fic | the natural consequences of desire

[sentito]

THE NATURAL CONSEQUENCES OF DESIRE

Somewhere in Northern Italy, early 1700’s.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ve got a decent pair of sea legs on me,” said Oliver on the day of his arrival, standing in the middle of the sitting room at Elio’s mother’s old family estate with its orchards and its direct view of the sea. Elio’s father had just asked him whether he needed a couple of hours’ rest after his travels, he’d come directly from Sicily by boat. Standing next to his father, looking up at their new house guest, whom they welcomed at least one of every two years and had done so for as long as he could remember, Elio had never heard a more frightening line spoken in his life. Himself, he’d never been the type to have sea legs. What a superpower to hold. What a superiority. What an advantage in life.

How far you could go, then.

“And how are your land legs?” his father asked, amused.

Oliver, tall and broad and wearing a light blue linen shirt with frills that covered everything except the tips of his fingers, but what tips they were, nails well cared for and skin tanned, laughed and replied, “Excellent, Pro! I’m ready for a tour of the grounds, if you are willing to provide.”

Unfortunately, Elio’s father didn’t have the time to walk with him, held up by university business at the moment, but he offered Elio’s services with all the confidence of presenting a substitute who you were sure could almost outmatch you, and Oliver, carefree and American about it, too, accepted without comment, gesturing towards the door as he met Elio’s eyes finally.

“If you don’t mind.”

Elio didn’t mind.

They walked through the orchard to get to the acres further back, where the carriage trail ran and where the road to town picked up by the end of the grazing fields for the sheep and horses. His mother’s family had been breeding horses here for more than two centuries, he told Oliver as they walked, ever since they’d fled Spain in the 1490s. Fine, Arabian horses that sold doubly what a normal working stallion was worth.

“Explains it,” Oliver said as way of response, Elio frowning and asking what it explained. “All this,” Oliver went on, gesturing about – the villa, the orchard, the well-mannered grassy fields that stretched on and on as far as you could see. We’re surrounded by water on one side, his father would sometimes say, earth on the other. What he meant, Elio knew, was that both were equally massive, maybe even frightening elements and you’d be wise to watch your step, no matter in what direction you went.

It was only because man had yet to find a way to go up that they didn’t count the sky as a third.

What frightened him more, the elements or Oliver, Elio didn’t know. Especially since the other man was tall, his powdered head of shoulder-length hair, which was tied up in a ponytail at the back, coronated by the cloudless, blue sky and the bright, golden sunlight. As they walked side by side along the borders of his mother’s lands, he looked like the saints in Catholic iconography and that was even as Elio knew him to be Jewish like himself, like his whole family.

Only, no one in Elio’s family had ever powdered their hair or worn a wig, no one in his family would ever dare address his father Pro or could say they had a decent pair of sea legs on them, sticking to land, sticking to horses and big, fat peaches, picked all throughout summer in big wicker baskets and sold at the nearest markets, a new town every day throughout the week, Manfredi was in charge of the household books, profits, spendings.

Oliver, who came from New York, born and raised in the colonies, this was his first trip to Europe and most likely it’s going to be my last, he’d mused when Elio had inquired whether he liked Italy, in itself a strange answer, stood apart from all that. Mundane, everyday things.

Him and his billowy, light blue shirt did, with frills that obscured everything but the very part of his body that would be touching you, if he should decide to touch you in the first place.

As they walked back, side by side, Elio kept his own hands curled into tight fists, all but drowning in finely cut, embroidered fabric trimming, white, though dusty now after an hour under the weather. Tightening his grip on himself, it was the only way he could ensure he wouldn’t be the one to reach out and touch first.


~*~


Everyone loved Oliver. Everyone.

The neighbors would visit often over the next many months, in the hopes of an invitation to dinner, where Oliver would sit next to Elio’s father and discuss such subjects as classical philology and Ancient Greek philosophers with those in attendance, most of them men who knew nothing about any of it, yet the two doctors would help them to sound wise and learned for a while there at the table, while afterwards Oliver always turned 180 degrees, saying to Elio’s father, what a tool, what an idiot, what a complete, ignorant fool, don’t you think, Pro?

And Elio’s father would correct him, in his quiet, thoughtful manner. “You’re a harsh judge. Do you hold yourself to those same standards?”

“Harsher, Pro. How else would I be here?”

Somehow, that appeased Elio’s father and he would pat Oliver on the back once, twice, turning away and leaving Elio behind as he led the other man out into the hallway that ended by his offices, where the two of them, i dottori, would continue to work till long after sundown. The candles burned bright in there, Elio could glimpse their windows from the room he’d been relocated to, since Oliver had been given his usual one, the flames flickered among the papers and the wooden panels and would reflect in the soft silks of their clothes, no doubt, pastel-colored and cream-like.

He remembered the light blue shirt in which Oliver had arrived, clearly. The color. He had imagined the texture of it as often as the neighbors came to dine, imagined pushing the frills on the sleeves aside, revealing strong, tanned hands with solid fingers that still knew how to be soft, or so he hoped.

All this made Elio wonder what judgement Oliver passed on him, where he couldn’t hear, couldn’t see and wouldn’t be any poorer for it. Neither poorer nor richer. None the wiser.

Everyone loved Oliver. Elio did, too.

