Christmas day. Awakening, I heard a bolt pushed shut, a padlock snap. It was six fifteen. Then through my window I could see Deborah going down the stairs. Too early for breakfast, though it was getting light. My first thought was like a spy's: Was she going to meet her lover?

In one minute I had dressed. No time to clean my shoes. I hurried downstairs,, surprised to see the gateman, normally so lazy, jump up to salute me. "Bonjour, Sahib."

Clearly Deborah had already given her Christmas tip, but I had no intention of spoiling the rascal further.

The sun had arisen before I arrived on the sea promenade. Off in the distance I saw Deborah pedaling her bicycle very fast. Then she turned and was coming back. She did not look like a woman who would get fat and therefore needed exercise. So her motive was perhaps sexual sublimation. (Poets and lovers do not make so much speed at sunrise.)

Rather disappointed in Her Ladyship, I returned to my room. There I saw that the six pairs of white gloves I had washed before retiring, because of the humidity in the air, had not completely dried. I turned them over. In all pairs the whiteness was relinquishing with time. Each pair had its slightly different colour, going toward grey or yellow. Sixty fingers, like sixty Flaminios. Criminal's gloves. Most comical.

"She promised that if she goes to see the Mother she'll ask to take me along. Only she won't know for sure until late this afternoon."

I told her I wished her luck. She said she was only interested for her article, that she wasn't expecting anything, that since coming to Villefranche she had come to dislike most things about the ashram and had very negative ideas too about the Mother.

We were still at the table when Tom appeared with Deborah's gift and one for me (hélas), beautifully wrapped. He sat down and signaled to the bearer for coffee. The hotel serves strong café au lait, but not quite hot enough for my pleasure, nor enough milk for the two cups.

Only then we hesitated to take the gifts; we had bought nothing for Tom. He looked rather disappointed. Then how could we accept? "I didn't give presents to anyone," Deborah told him.

"Nor did I," said our hero, taking this opportunity to make Tom the odd one.

Still, he insisted; we were polite. I unwrapped my gift. An ashram trinket. Conningsfield was overcome with gratitude. Deborah unwrapped hers. It was the saree I had sold to him, an expensive one covered with silver embroidery, although he had paid the price as for a gold one. Much screaming of delight, although I was thinking it was not the sort of thing she could ever use. Too elaborate, made for a wedding. It would be put away in a drawer forever when she returned home.

After breakfast we went to Tom's room. All the gifts that Deborah and I had wrapped the day before had been unwrapped. The presents and piles of paper and ribbons were everywhere in the room.

"You unwrapped them all?" asked Deborah in horror.

"I can't resist opening presents," said Tom. "Show me a present and I'll open it."

"You mean to say, all our work and you just ... ?"

Tom brushed some paper scraps off two chairs and offered us to sit down. "I'd planned to rewrap them carefully, but I haven't had time."

"I don't understand," said Deborah, shaking her head. "All that work."

"You're a lousy wrapper. Flaminio, too. Now do you understand?"

"You could have said that in the beginning,"

"I thought you knew. Anyway, then you'd have gone away and left me."

"Jesus. So now you have to redo them all?"

"It's too late for that. I may just not give them. Nobody gave me any."

"They're probably waiting for yours."

"Then they can wait."

Then Peter appeared in the doorway. "Anyone home?" He smiled in at Deborah. Tom stepped forward. "Hi, Tom. I came to wish you Merry Christmas and give you back your book."

"I gave it to you for keeps," said Tom. "Merry Christmas."

"Well, thanks. Can I come in?"

Tom stood back slightly. Peter came in and looked around. "Well, Tom, you certainly did get a lot of gifts."

Deborah laughed. "What are you doing today?" she asked Peter.

"I dunno. I was going to see what you folks were up to. Did any of you get to mass last night?"

We looked at Tom. Tom was the only mousquetaire who had definitely planned to attend midnight mass. He had spent fifteen minutes the day before trying in vain to convince Deborah to accompany him. Now he hung his head. "No."

"Then no wonder I didn't see you there. A shame you didn't go. Really pretty." He looked at Deborah. "I told you you should have come."

"I couldn't get away."

"Anyway," interrupted Tom, "going to mass isn't Chickie's thing."

"What's your thing?" Peter asked her. They looked at each other's faces, half smiling.

"Synagogue," said Tom. "Come on, you guys. Break it up."

Then a bearer came to say that the car had arrived. It was Tom's big surprise for us. He had hired a car to drive us to Ice Cream. "Let's go." He piled our arms with gifts to take along. As we walked through the diningroom we saw suitcases and rucksacks. Farther on, strange faces. Some of the international youths had arrived and were sitting all over the patio. Already what seemed our little world was being invaded by robots, a season coming suddenly to a close. As we passed Evil-eye's door her face peered out at us through a crack. When she saw the gifts she opened the door and waved Merry Christmas.

Tom dropped a gift off his pile into her hands. Her ugly old face was smiling in a dozen places. Then Juney appeared, having heard the noise, took her gift and kissed Tom on both cheeks. Out of the corner of her eye she was looking at the newcomers seated in the patio chairs. "The new year's beginning before the old one's ended," she observed.

On the street the rickshaw drivers crowded around. They took the gifts from our hands and placed them very carefully in the rear of the car. "Can Pete come with us?" Deborah asked Tom.

"No," he replied, only half teasing, I think.

"Then I'm staying."

"Of course he can come."

Deborah's face brightened.

"I'll get in front with the driver," said Pete.

Tom tipped a grinning, saluting Green Beret, then gave him more rupees to divide among the other drivers. One empty taxi had now driven up behind ours. Fatty and his wife appeared in the guesthouse doorway and the rickshaw drivers all rushed over to them. Fatty stood head and shoulders above the mob, his cigar in his teeth, looking them over. I noticed some resemblance in his face to Mussolini.

"Okay, I want you and you to get lost. I don't want to look at you. Go on. Get lost." He waved two drivers away like cringing jackals. "Okay now, I want you and ... you to take these parcels very carefully ... very carefully" (bellowing) "and put them exactly where I tell you."

Our taxi left the curb. "Jesus," said Tom, "and I thought I had the bastards organized. Did you see that?"

"That's father-power," nodded Deborah.

"Father power! Man. I can't wait to grow up."

"And have children."

"And have children."

"Don't hold your breath," said Deborah. Very comical. We all had to laugh.

We arrived at Ice Cream after a medium-long ride, during which Conningsfield's views on "Utopias, Real or Dreaming" were examined (in a brilliant monologue by the Great Man himself). Our hero' s personal belief is that utopias will work only if a new species of man can be evolved to inhabit them. Everyone in the car agreed with this, offering no argument. Conningsfield said further that the leaders of utopias must be sages and philosophers. Although this idea can admittedly be attacked on grounds of a basic naivité, no one present did so. He therefore felt happy at last to find himself among persons having a similar grasp of things as himself, though he knew that they may only have been humouring the Learned Fellow.

Half of Ice Cream, we discovered upon our arrival, was climbing into taxis to come spend the holy day in Villefranche. All these young Americans were dressed in beautiful colours, the boys more bright even than the girls. Many of the clothes seemed handmade. Tom gave out the gifts which he said were from all the ashramite guests to all the Ice Creamites. Though we had tried to buy some along the way, no ice cream (real) had been brought by us due to the unavailability of surplus milk to the ice cream manufacturers that morning. A poor land. So often, as if by accident, one sees the skeleton through the flesh.

Then Fatty's car arrived. He had three quarts of ice cream, much to our amazement.

"Naw, you don't have to order it in advance if you know how to talk to those fellas. I didn't order it in advance."

Miss Fatty arrived from her hut. Her face wore a genuine and kindly smile. Only her eyes were not clearly focused.

"What are you stoned on today, baby?" asked her father, kissing her front.

"Harry, don't talk like that in front of everybody." (His missus.)

"Hell, they know it." He looked around and laughed and coughed. He brought up phlegm and spat it onto the dusty red earth. I looked away and up. The sky was very blue, very wide. "They think I'm like that fella in the article. I'm showin' 'em they're wrong. My daughter can smoke, shoot, eat, or stick up anything she wants to, sleep with any guy she takes a fancy to, so long as she doesn't lie about it to her old man. Right, baby?"

The girl smiled at him. "Huh?" She hadn't listened.

I went to find Deborah. She had hidden herself behind one of the huts. "I can't stand him," she told me, making two fists. "I've never loathed anyone so much."

I reminded her what Spinoza had written, Spinoza, the Portuguese-Dutch philosopher (1632-1677), so young, such a brilliant scholar, only twenty-four years old when he was excommunicated from his Jewish faith by the Ecclesiastical Council in the synagogue in Amsterdam. With the judgement of the angels and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch de Espinoza, the whole of the sacred community assenting.... Let him be accursed by day, and accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down and accursed in his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed in coming in ... etc. "He wrote," I told her, "A man does not hate an enemy he knows he can vanquish." (Whom, what, had he in mind? His persecutors? Something within himself?)

Deborah was angry. "But nobody could stand that fat monster. Could you?"

"He is no worse than many. I do not find him more disagreeable than some others in the guesthouse."

She was silent. Instantly I was sorry to see her so helpless, wanting so to help her. How many volumes I have in my suitcases. History, philosophy, poetry. Any language. If only I could have her someplace alone, to share with her these treasures!

"What I hate about him, Spinoza or not, is his grossness, his vulgarity, his boorishness. And his meanness." She was trembling.

Tom came around the side of the hut. "Come on, gang. Back we go, Santa and all his helpers."

"Is it still Christmas?" asked Deborah.

"Just getting started."

"Tell me," she said, putting her hand on his arm. "Am I vulgar and boorish and mean?"

"Has someone been telling you that?" He looked at me.

"I just want to know."

He looked at her from her face to her feet and back. "Not always. Now come. The cab's waiting."