incessantly in my dreams. I told her the symposium had been unÂeventful and that France had started with chitchat more than anything. Because I loved her, I believed myself.
On my Michelin maps I marked in red all the places the master had recommended. The route zigzagged from Bordeaux to Venice by way of Cologne, and I couldnât visit them all. There was one red dot between Rome and Civita-Vecchia that blazed and that was the address of Bruno Farinacci-Lepore. I would write to him, as well, before I started out.
Save for my stay at Brunoâs, forty-eight hours, the summer was chaste. He lived with his mother in a minute pavilion on the property sheâd inherited, which looked down on the Lago di Bracciano. He told me nothing about the Farinacci family, in fact I didnât even meet his mother, though she fixed sumptuous meals for two that were brought to his terrace, from which a tired grove of olive trees sloped down towards the village. That was fine. I wouldnât have known how to respond to the knowing look sheâd have bestowed on our decadence, the lady I pictured as very brown, very long, very wrinkled, wrapped in heavy cashmere shawls at the first sign of the evening chill here in the hills, perhaps with a young lover to massage her. Her discretion testified to Brunoâs habits, to the parade of nameless creatures who came to Bracciano to kneel and to be dubbed, as I myself bent double twice on my way out of the bath, no longer knowing who I was. The shower, as I remember so well, was all white, tiled from floor to ceiling like a Raynaud. I understood the reference later, I did not yet know Raynaud. But Bruno knew everything.
The rest of the apartment, a single octagonal room, was also a theatre of the minimal. Brief black carpets under three Bauhaus chairs, a long glass table on stilts where he wrote and no doubt dined in winter, a bed, very narrow and very low, which precluded any notion of a regular lover. On the walls, also white, not one picture. Nothing. I asked no questions, for that, I sensed, was how he declared himself most eloquently. Genuine critics do not like art, individual works even less, and artists, rarely. They study, classify, define, mediate. Entomologists do not live with ants.
I wasnât ready for such renunciation, so I would never be a genuine critic. But I admired, I was making my own entrance into the avant-garde, I absorbed all these unforeseens without argument. In any case, when he described works of art I could see them. And so it was an equitable exchange, it was fitting that I lend my body to his, always so ravenous, in return for the aesthetic initiation he so generously lavished on me. Did I go so far as to vaguely fall in love? It took me years certainly to acknowledge that his mania for white could be an antidote for his self-loathing and not an intellectual statement, a reflection of the ultimate blank canvas that had been the final statement of the artists of his age. I was at least smitten.
And infinitely troubled when afterwards I went to Rome to lose myself, where I was poorly lodged in a very cramped hotel open to the noise from the Piazza del Popolo. I wandered unseeing, the centuries weighed too heavily, the baroque turned my stomach and the Renaissance bored me, I was behaving like the lout I was. I disappeared into crowds of tourists, to be no one. And to congeal there, while mulling over my pain.
I had to find out why Iâd experienced neither recoil nor repulsion during that first night, and especially why Iâd gone back for a second, and a third. Youâre familiar with menâs skin, Vitalie, it is not uniformly smooth, the muscles bulge, the throat is rough. There is nowhere one can lose oneself without stumbling. It is the hardness that makes desire rise, and today Iâm convinced that most men would be aroused if they approached their male friends without constraint. In Rome, though, I wavered. I watched the Roman
On my Michelin maps I marked in red all the places the master had recommended. The route zigzagged from Bordeaux to Venice by way of Cologne, and I couldnât visit them all. There was one red dot between Rome and Civita-Vecchia that blazed and that was the address of Bruno Farinacci-Lepore. I would write to him, as well, before I started out.
Save for my stay at Brunoâs, forty-eight hours, the summer was chaste. He lived with his mother in a minute pavilion on the property sheâd inherited, which looked down on the Lago di Bracciano. He told me nothing about the Farinacci family, in fact I didnât even meet his mother, though she fixed sumptuous meals for two that were brought to his terrace, from which a tired grove of olive trees sloped down towards the village. That was fine. I wouldnât have known how to respond to the knowing look sheâd have bestowed on our decadence, the lady I pictured as very brown, very long, very wrinkled, wrapped in heavy cashmere shawls at the first sign of the evening chill here in the hills, perhaps with a young lover to massage her. Her discretion testified to Brunoâs habits, to the parade of nameless creatures who came to Bracciano to kneel and to be dubbed, as I myself bent double twice on my way out of the bath, no longer knowing who I was. The shower, as I remember so well, was all white, tiled from floor to ceiling like a Raynaud. I understood the reference later, I did not yet know Raynaud. But Bruno knew everything.
The rest of the apartment, a single octagonal room, was also a theatre of the minimal. Brief black carpets under three Bauhaus chairs, a long glass table on stilts where he wrote and no doubt dined in winter, a bed, very narrow and very low, which precluded any notion of a regular lover. On the walls, also white, not one picture. Nothing. I asked no questions, for that, I sensed, was how he declared himself most eloquently. Genuine critics do not like art, individual works even less, and artists, rarely. They study, classify, define, mediate. Entomologists do not live with ants.
I wasnât ready for such renunciation, so I would never be a genuine critic. But I admired, I was making my own entrance into the avant-garde, I absorbed all these unforeseens without argument. In any case, when he described works of art I could see them. And so it was an equitable exchange, it was fitting that I lend my body to his, always so ravenous, in return for the aesthetic initiation he so generously lavished on me. Did I go so far as to vaguely fall in love? It took me years certainly to acknowledge that his mania for white could be an antidote for his self-loathing and not an intellectual statement, a reflection of the ultimate blank canvas that had been the final statement of the artists of his age. I was at least smitten.
And infinitely troubled when afterwards I went to Rome to lose myself, where I was poorly lodged in a very cramped hotel open to the noise from the Piazza del Popolo. I wandered unseeing, the centuries weighed too heavily, the baroque turned my stomach and the Renaissance bored me, I was behaving like the lout I was. I disappeared into crowds of tourists, to be no one. And to congeal there, while mulling over my pain.
I had to find out why Iâd experienced neither recoil nor repulsion during that first night, and especially why Iâd gone back for a second, and a third. Youâre familiar with menâs skin, Vitalie, it is not uniformly smooth, the muscles bulge, the throat is rough. There is nowhere one can lose oneself without stumbling. It is the hardness that makes desire rise, and today Iâm convinced that most men would be aroused if they approached their male friends without constraint. In Rome, though, I wavered. I watched the Roman
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