【书摘】Call Me by Your Name
前些天阴雨，仿佛又有江南梅雨季节的湿冷，在空无一人的宿舍看Call me by your name. 一封写给远去再也看不真切的年少时代的信，仿佛漫长的独白，曾经汹涌而至的欲望在多年以后并未褪色，反而一笔笔添上从未释怀过的热切追寻和永远耿耿于心的流连忘返。而我陷在这当中，一遍一遍忍不住读出声，太美了，太美的语言，所有的极端融于一处，迷乱与澄澈，释放与压抑，执著与逃避，恰似少年的荷尔蒙时代。
意大利小城在午后慵懒的静谧，空气中弥漫开来杏和桃子成熟的甜腻，太阳炫目的白色光晕漫漶在阳台上，海滩上年轻的男人和女人的嬉笑。
他们经历太多的试探与不确定，最终在几乎分别时才明白彼此，流星之火在短暂之间不顾一切燃烧，然后他们失去，就像从梦境回到现实，只不过，也许一个是痛彻心扉的一步步退回现实，强迫自己不回头不回忆，另一个是迷瞪恍惚间被梦境抛弃，跌回生活原来的轨道却始终不甘心地在梦的边缘兜兜转转，想抓住些什么，哪怕只是一点慰藉。
多年以后他们重逢，和对方和解，也与曾经那个自己和解。他们坦然珍藏梦境，是独属于两个人的秘密。
摘抄：
Sometimes the only way to understand an artist is to wear his shoes, to get inside him. Then everything else flows naturally.
Heavenly hours when voices from the world beyond our house would filter in so softly that I was sure I had drifted off.
I didn’t know what I was afraid of, nor why I worried so much, nor why this thing that could so easily cause panic felt like hope sometimes and, like hope in the darkest moments, brought such joy, unreal joy, joy with a noose tied around it.
But what I’d spoken into his pillow revealed to me that, at least for a moment, I’d rehearsed the truth, gotten it out into the open, that I had in fact enjoyed speaking it, and if he happened to pass by at the very moment I was muttering things I wouldn’t have dared speak to my own face in the mirror, I wouldn’t have cared, wouldn’t have minded—let him know, let him see, let him pass judgment too if he wants—just don’t tell the world—even if you’re the world for me right now, even if in your eyes stands a horrified, scornful world. That steely look of yours, Oliver, I’d rather die than face it once I’ve told you.
Or did I just want to have him? Or are “being” and “having” thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher.
I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back.
Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don’t want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place-all these started the summer Oliver came into our house.
What I forgot to earmark in that promise was that ice and apathy have ways of instantly repealing all truces and resolutions signed in sunnier moments.
It never occurred to me that what had totally panicked me when he touched me was exactly what startles virgins on being touched for the first time by the person they desire: he stirs nerves in them they never knew existed and that produce far far more disturbing pleasures than they are used to on their own.
Life still granted wonderful moments. Italy. Summer. The noise of the cicadas in the early afternoon. My room. His room. Our balcony that shut the whole world out. The soft wind trailing exhalations from our garden up the stairs to my bedroom.
I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he’d step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I’d been rehearsing for days now, Please, don’t hurt me, which meant, hurt me all you want.
Silence was always light and unobtrusive on those afternoons.
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.
Farther out and way below was a magnificent view of the sea with scarcely a few stripes of foam streaking the bay like giant dolphins breaking the surf.
Now, in the silence of the moment, I stared back, not to defy him, or to show I wasn’t shy any longer, but to surrender, to tell him this is who I am, this is who you are, this is what I want, there is nothing but truth between us now, and where there’s truth there are no barriers, no shifty glances, and if nothing comes of this, let it never be said that either of us was unaware of what might happen.
And I did not want words, small talk, big talk, bike talk, book talk, any of it. Just the sun, the grass, the occasional sea breeze and the smell of his body fresh from his chest, from his neck and his armpits.
Take your clothes off, oliver, and come into my bed, let me feel your skin, your hair against my flesh, your foot on mine, even if we won’t do anything, let us cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread out against the sky, and read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it's always themselves they can’t stand being alone with.
This felt special. Like showing someone your private chapel, your secret haunt, the place where, as with the berm, one comes to be alone, to dream of others. This is where I dreamed of you before you came into my life.
People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.
The dream had been right-this was like coming home, like asking, Where have I been all my life? which was another way of asking, Where were you in my childhood, Oliver? which was yet another way of asking, What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not he, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You’ll kill me if you stop, you’ll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from his mouth to my mouth back into hisnmouth, swapping words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me softly at first, till he said, “Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine,” which I’d never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.
I wondered if one got used to that or does one accrue a deficit of malaise so large that one learns to find ways to consolidate it in one lump feeling with its own amnesties and grace periods? Or does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like an intruder become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell--so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who’ll relieve it at night?
Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a “crime” to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn’t have it all life long, he said.
But I also loved the languor that sat upon the city, like a lover’s tired, unsteady arm resting on your shoulders.
When we opened the French windows, the glistening domes of numberless churches reflected the setting sun in the vast, unencumbered vista below us.
We live in time-it holds us and moulds us- but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions.
In Bangkok I kept thinking of Rome-What else?of this little roadside shop here, and of the surrounding streets just before sunset, and of the sound of church bells on Easter Sunday, and on rainy days, which last forever in Bangkok, I could almost cry.
I began to wonder what all this talk of San Clemente had to do with us—how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same
I had rehearsed losing him not just to ward off suffering by taking it in small doses beforehand, but, as all superstitious people do, to see if my willingness to accept the very worst might not induce fate to soften its blow. Like soldiers trained to fight by night, I lived in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness came rehearse the pain to dull the pain.
Don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night , and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. 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 have less to offer each time we start with someone new.
Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end. it is because of time that we suffer.
We were leaving his classroom and stepped into the commons where one of those long, languorous autumnal sunsets on the Coast threw luminous shades of orange over the adjoining hills.
We’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they'd use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual.
In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way.
