André Aciman’s “Call Me by Your Name”: A Beautiful, Timeless Love Story
Aciman writes with sensitivity and command to make this book a timeless tale of love and longing.
When I think back to that summer, I can never sort the sequence of events. There are a few key scenes. Otherwise, all I remember are the ‘repeat’ moments.” Life is, by extension, a summer made up of a few key scenes but otherwise replete with repeat moments, one indistinguishable from the other. The difference then, perhaps, lies in how willingly, lovingly one looks forward to those moments — and, at the end, with what heart one wishes to look back.
In André Aciman’s Call me by your name, Elio certainly looks back with fond remembrance. He was seventeen when, somewhere near a town named B. on the Italian Riviera, he met for the first time Oilver, that year’s summer resident at Mr Perlman’s, Elio’s scholarly father. The repeat moments Elio writes are “Oliver lying on the grass, or by the pool, I sitting at my table. Then the swim or the jog. Then his grabbing the bicycle and riding to see the translator in town. Lunch at the large, shaded dining table in the other garden, or lunch indoors, always a guest or two for lunch drudgery. The afternoon hours, splendid and lush with sun and silence.” Elio’s tone is at once obsessive and meticulous in its recalling of what is frozen forever in time. It puts, among all other things, Oliver first in the list of mentions; it maps his location and his activities. Elio’s own whereabouts are relative to those of Oliver’s. Without a preamble, and not in so many words, we have the topography of love, which is populated by the multitude but dominated by the two boys who are joined spiritually, corporeally, eternally.
The summers of our childhood glow with a dull luminosity deep into our adult lives. Those were the days when new tricks and games were learnt, as were new curse words; days when the same old places acquired new beauty and meaning with each visit; and, above all, summer days that went by forging friendships by the moonlight. Call me by your name throbs with the innocent pulse of days too beautiful and innocuous to be true, but it is, by the very virtue of its improbability, a remarkably acute rendering of love and longing.
Like many love stories — and this one is — it begins hesitantly. Elio is fascinated by Oliver but, unlike the rest of the family, his fascination is repressed, turbulent and inexpressible. The easy ways of the American Oliver, his cheery indifference so calmative to the Perlman’s household, in turn breeds a fierce desire in Elio. But Elio is wary and biding his time, as if testing the waters not so much for its unknown depths as for its scalding coldness. He weighs Oliver’s words, his gestures, and his flings with girls from town. His casually flung “Later” puts off Elio; his absence at the dinner table sets Elio’s mind racing; his bathing suit’s colour preordains Elio his mood for the day. There are girls with whom Elio goes out with. So what? One of the girls in the neighbourhood has leukaemia and is dying. So what? Guests come home for dinner, they leave, and more arrive the next day. So what? Far removed from all this, in an air-tight bubble sealed from social mores, Elio fights a reticent battle to give vent to his feelings, and brace himself against Oliver’s reaction.
Elio is a polymath who can play Goldberg Variations on the piano. He can hold his own on discussions about literature and music. He cites Celan and Ovid. “Is there anything you don’t know?” asks Oliver. Oliver, twenty-three, is no less erudite. He is a philosopher working on his manuscript, a study on Heraclitus; he argues over etymology with Elio’s father while addressing him as “Pro.” But while scholarship sates the needs of the mind, the heart has its own wants.
Narrated from Elio’s point of view, Oliver doesn’t cut so straightforward a figure. He can be aloof and dismissive, taunting and unapproachable now, easily friendly next. His complexity increases with time. Elio’s struggle becomes twofold: his own desire for Oliver, flickering but never fading out; and Oliver’s swinging demeanors, which Elio seems unable to fathom. So while the scenic setting of the Mediterranean and the homely hedonism is there to drink and feast upon, the private, esoteric struggle of containing and expressing desire in proper proportions is wringing their collective guts — rather, hearts — out.
Then comes an exquisite scene, pitch-perfect in its pace and construction, beautifully composed and controlled until the end. It starts with Oliver asking Elio to ride with him to town, to meet a translator, an offer Elio accepts with an incredulous “Now,” but by which he means a joyous “Really?” They ride slower than usual, easing their way ahead rather than zipping out. They reach the piazzetta overlooking the sea, they smoke, amble along with their bikes, and stop at the spot where Shelley drowned ages ago. Reading this passage, almost in a background, one can make out the unmentioned midmorning bustle of the town and the crashing of the waves; there, but not there. Blocking the worldly events, and leaping out from the page, is Elio’s quandary, as he contemplates his next move, turning over words in his mind to arrive at just the right phrase, desperate to not utter the wrong one that might break the mood. Within him rages a furious passion, like waves breaking against the seawall. But Elio dithers when he nears the cusp of his momentous admission: “This was my moment. I could seize it or I could lose it, but either way I knew I would never live it down… I was too nervous to plan anything.”
