giovanni's room - james baldwin

"And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached— it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom."

"Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it."

"Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together— whereas, 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."

"“You’re all I’ve got,” he said then, with a shy, pained grin. “Be careful.” “Daddy,” I said. And began to cry. And if speaking had been agony, this was worse and yet I could not stop. And my father’s face changed. It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely, helplessly young. I remember being absolutely astonished, at the still, cold center of the storm which was occurring in me, to realize that my father had been suffering, was suffering still."

"Once I was out of the house of course, it became much easier to deal with him and he never had any reason to feel shut out of my life for I was always able, when talking about it, to tell him what he wished to hear. And we got on quite well, really, for the vision I gave my father of my life was exactly the vision in which I myself most desperately needed to believe."

"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."

"“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” Jacques said. And then: “I wonder why.”
Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

"Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before."

"“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?” “Well,” I said, feeling myself being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water, “I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.”
He pointed a finger at my heart. “And when you have waited— has it made you sure?”"

"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.”"

"Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it."

"I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored."

"And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up."

"And I stared at the room with the same, nervous, calculating extension of the intelligence and of all one’s forces which occurs when gauging a mortal and unavoidable danger: at the silent walls of the room with its distant, archaic lovers trapped in an interminable rose garden, and the staring windows, staring like two great eyes of ice and fire, and the ceiling which lowered like those clouds out of which fiends have sometimes spoken and which obscured but failed to soften its malevolence behind the yellow light which hung like a diseased and undefinable sex in its center. Under this blunted arrow, this smashed flower of light lay the terrors which encompassed Giovanni’s soul."

"I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought, it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again."

"I got to the other side of the boulevard, not daring to look back, and I wondered what he had seen in me to elicit such instantaneous contempt. I was too old to suppose that it had anything to do with my walk, or the way I held my hands, or my voice— which, anyway, he had not heard. It was something else and I would never see it. I would never dare to see it. It would be like looking at the naked sun."

"And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it— it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far- off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."

"He held my face between his hands and I suppose such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt."

"And I moved toward him as though I were driven, putting my hands on his shoulders and forcing myself to look into his eyes. I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. “Don’t be frightened. Don’t worry.” And I also felt, standing so close to him, feeling such a passion to keep him from terror, that a decision— once again!— had been taken from my hands. For neither my father nor Hella was real at that moment. And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again— unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality."

"It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt."

"No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief."

"“But I am going to the United States,” I said, quickly. And he looked at me. “I mean, I’m certainly going to go back there one of these days.” “One of these days,” he said. “Everything bad will happen— one of these days.” “Why is it bad?” He smiled, “Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.” He played with my thumb and grinned. “N’est- ce pas?” “Beautiful logic,” I said. “You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don’t go there?” He laughed. “Well, isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.” “I seem,” I said, “to have heard this song before.” “Ah, yes,” said Giovanni, “and you will certainly hear it again. It is one of those songs that somebody somewhere will always be singing.”"

"I was vividly aware that he held a brick in his hand, I held a brick in mine. It really seemed for an instant that if I did not go to him, we would use these bricks to beat each other to death. Yet, I could not move at once. We stared at each other across a narrow space that was full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like flame. “Come,” he said. I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall. And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder."

"I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was."

"I was at the door with my suitcase. With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted. I felt a tremor go through me, like the beginning of an earthquake, and felt, for an instant, that I was drowning in his eyes. His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me. Now, as though I had been branded, his body was burned into my mind, into my dreams."

"And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty— or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry."