Giovanni's Room

Hella finally enters the narrative in Chapter 4. Her relationship with David appears as a relationship of convenience and pragmatism. David and Hella’s desires for a traditional family align, and they do not want to have to meet other people and start the courtship process over again. Hella wants to feel like a real woman, and she believes that can only occur once she is “attached—no, committed—to someone” (126), much like how David feels he will only feel like a proper man when attached to a woman. Hella thinks being in a relationship is a “humiliating necessity” (124) to feeling like a person. David and Hella do love each other, but David is unsure of how deep that love is. They cling to each other as the easiest way to their desired life of heterosexual bliss.

David initially tells the reader he left Giovanni alone for three days, but his accidental meeting with Jacques reveals the true extent of David’s cruelty to the boy. Not only did David not tell Giovanni where he was, but he left him “without any food, without any money, without, even, any cigarettes” (127), knowing too that Giovanni did not have a job. David tries to downplay this abandonment because Giovanni “knew where to go” (129) for help, but his annoyance rings hollow, even to himself. In the bookstore, Jacques implies the breadth of David’s cruelty when he makes an allusion to Marquis de Sade, a French philosopher from whose name derives the term sadism—taking sexual pleasure in the pain and humiliation of others. Jacques believes David could not learn about cruelty even from the inventor of sadism, as his careless cruelty to Giovanni—and his history of cruelty with Jacques—makes him a master on the subject.

David’s continued disregard for the feelings of others in the name of his personal morality amuses Jacques, who joins David’s performative distance with exaggeration to embarrass David. Jacques acts “outrageously and offensively effeminate” (128) in front of Hella—knowing it makes her uncomfortable—and performs an intense familiarity with David to show he spent much time in his company while Hella was away. David tries to perform this distance with Giovanni, introducing him as only his roommate, but Hella can see that Giovanni’s fears for David’s safety suggests a closer relationship. David relents that he and Giovanni are close, and that he loves the man “in a way” (124), but he only feels emboldened to confess this because he pretends Giovanni also has a mistress. David’s attempt to hide the true nature of their relationship becomes a mess of lies that get more complicated the more he speaks; however, rather than throw off suspicion, his evident circumventing makes Hella even more interested in knowing about Giovanni and David’s time with him and Jacques.

David also feels emboldened to discuss his feelings about Giovanni by making his observations about the individual man a generalized observation of European poverty. David reveals he feels sorry for “kids like Giovanni” (134) because his impoverished upbringing leaves him without the skills or vocation to even “be able to think about building any kind of future” (134). David wants to leave Giovanni because he cannot imagine a stable future between them as men, so he expresses this fear to Hella behind the guise of paternal concern for the Italian “kid” and his poverty. David sees that the lack of opportunity for young people like Giovanni leads them to become “gigolos and gangsters and God knows what” (134)—foreshadowing Giovanni’s future once David leaves him for good. This acknowledgement, however, does not prompt David to help Giovanni avert this future because he remains convinced that any act of kindness would make Hella suspicious.

Giovanni’s accusations of secrecy against David develop the theme of self-deception. Giovanni calls David out for never being open and honest, and for treating him as he would any other person rather than a lover. Even during this climactic moment, David cannot find the words to say until Giovanni descends into sobs, and he feels compelled to fill the silence. He tells Giovanni he is leaving him because he loves Hella, but Giovanni knows the real reason is that David is afraid of making a life with another man. Giovanni asserts, “You lie so much, you have come to believe all your own lies” (140). David’s declaration of deep affection for Hella appears false to Giovanni after their passionate few months—and false to the reader who remembers David’s uncertainty of feeling. For Giovanni, either David is completely oblivious to how his actions affect others, or he is cruel enough to not care. David projects his own fears about his failed manhood onto Giovanni, claiming he only loves David because he “want[s] to be made to feel strong” (142). David, so consumed by his inner struggle with his sexuality and masculinity, cannot see that Giovanni doesn’t have the same qualms and that David was projecting his own distorted perceptions.

To retaliate against David’s cruelty, Giovanni compares David to the men he hates: Jacques and Guillaume. When Giovanni reveals that he came to Paris because his wife had a stillborn son, he imagines how his son would have grown up. To hurt David, he imagines his son would have been “the kind of man you and Jacques and Guillaume and all your disgusting band of fairies spend all your days and nights looking for, and dreaming of” (140). Baldwin shifts David’s position among the divide of young and old, and the reader sees that Giovanni considers David one of the older “fairies” who exploit the vulnerable younger men’s need for money. The accusation changes the memory of David’s first meeting with Giovanni to one of predation and power imbalance, where Giovanni evidently perceived David as a rich man seeking Giovanni’s company. Giovanni illuminates David’s worst fear and exposes how his transformation into Jacques and Guillaume has already long begun.

David watches Giovanni’s visible descent wherein the pain and grief hiding beneath his bravado begins to seep to the surface. David sees that Giovanni continues to be kept by Jacques for survival, much to his own humiliation and Jacques’s satisfaction. The situation forces Giovanni to perform a “fairy’s mannerisms” of being “giddy and girlish” (147) to appease Jacques—though David believes the performance is also to make him feel bad for leaving Giovanni. The effeminate transformation appears particularly demeaning for Giovanni due to his earlier open disgust for Jacques’s behavior. Giovanni becomes the “street boy” David and Hella envisioned, which he used to call “lamentable” (147). Giovanni comes to look at David with “abject and vicious” (147) eyes, holding David accountable for his public disgrace.