#elio perlman edit | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

theseshipsshallsail · 2 years ago

Text

Chapter 4

There’s no set pattern, he learns, as they stroll alongside the billowing bed linen strung up on the line to dry.

“One minute she’s condemning Bush’s war. Or telling Little Ollie how I jammed a shell up my nose when I was six.” Elio adjusts his sunglasses, wiping the fine sheen of sweat from his temple. “And the next she’s crying uncontrollably. Dismayed we haven’t paid the knife-grinder ‘cause it’s Wednesday afternoon, and she can’t hear the grate of his whetstone over the pasta machine’s rollers.”

Nodding gravely, Oliver dodges a cobalt beetle flitting by the honeysuckle. “It’s curious,” he says. “The sights and sounds on which we grow dependent.”

We are all products of our subconscious, mon cœur, his invisible Elio pipes up.

Some more than others, Oliver acknowledges, closing the orchard gate behind them. “I keep listening out for Anchise’s hammer,” he says aloud, skirting a patch of ruby-red poppies. “The snip of his pruning shears as he goes about his grafts.”

Elio chuckles: sunshine after a hurricane. “The endless quarrels with Manfredi over dowsing his tomatoes…” Changing direction, he strides through the tawny rye grass. “We lost him to cancer, too, poor man. I used to think he was so old, but he wasn’t even fifty.”

“Mortality is no respecter of age,” Oliver says, longing for a glimpse of Vimini’s sombrero amongst the heavily-laden trees. “I had a Humanities colleague who’d argue it’s the breadth of one’s life that’s paramount. Not the length.”

Elio smirks in his peripheral. “Is that a euphemism?” he asks, and Oliver shakes his head as he plucks a glossy cherry from the bough.

“Goose.”

They’d begun their jaunt with a brief inspection of Samuel’s former office: Oliver cradling his first-edition Heraclitus as a Compaq laptop and dial-up modem whirred gratingly where Pro’s clunky typewriter once sat. From there, they’d ventured to the living room - past conversations rising up like dybbuks when Elio whisked a glissando upon the Bösendorfer’s ivory keys - but the notable absence of the Perlman patriarch soon drew them to the gardens outside.

“I had no idea he was so sick…”

“Very few did,” Elio’d revealed, standing shiva by the metre-high oak whose roots sheltered his father’s ashes. “There’s nothing Homeric in dying, mio figlio.” His impression had been uncanny. “So why set the cat amongst someone else’s pigeons?”

“These walls aren’t meant for silence,” Oliver tells him now. “Micol and the boys… they welcomed the leisurely pace that weekend. Lazing by the pool. Eating their fill of Mafalda’s bomboloni. But without you plunking Bach as Busoni or Liszt -” Without his barbs. His wit. His challenging disposition. “It all seemed false. Tarnished.” Something that saw him weeping in Sami’s arms during his late-night meltdown. “I couldn’t get past it,” Oliver confesses over the chirping cicadas. “The double standards. The disloyalty. The life we’d had to sacrifice to bring my traviamento about…”

Elio pauses by a thicket of brambles. “All forms of obligation entail some measure of submission,” he replies carefully. “Mankind is flawed; in that, we’re all the same. The mandate pressure to conform. To appease. To be liked and esteemed... that’s the modus vivendi. It’s how society works.”

Oliver appreciates the tact, but: “That doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” Elio replies, chewing slowly. “It doesn’t.”

“And to see your family dote on mine as if they were - oi!” Oliver baulks when a squidgy projectile ricochets off his forehead. “Did you just throw a berry?”

“Technically it’s an aggregate.”

“Pardon me?”

“Single flower: multiple ovaries,” Elio says with deliberate insouciance, calmly partaking of a second. “You need to stop torturing yourself, mio amico. We aren't made for looking back; not with all that lies before us. What’s done is done.”

If only it were that clear-cut. “I’d still hear you,” Oliver mumbles, snapping the cherry’s spindly stalk. “Talk to you - in my mind, that is…”

Elio’s eyes narrow suspiciously. “In your mind?”

“Sometimes out loud.” Oliver scrunches his face. “Like a wise-cracking Jiminy Cricket,” he says, earning a baleful glare, and the raucous scuffle that ensues sees them howling in fits of wild abandon.

“This stuff is like gold dust in New England,” Oliver explains, smacking his lips as he smears the condensation on his bottled Peroni. “I lucked out in Manhattan - mom-and-pop trattoria near the dry-cleaners - but Hanover’s liquor stores are… well…”

“Scraping the barrel?” Elio suggests, snickering into the dregs of his sparkling Negroni. “I had a similar problem my freshman year at Julliard. Got so homesick for melanzane alla parmigiana, Mafalda had to teach me some recipes over the winter break.”

They’re seated underneath the tricolore parasol of the Pirozi’s open-air café. The exact same venue they’d loitered at the day Elio presented him a dedicated copy of Stendahl’s Armance. A mid-week market lays claim to the piazzetta, yet the grand, Baroque architecture draws Oliver’s gaze to the residential balconies above: where the same moss-riddled window boxes spill forth a scarlet cascade of geraniums; the petals of which create an arbour over the same slatted door by which their younger-selves would’ve kissed if they could.

