The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Fortunately he was seldom free to spend a whole night away from the barracks, which gave me ample opportunities to cruise the Colosseum. There I met a tall blond Venetian waiter with a distinguished face and a beautiful body. His voice sounded hollow to me, as though he were calling from the other room and the other room was a big, tile-lined bathroom. Like a child, I’d touch his forehead when he spoke and it always resonated. He generated a sort of silent gusto that I found very reposeful. He had very bad breath that I started to think was erotic. It wasn’t a passing embarrassment caused by sleep or garlic, say, but a permanent rot that I’d search out, something initially repulsive but finally exciting, like a very ripe cheese.

  He couldn’t keep his right index finger out of my asshole. If I cooked spaghetti in my tart’s flat with the velvet swags, every time I approached the table with a new dish he’d pull me onto his knee and shove a hand down the back of my jeans. Later, in bed, if I’d kiss his big, veined hand it would smell of my ass, which I liked. For him my penis was just a laughable little handle he used to turn me over in bed. He didn’t correct me when I flubbed the subjunctive. He probably didn’t know how to use it himself.

  An American college friend I’d stayed in touch with had told me to look up his Roman cousin, Tina. On the phone she had a wonderfully low, seductive voice and a schoolgirl’s sudden, explosive laugh. She told me to come right over. I’d pointed out it was three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, which had seemed to surprise her but leave her indifferent. She’d laughed when she said, “But I don’t understand nothing you say.”

  Her huge, nineteenth-century palazzo was near the Quirinale, the President’s residence, and beside a Baroque fountain so ugly that when it was unveiled all Rome had mocked the sculptor, until he’d committed suicide. A sour-faced portiere opened the small, low door let into two big ones and growled something at me. In the dark, neglected courtyard at the bottom of a seven-story well, a thick-thighed Diana drew an arrow from a quiver on her shoulder. The tip of her cement bow had broken off and the exposed metal armature dripped rust stains down her gathered hunting skirt. The elevator clanked noisily.

  Tina opened a heavily barricaded door, shook my hand manfully and led me down a dark hall with a stone floor. I experienced the tension of meeting someone new whose sex and language placed her at a considerable distance from me, which neither love nor talk would ever close. In her cold, damp sitting room with its ineffectual heater and tattered couch and chair marooned in the midst of an immense stone floor, we stood for a moment, eyeing each other. She seemed to be as much a stranger here as I and just as uncertain what to do. She lit a cigarette and sat down and murmured, “Hmmmn” on a falling note, indicating the armchair with her chin.

  Stretched canvases were leaning against every wall, their backs turned modestly to the viewer. For an instant I tried to imagine Tina (short for Diamantina, a family name) as a blend of Christa, the plain-mannered European woman, and Maria, artist and intellectual, but these clues soon evaporated as I was faced with Tina’s unpredictability.

  “Yes, Emmanuele told me to look you up,” I said, naming her American cousin. “He seems to be doing very well. Ever the dandy, of course, ordering his hats from Lock’s in London with his initials stamped in gold on the sweatband.”

  “Cosa?” she asked, looking at me with huge eyes, liquid as oysters, floating between lids as black as mussel shells. Her cheap Italian cigarette burned between the yellowed fingers of a drooping hand. She shook her head silently as though to wake herself out of a bad dream.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Mi dispiace.”

  She never let her eyes drift away from mine. Even when she lowered her head, her eyes would still be fixed on me, their whites tinted yellow. She was in a simple grey skirt and white blouse. Her hair glistened wet on the sides where she’d just slicked it back, which gave her a slightly raffish glamor. She scrutinized me so closely that I felt false, as though so much attention must automatically uncover my superficiality or hypocrisy.

  The room was cold and dark, the windows shrouded in velvet curtains the color of wine dregs, curtains that had gone bald at the hem and at the height where a hand might have tugged them open or shut, day after weary day. Now they were shut. A floor lamp with a chromium hood and a flex—an old-fashioned dentist’s lamp—was lit and trained expectantly on the velvet, as though the curtains might suddenly part and reveal an old chanteuse.

