“You may watch me jump in,” he said. “I don’t mind if you see me from the back.”

I had meant what I said about not looking; I had nothing in my mind when I changed it.

His hair came down his back, almost to his shirttail. He was still wearing his shirt. I should have known that Nicholas would swim in the Tiber with his shirt on.

Even with his back to me, I could tell that my brother was striking a pose. I was sure that he knew how his back looked.

I named diseases. I did not know if he could get them from the water, but at least they were diseases.

Typhoid, I said.

Malaria, I said.

Nicholas turned his face, showed me his profile over his shoulder.

One of his profiles, one of his shoulders.

“Honey,” he said, “it’s only life.”

He unbuttoned his sleeves and jumped into the river. He had never learned to dive. I could not see him in the river until his head came up. Then his head was there, his face, but I could not see his body. The river was too dark to see below the surface.

It was only his face above the water. His hair floated out, blacker than the water, black spread out on black.

At first, he kicked against the current, swimming in the places where the man had rowed. When he had put himself in many of them, all the places we had seen him, he gave in to the current and drifted with it, back through the same places, toward a bridge downriver.

I followed his hair, his drifting face. I walked to the bridge where his body would emerge. He would come up the steps from the river to the walk. I carried his trousers, his shoes, a ball of linen socks.

I followed my brother drifting.

The places where the man had rowed were his.

“Seventeen years ago I sprang to life in this hotel,” I remember hearing my brother tell a man from San Francisco, in the bar in the garden of the Hassler hotel, a few nights after he took the swim in the Tiber, in 1966.

We spent an amount of time in hotel bars. Nicholas was partial to hotel bars. I was, too. I cannot say that now and then I did not share his taste.

The man from San Francisco was with a woman, but Nicholas did not address himself to her. Nicholas seldom addressed himself to women. He tended to avoid conversations that did not hold at least a possibility of conquest. For Nicholas, when he traveled with me, conquest was mostly an unmessy affair, a flirtation returned, although his flirtations themselves could get somewhat lubricious. For flirtations, they could get a little gamy.

By “sprang to life,” Nicholas must have meant to convey to the man from San Francisco a more vivacious image of human conception than could be achieved by clinical terms, but the man did not appear to get his meaning and obliged my brother to say, “I mean, I was conceived here, in this hotel, seventeen years ago, just upstairs.”