Ada and Munificence sat down across from each other, the tutor in a higher chair, where she looked to be in charge.
Firefly, liberated by the departure of the visitors, ran to the offices. He panted up the staircase. He knocked on the office door. No answer. Cautiously, slowly, he pushed it open. He peeked inside.
“Have the men gone?” he asked, flushed, bathed in a sudden sweat.
“The men?” Munificence asked back, surprised. “What men? No man has come here. Besides,” and she slayed him with a reproachful look, “you’re drunk. Utterly, completely drunk.”
And she shook him by the shoulders to bring him back to his senses.
He does not know what happened next. Nor where he spent the night. He awoke back in the yard. His hair was wet. To sober him up, someone had dunked his head in the fishpond. He guessed the time by the height of the sun and the noise of typewriters in the offices: twelve noon.
The owl took off from the top of the ceiba tree and rose vertically, wings spread, white symmetry in the whitened midday sky, and after several ever-expanding circles took refuge in its daytime hideout, the bell tower of the cathedral.
Amid damp green-and-yellow pyramids of freshly woven baskets, the Gypsies were cooking their lunch of dense phyllo pastries stuffed with olives.
Had he dreamed it all, like the white wooden house by the sea, like the phosphorescence of the lightning bugs above the sand? Was it simply delirium, a trumped-up story both gratuitous and meticulous, contrived by drink? Or were they fooling him again, making fun of him, callously playing with his frailty? But why?
He decided to search on the sly for some clue, some trace, convinced that if the visitors had been real they must have left a mark. Likely more than one, since the assault he half saw had seemed so real.
He perceived – but it was immaterial, indemonstrable – the dark emanation of the events like the tenuous impalpable shadow that remains in a room after a crime and which no one can point to but some people find unbearable.
Quietly he climbed the stairs to the office illuminated the night before. He was welcomed, as usual, by a fat-cheeked lawyer wearing blue-tinted bifocals and a gold watch chain, holding his head in his hands, either the victim of a migraine or lost in the twists and turns of some extortion.
“A café con leche really hot and a ham-and-cheese sandwich,” the man yelled at once. And he angrily pounded a yellowed document with a sealing-wax stamp, as if he meant to punch a hole right through it.
Firefly did not obey the order; on the contrary, he advanced a few steps toward the center of the office, observing everything, scrutinizing each object, searching for a sheaf of papers out of place, a fold in the rug, a sliver of glass. There was nothing.
“Why aren’t you on your way?” the lawyer scolded. “Are you in limbo or what the hell’s wrong with you?” Then suddenly changing his tone, he chuckled. “Ah, I forgot. My mind’s somewhere else.”
He held out a one-peso note.
Firefly left the office. His eyes scoured the floor. He heard them summoning him with a bell and with shouts from the other offices. But he paid no heed; he did not even go for the litigator’s order.
He was looking for a sign. More: for proof of his sanity.
Repeatedly, he went up and down the stairs. He combed the mezzanine. He returned, under the pretext that they had no change, to the scene where it all supposedly occurred. Nothing. And yet . . .
Disheartened and exhausted, he was about to give up the search and accept it was just alcohol playing tricks or mind-games spun by his imagination. He was ready to sink to the floor in tears, ready to head back to the yellow cupboard, when amid the chaos of the threadbare furniture on the first floor, on the leather of an easy chair people had to brush past to get to the door, he found, still fresh, no older than a night, a trickle of blood.
Now everything seemed linked, definitive: overlapping causes connected to consequences by indestructible bonds, like animals devouring and regurgitating one another from now until the ultimate extinction. Everything was crystal clear. Yet by late afternoon doubts accosted again him. Maybe it had been he himself, drunk, who had been wounded? Maybe the blood was old? With the same minute care with which he had scrutinized the office, he inspected his body in the mirror, millimeter by millimeter, an archaeologist of his own skin.
Nothing.
The following day he took to drink once more.
And the day after that.
