Firefly made his way deeper into the part of the city where land mixes with water.
Long covered boardwalks painted an intense violet-blue, like they had been rubbed with indigo, were slowly sinking into the swamp. The rambling houses on stilts, which looked to be perforated on all sides so as not to be so stifling, gave the impression they were floating, swaying slightly, hushed, always nocturnal, always alone. They were excessively large for the few who resigned themselves to a life plagued by mosquitoes on those sweltering and pestilent mudflats.
Only the gulls, always quick to ingest the refuse with which the fishing families polluted the waters, vied for the houses. They nested on the roofs and soon covered them with their excretions, forming veritable hummocks, irregular and grayish-brown, like bloated towers that at dusk turned the abodes into fossil outcrops or whimsical dunes or mosques dreamed up by demented architects.
Narrow semicircular canals, imperfectly laid out, formed a sloppy labyrinth through the neighborhood. The big houses were scattered according to the capricious law of mudslides or whatever potential opportunistic builders might have seen in preexisting rubble. Anemic laky waves, seemingly roused by some distant shudder, now and again agitated the dense waters and caused them to glisten like tarnished aluminum, ashen gray.
Firefly, frantically seeking the place where two canals meet, hurried down the rickety boardwalks that zigzagged from one sprawling house to the next, but the semicircles never converged. Having forgotten fatigue and hunger, he now ignored the cool downpour that began to pelt the mudflats. He thought about the yard with the chamber pot, shaded by the red flowers of the royal poinciana, so cozy and warm, and then, as if everything were bubbling up in his memory, he recalled the hospice courtyard and the spray of water from its fountain. The stocks did not come to mind.
He continued trudging along the boardwalks suspended over the muck, cobbled together with flimsy planks and wobbly, poorly anchored pillars, very high above the water. These wooden paths were not straight, rather they converged and forked with no apparent motive, perhaps following the precarious solidity of the ground or the convenience of the impromptu mullet fishermen, hungry for the oily opalescent eggs, who with nothing more than a lantern and a hammock occupied the derelict houses during the season and vacated them as soon as the ban was declared.
Suddenly, several of the creaking walkways seemed to flow into one, wider and more solid than the others, made with sturdier crossbeams. In the distance, sinking into the sea, or into that mortar of brine and silt that took its place on the nearby horizon, he could make out an enormous house, fixed up not long ago and slathered with garish colors.
These were not canals the way the lunar herald had announced; more like mud creeks, thinner and more fluid than the rest of the bog.
Firefly picked up his pace. He was zipping along now, closing in on the lurid purple doorway, anxious to read the words engraved on a vertical piece of varnished wood carved in undulations, like a prayer flag, when an ill-fated skid sent him face-first into the muck.
He started flapping his arms, as if anyone could swim in that slime. He was sinking. He knew that he had to hold still, that every attempt to rise up would bury him further. Carefully he stretched one leg, then the other. But he could not bring himself any closer to the posts holding up the boardwalk, though they were nearly within reach, an arm’s length away.
His body was a thing apart, a rough and shoddy entity he neither felt nor wished to feel.
The muscles in his arms were useless. For an instant, he imagined them bulging and covered in tattoos; he dreamed his body was obeying him, climbing effortlessly up to the boardwalk. He breathed deeply. He stiffened up. He remembered the stepladder he had mounted as a child in order to describe the hurricane.
Then he realized how alone he was. Unless he managed to clamber up on that boardwalk, no one would rescue him and he would sink for good into the mud, into the rot.
He tried to call for help, knowing it was useless.
Such a familiar failure: He opened his mouth and nothing came out.
He decided to wait. To attempt no movement. His body became somehow undifferentiated, mixed in with the slime and of the same texture. All he had to do was stop breathing and thinking to become forever one with the bog; he was already an inert substance, scum in the scum.
For Firefly an entire day went by, even if in the crude ticking of clocks the interval lasted only an hour. He thought he would never reach those posts, that he would become completely immobilized, a stone statue fallen into the muck centuries ago. He was crying, he realized. He had no idea how much time had truly passed.