  I started a sentence with the respectful form of you (“Lei”) and she immediately corrected me, not, I felt certain, because we were already such friends but because any sign of formality went against her bluff style.

  An hour went by as the smoke from our cigarettes floated through the lamp light trained on the velvet curtain. Every attempt I made to communicate, putting my two hundred Italian words together in various unlikely combinations, fell flat and I became nearly hysterical from frustration and the shame of boring Diamantina. She let her large, unhealthy eyes dissect me. As I became more and more hearty and despairing in the production of conversation-manual banalities, each so full of faults that I could distinctly see the big C-minus scrawled in red across my exercise sheet, Tina dropped into ever-gloomier silence. She had a two-liter bottle of red wine on the stone floor beside her chair, the cheap kind of wine bought at the corner for pennies in an unlabeled bottle sealed with a metal cap, the sort of bottle that suggested it marked a daily necessity, not an occasional festivity. Her teeth were blue from it, I noticed.

  Just when I thought I’d exhausted her patience, she said I should stay to eat something. I stood in the doorway of her ancient kitchen with its marble sink and tiny modern stove installed on a site that had once been occupied by an immense iron oven, to judge from the rust scrapes and stains on the wall and floor. Tina was suddenly efficient in the dimly lit kitchen, no longer a sibyl hanging over the smoke of her cigarette and staring into the void, but now a much younger woman, slim-hipped in her grey skirt, her pale slender arms weaving the air as she spin-dried salad leaves, mixed a vinaigrette, filled a cauldron with water to cook spaghetti.

  She gave me the name of Lucrezia, someone who could teach me Italian, a friend of hers—another “sad lady,” she said in English with a smile. I immediately wanted to know all the details behind Lucrezia’s unhappiness, since in America curiosity counts as a social grace. Tina was highly evasive in answering me, since in Europe satisfying curiosity of my sort counts as a betrayal. Americans serve themselves and their friends up as stories, laced with pathos and spiced with scandal, the dish piping hot on demand. A European discloses himself, if that word can be used to suggest a series of locks opening and shutting, the whole slow and cautious. For an American a confidence is an ice-breaker and we describe our grandmother’s suicide with the same desire to appear amiable that a European employs in commenting on the unseasonably warm weather. We forget what we’ve told to whom, whereas Europeans tremble and go pale when they decide to reveal something personal. In Europe an avowal counts as a precious sign of commitment; in America it amounts to nothing more than a how-do-you-do.

  MY FEAR of the bus—I didn’t know which end to get on, how much to pay, how to signal my wish to descend—meant that I walked everywhere, miles and miles until my legs ached at night and I longed for someone to rub them. The next afternoon I walked along the Tiber for an hour and then found, a mile behind the Vatican, Lucrezia’s address in a 1960s piazza of yellow-brick apartment blocks.

  She was small, chubby, tidy, sharp, always laughing, terminally depressed. Her three-room apartment was dark and hushed as though even on a cold, rainy January day she were determined to exclude the summer heat as a form of gaiety inappropriate to her deep mourning. She loved the latest American slang and pronounced it as though in italics; she was very proud of her hoard of argot, which she regularly replenished by translating the latest American novels and puzzling out these novelties with her American students. Sometimes when she laughed she hissed like a snake and this sound drowned out
the ends of conventional sentences. She lifted her arms away from her body and let them fall back in place, as though she were a duck too fat to fly. Her eyes would be squeezed shut when she laughed. Somehow her laughter struck me as mirthless, even sad.

  Her teaching method was clever. She invited me to gossip away in Italian as best I could, discussing what I would ordinarily discuss in English; when stumped for the next expression, I’d pause. She’d then provide the missing word. I’d write it down in a notebook I kept week after week. Somewhere no doubt that notebook still exists, a record of my frivolous chatter.

  I discovered that vocabularies had their own propriety, just as did people, and that they could not be mixed any easier than could the social classes. For instance, the word for a sports fan was tifoso, a “typhoid” victim, since the soccer enthusiast presumably foams at the mouth and shakes all over, but when I said I was “uno tifoso di Beethoven” (a Beethoven fan), Lucrezia looked at me as though I was mad. Whereas rapidly shifting from one register to another was a source of liveliness in English, it seemed barbaric in Italian, or just, quite simply, wrong.

