– photo by Bettina Rheims Alberto’s first mature sexual experience established a pattern. Prostitutes became the simplest solution to a problem that had no solution. It was not necessary to justify this expedience. Physical deliverance did that. But the time would come when he felt constrained to explain repeatedly in

I was on intimate terms with several important families, and for some time was penetrated by the beauty, still more the grace, of a society which ten years later had ceased to exist. … Whiskey … was firmly established at the drink indispensable to conversation, and everyone smoke Gauloises, having never heard