On one façade, above a trim of broken tiles and alongside a stucco niche containing a hairless and bloodied Christ with slanty eyes – a relic of Macao – a few tarnished gold letters remained.
Clothes floated on lines; flapping in the hot wind that presaged a storm were mended handkerchiefs, yellowing lace bedcovers, silver dresses, dazzling rags fit for welcoming an orisha’s descent or for leading a sumptuous procession.
From afar came the sounds of raucous jingle bells, off-key horns, and damp maracas from some fiesta; a strong aroma wafted in: grated coconut with butterscotch.
Downstairs, Firefly thought he heard something like the stumbling of a drunk. Then the big bolt opening. And the slamming of the door.
The wind blew hard. The rain had begun.
He understood then that he was expecting someone, but was convinced that no one was going to come.
* So, the prediction returns.
FIREFLY OUT COLD
He decided to escape. That morning he took a long look at himself in the mirror, deep into his own eyes. He ran his index finger along the fuzzy shadow above his lips. By now, his bamboo-flute tones were breaking into sudden bass notes that belonged to a voice nothing like his own: that of the someone else he would later become, but who was already keeping watch over him like a resourceful double from the vantage of his future, where all things appear ideal, incorruptible, until the present devours them.
He could make no sense of the reality around him. Such murkiness was lethal. The intrigue of the inexplicable visits, but one example of the pervasive darkness, threatened him like a daily warning blown his way by the Toothless One.
Suddenly one afternoon, like just before an earthquake, everything fell silent. The sky turned into a gray metal plate, insufferably heavy, that seemed to keep watch, mirrorlike.
The goldfish, as if struck by an electric current, jumped in unison out of the pond and did full somersaults on the cement floor up to the foot of the ceiba tree. As fast as he could, Firefly collected them and tossed them, still covered in dirt, back into the water. Though slowly, some of them began to swim again, seeming half asleep; others floated belly-up, shaken by brief spasms. Firefly scolded them, threatening famine, nets, feral cats, and he pushed them about with his cupped hands.
It was useless.
They lay at the edge, motionless except for a slight bobbing on the puny green-specked waves, lockjawed.
Firefly picked them up again, this time frantically. He dropped them into the deep holes where the lizards nest, down among the big strong roots of the ceiba.
The iron knocker on the main door rang out.
Munificence was waiting in the first-floor pantry with a tray of meringues, still warm, that she herself had painstakingly whipped and baked all morning long and whose whitish and satiny-wet appearance made them look more like the spiral excrement of a brooding hen than the refined output of a swanky patisserie.
She left the tray on a small round table and went to open the door.
It was two witches.
Each was enveloped in wrinkled, austere, uniform black, to which they had added black-and-white checkered headscarves whose ends draped like flexible chessboards around their necks and down their backs.
Crowning this cloak of armor was the unequivocal emblem of iniquity: mirrored sunglasses, which in place of the observing gaze return the intrigued spectator’s own questioning image, miniaturized to reflect the true dimensions of his self-importance, just to bring him down a peg.
The two mourners, however, were quite distinct: complementary inverse omens of danger. Or better yet: snakes, which though already sated, suck on each other, perhaps to replenish their poisons. The one who entered first was stout and striking; despite her somber attire, around her hips garlands of lusty fat stood out, and jutting from under her kerchief were three decreasing rows of plump double chins. The other, on the contrary, was a long tall drink of water, her headscarf held in place by an intricate onyx brooch in the shape of two leaves of holly, which clawed at the fabric like a crab. As for her shoes, it looked like a frightened lizard had wrapped itself around her feet.
They mounted the stairs at full tilt without tripping or taking in the mess on the first floor, as if they already knew the ins and outs of the place. Munificence led the way, plate of meringues in hand, making Versailles-esque gestures and flustered excuses about the perpetual disorder that reigns among men of the law.
But there was something else: the Venetian tower that had always crowned her head like an albino battlement held erect by hair spray . . . was gone.
