End of story.

So I sat on the doorstep in the sun and had a good cry and now I am drawing circles and lines in the dust. I have moved over to the shade and am sitting cross-legged on a rock. I feel better. A girl has come for water in the courtyard. She is cranking the rusty pump wheel. I listen to the old iron grating away and watch the water gush into her bucket like the magnificent tail of a silver horse. I look at the girl’s big, dirty feet—yawning because I didn’t sleep a wink that night—and try to catch a fly now and then. Life is returning to normal after the tears. The sun is still pouring its oppressive heat onto the courtyard.

Such was my first sexual adventure and my earliest childhood memory.

Thereafter I began feeling vague instincts that now burgeoned, now buckled, and eventually found their natural limits. What should have been an ever increasing fascination, however, was for me a series of renunciations and cruel reductions to an absurd banality. My evolution from boyhood to adolescence was attended by a continuous diminution of the world: as things took their place around me, they — like a shiny surface that has misted over—lost their ineffable features. Only the miraculous, the ecstatic figure of Walter retained its fascinating brilliance and does so to this day.

The day we met he was sitting in the shade of a locust tree reading an installment of Buffalo Bill. A luminescent morning sun was filtering through the dense green foliage to the swish of refreshing shadows. His attire was most unusual: he wore suede trousers, a deep-purple jacket with ivory buttons, and a pair of sandals made of fine strips of white leather. Whenever I feel like reliving the extraordinary sensation of our first meeting, I gaze upon the yellowed cover of a Buffalo Bill installment.

The first thing he did was to leap to his feet as gracefully as an animal. We immediately made friends. We had barely exchanged a few words before he made a sudden, stupefying proposal: that we should eat the blossoms on the tree. It was the first time I had met someone who ate flowers. Before I knew it, Walter was up in the tree gathering an enormous bunch of blossoms. Then he climbed down and demonstrated the delicate operation of removing the corolla and sucking its tip. I tried it. The flower burst between my teeth with a pleasant little pop, and a sweet, refreshing flavor I had never tasted before spread through my mouth.

We had been standing there for a while, silently eating locust blossoms, when all at once he grabbed my hand and said, “Want to see where our tribe holds its meetings?”

His eyes were sparkling. It frightened me a bit.

“Well, do you or don’t you?” he asked again.

I hesitated a second, then answered “I do” with a voice no longer mine and a sudden willingness to take a risk quite alien to me.

Still holding my hand, Walter led me through the little gate at the end of the courtyard. We came out on a vacant lot teeming with weeds. The nettles burnt my legs, and we had to pull the thick hemlock and burdock stems apart to pass through. At the far end there was a dilapidated wall with a deep pit just before it. Walter jumped into the pit and called up to me to follow. The pit tunneled under the wall, and we climbed out of it into an abandoned cellar. The steps were in ruins and overgrown with grass, the wall oozed water; the darkness ahead of us was complete. Walter squeezed my hand hard and drew me after him. We made our slow, cautious way down ten or so steps and came to a halt.

“This is where we stay,” he told me. “You can’t go any farther.