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stand in groups to watch the sunset, and gossip about the growth of plants. Even the wind isn't allowed to curl the waves in peace; they sing about it.
    And yet, they have no consciousness. It's as if they lack the part of the brain that rigs time into the geometrical construction in which one is trapped. Life for them is like floating in a warm river. They do not have the northern gifts of apprehension and perception, our bright sense of fire, our sharp dread of ice, but they live their lives as if they are riding on rainbows.
    Though they cannot see it, even the dissolute life they live is still a part of the truth—a ripple upon the sea, a diamond-flash in the stream. That I know and that I have known. What sometimes escapes me as I detest them for their licentiousness, their repulsive addiction to coffee, and their bulbous, floppity nakedness, is that their existence is not merely a part of the truth but also a means of seeking it out, a methodology, if you will, like the dance of the bee, or an orchid swaying on a warm breeze, all without pain, all vigorous, lovely, and full of grace.
    I have always thought of the year 1900 as the nozzle of a big pastry bag that unfurls icing when you squeeze it, and that for almost a hundred years the curl of civilization has been unraveling in discord. Though the rest of the world has left the antipodes behind, we are stuck in a better time. In Montevideo, everything is so old that it could be 1910, and, oh, if only it were so. I wish the world would stop hurtling ahead at such great speed. I wish that tranquility would, by action, cease to be overawed. In a sense, the century itself explains what I have done, although my purpose is not to make excuses.
    In the early 1950's—the month was June—I went to Rome for Stillman and Chase. The cities of Europe still had the feel of war. Many buildings were in ruins, many more pocked and damaged, and concrete fortifications littered the fields and beaches like remnants of a receding glacier. I remember the sound of the sea at Ardea on the Tyrrhenian, which had not been broken from its insistent rhythms by or since the years of war. The immutable brine washed through the stones like a heartbeat, just as it had when, almost ten years before, I climbed out upon a beach of the same sea in North Africa, still alive after having gone down in my plane.
    In those ten years I had put on a little weight—I was in my late forties—and had lost the grace I once had for running free and sailing over obstructions like a deer. And, except in the early hours of the morning or late at night, when I dressed in my habitual khaki shorts, polo shirt, and mountain boots, I was imprisoned in expensive suits.
    I had to be in Rome for a few days, including a weekend, and did not have enough time to visit the airfields from which I had flown against Germany, vaulting the Alps in a roll of voluminous air that lifted the wings of the P-51 so buoyantly that they bent with the strain. Nor was I able to arrange a trip to Venice as I had wanted, so I stayed in the city, and on Saturday night I went to an opera recital in the Villa Doria. I was very lucky in that the gentlemen who sang were at a high point. These were the greatest singers in the world, and they knew it. Despite the fact that they were singularly unhealthy champions of pallor and girth, they were angels of song. Perhaps they had trucked with the devil, or perhaps in their operations in such elevated realms they had simply needed their bodies less and less.
    I was ecstatic, and, like a young boy, I imagined myself in their place. Then I returned to the Hassler, where I stopped at the bar to get a bottle of mineral water before I went up to my suite. In the corner, almost hidden in darkness, were the four greatest male singers in the world. While I had walked through the night among robbers and bicycle thieves, these four huge blimps had taken a taxi. Suddenly, at the end of the long green