The Farewell Symphony (46 page)

I was determined not to touch him; he already had enough problems. Everyone in the neighborhood avoided him. I saw him only once with another person—his tiny grandmother who just smiled when Giovanni went into his obsessive-compulsive rituals. She came out for the cool of the evening and walked along the Zattere in her black lace-up shoes, each no bigger than a child's mitten.

One afternoon Giovanni wanted me to go with him to a kung-fu mo\ae being shown in a desanctified church. If Joshua and I spent long evenings with American art historians, with the English vicar and his boyfriend or with two Venetian aristocratic families he'd somehow encountered, my afternoons were devoted to Giovanni's adolescent pursuits. When we were seated in the cinema, surrounded by boys who were bopping one another over the head and girls who were dissolving into giggles and slumping even farther down in their chairs, Giovanni looked at me very gravely and said, "If you want to protect me all you have to do is to take my hand and say, 'You are my responsibility' {Tu set la mia responsabilita)." I nodded, a lump in my throat, a lump in my pants.

The film began. The room was hot and giggly and every time Bruce Lee twirled and delivered a kick to a villain the audience produced the necessary sound effects. The screen was raised high on what had once been the altar in this early Renaissance church. "Say it," Giovanni hissed in my ear.

I grabbed his hand, which was bigger than mine, and whispered, ''Sei la mia responsabilita.''^

Muddy Waters (which he pronounced "Moody Vahterre") was his favorite American singer and Giovanni and three other boys practiced every afternoon his group's repertoire. I was astonished: I thought that Giovanni had no friends and no talents. He begged me to come to the storeroom on the same fondamenta as Joshua's house but at the other end. The boys had fixed this place up as a clubroom with out-of-date fluorescent posters of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Paolo Conte.

With sheepish grins the boys thumped and twanged and crooned their way through a Moody Vahterre ballad. They gyrated their bodies. Their feet were too big and in the way. One T-shirt was too short and always hiking up to reveal the baby fat on the stomach of a boy with a cruel face, a boy like Donatello's David. Their adolescent sexuality took up so much space, was so awkward and charming, that they had to smile, as a mermaid would smile about her inconvenient tail.

When they'd finished, Giovanni, who'd been singing, said, "Did you understand the words?"

"Well, no, it sounded like English, but I couldn't make out the individual words."

"Listen to this," he said, dropping a needle on the well worn record.

After a few minutes I told him I couldn't understand the recording, either; which was incomprehensible to an Italian since their singers always articulate clearly.

"Are you sure you're not really a German?" Giovanni asked unsmil-ingly

The next day I showed him my American passport but he'd already moved on to other thoughts. We were sitting near the stone cistern in the Campo San Trovaso, looking out at the people moving on the far side of the canal. In other towns people were a distraction from the architectural beauties, but here humanity was the very medium in which the city worked—the flow and direction of people, their dispersal and concentration, the game of herding them up and down steps, of doubling their white shirtwaists or a black nun's robes with diluted watery reflections, the dense clotting of walkways and then the broad human wash let loose across a vast piazza, the calculus of moving spots of color on the balconies of churches or palaces. People were the notes that rippled across the musical staves laid down by the city, but even the staves weren't fixed but con-standy sunk in fogs or tides, obscuring rains or overpowering sunsets, and on days of acqua alta the old stones under our feet would be replaced by a big new mirror.

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Giovanni held my hand as we sprawled on the grass. He said, "You spend every afternoon with me but I don't understand how a fine man like you, a prqfessore —"

"Giovanni, I don't teach!"

"How could a professore be fond of someone like me, someone everyone else avoids, a maniaco? I love you, you are my only friend, but what can I offer you?"

"But you know, Giovanni, I have my own . . . vice."

"VVliat do you mean?"

"I like men." I had no idea whether I hoped we'd fall into each other's arms, or whether I was simply striking a blow for personal honest}- (as Maria had so many years ago when she'd told me, so straightforwardly, that she liked women), or whether I thought my candor would show him he was not alone, that the world rejected my kind even more categorically than his, but that I was surviving.

Giovanni looked puzzled. He released my hand, which was no longer a friend's. He said, "But have you never tried it with girls? You're not ugly, you could fmd a girl, you're just shy, I'll find you a girl. There's one I'm supposed to see at the pensione, a big Swede, Yulla, she's named Yulla, you can go with her in my place, she'd prefer you to me anyway, I'm sure."