Supposedly enthralled by the latest fashion, Munificence had turned up at the barbershop pleading for the utter annihilation of that extravagant edifice. That was her way, she clarified exhilarated, of celebrating.
The haircut came out, Firefly noted, patchy, jagged, and bristly. Something did remain of those golden strands. But now they stood on end atop a bluish cranium, close-cropped around the sides. A veritable buzz cut, poor woman.
So the three of them went on up, in single file, heads down and in a hurry, united it seemed by the same resolve or at least wrapped in the same silence.
They entered one of the notaries’ cubicles as if something inside were urging them on. The two desks were covered with unstable pyramids of dusty papers that seemed to have lain there for an eternity.
“Sit down a moment,” Munificence begged, and after a pause, “Knowing all too well that alcohol does not go with such matters, I’ve prepared some ice-cold lemonade. I’m going to the charity house to get it. But let me make it clear from the outset that I have not really explained to her what this is about, though being such a bright girl for her age she knows that to be a woman you have to suffer through many things like this. Even worse.”
In a little while her footsteps could be heard returning. She carried a silver tray bearing a full pitcher with tinkling ice cubes surrounded by little gold-filigreed glasses. Ada walked before her, dressed all in white. Her socks came up to her knees and her shining red hair, plaited into a French braid, was held in place at the nape of her neck by two ivory pins.
When they entered the office they left an aroma of bitter lime, hair spray, and camphor in the stale air of the corridor.
“Ada,” the stout one sprung on her once she had her face-to-face, “you are the oldest of the group. Your breasts are already showing.”
And she brushed her graceful, pallid right hand against them like an emeritus emcee, deadpan.
“What we are going to do to you,” skin-and-bones chimed in, her tinny voice interrupted by a nervous hiccup, “might nowadays seem abusive . . .” She took in air. Her bronchial tubes whistled like moist bellows.
“But once you are a full-grown woman,” clarified her expansive accessory, “you will thank us with all your heart.” She let out a sigh. “Come sit on this stool,” she added sweetly.
“Here it is,” was all Munificence managed to articulate. She drew from between her breasts an angular vial like a polyhedronic crystal of rainbow quartz that fit nicely the curve of her palm.
Ada began to sob. From a wide square pocket in the starched apron tied around her, like a kangaroo’s pouch, she pulled an immaculate lace handkerchief, which she handed immediately to Munificence.
The newly shorn woman moistened it carefully by turning over the vial, which she held tight in the hollow of her left hand. An aroma of pounded leaves inundated the cubicle. The transparent and viscous concoction, with a slight green tint like snake’s saliva or the sweat of a diseased orchid, left sticky stains on the fabric.
The gaunt one undid the brooch holding her headscarf, drew a shiny black thread, like the kind used for sutures, from between her breasts, and with it threaded the needle that, in place of a simple pin, had held the clasp in place.
“After this, I’m absolutely certain,” murmured her heavy and haggard partner, “if for your fifteenth birthday you get the urge to put on – and she yanked the brooch from the skel
etal hand, squinted her myopic turquoise eyes, and without further preamble drove the needle into the lobe of the redhead’s right ear – the finest hoop earrings, you’ll be able to do it,” she concluded.
Ada’s scream was an animal’s pierced by an arrow tipped with curare, an unbearable howl.
She tried to break free while the obese woman knotted the black thread in her earlobe. Munificence pinned her arms, immobilizing her in the chair; the skinny one’s wiry olive-skinned hands covered her mouth to stifle her shrieks.
“Think of the earrings, the earrings,” the perforator repeated, her mouth very close by the left ear she was about to stick with the needle. Ada struggled in the claws of her executioners, a trapped prey.
Along with her tears fell minuscule drops of blood on the greenish leather desktop, on the empty silver tray, and on the piles of thick file folders softened by the heat and the humidity.
Munificence staunched the wound with the lace handkerchief, now a blood-soaked rag on which she kept smearing goop from the bottle.
