Call Me By Your Name: Part 1: If Not Later, When? Summary & Analysis

Elio has never heard a person use the word “later” to say goodbye. That is, he’s never heard this until Oliver comes to stay with his family in their summer home in the Italian village of “B.” These days, Elio can still shut his eyes and hear Oliver’s voice saying, “Later!” This memory vividly recalls Oliver and his “billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere.” Whenever Elio thinks about this word, he remembers Oliver hopping out of a cab, giving him his backpack, and shaking his hand while asking if his father is home. At first, he thinks Oliver will be just another “bore,” yet another summer houseguest who has come to work on a book project. “I could grow to like him, though,” he thinks.

Each summer, Elio’s parents invite a young academic to “revise a manuscript before publication” while living with them in their Italian summer home. This means Elio has to switch bedrooms for six weeks, giving up his bed to sleep in an adjoining room that is connected by a small balcony. As long as the scholars help Elio’s father organize his correspondences and paperwork, they aren’t expected to do anything but live however they please and work on their projects. Other than these semi-permanent houseguests, Elio’s parents also frequently host dinner parties, inviting neighbors, colleagues, relatives, and academics of all sorts to sit around their dinner table for seemingly endless meals—a practice Elio refers to as “dinner drudgery.”

One afternoon not long after Oliver arrives, Elio notices how soft and pale this man’s skin is on his palms, neck, and the undersides of his feet. These places on his body, Elio thinks, are “private, chaste, unfledged,” and they tell him “things about [Oliver]” that he otherwise wouldn’t even know “to ask.” One day, he takes him on a tour of B., and this is the first time they spend alone together. Oliver asks questions as Elio shows off his knowledge about the area. However, when Elio asks if he wants to see a train car that has been taken over by “Gypsies,” Oliver says, “Later. Maybe.” This “polite indifference” cuts Elio to his core, as he feels like Oliver has recognized his desire to “play up to him.”

As they bike to the bank so that Oliver can open an account, Oliver asks Elio what there is to do in B. during the summer. In his responses, Elio tries to seem mature and casual, saying he simply waits for summer to end. When Oliver asks what one does in B. in the winter, Elio smiles, and Oliver cuts him off, saying, “Don’t tell me: wait for summer to come, right?” Oliver’s ability to read Elio’s mind appeals to the boy, who notices that Oliver picks up on things like dinner drudgery sooner than other residents ever have.

Elio tells Oliver he plays tennis, swims, goes out at night, jogs, transcribes music, and reads. He purposefully lists reading last because he thinks Oliver isn’t the kind of person who spends much time reading, given his “brazen attitude” and casual “indifference.” However, when he really thinks about it, he remembers that Oliver has recently finished writing a book about Heraclitus, meaning that reading is “probably not an insignificant part of his life.” Because of this miscalculation, Elio knows he must now “perform some clever backpedaling” in order to let Oliver know that his “real interests” align with his. However, this thought bothers him in and of itself, as it forces him to admit that even during “casual conversation” he is trying to appeal to Oliver.

On the way back from the bank, Elio offers to take Oliver to San Giacomo so they can “walk up to the very top of the belfry,” which he and his family have nicknamed “To-die-for” because of how much guests like it. However, he feels stupidly caught off-guard when, in response to this invitation, Oliver tells him that he’ll see the belfry “later.”

In retrospect, Elio wonders how he possibly could not have recognized his attraction to Oliver right from the start. “I know desire when I see it,” he writes, “and yet, this time, it slipped by completely.” Failing to fully acknowledge his attraction, he finds himself pontificating at dinner one night and hoping to impress Oliver. Because he’s only seventeen and always surrounded by older academics, he has a habit of speaking fast in order to fit in as many thoughts as possible. During dinner on Oliver’s third night, then, he speaks quickly about a musical transcription he’s working on, and when he falls silent, he can tell that Oliver is watching him. This pleases him immensely—Oliver must like him, he thinks. When he finally lets himself return the gaze, however, he’s horrified to discover that Oliver is staring at him with “a cold and icy glare” that is almost “cruel.”

In the aftermath of Oliver’s “icy glare,” Elio feels stupid for having “fallen for the skin of his hands, his chest, his feet.” He also feels silly for coveting Oliver’s kinder expressions, which seem like “miracles” now that he has seen this terrible look. In response, Elio returns this “wicked glance,” and they don’t speak to one another for two days, even avoiding each other on the balcony that connects their bedrooms. “He was going to be a difficult neighbor,” Elio notes. “Better stay away from him.”

