But we did not see him from a bridge; we saw him almost from the river itself, from one of the broad, paved walks that curve along its banks, nearly level to the water when the river runs high. Down there, so far below the city, the river seems unrelated to it, and to walk down there between the bridges is like a short trip out of town. Looking up, you can see the bridge that you came down from, but no other reminders of the city, no buildings, no people, no streets. Now and then you may see the tops of tall elm trees that line the lungotevere, but you will seldom, if ever, hear the traffic on those boulevards above the river. You will seldom hear anything, though you are walking along a river that cuts through the center of one of the noisiest cities on this earth. To walk along the Tiber is an escape from Rome, right in the heart of it. Yet it is an escape that no one seems to take; you can almost always have it to yourself, solitude in the middle of the city, and having a part of Rome so completely to yourself, you feel Rome is yours.

That is the feeling I had that late morning when we saw the man rowing.

I think Nicholas had it, too. We were, both of us, more with the river than we were with each other, and we were not talking when we saw the man rowing. It was too quiet to speak.

When we saw him, we watched in silence until he rowed under a bridge, out of view.

Then Nicholas went on looking—at the river, everywhere the man had rowed, at where his oars had been.

He said, “I have got to swim in this river right now.”

I told him he did not. I told him he could live without swimming in the river. He would be wise, I told him, to make himself live without swimming in the river.

“Stop being you,” he said.

I suggested that no one swam in the river, that there were reasons no one did. For instance, I told him, the water itself. I told him to look at the water, at what it was and what was growing in it. The current, too. I told him it was stronger than it looked.

Nicholas was already taking off his clothes.

He may have thought that he was taking a dip in the Tiber, and of course he was, but it could not have been absent from his mind that he was also taking off his clothes in the middle of Rome.

“Don’t look at me,” he said, “until I’m in the river.”

I said I was not going to look at him when he was in the river.

“Yes, you are,” he said.

I tried to think of diseases that he could get from the water.