The Rambla

There is a place in Montevideo where the city ends and the Río de la Plata begins. They are two worlds, really, earth and water, daughters of two gods. Each with a color, an energy, a soul of its own. Despite this, it is evident in the sidewalks that slope gently downwards towards the water and in the waves that lap up against the rocks, hoping for a taste of earth, that city and river are drawn to one another. Alas, these two worlds, for all the curiosity, for all the flirting, remain apart, divided by the Rambla. A simple stretch of sidewalk perhaps twenty feet wide and twenty kilometers long, the Rambla belongs to neither world. It is in and of itself an entirely separate dimension. The Rambla, in fact, may well be the birthplace of eternity, for it is the only place on earth where you can sit and watch the world go by without taking part.

On the Rambla you settle into a rinconcito to read to write to sleep to imagine what it would be like to be in love to grow old and you count the bricks on the boardwalk the clouds in the sky the wrinkles on your hand and you try to count the waves but you can’t because they are gone before you get one and you ask yourself if the same thing happens to God when he looks down on the men he’s created and if that’s why there are too many people in China and the cars fly by at seventy kilometers an hour and you wonder if they remember to breath and in sixty minutes there will be seventy kilometers between you and that yellow Volkswagen but the driver with the bushy mustache won’t know it because he never saw your face and you don’t pretend to know how fast the river travels and you don’t know where that wave that licked the cuff of your jeans will be in an hour but you think that it might be the same wave that carried your great-grandparents to the New World or the same cloud that rained on the rice fields in Thailand and the city and the river even the sky rush by each knowing the difference between tomorrow and last year and it is only

you
that is
still.

You and everyone else on the Rambla, all suspended in that narrow space between two worlds. And you think to yourself that Heraclitus was almost right but that he must not have known about this place at the edge of the world where everything is still, where you can wonder without getting lost, where Bob Marley is alive and where even the dogs look stoned.