Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  Part of me was ashamed that I’d allowed myself to do to him what I’d heard so many men did to women in crowded spaces, while another part suspected that he knew what we were both doing; but I didn’t know for sure. Besides, if I couldn’t really fault him, how could he fault me? But I was swooning and doing everything I could not to let him pass. Eventually he managed to slip between me and another passenger, which is when I got a good look at him. He was wearing a gray sweater and a brown pair of corduroys and looked at least seven or eight years older than I was. He was also taller, skinny and sinewy. He eventually found a seat in front of me and, though I kept my eyes on him, hoping he would turn to look back, he never did. In his mind, nothing had happened: crowded bus, people slithering their way between people, everyone almost lurching and holding on to someone else—it happens all the time. I eventually saw him get off before the bridge somewhere on Via Taranto. A sudden sickness began to seize me. The headache I had feared before stepping into the bus, stirred by the gas fumes, turned to nausea. I needed to get off earlier than I meant to, and I walked the rest of the way home.

  I didn’t throw up that evening, but when I got home, I knew that something genuine and undeniable had happened and that I would never live it down in my mind. All I had wanted was for him to hold me, to keep his hands on me, to ask nothing and say nothing, or, if he needed to ask, to ask anything, provided I didn’t have to talk, because I was too choked up to talk, because if I had to talk, I might have said something right out of the cloying, bookish, fin-de-siècle universe of Krafft-Ebing, which would have made him laugh. What I wanted was for him to put an arm around me in that man-to-man way that friends do in Rome.

  I returned to Piazza di San Silvestro many times afterward, always on Wednesdays, read from Krafft-Ebing for a while, stared at the statue of Apollo on display in the magazine kiosk, made sure I wore the same clothes I’d worn on the day I’d felt him lean into me, and at the same hour I saw one crowded bus come after the other, and I waited and kept watching for him. But I never saw him again. Or if I did, I didn’t recognize him.

  Time had stopped that day.

  Now, whenever I come to Rome, I promise to take the 85 bus at more or less the same time in the evening to try to turn the clock back to relive that evening and see who I was and what I craved in those days. I want to run into the same disappointments, the same fears, the same hopes, come to the same admission, then spin that admission on its head and see how I’d managed in those days to make myself think that what I’d wanted on that bus was nothing more than illusion and make-believe, not real, not real.

  When I reached home that evening feeling sick and with a migraine, my mother was preparing dinner with our neighbor Gina in the kitchen. Gina was my age, and everyone said she had a crush on me. I did not have a crush on her. Yet, as we sat together at the kitchen table while Mother cooked, we laughed, and I could feel my nausea ebb. Gina smelled of incense and chamomile, of ancient wooden drawers and unwashed hair, which she said she washed on Saturdays only. I did not like her smell. But, as soon as I let my mind drift back to what had happened on the 85 bus, I knew that I wouldn’t have cared what he smelled of. The thought that he too might smell of incense and chamomile and of old wooden furniture turned me on. I pictured his bedroom and his clothes strewn about the room. I was thinking of him when I went to bed that night, but, as I let arousal wash over me, at the right moment, I made myself think of Gina instead, picturing how she’d first unbutton her shirt and let everything she wore slide to the floor and then walk up to me naked, smelling, like him, of incense, chamomile, and wooden drawers.

  Night after night, I would drift from him to her, back to him and then her, each feeding off the other and, like Roman buildings of all ages snuggling into, on top of, under, and against each other, body parts stripped from his body were given over to hers and then back to his with body parts from hers. I was like Emperor Julian, the two-time apostate who buried one faith under the other and no longer knew which was truly his. And I thought of Tiresias, who was first a man, then a woman, then a man again, and of Caenis, who was a woman, then a man, and finally a woman again, and of the postcard of Apollo the Lizard Slayer, and I longed for him as well, though his unyielding and forbidding grace seemed to chide my lust, as though he had read my thoughts and knew that, if part of me wished to sully his marble-white body with what was most precious in me, another still couldn’t tell whether what it longed for on Apollo’s frame was the man or the woman or something both real and unreal that hovered between the two, a cross between marble and what could only be flesh.

