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Part 1: If Not Later, When?
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Call Me By Your Name, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Attraction
Pain, Heartbreak, and Regret
Coming of Age and Maturity
Language and Communication
Time and Anticipation
Summary
Analysis
By the end of July, Oliver and Chiara’s relationship has fully ended. In fact, Oliver has started having a number of flings with women all over town, prompting Elio to wonder every morning where he was the night before. Staring at Oliver sitting in “heaven,” Elio longs to have shoulders like his. “Maybe I wouldn’t long for them if I had them?” he wonders. “Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are ‘being’ and ‘having’ thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same […]?”
Once more, Elio shows his sensitivity to the intricacies of language. This time, he wonders if the words “being” and “having” are even capable of capturing the feelings he experiences when he looks at Oliver’s shoulders, which he desires in a way that is so complex he feels as if his yearnings themselves make up a “twisted skein.” Beyond this attention to language, though, lies something else worth noting: Elio’s attraction to Oliver again has to do with a recognition of himself in Oliver, though in this case he isn’t seeing in Oliver the person he is, but rather who he’d like to be.
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In the garden one day, Elio tells Oliver about the old fairytale, and he asks if the knight speaks or dies. “Better to speak, she said,” replies Elio. “But she’s on her guard. She senses a trap somewhere.” Asking again, Oliver says, “So does he speak?” “No,” Elio responds. “He fudges.” Getting up, Oliver says, “Figures,” and then he tells Elio he needs to go into town to pick up something from his translator. When Elio offers to do it for him, Oliver pauses and says, “No, let’s go together.” Surprised, Elio puts down his pen, closes his score, puts a glass of lemonade on the pages, and then they make their way to their bikes in the shed, where Manfredi—the house’s driver—is arguing with Anchise.
When Elio tells Oliver about the fairytale, Oliver responds in a way that encourages Elio to avoid making the same mistake as the knight. “Figures,” he says, suggesting that the knight’s inability to be honest about his feelings is all too common—something Elio should avoid if possible. He then invites Elio to come into town with him, emphasizing that he wants to spend time “together.” This is significant, considering that until this point their moments together have always been casual and unplanned. Now, though, Oliver goes out of his way to make it clear that he wants to be with Elio.
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Once they get their bikes, Elio asks Oliver if he thinks Anchise is creepy, which is the prevailing opinion around the house. However, Oliver maintains that he’s a nice man, explaining that Anchise treated a wound of his the other day after he fell off his bike and scraped his back. As they pedal toward town, Elio notices Oliver’s slow pace and decides to enjoy this easy moment while it lasts. When they reach the piazzetta in town that boasts a view of the ocean and hills below, Oliver asks Elio if he knows that Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in these waters. Elio admits that he already knows this, and then Oliver asks if he knows what Shelley’s wife and friends did upon finding his body. “Cor cordium, heart of hearts,” Elio says, referencing the fact that a friend grabbed Shelley’s heart before he was engulfed by the flames of cremation.
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“Is there anything you don’t know?” Oliver asks. Elio stares at him and realizes this is his moment to reveal his feelings. “I know nothing, Oliver. Nothing, just nothing,” he says, feeling like this is the first time he’s “spoke[n] to an adult without planning” what he’s going to say. Oliver counters by saying that he knows “more than anyone around here,” but Elio insists he doesn’t know anything about “things that really matter.” “What things that matter?” Oliver asks. “You know what things. By now you of all people should know,” he answers. After a moment of silence, Oliver says, “Why are you telling me all this?” “Because I thought you should know,” Elio replies. “Because you thought I should know,” Oliver repeats. “Because I want you to know,” Elio adds. “Because there is no one else I can say it to but you.”
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“Do you know what you’re saying?” Oliver asks. “Yes,” Elio says, “I know what I’m saying and you’re not mistaking any of it. I’m just not very good at speaking. But you’re welcome never to speak to me again.” At this, Oliver tells him to wait outside while he goes upstairs to see his translator, but when he returns he simply complains about a mix-up with the papers.
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“I wish I hadn’t spoken,” Elio says while biking home. “I’m going to pretend you never did,” Oliver replies, and when Elio asks if this means they’re still on “speaking terms,” he says, “Look, we can’t talk about such things. We really can’t.” Now that he’s revealed his desires, Elio no longer feels ashamed. At the same time, though, he also no longer can cling to “that dash of unspoken hope that [has] kept everything alive these weeks.” Feeling this way, he suggests that he and Oliver stop by one of his favorite places, an area called Monet’s berm, which is a cliff that Monet used to visit to paint. Elio gets off his bike and leads Oliver down a small wooded path to a shady and secluded knoll.
