Call Me by Your Name

by André Aciman

  He was not allowing me to forget him. I was reminded of a married chatelaine who, after sleeping with a young vassal one night, had him seized by the palace guards the next morning and summarily executed in a dungeon on trumped-up charges, not only to eliminate all evidence of their adulterous night together and to prevent her young lover from becoming a nuisance now that he thought he was entitled to her favors, but to stem the temptation to seek him out on the following evening. Was he becoming a nuisance going after me? And what was I to do—tell my mother?

  That morning he went into town alone. Post office, Signora Milani, the usual rounds. I saw him pedal down the cypress lane, still wearing my trunks. 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. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself—like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier’s bone together, the other man’s heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.

  The very thought of this suddenly made me want to drop everything I would do today and run to him. I waited about ten minutes, then took out my bike and, despite my promise not to go biking that day, headed out by way of Marzia’s home and scaled the steep hillside road as fast as I could. When I reached the piazzetta I realized I had arrived minutes after him. He was parking his bike, had already purchased the Herald Tribune, and was heading for the post office—his first errand. “I had to see you,” I said as I rushed to him. “Why, something wrong?” “I just had to see you.” “Aren’t you sick of me?” I thought I was—I was about to say—and I wanted to be—“I just wanted to be with you,” I said. Then it hit me: “If you want, I’ll go back now,” I said. He stood still, dropped his hand with the bundle of unsent letters still in it, and simply stood there staring at me, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea how glad I am we slept together?”

  I shrugged my shoulders as though to put away another compliment. I was unworthy of compliments, most of all coming from him. “I don’t know.”

  “It would be just like you not to know. I just don’t want to regret any of it—including what you wouldn’t let me talk about this morning. I just dread the thought of having messed you up. I don’t want either of us to have to pay one way or another.”

  I knew exactly what he was referring to but pretended otherwise. “I’m not telling anyone. There won’t be any trouble.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I’m sure I’ll pay for it somehow, though.” And for the first time in daylight I caught a glimpse of a different Oliver. “For you, however you think of it, it’s still fun and games, which it should be. For me it’s something else which I haven’t figured out, and the fact that I can’t scares me.”

  “Are you sorry I came?” Was I being intentionally fatuous?

  “I’d hold you and kiss you if I could.”

  “Me too.”

  I came up to his ear as he was just about to enter the post office and whispered, “Fuck me, Elio.”

  He remembered and instantly moaned his own name three times, as we’d done during that night. I could feel myself already getting hard. Then, to tease him with the very same words he’d uttered earlier that morning, I said, “We’ll save it for later.”

  Then I told him how Later! would always remind me of him. He laughed and said, “Later!”—meaning exactly what I wanted it to mean for a change: not just goodbye, or be off with you, but afternoon lovemaking. I turned around and was instantly on my bike, speeding my way back downhill, smiling broadly, almost singing if I could.

  Never in my life had I been so happy. Nothing could go wrong, everything was happening my way, all the doors were clicking open one by one, and life couldn’t have been more radiant: it was shining right at me, and when I turned my bike left or right or tried to move away from its light, it followed me as limelight follows an actor onstage. I craved him but I could just as easily live without him, and either way was fine.

  On my way, I decided to stop at Marzia’s house. She was headed to the beach. I joined her, and we went down to the rocks together and lay in the sun. I loved her smell, loved her mouth. She took off her top and asked me to put some sunscreen on her back, knowing that my hands would inevitably cup her breasts. Her family owned a thatched cabana by the beach and she said we should go inside. No one would come. I locked the door from the inside, sat her on the table, took off her bathing suit, and put my mouth where she smelled of the sea. She leaned back, and lifted both legs over my shoulders. How strange, I thought, how each shadowed and screened the other, without precluding the other. Barely half an hour ago I was asking Oliver to fuck me and now here I was about to make love to Marzia, and yet neither had anything to do with the other except through Elio, who happened to be one and the same person.

  After lunch Oliver said he had to go back to B. to hand Signora Milani his latest corrections. He cast an instant glance in my direction but, seeing I hadn’t responded, was already on his way. After two glasses of wine, I couldn’t wait to take a nap. I grabbed two huge peaches from the table and took them with me, and kissed my mother along the way. I’d eat them later, I said. In the dark bedroom, I deposited the fruit on the marble tabletop. And then undressed totally. Clean, cool, crisp-starched, sun-washed sheets drawn tight across my bed—God bless you, Mafalda. Did I want to be alone? Yes. One person last night; then again at dawn. Then in the morning, another. Now I lay on the sheets as happy as a stiff-grown, newly sprung sunflower filled with listless vigor on this sunniest of summer afternoons. Was I glad to be alone now that sleep was upon me? Yes. Well, no. Yes. But maybe not. Yes, yes, yes. I was happy, and this was all that mattered, with others, without others, I was happy.