"Giovanni, I've tried girls."

"Eallora?"

"Mmt£. Nothing. I like them. I especially like big blondes. But I love men. I feel good with men."

Which wasn't true. I never felt good with men; with a gay man I always felt something indefmable was missing, whereas with a woman I knew what was missing: a man.

Giovanni thought about it, then said, "Che bella coppia siamo, tu con la tua malattia, io con la mia mania" —"What a fme pair we make, you with your sickness, me with my mania."

I was even grateful that he was generous enough to put my sickness on a par with his compulsion.

Despite his generosity I could see that something had gone out of the friendship for him. I was no longer the simpatico guy who was also a real man, the sort he wanted to become. Now he must have thought back to that moment in the church when he'd made me take his hand and tell him he was my responsibility; he must have replayed that moment and winced, empded the church, blown its roof off, exiled me in one kung-fu

somersault to the other side of the rio, even the ocean, the big one, the Atlantic, wasn't that its name?

I didn't go back to Venice the next summer, but when I visited Josh there two years later he said that Giovanni and his whole family had moved to the Cannaregio district, to a little house of their own, apparently.

And then one day I saw a new Giovanni taller, rump rounder, black shoes heeled in steel—and he was wrapped around a cigarette under the statue of Goldoni near the Rialto. He was hanging out with two other fellows and he looked fine, unexceptional, but just to make sure, I watched as he walked up the inner steps of the Rialto Bridge and never once did he spit over his shoulder or turn and I was certain he could now say 'Hre" and ''sette" without a hitch.

But that first summer in Venice, I met one other guy, a real gay man. We picked each other up by the Molo, that strip of pavement beside the public gardens between the Piazzetta and Harry's Bar. Men cruised there, although gay Venetians in those days would have been afraid of being seen there. At midnight people—straight couples, families, sisters, friends—were always hurrying past, arm in arm, from the closing cafes on San Marco to the vaporetto pontoon or to the landing for the powerboat that crossed over to the Cipriani hotel at the tip of the Giudecca. Men, foreign gay men, sat along the railing or perched on the wood backs of benches. They stared at one another They almost never spoke and usually ended up walking home alone. But sometimes a guy would walk behind one of the shuttered and locked kiosks that sold curios and guidebooks by day. He'd stand between a kiosk and the metal fence that surrounded the public gardens. He'd pretend to piss but would jerk off. A guy doing the same thing behind the next kiosk might, if he were brave, slip over to join him.

I met Sergio in a more normal way. He just smiled at me with a big, comic smile that was out of phase with his eyes, as though he were wearing a commedia dell'arte half-mask. His mouth was very vsdde, comically wide, with lips as thick as those that women in the 1940s used to paint on. His nose was big and hooked. He had a prominent jaw and his face looked as though it were flooded with blood. Laugh lines flowed away from his eyes like the tails of colliding comets.

He had that high, childish, gendy querulous voice of the Veneto, but of

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course he spoke to me in Tuscan, not Venetian, and he talked so slowly and with such deliberation that I suspected he must be used to dealing with foreigners.

I brought him back with me to my stifling litde room next to the rio. It was so hot that our bodies were exuding sweat. He was strong, his hands callused, his back just a bit stooped. He fucked me and called me "Amore," shamelessly, without any of an American's cheese-paring niggling over accuracy.

In those days gay men had sex first, before conversation, and only in post-coital chat discovered if they would be friends. Sergio told me that his mother was a peasant and lived in a village in the Veneto. He was a servant and cook and looked after an old bachelor who lived in Vicenza. On his days off he took the train into Venice. Right now he had three days off because his boss was away in Turin visiting his sister.

As we talked we lay beside each other in the little bed. There was something reassuring, calming, about his slow way of speaking to a foreigner. The water lapped the mossy steps five feet away. Sergio kept pressing his finger to his lips and listening, as though hoping to discover an eavesdropper; I thought of the slot in the waU under the Doge's Palace where anonymous spies and informers had dropped denunciations of their neighbors.

I said, "I've never known an Italian to be so at ease with his homosexuality."

"Many people tell me I'm like an American, although I've never traveled abroad. Perhaps because I'm a Communist and have a critical oudook on diings, I seem like a foreigner." He had a huge nose, deeply recessed eyes and that wide, comic mouth—truly the face of a commedia mask. A ray of light cast the shadow of his big nose on the wall.