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“This is my spot,” Elio tells Oliver, saying he comes here to read. “Do you like being alone?” Oliver asks, to which Elio suggests that “no one likes being alone,” though he himself has “learned how to live with it.” “Are you always so very wise?” Oliver asks, but Elio only reiterates that he doesn’t know how to speak. “I like the way you say things,” Oliver says. “Why are you always putting yourself down?” Elio tells him he does this so that he (Oliver) won’t criticize him. “Are you so scared of what others think?” Oliver asks. As Elio contemplates this, he allows himself to stare directly into Oliver’s eyes. Disconcerted, Oliver tells him that he’s “making things difficult” because he himself often has to “hold back.”
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Oliver tells Elio that he’s “the luckiest kid in the world,” but Elio maintains that “so much of it is wrong.” Oliver then asks what, exactly, is wrong about his life. His family? The dinner drudges? Elio only smirks, and then Oliver says, “Us, you mean.” To this, Elio says nothing. “Let’s see, then,” Oliver says, scooching closer and planting his lips softly on Elio’s. After kissing him, he asks, “Better now?” but Elio doesn’t reply and instead kisses him again. “I was not so sure our kiss had convinced me of anything about myself,” he notes. “I was not even sure I had enjoyed it as much as I’d expected and needed to test it again, so that even in the act itself, I needed to test the test.”
“We can’t do this—I know myself,” Oliver says once they’ve stopped kissing. “So far we’ve behaved. We’ve been good. Neither of us has done anything to feel ashamed of. Let’s keep it that way. I want to be good.” Despite this sentiment, though, Elio says, “Don’t be. I don’t care. Who is to know?” He then places his hand on Oliver’s crotch. With composure, Oliver brings his own hand down and lets it rest atop Elio’s for a moment before lifting it away. “Did I offend you?” Elio asks. “Just don’t,” Oliver says before standing and wincing with pain as the scrape on his back flexes. Thinking about the cut, Elio suddenly feels the “real world” rush in and eviscerate the moment.
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“We’ll never speak again,” Elio says on the bike ride home. “We’ll chitchat. Chitchat, chitchat. That’s all. And the funny thing is, I can live with that.” At lunch, though, he realizes he can’t live with that. Beneath the table his foot briefly grazes Oliver’s. Then all at once Oliver’s foot is pressing assuredly against the top of his arch, rubbing gently against the soft skin. “A sudden giddiness overtook me,” Elio writes. “No, I wasn’t going to cry, this wasn’t a panic attack, it wasn’t a ‘swoon,’ and I wasn’t going to come in my shorts either, though I liked this very, very much.” Looking down at his plate, he notices a raspberry sauce on his chocolate cake—someone, it seems, is pouring more and more sauce onto the dessert, and then he realizes with a gasp that his nose is bleeding.
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Elio escapes upstairs with his bloody nose, telling his body not to “give the whole thing away.” Shortly thereafter, Oliver comes into his bedroom and asks if the nosebleed was his fault. Elio doesn’t answer, instead saying, “I’m a mess, aren’t I?” Oliver then asks if he’s going to be okay. “I thought I was,” Elio replies. “I’ll get over it.” On his way out of the room, Oliver tells Elio to get some sleep, promising he’ll “stick around.” When he leaves, Elio thinks about their interactions that day and begins to cry, wishing that he could soak Oliver’s clothing and make him taste his tears. “I didn’t understand why he had brought his foot on mine,” he notes. “Was it a pass, or a well-meaning gesture of solidarity and comradeship […]?”
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Lying in his room, Elio fantasizes about telling Oliver straightforwardly that he wants to be “taken” by him, even if it’s a one-time kind of thing. He plans to enter his bedroom that night and act without hesitation, reaching out to touch him and letting their Stars of David touch. However, when he wakes up later that afternoon, Oliver is nowhere to be found. He passes the time by going to the beach and speaking to Vimini—who tells him that Oliver likes him more than he likes Oliver—and then he comes home and has dinner, supremely disappointed that Oliver still hasn’t returned. In fact, he doesn’t come home until quite late, when everyone is in bed. Elio strains to hear him as he comes inside and starts the shower—a sure sign he’s had sex with someone. “Traitor,” he thinks.
