Call Me by Your Name Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    What did I want? And why couldn’t I know what I wanted, even when I was perfectly ready to be brutal in my admissions?
    Perhaps the very least I wanted was for him to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me, that I was no less human than any other young man my age. I would have been satisfied and asked for nothing else than if he’d bent down and picked up the dignity I could so effortlessly have thrown at his feet.
    I was Glaucus and he was Diomedes. In the name of some obscure cult among men, I was giving him my golden armor for his bronze. Fair exchange. Neither haggled, just as neither spoke of thrift or extravagance.
    The word “friendship” came to mind. But friendship, as defined by everyone, was alien, fallow stuff I cared nothing for. What I may have wanted instead, from the moment he stepped out of the cab to our farewell in Rome, was what all humans ask of one another, what makes life livable. It would have to come from him first. Then possibly from me.
    There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well. Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona. Love, which exempts no one who’s loved from loving, Francesca’s words in the Inferno . Just wait and be hopeful. I was hopeful, though perhaps this was what I had wanted all along. To wait forever.
    As I sat there working on transcriptions at my round table in the morning, what I would have settled for was not his friendship, not anything. Just to look up and find him there, suntan lotion, straw hat, red bathing suit, lemonade. To look up and find you there, Oliver. For the day will come soon enough when I’ll look up and you’ll no longer be there.
     
     
    By late morning, friends and neighbors from adjoining houses frequently dropped in. Everyone would gather in our garden and then head out together to the beach below. Our house was the closest to the water, and all you needed was to open the tiny gate by the balustrade, take the narrow stairway down the bluff, and you were on the rocks. Chiara, one of the girls who three years ago was shorter than I and who just last summer couldn’t leave me alone, had now blossomed into a woman who had finally mastered the art of not always greeting me whenever we met. Once, she and her younger sister