  Half an hour later, or maybe sooner, I was awakened by the rich brown cloistral scent of coffee wafting through the house. Even with the door closed I could smell it and I knew this wasn’t my parents’ coffee. Theirs had been brewed and served a while ago. This was the afternoon’s second brew, made in the Neapolitan espresso coffeemaker in which Mafalda, her husband, and Anchise made coffee after they too had lunched. Soon they would be resting as well. Already a heavy torpor hung in the air—the world was falling asleep. All I wanted was for him or Marzia to pass by my balcony door and, through the half-drawn shutters, make out my naked body sprawled on the bed. Him or Marzia—but I wanted someone to pass by and notice me, and up to them to decide what to do. I could go on sleeping or, if they should sidle up to me, I’d make room for them and we’d sleep together. I saw one of them enter my room and reach for the fruit, and with the fruit in hand, come to my bed and bring it to my hard cock. I know you’re not sleeping, they’d say, and gently press the soft, overripe peach on my cock till I’d pierced the fruit along the crease that reminded me so much of Oliver’s ass. The idea seized me and would not let go.

  I got up and reached for one of the peaches, opened it halfway with my thumbs, pushed the pit out on my desk, and gently brought the fuzzy, blush-colored peach to my groin, and then began to press into it till the parted fruit slid down my cock. If Anchise only knew, if Anchise knew what I was doing to the fruit he cultivated with such slavish devotion every day, him and his large straw hat and his long, gnarled, callused fingers that were always ripping out weeds from the parched earth. His peaches were more apricots than peaches, except larger, juicier. I had already tried the animal kingdom. Now I was moving to the kingdom of plants. Next would come minerals. The idea almost made me chuckle. The fruit was leaking all over my cock. If Oliver walked in on me now, I’d let him suck me as he had this morning. If Marzia came, I’d let her help me finish the job. The peach was soft and firm, and when I finally s
ucceeded in tearing it apart with my cock, I saw that its reddened core reminded me not just of an anus but of a vagina, so that holding each half in either hand firmly against my cock, I began to rub myself, thinking of no one and of everyone, including the poor peach, which had no idea what was being done to it except that it had to play along and probably in the end took some pleasure in the act as well, till I thought I heard it say to me, Fuck me, Elio, fuck me harder, and after a moment, Harder, I said! while I scanned my mind for images from Ovid—wasn’t there a character who had turned into a peach and, if there wasn’t, couldn’t I make one up on the spot, say, an ill-fated young man and young girl who in their peachy beauty had spurned an envious deity who had turned them into a peach tree, and only now, after three thousand years, were being given what had been so unjustly taken away from them, as they murmured, I’ll die when you’re done, and you mustn’t be done, must never be done? The story so aroused me that practically without warning the orgasm was almost upon me. I sensed I could just stop then and there or, with one more stroke, I could come, which I finally did, carefully, aiming the spurt into the reddened core of the open peach as if in a ritual of insemination.

  What a crazy thing this was. I let myself hang back, holding the fruit in both hands, grateful that I hadn’t gotten the sheet dirty with either juice or come. The bruised and damaged peach, like a rape victim, lay on its side on my desk, shamed, loyal, aching, and confused, struggling not to spill what I’d left inside. It reminded me that I had probably looked no different on his bed last night after he’d come inside me the first time.

  I put on a tank top but decided to stay naked and get under the sheet.

  I awoke to the sound of someone unhooking the latch of the shutters and then hooking it back behind him. As in my dream once, he was tiptoeing toward me, not in an effort to surprise me, but so as not to wake me up. I knew it was Oliver and, with my eyes still closed, raised my arm to him. He grabbed it and kissed it, then lifted the sheet and seemed surprised to find me naked. He immediately brought his lips to where they’d promised to return this morning. He loved the sticky taste. What had I done?

  I told him and pointed to the bruised evidence sitting on my desk.

  “Let me see.”

  He stood up and asked if I’d left it for him.

  Perhaps I had. Or had I simply put off thinking how to dispose of it?

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  I nodded naughtily in mock shame.

  “Any idea how much work Anchise puts into each one of these?”

  He was joking, but it felt as though he, or someone through him, was asking the same question about the work my parents had put into me.

  He brought the half peach to bed, making certain not to spill its contents as he took his clothes off.

  “I’m sick, aren’t I?” I asked.

  “No, you’re not sick—I wish everyone were as sick as you. Want to see sick?”

  What was he up to? I hesitated to say yes.

  “Just think of the number of people who’ve come before you—you, your grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, and all the skipped generations of Elios before you, and those from places far away, all squeezed into this trickle that makes you who you are. Now may I taste it?”

  I shook my head.

  He dipped a finger into the core of the peach and brought it to his mouth.

  “Please don’t.” This was more than I could bear.

  “I never could stand my own. But this is yours. Please explain.”

  “It makes me feel terrible.”

  He simply shrugged my comment away.

  “Look, you don’t have to do this. I’m the one who came after you, I sought you out, everything that happened is because of me—you don’t have to do this.”

