Call Me by Your Name: A Novel

Author:André Aciman [Aciman, André]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary, Gay
ISBN: 9780374707729
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2007-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Had we made noise?

He smiled. Nothing to worry about.

I think I might have sobbed even, but I wasn’t sure. He took his shirt and cleaned me with it. Mafalda always looks for signs. She won’t find any, he said. I call this shirt “Billowy,” you wore it on your first day here, it has more of you than me. I doubt it, he said. He wouldn’t let go of me yet, but as our bodies separated I seemed to remember, though ever so distantly, that a while back I had absentmindedly shoved away a book which had ended up under my back while he was still inside me. Now it was on the floor. When had I realized it was a copy of Se l’amore? Where had I found time in the heat of passion even to wonder whether he’d been to the book party on the same night I’d gone there with Marzia? Strange thoughts that seemed to drift in from long, long ago, no more than half an hour later.

It must have come to me a while later when I was still in his arms. It woke me up before I even realized I had dozed off, filling me with a sense of dread and anxiety I couldn’t begin to fathom. I felt queasy, as if I had been sick and needed not just many showers to wash everything off but a bath in mouthwash. I needed to be far away—from him, from this room, from what we’d done together. It was as though I were slowly landing from an awful nightmare but wasn’t quite touching the ground yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to, because what awaited was not going to be much better, though I knew I couldn’t go on hanging on to that giant, amorphous blob of a nightmare that felt like the biggest cloud of self-loathing and remorse that had ever wafted into my life. I would never be the same. How had I let him do these things to me, and how eagerly had I participated in them, and spurred them on, and then waited for him, begging him, Please don’t stop. Now his goo was matted on my chest as proof that I had crossed a terrible line, not vis-à-vis those I held dearest, not even vis-à-vis myself, or anything sacred, or the race itself that had brought us this close, not even vis-à-vis Marzia, who stood now like a far-flung siren on a sinking reef, distant and irrelevant, cleansed by lapping summer waves while I struggled to swim out to her, clamoring from a whirlpool of anxiety in the hope that she’d be part of the collection of images to help me rebuild myself by daybreak. It was not these I had offended, but those who were yet unborn or unmet and whom I’d never be able to love without remembering this mass of shame and revulsion rising between my life and theirs. It would haunt and sully my love for them, and between us, there would be this secret that could tarnish everything good in me.

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