  The room upstairs where I fudged the truth each night and dissembled it so well that, without turning into a lie, it stopped being true, was a shifting land where nothing seemed fixed, and where the surest and truest thing about me could, within seconds, lose one face and take on another, and another after that. Even the self who belonged to a Rome that seemed destined to be mine forever knew that, within moments of crossing over to a different continent, I would acquire a new identity, a new voice, a new inflection, a new way of being me. As for the girl I eventually drew to my bedroom one Friday afternoon when we were alone together and found pleasure without love, if she lifted the cloud that was hovering over me ever since the 85 bus, she could not stop it from settling back less than a half hour later.

  * * *

  I have frequently thought about Rome and about the long walks I used to take after school in the center of Rome on those rainy October and November afternoons in search of something I knew I longed for but wasn’t too eager to find, much less give a name to. I would much rather have had it jump at me and give me a chance to say maybe, or hold me without letting go, as someone did on the bus that day, or coax me with smiles and good cheer the way men flirt when they put up a coy front with girls they know will eventually say yes.

  In Rome, my itinerary on those afternoon walks was always different and the goal undefined, but wherever my legs took me, I always seemed to miss running into something essential about the city and about myself—unless what I was really doing on my walks was running away both from myself and the city. But I wasn’t running away. And I wasn’t seeking either. I wanted something gray, like the safe zone between the hand I only wished might touch me somewhere without asking and my hand, which didn’t dare stray where it longed to go.

  On the bus that evening, I knew I was already trying to put together a flurry of words to understand what was happening to me. I had once heard a woman turn around and curse a man in a crowded bus for being sfacciato, meaning impudent, because in typical street urchin manner he had rubbed his body against hers. But now I didn’t know which of us had been truly sfacciato. I loved blaming him to absolve myself, but I also reveled in my newfound courage and was thrilled by the way I’d struggled to block his passage each time he seemed about to release me to move elsewhere on the bus. I had followed my own impulse and didn’t even pretend I was unaware we were touching. I even liked the arrogance with which he had taken me for granted.

  All I had at home was my picture of the Sauroktonos. Chaste and chastening, the ultimate androgyne, obscene because he lets you cradle the filthiest thoughts but won’t approve or consent to them and makes you feel dirty for even nursing them. The picture was the next best thing to the young man on the bus. I treasured it and used it as a bookmark.

  In the end, I went to find the original in the Vatican Museums. But it wasn’t what I’d expected. I expected a naked young man just posing as a statue; what I saw was a trapped body. I looked for flaws in his body to be done with him once and for all, but the flaws and the stains I found were the marble’s, not his. In the end I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I stared not only because I liked what I was staring at but because such stunning beauty makes you want to know why you keep staring.

  Sometimes I’d catch something so tender and gentle on the features of the young Apollo that it verged on melancholy. Not a spot of vice or lust or of anything remotely illicit i
n his youthful body; the vice and lust were in me, or perhaps it was just the start of a kind of lust that I couldn’t begin to fathom because it was instantly muffled by how humbled I felt each time I stared at him. He does not approve of me, yet he smiles. We were like two strangers in a Russian novel who, before being introduced, have already exchanged meaningful glances.

  But then, I remembered, the candor would gradually dissipate from his features, and something like an incipient look of distrust, fear, and admonition would settle there, as though what he expected from me was remorse and shame. But it’s never so simple: admonition became forgiveness, and from clemency I could almost behold a look of compassion, meaning, I know this isn’t easy for you. And from compassion, I was able to spot a touch of languor behind his mischievous smile, almost a willingness to surrender, which scared me, because it asked me to confront the obvious. He’s been willing all along, and I wasn’t seeing it. Suddenly I was allowed to hope. I didn’t want to hope.

