Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

He was going to be a difficult neighbor. Better stay away from him, I thought.

all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything

That he might have mistaken these as aimed at him never crossed my mind. Maybe it was for similar reasons that I would look away each time he looked at me: to conceal the strain on my timidity. That he might have found my avoidance offensive and retaliated with a hostile glance from time to time never crossed my mind either.

The summer I learned to love fishing. Because he did. To love jogging. Because he did. To love octopus, Heraclitus, Tristan. The summer I’d hear a bird sing, smell a plant, or feel the mist rise from under my feet on warm sunny days

To withhold universal approval would simply alert others that I had concealed motives for needing to resist him.

I wanted him dead too, so that if I couldn’t stop thinking about him and worrying about when would be the next time I’d see him, at least his death would put an end to it. I wanted to kill him myself, even, so as to let him know how much his mere existence had come to bother me,

Okay crazy

If I didn’t kill him, then I’d cripple him for life, so that he’d be with us in a wheelchair and never go back to the States. If he were in a wheelchair, I would always know where he was, and he’d be easy to find. I would feel superior to him and become his master, now that he was crippled.

Elio is crazy

I’m sure he knew I knew he knew I was avoiding all mention of Monet’s berm,

I wanted to come back years later and believe, if only for a moment, that he had truly spoken these pleading words to me.

I said I would wear the purple shirt given me by a distant cousin from Uruguay. My father laughed it off, saying I was too old not to accept people as they were. But there was a glint in his eyes when both showed up wearing purple shirts.

“Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine,” which I’d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.

Why hadn’t we talked like this before? I’d have been less desperate for him had we been able to have this kind of friendship weeks earlier.

To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me.

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

For weeks I had mistaken his stare for barefaced hostility. I was wide of the mark. It was simply a shy man’s way of holding someone else’s gaze. We were, it finally dawned on me, the two shyest persons in the world. My father was the only one who had seen through him from the very start.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight.

I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn’t dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but didn’t care to read the mile-posts.

but away from me now? Whom else would I ever be able to call by my name?

how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same.

In a month or so from now, when I’d revisit Rome, being here tonight with Oliver would seem totally unreal, as though it had happened to an entirely different me.

He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn’t changed. Yet nothing would be the same.

I began to wonder what turn my life would have taken had someone else shown up instead. I wouldn’t have gone to Rome. But I might have gone elsewhere. Wouldn’t have known the first thing about San Clemente. But I might have discovered something else which I’d missed out on and might never know about. Wouldn’t have changed, would never be who I am today, would have become someone else.

“Elio,” he said. I could hear my parents and the voices of children in the background. 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.

“Did I have a spot?” he asked with a half grin. “You’ll always have a spot.”

I wanted to tell him that the pool, the garden, the house, the tennis court, the orle of paradise, the whole place, would always be his ghost spot.

which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.