Without reason or warning, the silence breaks three days later when Oliver asks Elio if he wants to go swimming. Speaking in the present, Elio understands that “the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new,” all of these experiences can be traced back to his summer with Oliver, since his experience with him is now “embossed” on his entire life. Still, he comes to learn how quickly his relationship with Oliver can go cold, as if “distance” can abruptly slip between them at any moment. “It was almost as though he were doing it on purpose,” Elio thinks, “feeding me slack, and more slack, and then yanking away any semblance of fellowship.”

While playing guitar one day, Elio senses Oliver staring at him. When he looks up, he’s once more met with the “icy glare.” This time, though, Oliver can’t hide it, so he asks questions about the guitar as a way of diminishing his cruelty. They quickly begin arguing about how Elio was playing the song, so Elio moves to the piano, where he plays another variation. However, Oliver doesn’t like how Elio has changed it—he only wants to hear it the way he originally played it on the guitar, but Elio keeps presenting new and increasingly complex interpretations. Finally, when he has exasperated Oliver, he plays the work in the original way, knowing “exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him.” “We were—and he must have recognized the signs long before I did—flirting,” he writes.

Not long after this interaction, Elio begins to admit to himself that he’d do anything for Oliver because he feels strongly for him. Then, one afternoon, he finds himself home alone with Oliver, and he feels as if “fire” is tearing through his “guts.” He sits in his bedroom, waiting in torment for something to happen and thinking about what it would be like to be with Oliver. “I had learned to leave my French windows ajar, and I’d lie on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire,” he writes. “Fire like a pleading that says, Please, please, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’ve imagined all this, because it can’t possibly be true for you as well, and if it’s true for you too, then you’re the cruelest man alive.”

When Oliver finally does walk into Elio’s bedroom, he asks why he isn’t with the others at the beach, and though he wants to, Elio can’t bring himself to say, “To be with you, Oliver. With or without my bathing suit. To be with you on my bed. In your bed. Which is my bed during the other months of the year. Do with me what you want. Take me. Just ask if I want to and see the answer you’ll get, just don’t let me say no.”

Elio also wishes he and Oliver could talk about the other night, when Oliver came into his room and lay down flat upon his body, pressing him into the mattress. As Elio lay on his stomach, he didn’t know what to do, but he knew he didn’t want Oliver to leave. “This is like coming home,” he thought, “[…] like coming home to a place where everyone is like you.” Instead of saying any of this, though, he simply stayed still, pretending to be asleep but also trying to invite Oliver to do more. “I decided to convey without budging, without moving a single muscle in my body, that I’d be willing to yield if you pushed, that I’d already yielded, was yours, all yours, except that you were suddenly gone,” he writes.

While playing tennis the next day, Oliver throws his arm around Elio during a break and massages his shoulder. Although this is done in a very friendly way, Elio immediately flinches from his touch, scared that he’ll give in to his desire to embrace this contact. Startled, Oliver suggests that he must have pinched a nerve, though Elio thinks he only says this to play into the way he himself is reacting. “Knowing, as I later came to learn, how thoroughly trenchant was his ability to sort contradictory signals, I have no doubt that he must have already suspected something.” Nonetheless, Oliver simply tells Elio to “relax,” inviting a girl named Marzia to feel the knots in his back. “Feel it? He should relax more,” he says. “You should relax more,” Marzia agrees.

After the incident on the tennis court, Elio wonders why he’s so afraid to show Oliver how much he affects him. “Because I was afraid of what might happen then?” he asks. “Or was I afraid he would have laughed at me, told everyone, or ignored the whole thing on the pretext I was too young to know what I was doing?” Or, he wonders, perhaps he’s afraid to reveal his feelings because they might “tempt” Oliver to “act.” “Did I want him to act?” he asks himself. “Or would I prefer a lifetime of longing provided we both kept this little Ping-Pong game going: not knowing, not-not knowing, not-not-not knowing?”

Elio is overcome by Oliver and his billowy blue shirt and the scent of his skin. More than anything, though, he’s drawn to the Star of David hanging from a gold necklace around Oliver’s neck. This, Elio feels, connects them to each other, as they are both Jewish. Because he and his family are what his mother calls “Jews of discretion,” he’s astounded to see how proudly Oliver displays his Star of David. “Staring at his neck with its star and telltale amulet was like staring at something timeless, ancestral, immortal in me, in him, in both of us […].” Elio thinks that his family and Oliver are the only Jewish people in B., but this doesn’t make Oliver want to hide his religion. Instead, he wears it with his shirt collar open in a way Elio can never manage to imitate without feeling self-conscious.

On the day Oliver walks into Elio’s room and asks why he didn’t go to the beach with the others, Elio lies and says he has bad allergies. Oliver then suggests they go swimming together, pulling Elio off the bed and noticing his low-slung bathing suit. Elio turns away so Oliver won’t notice his erection, and as he does so he asks, “Must we?” This question, he feels, is the closest he can come to suggesting that they simply stay in the bedroom, where Elio will let Oliver put his hand down his swimsuit. However, Oliver only says, “I’ll meet you downstairs,” and when Elio looks down at his crotch, he’s mortified to find that it’s damp. “How could I have been so careless, so thoughtless, so totally stupid?” he asks himself. “Of course he’d seen.”

In retrospect, Elio understands that he should have embraced Oliver’s attitude of self-acceptance and simply “shrugged” away any worries about Oliver noticing his damp crotch—“So what if he saw? Now he knows.” At the time, though, he’s unable to embrace this idea and unable to conceive of the fact that “someone else in [his] immediate world might like what [he] liked, want what [he] wanted, be who [he] was.” This thought has never crossed his mind, he notes, because he hasn’t heard of anybody his age wanting “to be both man and woman—with men and women.”

Every night, Elio lies in bed yearning for Oliver to enter his room. During the day, he sits at a table by the pool and works on his music transcriptions. Unlike the residents before him, Oliver doesn’t work in isolation in his room, instead spreading a blanket on the grass and working on his book as Elio toils over his transcription nearby. Without fail, Oliver eventually migrates to the edge of the pool, where he lies down on the warm tiles and reads, saying, “This is heaven.” After lunch, he often says, “I’m going to heaven now.” When he lies down like this, Elio sometimes asks him if he’s sleeping, and they have slow, easy conversations.

Sometimes while lying in the orle of paradise—as he calls his poolside perch—Oliver repeats the things Elio says as a response to his questions. When, for example, he asks what he’s thinking about and Elio says his thoughts are “private,” Oliver says, “So you won’t tell me?” In response, Elio says, “So I won’t tell you.” “So he won’t tell me,” Oliver repeats in a way that comforts and assures Elio. In other conversations, Oliver asks Elio academic questions and marvels at the boy’s intelligence. “I don’t get it,” he says one day about how smart Elio is. “What’s not to get?” Elio replies. “Dad’s a university professor. I grew up without TV.” On another occasion, a glass falls off Elio’s table into the grass, and Oliver walks over to pick it up. “You didn’t have to,” Elio says. “I wanted to,” Oliver answers.

Each day, neighbors and friends visit the house, including Chiara, a girl Elio’s age who was smitten with him last summer but now shows no interest in him. In just one year, she has developed into a strikingly attractive adult, and it isn’t long before she and Oliver start spending time together. Elio watches them flirt when one day she comes over and tells him to come swimming with her and her sister. Oliver dashes upstairs to change and comes down in his red bathing suit. By this point, Elio has decided that Oliver has four distinct moods that correspond with the color of his swimsuit: “Red: bold, set in his ways, very grown-up, almost gruff and ill-tempered […]. Yellow: sprightly, buoyant, funny, not without barbs […]. Green […]: acquiescent, eager to learn, eager to speak, sunny. […].” Blue, Elio notes, is the color Oliver wears when he’s most affectionate.

Everybody loves Oliver. Even Elio’s mother, who claims to dislike his gruff “Americanisms,” finds him charming and affectionately calls him “Il cauboi” and “La muvi star.” Elio’s father also takes a liking to Oliver, though he suggests that he’s shy—an idea Elio finds bewildering. “Could all of his gruff Americanisms be nothing more than an exaggerated way of covering up the simple fact that he didn’t know—or feared he didn't know—how to take his leave gracefully?” he wonders. Thinking this way, he remembers that Oliver declined soft-boiled eggs every morning when he first arrived, but that once Mafalda—the cook—offered to open them for him, he accepted them eagerly. This, he admitted with embarrassment, was because he didn’t know how to peel boiled eggs.

Oliver now eats two soft-boiled eggs each morning, which Mafalda peels for him. When she offers a third, though, he declines, saying, “I know myself. If I have three, I’ll have a fourth, and more.” This strikes Elio, for he has never heard anyone say “I know myself,” and the phrase intimidates him.

In the coming weeks, Elio senses that Chiara is—like him—“smitten” with Oliver. However, this does nothing to change the way he himself feels. When his father asks what he thinks of Oliver, he makes sure to answer in a way that won’t make him suspect that he has a stronger affinity for Oliver than anyone else does. One night, Oliver goes out on the small fishing boat with Anchise—the gardener—and doesn’t return for quite some time. Everyone in the house is overcome with worry, and Elio allows himself to openly lament the situation, though he makes sure to match everyone else’s grief so no one will pick up on what he’s really experiencing.

Elio and his family aren’t the only people vying for Oliver’s time. Indeed, locals invite him almost nightly to dinner, and Chiara and her sister often whisk him away. As a result, Elio waits to see if Oliver will be at the dinner table each night, and when he isn’t, his heart sinks. In light of this, he tries to curb his expectations, thinking that “there are certain wishes that must be clipped like wings off a thriving butterfly.” He decides that he wants Oliver “gone from [his] home so as to be done with him” and fantasizes about Oliver dying, at which point he switches to imagining his own death, thinking about committing suicide so Oliver will know how much pain he’s put him through.

Chiara spends much of her time with Oliver while Elio himself simply yearns for one night together. “Just one night—one hour, even—if only to determine whether I wanted him for another night after that,” he writes. “What I didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.” Chiara, on the other hand, goes forth and makes her intentions clear, spending most days with Oliver floating on a small rowboat and taking off her bra once they float out far enough. Elio watches them do this, thinking that he doesn’t want to lose Oliver to her and that, when he thinks about it, he also doesn’t want to lose her to Oliver.

Watching Chiara and Oliver dance one night in town, Elio tries to convince himself that this is a good thing: now Oliver is taken, and he can’t do anything about it. Maybe this will help him “recover.” The next morning, though, his “heart jolt[s]” when he sees Oliver. Wanting to understand how his and Chiara’s relationship has advanced so quickly, he starts talking to each of them about the other. When talking to Chiara, he compliments Oliver and pretends that he doesn’t know what’s happening between them. When talking to Oliver, he describes Chiara’s naked body, which—he reveals—he saw two years ago. He admits to himself that he simply wants to watch Oliver become aroused, even if it has nothing to do with him. Similarly, he describes Oliver’s body to Chiara to see if she desires the same things he does.

In the coming days, Oliver and Elio stop talking, and Elio experiences pangs of jealousy as Oliver skips their tennis matches and swimming outings in order to spend time with Chiara. Before long, though, Chiara starts coming to the house and waiting for Oliver to appear, and it becomes clear that he’s beginning to lose interest in her, though not completely. While waiting for him one day, she overhears Mafalda talking about the fact that she’s much too young for Oliver. “Nobody asked you anything,” she retorts. “She’s not even seventeen yet and she goes about having bare-breasted crushes,” Mafalda laments. “Thinks I haven’t seen anything?” This aside makes Elio think about the fact that nothing can “escape this network of informed perpetue, housekeepers.” Eyeing Chiara, he understands that she’s “in pain.”

In town one night, Oliver walks by with Chiara and sees Elio sitting with friends outside a caffè. Stopping for a moment, Oliver asks what Elio’s doing out past his bedtime, and Elio reminds him that his father “doesn’t believe in bedtimes.” Oliver then explains to Chiara that there are hardly any rules in Elio’s family, suggesting there’s “nothing to rebel against.” In response, Elio says, “We all have our ways of rebelling.” When Chiara tells him to name one way he rebels, he’s unable to furnish an answer, so Oliver jumps in and says, “He reads Paul Celan.” In turn, Elio wonders if he’s trying to make up for his “little jab” about Elio’s bedtime. Chiara, for her part, asks who Paul Celan is, and Elio gives Oliver a “complicit glance.” “A poet,” Oliver whispers as he and Chiara walk away. “Later!” he says.

In the aftermath of this conversation, Elio is delighted that Oliver—with whom he hasn’t spoken to for several days—has remembered that he reads Paul Celan. Feeling high after this interaction, he dances excitedly with Marzia and walks her home along the beach. When they stop for a moment, he suggests they go swimming, and they both take their clothes off and plunge into the dark water. “You’re not with me because you’re angry with Chiara?” Marzia asks. “Why am I angry with Chiara?” Elio responds. “Because of him,” she says. Elio does his best to look confused, and when they’re done swimming he takes her face in his palm and kisses her. After this initial kiss, she presses back passionately, and they decide to meet in the same place the following night. “Just don’t tell anyone,” she says.

“We almost did it,” Elio tells his father and Oliver the next morning at breakfast. His father asks why they didn’t, in that case, and he says that he doesn’t know. “Better to have tried and failed…” Oliver chimes in. “All I had to do was find the courage to reach out and touch, she would have said yes,” Elio claims. “Try again later,” says Oliver, and as Elio works out the implications of this statement (is he criticizing him? making fun? seeing through his act?) Oliver adds, “If not later, when?” Mr. Pearlman likes this phrase, but it stings Elio. He thinks about how he will try again later with Oliver, but he doesn’t like applying if not later, when? to their relationship. “What if he had found me out and uncovered each and every one of my secrets with those four cutting words?” he worries.

The summer trudges on, and Elio continues to debate whether or not he wants Oliver to know his true feelings. During a conversation about Chiara, Oliver finally snaps and admits that he’s not particularly interested in her, suggesting that maybe Elio should make a move on her. “I know you like her,” he says, to which Elio replies: “You have no idea what I like.” In this way, their conversations twist in and out of easy communication and tense allusion. When Oliver isn’t in “heaven,” he spends time with Vimini, a charming ten-year-old who lives in the nearest house and who everyone maintains is a genius. “It would be in rather bad taste for nature to have made me a genius,” she says the first time she meets Oliver. When she sees his look of confusion, she explains that she has leukemia and is expected to die young.

Oliver and Vimini start going to the beach together almost every day, where they sit and talk. Elio admits that he’s never “seen a friendship so beautiful or more intense,” though he isn’t jealous and doesn’t want to do anything to drive them apart.

As the days pass, Elio’s parents worry about how much time he spends alone. Waiting for Oliver to turn up, he spends a large amount of time each day sleeping fitfully on the living room couch, reading, or working on scores. “You can always talk to me,” Mr. Pearlman says. “I was your age once. The things you feel and think only you have felt, believe me, I’ve lived and suffered through all of them, and more than once.” He assures his son that he knows “almost every bend, every tollbooth, every chamber in the human heart.” Along with Mrs. Pearlman, he urges Elio to go out and “do crazy things” so that he can “get to know people” and discover for himself “why others are so necessary in life and not just foreign bodies to be sidled up to.”

Elio tries to hide how closely he tracks Oliver’s movement, but it’s difficult to conceal his disappointment when he doesn’t appear for dinner. He’s especially eager to convince his parents that he doesn’t care what Oliver does, since they have always said that he gets “too easily attached to people.” “They worried for me,” he notes. “I knew they were right to worry. I just hoped they’d never know how far things stood beyond their ordinary worries now.” And yet, he’s certain they don’t know what he’s feeling, leaving him alone in his torment with no one to talk to. He wonders who he could possibly confide in, and the answer horrifies him: “There is no one else to tell, Oliver, so I’m afraid it’s going to have to be you…” he thinks to himself.

When no one is home one afternoon, Elio sneaks into Oliver’s room and finds his red swimsuit hanging in the closet. Before knowing what he’s doing, he shoves his face inside the suit and inhales, cozying up against the fabric and taking in the smell of Oliver’s body. He then takes off his own suit and puts Oliver’s on. “I knew what I wanted,” he notes, “and I wanted it with the kind of intoxicated rapture that makes people take risks they would never take even with plenty of alcohol in their system. I wanted to come in his suit, and leave the evidence for him to find there.” But then an even bolder idea overtakes him. Taking off Oliver’s suit, he jumps naked into his bed and gets between the sheets and wraps himself around Oliver’s pillow, kissing it and folding his legs around it and whispering his desires into it.

One night Elio goes into his father’s library and reads an old fairytale about “a handsome young knight who is madly in love with a princess. She too is in love with him, though she seems not to be entirely aware of it, and despite the friendship that blossoms between them, or perhaps because of that very friendship, he finds himself so humbled and speechless owing to her forbidding candor that he is totally unable to bring up the subject of his love. One day he asks her point-blank: ‘Is it better to speak or die?’” Having read this, Elio is struck by the thought that he’d never be able to ask this kind of question. When he whispered into Oliver’s pillow, he realized that he’d “rather die than face” Oliver’s “steely look” after revealing his feelings.