  * * *

  Today, after being in Rome for a month almost, I am taking the 85 bus. I will not catch it somewhere along its long route, which might be easier for me, but will take it where the terminal used to be fifty years ago. I will get on the bus at dusk, because this is when I used to take the 85 bus, and I will ride it all the way to my old stop, get off, and walk down to where we used to live. This is my plan for the evening.

  I expect that my return may not bring me much pleasure. I never liked our old neighborhood, with its row of small stores that peddled overpriced merchandise to people who are almost all now pensioners or young salesclerks who live with their parents, smoke too much, and cradle large hopes on meager incomes. I remember hating the square balconies jutting out like misbegotten shoeboxes from ugly, squat buildings. I’ll walk down that street and ask why I always want to come back, since I know there’s nothing I want here. Am I returning to prove that I’ve overcome this place and put it behind me? Or do I return to play with time and make believe that nothing essential has really changed, either in me or in the city, that I am still the same young man and that an entire lifetime has yet to be lived, which also means that the years between me-then and me-now haven’t really happened, or don’t really matter and shouldn’t count, and that, like Winckelmann, I am still owed so much?

  Or perhaps I’ll come back to reclaim a me-interrupted. Something was sown here, and then, because I left so soon, it never blossomed but couldn’t die. Everything I’ve done in life suddenly pales and threatens to come undone. I have not lived my life. I’ve lived another.

  And yet, as I walk around my old neighborhood, what I fear most is to feel nothing, touch nothing, and come to grips with nothing. I’d take pain instead of nothing. I’d take sorrow and think of my mother still alive upstairs in our old building rather than just walk by, probably with some degree of haste, eager to catch the first taxi back to the center of Rome.

  I get off the bus at my old stop. I walk down the familiar street and try to recall the evening when I came so close to throwing up. It must have been in the fall—same weather as today. I walk down the same street again, see my old window, pass by the old grocery store, imagine my mother miraculously still upstairs preparing dinner, though I see her now as she was recently, old and frail, and finally, because I want to arrive at this thought last, I pass by the refurbished film theater where someone came to sit next to me once and placed a hand on my thigh while I took my time before acting shocked when all I wanted was to feel his hand glide ever so softly up my leg. “What?” I had asked. Without wasting a second, he got up and disappeared. What?, as if I didn’t know. What?, to say, tell me more because I need to know. What?, to mean, don’t say a thing, pay no mind, don’t even listen, don’t stop.

  The incident never went anywhere. It stayed in that movie house. It’s in there now as I’m walking past it. That hand on my thigh and the young man on the 85 bus told me there was something about the real Rome that transcended my old, safe, standby collection of postcards of Greek gods and of the teasing boy-girl Apollo who’d let you stare at him for however long you pleased, provided it was with shame and apprehension in your heart, because you had infringed upon every curve of his body. I used to think at the time that, however disturbing the impact of a real body was against mine, the weeks and months ahead might cast a balm and quell the wave that had swept over me on the bus. I thought I would eventually forget, or learn to think I’d forgotten, the hand I’d let linger on my bare skin for a few seconds more than others my age might have allowed. Within a few days, a few weeks, I was sure the whole thing would blow over or shrink like a tiny fruit that falls to the ground in the kitchen and rolls under a cabinet and is discovered many years later when someone decides to redo the floors. You look at its shriveled, dried shape, and all you can say is, “To think that I could have eaten this once.” If I didn’t manage to forget, then perhaps experience might turn the whole incident into the insignificant thing it was, especially since life would eventually unload so many more gifts, better gifts that would easily overshadow these fragments of near nothings on a crowded Roman bus or in an ugly neighborhood theater in Rome.

  We remember best what never happened.

