Firefly

by Severo Sarduy

  That much Firefly was able to recount – in his own way of course, and in a stuttering stammering fashion – to the gathering that longed fervently for cleverness and received his words with a thousand mocking sniggers. What he could not recount is what happened next: how one of the roofing sheets first opened up like the blade of a jackknife, and then slid down and took off, a leaf of zinc that flipped halfway in the air and shone like a silver dagger before diving straight down like a bolt of lightning . . . and slicing off the head of a black man running with a suitcase in his hand.

  In the illusions of the circus (Firefly had gone to a matinee performance of the Santos y Artigas), the head cut off at a drum roll settled imperturbably back on the neck of the plump albino woman who undertook this remarkable exploit daily; that of the black man under the hailstorm fell smiling onto the suitcase that the decapitated body continued to hold.

  Firefly tried to speak, but could not. His right hand rose and fell, again and again, like someone chopping down a tree. He had become mechanized, a windup toy, voiceless.

  Then he felt something not only invade him icily through his feet, tying all his nerves in knots, but mix in with his very body, spilling out all over, like a shroud of sweat and cold.

  He looked away from the blood-spattered circus, but it was too late: his legs trembled, his teeth chattered like castanets, he stared off into space like someone cross-eyed or hallucinating, hearing voices. The stepladder itself began to wobble, as if a benign earthquake were shaking the foundations of the house, rather than a hurricane its rooftop.

  Seeing him like that, so stricken and mute, his face mottled with streaks spreading like angry little snakes, the family, as always when faced with a defenseless rara avis, redoubled its cruelty.

  The aunts launched into a derogatory dance – because a little boy must not go soft – and the cackling cripples, like deboned Graces, parodied his vacillations and silence by mamboing in unison while emitting chortles, cachinnations, and stuttering shrieks.

  The father kept repeating, “For the love of God, for the love of God!” yanking on the tip of a Havana with his teeth and draining compulsive cups of cognac.

  The mother worked the empty spinning wheel and began to sway senselessly in a rocker piled with cushions, the haunt of parturient she-cats.

  The sister took him by the arm to help him climb down the last steps. She whispered in his ear, affectionately, “How about some linden-flower tea? Or the Golden Book of Animals to take your mind off it?”

  The butt of the adults’ ridicule gave no answer. He fled sobbing to the kitchen, hunched over, hiding his face.

  Once in the kitchen, using the cloth for drying the porcelain, he wiped away two big tears.

  The buffeting winds were barely audible in there, but the brass pots hanging from the wooden rafters tinkled.

  He counted the members of the family.

  He prepared cups of linden-flower tea. For all, except himself.

  He sprinkled them generously with rat poison.

  With the utmost care, he laid them on a tray.

  “So no one will know I’m afraid.”

  * “The sandpiper dies blind,” says Gustavo Guerrero. A fisherman from Laguna de la Restinga, on Margarita Island in Venezuela, once told him their eyelids get scorched from all that pecking in salt water.

  TO BECOME SOMEBODY ELSE

  Around a fountain, as if drawn by its cool waters, the feverish patients lie under archways on wobbly cots with no more accoutrements than a few mosquito nets of coarse tulle rolled up on spindles during the day and unfurled at night to reach the brick floor.

  Beside the beds stand large copper pitchers for their ablutions, as well as bowls, enema hoses, white ceramic jars with green unguents, a sieve of vein-hungry leeches swimming over one another, and an archipelago of cotton swabs stained with pus, saliva, and blood. Farther off, an amphora of wine. A crystal vase with an iris.

  Muscular nuns with ruddy cheeks and severe mannerisms make their rounds under the archways in a perpetual scurry and always in the same direction, collecting refuse and tendering salves and consolation, or little wool sacks with camphor stones, which they slide brusquely under the pillows.

  Carefully, they close the eyes of the moribund and tie their jaws up with white cloths so that rigor mortis will not catch them by surprise; they give the thirsty salt to suck; they oblige those suffering boils or anemia to gulp a gelatinous and searing fish soup, which they shove at them with an enormous wooden spoon.

