Firefly

by Severo Sarduy

  After these apparently incandescent inquiries, the two focused directly on scrutinizing this child overcome by the excesses of Morpheus. They understood instantly, and quickly exchanged glances out of the corners of their eyes like two accomplice snakes before a defenseless partridge, that something was not spinning smoothly in this strange case of familial oneiromancy.

  The shining aunts were demanding they be “left in peace,” that they “needed some shut-eye,” believing they were washing clothes on the white stones of a large river during siesta hour, after a succulent codfish stew.

  But let’s go again to El Floridita, where the two maverick sawbones are now describing how they unmasked, thanks to a well-interpreted remark, the cataleptic’s crude pretending. “From that triple swing of the inquisitor pendulum,” the radiesthesist told the openmouthed waiters, including the operatic barmaid, indicating his guest the exemplary herbalist as witness, “had come inescapable truths.” He underlined the words syllable by syllable. By then they had spiked Isidro’s bloody potion three times over with angostura bitters and celery salt.

  The waitress listened wide-eyed and artlessly dribbled across the tablecloth the soy sauce that was to dress a special wheat-germ steak (for the restaurant staff unnatural and evidently emetic) that a skillful cook had prepared for Gator. Before wiping it up, she gave a quick pull on the silk strap that sustained her décolletage.

  “That’s right,” the herbalist continued, picking up the radiesthesist’s long monologue as if they had been rehearsing their entire lives for this dramatic performance: the meeting of minds of two specialists puffed up by what the Diario de la Marina was calling their illustrious contribution to solving “the atrocity of the century.” “That’s right. No longer could we presume that this was simply the morbid reflex that quicksilver, when corrupted by the hurricane’s magnetic disturbances, will project onto vulnerable bodies.”

  “No!” Isidro piled on, waving his right index finger in the air. “In a pause between ignoble snores, one of the Fates had assured them: Early in the morning, the family had carefully masked all the mirrors with black brocade.”

  On stretched a silence filled with suspense. He looked keenly at the slack-jawed waiters. Another sip. Meanwhile, Gator carried on, exalted by the fascination the duo evoked in the marinated listeners.

  “The nocturnal bite of certain bats, as was well known by the Ciboneys who at dawn would staunch the wounds with saffron flowers, leaves its victims groggy and exhausted. But in this case the insentient victims bore not the least sign of jugular perforation. What’s more, knowing that those sucking sneaks always lie in wait, the family had not neglected the home’s defenses, making ample prophylactic use of cloves of garlic.* Something, however, and this was our last resort, was affecting the lymphatic flow in each member of the family except the child, whose pendulum map was normal, though we did not have a clue as to what had caused the spell: the bite of a mosquito infected with a lethal virus, mass hypnosis . . . or a cataleptic potion.”

  “I was racking my brains,” Isidro, after insisting on Worcestershire sauce for the next drink, “when suddenly one of the three narcissistic nasties opened her eyes and asked Firefly for nothing less than another cup of linden-flower tea as delicious as the one he’d made for her at home . . . That was when, like a bolt of lightning, I felt a spark of truth fly between two oppositely charged poles: on the one hand, we had a ruse, yes, a catatonic ruse by the melon-head, who was the one with something to hide and who with that rictus of his rebuffed any possible interrogation; and on the other, we had the aunt’s soothing and unknowingly revelatory request . . . Another linden-flower tea! Evidently, the crafty barracuda had given his family a sleeping potion, a diabolical concoction that he himself had not drunk, but whose effects – the scoundrel – he pretended to suffer.”

  “You criminal!” Isidro sputtered through clenched teeth. He pointed mercilessly at Firefly and hurled the pendulum to the floor amid a scattering of terrified nuns.

  “You monster!” Gator echoed from the fountain, where his botanical ruminations had led him to the same conclusion at the very same time.

  From the hospice wing across the courtyard, cupping their hands to their mouths and parting the mosquito nettings to reveal faces waxen or enraged, the lepers immediately began to howl “To the stocks!” though they had no clue who was being accused, or of what.

