from Studies of
Silhouettes
they came in by the open gate and we went to meet them. we shared recent news. we looked each other in the eyes. One of us had been designated to play the part of Hernán Cortés, one of them the part of Montezuma—some beautiful, interminable, continuous dialogues ensued, until sundown, in a perfectly amiable mixture of humanist comprehension and irremediable misunderstanding, the superb contributing to the ridiculous, superb Spaniard, superb Indian, ridiculousness of Seville and ridiculousness of Tenochtitlan, and it took a great deal of patience and the patronage of the gods to prevent a soldier at wit’s end, or a similarly exhausted priest (raised by Jesuits though), from cutting to the chase with some axe blows, so as to put an end to ridiculousness and the superb alike (to attend at last to serious matters).