A Love Letter from a Stray Moon by Jay Griffiths Page A

never forget how sweet was the fruit of our disobedience in that orchard.
    I scampered quicksilver through my childhood, out to being a naughty teenager when everything tasted of wine, melons and chilli. I wore a peaked cap and men’s suits so they tutted, the neighbours, who does she think she is? I scorned them—I scorned all those who scorned me—and I took a cigarette lighter and darted towards the hems of their shawls till they squawked and flapped my hands away. (And the trompetilla sniggered to the cactus.) In my gang at college we played havoc, in all the keys of chaos. Cleverer, quicker, droller and better read than most of the teachers, we exploded with anarchy and mischief. We got hold of a donkey, one day, and rode it through the college, falling about laughing at the stale-faces who tried to tell us off. We caught a stray dog and tied it up with fireworks, and lit them so the dog shot off dementedly around the corridors. Poor dog, I thought later. At the time, I was drunk, giggling like a skellington in wellingtons, flowers sprouting from my skull. What flower? Ix-canan , in its Mayan name, the guardian of the forest, which they also call the firecracker bush.
    I was fifteen and I carried a world in my satchel: books, quotes, notebooks, butterflies, drawings and flowers. I cut my hair like a boy, wore overalls, and my eyes shone with devilry and love. The stale-faces called me irreverent. Absolutely not, I snapped, I revere Walt Whitman, Gide, Cocteau and Eliot, Marx, Hegel and Engels, Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy. We were terrible show-offs: ‘Alejandro, lend me your Spengler, I don’t have anything to read on the bus!’ I cried to my clandestine lover. We went busking, playing the violin in the Loreto Garden, listening to the organ-grinders and skating at dawn. In imagination, we climbed the Himalayas, rowed down the Amazon and sauntered across Russia. I read the imaginary biography of the painter Paolo Uccello and adored it so much that I learned it off by heart.
    We curled up in libraries eating sherbet, we flirted and argued and set fire to everything which offended our souls. That was how Diego Rivera first heard of me. ‘Arm yourself to deal with these kids,’ he was told by the other painters. He laughed, incredulous, as they told him what had happened to them. The other muralists had come and painted garbage on our walls; they built a scaffold to overreach themselves and underneath them were wood shavings, paper, bits of oily rags, so we’d set them on fire, obviously. The paintings would be ruined, the painters so pissed off that they took to wearing pistols.

    I never needed to trace my roots; I could feel them, inside me, my fallopian tubes were grinning like tendrils of vines, my veins as tough as lianas while my legs grew from the earth, twining up into my body, and my fingers were leaves asking questions of the world of spring, those fingers which would one day find his. My heart turned, heliotrope to the sun, wherever sun was. El ojo verde , the green eye, all the Amazon was winking within my eyes, and my mouth was full of Das Kapital and poetry. Oh, and the faun, I forgot to say, was my friend. I suckled from the breast of Mexico, before gringos, before Columbus, the milk of the Olmec and the Aztec; my blood is the sap of Mexican plants and my mind is metamorphosing from caterpillar to butterfly, symbol of the psyche.
    I was drunk on life, drunk on night which was wicked with scent, night which lay across my body like Othello’s heavy love over Desdemona’s sleeping, breathing, dying body. I sucked all the scent from the orange blossom, and the datura gave itself to me. I could smell everything; I could smell thoughts and words and colours, vanilla days, vermilion nights. Believe me, I could smell the very sky— with my teeth .
    I grew up in rays of love from the sun, my father. I lived in the sky (why not?) for my father’s house was Casa Azul,