  Have you seen the little kid in that Goya tapestry bobbing up and down on a tablecloth being shaken by four peasant women? Or those Chinese acrobats who bounce like beads on a taut string? Well, though it seems unbelievable, Firefly jumped just like that from the simple cot that sheltered him, no tablecloth, no taut string, as soon as he saw the outstretched, outsized arms of the radiesthesist and the herbalist coming at him like gyrating tentacles about to strangle him.

  “That leap settled it.” The obese one is now speaking without slides before a packed classroom. He waves the pendulum about like a pointer; nothing interrupts the sepulchral silence of the place but pencils and sighs; the devotees record with the former and concur with the latter the professor’s all-encompassing evidence. “And it proved beyond any doubt that the energy contained in a ‘catatonic simulation’ can, via that hysterical conversion noted by Charcot, be transformed into ‘agitation tremens.’ There have been cases,” he says, the mangy dog punctuating his sentences by rustling the beaded curtain, while a stink of potato soup wafts in from the kitchen, “of Teresian nuns, hardly acrobats, who went straight from ecstasis to compulsive flexion: drooling, their eyes glassy, they’d bend over backwards . . . until their heads touched their heels.”

  Let’s leave the culpable extra-large cranium hanging in the air for a moment before he completes his fall. A moment to analyze the situation, to unravel if possible the Gordian knot of this “familicidal” personality, as the Diario de la Marina put it in their apt headline, yet “vulnerable, even fragile, ever affectionate, at times exemplary.”

  Whoever is innocent, or believes himself to be, defends himself. Whoever retains some trace of purity, a surviving smidgen of his original decency, answers the accusations. But he who is wholly guilty, or who suspects as much, can do nothing but remain silent, hide his face, dodge insults, flee.

  The poor melon-head figures his error is indelible and he is lost for good; that is why he leaps the way he leaps. Reproof and self-disgust are what give rise to his bounding energy. Nothing else. It is the “urgent, urgent” need (he repeats the word to himself) to become somebody else that explains his sudden ability to jump.

  So much so that he can visualize his own body hanging there. And he feels it so sullied and blameworthy that it has become no more than a charcoal silhouette, a dirty rag, a useless black burden. Better to let himself fall, allow himself to plummet as if he were still astride that fecal cistern. Allow himself to slide toward his mother, run into her open arms, hear her voice next to his ear: “It’s all over now, it’s all over now.”

  He lands back on the cot as the accuser and his pal, who is brandishing a bunch of purple plants, followed by several breath less and blood-curdling nuns, close in on their prey. Purulent fingers point at him once again: “Make him pay for his crime! The devilish monster! He tried to poison his own family!”

  The hairless Chinaman bounces like a doll stuffed with sawdust. Weak. Utterly without strength. And the tiny bit that remains he draws on to run.

  He crossed the courtyard diagonally. The accusing shouts of the lepers fell on him like a rain of hot stones and ash through which he barely managed to move; a very familiar paralysis began to take hold of him, like tetanus rising up from his feet. Urging himself on, he tried to reach the tiled door but felt his legs refuse. Then he tried to scream. As in a dream, he opened his mouth, sent air rushing from his throat, from his chest, from his belly. He pushed hard. Nothing came out.

  It seemed to him undeniable that his body had become superfluous, a useless excess, morbid, better eliminated so the world could recover i
ts equilibrium, its original harmony. It was as if something or someone were urgently demanding his exclusion, his eradication in the pursuit of cleanliness and an ideal of order. He imagined the peevish gesture of an immaculate muscled hand, flicking from some untainted marble a disgusting insect, a larva, a crazy man’s spittle, something abject yet visible, a focal point attracting everyone’s gaze like a magnet: that which must be extirpated.

  From the lepers’ wing, clutching it as best she could with her two bleeding stumps, an old woman with a nose devoured by cankers tossed a basin at him, rubber enema hose and all, filled with sour wastewater that spattered him and provoked an irrepressible desire to throw up. Then another of the decayed women who had seen it all raced to her bed, bawling insults or mocking scorn in a mousy singsong, and quickly returned with a rotten mango, which she also threw at him.

  Fortunately, Firefly had by then crossed the threshold and was in the front yard of the hospice. At the last moment, he turned to look back at the ward that held the catatonics. He had the fleeting impression that his sister was waking up and glancing around uneasily, looking for him.