After a sleepless night during which he periodically thinks Oliver has entered his room only to discover that no one is there, Elio is silent at breakfast. Mr. Pearlman asks Oliver if he drank a lot the night before while playing poker (which is what he was doing). “That—and other things,” Oliver replies. “How I admired people who talked about their vices as though they were distant relatives they’d learned to put up with because they couldn’t quite disown them,” Elio muses to himself. “How I wished I could say such a thing one day.”
That night, Oliver is kind and calm, eating with the family and going to bed early. The next morning, Elio finds him working hard by the time he himself is awake, and though he doesn’t want to interrupt, he finds himself saying, “I waited for you the other night.” He then asks if Oliver wants to go to town together. “You mean like the other day,” Oliver says. “I don’t think we’ll ever do anything like that again,” Elio says. “But, yes, like that.” As Elio continues to talk about how their time together two days before was an anomaly, Oliver asks, “Do you like me that much, Elio?” Astounded, Elio tells him that he worships him—a word he thinks both describes his affection while also remaining the “murkiest” thing he could possibly say.
Oliver agrees to go into B. with Elio on the condition that he make “no speeches.” In the town bookstore, Elio picks up two copies of an old Romantic novel and gives one to Oliver, though not before inscribing it. “Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in silence, somewhere in Italy in the mid-eighties,” he writes, delighted by the idea of a stranger looking through Oliver’s books one day in the future and wondering who wrote this note.
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The night before this outing to the bookstore, Elio had a dream in which he was having sex with Oliver and looking into his face. The expression Oliver wore was so striking that it ripped “every emotion out of” Elio and confirmed to him “that not to give what [he] was dying to give [Oliver] at whatever price was perhaps the greatest crime [he] might ever commit.” Then, in the dream, Oliver said, “You’ll kill me if you stop,” words that stayed with Elio long after he awoke. Now, as the two ride their bikes down a hill on their way home, Elio turns to him and yells, “Kill me if I stop.” In this way, he thinks, he gives Oliver “back his words with the implicit wish that he repeat them back” like in the dream.
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When Oliver and Elio return, Oliver is quiet and unresponsive, shutting himself into his room for the night. Unable to sit still, Elio calls Marzia, who has a “dusky chill in her voice” but agrees to ride bikes with him to B. In town they eat ice cream and visit the bookstore, where a poet has just released his new collection, Se l’amore (If Love). Elio buys two copies—one for him and one for Marzia. “I’m not sure this book is for you, but…,” the poet says as he signs them. Outside, Marzia asks Elio why he bought her a book. When he says he doesn’t understand her question, she says, “Any idiot would understand why I’m asking. But you don’t. Figures!” Uncomfortable, Elio senses that he understands what Marzia’s getting at, but he doesn’t want to admit it, worrying that he has perhaps been “purposely disingenuous.”
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As he plays dumb, Elio realizes that he’s “ignoring” Marzia’s signals so as to “draw her out.” He then understands with an unpleasant sense of shock that this is exactly what Oliver has been doing to him—“intentionally ignoring” him so as to bring him closer. As he and Marzia walk together, she finally tells him what she feels, saying, “I think you can hurt me and I don’t want to be hurt. Not that you mean to hurt anyone, but because you’re always changing your mind, always slipping, so no one knows where to find you. You scare me.” With this, they stop walking, and Elio kisses her. She then balances her bike against a shop door and leans against the ally wall. “Kiss me again?” she says.
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Elio lets go of his own bike and leans into Marzia, his hands moving up her shirt as hers play with his hair and then travel down his pants. “Sei duro, duro, you’re so hard,” she says. As they kiss and touch each other like this, she briefly lifts her face and says, “Ma tu mi vuoi veramente bene, do you really care for me?” In this moment, Elio wonders how Marzia can embody such contrasting emotions. “I couldn’t understand how boldness and sorrow, how you’re so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants […].”
Even as Elio kisses Marzia, he finds himself composing a note that he later leaves in Oliver’s room. It reads: “Can’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you.” Before he does this, though, he and Marzia spend the night making love on the beach. Upon leaving at dawn, they plan to meet later in the day. Throughout the daylight hours, Elio obsesses over whether or not Oliver has found his note. Finally, he goes to his room and finds a response: “Grow up. I’ll see you at midnight.” Suddenly, Elio doesn’t know what to think. “Did I want this, now that something was being offered?” he wonders. “And was it in fact being offered? And if I wanted or didn’t want it, how would I live out the day till midnight?”
