Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (20 page)

“I turned down so many. Never went after anyone.”

“You went after me.”

“You let me.”

Via Frattina, via Borgognona, via Condotti, via delle Carrozze, della Croce, via Vittoria. Suddenly I loved them all. As we approached the bookstore, Oliver said I should go along, he’d just make a quick local phone call. He could have called from the hotel. Or perhaps he needed privacy. So I kept walking, stopping at a local bar to buy cigarettes. When I reached the bookstore with its large glass door and two clay Roman busts sitting on two seemingly antique stumps, I suddenly got nervous. The place was packed, and through the thick glass door, with spare bronze trimming around it, you could make out a throng of adults, all of them eating what appeared to be petits fours. Someone inside saw me peering into the store and signaled me to come in. I shook my head, indicating with a hesitant index finger that I was waiting for someone who was just coming up this road here. But the owner, or his assistant, like a club manager, without stepping down on the sidewalk, pushed the glass door wide open with his arm totally extended and held it there, almost ordering me to come in. “Venga, su, venga!” he said, the sleeves of his shirt rakishly rolled up to his shoulders. The reading had not started yet but the bookstore was filled to capacity, everyone smoking, chatting loudly, leafing through new books, each holding a tiny plastic cup with what looked like scotch whiskey. Even the upstairs gallery, whose banister was lined with the bare elbows and forearms of women, was tightly packed. I recognized the author right away. He was the same man who had signed both Marzia’s and my copy of his book of poems,
Se l’amore.
He was shaking several hands.

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.”