  “Nonsense. I wanted you from day one. I just hid it better.”

  “Sure!”

  I lunged out to grab the fruit from his hand, but with his other hand he caught hold of my wrist and squeezed it hard, as they do in movies, when one man forces another to let go of a knife.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Then let go.”

  I watched him put the peach in his mouth and slowly begin to eat it, staring at me so intensely that I thought even lovemaking didn’t go so far.

  “If you just want to spit it out, it’s okay, it’s really okay, I promise I won’t be offended,” I said to break the silence more than as a last plea.

  He shook his head. I could tell he was tasting it at that very instant. Something that was mine was in his mouth, more his than mine now. I don’t know what happened to me at that moment as I kept staring at him, but suddenly I had a fierce urge to cry. And rather than fight it, as with orgasm, I simply let myself go, if only to show him something equally private about me as well. I reached for him and muffled my sobs against his shoulder. I was crying because no stranger had ever been so kind or gone so far for me, even Anchise, who had cut open my foot once and sucked and spat out and sucked and spat out the scorpion’s venom. I was crying because I’d never known so much gratitude and there was no other way to show it. And I was crying for the evil thoughts I’d nursed against him this morning. And for last night as well, because, for better or worse, I’d never be able to undo it, and now was as good a time as any to show him that he was right, that this wasn’t easy, that fun and games had a way of skidding off course and that if we had rushed into things it was too late to step back from them now—crying because something was happening, and I had no idea what it was.

  “Whatever happens between us, Elio, I just want you to know. Don’t ever say you didn’t know.” He was still chewing. In the heat of passion it would have been one thing. But this was quite another. He was taking me away with him.

  His words made no sense. But I knew exactly what they meant.

  I rubbed his face with my palm. Then, without knowing why, I began to lick his eyelids.

  “Kiss me now, before it’s totally gone,” I said. His mouth would taste of peaches and me.

  I stayed in my room long after Oliver left. When I finally awoke, it was almost evening, which put me in a grumpy mood. The pain was gone, but I had a resurgence of the same malaise I’d experienced toward dawn. I didn’t know now if this was the same feeling, resurfacing after a long hiatus, or if the earlier one had healed and this was a totally new one, resulting from the afternoon’s lovemaking. Would I always experience such solitary guilt in the wake of our intoxicating moments together? Why didn’t I experience the same thing after Marzia? Was this nature’s way of reminding me that I would rather be with her?

  I took a shower and put on clean clothes. Downstairs, everyone was having cocktails. Last night’s two guests were there again, being entertained by my mother, while a newcomer, another reporter, was busily listening to Oliver’s description of his book on Heraclitus. He had perfected the art of giving a stranger a five-sentence précis that seemed invented on the spur of the moment for the benefit of that particular listener. “Are you staying?” asked my mother.

  “No, I’m going to see Marzia.”

  My mother gave me an apprehensive look, and ever so discreetly began to shake her head, meaning, I don’t approve, she’s a good girl, you should be going out together as a group. “Leave him alone, you and your groups,” was my father’s rebuttal, which set me free. “As it is, he’s shut up in the house all day. Let him do as he pleases. As he pleases!”

  If he only knew.

  And what if he did know?

  My father would never object. He might make a face at first, then take it back.

  It never occurred to me to hide from Oliver what I was doing with Marzia. Bakers and butchers don’t compete, I thought. Nor, in all likelihood, would he have given it another thought himself.

  That night Marzia and I went to the movies. We had ice cream in the piazzetta. And again at her parents’ home.

  “I want to go to the bookstore again,” she said when she walked me toward the gate t
o their garden. “But I don’t like going to the movies with you.”

  “You want to go around closing time tomorrow?”

  “Why not?” She wanted to repeat the other night.

  She kissed me. What I wanted instead was to go to the bookstore when it had just opened in the morning, with the option of going there that same night.

  When I returned home the guests were just about to leave. Oliver was not home.

  Serves me right, I thought.

  I went to my room and, for lack of anything else to do, opened my diary.

  Last night’s entry: “I’ll see you at midnight.” You watch. He won’t even be there. “Get lost”—that’s what “Grow up” means. I wish I’d never said anything.

  On the nervous doodlings I had traced around these words before heading out to his room, I was trying to recover the memory of last night’s jitters. Perhaps I wanted to relive the night’s anxieties, both to mask tonight’s and to remind myself that if my worst fears had suddenly been dispelled once I’d entered his room, perhaps they might end no differently tonight and be as easily subdued once I’d heard his footsteps.

  But I couldn’t even remember last night’s anxieties. They were completely overshadowed by what followed them and seemed to belong to a segment of time to which I had no access whatsoever. Everything about last night had suddenly vanished. I remembered nothing. I tried to whisper “Get lost” to myself as a way of jump-starting my memory. The words had seemed so real last night. Now they were just two words struggling to make sense.

  And then I realized it. What I was experiencing tonight was unlike anything I’d experienced in my life.