9

Here was someone who lacked for nothing. I couldn’t understand this

feeling. I envied him.

“Oliver, are you sleeping?” I would ask when the air by the pool had

grown oppressively torpid and quiet.

Silence.

Then his reply would come, almost a sigh, without a single muscle

moving in his body. “I was.”

“Sorry.”

That foot in the water—I could have kissed every toe on it. Then kissed

his ankles and his knees. How often had I stared at his bathing suit while his hat was covering his face? He couldn’t possibly have known what I was

looking at.

Or:

“Oliver, are you sleeping?”

Long silence.

“No. Thinking.”

“About what?”

His toes flicking the water.

“About Heidegger’s interpretation of a fragment by Heraclitus.”

Or, when I wasn’t practicing the guitar and he wasn’t listening to his

headphones, still with his straw hat flat on his face, he would suddenly

break the silence:

“Elio.”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing?”

“Reading.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Thinking, then.”

“About?”

I was dying to tell him.

“Private,” I replied.

“So you won’t tell me?”

“So I won’t tell you.”

“So he won’t tell me,” he repeated, pensively, as if explaining to

someone about me.

How I loved the way he repeated what I myself had just repeated. It

made me think of a caress, or of a gesture, which happens to be totally

accidental the first time but becomes intentional the second time and more

so yet the third. It reminded me of the way Mafalda would make my bed

every morning, first by folding the top sheet over the blanket, then by

folding the sheet back again to cover the pillows on top of the blanket, and

once more yet when she folded the whole thing over the bedspread—back

and forth until I knew that tucked in between these multiple folds were

tokens of something at once pious and indulgent, like acquiescence in an

instant of passion.

Silence was always light and unobtrusive on those afternoons.

“I’m not telling,” I said.

“Then I’m going back to sleep,” he’d say.

My heart was racing. He must have known.

Profound silence again. Moments later:

“This is heaven.”

And I wouldn’t hear him say another word for at least an hour.

There was nothing I loved more in life than to sit at my table and pore

over my transcriptions while he lay on his belly marking pages he’d pick up

every morning from Signora Milani, his translator in B.

“Listen to this,” he’d sometimes say, removing his headphones,

breaking the oppressive silence of those long sweltering summer mornings.

“Just listen to this drivel.” And he’d proceed to read aloud something he

couldn’t believe he had written months earlier.

“Does it make any sense to you? Not to me.”

“Maybe it did when you wrote it,” I said.

He thought for a while as though weighing my words.

“That’s the kindest thing anyone’s said to me in months”—spoken ever

so earnestly, as if he was hit by a sudden revelation and was taking what I’d

said to mean much more than I thought it did. I felt ill at ease, looked away,

and finally muttered the first thing that came to mind: “Kind?” I asked.

“Yes, kind.”

I didn’t know what kindness had to do with it. Or perhaps I wasn’t

seeing clearly enough where all this was headed and preferred to let the

matter slide. Silence again. Until the next time he’d speak.

How I loved it when he broke the silence between us to say something

—anything—or to ask what I thought about X, or had I ever heard of Y?

Nobody in our household ever asked my opinion about anything. If he

hadn’t already figured out why, he would soon enough—it was only a

matter of time before he fell in with everyone’s view that I was the baby of

the family. And yet here he was in his third week with us, asking me if I’d

ever heard of Athanasius Kircher, Giuseppe Belli, and Paul Celan.

“I have.”

“I’m almost a decade older than you are and until a few days ago had

never heard of any of them. I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get? Dad’s a university professor. I grew up without TV.

Get it now?”

“Go back to your plunking, will you!” he said as though crumpling a

towel and throwing it at my face.

I even liked the way he told me off.

One day while moving my notebook on the table, I accidentally tipped

over my glass. It fell on the grass. It didn’t break. Oliver, who was close by,

got up, picked it up, and placed it, not just on the table, but right next to my

pages.

I didn’t know where to find the words to thank him.

“You didn’t have to,” I finally said.

He let just enough time go by for me to register that his answer might

not be casual or carefree.

“I wanted to.”

He wanted to, I thought.

I wanted to, I imagined him repeating—kind, complaisant, effusive, as

he was when the mood would suddenly strike him.

To me those hours spent at that round wooden table in our garden with

the large umbrella imperfectly shading my papers, the chinking of our iced

lemonades, the sound of the not-too-distant surf gently lapping the giant

rocks below, and in the background, from some neighboring house, the

muffled crackle of the hit parade medley on perpetual replay—all these are

forever impressed on those mornings when all I prayed for was for time to

stop. Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on

perpetual replay play forever, I’m asking for very little, and I swear I’ll ask

for nothing more.

to be continued

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