Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman Page A

age six.
    I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, Go ahead, I couldn’t care less. But no sooner had they left than I scrambled upstairs and began sobbing into my pillow.
    At night sometimes we’d meet at Le Danzing. There was never any telling when Oliver would show up. He just bounded onto the scene, and just as suddenly disappeared, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. When Chiara came to our home as she’d been in the habit of doing ever since childhood, she would sit in the garden and stare out, basically waiting for him to show up. Then, when the minutes wore on and there was nothing much to say between us, she’d finally ask, “C’è Oliver?” He went to see the translator. Or: He’s in the library with my dad. Or: He’s down somewhere at the beach. “Well, I’m leaving, then. Tell him I came by.”
    It’s over, I thought.
    Mafalda shook her head with a look of compassionate rebuke. “She’s a baby, he’s a university professor. Couldn’t she have found someone her own age?”
    “Nobody asked you anything,” snapped Chiara, who had overheard and was not about to be criticized by a cook.
    “Don’t you talk to me that way or I’ll split your face in two,” said our Neapolitan cook, raising the palm of her hand in the air. “She’s not seventeen yet and she goes about having bare-breasted crushes. Thinks I haven’t seen anything?”
    I could just see Mafalda inspecting Oliver’s sheets every morning. Or comparing notes with Chiara’s housemaid. No secret could escape this network of informed perpetue , housekeepers.
    I looked at Chiara. I knew she was in pain.
    Everyone suspected something was going on between them. In the afternoon he’d sometimes say he was going to the shed by the garage to pick up one of the bikes and head to town. An hour and a half later he would be back. The translator, he’d explain.
    “The translator,” my father’s voice would resound as he nursed an after-dinner cognac.
    “ Traduttrice , my eye,” Mafalda would intone.
    Sometimes we’d run into each other in town.
    Sitting at the caffè where several of us would gather at night after the movies or before heading to the disco, I saw Chiara and Oliver walking out of a side alley together, talking. He was eating an ice cream, while she was hanging on his free arm with both of hers. When had they found the time to become so intimate? Their conversation seemed serious.
    “What are you doing here?” he said when he spotted me. Banter was both how he took cover and tried to conceal we’d altogether stopped talking. A cheap ploy, I thought.
    “Hanging out.”
    “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
    “My father doesn’t believe in bedtimes,” I parried.
    Chiara was still deep in thought. She was avoiding my eyes.
    Had he told her the nice things I’d been saying about her? She seemed upset. Did she mind my sudden intrusion into their little world? I remembered her tone of voice on the morning when she’d lost it with Mafalda. A smirk hovered on her face; she was about to say something cruel.
    “Never a bedtime in their house, no rules, no supervision, nothing. That’s why he’s such a well-behaved boy. Don’t you see? Nothing to rebel against.”
    “Is that true?”
    “I suppose,” I answered, trying to make light of it before they went any further. “We all have our ways of rebelling.”
    “We do?” he asked.
    “Name one,” chimed in Chiara.
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “He reads Paul Celan,” Oliver broke in, trying to change the subject but also perhaps to come to my rescue and show, without quite seeming to, that he had not forgotten our previous conversation. Was he trying to rehabilitate me after that little jab about my late hours, or was this the beginnings of yet another joke at my expense? A steely, neutral glance sat on his face.
    “E chi è?” She’d never heard of Paul Celan.
    I shot him a complicit glance. He intercepted it, but there was no hint of mischief in his eyes when he