A Tropical Intermezzo
A TROPICAL INTERMEZZO
The tale of paradise lost is the oldest tale in the world. Myriad are its incarnations.
Myths, legends, and fairy tales are peopled by wanderers who find paradise and then lose it. Dreamers who visit heaven only to awaken back in the world of woe. Lovers who reach for the ghostly beloved only to grasp the empty air.
With the loss comes regret.
Regret for that which was, but is no more. That which was and never will be again. That which, even half-remembered, makes a travesty of this world.
Greatest of all sufferers are not those who have merely lost paradise, but those who have forsaken it – like the conquistador who heeded the call of the world.
Hearn was not one of these. He was the abandoned child whose golden dream was innocent and pure. Yet he too felt regret, for regret is what we feel in a world that is alien to us, a world so different from our true home.
In an untitled story written for the City Item, a conquistador wanders into a paradise where he bathes in the fountain of youth and is loved by a beautiful woman, his bliss marred only by the faint call of a bugle which eventually lures him from the paradise to which he can never return – save in death.
In later years Hearn revised the story and titled it “A Tropical Intermezzo.” The tale is told by a mysterious wanderer on his deathbed. And his story unfolds like a dream.
He feels a sudden strange desire to walk into the woods. There is no deliberation. Just an impulse. For in a dream, to think it is to do it. Then the scenery changes as he walks, the trees becoming greener, loftier, older. He reaches a natural fountain with water so clear he can see the sparkling gold sand at the bottom, but when he dives in and tries to swim to the bottom, it seems bottomless. For such is the paradox of dreams.
After bathing in the fountain of youth, he falls asleep and when he awakens he sees a beautiful golden-skinned woman. Her black hair adorned with white flowers. He loves her and he lives with her there in eternal youth and changelessness.
But the world of shadows called to him and he heeded the call. He wandered out of paradise as unthinkingly as he had wandered in. And never could he find his way back.
Thus his wandering. And thus his sojourns through wild and foreign lands. Ever trying to get back to the garden. To that unchanging hollow in the ancient woods where he was forever young and in love.