His diffidence soon slips into the pseudo-cryptic.
“I know nothing, Oliver. Just nothing.”
“You know more than anyone around here.”
“If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter.”
The things that really matter and the task of knowing them and making them known is subjected to a brief interruption, as if the world were trying its bit to thwart the inevitable. Not for long, though.
The two set off back from the errand. The road home is ditched in favor of a detour and a short stop. They come to the edge of a cliff, below which lies a secluded cove, and, at that point called Monet’s Berm, passion finally uncoils its ropes and entwines the two in its holy hold, thus freeing them to live for the rest of the summer in each other’s confidences and love.
For time is limited, and even this idyllic a bond still has the ticking of time to reckon with. “I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn’t dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but didn’t care to read the signposts. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I’d always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.” The summer’s end, as always, arrives too soon. But disunion seems impossible to comprehend, even when it’s meant to be so. What’s more, we don’t want it to end. We expect this astute a pair of lovers to negotiate heartbreak and separation and find alternative thoroughfares when they can’t make headway.
A three-day stay in Rome, where Oliver meets his publisher with Elio accompanying, is their way of embroidering some more memories together. On one of those cobbled streets, Elio shows him the nook where he once refused the offer of another boy, the first of many such. Later that night, in another similarly narrow street, they make love, thereby painting a coat of requited passion over the unrealized speckles.
All of this, and much more that happens later, is easy to dismiss as empty emotionalism. The bubble can be easily burst for its lack of logic (how can this romance be allowed to bloom without an iota of opposition?). The casualness that comes over the proceeding from time to time and the lack of sexual awakening among its protagonists are concerns that can be held against the book. But do these factors hold the book back? To such claims, Aciman seems to offer love as the only answer. The kind of love that hovers above the reaches of prejudice, society, distance, and logic. I, for one, am happy to accept it.
Not because the book dishes out a large slice of bliss from its larder of spotless romance. And definitely not to swoon in the heady heat of highbrow eclecticism that emanates from its environs: scholars and intelligentsia for guests; peaches and apricots for fruits; tennis and swimming in the afternoons; Bach and Brahms on the piano; a bookstore that organizes readings of a prominent poet; a bike ride away from a town thriving with night life. What Aciman does despite the distractions of this bounteous world is create a smaller, denser, chaotic world within it: A world — as real and difficult as anything — within a world, as exotic as nothing. In fact the very eternally exotic settings that give the novel its embellishments, Rome and Riviera, later serve to strike a sharp contrast that illumines the conflict and ephemera that love is doomed to contend with. This private world is at first defined by all that’s withheld: words, contact, company; later blossoming in the dispensing of these very things; and, finally, the separation leading to the abandoning of this beautiful paradise. But while it lasts its beauty is beyond imagination. As if its boundaries were defined by the distance between Elio and Oliver, it shrinks and expands. (Only a bedroom wall separates them, but it seems too much. They sit together at a pub, but they can’t wait to get away from the public.) What’s said matters less than how it’s said. Every inflection, every pause, every lilt in the voice matters. Tension holds them together — but also cuts them with time. More importantly, love rises above some platonic bunkum to the more satisfying, consummating physical entity. Bodily needs matter as much as the heart’s. Eroticism becomes indispensable. Love and desire become one.
What confounded me the most was the characters’ staunch refusal to deliberate a life together, as if the idea itself was impossible to even dream about. (If this is a nod to the conservative times of the 1980s, when the book is set, it comes off as inconsistent with the otherwise bravura narrative.) As if it’s foregone that the summer tryst was a one-off, they head off in their respective directions in life. The summer tryst freezes in time hence, never ever to thaw and trickle into their lives again. Not that it’s forgotten by either of them. Not that the two never meet. They do, in a reunion of sorts, many years later, one brimming with longing for a time gone by, while the other has decidedly moved on, is married and seemingly settled. A return to the place where it all started only drags in nostalgia. Bonds, though not severed, now sag under the weight of time. Are all loves, one way or other, never realized in totality? Or does love, after the first onrush of passion, sublimate into an uncategorizable substance truly its own?
Elio’s father, in the only occasion where someone other than Elio or Oliver takes centerstage, speaks to his son in words full of wisdom and unworldly understanding.
“You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you… We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and hence have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!
“Then let me say one more thing. It will clear the air. I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way… But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out….”
Elio himself wonders on a name to christen their relationship:
“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”
From the way the book ends, it’s tempting to invert this idea: to label and stash away the relationship as friendship. But doing so would be to forget what the Professor said. Doing so would mean forgetting the events — both the key scenes and the repeat moments — of that golden summer. Doing so would mean forgetting Elio and Oliver.
