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Part 3: The San Clemente Syndrome
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
Anchise picks Elio up at the train station in B. and asks him if “Signor Ulliva” has left. When Elio confirms that he has, Anchise says, “Triste.” Elio agrees, and Anchise adds, “Anche a me duole, I too am saddened.” When they get home, Mrs. Pearlman is excited to hear about Rome and tells Elio that they’ve moved his things back into his old room. “I was instantly saddened and infuriated,” Elio writes. “Who had given them the right? They’d clearly been prying, together or separately.”
Throughout Call Me by Your Name, Elio’s parents give him a fair amount of space, respecting his privacy as he develops his relationship with Oliver. Now, though, he’s “infuriated” to find that they’ve moved him back into his old bedroom, since this means he can’t pretend Oliver is still in the house (as he planned to). Of course, this isn’t a rational thing to be angry about, since his parents have only done something nice for him, but his anger shows his emotional fragility in the aftermath of Oliver’s departure.
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Elio goes upstairs and sleeps, thinking there will be “plenty of time for mourning.” And yet, he knows that “anticipating sorrow to neutralize sorrow” is “paltry, cowardly stuff.” Still, he thinks about all the ways he will suffer—perhaps he’ll never be able to sleep alone without Oliver, or live with himself without having his lover’s touch. “Even in my sleep,” he writes, “I knew what I was doing. Trying to immunize yourself, that’s what you’re doing—you’ll end up killing the whole thing this way—sneaky, cunning boy, that’s what you are, sneaky, heartless, cunning boy.”
Now that Oliver has finally left, Elio has no choice but to face the heartache he knew was coming all along. However, he tries to “immunize” himself from this emotional pain by “anticipating” it, thinking that if he properly prepares, he’ll be able to minimize his sorrow. Despite this, he ultimately understands that there’s nothing he can do to escape the turmoil he’s bound to feel.
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Elio rises from his nap in the evening and goes downstairs, where he finds Vimini. They decide to go swimming together, walking out and sitting on a rock where she and Oliver used to pass the time. “We missed you,” Vimini says, and when Elio asks who we is, she says, “Me. Marzia. She came looking for you the other day.” Vimini explains that she told Marzia where Elio was, then says, “I think she knows you don’t like her very much.” Vimini then reveals how hurt she was herself when Oliver left without saying goodbye, since she’ll probably never see him again.
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After dinner that night, Oliver calls and tells Elio he has arrived safely in New York. Their conversation is sad and somewhat stilted, though Oliver promises to visit during the holidays. He also tells Elio that he took a keepsake from his bedroom. After their conversation, Elio bounds upstairs and sees that Oliver took an “antique postcard of Monet’s berm” that used to hang on the wall. Apparently, one of the family’s summer residents gave this to Elio, knowing how much he liked the berm. On the back, he inscribed, Think of me someday. This resident’s name was Maynard, and he lived with the Pearlmans when Elio was fifteen. One afternoon he asked to borrow some ink from Elio and, while asking, let his eyes sweep over the boy’s body. “I wouldn’t have said no,” Elio notes.
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Downstairs, Elio sits with his father, who asks about his trip. Throughout the conversation, Mr. Pearlman’s questions hint at Elio’s relationship with Oliver. “You two had a nice friendship,” he says eventually. “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was.” Elio tries to sidestep this by saying, “Oliver was Oliver,” but his father presses on, saying, “What lies ahead is going to be very difficult. […] Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it’s not with me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.” Elio looks at him, feeling like he should say something to avoid this conversation, but he can’t bring himself to do so.
“In your place, if there is pain, nurse it,” Mr. Pearlman continues, “and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. […] We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!” Elio is shocked to hear this, but he doesn’t pretend his father is imagining things. “I may have come close,” Mr. Pearlman says, “but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way.” Elio wonders how his father knew about him and Oliver, but all he can ask is if his mother knows. “I don’t think she does,” he replies.
Oliver returns over Christmas but doesn’t treat Elio with the same kind of open passion as before. Just when Elio thinks they may never speak in earnest again, though, Oliver comes into his bedroom. Declining to get under the covers, he sits next to him and tells him he’s engaged to be married. The relationship, he explains, has been “on and off for more than two years.” Elio is surprised, but this doesn’t stop him from trying to convince Oliver to kiss him and take off his clothes. Admitting that he’d like nothing more than to hold him, Oliver says that he can’t do this anymore.