But he pretended valiantly not to care, didn’t show the way it crushed his soul every time his father took Oliver aside and didn’t bring Elio along, to stand next to him, to look up at the familiar profile of his face, to see the sunlight bring out the gold in his blonde hair, beneath the thin layer of white powder that no one in the Perlman family ever made use of.

“Oliver’s divine,” Chiara would say, walking next to Elio through the orchard, her skirts brushing over the dewy grass. The sun had only risen an hour ago, the shadows prolonged the life span of the night’s chilly grip on the ground in late October. Their parents hoped for an easy match between them, Chiara’s family with their woodwork expertise, a century’s worth of exquisite cabinetmaking and carpentry, and Elio’s family with their horses that always needed new coaches and carriages and repairing of the stables that they stayed in. Together, they had walked this same route the past year and a half, Chiara and Elio. Since Elio’s father’s last house guest who, Elio is pretty sure, Chiara didn’t find divine.

One time, they had undressed by the shore and skinny-dipped, one after the other, not touching the same wave, the same water, he had seen her naked breasts and felt initiated into an adulthood that matched all his expectations. Chiara had a mature, womanly body, her breasts were to die for. She was the same age as him.

“Tell him to come visit me, I’ll show him the desks and working tables my father has made. Maybe he’ll like one,” she continued, meaning: maybe he’ll like me. And maybe, if he did, she would come with the furniture, lie bared on the desk brought into Oliver’s room, Elio’s room, and she would show her beautiful breasts to him and unlike her and Elio, Oliver and she would ride the same wave.

Since Elio loved Oliver only the same way everyone else did, and since he showed no particular care for him beyond the ever-so-polite, he’s great, of course, he’s popular with everyone, he didn’t mind the thought of Chiara and him, he didn’t mind imagining what Oliver might do, once all Chiara’s half-baked intentions and her fully-matured breasts had been exposed.

If you loved someone like Oliver, you had to love how everyone else loved him as well. You had to take a certain pride in that.

In not being the first, maybe, but definitely being the one who loved him the most, the greatest. You had to take comfort in that, because there was no comfort in any of the rest.

“He doesn’t listen to me,” he replied, her feet following a parallel trajectory alongside his, amongst the peaches and apricot groves, his breeches matching her apron in shades of green. The trees had produced their last fruit of the season, Anchise at constant work to prepare for winter now. “Tell him yourself, and he’ll be sure to come.”

She had smiled, then, like Elio had paid her a big compliment and when she did ask Oliver the same evening, and the next day he went to the neighboring estate for supper, staying long into the night, Elio wondered if that might not have been the purpose of it, after all.


~*~


As perceived from the outside, it seemed evident what was happening. Oliver visited Chiara’s family estate every night the following week, riding out early in the afternoon, once his work with Elio’s father had been carried out in a sufficient manner, and returned home with the rise of the moon, Elio heard him tiptoeing down the hallway, whispering to Mafalda to please not make a fuss.

“No changing the sheets before bedtime, Mr. Oliver,” she asked dryly in a none-too-hushed voice.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just me,” he assured her, and Elio recognized the wry tone in response.

“Well, I’m not going all the way over to Chiara’s,” the housekeeper proclaimed, ushering him the rest of the way down the hallway to his room that was Elio’s room, he was in Elio’s space, he lived there, he had become rooted like some landmark olive tree.

Once everything had fallen silent once more, the stars were out and Elio lay in bed, awake, alone, wondering whether he wanted to do to Chiara whatever Oliver was doing to her as much as he wanted to do to Oliver what Chiara no doubt did to him in turn. It wasn’t a matter of either or, he decided as the sun dyed the horizon a pale golden pink. It was a matter of both and.

“Rumor has it, Chiara’s father is collecting for her dowry,” Elio told Oliver the next morning when they were the last ones at the breakfast table, Oliver eating his second soft-boiled egg with a small spoon, because Mafalda always cut two open for him, assuming he wanted them and assuming he wouldn’t treat himself.

Elio looked at Oliver and thought, it wasn’t a lack of will, Oliver knew what he wanted for himself in all other aspects of life, he had a decent pair of sea legs on him, he’d said, but upon arrival he hadn’t known how to open the egg they put before him. Maybe he still didn’t, really.

And maybe it wasn’t about the egg in any case, maybe the egg was just a symbol. A substitute for something else.

“Hasn’t he been doing that for years?” Oliver asked innocently, referring to Elio and Chiara’s weekly walks around the gardens and grounds of Elio’s mother’s estate without mentioning either of them, because that would’ve been presumptuous under any circumstances. No one in the Perlman household had at any point outright mentioned marriage. It was one of those unspoken things, no pressure, but no permissions either. Elio frowned.

“Yes, but they say there’s a new contender to her inheritance now,” he tried, a little bit desperately, knowing he was overstepping bounds the very moment the words had left his mouth. Oliver, sitting opposite him, looked up from his now emptied egg and wiped at his mouth, slapping the napkin down on the tabletop next to his plate.

“That’s not something ‘they’ have any business getting mixed up in.”

“It’s just that everyone knows she’s beautiful and her father’s wealthy and --” Elio began.