  So heavily starched are the edges of their polyhedral cornets that the patients fear getting sliced open when the nuns go rushing by, busy as leaf-cutter ants throughout the night.

  In the courtyard, next to the central fountain and spattered by its spray, stood a whipping post. Sick children frolicked around it and leaned contentedly against it, like someone playing on a swing unaware it was once a gallows.

  The seven recent arrivals occupied an entire side of the square formed by the archways framing the courtyard. Firefly was in front. Wearing loose trousers, he lay on an unmade cot with a very heavy pillow across his feet.

  The rest of the family floated in limbo, laughed in dreams, snored in chorus, praised or battled invisible interlocutors, caught a glimpse perhaps of the paradise to which all believers aspire and which often takes the form of a garden in full bloom. The chief and only physician of the provincial hospital called on two retired luminaries of the island’s medical community and begged them to join forces to decipher the enigma of this family, delivered from the recent disaster only to be plunged into a bottomless and immutable “post-cyclonic hypersomnia.”

  Let’s watch the two healers from behind, strolling along a promenade bordered by royal palms up to the doorway, where the doctor greets them with only a simple embrace then points the way with a gesture of therapeutic impotence.

  But, before we go on, who are these providential practitioners? To us, they appear as if in yellowed photographs or old faded postcards, surrounded by their appurtenances, their favorite gadgets, like peasants at a fair with the wooden cigarettes, desiccated cockatoos, sailors’ caps, or tin rings, all provided by the photographer and yet true to the subject’s identity.

  First Gator, the herbalist, who collects the most paraphernalia.

  Gator is wearing what looks like a dark blue suit with white pinstripes, round wire-rim glasses, and a silk tie decorated with tiny four-leaf clovers. His shoes are made of his own skin.

  More worthy of mention is the place where he makes his appearance: in an orthopedic chair. Not that he is crippled, not at all; though he is lean and olive-skinned, long and bony, all obtuse angles and kinks, there is nothing unhealthy about him. His sallow disjointed face and that habit of sliding his index finger from his upper lip to his cheekbone are just his normal peculiarities. This phyto-practitioner, or herbalist to be more precise, has conserved (no one really knows why) all the therapeutic artifacts of bygone days when, rather than obey nature in its tortuous designs, he set his mind to using the most polished and austere of mechanical devices to oblige it to follow his own.

  His house – floral lamps, arabesque banisters, opaline stained glass in that mother-of-pearlish vegetal style, all curves, which exaggeratedly typified art nouveau in the colonies – is brimming with dried plants in tiny envelopes of all colors, and crammed with the jumbled remains of all that clinical hardware, whose lines, authoritarian in their rectitude, interrupt the slow impinging curl of the crystal volutes.

  Carpeting the bathroom are the most ludicrous of tiles made of bright ceramic, each containing dried eucalyptus leaves, bitter melon, nettles, or star apples in their two colors. The sink overflows with a greenish infusion made of cashew seeds, which keeps away wrinkles and gray hair. Two swan beaks are draining in the bidet.

  This veggie-doc eats at a table with a well for a charcoal fire, covered by a dragonfly-and-lily patterned cloth, in the center of which sits an opaque, oval-shaped Galle vase filled with iridescent l
ilies. In a crosshatched physiotherapy mirror he spies on his own moves, as if they were those of a twisted competitor in a feverish game of crepuscular solitaire. He lays out the cards on a dissecting table.

  Gator, as the assiduous reader would have noted by now, lives alone, but it is as if he were married to himself. He is a dreamer given to meditative mulling, for whom daily plant collecting, undertaken with the strabismic gaze of someone tracking the meandering flight of a butterfly with damp wings, is a search for primogenital purity or the unpredictable diversity of the planet.

  Early in the morning, in an ablutionary reversal of his rural peregrinations, he masturbates, flipping through a French magazine filled with naked bodies and brief captions.

  Then the dissident medic examines himself in the crosshatched mirror and organizes his thoughts about the day’s practice, about using a burning mustard plaster to pull the malady out by the root. And with daily devotion, almost fear, he revisits the album of “Sicilian photos” by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, his secret mentor, his role model.

