Short story
A Hot Summer Afternoon
A short story on heat
As soon as he entered his apartment, he threw away his t-shirt. Placed a tablemat on the kitchen counter, a plate, a cup, cutlery. The walk back from college, besides being tiring, left him hungry. He opened the fridge and got some lettuce. Seasoned the salad and ate it. Then he got chicken salad and chips, that was his lunch — when one lives alone, one improvises with their meals. The beverage could not be something other then Coke, bought at a bakery around the corner. With each sip, he felt the temperature of his body reach equilibrium. So good to eat something cold at this weather! The heat, for now, seemed irrelevant.
He put na effort to wash the (very few) dishes after lunch instead of procrastinating that task — even the water was coming out of the sink warm! But, once he finished, the jumped into the couch and laid there going from Instagram to Twitter to Facebook, to Instagram to Twitter to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Facebook. It was on heated days like this that I understood what Macunaíma meant by “Ai, que preguiça…!” To hot to work on any chore; he’s Future Self would have to deal with it later.
Such a boring social network cicle. Such a boring afternoon. Nothing happened. At least, some rain could happen — he enjoyed watching the summer showers coming and, half an hour later, going away. Waiting for the rain wasn’t enough, as he was already procrastinating he could at least read a book.
On the corridor to his bedroom he removed his shorts. The good thing about living alone is that one can walk around half naked. He threw himself in the bed and felt like thos anguished teenagers of the romantic period — whose anguish might come from having nothing better to do. Can one be melancholic with this heat? How does one choose to be gothic and is able to live like that? It doesn’t make any sense to be emo in Brazil, it’s impossible to dress all black in this weather. To him, that was something a culturaly colonized person would do — it doesn’t matter that you are a brilliant homo, Álvares de Azevedo, Nights at the Tavern doesn’t make sens in Brazil!
He got a book. It told the story of a 17-year-old Italian boy who used to spend his summer vacations at his parent’s villa. Each year his father (a college professor) would invite a lad to work as his assistant in exchange for help in the lad’s theses. This boy fell in love for that year’s lad: a 24-year-old united-statian. Narrated in first person, the book explores the boy’s discovery of his own sexuality. As he read, he dreamed of spend a summer in an Italian villa, eating burrata with basil and drinking lemonade.
He started reading at the moment in which the boy and the lad were alone in a bern — a place where, supposedly, Monet would have painted some of his work. He could feel the cold water that came down from the mountains, he heard the murmur of the stream. Outside his apartment, a river called Pacaembu Avenue roared with horns.
“ — except that I didn’t have any time left, because he brought his lips to my mouth, a warm, conciliatory, I’ll-meet-you-halfway-but-no-further kiss till he realized how famished mine was. I wished I knew how to calibrate my kiss the way he did. But passion allows us to hide more, and at that moment on Monet’s berm, if I wished to hide everything about me in this kiss, I was also desperate to forget the kiss by losing myself in it.
‘Better now?’ he asked afterward.” ¹
He was amazed by how the writing was able to be so erotic, and yet so elegant!
He thought that on an afternoon like that, a date with Henry would be perfect — that lad was great for these days where one’s body just desire and craves. He remembered that once, after a date, Henry noticed: every time that he visited the rain poured. Maybe, then, Henry was able to bring the rain? But he got lazy just by thinking the preparations a casual date would demand of him, so he eased his lust by himself.
He craved for a least a drizzle, he craved for ice-cream. There was no ice cream at his apartment. He dressed his shorts and t-shir again, pocketed some cash and left.
As he walked, he saw the people coming back home after work, or taking their dogs for a walk. The crackling asphalt. And then, a divine mirage: a shirtless jock running! He tried not to seem that he was staring, while he savored that view. “So hot!”. Maybe the guy was his age…
He rememberd the summer he spent on a seaside hotel at Maceió. A family who came from the same city as his had also stayed there during the same period. The eldest son must’ve been the same age as him — the first time he saw him shirtless at the beach he was amused: “How can a 17-year-old have these muscles? Is he a gimnast?” He, on the other hand, was too skinny; he hated to be shirtless around other people, hated the oily texture of the sunscreen, hated the sand — he would even avoid getting inside a pool. So he decided to read his SAT’s books at the beach mats by the shore, and admiring the gymnast while the lad played beach tennis — his torso lengthening as he jumped with his right arm stretched upwards to serve the ball — or while the gymnast when for a dive — his curly locks shaking in an attempt to dry the hair faster. “Why do I feel melancholic after watching a handsome man swimming?” And he would watch the lad as the gymnast left the ocean running towards the hotel when a summer storm caught the diver by surprise.
Back to his apartment, he ate the chocolate flaked ice cream — an avalanche feeling his mouth. He sighted in relief. The snack-money was also enough for another Coke he would drink at dinner. As the sun was setting, he decided to take a shower. The sound of water falling from the shower and hitting the floor made it take a moment for him to realize that it was finally raining.
¹ Excerpt from Call me by your name, by André Aciman.
NOTE: This short story was originally written in portuguese for “Escrever aprende-se escrevendo”, a creative-writing workshop taught by Luana Chnaiderman at A Escrevedeira.
You can read the original story in portuguese here:
