My first dim perception of this last lesson that we are taught, which is also the first we learn on our own, came as a certain sense of pique, a petulant feeling of betrayal as, one by one, the older members of my circle of friends and lovers first announced their intent to leave our garden of juvenile delights and then departed for other worlds. When those whose faces were no longer to been seen among us were a year and more my senior, the lofty airs and moues of condescension with which they said good-bye could be laid to the arrogance of peers who suddenly conceived themselves to be older and wiser beings than their comrades of the week before.
But when at last some who left began to be no more mature in years than I, when I began to see myself as no longer quite the precocious femme fatale sought after by older boys and instead found myself forever repulsing the unwanted attentions of what I perceived as callower and callower youth, my unease by slow degrees began to focus less and less on the decaying social life without and more and more on the growing mal d'esprit within.
As the esthetics of karma would have it, the moment when this spiritual malaise crystallized itself into satoric resolve came with the clarity and definition of a classic koan.
I was lying in my garden playhouse boudoir with Davi, a boy some several months my junior to whom I had begun to grant my puissant favors not three weeks before, more out of ennui and a sense of charity than any grand passion.
As we lay in each other's arms during what I then supposed to be a brief recumbent interlude between the acts, I could sense him becoming somewhat distant, withdrawing into himself. At length, he prised himself from my embrace and sat some small but significant distance apart from me on the cushioned floor, eyes downcast, shoulders hunched, as if nerving himself up to inform me of a rival for his affections.
"Que pasa?" I asked, with no more than a careful petulance of tone, for on the one hand my primacy in his affections was a matter to which all save my pride was indifferent, and on the other, this would obviously best be served by the assumption of an air of superior calm.
"Verdad, you're the finest lover I've ever had," he muttered fatuously.
"Verdad," I agreed dryly, for given the modesty of his mystique in this regard among our peers and his no more than ordinary skill in the tantric arts, this was a pleasantry that left my girlish heart less than overwhelmed.
"Don't make what I have to say more difficult ..." he fairly whined, meeting my gaze with a pout, obviously all too relieved to exchange his shy discomfort for a facade of pique with me,
"Relax, klein Davi," I said with quite the opposite intent, "if you're afraid to wound me with a confession of some other amour, rest assured, my pauvre petit, that I myself have a surfeit of lovers, past, present, and future, and will therefore hardly be crushed to learn of any peccadilloes of yours."
But instead of flinching at the planting of this barb, he smiled at me most foolishly, or so it seemed. "Ah, Moussa, I knew you'd understand ..." he fairly moaned in relief.
"Who is it then -- Andrea, Flor, Belinda?" I inquired, with a nonchalance that was both feigned and sincere. For while the undying loyalty of this lover whom I was already regarding in the past tense would in fact have been a tiresome burden to my indifferent heart, the outre notion that this lout could possibly prefer the favors of some other to my own, while the ultimate proof of his callow unsuitability as a swain, was still an outrage of lese majeste, which, nevertheless, I could hardly acknowledge with less than lofty amusement, even to myself. Especially to myself.
Once again, however, my perception of the situation proved to be at variance with the reality. "There isn't anyone else, Moussa," he said. "How could there be? Of all the women that I know, you're the only one who tempts me to stay."
"Tempts you to stay?"
"Verdad, you do tempt me to stay, but ..."
"But what, cher dumkopf? What are you blathering and babbling about?"
He regarded me as if I were the one who could not find the sprach to make the Lingo of my meaning plain. "But I leave to begin my wanderjahr next week," he blurted. "Next week, the Ardent Eagle leaves for Nova Roma, and I'll be aboard, My parents have already bought my passage."
He beamed at me. He fairly glowed. "Fantastique, ne?" he exclaimed. "The Grand Palais of the Ardent Eagle is presided over by Domo Athene Weng Sharon! My mother once voyaged with her, and she says that the decor is marvelous, the entertainments superb, the ambiance exhilarating, and the chef maestro, Tai Don Angelica, one of the half-dozen finest in the entire floating cultural."
"You're ... you're off on your wanderjahr next week ...?" I stammered. "As an Honored Passenger?" Why did this entirely unexpected revelation cut me to the quick as no confession of human rival could have done? From whence this sudden pang of loss? What was Davi to me but a casual lover whose season had already passed? Why the desire to hold him here with me which I could not deny but which I could still less understand?
"Naturellement," he said gaily, answering my words with total obliviousness of the import of their tone. "My parents, as you are certainly well aware, can afford to pay my way from world to world in proper style with ease. Why would they have me stacked like so much meat in electrocoma when they can afford to buy me access to the floating cultura without even noticing the debit in their accounts? Surely your own mother and father will do no less for you?"
"Of course!" I told him, though the subject had never been broached between us. "But why such haste? Has life on Glade become such a bore? Will you not be sad to leave Nouvelle Orlean behind?"
"Haste? But soon I will be eighteen standards .Many are our friends who became Children of Fortune long before reaching such an advanced age ..."
Such an advanced age? But this silly boy was younger than I! All my young life I had wished to be, or at least wished to appear to be, older and more mature than my years, and now, all at once, this ... this imbecile was making me feel like some sort of eighteen-year-old crone! For the first time in my life, I wished, at least for the moment, to be younger than my years; there are those who would contend, nicht wahr, that that is precisely the moment when a woman ceases to be a girl.
"And as for Nouvelle Orlean ..." Davi blathered on, entirely oblivious to my mood, entirely blind to the havoc his prattle was working on my spirit.
"And as for Nouvelle Orlean?" I demanded sharply.
Al fin, Davi began to dimly perceive that his discourse was being met with something other than avid enthusiasm, though the concept that he was being the cause of no little dolor d'esprit never seemed to penetrate his primitive masculine brain. He touched his palm to my cheek as one would console a child.
"As for Nouvelle Orlean," he said, "I'llmiss you, Moussa, most of all. Indeed for nearly a year, I dreamed of nothing but being your lover. If not for that, I probably would long since have gone. Verdad, if we had not yet had our time together, I might tarry still. But as for the rest ..."
He smiled, he shrugged, he cupped my cheeks and kissed me like a proper man, and for that moment at least, I saw once more the sincere and naive charm that once had won some small portion of my heart.
"Have we not tasted what there is to taste, seen what there is to see, been what there is to be, as children of Nouvelle Orlean, Moussa, you and I?" he said. "Nouvelle Orlean is the most marvelous city on our entire world, and we both know and love it well. But having tasted it to the full and come to know it as well as we know our parents' gardens or each other's spirits, is it not therefore time to travel on?"
I regarded him in silence, glimpsing for the first time the sweet and noble man that this lightly regarded lover of mine might one day grow to become, and in this moment of farewell I do believe I was touched to depths that never before had been stirred within my heart.
"Next week I depart for my wanderjahr, and soon enough you'll be a Child of Fortune too, mi Moussa, ne. Could I have remained here with you forever and never lived to learn my true name tale? Would you have stayed here with me until we both grew old and never walked the lands of another world?"
"No," I said softly.
"Then may we part as friends? For truly of all that Glade has meant to me, the finest of it all has been my time with you. Should not the best memory of home be the last?"
"Truly and nobly spoken. cher Davi," I told him, with more sincere affection than had ever before filled my callow young heart. "Friends forever, Davi. May your road rise up to meet you. Bon voyage."
And I kissed him one last time, as much to hide my tears as to bid him good-bye. Verdad, my best memory of all the lovers that I had on the planet of my birth was my final sight of the very last.
After Davi left, I went out into the garden and sat for a time under the overhanging trees, deep in formless thought. The sky was cloudless, the air was still, and the sun was warm, and soon I became aware of the piping whistles of the little moussas in the treetops.
For a long time I sat there, staring up into the trees, catching quick glimpses of little golden shapes frolicking high in the branches. Now and again, or so it seemed, tiny bright emerald eyes looked down as if through the billowing green mists of the innocent past. Foolishly, I hoped that the playmates of my young girlhood would descend one final time to nestle in my hands, if only to bid a final farewell to the Moussa that had been.
Naturellement, they never came, not even after I took some crumbs of cake from the playhouse and sat there offering them on my open palms as I had not done for many years.
And as the sky began to deepen towards sunset over my parents' garden and still my little lost friends deigned not to call, I tried to remember when last it had been that the little Moussa had held one of her namesakes in her childish hands. Verdad, when last I had even spared the moussas of the garden a passing loving thought.
And failed. And in that failing understood that it had not been the moussas who had forsaken me but I who had forsaken them, as that little girl grew into the creature who short hours before had bidden the final lover of her childhood a fond and tender bon voyage.
At the moment of this wistful satori, a golden shape chanced to pause in a small bare spot among the branches; tail wrapped around a twig for balance, the moussa stood half erect, as if dubiously testing the posture of a little man.
Or was it chance? For a long moment, the moussa's wide green eyes seemed to lock on my own as if remembering back across time to my childhood years. As if to say, bon voyage, old friend, may your road rise up to meet you, As if to say, mourn not what has been but greet what is to come with a happy heart, and know that we of your childhood's garden wish you no less than your heart's desire. No blame, little Moussa that was, remember us sometimes out there among the stars, and hold our memory in the palm of a child's hand.
Then, with a little chirp of farewell, he was gone, and with him the little girl that longed to stay in her parents' garden, for in that moment, the wanderjahr of my spirit had begun.
Chapter 3
That evening, my mother, my father, and I dined en famille out on the second-story porch overlooking Rioville, and the river, and the mirrored towers of the western bank, and the Hightown looming high above the shore. Of the viands and vegetables and pastas, of the wines and sauces and desserts, I remember nothing, for I was full of myself, engorged with sudden resolve, trepidatious at the thought of leaving all I had known behind, and, if truth be told, not quite so certain of the lavishness of my parents' largesse as to Davi I had pretended. So I spent the opening courses contemplating various strategies for the maximization of same and silently rehearsing the declaration that must come before the sweets were served, which put me sufficiently off my feed to be the object of some bemused regard.
Sin embargo, I do remember the sight of the sun setting into a nest of purple clouds behind the lights of the Hightown, the stars peeping in and out of the half-overcast sky as it deepened to black, the tongue of seafog enrobing the flash and dazzle of Rioville in the softening mists of legend, the bobbing boats plowing upstream through the foaming little crests of the river, the twice-reflected flame of the sunset on the waters, all as if a holo of the setting for my pronouncement of my intent were lased into the cells of my brain.
So too, even now, will the smell of jungle musk, or the overrich fragrance of a river bank, or the perfume of any great city arising at night to some peripheral venue upon a bank of fog recall to my sensorium the internal climate, the precise sensual memory of what it felt to be inside the body of that girl on that very night, the languor in my sated loins, the tension in my viscera, the adrenal storms roiling within my being as I finally found the courage to give my new spirit voice.