  Little by little, the city had begun to recover from the storm. Storekeepers, between sobs, totted up their losses.

  He was in the street. It was morning. From a nearby market came the calls of fishermen; pushcart wheels squealed on the paving stones. Harried planters crowded around a slaver. They tasted the sweat of the black women, bargained, then packed them into carts and carried them off to distant sugar mills to be deposited in malodorous barracks. Also reaching him in the little square, like stampedes of color, were beams from the rising sun reflected off the awnings that covered the kiosks: yellow canvases that returned the light or spread it across the limestone façades, on pyramids of mammee or pineapple. In the middle of one golden stall, the breeze undid little piles of purple and red powders for offerings.

  Surrounded by the throng, he felt the useless dross of his body, the sensation that he was dragging about a stain or a burden from which he could not free himself. Guilt surrounded him like an opaque aura; an invisible leprosy devoured his skin. He was hungry and thirsty. He wanted someone to play with. To see his sister. He recalled his father’s footsteps in the corridor of the house, the early clattering of his mother in the kitchen, the owl that from the garden ceiba tree awakened him each night, the far-off strumming of guitars, the misplaced steps of singing drunks. He yearned for a long deep sleep. He wanted to die and be born again, to return to the state that precedes birth and succeeds death. He wanted to de-exist. To become somebody else.

  He found himself lost among the vendors in the little square, amid a tumult of shoppers, passersby, fleeting nuns, cabin boys, leering quadroons, pickpockets, card sharks, knife-sharpeners, witch doctors, medical astrologists, herbalists, swindlers, and slaves. He knew not where to go or what to do. One thing he did know for sure: Never again would he have a home or a family, a place of origin or repose. Flight had cut off his roots, thrust him into an exile with no return. Although he had only just left them, his mother’s lap, his sister’s voice, a bed covered in gifts, and, upon rising, the smell of bread with salted oil and a mug of coffee, it all seemed very distant, like a fuzzy recollection, almost like a dream.

  He was weak, trembling, his skin mortuary pallor. He felt someone was about to grab him by the scruff of the neck like a cat and hoist him up into the void, then let him fall from on high and smash against the paving stones, just to watch the bits of his brain and blood bounce.

  He huddled against a marble fountain with four dolphins, whose cool jets he tried to reach. Beggars pleaded for crumbs and even doubloons from the calash drivers done up in frock coats and bowler hats; a Manila shawl slipped off the shoulders of a Creole lady and fell into a pile of horse manure.

  An elderly black woman passing by, dressed neatly in white linen with a silk turban, picked poor Firefly up. She was wearing necklaces, earrings, and bracelets made of tiny shells, also white, which, when she hoisted him higher to caress his head, rang in his ear like the rattles of his infancy, like the maternal murmur.

  “I cannot care for you, my son,” she whispered with regret while smoothing his hair with her hands, “because I already have many with what God has given me, and they are waiting at home. But I will take you to a very big and very pretty house with ceiling fans and a refrigerator and everything, where a white woman, kind and clean as only she can be, will give you a little glass of crème de vie.”

  * Thus works clairvoyance. The poor herbalist could not know that with these suspicions, even though later disproved, he was confirming Firefly’s prediction when he heard the dispatch from the observatory and interpreted it as announcing an invasion of bats. Not even the seer himself understands his words – and I say this from my own experience. No science is capable of ordering the abstruse language of vaticinations.

  LACK OF AIR

  “Milk,” answered Munificence. “Condensed milk. Two cups.”

  “What else?” Firefly asked, licking his lips.

  “Rum. Three tablespoons of rum. And two eggs, beaten. Just the yolks. You save the whites for meringue.”

  “It’ll make you strong.”

  “Now, to work. Before bed you’ll get a big bowl of soup with a slice of bread and a bit of bacon. Porridge in the morning. But we’ve got a lot to do. More?”

  “I can’t, my head’s spinning.”