In the afternoon, Elio plays tennis with Marzia. Later, they have sex in his bedroom with the shutters closed but the windows open, and all the while some part of Elio hopes they’ll make an obvious noise that Oliver will hear. When she leaves that night, he stays behind and waits for midnight, agreeing to sit through a long dinner with a gay couple visiting from Chicago. Before they arrive, Elio tells his father that he’ll wear a purple shirt that was a gift from a distant cousin. “My father laughed it off,” he says about the joke, “saying I was too old not to accept people as they were. But there was a glint in his eyes when both showed up wearing purple shirts.”
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After dinner, Elio goes upstairs and tries to imagine what kind of person he’ll be the next time he descends this very same staircase. “By then I might be someone else,” he thinks. “Did I even like this someone else whom I didn’t yet know and who might not want to say good morning then or have anything to do with me for having brought him to this pass? Or would I remain the exact same person walking up this staircase, with nothing about me changed, and not one of my doubts resolved?”
Sitting on his bed, Elio imagines his grandfather’s voice telling him not to go through with his plan. “I was his namesake, and he was speaking to me from the very bed where he’d crossed a far more menacing divide than the one between my room and Oliver’s,” he notes. “Turn back. Who knows what you’ll find once you’re in that room,” the voice warns. Nonetheless, Elio relishes this fear, imagining Oliver whispering, “You’ll kill me if you stop.”
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When the time comes, Elio enters Oliver’s room and watches him move about awkwardly as he assures him how glad he is that Elio has come. Sitting on the bed, the two men share a joint, which Elio is glad to have because it gives him “something to do.” Then, as they wait for something to happen—their legs stretched out next to each other on the bed—Elio brushes his toes against Oliver’s, moving them through the gaps until Oliver begins to “reciprocate the movement.” Then Oliver puts his arm around Elio, who slips his hand under his shirt. “You sure you want this?” Oliver asks, and Elio nods even though this is a lie. “By then I wasn’t sure at all,” he writes. “I wondered when my hug would run its course, when I, or he, would grow tired of this.”
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“We haven’t talked,” Oliver says, but Elio only shrugs. “Can I kiss you?” he asks, lifting Elio’s face. Without answering him, Elio brings his mouth forward in the same way that he kissed Marzia the previous night. Before long, Elio gets under the covers and revels in the way they smell of Oliver. Then he’s naked and Elio feels as if there’s “not a secret left in the world” as Oliver’s hands run over his body. When he realizes Oliver is naked, too, Elio feels compelled to ask “the tactful health question,” to which Oliver says, “I already told you, I’m okay.” As they resume, Elio feels “on the cusp of something,” though he also wants this feeling to “last forever” because he knows there’s “no coming back from this.”
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“When it happened,” Elio writes, “it happened not as I’d dreamed it would, but with a degree of discomfort that forced me to reveal more of myself than I cared to reveal. I had an impulse to stop [Oliver], and when he noticed, he did ask, but I did not answer, or didn’t know what to answer, and an eternity seemed to pass between my reluctance to make up my mind and his instinct to make it up for me.” Then, as Oliver is inside him, Elio feels a “distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, me, and no one else.”
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Elio realizes his dream was accurate: having sex with Oliver is “like coming home.” And this is why he says, “You’ll kill me if you stop” over and over before switching to curse words, which Oliver repeats before saying, “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by mine.” Elio has never done this before. “As soon as I said my own name as though it were his,” he notes, “[it] took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.”
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After making love, Elio wonders if they made too much noise, thinking he might even have “sobbed” a little. As they talk quietly while holding one another, Elio finds a book that he pushed aside while they were still having sex. Now he realizes it was a copy of Se l’amore and wonders if Oliver went to the same book party that he and Marzia stumbled into the other night. He then falls asleep and wakes up before knowing he drifted off—suddenly he’s overcome by “a sense of dread and anxiety” that he can’t “begin to fathom.” “I felt queasy,” he writes, “as if I had been sick and needed not just many showers to wash everything off but a bath in mouthwash. I needed to be far away—from him, from this room, from what we’d done together.”