They noted – winking at one another, if discreetly, fearfully – that the victim was growing pale; she rested her drooping head on the back of the easy chair; her eyes kept closing. A purplish stain like a sick jellyfish spread across her eyelids. She was sweating. Her lips were white.
“Hang on,” Munificence ordered the busy perpetrators. She watched Ada uneasily and with pity, perhaps even an unexpected love. “Let’s wait until she recovers before we continue. A bit of lemonade, with lots of sugar.”
But she would not drink.
Then they rubbed her face with a slice of lime. Munificence began to speak to her quietly, to awaken her: “Ada, Ada, the worst is over. We’ll do the rest another day. Think of the earrings.”
The scarecrow restrung the clasp’s needle to achieve some symmetry.
Fatso slipped pieces of ice between the girl’s lips.
The afternoon heat had become suffocating and dense. A salty breeze wafted in. A bolt of lightning streaked the sky.
Ada opened her eyes.
They were about to carry on when suddenly they heard something bulky collapse on the first floor like a landslide. Then silence.
Munificence went slowly, noiselessly to the door. She yanked it open and went out fuming.
Down the stairs she went, stamping furiously on each step. When she reached the lower floor she could contain herself no longer. “As if I hadn’t had enough!” she shrieked. “As if I hadn’t had enough! Now Firefly’s out cold!”
“Lethargy cubensis,” diagnosed the intern, excessively learned like all apprentices, “a typical case.”
He glanced out of the corner of his eye at the spot where his idle supervisor stood beside a Victrola, listening attentively to a scratchy record and swinging a stethoscope in his hand.
Firefly lay on a low cot between two cabinets of surgical instruments, duly burnished and classified, displayed on glass shelves. The sharp edges of the aluminum bistouries and pincers sparkled in the stale and morbid air of that municipal clinic located next door to the charity house, a refuge of the penniless and the thunderstruck, where lowly students aided renowned physicians in the most trivial or unpleasant sanitary tasks.
When anyone ran down the hall or strode by like a boxer or a boss, the instruments of incision vibrated with a tiny tinkling.
Anatomy charts and silent-film posters covered the walls. Besides the nasal sound of the record player, there was rumbling from a water pump, chirping from a few birds, and, closer by, the groans of a patient.
Munificence, seated on a wire stool and reading an old copy of Hola, awaited the intern’s verdict.
Firefly swiveled his right hand back and forth, signaling from his cot, “I’m not great.”
“We’re going to do a blood test,” the assistant clarified, addressing Munificence. He overarticulated the words, the way one shouts to someone far away or speaks to the deaf.
Firefly felt like he was naked and alone in a marble room, covered with an ice-cold sheet. From head to foot.
The intern opened up the cabinet and pulled out a syringe and a tourniquet. He raised the syringe in the air and held it to the light, slowly pushing and pulling the plunger to see if it was working. He went over to Firefly, who watched him, sweaty and frozen.
He wore a white cap secured at the forehead with an elastic band, and a doctor’s coat, open and starched. Below that, a shirt and a silk tie with painted dragonflies and big golden blooms held in place by a clip. Baggy pants, tied at the waist and ankles with white cords.
“Make a fist, real tight.” He tied the tourniquet around Firefly’s upper arm. “Think of something else.”
Firefly heard a loud buzzing in his ears.
Then the voice of his sister. But he could not tell what she was saying.
Nor what happened after that.
POEM FROM PLAZA DEL VAPOR
He spent his final charity-house days absorbed in his pious part as the gofer, the errand boy on permanent probation, the flunky bargaining for brownie points for an improbable posterity. He gave up his nocturnal snooping, slept naked and forsaken, his feet propped up on the varnished mahogany volute of the recamier, which could no longer contain both him and the disarray of disheveled dockets. Now he dreamed and it was always the same: He was saying goodbye to his mother in a place divided by walls made of thick fractured glass; he reproached her for allowing him to leave (as if something that happened much later were occurring at that very moment), for not insisting he stay on at home. He felt the warm maternal skin of her arms and face so singularly close that he was convinced they were real. When they were about to part, he would wake up in tears.
