David. A beautiful, cowardly, self-deceiving, respectable, cold person.

According to the book (Giovanni’s Room), he had a decent upbringing — only his mother died early, and his father’s drinking and women hollowed the family out into a respectable shell. After that morning with Joey, he learned to walk away. Just as David began to feel a bit of warmth in Giovanni’s small room facing the courtyard wall, Hella came back from Spain. What followed was Giovanni losing his job, being thrown out of the bar, killing Guillaume, and going to the guillotine. And Hella, catching him with the sailor at the dockside tavern, left too.

All in all, David never lacked for money in his life — his father’s remittances always arrived at the most awkward moments; nor did he lack for people: Joey, Hella, Giovanni, Jacques, the sailor… a dazzling array, and every one of them willing to leave a light on for him. As for the future, he had a fiancée, a ticket back to America, a house in the South — he lacked nothing at all. Barring this or that bizarre accident, he should have been happy, shouldn’t he? At the very least, the outcome should have made him so!

And yet David is not happy…

The book stops here, though really it doesn’t. Giovanni’s head falls, dawn breaks, David stuffs the torn letter into his pocket, and the wind blows the scraps back onto him. His lucidity, too, comes only in intervals: he was lucid that morning with Joey, lucid the night Giovanni asked him “do you love me.” But it was only ever a moment’s thing. In every crevice of life there seems to hide someone who lets him off the hook from answering.

By contrast, Giovanni lacks almost everything: no money, no passport, no status… back home there’s still a dead infant and a village he once cursed. Yet in that filthy, dim little room he tears down walls, builds them back up, hauls bricks — determined, with his whole heart, to make a home. David, in that same room, counts the days, living there while telling himself he’s only passing through. One person with nothing is building; one person with everything is stalling.

Jacques plays something like the role of a spiritual guide in the book, urging David not to sully this thing. That role is later taken up by Giovanni, except Giovanni teaches the lesson with his life, which is precisely why David dares even less to listen.

The book is called Giovanni’s Room. As I understand it, that room was never really Giovanni’s — it was David’s. What people fear most isn’t living in poor conditions; it’s refusing to admit where they actually live. Baldwin said in an interview, later, that the worst things people do are often done to avoid looking directly at themselves. No wonder this book has not a single villain from start to finish — only one person who refuses to look back, and a cluster of others he drags down along with him.