Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

“If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy, then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at each opportunity, and if Woden or Shiva or Buddha or that Christian fellow — what's his name? — cannot respect that, then I'll accept their wrath. At least I will have tasted the banquet that they have spread before me on this rich, round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toothless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.”

Alobar paused to consider what he'd said. He had not given voice, even inwardly, to such thoughts in years, although one day, watching a yak calf gambol about the rocks like a goat, he asked himself what the Great God Pan might think of the Buddhist way of life. The answer promoted a prolonged twinge of discontent.

“The lamas declare that they have no fear of death, yet is it anything less than fear that causes them to die before they die? In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance — and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done. They are good fellows, and I must respect their choice, but fullness, completion, not empty perfection, is this fool's goal.”

“I take it that if the Bandaloop doctors were to give you another go at their provisions, you would not this time abstain?”

“There is the matter of quality, my lady. Have I implied that a person must abandon discretion in what he enjoys, then my tongue, or your ear, has erred.”

As if to correct the one or the other, he thrust his tongue into the nacreous coils of her ear, smothering all the while her breasts with his hands, lest their rocking motion somehow interfere with the process of correction. Her right ear thusly plugged, her left nevertheless clearly heard a donging back at the lamasery.

“I'm famished!” she announced, springing to her feet with such force that for a moment he feared she'd taken his tongue with her. “I do hope that is the dinner bell.”

Reluctantly, he led her down from the outcropping, whose grass was destined to go unmoistened by their mingled dew. She was reassigning her hair to the turban as they walked, and frequently stumbled, on the uneven ground. She was thick-thighed, broad-hipped, and heavy-breasted, but so slender of waist that a snail with a limp could circle her beltline in two minutes flat; in short, she manifested the Indian ideal of the woman built for physical satisfaction, and while Alobar had developed slightly different standards, he could not help but watch wide-eyed as this turbulent culture of flesh fought to gain control over its barbaric frontiers (bouncing breasts, swinging buttocks) and consolidate into an integrated empire as it slipped and slid down the hillside.

Much as the departure of daylight had turned the mountains into violet silhouettes, so had the departure of inner peace silhouetted Alobar against the overcast of his frustration. He was in such a funk that when he fetched a dish of buttered barley to the rockpile outside the gatehouse, where the “boy” Kudra waited, he completely missed the significance of the pennyroyal that she sprinkled on her food.

Alobar took his simple meal with the lamas, as was his custom. After dinner, with Fosco's assistance, he found Kudra a place to sleep in the stable.

“I apologize,” Alobar said, “but this is the way women are regarded around here.”

“I am used to that,” said Kudra. “The way you regard women, however, is more of a novelty to me.” She squeezed his hand. “Come back when the moon is above the stable,” she whispered.

Alobar went outside and walked around in the Himalayan night, the dark at the top of the stairs. The thin, crisp air vibrated like a hive with the chants of the lamas. White stars pimpled the atmosphere. It was easy to imagine that the stars were bees, that they were the source of the ubiquitous lama-buzz. It was easy to imagine that the pale crescent moon was the beekeeper's paddle, dipping into the hum and honey.

The nightful of chanting was soothing to him in the way that the sound of a turning screw would one day be soothing to men at sea. In those days, boats were only as noisy as the winds that drove them, and there were no sailors in the Himalayas, of course; there were not even leafy trees that could unfurl flotillas of little sails, as green as mermaids' curtains. Himalayan winds blew snow-flakes about, and grass seed and panda hairs and the serious, droning vowels of lamas.

Alobar had, himself, learned a chant. The abbot had given him the syllables personally. The chant transported him to a place inside himself impervious to gales or breezes, a place as unruffled as the abbot's shaved noggin, as smooth as Buddha's belly. That night, however, he felt more inclined to sing that little ditty he had made up long ago, the one that went: The world is round-o, round-o . . Obviously, it was the dusky widow who was reviving in him those old sensations.

Kudra had awakened him from a long sleep. No, that was false, he hadn't been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth. His stay at the lamasery had become a rut, a tranquil, nourishing, educational rut that had done him little harm and much good, but a rut, nonetheless; his wheel was stuck in a ditch of light, so to speak, and he felt an overpowering urge to steer in the direction of darkness. If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?

In any event, Alobar had lost his calm satisfaction only to gain a kind of anxious, electric joy. Whether it was a temporary state, tied to the licentious yearning that Kudra had reawakened in him, or whether it signaled the end of his serene years as Samye's token pagan, he could not ascertain. What he did know was that the lunar rooster was crowing on the stable lintel now, and that, inside, the fugitive widow had some need or other of him.

It is said that when a man is anticipating sexual activity, his whiskers grow at an accelerated rate. Alobar might have to stop and shave before we reach the end of this paragraph. Before the last of the chanting dies out behind the high walls and the condensed breath of a dozing yak momentarily fogs the page.

Having finished a bath in a pony trough, Kudra was debating whether or not she should squirm back into her nephew's clothes. There was a chill in the May night that had set her to shivering, but the prospect of pulling those soiled, unfeminine garments over her glistening brown body was less inviting than goose bumps. Besides, Alobar would only undress her again, would he not?

She was resigned to having him mount her. She would have preferred to postpone, if not avoid it — with so many things to sort out in the head, the body must be regarded as a distraction — but he was as bent on carnal embrace as a pilgrim was bent on the Ganges. To see him again would be to roll around with him, and she simply must see him.

He is overwhelmingly exiting , she thought. Then she added, Not in any sexual way, of course . He excited her because he was as damned as she was, yet had no regrets. He actually made damnation seem attractive. She had heard of men who rejected the gods, who professed not to believe, but here was a believer who refused to grovel, a man who stood up to Shiva, to Buddha, to the gods of his own race, whoever they might be, who stood right up to them and demanded an accounting for a system in which pleasure must be paid for with pain, a system in which the only triumph over suffering was hard-won oblivion, a system that offered its captive audience little choice in matters concerning duration of performance.