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Toni quickly announced that she was running late for a meeting with one of her girlfriends. “We went to Newnham together for a time. Which college are you at, Bron?”
Giovanni quickly corrected her.
“Oh, you are with the Edwardsesfulltime? How very brave.” She said ciao to them both, with two kisses on the cheek, and disappeared down the street toward Pembroke.
Giovanni turned back to him as she disappeared from view. “So what brings you to town? I lecture at Corpus”—he waved in the general direction behind him—“so you can often find me here.”
“Oh, is that Corpus Christie?” Bron asked. “You are a professor at the university?”
“A lecturer, and not a very good teacher. I do it for the research.”
“I’m sure you’re a great teacher.”
“No, no, I’m not. I like to spend time with other people’s opinions, then break them apart and form my own.”
Bron was intrigued by what Giovanni had to say, how a researcher’s time was spent reading, taking in information and countless arguments, only to come up with a new argument altogether, a new lens from which to view a book, a piece of media, the world. “So you don’t care what other people think?”
Giovanni laughed. “You misunderstand me. I very much care what other people think, and at the same time I don’t. It is the work of amalgamation, I suppose. A balance of many ideas. But it is hard to trust people, or share their views, when everybody thinks the same.”
Bron was guilty of reading quickly fired threads on the internet and taking them as gospel. Opinions that he would hold and further distribute (if he agreed with them, of course). But were his thoughts, and the opinions he had of himself, his own or a diluted version of many similar think pieces?
“Well, that’s right,” Bron said, edging around a close to the conversation. He needed to get back to the house.
“And you are a teacher too, yes? You teach the little one.”
“I suppose.”
“Say, do you want to get a drink? Because we are here.” Giovanni pointed to the café that sold bread and scones. In the window was a wonderful display of macarons and Chelsea buns. “You get us a table. I will order. Two espressos, okay?”
Ada would be expecting him back very soon, and the walk around town had tired him out. He was itching to say no. Equally, he was completely enraptured by this man’s confidence. He also suspected he could learn more about the Edwardses from him. “Okay.”
Most of the seats had already been taken, but he found a spot at the back of the café and grabbed the sugar tin from another table so that he could pour it into the coffee. He twiddled his thumbs, waiting for Giovanni, who casually leaned on the glass counter by the till, pointing to the pegged letter board behind the barista, then yanked a wallet from his back pocket. Bron thought Giovanni’s black jeans to be particularly tight.
Giovanni approached and perched on the stool, his back and neck upright.Why do you slouch?Bron became suddenly conscious of his own posture. “I also ordered us two muffins.”
“Grazie,” he tried.
“Aha, prego!” replied Giovanni, enthused. Just like that night a few weeks prior, Giovanni’s eyes were inquisitive. They made Bron’s arm hair stand up.
Bron asked what he thought would be the obvious question: “So, what led you to teaching?” and it emerged that Giovanni had a passion for all kinds of things: causes relating to diversity andinclusion; HIV and AIDS awareness; Barthes, Foucault—always Foucault—and other theorists and their frameworks. Anything that debunked old ways of thinking. A lecturing post offered him a space in which to discuss all his interests, and in the classroom, an outlet through which to share his opinions without his being argued against … much.
“The ones that do—those students, they are the feisty ones, the ones I like. A teacher needs an open mind, to be led by their students, but I find that most of them are too wrapped up in the books themselves. They are less concerned with what we have to say about the literature, but focus on what the literature says verbatim.”
“But isn’t what the literature says verbatim our gateway into making it anew?”
Giovanni seemed piqued by his statement. “Go on.”
“I … I don’t know. I just think that perhaps we are allowed to enjoy what is there, on the page. That we don’t necessarily need to say anything about it.”
“But what about problematic representation? Outdated views? I am not suggesting we silence them, but shouldn’t we critique them? Otherwise, how will we fill in the gaps? Many say that certain histories are ‘lost,’ but they weren’t lost—they were stolen. From many, and certainly from us as queer people. How do we go about rectifying that?”
Something was made clear in that moment: Giovanni’s words were inclined to overhaul any sense of difference between them. To make clear that they were on the same side. And that he was ready to put in the work in the face of social change. Such an outpouring of opinion and passion ultimately led to the question “And what do you like to read?” paving the way for much easier discussion. Bron spoke aboutJane Eyreand all its film adaptations.
“And there’s this one scene where it is announced that a woman has come to Thornfield Hall to tell the people’s fortunes. Mr. Rochester, the master of the house, is nowhere to be seen. When Jane enters the library, the woman asks her somany questions, all in the hope of tricking her into talking about her master, only it turns out this woman is actually Mr. Rochester in disguise, in—well, drag! It’s one of my favorite moments ever in all of literature. And yet no one talks about it. The films always work their way around it, either having a real woman play the part or discarding it all together. It’s such a shame!”
“A shame. See, you are exactly like my students. Swept away in specific stories. And I can see the way your eyes light up. But what is it actually saying about the world today? Why do they omit it, do you think? Remember, we fill in the gaps.”
Bron had never thought of it quite like that before.
