Call me by your name - André Aciman (p234)

...

How was I ever going to explain to him, or to myself, why I couldn't go to his home and meet his family, though every part of me was dying to? Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, books, world, life. What had I expected? A hug, a handshakem a perfunctory hail-fellow-well-met, and then the unavoidable Later!?

The very possibility of meeting his family suddenly alarmed me--too real, too sudden, too in-my-face, not rehearsed enough. Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we've lost and may never have cared for.

Or was it that I was jealous of his family, of the life he'd made for himself, of the things I never shared and couldn't possibly have known about? Things he had longed for, loved, and lost, and whose loss had crushed him, but whose presence in his life, when he had them, I wasn't there to witness and wouldn't know the first thing about. I wasn't there when he acquired them, wasn't there when he'd given up. Or was it much, such simplier? I had come to see if I felt something, if something was still alive. The trouble was I didn't want anything to be alive either.

All these years, whenever I thought of him, I'd think either of B. or of last days in Rome, the whole thing leading up to two scenes: the balcony with its attendant agonies and via Santa Maria dell'Anima, where he'd pushed me against the old wall and kissed me and in the end let me put one leg around his. Every time I go back to Rome, I go back to that one spot. It is still alive for me, still resounds with something totally present, as though a heart stolen from a tale by Poe still throbbed under tge abcient slate pavement to remind me that, here, I had finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have. I could never think of him in New England. When I lived in New England for a while and was seperated from him by no more than fifty miles, I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral. The places where he'd lived also felt inanimate, and as soon as I tried thinking of them, they too would float and drift away, no less unreal and spectral. Now, it turned out, not only were New England towns very much alive, but so was he. I could easily have thrust myself on him years ago, married or unmarried--unless it was I who, despite all appearances, had all along been unreal and spectral myself.

Or had I come with a far more menial purpose? To find him living alone, waiting for me, craving to be taken back to B.? Yes, both our lives on the same artificial respirator, waiting for that time when we'd finally meet and scale our way back to the Piave memorial.

...

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Remember it? I once wondered when someone and I would be twenty years later. But I also knew at that time things would soon become long lost memories just in less than two years. I was right as I'd known. In comparison to what Oliver was for/to Elio, that man was nothing to me. He was just there when I suddenly had that question about future itself and he was just an object of the subject. But it was enough for me to have a small taste of what the matter itself really means to anyone who looks back to the past and recognizes how his life become with or without that other important part of himself.

...

Call me by your name - André Aciman (p42)

...

His life, like his papers, even when it gave every impression of being chaotic, was always meticulously compartmentalized. Sometimes he skipped sinner altogether and would simply tell Mafalda, "Esco, I'm going out."

His Esco, I realized soon enough, was just another version of Later! A summary and unconditional goodbye, spoken not as you were leaving, but after you were out the door. You said it with your back to those who you were leaving behind. I felt sorry for those who on the receiving end who wished to appeal, to plead.

Not knowing whether he'd show up at the dinner table was torture. But bearable. Not daring to ask whether he'd be there was the real ordeal. Having my heart jump when I suddenly heard his voice or saw him seated at his seat when I'd almost given up hoping he'd be among us tonight eventually blossomed like a poisoned flower. Seeing him and thinking he'd join us for dinner tonight only to hear his peremptory Esco taught me there are certain wishes that must be clipped like wings iff a thriving butterfly.

I wanted him gone from our home so as to be done with him.

I wanted him dead, too so that if I couldn't stop thinking about him and worrying 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, how unbearable his ease with everything and everyone, taking all things in stride, his tireless I'm-okay-with-this-and-that, his springing across the gate to the beach when everyone else opened the latch first, to say nothing of his bathing suits, his spot in paradise, his cheeky Later!, his lip-smacking love for apricot juice. 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.

Then it hit me that I could have killed myself instead, or hurt myself badly enough and let him know why I'd done it. If I hurt my face, I'd want him to look at me and wonder why, why might anyone do this to himself, until, years and years later--yes, Later!--he'd finally piece the puzzle together and beat his head against the wall.

...


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I'll introduce you Call me by your name (by André Aciman) by putting paragraphs that I love so much here. I like this book a lot and can not giving me the freedom of reading as fast as usual. I just read line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page and pause long enough to devour each word. I really think of André Aciman as a master of using grammar as one of his effective methods. I like the way he blends the present tense and past tense into one mixture of a story line in which we can pick up easily his remaining emotion from the past and the present feeling which is still there, somehow even through 20 years of distance.

Someone once said time is just another dimension of space as in space has more than 3 dimensions. If you belive it, 20 years is a distance, really... but if you ever catch up with it again? Ever?... Again?...