"Giovanni's Room"

[fiefoe]

If only David and Giovanni could have stayed with the night they met. But of course James Baldwin has to show us the ruins. #贫贱夫妻百事哀
Hella said a lot of things that made me wince so hard.

• now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
• I did not want to think that my life would be like his, or that my mind would ever grow so pale, so without hard places and sharp, sheer drops. He wanted no distance between us; he wanted me to look on him as a man like myself. But I wanted the merciful distance of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him.
• For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.
• “Well then,” he continued, “as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place. And when I say everything,” he added, grimly, “I mean all the serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love, in which you Americans do not believe.”
• “In my country,” I said, feeling a subtle war within me as I said it, “the little fish seem to have gotten together and are nibbling at the body of the whale.” “That will not make them whales,” said Giovanni. “The only result of all that nibbling will be that there will no longer be any grandeur anywhere, not even at the bottom of the sea.” “Is that what you have against us? That we’re not grand?” He smiled—smiled like someone who, faced with the total inadequacy of the opposition, is prepared to drop the argument. “Peut-être.” “You people are impossible,” I said. “You’re the ones who killed grandeur off, right here in this city, with paving stones. Talk about little fish—!” He was grinning. I stopped. “Don’t stop,” he said, still grinning. “I am listening.”
• of measure—” “Measure!” cried Giovanni, “ah, these people and their measure! They measure the gram, the centimeter, these people, and they keep piling all the little scraps they save, one on top of the other, year in and year out, all in the stocking or under the bed—and what do they get out of all this measure? A country which is falling to pieces, measure by measure, before their eyes. Measure. I do not like to offend your ears by saying all the things I am sure these people measure before they permit themselves any act whatever.
• “But you will come,” he teased, with a wonderful, mocking light on his face, “more often now?” I stammered: “Why?” “Ah!” cried Giovanni. “Don’t you know when you have made a friend?” I knew I must look foolish and that my question was foolish too: “So soon?” “Why no,” he said, reasonably, and looked at his watch, “we can wait another hour if you like. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until closing time. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until tomorrow, only that means that you must come in here tomorrow and perhaps you have something else to do.”
• He put his watch away and leaned both elbows on the bar. “Tell me,” he said, “what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?”
• “And, at the risk of losing forever your so remarkably candid friendship, let me tell you something. Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”
• “I could say the same about yours,” said Jacques. “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.”
• Jacques followed my look. “He is very fond of you,” he said, “already. But this doesn’t make you happy or proud, as it should. It makes you frightened and ashamed. Why?” “I don’t understand him,” I said at last. “I don’t know what his friendship means; I don’t know what he means by friendship.” Jacques laughed. “You don’t know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?” I said nothing. “Or for that matter,” he continued, “what kind of love affairs?”
• And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.” He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. “You play it safe long enough,” he said, in a different tone, “and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.”
• “Somebody,” said Jacques, “your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.”
• arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
• Yet it was true, I recalled, turning away from the river down the long street home, I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed. I wanted the same bed at night and the same arms and I wanted to rise in the morning, knowing where I was. I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed. It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.
• I might ask to be forgiven—if I could name and face my crime, if there were anything or anybody anywhere with the power to forgive. No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.
• Those days after Giovanni had lost his job, we dawdled; dawdled as doomed mountain climbers may be said to dawdle above the chasm, held only by a snapping rope.
• She was silent. “I don’t know,” she said at last, “but I’m beginning to think that women get attached to something really by default. They’d give it up, if they could, anytime, for a man. Of course they can’t admit this, and neither can most of them let go of what they have. But I think it kills them—perhaps I only mean,” she added, after a moment, “that it would have killed me.”
• “Why,” she said, “I’m talking about my life. I’ve got you to take care of and feed and torment and trick and love—I’ve got you to put up with. From now on, I can have a wonderful time complaining about being a woman. But I won’t be terrified that I’m not one.” She looked at my face, and laughed. “Oh, I’ll be doing other things,” she cried. “I won’t stop being intelligent. I’ll read and argue and think and all that—and I’ll make a great point of not thinking your thoughts—and you’ll be pleased because I’m sure the resulting confusion will cause you to see that I’ve only got a finite woman’s mind, after all. And, if God is good, you’ll love me more and more and we’ll be quite happy.” She laughed again. “Don’t bother your head about it, sweetheart. Leave it to me.”
• Jacques, “and hurried out to get him. He thought we should drag the river for you. But I assured him that he did not know Americans as well as I and that you had not drowned yourself. You had only disappeared in order—to think. And I see that I was right. You have thought so much that now you must find what others have thought before you. One book,” he said, finally, “that you can surely spare yourself the trouble of reading is the Marquis de Sade.”
• All this love you talk about—isn’t it just that you want to be made to feel strong? You want to go out and be the big laborer and bring home the money,
• “Why aren’t you? Isn’t it just that you’re afraid? And you take me because you haven’t got the guts to go after a woman, which is what you really want?” He was pale. “You are the one who keeps talking about what I want. But I have only been talking about who I want.” “But I’m a man,” I cried, “a man! What do you think can happen between us?” “You know very well,” said Giovanni slowly, “what can happen between us. It is for that reason you are leaving me.”
• He did not smile, he was neither grave, nor vindictive, nor sad; he was still. He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen. I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away. “Au revoir, Giovanni.” “Au revoir, mon cher.”
• “They’re telling the truth. He’s a member of a very important family and he’s been murdered. I know what you mean. There’s another truth they’re not telling. But newspapers never do, that’s not what they’re for.”
• A body which had to be covered with such crazy, catty-cornered bits of stuff began to seem grotesque. I sometimes watched her naked body move and wished that it were harder and firmer, I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive.
• “David, please let me be a woman. I don’t care what you do to me. I don’t care what it costs. I’ll wear my hair long, I’ll give up cigarettes, I’ll throw away the books.” She tried to smile; my heart turned over. “Just let me be a woman, take me. It’s what I want. It’s all I want. I don’t care about anything else.”
• Americans should never come to Europe,” she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, “it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.” And she fell forward into my arms, into my arms for the last time, sobbing.
• No, I don’t want you to come to the station with me. I wish I could drink all the way to Paris and all the way across that criminal ocean.”