At first he fixed the yellow cupboard so Munificence would not notice the break-in, and he doctored the crème, reducing its alchemy with equal measures of harsh rum and condensed milk, but found it insipid and repugnant and stopped straightaway. Then, with his morning coffee he would search the pantry for bottles of beer he could hide among the dockets and then sip bit by bit in furtive paper cups between his hurried and irritating errands.
At six in the afternoon, when the notaries abandoned their cubicles, he would leisurely take the last warm sips and begin to ruminate on Ada and the interloping quacks. Paper cup in hand, he would go down into the yard and stand next to the fishpond by the gate that led to the basket workshop. He would watch the Gypsies weave in silence, eat standing up, and on Sundays and after baptisms (they were believers and prolific) sing and dance, lifting their colorful ruffled skirts, clapping their hands, and stamping their heels. He watched them through the wrought iron, their arms raised very high to sketch arabesques, their bodies stretching and twisting as if they yearned to catch fire. Everything they did seemed to be one big party, cante jondo, heralds of Ada, rum, deep cool breaths that reached the bottom of his lungs, imminence of definitive departure, the red and gold of the waving skirts, the white of the baggy sleeves, the silver of the Moorish bracelets. And the gravelly voice, the voice of rum, and the arms reaching up so the hands could scribble on the sky.
Everything was a party. Yet in those inaccessible songs, in the scratchy voices worn by alcohol and the waning light of afternoon, he thought he heard something from his childhood, from the time when people nailed the doors shut to keep out the screams of the spirits: the innocent children, throats slit by the Inquisition, back with their interminable wailing, their voices rent but recognizable. For the voice is the only thing that remains intact after death.
HAVEN’T YOU EVER SEEN A BAT SMOKE?
Firefly tried to forget that inopportune visit or chalk it up to his imagination or to drink. Now he could enter and leave his office hideaway whenever he wished: He had his own key and was in charge of the door bolts. His voice was still high-pitched like a bamboo flute, but rubbing his sex against the silk of the recamier now shook him from tip to toe and did not end dry like before. Upon rising, he would pull a page from one of the files, crumple it in his hand, and wipe up the white stain.
Of the outside world, he was now familiar with Plaza del Vapor, the rooming houses painted indigo, mustard, and green under the royal poincianas with their tentacle roots. He knew a bird shop where an old man in thick glasses trained canaries and the window of a crippled woman who painted piggy banks. He could also distinguish the aromas of a Chinese restaurant, of the talcum women wore, and of fresh-cut wood from a sawmill, which was his favorite – it was like sharpening a pencil. He knew where they sold oysters in little cups, where there was a blue lamp, always lit, shining on women who never sat down.
He spoke with no one, never set foot in a store, never stayed out after sundown, not even on Sunday. He had only one set of clothes, which he washed at night. If he had a beer, he drank it alone.
One Sunday he returned from the harbor. He had seen an Italian ship festooned with bunting for a party on board. Women in tight-fitting white silk gowns and peacock-feathered hats had been tossing paper streamers in the air and flinging empty champagne bottles off the stern. Bursts of laughter reached all the way to the park, where Sunday strollers reveled in the celebration.
He opened the big door, passed the threadbare furniture, shoved aside a stool with his foot, took
the stairs to the mezzanine and on up to the second floor. His mind was not on his whereabouts, rather on the words he had heard from the ship. A woman dressed to the nines had leaned over the first-class rail and, between giggles, yelled, “I’m not expecting anyone, but I’m convinced someone is going to come!”
He was about to enter the moth heaven that was his room, when he saw pressed against an office door, standing stock-still, a figure he could not make out in the darkness of the hallway. Someone was peeking through a keyhole or glued to the wood listening, apparently not even breathing, eavesdropping on what was occurring inside.
He approached silently. No doubt about it. It was she, Ada, so fascinated by what she was hearing that she did not even notice his presence, his nearness. When he reached her the redhead gave a start and covered her mouth. Having stifled her cry, she put a finger to her lips, opening wide those purple eyes in which Firefly thought he could see himself acknowledged, perhaps reflected, as in a minuscule and convex ship’s mirror.