“Sounds like you’re the one interested in her,” Oliver snapped, standing up suddenly and Elio quickly scrambled to his feet, too, fingers curled into fists where he was leaning against the tabletop, but only because he was going to hold on to himself, or he was going to hold on to Oliver, and one was worse than the other, surely.

“That’s not what I’m interested in,” he managed.

“So, what are you interested in?” Oliver’s voice was hard as rock and cold as steel, it burned like snow that was mercilessly slow to melt against your skin. For once, briefly speechless, Elio stared at him, met blue eyes that were no softer than his words had been. He thought about Oliver’s fingertips that he’d noticed on the first day he was here, that glimpse, that promise of touch, wrapped in frills and linen trimming. His own hands buried into the coarser fabric of his breeches; his heels scraped against the wooden floors.

What was he interested in?

“You wouldn’t understand,” he heard himself utter, from somewhere removed from his body, a place even the softness of Oliver’s fingertips wouldn’t be able to reach, trace, or penetrate. The important thing was how the hardness of his attitude definitely couldn’t go there, the rest was collateral. Lost in the storm. “You wouldn’t understand what I desire.”

A long moment, they simply stared at each other, stared each other down, across the table, then Oliver huffed out a breath and turned aside, heading for the door that led out into the hallway, the shortcut to every other room in the house. At this time of day, he was probably headed for Elio’s father’s study to have the daily correspondences dictated to him. Elio, on the other hand, had nowhere else to be. To go.

“Let’s keep it that way,” Oliver said with his back turned, a quiet mutter that sounded to Elio more like a shout, something so loud that no one in the house could possibly avoid hearing it, but Elio’s mother, entering the dining room just as Oliver was exiting, asked an amused, what was that, Mr. Oliver, before coming over to the now deserted table, beginning to gather things for Mafalda to collect.

She’d heard nothing.

“Always has something to say, doesn’t he?” she remarked to Elio, who shook his head like in a trance, stepped away and fled out into the gardens.

There were hours to waste. Chiara wasn’t expected to arrive until past noon.


~*~


For almost a whole month after that, they weren’t on speaking terms, Oliver and him. Sure, they would exchange bland pleasantries over dinner, though the drudgery of his father’s evening arrangements gave too many easy excuses not to try and initiate real conversation, and they both accepted them without comment. No genuine attempts to break the ice were made. During the large, end-of-the-week balls, they danced with each their partners, eligible girls from the area, everyone whispering about whom they’d end up with, since Chiara wouldn’t be available to both of them, obviously. Who is going to be the first to give up, the question sounded, but Elio could tell, no one truly knew what they were actually asking. No one understood what lay behind.

He hardly understood it himself.

Then came mid-November and on his birthday, celebrated with all his favorite dishes, Mafalda force-feeding him fruitcake at breakfast until he was one slice from throwing up, the whole household gathered around, presenting him with a new shirt in a pale, blue linen, the frills large enough to cover everything, maybe except the tips of his fingers, and Elio was moved enough to stand aside after that. It’s the fruitcake, he insisted, turning away and letting his fingers run over the thin fabric of the shirt, feeling the texture of it. It was completely identical to Oliver’s shirt, same color, same style. When he thought no one was looking, he raised it to his face and smelled the collar.

Clean and unused, no trace of scent except his own shaking breath and old traces of bleaching agent. The shirt had probably been a brighter blue once. Then, they’d made the tailor change it, for him.

His hands sunk slowly.

How much did they know, his parents? How much did they understand? How much had Oliver complained about in the privacy of Elio’s father’s study? Your son gives me the creeps, Mr. Perlman, he’s offensive and doesn’t know how to behave himself.

No, Oliver would never say that, would he? Or if he did, Elio’s father would certainly not listen.

Would he?

Elio looked down at the shirt, turning back towards the table where the rest of the household had immersed themselves in devouring the newly arrived pan of sausages and eggs. Everyone was talking over each other, forks gesturing wildly in the air, Manfredi was yelling something after Mafalda that only she understood, because his Neapolitan dialect was all but impossible to decipher for anyone not from that part of the country. It was their secret code. Elio’s mother insisted they used it to badmouth their employers. Oliver, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen.

In the midst of the chaos, the disorder raging within Elio’s mind, too, Elio’s father looked up and caught sight of his son, holding out one arm towards him and gesturing with the other, fork-wielding and extremely precise with it in addition, like someone conducting a chamber orchestra, towards the open terrace doors. “Let me take the shirt, Elio.” Elio passed his birthday gift to him with an indescribable sense of relief. “Oliver said he’d meet you outside when you were ready.”

Oliver outside, Elio thought, dumbly. Oliver ready.

He left the dining room in a daze, stepping out into the chilly, shadowy November morning, the sky overcast and grey, dreary, his birthdays had always been like that. His father, to cheer him up when he was a child and the weather mattered, because the weather was his insides turned out, had often insisted it needed to be like that for everyone to realize the ray of sunshine that his son was. It was a contrast, not a reflection.

No, his father definitely wouldn’t listen, if Oliver was complaining about him. He wouldn’t believe a word.

“Took you a while,” Oliver greeted him once Elio located him in the farthest end of the, at this point, mostly down-cut orchard, Anchise had prepped the whole garden for winter now; the older man stood under the big peach trees, hands behind his back, a thick silk jacket slipped over his white vest and blue shirt, same color and same style as the one Elio had just received not half an hour ago.

