André Aciman
Call Me By Your Name
Call Me By Your Name really moved me. Reading it was an indescribable experience that I hope I will never forget. The way love is described touched my soul. I have never read anything so raw and yet so beautiful. I think it goes beyong love, they are meant for each other, soul mates. Here are my favourite quotes (couldn't keep it shorter):
“I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy, so many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab, billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere.”
“Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete's face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night. It told me things about him I never knew to ask.”
“I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back.”
“You could never stare long enough but needed to keep staring to find out why you couldn't.”
“Later that evening in my diary, I wrote: I was exaggerating when I said I thought you hated the piece. What I meant to say was: I thought you hated me. I was hoping you'd persuade me of the opposite—and you did, for a while. Why won't I believe it tomorrow morning?
So this is who he also is, I said to myself after seeing how he’d flipped from ice to sunshine.
I might as well have asked: Do I flip back and forth in just the same way?
P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.”
“This, the afternoon he did finally walk into my room without knocking as if summoned by my prayers and asked how come I wasn't with the others at the beach, and all I could think of saying, though I couldn't bring myself to say it, was, To be with you. To be with you, Oliver.”
“All this I could have denied. And believed my denials.”
“He saw through everybody, but he saw through them precisely because the first thing he looked for in people was the very thing he had seen in himself and may not have wished others to see.”
“What struck me was not just his amazing gift for reading people, for rummaging inside them and digging out the precise configuration of their personality, but his ability to intuit things in exactly the way I myself might have intuited them. This, in the end, was what drew me to him with a compulsion that overrode desire or friendship or the allurements of a common religion.”
“That someone else in my immediate world might like what I liked, want what I wanted, be who I was.”
“Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play forever, I'm asking for very little, and I swear I'll ask for nothing more.”
“I had never heard someone his age say, I know myself. It intimidated me.”
“But seeing everyone take such a liking to him, I found a strange, small oasis of peace. What could possibly be wrong with liking someone everyone else liked?”
“Then it hit me that I could have killed myself instead, or hurt myself badly enough and let him know why I'd done it. If I hurt my face, I'd want him to look at me and wonder why, why might anyone do this to himself, until, years and years later-yes, Later!-he’d finally piece the puzzle together and beat his head against the wall.”
“One day, when there was one too many of them to go biking, Oliver turned to me and asked if I minded letting Mario borrow my bike since I wasn't using it.
It threw me back to age six.
I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, Go ahead, I couldn't care less. But no sooner had they left then I scrambled upstairs and began sobbing into my pillow.”
“Was he my home, then, my homecoming? When I'm with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you're with me, Oliver.”
“ “Try again later,” said Oliver. This was what people who were okay with themselves did. (...) But try again later what's the veil he’d drawn over If not later, when? … Try again later were the last words I’d spoken to myself every night when I’d sworn to do something to bring Oliver closer to me. Try again later meant, I haven't the courage now. Things weren’t ready just yet. (...) Try again later worked for people like Oliver. If not later, when? was my shibboleth. If not later, when? What if he had found me out and uncovered each and every one of my secrets with those four cutting words? “
“Sometimes the only way to understand an artist is to wear his shoes, to get inside him. Then everything else flows naturally.”
“They had always said I got too easily attached to people. This summer, though, I finally realized what they meant by being too easily attached. Obviously, it had happened before, and they must have already picked up on it when I was probably too young to notice anything myself. It had sent alarming ripples through their lives. They worried for me. I knew they were right to worry. I just hoped they’d never know how far things stood beyond their ordinary worries now.”
“Is it better to speak or die?”
“Muvi star.”
“I know nothing, Oliver. Nothing, just nothing.”
“The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that’s what you are, light of my life.“
“Traitor. I thought as I waited to hear his bedroom door squeak open and squeak shut. Traitor. how easily we forget. I'll stick around. Sure. Liar.
It never crossed my mind that I too was a traitor, that's somewhere on a beach near her home a girl had waited for me tonight, as she waited every night now, and that I, like Oliver, hadn't given her a second thought.”
“That’s because you see me as a figure, not a human being. Worse yet: as an old figure. But there were. Mistaken turns, that is. Everyone goes through a period of traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other.”
“ “I don't think we'll ever do anything like that again.” I was trying to sound noble end grave in my defeat. “But, yes, like that.” I could be vague too.”
“I began to feel we were not even two men, just two beings. I loved the egalitarianism of the moment. I loved feeling younger and older, human to human, man to man, Jew to Jew. (…) I even liked the fact that there were things on the bed that hadn’t been removed and which I kept kneeing into and didn’t mind encountering when I slipped a foot under them, because they were part of his bed, his life, his world.”