“Who is it?” the melon-head asked straight off in a whisper, as if the snooping had rekindled a long-standing complicity of which this chance meeting was but an astute step, minutely plotted.
She moved close, her lips to his ear. Her mothball-and-violets perfume, the rhythm of her breathing, the warmth of her breath against the lobe of his ear all shook him with the same intensity as the fear or desire that made him tremble when he rubbed himself against the silk or the words he had overheard coming from the ship.
“It’s them,” the redhead murmured, as if their identities went without saying. “Them again.”
Firefly’s right hand went to his throat, his breath caught short.
“The same ones? Are you sure?”
“Yup. Greaseball and Boots from his own skin.”
“The healers . . . Isidro and Gator, those are their names . . .”
“Them . . .”
“So . . . how come?”
Ada touched one of her index fingers to the other in a rapid indication of a bridge, a contact, an electrical charge, something going on between the peroxide giraffe and the odious men.
Inside, the conversation stopped.
Firefly was about to say, “Let’s get out of here,” when the door flew open.
The spied-upon trio came into view. They were rigid, flushed with contained rage. In the middle reigned Munificence, her Venetian tower in full erection, an emblem of unwavering determination. On either side, like two merciless Cerberuses awaiting the order to kill, were Fatso (his alcoholism evident in the pendular oscillation of his gelatinous body and in the incandescence of his beady eyes, now tinged orange like a vulture’s behind those heavy lenses) and bearded Gator, who brandished a decoction like an avenging dagger in his raised right hand, his face frozen in an infanticidal smirk.
From these offended souls emanated a reproving, practically mucilaginous silence that stuck to the skin, that befouled, and that – Firefly felt it immediately – also enveloped the redhead, trapping the two of them in a single net of disgust.
It was Munificence who spoke up, without raising her voice, her teeth clenched tight enough to squeak.
“I knew it,” she spit out each syllable, the words like hissing blow-darts sent to punch holes in them. A moment of silence, then, “What a disgrace my life is! What a disgrace!”
She leapt upon the defenseless redhead as if on a bloodied prey, seizing her in the blink of an eye by both shoulders. Quickly she covered her mouth and hauled her the length of the hall and down the stairs.
Firefly thought he heard Ada’s sobs, then realized he was alone with the two henchmen. What surprised him most, however, was not the suddenness of his abandonment but the inexplicable reaction of the visitors: They looked at each other, as astounded as the melon-head himself . . . and they burst out laughing!
“So, now we’re grown up, little man!” Gator fired at him derisively while opening the door wide and stepping aside, extending his hand toward the interior of the office in a gesture of invitation.
“Come in, young gentleman, come in,” Isidro added in the same tone. “As you can see, there is still plenty left for a surprise guest.”
On the desk, with no more utensils than two baccarat goblets, a kitchen knife, a stack of paper plates and another of paper napkins, they had laid out a veritable cold banquet. The chicken salad had stained the green leather that covered the desktop. Plunged into a meatball minus a bite was a little red plastic fork.
“Now you’ve got the keys just like the man of the house . . .”
Firefly wondered how and from whom Gator had learned that detail.
“At the least,” the reptile continued, “you, sir, ought to smoke a good cigar, don’t you think?”
“And sure enough,” Isidro took up the lead voice, “here’s one of the finest Romeo y Julietas.”
He broke into a sebaceous giggle.
Gator struck a match and lit the Havana himself, inhaling hard.
“Suck in that smoke!” he ordered. “You’ve got too much on your mind.”
A snigger.
Firefly was standing next to the desk. He tried with all his strength to say, “I don’t want to.” But not a word emerged.
He had no idea why he looked at his feet. They were firmly on the ground, the laces well tied. He thought he heard the tinkling of the cut glass hanging from the dusty old lamp, as happened whenever there was a lot of wind or when disoriented birds, fleeing the fumigated warehouses of the port, found their way inside.