  I’ve gone back to the Vatican Museums to see my Apollo who is about to kill a lizard. I need special permission to see the wing where he stands. The public is not allowed to see him. I always pay homage to the Laocoön and His Sons, and to the Apollo Belvedere, and to the other statues in the Pio Clementino wing, but it was always the Apollo Sauroktonos I longed for and put off seeking. The best for last. It’s the one statue I want to revisit each time I’m in Rome. I don’t have to say a word. He knows—by now he surely must know, always knew, even back then when he’d see me come by after school, knowing what I’d done with him.

  “Have you never tired of me?” he asks.

  “No, never.”

  “Is it because I’m made of stone and cannot change?”

  “Maybe. But I too haven’t changed, not one bit.”

  How he wished he could be flesh, just this once, he used to say when I was young. “It’s been so long,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “And you’ve grown old now,” he says.

  “I know.” I want to change the subject. “Are there others who’ve loved you as much?”

  “There’ll always be others.”

  “Then what singles me out?”

  He looks at me and smiles. “Nothing, nothing singles you out. You feel what every man feels.”

  “Will you remember me, though?”

  “I remember everyone.”

  “But do you feel anything?” I ask.

  “Of course, I feel. I always feel. How could I not feel?”

  “For me, I mean.”

  “Of course for you.”

  I do not trust him. This is the last time I see him. I still want him to say something to me, for me, about me.

  I’m about to walk out of the museum when my mind suddenly thinks of Freud, who surely must have come to the Pio Clementino with his wife or his daughter or with his good friend from Vienna then based in Rome, the curator Emanuel Löwy. Surely the two Jews must have stood there for a while and spoken about the statue—how could they not? And yet Freud never mentions the Sauroktonos, which he must have seen both in Rome and in the Louvre during his student days. Surely he must have thought about it when writing about lizards in his commentary to Jensen’s Gradiva. Nor does he mention Winckelmann except once, Winckelmann who, himself, surely must have seen the original bronze version of the statue every day during his tenure in Cardinal Albani’s home. I know that Freud’s silence on the matter is not an accident, that his silence means something peculiarly Freudian, just as I know he must have thought what I myself thought, what everyone seeing the Sauroktonos thinks: “Is this a man who looks like a woman, or a woman who looks like a man, or a man who looks like a woman who looks like a man?” So I ask the statue, “Do you remember a bearded Viennese doctor who’d some
times come alone and pretend he wasn’t staring?”

  “A bearded Viennese doctor? Maybe.” Apollo is being cagey again, but then, so am I.

  But I remember his final words. They were spoken to me once, and he repeated the exact same ones fifty years later: “I am between life and death, between flesh and stone. I am not alive, but look at me, I’m more alive than you are. You, on the other hand, are not dead, but were you ever alive? Have you sailed to the other bank?” I have no words to argue or reply with. “You found beauty but not truth. You must change your life.”

  CAVAFY’S BED

  It’s my first Palm Sunday in Rome. The year is 1966. I am fifteen, and my parents, my brother and I, and my aunt have decided to visit the Spanish Steps. On that day the Steps are filled with people but also with so many flowerpots that one has to squeeze through the crowd of tourists and of Romans carrying palm fronds. I have pictures of that day. I know I am happy, partly because my father is staying with us on a short visit from Paris and we seem to be a family again, and partly because the weather is absolutely stunning. I am wearing a blue wool blazer, a leather tie, a long-sleeved white polo shirt, and gray flannel trousers. I am boiling on this first day of spring and dying to take off my clothes and jump into the Roman fountain—the Barcaccia—at the bottom of the Steps. This should have been a beach day, and perhaps this is why the day resonates with me so much.

  Two years before, in 1964, we were probably celebrating Sham el Nessim, the Alexandrian spring holiday, which for many of us usually marked the first giddy swim of the year. But in Rome at the time I am not thinking of Alexandria at all. I’m not even aware that there might be a connection between Rome, this eruption of beach fever, and Alexandria. The yearning to jump into a body of water and drink it whole, and always that search for shaded areas, away from the blazing sun—these are what my body wants, now that the wool I’m wearing is unbearable.