*
And after his innocence was lost -- or exploded as nonexistent -- Jorge would walk the garden of orthodoxy and watch the birds explode too, as if all the leaves had blown away in a sphere of chatter. So the fall surrounded his fall.
They were not birds but nymphs, the lost nymphs of poetry. They blew out of the trees.
They flew in a burst out of the trees, all the nymphs, all the exiled nymphs. They were too delicate to protect.
You bad man! You bad man! they chattered, as Jorge walked under them and all the roving ones stared after him. You have chased us away! the nymphs cried.
Not me, Jorge answered. I want you here. I love to watch you flashing your little skirts and flying over my head. Or hiding in the trees, which are your abode and possession, after all. Every tree to its nymph.
I have not exiled you. But his heart sank as the nymphs deserted their milieu. And the campus developers scouted yet another piece of land, hungry for dorms, hungry for labs, needing something to fill what they saw as empty absent space.
All this was well after Jorge was defiled. The birds left long ago.
*
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