Call Me by Your Name-André Aciman

wife, for me, for himself, it would finally dawn on us both that he was more
me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became
him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after
every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my
father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself. In the weeks we’d been
thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had
crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to
earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked
the other way. We spoke about everything but. But we’ve always known,
and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. We had found the
stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

Last summer he finally did come back. It was for an overnight visit, on his
way from Rome to Menton. He arrived by cab down the tree-lined
driveway, where the car stopped more or less where it had stopped twenty
years before. He sprang out with his laptop, a huge athletic duffel bag, and a
large gift-wrapped box, obviously a present. “For your mother,” he said
when he caught my glance. “Better tell her what’s in it,” I said as soon as I
helped put his things down in the foyer. “She suspects everyone.” He
understood. It saddened him.

“Old room?” I asked.
“Old room,” he confirmed, even though we’d arranged everything by e-
mail already.
“Old room it is, then.”
I wasn’t eager to go upstairs with him and was relieved to see Manfredi
and Mafalda shuffle out of the kitchen to greet him as soon as they’d heard
his taxi. Their giddy hugs and kisses defused some of the uneasiness I knew
I’d feel as soon as he’d settled down in our house. I wanted their
overexcited welcome to last well into the first hour of his stay. Anything to
prevent us from sitting face-to-face over coffee and finally speaking the
unavoidable two words: twenty years.
Instead, we’d leave his things in the foyer and hope Manfredi would
bring them upstairs while Oliver and I took a quick walk around the house.
“I’m sure you’re dying to see,” I’d say, meaning the garden, the balustrade,

and the view of the sea. We’d work our way behind the pool, back into the
living room where the old piano stood next to the French windows, and
finally we would return to the foyer and find that his things had indeed
already been carried upstairs. Part of me might want him to realize that
nothing had changed since he’d been here last, that the orle of paradise was
still there, and that the tilting gate to the beach still squeaked, that the world
was exactly as he’d left it, minus Vimini, Anchise, and my father. This was
the welcoming gesture I meant to extend. But another part of me wanted
him to sense there was no point trying to catch up now—we’d traveled and
been through too much without each other for there to be any common
ground between us. Perhaps I wanted him to feel the sting of loss, and
grieve. But in the end, and by way of compromise, perhaps, I decided that
the easiest way was to show I’d forgotten none of it. I made a motion to
take him to the empty lot that remained as scorched and fallow as when I’d
shown it to him two decades before. I had barely finished my offer—“Been
there, done that,” he replied. It was his way of telling me he hadn’t
forgotten either. “Maybe you’d prefer to make a quick stop at the bank.” He
burst out laughing. “I’ll bet you they never closed my account.” “If we have
time, and if you care to, I’ll take you to the belfry. I know you’ve never
been up there.”

“To-die-for?”
I smiled back. He remembered our name for it.
As we toured the patio overlooking the huge expanse of blue before us,
I stood by and watched him lean on the balustrade overlooking the bay.
Beneath us was his rock, where he sat at night, where he and Vimini had
whiled away entire afternoons together.
“She’d be thirty today,” he said.
“I know.”
“She wrote to me every day. Every single day.”
He was staring at their spot. I remembered how they’d hold hands and
scamper together all the way down to the shore.
“Then one day she stopped writing. And I knew. I just knew. I’ve kept
all her letters, you know.”
I looked at him wistfully.
“I’ve kept yours too,” he immediately added, to reassure me, though
vaguely, not knowing whether this was something I wanted to hear.

It was my turn. “I have all of yours too. And something else as well.
Which I may show you. Later.”

Did he not remember Billowy, or was he too modest, too cautious, to
show he knew exactly what I was referring to? He resumed staring into the
offing.

He had come on the right day. Not a cloud, not a ripple, not a stir in the
wind. “I’d forgotten how much I loved this place. But this is exactly how I
remember it. At noon it’s paradise.”

I let him talk. It was good to see his eyes drift into the offing. Perhaps
he too wanted to avoid the face-to-face.

“And Anchise?” he finally asked.
“We lost him to cancer, poor man. I used to think he was so old. He
wasn’t even fifty.”
“He too loved it here—him and his grafts and his orchard.”
“He died in my grandfather’s bedroom.”
Silence again. I was going to say My old room, but I changed my mind.
“Are you happy you’re back?”
He saw through my question before I did.
“Are you happy I’m back?” he retorted.
I looked at him, feeling quite disarmed, though not threatened. Like
people who blush easily but aren’t ashamed of it, I knew better than to stifle
this feeling, and let myself be swayed by it.
“You know I am. More than I ought to be, perhaps.”
“Me too.”
That said it all.
“Come, I’ll show you where we buried some of my father’s ashes.”
We walked down the back stairwell into the garden where the old
breakfast table used to be. “This was my father’s spot. I call it his ghost
spot. My spot used to be over there, if you remember.” I pointed to where
my old table used to stand by the pool.
“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.
Instead, I pointed upstairs to the French windows of his room. Your eyes are
forever there, I wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from

my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days. When there’s a breeze
and they swell and I look up from down here or stand outside on the
balcony, I’ll catch myself thinking that you’re in there, staring out from
your world to my world, saying, as you did on that one night when I found
you on the rock, I’ve been happy here. You’re thousands of miles away but
no sooner do I look at this window than I’ll think of a bathing suit, a shirt
thrown on on the fly, arms resting on the banister, and you’re suddenly
there, lighting up your first cigarette of the day—twenty years ago today.
For as long as the house stands, this will be your ghost spot—and mine too,
I wanted to say.

We stood there for a few seconds where my father and I had spoken of
Oliver once. Now he and I were speaking of my father. Tomorrow, I’ll think
back on this moment and let the ghosts of their absence maunder in the
twilit hour of the day.

“I know he would have wanted something like this to happen, especially
on such a gorgeous summer day.”

“I am sure he would have. Where did you bury the rest of his ashes?” he
asked.

“Oh, all over. In the Hudson, the Aegean, the Dead Sea. But this is
where I come to be with him.”

He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“Come, I’ll take you to San Giacomo before you change your mind,” I
finally said. “There is still time before lunch. Remember the way?”
“I remember the way.”
“You remember the way,” I echoed.
He looked at me and smiled. It cheered me. Perhaps because I knew he
was taunting me.
Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this
morning, and morning seemed light-years away.
“I’m like you,” he said. “I remember everything.”
I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say,
and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when
you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye
to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this
once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, 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.

Also by André Aciman

Out of Egypt: A Memoir
Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

(editor)
False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory

Entrez: Signs of France
The Proust Project (editor)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Copyright © 2007 by André Aciman
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aciman, André.
Call me by your name / André Aciman.—1st ed.

p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-374-70772-9

1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Gay teenagers—Fiction. 3. Authors—
Fiction. 4. Italy—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3601.C525 C35 2007
813'.6—dc22

2006011720

www.fsgbooks.com