Unaware how much time had passed, he heard in a dream or echoing over a loudspeaker the inquisitor’s stentorian voice: “Here is your cigar.”
Firefly shook his head.
Then the man with scaly skin and bloodshot eyes, loosening his tie and his fly at the same time, as if an urgent need had overcome him, swayed into the office next door and disappeared.
He returned wielding another cigar, this one twisted and greenish. Closing his zipper, he came toward Firefly, his gaze fixed on something nonexistent but vile, like a liquor stain or a yellow smear.
The poor melon-head watched him approach and hid his sweaty hands in his pockets. His knees were trembling and he understood at once that he would not be able to move or speak.
“If you don’t want that one,” Gator ordered, putting the Par-tagás Culebra in his own mouth, “then smoke one of these. They’re so mild even women like them . . .”
Firefly grabbed hold of the Havana with his two small moist hands; the silky texture and the warmth of the leaves surprised him. He was about to bring the cigar to his lips when the first ash burned his fingers. He blew on them, his eyes full of tears.
“I don’t know how to smoke or how to whistle,” he heard himself say. “No one ever taught me.”
“Look,” the scaly one replied, shaking with laughter, “nothing’s easier.” And he rubbed his hands together like a mason about to build a wall. “Haven’t you ever seen a bat smoke?” *
He surged forward, and using thumb and forefinger like a pincer he held the boy’s nose. Then he stuffed the cigar in his mouth. The little firefly began to choke.
Isidro was breaking up the bread crumbs left on the tablecloth and devouring them compulsively. He tried to make the doughy ones into figurines, but they all came out grotesque, like ugly big-nosed priests.
The poor buzzing insect managed to breathe in the smoke and cough it out. He clenched his belly, bent toward the floor, tried to throw up. But he could not. His red-rimmed eyes spun out of their orbits.
“Again, dammit!” was the executioner’s only response. “Again! Let’s see if you can learn!”
Firefly sucked in air. He thought about his sister. He looked around for help.
That was when Isidro, without a word, and with that instantaneous energy only hatred can produce (had it germinated slowly between them like a miasma, an emanation of deep-seated rivalry or reciprocal envy?), knocked Gator aside with a sharp slap to the face.
The
reptile teetered. He grabbed onto a chair. He straightened as if preparing to return the affront. Indignation made his eyes glassy. He looked at the kitchen knife. His right hand trembled for a moment . . . Then he turned toward the door, stepped determinedly through it, and slammed it shut behind him.
Without a glance at Firefly, without any gesture of reproval or satisfaction, and in no hurry, Isidro followed him.
The melon-head was left alone in the cubicle. A sick silence again took hold of everything, an exasperating calm, like after a curse. Or the filth of sex.
Firefly then contemplated the city from another window.
The sky was leprous. Humidity and heat, like acid, had corroded the soaring façades piled upon one another; purple peelings, like scabs or oozing cankers, curled from broken lintels, triangular porticos, and cracked volutes. On the sagging roofs nested seabirds, speckled lizards with spiny tails, raucous macaws, and mesmerized cats, indifferent to the hordes of rodents.
Making his way down the winding cobblestone alleys, amid the cries of washerwomen and the scurrying of pickpockets and children, was an emaciated blond teenager, long-haired, barefoot, and bearded, wearing a violet-and-gold cape and hauling a wooden cross. With his right hand he held up a sign: crude red letters announced the apocalypse and called on the pope to reveal the prophecies of Fatima.
Heading in the other direction, unperturbed by the prediction, was a stout black man, his muscled chest shining with sweat, as if swathed in dusky silk, under the weight of the casket on his back.
The geometries of windows, semicircular arches held by slight copper frames, stood out in the fractured walls above doorways splayed permanently open. Scarlet, lime-green, mustard, and amethyst windowpanes projected daubs of color onto the tiled floors of darkened rooms, deforming their polished checkerboards of floral motifs and sweeping still lifes.
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