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Oliver gets married the next summer. Elio writes him a letter when Vimini dies, but by the time Oliver—who’s traveling when he receives the letter—responds, his sorrowful note renews the Pearlmans’ sadness. “Then came the blank years,” Elio notes. Hardly ever hearing from Oliver, he has a number of lovers—some of whom are important, some of whom aren’t. Like Oliver, several of these lovers Elio can’t imagine living without. Then, nine years later, Elio’s mother calls him over Christmas and says she has a surprise and puts Oliver on the phone. Elio can hear Oliver’s children running around the living room with his wife. The conversation is short, because Oliver starts crying. “He’s all choked up,” Mrs. Pearlman says, and then Elio himself begins to cry, surprised to feel this way about someone he has “almost entirely stopped thinking about.”
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After another four years, Elio finds himself passing through the New England town in which Oliver teaches. As such, he pays him a visit at the university. At first, Oliver doesn’t recognize him because of his beard, but then he’s overjoyed to see him standing before him. It has been fifteen years, but Oliver still looks handsome and lively. He insists that Elio must come over for dinner, but Elio says he can’t. When Oliver presses, Elio says, “You don’t understand. I’d love to. But I can’t.” By this he means that he can’t “bring [himself] to do it,” though he doesn’t know how to express this to Oliver. How, he wonders, can he explain that he can’t possibly stand to see his wife and children? After a moment, Oliver says, “So,” and the word seems to capture all of Elio’s “uncertainties.” “So,” Elio repeats.
Oliver and Elio walk to Oliver’s office together. On the way, Oliver stops to introduce him to his colleagues, surprising Elio by telling people specific details about his career—details he can only have learned by reading about Elio online. In the office, Oliver shows him the postcard of Monet’s berm hanging on his wall. “I had hoped one day to let one of my sons bring it in person when he comes for his residency,” Oliver says. “I’ve already added my inscription—but you can’t see it.” Elio then invites him for a drink at his hotel, and though Oliver hesitates, he eventually accepts. “In another eight years, I’ll be forty-seven and you forty,” Oliver says at the bar. “Five years from then, I’ll be fifty-two and you forty-five. Will you come for dinner then?” “Yes,” Elio replies. “I promise.”
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Elio tells Oliver, “You are the only person I’d like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense.” He then asks what Oliver wrote on the back of the postcard, and though Oliver wanted it to be a surprise, he tells him: “Cor cordium, heart of hearts.” He then says that he’s “never said anything truer in [his] life to anyone.”
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“Last summer he finally did come back,” Elio writes, explaining that Oliver returns to B. for one night on his way through Italy. He arrives with a wrapped gift for Mrs. Pearlman, who Elio says is suspicious of everyone. Elio then takes Oliver on a tour of the house, showing him how the place has remained the same—the orle of paradise is “still there,” as is the same gate to the beach, though things are also different because Vimini, Anchise, and Mr. Pearlman have all died. And although Elio wants to show Oliver that nothing has changed, he also wants to make clear how much time has passed. “Part of me wanted him to sense there was no point trying to catch up now,” he writes, “we’d traveled and been through too much without each other for there to be any common ground between us.”
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The old lovers sit on the rock Oliver used to visit with Vimini. “She’d be thirty today,” he says. “She wrote to me every day. Every single day. Then one day she stopped writing.” Soon conversation turns to Mr. Pearlman, and Elio shows Oliver the garden where they buried some of his ashes. “I call it his ghost spot,” he says. He explains that he spread his father’s ashes in many different places, but that this is where he comes when he wants to be with him. “I know he would have wanted something like this to happen, especially on such a gorgeous summer day,” he says, referring to Oliver’s visit.
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Elio says he’s going to take Oliver to the belfry in San Giacomo before lunch. When he asks if he remembers the way, Oliver says he does. “I’m like you,” he says. “I remember everything.” This makes Elio pause. “If you remember everything, I wanted to say,” he writes, “and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.”
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