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Montevideo
Sunday, October 14, 1956

Dear Kittredge,

I haven’t been out of this city since I arrived. From the little I’ve been told at the Embassy, our work is often heavy enough to call for sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. The consequence is that Montevideo, with its one million people, half the population of Uruguay, is all I’m likely to get a look at for a while.

My hotel, the Victoria Plaza, a brand-new red-brick edifice, all of sixteen stories high, looks, I fear, like a cardboard carton on end. “That’s where the action is,” E. Howard Hunt advised me before I left, and I assumed that my future Chief of Station would know, and yes, there is action of a sort—businessmen of various nationalities in the hotel bar looking to make deals. Since I can barely afford the room, I’ve spent my time walking about. You see, on Thursday when I arrived, my superiors, all two of them, were absent on Company business, and Porringer, the man who met me at the airport, told me to look around until Monday and get the feel of the city, because I wouldn’t have a chance later. He was too jammed right then, he added, to install me properly.

Wonderful. I have the feeling this is the last weekend I am going to have free until Christmas. My cohorts in our small wing of the Embassy up on the second floor have the look of Hugh’s Mormons. Hellishly overworked individuals.

Well, it’s also hell to be alone in a country. I’ve been so tired from walking all day that I fall asleep right after dinner—no nightlife to report as yet—then up again in the morning to stroll around again. Would you believe it? I find Montevideo half beguiling. That is an achievement since, to the casual eye, it’s nothing remarkable. For that matter, most of Uruguay looks to be of modest interest. It can boast of no Andes; indeed, it hardly has hills, and there’s nothing of the great Amazonian jungle. Just rolling plains and cattle. Montevideo itself is a seaport on the estuary of the River Plata where it enters the Atlantic, and a lot of silt from the riverbottom separating Uruguay and Argentina colors the water a clay-gray brown, not in the least reminiscent of the blue Atlantic we know in Maine. Nor does the port amount to much. It looks like Mobile, Alabama, or Hoboken, New Jersey; all industrial harbors look the same, I guess. Access to the docks is mostly interdicted, so you can’t wander down to where they unload. Anyway, the port seems dingy. Winches scream in the distance.

The main street, called the Avenue of the 18th of July, is full of bustle, and has a predictable plethora of stores—nothing special about the main street. An occasional plaza sports a bronze general on a horse.

All right, I know you’re ready to comment—what is unique about Montevideo? And I answer: Nothing, until you learn how to look.

At this point, I put aside what I had written. It was not a lively enough letter to satisfy my lady.

Montevideo
October 14, 1956

Dear Kittredge,

You wouldn’t know you were in South America, at least not by my preconceived idea of this continent. There’s no heavy foliage and very few Indians. Apparently, they all died off from infectious diseases brought in by the first Europeans. So, on the street you see a Mediterranean population—Spanish, with an underwriting of Italian. Earthy, serious-looking people. The older architecture, Spanish baroque and Spanish colonial, is not inspiring unless you develop an eye for little surprises. This land has a spirit I could not locate until it came to me: I feel as if I’m living in an ink drawing of Italy in the eighteenth century. I suppose I am thinking of the sort of prints you find in old English travel books—a lonely hiker rests on a knoll, and contemplates an empty landscape. All is in repose. The ruins have crumbled gently and live in peace with the edifices that still stand. Time is a presence high in the sky, hardly moving. Eternity has come to rest at noon.

For example: the Legislative Palace. During the week, all governing takes place here. It is as large as a railroad station and looks like a cross between Versailles and the Parthenon, yet in front of this huge wedding cake, at the debouchment of the grand and empty Avenue of the Libertador General Lavelleja, stands one policeman dressed in the hat and cape of a Paris cop. One bicyclist rides by. It is Sunday, but even so! On a side street off this edifice, a small plump man in a blue workingman’s smock is entertaining kids with an incredible foot-and-forehead species of juggling with a soccer ball. It seems medieval. On the next street a beggar sits on a box, his swollen foot stretched out before him.