Oliver shirt, he thought, though what he said was, “I didn’t know I was in a hurry.”

Without answering, Oliver just smiled, the wry half-smile that could mean anything and everything – and probably carried a tint of sardonic amusement about the fact that it left you baffled to begin with. Elio didn’t trust it as far as he could spit, but at the same time he’d never dream of spitting after it. It mattered too much for that.

At his sides, his fingers curled into fists. Oliver, sensing the tension between them and seemingly seeking to diffuse it, finally showed his hands, a small, rectangular package between them that he held out towards Elio unceremoniously and silently, as if refusing to say, here, for you, because his whole body already spoke those same words and he didn’t want to be redundant. Redundancy was ill perceived among scholars. Elio knew, because he was the son of a professor.

“What’s this?” he inquired, hesitantly, though he had taken the present before he could even hope to stop himself.

“Open it,” Oliver said, meaning, find out for yourself.

He unwrapped the gift slowly, the thin leather folded around its contents old and worn, it had seen other gifts, other places, and for some reason Elio found it all the more beautiful for it. Inside was a small book, leatherbound and with gilded letters spelling out, in English, The Fatal Marriage, on the cover, beneath it, Thomas Southerne. Holding his breath, Elio opened it. It was a play. He’d never heard of it before. Suddenly he couldn’t wait with losing himself in the lines.

“What’s it about?” he asked Oliver, looking up slowly, not even thinking as far as to thank him or, considering their previous weeks of the silent treatment, pretend he wasn’t the least bit interested. Oliver, like he was rewarding him for his genuine enthusiasm, didn’t scorn him, but instead said:

“It’s about the kind of tragedies desire can make us cause.”

It was Elio’s turn to smile, wryly. “That’s pessimistic of you.”

“I’m a mere realist,” Oliver responded after a moment of just looking him over, “Besides, we’re not talking about me, but about Mr. Southerne.”

Glancing down at the book, Elio bought himself a few moments extra in Oliver’s immediate vicinity by folding and re-folding the piece of leather in which the book had been wrapped, holding both things between his hands and only then, raising his chin to meet the other man’s eyes. Blue. Bluer than their shirts. Bluer than the skies on any other day but Elio’s birthday.

“How do you expect me to show my appreciation?” he finally managed, a small part of him hoping, hoping, hoping. Come to my room that is your room tonight, pay me back with your body, with the tragedies that desire can make us cause.

“Admit that you’re not good with compliments and get it over with,” Oliver answered, instead, laughing once, harshly.

Like snow that was too slow in melting against your skin, that kind of burn. Elio clung to the book, cradled it to his chest and shook his head.

“Do you call this a compliment?”

Oliver’s eyes narrowed. “What else would I call it?”

“Don’t know,” Elio attempted to stall, though he knew he couldn’t hold onto that attitude for long, bracing himself for disappointment, readying himself for a brush with death. “A confession?”

“And what would I be confessing?” Oliver slowly spoke. Every syllable was deliberate, his Italian had never sounded more correct and by the book as it did in that one sentence.

“Desire,” Elio said. In a way that made it seem self-evident. Above their heads, the wind rustled the mostly desaturated foliage of the peach trees.

What precisely he expected, he didn’t know. That Oliver would tell him he was crazy, obscene, disgusting, take your pick. That Oliver would take back his book and never exchange another word with Elio again. That this would be his first taste of the tragedies of which Oliver had warned and of which Thomas Southerne had written in The Fatal Marriage. What he hadn’t expected was for Oliver to purse his lips a long moment, then say in a low voice:

“We shouldn’t talk about such things.” After which, he turned around and stalked off with a casual, dismissive happy birthday tossed over one shoulder.

Remaining behind long after the other man had disappeared down the gravel path among the groves, Elio felt as delighted as he felt utterly defeated. Not a concept of either-or, but the authentic experience of both-and.

For some reason he couldn’t explain, he was greedy for both sensations, the joy, and the despair. Combined, they made him feel alive. More alive than he had ever felt before in his life. All eighteen years of it, on that day.


~*~


What ‘such things’ implied, it would take them several months to settle. In the meantime, the whole household celebrated Hanukkah in the quiet confinement of the house, while the rest of the country prepared for Christmas; the Perlman family, and Oliver in extension – a count that Elio began to love keeping, his mother, one, his father, two, and Oliver, another – a foreign but flexible element in the Roman Catholic structures of contemporary Italy. Oliver and he didn’t speak about his birthday, neither of them acknowledged the book that now existed between them, binding them together whenever Elio brought it down, reading by the fireplace in the early winter evenings.

One night in mid-January, when Elio’s father noticed the title of the book, going hmm and coming over, leaning in over Elio’s shoulder, Elio clutched the frail pages of it between his fingers, not daring to move, not daring to breathe too hard.

“That isn’t from our library,” he said, asking without forming the question, a habit Elio had picked up from him to great annoyance for his teachers. Across from them, Oliver was writing a letter in the light of a candle, a derisive curve around his lips, like he was thinking, you try and get us out of that one, now. Glancing over at him, at the shadows crawling over his features, he was half darkness this way, which seemed fitting, Elio finally looked down at the page he had been reading and shook his head.