He stayed with me. Joshua liked him, I could see, but was jealous of us. The third night I said to Sergio, "Maybe you should spend tonight in the proJessore\ bed."

"7;/ seijurbo —you're crafty," Sergio said, laughing, and he pressed his finger to the side of his nose.

The next morning they were a couple. Within a week, when Sergio was back for a night off, they'd become thoroughly domestic. They went shopping together. We gave dinner to Peggy Guggenheim and a few other friends and Sergio chopped up all the fruit for the dessert and put Josh's tomato sauce for the pasta through the blender, which infuriated Joshua:

"I don't want it to look like something in a restaurant. It's lost its peasant character." ■'

Sergio never lost his. Josh forced him to sit at the table with us, but Sergio called Peggy ''Principessa" and occupied his chair only for a second at a time, as though nervously exercising a new-won right that made him uncomfortable. Peggy, always so vague, scarcely noticed, although in her own house she was severe with the servants, gave them food to eat that was different from her own and counted the number of apples they'd taken out of the fridge.

Italian friends suspected that Sergio must be working Joshua for money, but the only thing Sergio wanted Josh to buy him were huge silk lampshades dripping fringe for his mother's house in the village, shades worthy of the Nile Hilton. Otherwise he was happy to spend his days off with Josh, to iron Josh's clothes, over-water his plants and in the evenings, to dress up in tight white trousers, a lightweight blue blazer, yellow shirt and silk ascot and saunter forth with us to one of the half dozen restaurants we frequented. He opposed expensive places, criticized a stingy an-tipasto, wanted Josh to tip generously but treated other waiters with seigneurial disdain. One evening, when Josh discovered he had no cash, Sergio said, calmly, grandly, "Andiamo in plastico" ("Let's go with plastic," by which he meant Josh's credit card).

At home Sergio spared his clothes from wear and tear by walking around in his underpants. His toes and fingers were stiff and swollen, as though he'd had to work for years in cold water, say, cleaning fish. Whereas Josh and I were always reading, writing or talking and generally lounging about in the pretzel shapes of thought, Sergio could never sit still and was scouring the kitchen sink or emptying the fridge of the moldy bits in clingwrap that Joshua never wanted to throw away, or dusting the cornice with a rag tied to the end of a broomstick. He seemed to have no other friends. His mother had recently put in a phone and when Sergio called her he shouted, spoke to her harshly and never stayed on the line longer than three minutes.

He showered three times a day. When he passed me wrapped in a towel I'm ashamed to say I half-expected he'd wink at me or even embrace me rapidly while Josh was out of the room, but he never flirted with me again, not once after he moved upstairs. Josh's name was hard for him to say but each time he tried it with a new, experimental pronunciation he added, ''amore mio."

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Several times Joshua said to me, "No one ever gave me such a marvelous present as you did." I envied the lovers on their weekends together although I recognized I wouldn't have known how to create the easy, chattering domesticity they had together which even their spats made more intimate.

Sergio became "the treasure"— il tesoro, and soon everyone referred to him that way, even Eddie, who was delighted by my matchmaking. Eddie was the one who'd convinced Joshua to buy contact lenses, style his hair differendy and to be dressed by Eddie's own Venetian tailor. But only now had I found Joshua a lover who if he wasn't a scholar was at least a sexual athlete and who, if he couldn't discuss contemporaiy poetry, was still suf-ficiendy exotic as an Italian servant to fascinate Joshua for years to come. Sergio had shrewd political opinions and large, naive lapses of the most basic information. Like the peasant he was he attributed the pettiest possible motives to strangers and was entirely gullible with friends. He thought that he, too, was crafty, but his life went nowhere. Year after year Joshua thought of inviting il tesoro to live in New York and I, ever the romantic, urged him to do so. But Josh had read too many Henry James novels to risk the transplant.

Perhaps Josh feared his New York friends would disapprove of Sergio as an absurdly strutting Italian male and a kept boy. Joshua knew that Sergio was a lot more complicated than that and if he was always the aggressor in bed (which Joshua liked), everywhere else he was flexible or at least unpredictable—needle and thread in his mouth, dustcloth in hand, off in die kitchen soaking somediing in vinegar, polishing the pavimenti with a rag under his big, deformed feet. Josh may have been the adored amore who got screwed every night, but he was also the great professore who must not be disturbed while he was writing his capolavoro.