  Day after day I trekked to Lucrezia’s and she tore out the seams of my shoddy, ill fitting Italian and found ways to tailor it to my needs and interests. Her apartment was dustless, underfurnished, plantless; she seemed the chubby, cinched-in soubrette in a tragedy, the winsome maid who simpers as she opens the door to let in the Stone Guest. Slowly I filled in the story. She’d been married to an American professor of Italian and had lived with him at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana; one day, quite banally, he’d divorced her to marry a slim, freckled student with granny glasses from Bloomington, but Lucrezia, unlike an American, was not willing to adapt to this change. She didn’t want to work through her resentment in therapy or channel it into lesbian feminism; she vowed herself to a life of mourning, returned to Rome and closed her shutters. She suffered from headaches that made her unavailable on certain days. Tina explained that Lucrezia’s “headaches” were in fact paralyzing depressions provoked by anniversaries of key dates in her marriage.

  My impatience with her grief was not only that of an American optimist but also of a homosexual pessimist. The American in me was astonished, even offended, by her irrevocable decision to take grief’s veil and I wanted to line her up for an exercise class, a husband-hunting Caribbean cruise or a macrobiotic diet. But the homosexual in me, that lone wolf who’d been kept away from the campfire by boys throwing stones, who considered his needs to be perversions and his love to be a variety of shame—that homosexual, isolated, thick-skinned, self-mocking, fur torn and muzzle bloody, could only sneer at the incompetence of these heterosexuals in maneuvering their way through disaster. Of course men betray you, of course love is an illusion dispelled by lust, of course you end up alone.

  I SPENT MORE and more time with Tina, who took a sort of big sister’s interest in me, as though I were a frail, naïve boy. She’d pick me up in her battered Cinquecento and speed me confidently through the narrow, clangorous streets. We’d have dinner in a dim, cheap restaurant looking out across an empty, rain-swept square at a rugged Renaissance palace. We’d eat our plate of spaghetti and nugget of veal in almost total silence. In the center of the square a wide, ancient Roman basin overflowed in the rain, its surface smooth as polished onyx.

  Through Tina I started to meet young Italians from good families and they were shocked by my primitive, egotistical brand of leftism. When I told them I was a writer working on a “love story” (I said that just to shut them up, since in the States such a theme would have been unexceptionable), they laughed mockingly. “Ooh-la-la, l’amour” they cackled, pretending to be mustache-twirling French rakes, as though nothing could be more idiotic, retrograde, even menopausal, than love. A young woman who defended me said she was sure there must be a translation problem.

  What shocked me was their conformity. Everyone was a Marxist, albeit of a sophisticated cultural variety. I didn’t yet know the writings of Gramsci, but when I discovered them ten years later I saw that these Italian kids weren’t American-style New Leftists who confused rebellion with revolution or who thought vegetarianism, nudism and Buddhism were part of a progressive package deal. In America there were only two political parties, virtually interchangeable, and even to our ears talk of real political change sounded unconvincing and quixotic. But here in Italy there seemed to be half a dozen parties, each with a distinct program, newspaper, geographical stronghold, elected senators, and any ruling coalition appeared to be so fragile that the police and the army were always present, night and day, on every corner, to quell a riot should it break out. I was warned not to talk too freely on the telephone, not even in English, since most phones were tapped.

  Tina took me by to meet her father, a tiny, wizened scholar who lived in another apartment in the same family palazzo. I was used to the American notion that parents are dull if responsible creatures and their children wild and fascinating, but Tina’s father was as hopeless and eccentric as she was. He forgot to eat and lived on cheap wine, he turned night into day and wore the same suit all the time, although every third day Tina convinced him to change his shirt. He was usually morose as he thought about the hundred-page philosophical essay on Time that he’d been writing for the past twenty years, but occasionally he’d throw a rust-colored scarf around his neck and gaily saunter forth in his old Jeep. His girlfriend was an extremely elegant lady his age who invited Tina and me to her palace for a party. Champagne and canapés were handed around by servants in white gloves, although at midnight the hostess herself put on an apron and made us a spaghettata—the Italian aftermath to an otherwise stiff, French-style reception. This woman—so dazzling in her diamonds and so punctilious in her politeness—took Tina’s father’s bohemianism in her stride. She sat placidly beside him in the Jeep, a scarf tied around her impeccable hairdo, her tiny black shoes poised on the floorboard with its gaping hole through which the pavement was visible.

