Rooms Of Love And Fear
Rooms are living spaces.
The four walls may become a barrier towards the outside world; yet these spaces, these places live. They form into the galaxy of the person living inside them; absorbing the words they hear, the things that they do. Seeing the raw thoughts scrawled on their old and newly-coated surfaces. People sometimes come alive, and sometimes survive in these rooms. Human as we are, we find love in these spaces; and fear too. But truly, you might think, how can a room be a testament for love twisting into sour fear? But these rooms are by themselves, expanding tunnels: they grow and shape themselves until they come alive with the feeling of the human surviving in it.
And so, we arrive at James Baldwin’s book, “Giovanni’s Room”. Written in 1956, it places us in the world of David in the city of Paris; and about the emotions that he feels, that he rejects to the depths of his heart. About euphoria and love; about rejection and heartbreak; about men and women. About rooms.
“The world is full of rooms — big rooms, little rooms, round rooms, square ones, rooms high up, rooms low down — all kinds of rooms! What kind of room do you
think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took
me to find the room I have? And since when, since when, have you so
hated the room?”
The first reference of rooms being houses of feelings comes from first chapter: David’s teenaged self when he made love to his friend, Joey for the first time. The first time when the former became aware of the latter’s body sleeping close to him. There is a lack of knowledge, but plenty of curiousity filling the room as they touch each other, slowly inching closer and closer into the night. And when they come together, there’s euphoria that David feels along with painful joy. He describes the feeling with the phrase ‘as tenderness so painful.’ But it’s instantly numbed by fear that he feels towards the other’s body, and the disgust he realizes for the act itself, and for the naked limb that faces him. For Joey was a boy. And David could see his manhood, his ‘masculinity’ washing away with the winds. He couldn’t believe the truths his body showed him, told him calmly. A room of love morphed into a room of shame; the shame he felt for his body, and that of his friend’s.
“A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of
half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty
words. I thought I saw my future in that cavern. I was afraid. I could
have cried, cried for shame and terror, cried for not understanding
how this could have happened to me, how this could have happened
in me.”
The second time we see David in a room is in his adulthood; in Paris, with a bartender named Giovanni. He’s an Italian, and from the beginning the readers witness an infectious attraction both hold for each other: they make laughter and laugh, they drink and feel drunk in their arms, and they love and feel loved. In Giovanni’s room is where David spends the happiest days of his life. They were drunk when they came into union; and still even if he felt disgust, he was happy. He cleaned and cleared the space for Giovanni for when he returned from work at Guillame’s (the person who employed Giovanni); and then they talked and drank and went to the cinema halls. They were happy, the room was filled with euphoria; laced with David’s affection and Giovanni’s love.
“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.”
David found himself falling into love with Giovanni; he saw his body, his beautiful skin, in the men that walked past him on the streets. He saw him everywhere, and he was surely in love with the Italian bartender. Yet, in his young age, he’d decided not to let any love touch his heart. But Giovanni awakened a sense within him that refused to die down; his repressed, true self that he didn’t allow to wrap his heart. Even though he was promised to another woman, Hella, he considered Giovanni as his happiness. His words for Hella were conditional, necessary, formal; words reserved for Giovanni were real, loving, and filled with the sense of freedom.
And suddenly, the house of cards fell apart.
“In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues.”
Giovanni lost his job at the bar, and was found drinking and laughing hysterically at David. In that moment, the latter realized how trapped he was, how disgusted he was for the room. The repulsion that David showed for Giovanni’s Room reminded me of the anxious greens and reds of Van Gogh’s Night Cafe: the way the shame and fear that he felt for Giovanni; afraid of himself, afraid of love. He promised that he wouldn’t leave Giovanni; and they held onto each other like lost ships on a stormy sea, searching for an anchor. And when Giovanni thought he found his; David left.
“What kind of life can we have in this room? — this filthy little room. What kind of life can two men have together, anyway? 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, and you want me to stay here and wash
the dishes and cook the food and clean this miserable closet of a room and kiss you when you come in through that door and lie with you at night and be your little girl. That’s what you want. That’s what you mean and that’s all you mean when you say you love me. You say I want to kill you. What do you think you’ve been doing to me?”
David leaves Giovanni for Hella; replacing a room that he found filthy with one that was clean. They decide to get married and buy a house outside Paris, for David wants to leave the despicable city, bringing out the worst of him in his eyes. He’s content, he’s happy, and he leaves a hell for a supposed ‘heaven’. But Giovanni still haunts him; and when David sees him, he’s heartbroken. He has tears, he sobs, he is wrecked dry by the pain of the glass of love breaking in his deep heart. They then toast to each other (a la tienne; to you); ‘tienne’ is a manner in which you refer to your closest love, yet Baldwin makes the usage feel very formal; almost as if at the time of the toast, Giovanni and David are transformed from lovers to strangers in the river of life.
But David’s life was not worth a happy ending; for even the room that Hella and him lived happily fell apart as Giovanni haunted his dreams. The latter was long dead, executed for murdering Guillame, his former employer. Happiness, once again, converted itself into shame; Hella, dry-eyed, blamed David for never letting her touch his heart (“but where are you? You’ve gone away somewhere and I can’t find you. If you’d only let me reach you — !”). But as he left Giovanni, he left a sleeping Hella to Nice. Like a maddened wanderer, he walked through the places and saw the familiar faces around him, the loves he can’t give all of himself. Hella leaves too; leaving a desolate David to himself and his shame.
“I long to make this prophecy come true. I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife. The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over. Yet, the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.”
Hella and Giovanni were rooms. Rooms that could have set David free if his heart, his childhood didn’t cage him within himself. Continually, he describes his body as ‘dirty’; for desiring men was where the filth in his flesh lay. The twin loves of the two people in his life contained euphoria and love; unconditional as the oceans, and yet he didn’t let anyone reach their deepest depths. He remained caged within the darkness of his body, and in the mirror, he sees Giovanni’s face at last; for David truly loved Giovanni with all abandon.
“The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”
The novel ends with David stepping into the morning and in a bus, ripping a blue envelope containing a letter. Jacques (his friend in Paris) had sent it to him as he lets the wind take it and the memories away from him. But I really wonder, who sent the letter to David? Was it Giovanni’s last words of love for him? Was it Hella, in her sadness and anguish? Were they words of heartbroken glasses of pain? Or were they the twisted emotions of bittersweet happiness? Only the passing winds know.