“I got it in town,” he replied, telling himself that a white lie wouldn’t add to the dusk by much, wouldn’t obscure the corners of the sitting room any more than they already were.

Oliver’s quill scraped across his piece of parchment. His mother’s fabrics, where she was seated by the window, doing her needlework, rustled faintly. Elio’s father hummed and straightened up. “Remember to catalogue it correctly, when you’re done,” he instructed, always the professor, used to having his every word heard and heeded. His every advice welcomed.

Across the room, Elio’s and Oliver’s gazes met for a second, both of them smiling quietly, though neither of them could verbalize what they were smiling about. Their eyes knew, however, that some things were impossible to catalogue or categorize, some things did not have a place in the Perlman library. The Fatal Marriage was one of those things, as was whatever relation they now shared, wrapped up and cocooned like a hibernating butterfly in this protective secrecy of theirs.

Saying nothing of it, the truth as they knew it or maybe, rather, as they didn’t, they returned to their respective pastimes, Oliver to his letter, Elio to his book. Oliver’s book. Elio’s father didn’t inquire further.

With the arrival of spring, their houseguest stopped paying visits to Chiara’s family, while she in turn stopped paying visit to Elio. People whispered of a stalemate. Elio, by now, had read The Fatal Marriage a dozen times and he was elated not having to devote one whole afternoon every week to Chiara’s company. Instead, he spent more time at the harpsichord, improving his technique and rehearsing his Couperin, sometimes for several hours a day. Mafalda complained about the noise. Elio’s father reminded her that to the untrained on-looker, all art was senseless. With a scoff, she went back to the kitchen and didn’t complain again. At least not in a language they understood. Naples was another place.

One morning, while Elio was playing a particularly pleasing allemande, Oliver came into the parlor and stopped right inside, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, Elio tempering his nervousness enough to finish the piece satisfactorily. Is he going to complain about the noise as well, he wondered, resting his hands on his thighs and turning around halfway. Because they were alone in the room, it felt like they were alone in the world, just the two of them and not a soul besides. Even the sounds of the servants working farther up the hallway had stopped mattering from the second the other man joined him.

As if reading his mind, Oliver said, “I’m not complaining. I like that one, though I’ve heard you play it better than you did just now.”

He’s been listening to me playing, Elio thought, feeling his spirit soar.

“So have I, but you made me nervous,” he answered after a moment.

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to play for people?” Oliver retorted, a slight jeer to his voice.

Softly, Elio said, “You’re not people.”

This made Oliver fall very quiet for a long time, until he finally pushed off the wall, his white shirt billowing from the movement and he turned towards the door once more, Elio thinking he’d leave, he’d not deign that with a response, telling him offhandedly that he was going into town, the carriage would be ready in the quarter of an hour, if Elio wanted, Elio could come.

Elio stared at his back, broad, tall. There was nothing that Elio wanted more.

“I’ll wait for you in the courtyard,” was Oliver’s reply. Only then did he leave him behind. With his harpsichord and his Couperin. Elio had to force himself to play the allemande once more, better than the first time, better than he had ever played it before.

So much hope to it, suddenly.


~*~


The carriage jostled along the dirt road that led into the nearby city, where Oliver – he told Elio – had to pick up some orders of clothes and travel provisions, since he was going to Rome in a couple of week’s time, it was just a brief one-month stay, but under any circumstances, new supplies were needed. I don’t want to burden your household with trivialities like that, were his exact words. Elio could’ve kissed him for his consideration.

He could’ve kissed him for many different reasons.

It didn’t scare him anymore, that he wanted to, that he was a person capable of these desires. ‘Such things’, Oliver had called them.

They’re just desires, Elio found himself thinking, watching Oliver under the rounded roof of the carriage, the sound of the horses, his mother’s prized Arabians, with their hooves striking the ground rhythmically a soothing melody, like a nursery rhyme or a lullaby. They do nothing except desire.

Without realizing it, he had started humming the Neapolitan drinking song that Mafalda used to sing to him, to lull him to sleep when he was a toddler, he had grown up with the words of that song, until his mother had realized what exactly the cook had taught him and made him swear never to sing it under her roof again. Well, this wasn’t her roof. Above the closed carriage were only the endless expanses of sky, heavens, known universe.

“I don’t know that song,” Oliver interrupted him, making Elio finally notice his own voice, chanting the familiar words. He blushed, fell immediately quiet. Oliver frowned. “I don’t even think I could identify the words, what is it?”

Without looking up even once, Elio told him.

“Teach it to me,” the other man demanded.

“It ends tragically,” Elio heard himself warn.

“Then, it must be about desire,” Oliver shot back, repeated, “Teach me.”

Their eyes met and neither one of them looked away for the longest moment. Under them and all around, the carriage bustled along, heading for B. Elio knew instinctually that he wasn’t being asked to recite just the words of Mafalda’s old lullaby, or even repeat the melody, or to teach Oliver the Neapolitan dialect that he could, any day, learn from Manfredi who adored him like an adopted son. He wasn’t asking about anything that anyone else might possibly pass on to him back at Elio’s mother’s estate. He was asking about the one thing only Elio could.

Desire.

Elio inched closer, crossed the distance, the half a meter of velvet-covered seating space, sidling up close to Oliver’s side until they were perfectly parallel, lines running side by side, hurdling themselves towards some horizon where they might finally meet, collide. Oliver didn’t move away, didn’t tell him to stop, but instead reached up with his right arm to let his fingers run along Elio’s jaw. He had changed his shirt before they left. From white to blue. It was the one of which Elio had one similar. Except, this one, where the frills of the sleeves brushed along his skin as Oliver stroked his chin, followed the shape of his lips with his fingertips, wasn’t permeated with Elio’s own scent, but held every trace of Oliver’s personal odor. Elio turned his face into the fabric, breathed him in, caught his thumb between his lips and licked it, to also taste.

Taking a deep breath, the other man let him suck for a long minute, hungrily, desperately, then he withdrew his hand, cupped Elio’s jaw and turned his face back towards him. Like that, they kissed. Open-mouthed and wanting. Licking into each other, as if to take a little part of the other with them back as they parted for breath, again and again. Diving right back in each time, as if into the ocean.

The coachman called for them what felt like an eternity later, making them spring apart. B. up ahead, gentlemen, resounded his hoarse shout. While Elio could feel Oliver’s eyes on him, narrowed and suddenly ice cold, snow too slow in melting against your skin, his own scanned the sky, the heavens, what little he knew of the universe and beyond it, all that he didn’t know.

They picked up a full ensemble of breeches, vest and jacket from the tailor. From the grocer’s, they came away with a sack of sea biscuits and a small barrel of red wine. Between them, they didn’t share a single touch all the way home.

Shaking himself where he was sitting by the drafty carriage door, Elio felt frozen to the core of him.


~*~


The following night, Elio dreamt.

He dreamt that the door to his room, that was usually a storage room, opened with the greatest carefulness, it made almost no sound at all. Bare feet patted across the raw floorboards, someone was breathing heavily, and the covers rustled as they were lifted, a weight joining him in bed. A weight that perfectly balanced out his own, shaped like a body that fitted perfectly alongside his. They slotted together. They lost nightshirts and undergarments. They rubbed against one another with zeal and with desire. One which was said to bring them to victory, the other which was said to cause their tragic ends, if you were to believe Oliver or Thomas Southerne.

Elio believed Oliver. Elio believed Oliver when he whispered, no matter where I go, you’re in my space, I can’t escape you. He believed him and he was glad.

Do you want to escape me, he asked by way of answering.

No, I want to carry you inside me everywhere, and for you to carry me the same way, Oliver muttered, kissing his temple, his throat with its bobbing Adam’s apple, his shoulder with its myriad of bones.

At that, Elio just smiled, caught his mouth and took it. I already am, it meant as he plunged his tongue in between his lips. Here, take me with you.

They made not a sound to disturb the rest of the house that night, but between the two of them, their rising and falling chests, like waves, like ebb and flow, Elio was expressing himself more loudly than he ever had before and would ever manage to do since.


~*~


It was Elio’s father’s idea, or at least they let him believe it was. Only after several days’ worth of mentioning how he could need an assistant, someone who speaks the local jargon, Pro, did Oliver finally catch Samuel Perlman in the mood to consider solutions. He couldn’t spare any of his own men around the estate, but Elio had grown up in the city and furthermore, hadn’t been in Rome for years now. We must all return to our roots eventually, Elio’s father commented, giving Oliver a sidelong glance before sending for Elio himself.

“How is your practicing coming along?” he asked as introduction to the subject. Standing in the middle of his offices, Elio threw a long look in Oliver’s direction, but the other man pretended not to see. It was the closest he could come to shrugging his shoulders without it seeming too conspicuous. I don’t know, it meant, either way.

Elio met his father’s slightly raised eyebrow. The study was lit up by the rays of a generous April sun, shining from a clear, blue sky outside. He licked his lips. “I need new scorebooks,” he said, trying not to lead too hard, “I’ve finished the collection I’ve got.”

“He needs new scorebooks,” Samuel Perlman repeated, turning towards Oliver with a slight laugh. “It seems to be your lucky day, my friend.” Rome it was, in that case.

All the while, as they packed their things and prepared the carriage, Elio wondered whose lucky day it really was, underneath it all. For whose sake, his father was actually sending him along as Oliver’s travel companion. And what ‘travel companion’ might have of different meanings in all of the languages that his father spoke, the university professor, the scholar out in philology. Probably many more than were in common use. Many more than were understood by the ordinary man.

That was obviously his luck.

They left at the beginning of the following week.

Although Elio had grown up in Rome, it was where his parents and he had lived while Elio’s maternal grandparents had still been alive and tended to the estate, he hadn’t been back for years, receiving all his education and harpsichord training in their home up north, from travelling tutors and musicians called upon to assist with it. His repertory was wide for that very reason. Contemporary styles as familiar to him as classical technique. Your talent is undeniable, his last harpsichord teacher, Maynard, had remarked, but you’re regrettably all over the place, Mr. Perlman.

Personally, Elio had never minded being all over the place, but he understood that it could be a hindrance to his career and possibly, in an emotional capacity, a problem for other people. So, he had stuck to Couperin and to Chiara, too, except here he was.

In Rome with Oliver.

It was a noisy and grimy city with churches everywhere, Elio suspected it was the consequence of being loud like that. When you were constrained to the dirt and the dark corners, naturally the counter-response would be candles and street altars everywhere the shade touched. To light up the way.