  Today’s exertions have exhausted him. He opts for a brew of guasima bark, which he sips through a cinnamon straw. Once again he contemplates his unclothed image in the mirror as he wished never to have seen it. He touches the back of his hand to his incipient, rather white beard. With his index finger, he caresses his upper lip and then out along his cheekbone, tracing as if there were a straight line marked on his skin. He decides, at least for today, not to shave. At this juncture he no longer cares if they laugh at him, point at him in the street, and shout, “Gator’s got a beard!”

  Among the baron’s yellowing photographs he selects one for unhurried contemplation that is particularly lascivious: two Sicilian lads, Hellenized with laurels and sandals, are about to touch breasts; between them, hieratic and naked, an adolescent girl in profile gazes at the heavens.

  Isidro is the one who teaches anatomy. He lives surrounded by diligent attendants. For strictly pedagogic reasons, and with the compulsion of a bulimic foreseeing scarcity, he collects cadavers, which he bargains for at the morgue when no one is looking.

  He is obese. When he returns from his lugubrious bazaar he stinks of formaldehyde and body odor. He shuffles about in battered flip-flops that the corner cobbler and his big mulatto make for him, not without plenty of teasing and a bit of remorse, deforming exquisite Italian shoes with hammer blows so that his swollen feet will fit and even find some consolation under that pile of blubber.

  So pervasive was the anti-dictatorial chaos in Upsalón U, so predictable the daily rallies, muggings, knifings, and gunfights, and so precarious and early-morning the formal medical schooling, that sawbones-in-training would come by the dozen to the mouse-infested grotto Isidro had built in his own home so that he could share, with those willing to pay, his Frenchified skills in the pestilent art of dissection.

  At sundown in the homespun lecture theater, wearing starched white lab coats and exhibiting the manners of unctuous bishops (“Medicine is a priesthood”), they received the anatomical rudiments that years later would earn them a license to heal.

  Armed with a pointer, a series of colored slides, and a memorized translation of Testut’s Anatomie, duly peppered with apothegms from Mesmerian electricism, the tub of lard projected diagrams of the alternating current that secretly joins the pylorus to the cardiac orifice, the voltaic arc that leads from auricles to ventricles, or the intermittent magnetism that simultaneously communicates and divides the two hemispheres of the brain. He had sketched these intensities on the transparencies as perfect discontinuous curves, like those made by iron filings between two magnets or under the rotation of a cone-shaped pendulum.

  In the kitchen beside the amphitheater – between the two rooms, a beaded curtain clicked and quivered from the obsessive pacing of a mangy dog – an oniony and in her own way anatomical woman from Galicia, hair in a double bun and frying pan in hand, slaughtered chickens, fried up shrimp in red sauce, and baked biscuits with butter for the frugal meal of the man in flip-flops.

  When he tired of the Galician’s coarse dishes, or on Sundays, which she spent on the outskirts of town on the other side of the bay visiting her Dositheus (she would take him a wicker basket with a bottle of papaya wine and two chicken livers with raisins), Isidro would wash up at El Floridita.

  “Let me have,” the adipose figure would grunt as he seated himself, panting from the marathon it was for him to get from the entrance to the table, “that drink that carries the nickname of Mary Queen of England and of Ireland who did not hesitate to martyrize Protestants or execute her rival for the throne, plus an archbishop and another three hundred people . . .”

  After his first salty sip, the gourmand would concentrate, not so much on the lobster in garlic sauce or the roast suckling pig with guava leaves swimming in cassava, as on the generously open décolletage of the young Zerlina of a waitress who, ever since his first visit, served him with wheedling chortles and pretended to understand his alcoholic riddles, which for her were boorish allusions to her bust and behind.

  At the base of her cleavage, between the two nascent pearly spheres, bulging with bluish reflections à la Rubens, he could spy the diminutive slender lace of her brassiere. When the waitress came by to serve him, the fat man tried to breathe deeply to catch the aroma of her breasts, which he presumed to be tawny and musky, but the insistent odor of the shrimp’s orange sauce blocked his way.