Sergio's age was something we speculated on endlessly. I thought he couldn't be more than twenty-two; he might look twenty-seven, but everyone knew Italians went off early. Joshua thought he might be as much as twenty-nine; something suggested he'd known the tail end of the 1950s. WTien I asked Sergio one day, he said thirty-nine, which made us gasp. He was five years older than I and not that much younger than Josh. Suddenly I felt protective and still warmer toward him because I realized he wasn't ever going to escape his life as a servant.

On my way home I flew to Rome to see Tina. She was living in a big, white, nearly empty apartment that looked down on one of the forums.

She told me she'd already divorced her tall, skinny American academic. "I married him just to spite you, anyway," she said. She held my eyes a long time whenever she said something so direct, but otherwise she seemed much more remote. She said she was in love with an Argentinian and hinted that he might be a terrorist.

Eduardo was away when I called. Tina herself slept in a windowless bedroom at the very heart of the floor-through apartment with its fifteen windows.

She asked me if I'd seen the gaily painted gypsy wagon on the gravel just outside her building. She said that the strega, the witch who lived in it with four of her children, had knocked at her door one evening with a sick child in her arms. "I must see a doctor," she'd railed, "or the litde one will die." Gradually, using one ruse after another over a three week period, Drusa inserted herself into Tina's apartment. She needed to wash her family's clothes, cook up some white beans, bathe a litde boy who'd had diarrhea and was now covered with filth. Drusa elbowed her way into the apartment without even asking, always determined, sometimes desperate. Soon the gypsies were living fuU time with Tina, breaking dishes, fouling the toilet, handing over to Tina a grocery list that needed filling, strewing bedding over the stone floor, playing the television tiU all hours at top volume. Drusa advised Tina about love and gave her a talisman designed to bind the terrorist to her forever.

In the end Tina, sentimental Marxist, was completely under Drusa's spell. She could see no reason (nor can I, even now) why she shouldn't share her inherited wealth—enough to keep her idle, drunk and unhappy in those airy, sunlit rooms all by herself—with a family of five, poor and despised gypsies. It was Eduardo, the terrorist, who finally cleared them all out one day, changed the locks, had a metal gate installed downstairs.

Tina seemed strangely indifferent to me. I knew that since I'd hurt her it was only normal that she'd protect herself Or perhaps she was so in love with Eduardo that she had little energy left over for me. Her coolness piqued me. It wasn't my vanity that caused me to feel irritated. I just missed her love, even though it had troubled me so much.

Just last spring I was in Rome again. Tina's American cousin (the one who'd originally introduced us) had told me her father had recendy died. He gave me her phone number, and asked me to call her.

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Her voice sounded even lower except u^hen she cried out my name with a genuine enthusiasm on a high, hoarse note. She wanted to see me instandy.

Suddenly, there was Tina, still slender, back in her old palazzo, except now I was jowly and she seemed to be missing a few teeth. I told her, just for the pleasure of recollection, eventthing I could remember about her father, ever)' last detail, and that pleased her, as though such clear and detailed memories proved her father had made an impression after all, even on a foreigner. She wanted me to repeat what I'd said about him to his elegant old girlfriend, who'd become his wife. Tina said her father had abandoned his Utde book about Time some ten years ago.

I asked her about Eduardo.

"He died last year, and I suffered terrible angoscia" Tina said, sitting forward and nursing her cup of espresso between her hands, even though the day was unusually warm for Palm Sunday, "but now I'm just angry."

"Angry?"

"Yes!" And she let her wild laugh geyser up out of her. "He told me he was an .\rgentine terrorist living incognito and we drank too much and never went out because we were in hiding from the enemy." She sHced the air repeatedly with a sideways karate chop, an Italian gesture that, combined with her smile and frown, meant that she was playfully threatening to punish a child—Eduardo, I suppose.

"Why are you angry?" I still wanted to know.

"Because when he died his entire family came to the funeral, they were all Romans, he wasn't Argentine, he was a Roman, for fifteen years we'd been hiding and drinking and he'd been making up stories, even his accent he'd made up."

I looked at her, amazed, then burst out laughing, and she burst out laughing, too. I told her my young French lover, Brice, who'd just died of AIDS, had pretended for the five years we were together to be a member of the "minor nobility," but after his death I'd found his mother had been a hairdresser in Nancy.