Now, of course, there’s all sorts of bustle in parts of town. The stores have names like Lola and Marbella—merely to sell clothing! Hordes of materialistic-looking shoppers are out on Saturday. Carcasses hang everywhere in the butcher shops, and bloody as hell. In fact, they eat so much meat in this land (238 lbs. a year per capita!) that you can smell barbecue grease on every street corner. It gets into everything you eat, fish, chicken, eggs, all those great galloping beef on the pampas. Yet this smell of the griddle is not the element I find unique. It’s the back streets. Montevideo is spreading out all the time, and the old parts don’t get rebuilt, merely repaired in a fashion. Most of the natives here are not living in history as we know it. When I left Washington, everybody was concerned with Hungary and Suez and the presidential campaign; now I feel far away from the world’s troubles. In Montevideo, all the public clocks seemed to have stopped. It is always 9:00 and 2:30 and 5:21 in different parts of town. Not much on the scale of world history is ever going to happen, evidently, in Uruguay. The trick, I expect, is to know how to live for the sake of living.

For example: the cars. They love automobiles here. You see old vehicles of every make and twenty-year vintage. They keep patching and repainting them. I think the owners can’t afford enough paint to do the entire job at once, so they start with a half-pint and cover the worst rust spot first with whatever pigment is available, usually about enough to slap up half of one door. Then a month later, another patch of rust pops out. If they can’t find the old paint can, they put on another hue. After a while, the cars clatter by like Joseph’s coat of many colors. What verve! I must say they prance like prize bulls at a fair.

In many neighborhoods, however, the streets are peacefully spooky. The other end of the world may be rushing along, but not on some poor block of shabby houses where the only vehicle in sight is an old olive-drab Chevy sporting bright yellow and orange splotches. Such silence prevails that I feel as if I’m in a wood. A boy in the near distance is wearing a yellow sweater, same hue as the bright yellow someone splashed on the old olive-drab car. Another old car, on another old street, is jacked up by the front end, its hood lifted so high that it looks like a duck quacking. It has been repainted a brilliant off-blue. Above it, on a battered old balcony, laundry is drying. I promise you, Kittredge, one of the shirts is the same off-blue as the car.

I think when a land is sheltered from the storms of history, smaller phenomena take on prominence. In a Maine meadow protected from winds, wildflowers pop up in the oddest places as if their only purpose is to delight the eye. Here, down the length of one low, commonplace, nineteenth-century building, I see an ongoing palette of stone and stucco: brown and gray-brown, aquamarine, olive-gray, and tangerine. Then lavender. Three foundation stones in rose. Just as the cars reflect the sediments left in old paint cans, so, under the sooty pervasive city-color is this other subtler display. I begin to suspect that these people keep an inner eye on their street, and if a unique patch of moss-green has been put on a sign, then there, at the far end of the block, someone chooses to paint a doorway in the same hue of green. Time and dirt and damp and peeling plaster work their inter-washings into the view. Old doors fade until you cannot determine whether the original was blue or green or some mysterious gray reflecting light from the spring foliage. October, remember, is like April here in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the Old City, on a street that runs down to the water’s edge, the gray claylike beach is deserted. At the bottom of this vista is an empty plaza with a lone column standing against the sea. Can they have selected the spot to prove that De Chirico knows how to paint? So often in these lonely landscapes, one sees a solitary figure dressed in mourning.

The old city, and the medium old city, and the city they have put up in the last fifty years are all, as I say, quietly crumbling. What dreams must have gone into the construction of all these baroque whirls and turns and whorls and fenestrations. On the commercial streets are bay fronts and wrought-iron balconies, round windows, oval windows, ogival, and Gothic and art-nouveau windows, and roof balustrades with broken pediments. Iron gates lean in various stages of disrepair, old doors are bereft of pieces of their molding, and laundry hangs in the apertures of grand windows.

Kittredge, forgive me for going on at such length after being here only a few days, but, do you know, I never had an opportunity to enjoy Berlin, or even look at it. I know you were expecting a little more substance, but a good rule to follow in these matters is to make certain that one’s means of sending a letter actually do work.

Yours devotedly,
Herrick

I didn’t receive a reply for two weeks. Then came a short note. “Dispense with the excelsior. Send the dry goods. K.”