Regardless, Oliver thrived in this setting; he had contacts among the intellectual elite already and every night, they attended a new gathering, a new ball, greeting people that Elio didn’t know and whom Oliver was only acquainted with through letters, but treated like the most jovial of friends even so – as he was treated in turn. And Elio with him. He met painters, poets, musicians of whom he’d only ever read in his textbooks. He met women and men. He flirted and he was being flirted with, and Oliver only encouraged him.

Because at night, they returned to their humble lodgings in the inn where they had been accommodated. They ate sea biscuits, almost breaking their teeth, even after dipping them in the wine they’d brought along – and which they later bought another of, new and full, because the old barrel ran on empty. Elio would use it as a stool. They’d sit opposite each other, their naked feet touching.

“Here I thought you preferred to be alone,” Oliver would say.

“No one prefers to be alone, some people simply think they have no other choice.”

“As someone who has studied the Ancient Greek philosophers, I have to ask the question: do we actually have another choice?” Oliver wanted to know, and it was asked with such open and mildly drunk sincerity that it hurt Elio’s heart, because at one point he’d wondered the same thing, but then everything changed.

“You’re my choice,” Elio told him.

A long while, Oliver stared at him through the darkness, eyes grey from shadow and pupils blown wide from drink, and something else that Elio now knew, but didn’t dare name, in case it slipped away just as he called for it. “Come over here,” Oliver ordered. Wordlessly, Elio slipped down on his knees on the floor and crawled past the sack of biscuits, past the keg of wine, past their two mugs and their wide-open balcony doors, showing them the darkened landscape of Rome by night.

Pulling him back up with one hand in his collar and the other in his hair, Elio muttering a breathless, you’re hurting me, Oliver kissed him. Elio made sure he knew it wasn’t an objection.

In some variety thereof, that was how every night ended that month. Wanting to point and say, that’s the true consequence of desire, Elio nevertheless guarded his luck and held his tongue. He didn’t want to consider going home any more than he considered that eventually, Oliver would have to do so as well.

But there was an end to Rome. Same way there was a natural end to a year.


~*~


Summer had come around again. Wicker baskets of peaches, apricots, oranges and pomegranates had been picked and packed for Oliver’s departure, they wouldn’t last forever on that boat, but they would last as long as they could. It had all been sent ahead to the harbor officials in Rome, to be installed in his cabin on the America-bound ship. The whole Perlman family had travelled together to B. to see him off, this was after several days of him having stayed in an inn there, he’d left Elio’s bed three nights prior and never returned.

The blue shirt, of which Elio had one similar, he now had one more, because Oliver had left him the billowy, blue garment, complete with his scent and his imprint, stains of ink on the frilled sleeves, sweat under the arms, other signs of use elsewhere. Elio had slept with it like a lover since Oliver had ridden off on one of his mother’s stallions. A good specimen, his mother, who knew these things, had said, and Elio couldn’t tell whether she was talking about Oliver or the horse. Maybe both, maybe there was no difference.

Maybe they were both good.

Once their household was without its guest once more, Elio’s father had called Elio to his study and dictated his letters to him as his new assistant in Oliver’s absence, Elio dutifully writing down every word, every name, date, important philological observation, quoting this or that text by Heraclitus. His quill scraped over the parchment, though he was careful not to blot.

“You’re a faster scribe than Oliver was,” Elio’s father remarked in the middle of a sentence. Elio knew not to note that down.

“Oliver was better than me in other ways,” Elio replied, not looking up.

“If you ask me,” and everyone always had questions for il dottore, of course, only Elio didn’t in this case, “The two of you made each other better.”

Between his trembling fingers, the quill broke at the tip. Elio gasped, almost drowning out his father’s kind, loving, understanding, you had a beautiful friendship, my son.

Those would be the first tears he cried over Oliver. And Oliver wasn’t even there.

Rather, Oliver was in B., waiting outside the inn for their arrival by carriage, embracing Elio’s father first as he stepped out, then his mother, then – finding himself before Elio – he hesitated for a second, the first ever look of doubt that Elio had seen on his face, passing, gone, before also holding him close, his muscles trembling from the force of it. Elio let himself be held.

They both stepped back at the same time, and Elio’s father said, “You’ve been welcome here, Oliver.”

“Yes, well,” Oliver replied, smiling that water-over-your back smile that Elio knew and had hated once, because he feared it, feared what it meant, “I don’t want to overstay it, do I?”

Elio’s father also smiled, in response.

For the quarter of an hour, they chitchatted, talked about unimportant, practical things and Elio kept shifting back and forth on his feet, restless and agitated. He wanted one last goodbye. He wanted late nights in Rome, early mornings kissing Oliver’s rounded ass cheek as he was trying to tiptoe out of Elio’s room and back to his own, the curve of it reminding him of peaches, full-bodied and ripe. Mature. Grown up. What a difference a year could make.

As Oliver gave one last wave and turned to enter the inn again, make his final travel preparations, Elio heard himself utter a strangled sound and he rushed up behind him, slinging both arms around his torso, pressing himself to his back, letting him feel his whole front, his chest and his crotch and every part that he had desired and that had desired him right back. That still desired him now. That, Elio was sure, would always desire him in some shape or form.