'%'azzo, these men!" she said. She laughed again, her huge eyes searching my face for some explanation. Now that Eduardo was dead she'd stopped drinking and was painting again. She gave me a painting and a sheaf of her poems in Italian. Tina may have been lined from so many years of drinking and hard living, but she was also miraculously vital— hardheaded in her vitalin: I thought she wouldn't have killed herself not

even if all Rome had laughed at her for making an ugly Baroque fountain. She laughed at "these men," as did I, and suddenly the intervening years melted aw^ay. She seemed as vital as that day when she'd come gunning for me in her car, the day I had refused to put out, except that now she said she'd never wanted to kill me, just find me, talk to me, convince me of her love.

When I returned to New York at the end of that first summer in Venice I couldn't bring myself to wear socks. M 11\| £ I hadn't had sex more than four times in two

months but putting it like that suggests that I felt justified in going out to get laid now because I had an exact notion of how much sexual activity I needed and of how much I wanted, whereas in fact I'd never considered sex to be an appetite, certainly nothing needed on a regular basis. I could never—well, perhaps I could, but I wouldn't have wanted to—answer a questionnaire about my sexual habits. For I was convinced my erotic behavior was no more habitual than anything else I did, whereas in fact the scientists hovering over my cage could no doubt have plotted exacdy my activity patterns, the number of times I could press the sex lever without receiving a pellet before becoming discouraged as well as the precise percentages of time I devoted to feeding, working, socializing and mounting.

I was a dandy, and a dandy is a moral tourist, not a habitue. One night I went to a party with Buder and when we left it, both fed up with the way the young gay lawyers and account executives (guys I knew from Fire Island) had tried to impress us with their new possessions and their cosdy, lightning visits to big gay weekend bashes in towns scattered across the country, I said, "These circuit queens are satisfied with so litde. Say I, with

fifty-seven dollars to my name. But can you imat^nc debating the virtues of a Corvette and an Eldorado convertible for a whole evening? One of them even said, 'I'm an Eldorado kind of guy.' And even though he had the obligatory way of snickering when he said it, in reality he'd trade his immortal soul for a new model every year."

Butler smiled as much at my indignation, I'm sure, as at the circuit queens' cupidity. "What you forget, hon, is that as a writer you think you'll be able to use all this years later, that this life in 1974 is just raw material for some future, eternal version of it you'll be hammering out twenty years from now. But these guys aren't going to have the last laugh. They won't have another chance to get it right. They need that fine automobile right now because, well, this is their one and only life."

If Buder sounded so aloof it was also because he'd moved on from his last lover, the architect, to another writer, someone much richer, more usefully connected and more conspicuously devoted. This new lover, Philip, had beautiful teeth and a luxuriant black beard. Max referred to them as King Carol and Magda Lupescu.

When I spent an evening wdth them I decided that Buder was always so successful in love because he was so quick to reproach and complain. He didn't let Philip's slightest burst of bad temper pass unnoticed. Buder, so fastidious—one could say so idealistic if a querulous perfectionism constitutes an ideal—could be content only if their own communication was complete, the decorum of their life unrelentingly grave, their pleasures refined, their superiority widely acknowledged.

Philip, a Boston Brahmin who alternately cosseted his friends and made them face the usually grating music, caused Butler often to frown with disapproval. Philip had a way of barreling right into even the most highstrung and rarefied existences and bullying everyone with his favors. He and Eddie had become best friends almost overnight. Maybe Eddie was predisposed toward Philip as a fellow poet, but the real attraction surely was Philip's astounding energy. Far a dozen friends he mailed their packages, bought their opera tickets, edited their manuscripts, ferried their pets to the vet, advised on plants for the new herbaceous border and talked turkey to their ineffectual agents or bankers. Eddie was selling his house in Athens and restoring a cottage in Key West, but it was Philip who barked at the brokers or swooped down on the contractor. Philip printed up a private birthday edition of Eddie's poems for Eddie's old bridge-playing mother and her friends. Philip went with Eddie to the surgeon when he had a cataract removed. At the same time Philip was

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writing and publishing his own poems, which sharp tongues said rendered an almost excessive homage to Eddie's (ruvre, and was conducting interviews of elderly bards for a book he'd been commissioned to do. And such industry couldn't be dismissed as social-climbing, since his family connections were as much Mayfair as Mayflower and Philip had already won all the prizes.