  One night when I was alone with Tina—the two of us under a lamp, our armchairs and scrap of carpet marooned like a cheap set hastily assembled on an immense sound stage—I was about to break the exhausting silence to say, “Look, I’ll come back in a month when I know more Italian,” but she spoke first and said, “I love you.”

  I was amazed by this declaration, which I hadn’t seen coming, but if it made me important and desirable rather than an annoying pest, a tongue-tied foreigner, it also scared me. “But you know,” I told her, “I like men.”

  She stared at me with her huge black eyes turned toward me, humbly. She did not wheedle or seduce or whine or even argue her case; she simply presented herself before me, at once Salome and the head on the platter, pure desire and the bloody sacrifice to it.

  “Sono frocio,” I said, “I’m a fag,” using the worst word I knew, the most shocking.

  That stung her into a response. “Don’t say that. You can say whatever you want—omosessuale, invertito—but not that horrendous word. You use it only because you don’t know Italian.”

  I tried to explain to her the strategy of adopting the enemy’s worst insult, something the new Boston gay commune had done in naming its newspaper Fag Rag, but she merely shook her head as though awakening from a bad dream and returned to the assault: “We are peoples,” she kept repeating in English, which I assumed meant we’re individuals before we’re gendered (a truism I wasn’t sure I believed) and that as individuals we’re as likely to fall in love with another soul as another body, with a simpatica woman as a dull man.

  I began to think how soon I could plausibly take my leave. We were both drunk, she drunker. She let the silence collect in a big cistern ready to overrun. Her instinct was not to permit me to wriggle gracefully out of an awkward situation; does Medea let Jason off the hook, does Phaedra give Hippolytus an easy out?

  I stood and she walked into my arms. We began to embrace. My hands traveled over her lean body and pressed her flanks through her skirts. I could feel
myself kindling under her touch, but I instantly worried that I’d disappoint her—as a lover and as a husband, for every time I kissed a woman I feared I’d be impotent and insolvent, too flaccid to penetrate her and too poor to support her. When I looked at married men I often sympathized with their obligation to mount their wives, tirelessly, night after night—and to have to pay for the pleasure. In gay life, hustlers were paid to penetrate men; we assumed passivity was always the more desirable role and that the drudgery of activity naturally had to be recompensed.

  But now all the wine I’d drunk calmed my fears. Nor was Tina decorous or cold. We grappled as violently as any two men might have done and somehow I found myself in the dark hallway leading to her bedroom where her bed glowed like a moonlit pond seen at the end of an alleyway of firs. Then she bit my nose, hard, and I thought, She’s mad, she’s dangerous, I’m getting out of here.

  “Okay, that’s it,” I said. “I’m leaving.” I said it in English, quickly, and I didn’t care if she understood me or not.

  Once I was outside in the hallway, groping toward the light switch and fumbling to close my trousers, a chilling certainty came over me that she really was crazy and might try to kill me.

  I didn’t wait for the elevator but ran down the five flights and through the rainy courtyard, my feet striking sound off the cold, mossy pavement just as I heard behind me the elevator motor groaning into action and I knew that soon Tina would be pursuing me.

  I ducked through the small door set into the portone and found myself on a deserted street, beside the ugly fountain that had provoked its designer’s suicide. I felt seized by an intense fear: Tina was going to run me over with her car. I started to streak down the hill past the Barberini Palace; then I sighted a street on the other side and I ducked down it, although after I’d run another block I saw to my horror that it was a dead end. I crept back up to the main thoroughfare, hugging the shadowy wall, and arrived at the corner just in time to see a grim-faced Tina hurtling by behind the wheel of her tiny, battered car.