The Sorcerer practically handed me to my future.
Although he was thorough as he explained to me the nature of the bohemian part of town I was to go, I didn’t understand the cause and effect of living amongst the libertines of the Capital City.
I’m sure the Sorcerer did.
We become the people we surround ourselves with. I’m sure you understand that, Shepherd.
Anyway, I did exactly as the Sorcerer told me to, and everything went precisely as he said it would.
He had prepared me well for getting set up in a place of my own.
My palms tingled when my landlady handed me those copper keys.
One for the street door and one for my apartment, none of it seemed real until I opened the door for the first time.
Moving in was easy, since all I had was what I had carried when I fled for the carriage that would take me to the Capital City.
I loved that apartment.
In some ways, I loved it even more than my glorious Casa.
By the time I moved in here I was at ease with riches, and the luxury wealth afforded.
But in the beginning of this Life, my apartment was beyond my wildest dreams.
How incredible that I had remained inscrutable the first time I walked through those rooms!
The spaciousness was too wonderful. The landlady brought me there in the late morning, and the light made me fall in love with the place.
I didn’t even pay attention as she boasted about the elegant rooms – the entry, drawing room, kitchen, servant’s quarters, boudoir, bedroom, and my toilette room.
As soon as I walked in, I knew I had to live there. My first minute in that apartment gave me my first taste of freedom, real freedom.
The windows faced east, and stretched more than half the height between floor and ceiling. The sun beamed through those tall windows, and the radiance was so brilliant I almost believed I had just entered the gates of heaven.
The landlady was exactly as the Sorcerer had described, a stout matron with a tight mouth and beady eyes that darted from side to side. She clearly loved money, especially when it flowed to her easily.
On that first morning, when I showed her a generous pile of copper coins and asked for a week’s lodging in her boarding house, she didn’t even ask my name.
She simply took the money and brought me to my room.
If she had been more observant as she guided me on a tour of her best apartments, she could have cheated me with an exorbitant rent.
I wanted that heavenly apartment so much it hurt. However, I played it casual enough that she didn’t pick up on my insatiable desire for that place.
I managed to talk the rent down to nearly half of what the landlady declared as the proper value for it.
Of course, offering six months rent immediately with a gold coin put the negotiation in my favor.
The landlady stared at me as if I had just said I was born on the moon.
Then she gushed and promised to be at my service if there was anything more that I needed, anything at all.
After I got to know the Capital City, I found that there were many apartments of a similar style and spacious layout, even with brilliant morning light.
But to me, that apartment has always been the most beautiful place in the world.
The elegant building I moved into was divided into four identical apartments between two floors.
Mine was upstairs with a southeastern exposure. My neighbors across the hall and below me were courtesans, and a con man lived in the downstairs northwestern apartment.
I was more than a little shocked that the landlady told me that straightaway, but later I would learn that nobody in the bohemian neighborhood attempted pretense at respectability.
I didn’t take much notice of them right away. That was a mistake, which could have had terrible consequences.
But I had been in the Capital City for less than a week when I moved in, and I was so overwhelmed with this strange and wonderful new place I couldn’t attend to specific people just yet.
My apartment alone was an exotic adventure to explore.
Any one room there was bigger than the cabin I grew up in with my parents, except for the kitchen and toilette room.
The toilette room was a marvel to me, for I’d never seen one before.
It was at the very end of my apartment, as far from the social rooms as possible. It wasn’t elegant by any means.
Besides the chamber pot with basin and pitcher, the toilette room had a round iron tub that was just big enough for me to sit in and stretch my legs out.
The spout of the water barrel was right over the tub.
I was amazed that the toilette room had its own water barrel, as did the kitchen.
Fortunately, the bathroom barrel was half full when I moved in because I forgot about the water sellers every day for the first week.
That water sellers even existed was so peculiar to me because I had always gathered water from the river when my family needed it.
In the Capital City, I had to get my water from the sellers who roamed the streets every day, shouting “fresh water!”
This was convenient, because going to the fountain at the Avenue of the Theaters was not.
The cesspool for my waste was not close to my apartment. I found it both pleasant and unfortunate that the neighborhood dumping-pit was in an alley behind brothel row, several blocks away from me.
My first days in that apartment, I wandered from room to room, looking up the blank walls that stretched so high.
I had no furniture for weeks because I had no idea what to get or even how to get it.
I didn’t mind having nothing in my new home.
I saw endless possibility in the vast emptiness of the rooms.
