Memoir From Antproof Case Read Online Free PDF

light to resolve them, at least to my worn eyes. I have told him much that I assumed he could not understand, but I think that, somehow, he did.
    One thing, however, that he cannot know, because he cannot feel it, is the fleetingness of the moment. When we go to the beach, I have an open heart for the ocean, as I always have, but now, even as we are thrown by the waves and tossed forward in the sun, I rise from the scene and look upon it with affection, as if I am gone or hearing the story of others. And I remember how my own father held me, in the ocean, in an age that now belongs mainly to history, and will, with the passing of my generation, revert to it entirely. I would be lost and entranced with that recollection did not the ocean insist on slapping me in the face with its endlessly rocking foam and if the wind did not roar above the water. Funio is tossed on the waves even more easily than I, and after he goes under, he pops up like a cork.
    I would not have lasted a minute in this place were it not for the Atlantic. It is the same ocean in which I learned to ride the waves at Amagansett, in 1910, when I was six years old. Well before I fled the United States, that area had become a fashionable extension of Southampton, but when I was a boy it was still a whaling village, and the most fashionable thing for many miles around was an encampment of United States Marines who had yet to hear the words
Belleau Wood.
    The waves are a difficult place in which to feel pride or distraction, for they speak intimately and are buoyant with the promise of eternity. I still swim four times a week. Each day after my Alaskan immersion in the naval academy's powerful air-conditioning, I go briefly to Flamengo, and on Saturdays Marlise, Funio, and I go to a more splendid beach—to São Conrado, or to a cove on the coast, where the waves are clear and the distant water is green.
    Rio would be intolerable without the surf, and not just for me. The
favelas
would explode were it not for the beach, where rich and poor alike can bathe in the same ocean and receive the same blessing.
    Foreigners—I'm a foreigner, but I've been here a long time—often fail to understand that the beach is Rio's cathedral and the sea its most holy sacrament. The tourists come for titillation, not realizing that the great sexual power that pervades this city is downshifted at the beach in the same way that cowboys used to check their guns at the doors of a saloon.
    Until Marlise stopped me, I would correct this misconception by persuading many of the northern European women who had removed the tops of their bathing suits to replace them. To stem this barbaric practice I would approach a group of recreants (among whom were usually half a dozen young men who could have broken me like a match-stick) tap my cane on the sand, and point it at the parts that required modesty.
    Sometimes they laughed, but then they would observe my wiry frame, my scars, and my narrowed, determined eyes. I think the butt of my automatic and the way my still strong hand curled around the bamboo stick may have influenced them too. And when I barked enraged commands in my raw and mysterious German, their amusement would turn to the sudden whiteness of fear. Then I would clinch it in English, because they all speak English. Taking a leaf from Watoon, I would say, "Beware, shit-eating wussies! Visigoth scum! You are as dung and vomit to your fathers, who were brave and fearsome soldiers but who were beaten to paste by the English-speaking world, by me. The power of the West is clear, and the New World will crush the recreants of the Old. Unless you want me to unleash upon your soft and decadent flesh the accumulated ferocity of the North American continent,
cover up.
"
    It worked again and again, until Marlise snuck up behind me as I was confronting what turned out to have been a group of speechless Canadians. How was I to know? Perhaps they were of Teutonic stock. She marched me to