The kind of tragedies desire can make us cause, right?

Elio clung to him. In his grip, Oliver turned around, slipped two strong arms around his shoulders and held him closer, closer than ever before, there was no part of him that didn’t know Elio, just as no part of Elio couldn’t pick Oliver out of a crowd now. Any crowd. A crowd of hundreds. Thousands. All the world’s population. Across all the lands, across all the oceans. The first thing Oliver had said upon arrival was that he had a decent pair of sea legs on him, now those sea legs were going to take him away.

“You’re fine, you carry me within,” Oliver muttered into his hair. What it really meant was, don’t be such a baby. Elio only clung harder.

“I want to carry you on the outside, too,” he whispered.

“Got my shirt for that,” Oliver reminded him, smiling, it was a nostalgic smile, “My best shirt, on top of that.”

Elio snorted. Finally, he released the other man. They clasped arms, then hands, then parted. Returning to his parents, Elio didn’t look behind him.

No one said anything on the way back to the estate. Each stuck to his or her own thoughts.


~*~


Half a year passed. Chiara didn’t resume her visits, though they danced at her father’s balls, friends more than anything and eventually she announced her engagement to a carriage manufacturer from B. It was all a big spectacle. Elio wished her well. Marzia, living nearby, too, was sent to walk with him instead and although they had little in common except their good looks, her words, not his, they got along well and for a while, Elio was acutely aware of how his parents were making plans with hers. He shouldn’t mind, or maybe he should, but mostly he felt nothing at all at the prospect.

Then, after Hanukkah, the letter arrived.

Curiously, they had heard nothing from their latest house guest until then, although other of their previous house guests were diligent about writing the Perlman family at any given occasion. Neither his mother nor Elio had asked questions about it, especially once Elio’s father had had confirmed that the ship had docked and seen all its passengers safely off. He wasn’t dead, Oliver. He was simply not keeping in touch.

His mother mentioned terrible American manners.

Elio wore his shirt as often, if not more, as he wore his own, similar, but not the same. On the day the letter arrived, he was wearing it as well. If anyone could tell the difference, no one said anything. They were all gathered in the sitting room, the fire in the fireplace ablaze and the shadows from the stacks of lit candles dancing on the walls. His mother, doing needlework. Mafalda, half-asleep in her chair. Manfredi and Anchise bickering over how best to mend a shoe. His father came in, holding the fat envelope in his right hand. Everyone fell quiet.

“This arrived today,” he announced, needlessly.

“From whom?” Elio’s mother asked, equally needlessly. Everyone knew for sure. No one else would cause this level of commotion.

“Oliver,” his father confirmed.

“Ah,” she muttered, “Mr. Oliver.”

In a trance, Elio got up and moved across the room. His father, as if expecting him, held out a piece of parchment, folded in three sections, closed on the middle by a seal with an elegant O. melted into the wax. The seal was unbroken, which was all Elio cared about. He took it without saying anything. His father, too, didn’t speak. It simply passed between them with no words of encouragement, no information given, no conclusions made. Turning back around, Elio returned to his seat by the fireplace and tore the seal apart. The parchment unfolded between his hands.

Quickly, he read over the contents of the letter. He read it twice, three times, then he folded it back up, slipped it into his copy of The Fatal Marriage and didn’t read it again.

He already had it committed to memory.

From there, he would take it to heart.


~*~


Dear Elio,

Let no one else read this letter, though I probably don’t need to tell you. You’ll know, the way you always knew everything. I’ve passed on the same core information to your father, spare a few details that I guess are meant for your eyes only.

Has it already been six months? Feels like yesterday you clung to my back, unwilling to let go of me, and for a moment you made me falter, although I knew I had to go home. Like your father said, everyone must return to their roots eventually. My roots are here. Did you ever get to hear your mother call me hopelessly American? She did. I was a lost cause, she thought.

You should listen to your mother, Elio.

When you read this, I am probably married. Micol and I got engaged right before I left for Europe, and she promised to wait for me. I made the same promise in turn, though I have no doubt been a bit laxer in my definition of it than her. Or so, I hope. Unless I need to round up some second Elio Perlman in the greater New York area and bring him to justice.

Serves me right, supposedly. Yes, maybe I’d really deserve that one. If you hate me now, I understand. If you’re never going to forgive me, I understand that, too, and am relieved I at least won’t have to bear the weight of your response.

Don’t ruin it and write me back, let me imagine it until my dying day, okay? You, sitting near the fireplace, reading by the light of it. My book. My letter. I wish I could’ve given you more hopeful reading material than these writings that only prove how the nature of desire is tragedy. You called me a pessimist once, but I’m not. Maybe I was a realist once, as I told you, but now I’m just a cynic.

An old and bitter man, that’s the way it’s going for me. Never come for me, Elio. Remember me how I was. That’s for the best. For the both of us. There is only one method of preserving the years past, and that is by sticking to the memory of them, trying to relive them is futile work.

Lacrimae rerum. You’ll know what I mean.

Know you were the sun of my days in Italy, but the year is more than summers and life’s more than light. I don’t have your family and all that, so I must build my own from scratch. It’s another life, Elio. And in another life…

Let’s leave it at that.

In memoriam,
Oliver.