  Munificence was sitting with her back against a white stone fireplace, a useless holdover from the turn-of-the-century colonial style that for no reason but overblown pretentiousness had filled the island’s stifling living rooms with cloying volutes and ornate window frames. Two large windows, always open, failed to cool the moth-eaten stacks of notaries’ folders stuck in transit to or from the offices on the upper floor; the shelves were all overflowing with pasteboard notebooks, each threaded by a red marker ribbon, offered up to spiderwebs and dust.

  During the end-of-year drought they called winter, they would close the book cabinets and fill the fireplace with mahogany logs or some sort of aromatic fresh-cut wood that never quite burned and would become a favorite haunt of rats fat as hutia tree rodents, bulimic beasts that went on from that woodpile to lay claim to everything devourable until the next dry season when the decorative mahogany logs would be replaced and the rodents would start in all over again.

  Munificence was enormously tall, a pole for knocking cats off the roof. Behind her back, the “girls” – as she called the innocents forgotten or confined by their parents in the big charity house adjoining the offices – called her “the flaming giraffe,” and to gratify her in public they never failed to compare her height to her generosity.

  The shoes she wore made her even taller, as did the taffeta suit with vertical white stripes and the faded gardenia pinned high up on her blond hair, which was always braided Venetian style, fashioned into a cylindrical roll and drenched in hair spray: No rebellious wisp could ever break free.

  The girls frolicked in spirals around Munificence, playing hand games, pinching each other, stifling sudden fears and giggles; they were big butterflies, sumptuous and mischievous, or red-headed squirrels shaking off the frost after an interminable hibernation.

  “Is this your house?” Firefly asked Munificence, handing back the mug.

  “No,” the tower replied, “I just come to these offices to keep an eye on things. A fire would be the end of it all, there’s so much paper. My house is in the back on the other side of the yard. It’s the charity home where I take care of these angels.”

  Little by little, in the days that followed, Firefly discovered the connections between these two places and the rules that governed each, though he was never sure he grasped their true meaning.

  The office building’s big three-bolt door and two large windows faced the street. The ground floor was just a cemetery for unfulfilled contracts, invalid legal papers, and files gnawed by the rats. A pointlessly vast staircase led to a diminutive mezzanine, then
on to the second floor, where the city’s shadiest notaries had set up shop. A moth-eaten recamier, used as a depository for old dockets in one of the offices, became Firefly’s nightly resting place.

  The purple shadow of a large ceiba tree cooled the office-building yard and spread over the course of the day from a goldfish pond, whose care was immediately given over to Firefly, to a pair of wrought-iron gates. Beyond one of them, in the distance, lay a basket workshop populated by tattered and raucous Gypsies who never paused in their wicker-weaving or their singing; the other gate led to the dormitory, a structure similar to the office building and just as dilapidated and decayed but lacking windows and its own exit to the street. There, Munificence’s pupils kept their bedrooms swept clean and had their sewing workshop, the handful of Singers so well-oiled they made practically no sound; during working hours one could hear the chapter being read out by the reader of the day.

  A seminarian with very fine whiskers dusted the minuscule gold-and-red chapel every Sunday.

  To reach the street on their way to school, the girls raced impetuously through the first floor of the offices, zigzagging around the furniture buried in paper: “A sip of vinegar,” Munificence told them about that bit, “which you’ll have to endure.”

  Not knowing exactly why, Firefly began spying on the pupils, though he could only devote himself to that solitary pleasure after six in the afternoon. Once he was old enough, the melon-head spent his days in frenetic, breathless races between the offices and the corner store, a Mozarabic tray in hand bearing stained and tottering little glasses of coffee with condensed milk, croissants, pastries dripping with clear syrup, mille-feuilles, sacred-heart cakes, Morón cookies, and candied guava, brilliantly red like garnet, crowned with little squares of fresh cheese.

  He also went for tobacco and stamps, Dutch quarto paper, envelopes, change, the afternoon papers; he cleaned the offices redolent with ink, picked up the trash, swept the shelves with an ostrich-feather duster, and using two legal documents even shined the shoes of the scriveners who would stop by their cubicles always in the morning and always in a hurry to consult certain records and tear up others, erase names and numbers or change them for what they had scribbled on little slips of paper, which they would simply paste over the old ones.