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Feeling as if he’s just woken up from a nightmare, Elio wonders how he possibly let Oliver do to him what he did. “I would never be the same,” he notes. He wonders if the “loathing” he now feels is something that has “always been there, though camouflaged.” Oliver, for his part, notices this shift in Elio’s mood and says, “You’re not happy.” Elio shrugs. “It was not him I hated,” he writes, “but the thing we’d done. I didn’t want him looking into my heart just yet.” Nonetheless, Oliver presses on, saying, “I knew we shouldn’t have. I knew it.” He then asks if Elio hated the entire experience. “No, I didn’t hate it at all,” Elio writes. “But what I felt was worse than hate. I didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to think about it.”
After a moment, Oliver tells Elio he can go to sleep, so he closes his eyes and wishes he were far, far away. At the same time, he knows he needs to keep Oliver close by “in case this thing [takes] a turn for the worse and there [is] no one to turn to.” And yet there’s also part of Elio that is happy he had sex with Oliver because now his desires are out of his “system.”
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Very early in the morning, Elio and Oliver go swimming, and Elio thinks this is the last time they’ll be “together like this.” Sitting on the rocks, they speak without reservation, prompting Elio to wonder why they were unable to talk like this before sleeping together. Finally, Oliver looks at him and asks if he’s okay. “Do we need to speak about it?” Elio says eventually, using “the same words that Marzia […] uttered when [he] wished to know if she liked what [he’d] done to her.”
When they reach the house and go upstairs, Elio goes to his room and is surprised when Oliver follows him. “Take your trunks off,” Oliver says, and Elio finds himself unable to “disobey.” Then Oliver orders him to sit, whereupon he takes Elio’s entire penis in his mouth. “I was hard in no time,” Elio writes, but Oliver abruptly stops and says, “We’ll save it for later.” When he leaves, Elio falls onto his bed and realizes that his “craving to be done” with Oliver has vanished, though his “sickness” lingers like a hangover. Each time he moves, he experiences a “sudden soreness” that incites a “twinge of discomfort and shame.”
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At breakfast, Oliver is wearing Elio’s bathing suit, which Elio thinks is “an unbearable turn-on.” Later in the day, he suddenly feels the need to see Oliver, so he grabs his bike and follows him into town, where he finds him in front of the post office. “I had to see you,” he says, and Oliver confesses that he’s incredibly happy that they slept together. “I just don’t want to regret any of it,” he says. “[…] I just dread the thought of having messed you up. I don’t want either of us to have to pay one way or another.” In response, Elio assures him he won’t tell anyone, but Oliver says, “For you, however you think of it, it’s still fun and games, which it should be. For me it’s something else which I haven’t figured out, and the fact that I can’t scares me.”
Just before Oliver enters the post office, Elio comes up behind him and whispers, “Fuck me, Elio,” in his ear. “He remembered and instantly moaned his own name three times,” Elio writes, “as we’d done during that night.” Then Elio suggests they’ll “save it for later,” and then he explains to Oliver how much Later! always affected him. Laughing, Oliver says “Later!” over his shoulder and enters the post office.
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On his way home, Elio stops at Marzia’s house and joins her as she goes to the beach. Elated, he realizes that he loves the way she smells and the way her mouth looks, and then she takes off her top and asks him to put sunscreen on her back. As he does so, he lets his hands slide around her sides and “cup her breasts,” at which point they steal into a small “thatched cabana” that her family owns on the beach, where they have sex, Marzia sitting on a table with her legs on Elio’s shoulders as he stands before her. “Barely half an hour ago I was asking Oliver to fuck me and now here I was about to make love to Marzia,” Elio thinks, “and yet neither had anything to do with the other except through Elio, who happened to be one and the same person.”
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Elio goes home for lunch and has two glasses of wine, which make him pleasantly sleepy. He then grabs two ripe peaches and goes upstairs and falls asleep while thinking about Oliver or Marzia walking by the balcony and seeing him lying naked on the bed. He imagines one of them—either one—enter the room, take the peach from him, and slide it onto his “hard cock.” He vividly envisions the entire scene: “I know you’re not sleeping, they’d say, and gently press the soft, overripe peach on my cock till I’d pierced the fruit along the crease that reminded me so much of Oliver’s ass. The idea seized me and would not let go.”