One day his feet nudged a few of the documents as he awoke, and he realized he could read the lawyers’ letterheads and even their signatures. No one had taught him. Unless you could call it teaching when the big-shot lawyers, laughing and tugging on his earlobe, would point at a letterhead and shout out syllable by syllable the surname printed there. The day he first arrived on the arm of the black Santeria priestess, Munificence showed him Christ on an alphabet card all dog-eared and yellowed.
“The rest is too hard for you,” she said and, as if she wanted to make sure no one could reach it, she stuck the abecedary between the leaves of the acanthus molding on a false column, a fleetingly popular stucco ornamentation in what once had been the impeccable front room of the lower floor. “I’ll teach you,” she added peevishly, “one letter a day.”
But he never got any follow-up ABC’s, nor did he manage to decipher the intricate ink symbols on his own after he managed, high on a folding stepladder, to steal the dusty rolled-up card from amid the Corinthian foliage.
With the same security – that irretrievable feeling which emanates from innocence and which all knowledge corrupts – with which he had once pronounced “decimeter, centimeter” perfectly without knowing its meaning, like a spell against fear, he now took hold of a quill pen lying on the desk next to the recamier. He moistened the moldy tip in the depths of an inkpot; all that remained was a thick, dirty, black paste, like sediment from medicine or extract from poison. On a vellum paper envelope he sketched several laconic and authoritative squiggles without a clue as to their meaning: something, no doubt, that he had better remember.
He spent that day imagining inscriptions, which he visualized distinctly in his mind’s eye on a red background, embellished with arabesques and gold filigree.
From the drawer of a mortgage broker he stole a notebook with big cottony pages, wide margins, and horizontal turquoise lines; from the satchel where a tax official hid his clutter, he snitched a pencil. He slipped them both carefully into the front pocket of his trousers. He felt the binding of the notebook rubbing against his sex, the iridescent seam like a soft piece of mother-of-pearl caressing him throughout the day, while he, docile lackey, hurried down the long corridors of the office building.
Afternoon again came to an end in Plaza del Vapor. They had not ye
t closed the slaughterhouses, the rag dealers, the cinnamon shops. Glowing inside the darkened stores, as if touched by the last rays of sunset, were the silver threads of Indian fabric, the purple of dyes, the misshapen spice jars that still conserved their fleur-de-lis insignia, old colonial coats of arms, lacquered seals from provincial apothecaries, or the still-legible emblem of the Compañía de Indias. Moneylenders packed away their etched-glass lamps and their strongboxes inlayed with sandalwood, ebony, and jacaranda; a hand with rings over black-gloved fingers unpinned from the edge of a shelf a square of black velvet displaying large irregular coins whose royal profiles were cracked, and another featuring little cellophane envelopes overflowing with vibrantly colored triangular stamps from countries that had disappeared or never existed.
A squalid apprentice dressed in white, stinking of soy sauce and shellac (his limp and shiny black hair hung down his back) unhooked from an oxblood-red wall a sign that announced in impulsive angry letters, like ideograms, a brief, amenable Cantonese menu. At least that is what Firefly managed, more than read, to guess. Or make up.
He took an alley that dropped sharply to the docks, as did the storm sewer that ran down its center, where the Indian women, before heading off to the tenements where they crowded in for the night, washed up their offspring, watered the tree rodents they kept in cages, and spread on the cobblestones the rags they had pounded with their fists and then wrapped, still moist, in the filthy rucksacks they carried on their backs.
The fork to the right was less inviting: ruins of those big neoclassical homes with Corinthian columns, frontispieces, and fleur-de-lis heraldry that sugar magnates coveted back in the early republican era, today the domain of fiery red brambles, lizard colonies, single-minded mice, and two tramps. Beggars were simultaneously reproach and entertainment in the city’s older neighborhoods, which accepted them as eccentric residues of the twisted fauna engendered by the Machado dictatorship, when a person’s daily ration was a “blond with green eyes” – a plate of rough flour with two slices of avocado.
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