“I had, as I’d never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere, very dear, of wanting this forever, of being, me, me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet by no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all of my life and I’d misplaced it and he had helped me find it. The dream had been right—this was like coming come, like asking, Where have I been all my life? Which was another way of asking, Where were you in my childhood, Oliver?”
“No one had ever worn my clothes. Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me.”
“This was the best person I'd ever known in my life.”
“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.”
“Why did I feel older than he was at that moment? I wanted to protect him from everything this morning.”
“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”
“We were, it finally dawned on me, the two shyest persons in the world.”
“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.”
“I wanted no secrets, no screens, nothing between us. Little did I know that if I relished the gust of candor that bound us tighter each time we swore my body is your body, it was also because I enjoyed rekindling the tiny Lantern of unsuspected shame. It cast a spare glow precisely we are part of me would have preferred the dark. Shame trailed instant intimacy. Could intimacy endure once indecency was spent and our bodies had run out of tricks?
I don't know that I asked the question, just as I am not sure I am able to answer it today. Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency?
Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, How you acquire it, what you pay for it—black market, grey market, taxed, untaxed, under the table, over the counter?
All I knew was that I had nothing left to hide from him. I had never felt freer or safer in my life.
We were alone together for three days we knew no one in the city, I could be anyone, say anything, do anything.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 two separate destinations.
Perhaps it was his gift to me.
Perhaps it was my father's gift to the two of us.”
“Who I am when I wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and right about the person I know no one knows I am; who I am when I crave to be naked with another naked body, or when I crave to be alone in the world; who I am when every part of me seems miles and centuries apart and each swears it bears my name. I called it the San Clemente Syndrome.”
“He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn't changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.”
“He pressed me against the wall and started to kiss me, his hips pushing into mine, his arms about to lift me off the ground. My eyes were shut, but I knew he had stopped kissing me to look around him; people could be walking by. I didn't want to look. Let him be the one to worry. Then we kissed again. And, with my eyes still shut, I think I did hear two voices, old men’s voices, grumbling something about taking a good look at these two, wondering if in the old days you'd ever see such a sight. But I didn't want to think about them. I didn't worry. If he wasn't worried, I wasn't worried. I could spend the rest of my life like this: with him, at night, in Rome, my eyes totally shut, one leg coiled around his. I thought of coming back here in the weeks or months to come—for this was our spot.”
“ “I can, from the distance of years now, still think I'm hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again.
"Tomorrow let's go to San Clemente," I said.
"Tomorrow is today," he replied. ”
“And hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream of it, hurts just the same.”
“I'll never forget Rome so long as I live.”
“I don't want to lose you.”
“ “Oliver was Oliver,” I said, as if that summed things up.
“Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi,” my father added, quoting Montaigne’s all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.
I was thinking, instead, of Emily Bronte’s words: because “he's more myself than I am.” ”
“I think he was better than me, Papa.”
“Speaking abstractly was the only way to speak this truth to him.”
“Fear not. It will come. At least I hope it does. And when you least expect it. Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it's not with me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.”
“In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can we a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten Is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster.”
“But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.”
“I wanted to ask him how he knew. But then how could he not have known? How could anyone not have known?”
“Wouldn't have changed, would never be who I am today, would have become someone else.
I wonder now who that someone else is today. Is he happier? (…) Would I like him, would he like me, would either of us understand why the other became who he is, would either be surprised to learn that each of us had in fact run into an Oliver of one sort or another, man or woman, and that we were very possibly, regardless of who came to stay with us that summer, one and the same person still?”
“No one could say my name that way. “Elio,” I repeated, to say it was I speaking but also to spark our old game and show I’d forgotten nothing. “It's Oliver,” he said. He had forgotten.”
“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
“I had come to see if I felt something, if something was still alive.”
“ “Perhaps it never went away.” (…) “I don't think it went away,” I repeated. ”
“We belong to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”
“In fact, he's closer to the person you were when we were together and you are to the Elio I knew then.”
“But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it—it's just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a somber field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.“
“ “And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we want to call it envy, because it to call it regret would break our hearts.”
Silence again.
“Perhaps I am not yet ready to speak of them as strangers,” I said.
“If it makes you feel any better, I don't think either of us ever will be.”
“That kiss still imprinted there, thank goodness. it's all I have from you.” ”
“We missed out on so much.”
“Do these things die out on their own or do some things need generations and lifetimes to sort themselves out?”
“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I've never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”
“It would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself. In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way. We spoke about everything but. But we've always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. We had found the stars, you and l. And this is given once only.”
“I'm like you,” he said. “I remember everything.”
