Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

“If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter.”

could swear it lay around us,

playing for time by repeating the words.

with a vague and weary tone that was my last diversion, my last cover, my last getaway, said, “Yes, I know what I’m saying

At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief—or do they hound you till the bitter end?

A thought raced through my mind: Would my descendants know what was spoken on this very piazzetta today? Would anyone? Or would it dissolve into thin air, as I found part of me wishing it would? Would they know how close to the brink their fate stood on this day on this piazzetta?

Only the scenery and the weather could buoy my spirits now.

though he had found the overplayed tact in my words slightly comical.

And maybe I stared back because there wasn’t a thing to lose now. I stared back with the all-knowing, I-dare-you-to-kiss-me gaze of someone who both challenges and flees with one and the same gesture.

I wasn’t even ashamed of showing how flushed I was. So let him know, let him. “Because it would be very wrong.” “Would?” I asked. Was there a ray of hope, then?

“Yes, would. I’m not going to pretend this hasn’t crossed my mind.”

“The best I can do is pretend I don’t care.” “That much we’ve known for a while already,” he snapped right away.

He stared me right in the face, as though he liked my face and wished to study it and to linger on it,

desperate to forget the kiss by losing myself in it.

zeal

and the smell of his body fresh from his chest,

Give me a blindfold, hold my hand, and don’t ask me to think—will you do that for me?

was just two wet tongues flailing away in each other’s mouths.

glacial,

What is more sobering in love than the unavoidable end? The only thing capable of stopping love?

pouring more and more

Get a grip, I kept saying to myself, get a grip. Don’t let your body give the whole thing away. “Was it my fault?” he asked

as if humoring someone who’d been hurt enough already.

Maybe the ancients were right: it never hurt to be bled from time to time.

which seemed to aim a rippling shaft of sunlight on the water directly toward me, as in a Monet painting.

he had shown me that what I wanted could be given and taken so naturally that one wonders why it needed such hand-wringing torment and shame,

boat should be totally dismantled. But the boat was downstairs, I said. “Then it must be the translator. Who

belonged to another time segment, as though it had happened to another me in some other life that was not too

read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it’s always themselves they can’t stand being alone with…

languorous

I knew he knew I was avoiding all mention of Monet’s berm, and that this avoidance, which gave every indication of drawing us apart, was, instead, a perfectly synchronized moment of intimacy which neither of us wished to dispel.

while I made every effort to recover the dream I was about to reenter any moment now

There they were, the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life, hunger and fear, watching over me, saying, So many before you have taken the chance and been rewarded, why can’t you? No answer. So many have balked, so why must you? No answer. And then it came, as ever deriding me: If not later, Elio, when?

he was gasping, conscious that he’d already spoken these selfsame words to me a few nights before in another dream

This very image of him would become like a night-light in my life,

The look on his face became like the tiny snapshot of a beloved that soldiers take with them to the battlefield, not only to remember there are good things in life and that happiness awaits them, but to remind themselves that this face might never forgive them for coming back in a body bag.

This was who he truly was; the rest was incidental.

That morning, I’d written it down in my diary but omitted to say I had dreamt it. 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’d stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.

Perhaps I didn’t want to believe what she was implying for fear of having to answer for my behavior. Had I been purposely disingenuous?

“People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.”

night—untrammeled, frank, human—

A kiss on the mouth was not a prelude to a more comprehensive contact, it was already contact in its totality.

The parallels between kissing, dancing, and making love After a year of sex I do understand how fluidly one motion can lead to the next

but my mind was racing ahead

Always thinking and never feeling

canicular

lachrymose,

“Must be tired, then,” was my father’s ironic contribution to the conversation.

The last time I had waited so long for something was for my report card. Or on the Saturday two years

Or does gratitude, however restrained, always bear that extra dollop of treacle that gives every

mawkish,