  Isidro’s purely electromagnetic conception of all phenomena had led him to practice radiesthesia: he was adept at the copper pendulum, which he swung over the unclothed bodies of patients, seeking the spot where it shifted or abruptly changed the direction of its rotation.

  The pendulum also swung over, who could say why, his deepest fantasies. The fourth bloody mary, which by then he called for without circumlocutions, and the ever more confounding proximity of the waitress, led him without fail to his dominical nirvana: he saw her before him serving his cocktail and at the same time lying naked in his empty amphitheater. Using the pendulum, he explored without touching her trembling body. When the rotations accelerated, he would place his right ear on her skin and listen to the blood rumble in her veins, and then he would continue roaming until he returned to the sound of her breathing, the whoosh of her lymphatic fluid, the creaking of her cartilage against the calcium in her bones: the entire infinitesimal swamp of life itself.

  Thus he was able, without the lamentable impediment of culinary effluences, to sniff every bit of her, to breathe her in slowly, to assess her skin with his sense of smell, even the most humid and hidden parts, the very walls of her sex; he could hear the dull roar of the hairs of her pubis under the lobe of his own ear. And all this without anyone knowing, not even she, exposed as she was, unknowingly, to radiesthetic inspection – thanks to a small menstrual retardation.

  Once he figured out who these prostration professionals were and why they had come, Firefly set to convincing himself of the gravity of his own illness. As a cover he devised a rigid catatonia and perfected it to such a degree that the doctors were faced with a wide-eyed wooden doll, gaze fixed on the zenith, a thread of transparent purple saliva drooling from his lips. Flies did not disturb him, nor did the handbell rung by the nun who dispensed the cane juice, which was so piercing and shrill it made even the moribund tremble.

  In examinations of the parents and sister, which the experts undertook straight off, the pendulum’s spin was sluggish, stumbling, knotted like the speech of a drunk. Such lethargy could be caused by anything, since magnetic disturbances often overwhelm sensitive bodies in the aftermath of a hurricane.

  More revealing was the radiesthesic map of the aunts, the three of them wrapped in the same hypnosis, as if huddled under the red sealing wax of a single blanket. Very useful, it must be admitted, was the light interrogation that accompanied the auscultation, with responses obtained via screams in the ear, shakings, and slaps across the face.

  They then turned to Firefly.

 
To the astonishment of the specialists, the copper cone spun normally up the length of that wooden body, but when it reached his heart the device jumped like a frightened rabbit: it stopped abruptly, remained still a few seconds, then began spinning crazily in the wrong direction. Clearly, the blood beat mightily and flowed in torrents through that pretend cadaver.

  Isidro and Gator looked at each other, both suspecting the same thing. The herbalist turned and faced the garden, apparently intrigued by the plants; in reality he wanted to meditate on this enigma, which he intended to solve on the spot.

  Then he swiveled back toward the bed of the petrified boy. Once more he scrutinized the stiff. “Precocious catalepsy,” the experts declared in unison, though, smelling something fishy, they remained unconvinced.

  Once the verdict had been pronounced, Isidro and Gator sat down on either side of the cot. The chubby one pulled the pendulum from the right-hand pocket of his trousers and suspended it in the air, observing it calmly, as if he wished to confirm the impeccable operation of the laws of gravity.

  In his mind, Gator went over the various tonics or revivifying potions, all based on a French wine, Château des Mille Tremblements, mixed with rum and raw sugar, which he could insist the young patient, despite his inert, practically wooden state, drink through a cinnamon straw.

  Isidro, while studying the pendulum’s easy swing, peered at the melon-head with the astuteness of a caged bird, careful not to let him know he was being watched. Gator meanwhile was fascinated, or pretended to be, by the minuscule purple flowers that grew between the bricks, a practically extinct species that sprouted there alone due to the aseptic nature of the place. In reality, he was eyeing cataleptic Firefly from askance to see if he was breathing or not.