It’s about there, however, that the likenesses end, because the Zanetti’s bookshop has been replaced by a trendy wine bar, la osteria bears all the hallmarks of a pizza parlour, and the chalkboards advertising the traders’ wares tout the prices in euros, rather than lira. All in all, it should be jarring, but 1983 is another country, so Oliver revels in the casual brush of knees below the cast iron table, instead. The cathartic freedom that comes from such simple displays of affection.

“My roommates could barely make toast without setting off the smoke detectors,” Elio tells him then, wrinkling his nose at the exhaust fumes when a wheezing shuttle-bus pulls up by the Piave memorial. “We got by on takeaway menus and instant noodles for weeks.” A snort. “That all changed when I introduced them to torta barozzi and homemade ribollita.”

“I bet it did.” Oliver spies a cassocked priest disembarking the idling vehicle. “You’ll have to tutor me on ziti alla norma. Lord knows how Mafalda dices the eggplant that thinly.”

“Lo farò.” Elio leers. “It’s all in the wrist action.”

“Reprobate.”

“You love it,” Elio says, taking an economic sip, and the bob of his throat makes Oliver’s mouth water for a delicacy more alluring than the deep-fried arancini they’d devoured earlier.

Because he does.

He does love it.

Loves him.

And hard as it is to credit? Elio loves him, too.

“Do you know what else I couldn’t find in the States?”

The other man tilts back in his chair. “Besides me, you mean?”

It’s coy to the point of transparency. “Yes, you miscreant. Besides you.”

“Illuminami.” Elio swirls the melting ice cubes in the bottom of his glass. “What else couldn’t you find?”

“That.” Oliver nods at the harlequin awning of the gelateria. “The genuine article, at any rate. How about it, huh? A scoop of something cold before we hit the road?”

The tips of Elio’s ears rouge pink. “Are you asking me on a date?”

“And what if I am?”

“And what if I am, he says…” Elio bites his lower lip. “In that case, I’m ordering the stracciatella.” A beat. “Chocolate sauce, too.”

“Chocolate sauce?” Oliver’s outright giddy; something he hasn’t experienced in a long, long while. “What are you? Twelve?”

Elio winks. “When in Rome…”

“Desecrate a fountain? Vomit in a trash can?”

The gentle weight of a sneaker butts his canvas toe-cap, and Oliver grins indulgently as Elio hums a couple lines of Fenesta Ca Lucive. “Perhaps if I ask her nicely,” he says, low and teasing. “…Sofia might sprinkle on some peas…”

“A worthwhile goal is like a strenuous exercise, my boy: you must exert yourself to achieve it!”

That’s the mantra his zayde used to preach, giving his six-year-old self that extra boost when his stubby fingers couldn’t reach the rugelach cooling on his bakery counter. Solid advice, indeed - a motto that’s seen him through school and vocation, alike - so it’s no surprise that Oliver repeats it verbatim until the quad-aching moment he finally scrambles to the summit of San Giacomo’s spiralling belfry.

They’d forgone their bikes at the base of the hiking trail; entrusted them to a crumbling cenotaph whose granite Neptune stood valiantly despite an encroaching veneer of bougainvillaea and silver lichen. Within minutes, Elio’d shunned the drab, wooden markers - their arrows so worn as to be almost indecipherable - and grabbing Oliver’s hand he’d leapfrogged a petering brook, steps brisk and undaunted on the cumbersome terrain.

“You know what?” Oliver says, bow-taut and gasping. “I stand by my previous assertion. I am too old for this kind of schlep.”

Both their shirts are dotted with perspiration, and Elio’s scoff bounces off the seventeenth century stonework as he doubles over; hip-checking him lightly. “Don’t be so defeatist. You’ve hardly aged a day.”

“Tell that to my joints,” Oliver grouches, rubbing his left patella. “Though I’d like to think I’ve gained some modicum of wisdom.”

“You’ve always liked to think that.”

“Brat,” Oliver grunts, drunk on the build.

They’re four-hundred metres above sea-level - if his sketchy interpretation of the bacheca informativa holds true - and when a balmy wind ruffles his hair Oliver leans into it. Leans atop the parapet, also; inhaling raggedly as he takes in the view.

The vivid tapestry of poplars and cyprī woven into the verdant landscape.

The two-masted schooner where sky meets ocean.

The swarm of American sightseers clogging the tapered path, whose overbearing hubbub precipitated them taking Elio’s shortcut in the first place.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?”

“Bellissimo,” Oliver replies, sidling closer to where Elio’s propped his forearms on the rusty railings. “To-die-for,” he adds, evoking the parochial nickname. “It’s just a shame we’re not -”

“Da questa parte, signore e signori!”

Oliver groans at the shrill interloper marshalling her troops in the flagstone courtyard below.

“Riuniti in stretta. This way, please!” the tour guide continues, launching into a pre-prepared spiel on the history of the Franciscan watchtower.

Elio sniggers when she starts in on the legends of the six copper bells - muttering his own annotations whenever she fudges - and Oliver’s forced to stifle a guffaw when the peeved woman glances up mid-flow; her entire entourage following suit like a mob of reproachful meerkats.

#cmbyn fanfic #elio x oliver #reunion fic #new chapter #call me by your name

17 notes · View notes