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Unable to shake the idea from his mind, Elio gets up and takes one of the peaches, presses his thumbs into it, and pushes the pit out the other side. “[I] gently brought the fuzzy, blush-colored peach to my groin, and then began to press into it till the parted fruit slid down my cock.” He thinks about how he has “already tried the animal kingdom” and is now moving on to “the kingdom of plants.” Eventually, he finishes masturbating with the peach, ejaculating into the center of the fruit and setting it carefully aside on his nearby desk. Shortly thereafter, he hears someone sneaking into his room. Before he opens his eyes, he knows it’s Oliver, who takes his arm and kisses him, lifts the sheet, and finds him naked.
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Oliver lowers his mouth to Elio’s penis and finds the “sticky taste” of the peach. Elio tells him what he did and points to the “bruised evidence” on the desk. Taking the peach, Oliver asks if Elio left it for him, and then he brings the fruit back to the bed, balancing it so the semen stays inside. “I’m sick, aren’t I?” Elio says. “No, you’re not sick—I wish everyone were as sick as you. Want to see sick?” Oliver replies, lifting the peach to his mouth. Just as he’s about to “taste it,” Elio shakes his head. “Please don’t,” he says as he watches Oliver dip his finger into the center and bring it to his mouth. “Look,” Elio says, “you don’t have to do this. I’m the one who came after you, I sought you out, everything that happened is because of me—you don’t have to do this.”
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Oliver tells Elio that he wanted him “from day one” but that he simply “hid it better.” Hearing this, Elio lunges for the peach, but before he can wrest it away, Oliver grabs his wrist and holds it with a crushing grip. “You’re hurting me,” Elio says. “Then let go,” Oliver replies. And then, unable to do anything, Elio watches Oliver put the peach in his mouth “and slowly begin to eat it, staring at” him as he does so. “If you just want to spit it out, it’s okay, it’s really okay, I promise I won’t be offended,” Elio says, but Oliver shakes his head and swallows. “Something that was mine was in his mouth,” Elio writes, “more his than mine now.”
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Elio breaks down crying. “And rather than fight it,” he writes, “as with orgasm, I simply let myself go, if only to show [Oliver] something equally private about me as well.” He cries for all the feelings he’s experiencing and for the many thoughts racing through his mind, like that he’ll “never be able to undo” the fact that he has slept with Oliver. “Whatever happens between us, Elio, I just want you to know,” Oliver says. “Don’t ever say you didn’t know.” These words make no sense to Elio, and yet, he feels he knows “exactly” what they mean. “Kiss me now, before it’s totally gone,” he replies.
That night, Elio and Marzia go to the movies and make plans to go to the bookstore the following night. When Elio returns, Oliver is nowhere to be found. After waiting in agony for him to return, Elio finally gets up in the middle of the night and resolves to go looking for him in B. Luckily, he spots Oliver before reaching the bike shed—he’s sitting on the rocks. “I was waiting for you,” Elio says, and Oliver says he’s been thinking about how soon he’ll be returning to America. “I come here every night and just sit here,” he says. “All by yourself?” Elio asks, and Oliver nods. “I thought—” Elio begins, but Oliver cuts him off, saying, “I know what you thought.” He then reminds Elio that in two weeks he’ll be returning to the States.
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The next morning, Elio opens Oliver’s soft-boiled eggs, taking Mafalda’s job and surprising everyone at the table. In particular, his father takes note of this intimacy and stares at him. “Americans never know how to do it,” Elio justifies. “I am sure they have their way…,” his father replies, and then Elio feels Oliver’s foot pressing on his own beneath the table, as if to tell him to “let it go and assume [his] father [is] onto something.” Later on, in private, Oliver says, “He’s no fool.”
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“I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight,” Elio writes. Although he knows summer is drawing to a close, he does nothing to slow down or conclude his relationship with Oliver. He thinks of this as neglecting to “drop bread crumbs” for a “return journey,” instead eating the crumbs as he goes. However, he’s unable to deny that summer is ending when one morning the sky over B. looks unmistakably like autumn. Then, shortly before leaving, Oliver invites Elio to Rome, where he himself plans to spend three days before leaving for America. He needs to see his Italian publisher, and then he’ll fly home from there. Elio immediately accepts this invitation. Wanting to give Oliver—and Elio—a “gift,” Mr. Pearlman books and pays for their hotel room.
Giddy with excitement, Elio packs and tries not to think about how short three days really is. He decides that when he returns, he won’t move back into his old room, because this way he’ll be able to pretend that Oliver is still sleeping next door. Before they depart, Elio makes Oliver promise to give him his red bathing suit, his “billowy” shirt, his sandals, and his sunglasses when he leaves.
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