Magnify

Why did I stir from bed on this humid July day in Florence, Italy? One reason is gelato; in this punishing season, gelato is not a treat, it is a necessity. Since arriving in Florence, I have subsisted on four gelati a day and little else; on this diet, paradoxically, I am losing weight.

Right now, I am indulging in the other reason. While looking at Italy’s artistic treasures, I can sometimes forget my body’s misery. It’s happening now: A piece of art has stopped me in my tracks.

I’m staring at a fresco depicting a naked man and woman walking side by side. In their poses, the figures convey agonized despair. The man hides his head in his hands, while the woman lifts her eyes toward heaven, her face a mask of grief. Pursued by a sword-bearing angel, Adam and Eve are being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

The fresco was painted almost 600 years ago, and yet across the gulf of centuries, the artist is speaking to my heart. The painting’s story is clear to me. I lived it myself.

At 16, I fell in love for the first time. Jim was curly-haired and mischievous, bright-eyed and outgoing, a Pied Piper. The music of his attention made me want to join the dance.

We were devoutly religious, so there was no instant or even prolonged tumble into bed, just hand-holding and hugging, progressing to that first kiss. Eventually, after much adolescent angst over the precedent it would set, we took the next big step…to French kissing.

We were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in those first months of young love. The world glowed with a light only we could see. We loved each other with a pure and perfect adoration we were sure came straight from God.

But physical exploration would not stop when tongue met tongue. Teenage bodies being what they are, how could it? One Saturday night, we cuddled on the couch, Jim behind me. His arms wrapped around my body, first at my waist, then higher, higher...

That was it, that was all it took: That was my fall from Paradise.

The next morning as my family prepared for church, I sat in the living room, crying. I couldn’t go. My body had led Jim into sin; what’s worse, I had liked it. I was evil and unclean. I was Eve.

Here’s how I understood her story then: Adam and Eve had a great home and everything they needed, but Eve screwed it up. Adam was content to wander the garden naming animals, but not Eve—she got curious about that tree, the Tree of Knowledge, and had to do the one thing she was forbidden to do. She compounded the error by getting Adam involved. Eve was the temptress, her weakness the source of evil in the world. In other words, she was me.

What a harsh story to offer a young woman: a beautiful garden, an eternal world of peace and beauty, lost by woman’s error. There I was at 16, my heart enraptured, my body awakening to the possibilities of sex. I can’t imagine what first love would have felt like, without that myth whispering in my ear, “This is wrong and you are bad.” What it would have been like to experience my first love affair knowing what my heart and hormones, body and brain chemicals were doing. To fall in love without the stain of moral judgment making everything natural seem dirty.

I look back and remember how powerfully sensual my body felt, and wish— oh, impossible wish—I could have felt joy, rather than shame. The passage from one way of knowing my body, to another—from girlhood to womanhood—could have been a rising instead of a fall, if not for the story of Eve.

Or could it? Staring at the fresco, I realize that it wasn’t sharing the sin of Eve that prompted those tears. Even without Eve, I still would have cried.

If we have a certain kind of protected and safe childhood, isn’t that the condition of the Garden of Eden? We know our bodies as animal bodies, physical marvels, purely ours, and though we experience them as sexual, we also experience them as innocent. For that space of time, the one does not preclude the other, but along the path of growing up, our bodies go from being innocent of need or desire, to being something new, something that can be pleasured by another person. They no longer belong to us in the same way or mean the same thing as before. Once we’ve tasted that fruit, we can’t forget, can’t undo it; our bodies will never be innocent and sexual at the same time, or entirely ours, ever again.

That fall is the first inkling of a mature awareness. It’s the moment we realize we can’t be children in the garden anymore. We have to go out, grow up, make a mature relationship with someone. As awareness grows, the eternal summer of childhood ends and we awaken to the merciless advance of time. What better reason for tears?

Gazing at the fresco, high up on one wall of this ancient chapel, I am reminded why I love art. In this experience of recognition, this moment of connection across the centuries, the artist showed me something I didn’t realize before. Why did I cry after my boyfriend touched me? Not because I was religious and believed I had committed the crime of Eve, but because I was human, and my childhood was done. With our first love, we experience a moment that strips us bare, in soul as well as body. The artist knew, as I learned at 16, as everyone learns, what it feels like the day you first know more than you wanted to about life, the day you leave the Garden behind forever.

Julie Hammonds is a freelance writer and the associate editor of Arizona Wildlife Views magazine. Her essay “The Love List,” about creative ways to construct a joyful life, appears this month in the anthology Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On.