines in Italian—when suddenly there was a moment of silence, and when I looked up at him he was staring at me point-blank, that icy, glassy look of his which always disconcerted me. I was struggling to say something, and when he asked how I knew so many things, I had the presence of mind to say something about being a professor’s son. I was not always eager to show off my knowledge, especially with someone who could so easily intimidate me. I had nothing to fight back with, nothing to add, nothing to throw in to muddy the waters between us, nowhere to hide or run for cover. I felt as exposed as a stranded lamb on the dry, waterless plains of the Serengeti.
The staring was no longer part of the conversation, or even of the fooling around with translation; it had superseded it and become its own subject, except that neither dared nor wanted to bring it up. And yes, there was such a luster in his eyes that I had to look away, and when I looked back at him, his gaze hadn’t moved and was still focused on my face, as if to say, So you looked away and you’ve come back, will you be looking away again soon?—which was why I had to look away once more, as if immersed in thought, yet all the while scrambling for something to say, the way a fish struggles for water in a muddied pond that’s fast drying up in the heat. He must have known exactly what I was feeling. What made me blush in the end was not the natural embarrassment of the moment when I could tell he’d caught me trying to hold his gaze only then to let mine scamper to safety; what made me blush was the thrilling possibility, unbelievable as I wanted it to remain, that he might actually like me, and that he liked me in just the way I liked him.
For weeks I had mistaken his stare for barefaced hostility. I was wide of the mark. It was simply a shy man’s way of holding someone else’s gaze.
We were, it finally dawned on me, the two shyest persons in the world.
My father was the only one who had seen through him from the very start.
“Do you like Leopardi?” I asked, to break the silence, but also to suggest that it was the topic of Leopardi that had caused me to seem somewhat distracted during a pause in our conversation.
“Yes, very much.”
“I like him very much too.”
I’d always known I wasn’t speaking about Leopardi. The question was, did he?
“I knew I was making you uncomfortable, but I just had to make sure.”
“So you knew all this time?”
“Let’s say I was pretty sure.”
In other words, it had started just days after his arrival. Had everything since been pretense, then? And all these swings between friendship and indifference—what were they? His and my ways of keeping stealthy tabs on each other while disclaiming that we were? Or were they simply as cunning a way as any to stave each other off, hoping that what we felt was indeed genuine indifference?
“Why didn’t you give me a sign?” I said.
“I did. At least I tried.”
“When?”
“After tennis once. I touched you. Just as a way of showing I liked you. The way you reacted made me feel I’d almost molested you. I decided to keep my distance.”
Our best moments were in the afternoon. After lunch, I’d go upstairs for a nap just when coffee was about to be served. Then, when the lunch guests had left, or slunk away to rest in the guesthouse, my father would either retire to his study or steal a nap with my mother. By two in the afternoon, an intense silence would settle over the house, over the world it seemed, interrupted here and there either by the cooing of doves or by Anchise’s hammer when he worked on his tools and was trying not to make too much noise. I liked hearing him at work in the afternoon, and even when his occasional banging or sawing woke me up, or when the knife grinder would start his whetstone running every Wednesday afternoon, it left me feeling as restful and at peace with the world as I would feel years later on hearing a distant foghorn off Cape Cod in the middle of the night. Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a “crime” to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn’t have it all life long, he said. Then the rolling fields of the valley leading up to the hills seemed to sit in a rising mist of olive green: sunflowers, grapevines, swatches of lavender, and those squat and humble olive trees stooping like gnarled, aged scarecrows gawking through our window as we lay naked on my bed, the smell of his sweat, which was the smell of my sweat, and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was, and all around us Mafalda’s chamomile-scented laundry detergent, which was the scent of the torrid afternoon world of our house.
I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn’t dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but didn’t care to read the mile-posts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a total creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I’d always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.
One morning, though, I awoke and saw the whole of B. overborne by dark, lowering clouds racing across the sky. I knew exactly what this spelled. Autumn was just around the corner.<
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A few hours later, the clouds totally cleared, and the weather, as though to make up for its little prank, seemed to erase every hint of fall from our lives and gave us one of the most temperate days of the season. But I had heeded the warning, and as is said of juries who have heard inadmissible evidence before it is stricken from the record, I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more. Suddenly, I began to take mental snapshots of him, picked up the bread crumbs that fell off our table and collected them for my hideaway, and, to my shame, drew lists: the rock, the berm, the bed, the sound of the ashtray. The rock, the berm, the bed…I wished I were like those soldiers in films who run out of bullets and toss away their guns as though they would never again have any use for them, or like runaways in the desert who, rather than ration the water in the gourd, yield to thirst and swill away, then drop their gourd in their tracks. Instead, I squirreled away small things so that in the lean days ahead glimmers from the past might bring back the warmth. I began, reluctantly, to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I’d incur in the future. This, I knew, was as much a crime as closing the shutters on sunny afternoons. But I also knew that in Mafalda’s superstitious world, anticipating the worst was as sure a way of preventing it from happening.
When we went on a walk one night and he told me that he’d soon be heading back home, I realized how futile my alleged foresight had been. Bombs never fall on the same spot; this one, for all my premonitions, fell exactly in my hideaway.
Oliver was leaving for the States the second week of August. A few days into the month, he said he wanted to spend three days in Rome and use that time to work on the final draft of his manuscript with his Italian publisher. Then he’d fly directly home. Would I like to join him?
I said yes. Shouldn’t I ask my parents first? No need, they never said no. Yes, but wouldn’t they…? They wouldn’t. On hearing that Oliver was leaving earlier than anticipated and would spend a few days in Rome, my mother asked—with il cauboi’s permission, of course—if I might accompany him. My father was not against it.