Contact!

Oh you splendid liar, I said to myself, you've never heard of the place. There was a pause. I laughed, and so did he. He shook my hand in both of his. We lingered for a moment and parted. When I think of Trieste, lust, and love I often think of him.

Would they be casting their votes as Jamaicans, I asked the Kingston Rastafarians, in the forthcoming elections? The idea horrified them. 'Tell your Queen Elizabeth,' they said, 'that the suffering Ethiopians assembled here from the corners of the earth, yeah verily from the four corners, it is written, the seventh year of the seventh epoch, yea verily the time has come, Abja!--tell her that we are aliens in this land, and cannot vote in elections imposed upon us by our oppresors. Fair enough?'

My small daughter and I looked up from the waterfront of Douarnenez, in Brittany, to see an old woman smiling down at us from an open window. She had a shawl around her shoulders, her face was infinitely wrinkled, and her smile was so kind that it seemed to be reaching us from different times altogether—from before the Fall, perhaps. 'I want that lady,' my small daughter said.

General Peron's dictatorship of Argentina had ended, but in the plush fin-de-siecle cafe I chose for my lunch in Buenos Aires his presence was still palpable. Around me gaggles of elderly women were sipping Cinzano with soda water and nibbling biscuits, nuts and bits of flabby cheese, but in the dimmer recesses of the room various lonely men were deep in the contemplation of La Prensa. When I asked my waiter if there were still many Peronistas about he nodded darkly but wryly, with a flicker of his thumb, towards those several gray solitaries in the corners, who certainly had a brooding conspiratorial look to them but were probably, in fact, looking through the small advertisements for second-hand canoes.

In the ill-lit pedestrian tunnel that goes under the Elbe at Dresden I heard ahead of me the strains of a Viennese waltz, played by a pair of Gypsy violinists. I was in a stingy mood, and resolved to give them nothing. As it happened there was nobody else in the tunnel at that moment, so when I emerged into the open I dug a few coins out of my purse and re-entered the tunnel. Melodies from the Vienna woods were still sounding in its twilight, and the Gypsies were not in the least surprised to see me back. They had read me like a book, and were expecting me. I put my coins in their violin case, and they both bowed courteously, without a smile. I bowed back in admiration.

I was strolling through the souk in Qatar when there emerged from a doorway the smallest man I had ever seen. He was about four feet high, stout and prosperous looking, dressed in the resplendent regalia of an Arab gentleman. With a flourish and a toss of his head this marvelous figure strode down the steps of his house and swaggered away through the souk. His proud head bobbed away among the packing cases, and a breath of the incense that perfumed his beard hung in the bazaar behind him.

In Montana once I found the road blocked for a mile or more by a mass of sheep.  Some were nibbling the sparse grass beside the highway, some were sitting down and one or two seemed to be fast asleep. At the head of this leisurely procession were two cowboys, mounted on fine black horses. "We been fourteen days in the hills," said one, "and seven days on the move. Sheep ain't very fast movers.  Boy, will I be glad of a bed! As for this horse," he added affectionately, "all he wants is a good hot cup of coffee and a place to put his feet up. Ain't that right boy?"

Sometimes Sydney seems to be inhabited chiefly by school-children, children kicking pebbles across bridges, children racing fig leaves down the channels of ornamental fountains, children clambering like invading armies all over the Opera House, or mustered in their thousands in the New South Wales Art Gallery. They seem to me a stalwart crew.