The surface of the mud was swarming. Thousands of iridescent green insects with gigantic legs and filigreed wings jumped and chased each other on the thin mossy coating; others navigated slowly, sliding in pairs along minuscule shoots from one lily pad to the next.
A frog jumped.
The sun began to go down.
Firefly opened his eyes, perhaps to hear better.
He turned his head. Yes, it was the distant roar of a motor. A small boat was approaching from the sea.
“A drowned man!” yelled one of the crew. “A drowned man!”
Firefly recognized them right off. In taking away his sense of direction, Mother Nature – always stingy in her consolations – had given him the ability to recognize anyone immediately, no matter if he had only laid eyes on him once and just for a moment. In this instance, he was certain that both of them had been in the basement of the Gothic tower.
They pointed at him from afar with curiosity bordering on disgust; he might have been a beached shark. Between sneering jibes, they fished him out, sopping and silent.
“Just what you deserve, kid, so you’ll learn not to get drunk and wander about alone in places like this!” one shouted at him.
“Come off it, pal,” replied the other. “You can see he’s old enough for that! He wasn’t going to spend his whole life jerking himself off!”
The man was wearing nothing but a bathing suit and a thick silver chain bearing a charm. He was emaciated. His cranium shone with the morbid gleam of tanning oil. His flesh was milky and insipid.
The other, redheaded and freckled, came armored with a baseball cap and green sunglasses, a big flowery shirt, very tight white pants, and canvas shoes.
Once they had deposited Firefly in one of the white seats of their impeccable launch, like a freshly caught porgy left to suffocate on dry land, they carried on with the taunts, since watching him gasp for breath seemed to amuse them.
“Have some rum to warm up. Though you must be pretty warm already to end up down there, right?” They cracked up.
“I . . . I was looking for the big house,” Firefly tried to explain. “A big house where two canals meet.”
“Aha! So you don’t know your way around here and don’t even have a clue what’s what! Then what were you doing here alone at this time of day, girlie? Fishing around for the big bullfrog?” More cackles.
“Enough, cut the clowning,” the bald one decided. “If you want to go into the pavilion, we’ll take you. That’s why we’re members and come whenever we feel like it. Though we always take the boat, not like you dragging yourself through the mud. Dry yourself off with this sponge. And here, put on a clean T-shirt.”
Only then did Firefly grasp what he had seen carved on the placard by the door: THE PAVILION OF THE PURE ORCHID.
They took hold of the wooden banner and yanked on it, like they were milking a cow. Far away, deep inside the ramshackle house, maybe at the back of a kitchen filled with sacks of flour or perhaps only muffled by the sticky, ever-present humidity, a little bell rang, dark and dull like the low keys on a marimba.
When the new owners christened the house, they must have scraped the placard with the tip of a jackknife; underneath the letters of the new name a few of the previous ones were still visible in elegant, sparkling gold loops: THE . . . IDEA.
Two metal lounge ch
airs, rusted and unusable, their once-perfect springs now greenish-black and bunched up, flanked the heavy repainted door, which was perforated near the top by a deep peephole like a miniature spyglass. Quietly swaying to the rhythm of the breeze like bunches of charred garlic heads, bat colonies hung from the eaves.
Three bolts rattled: the first a rough rasp like a horseshoe clattering against red marble; the next two soft glides like the trigger on an antique revolver.
A black man opened the door.
His cheeks and forehead were covered in tribal tattoos.
He looked the three of them over from head to toe, and considered before offering a perfunctory, nearly inaudible, “Gentlemen, come in.” Either he was not sure he recognized them or he recalled from the last visit their less than adequate tips. Thinking it over, he added in a dry cutting tone, “Are you certain that the youngster is old enough to do us the honor of a visit? Do you know the baron? Would you like me to call him right now?”
“The youngster?” the bald one erupted, huffy and scornful. “Take a good look, and if that won’t do then give him a feel. Come on, in the crotch and you’ll see!” He grabbed hold of the Dahomean’s arm and started pulling on it.
The doorman, maybe worried about herpes, snatched it back; Firefly had turned bright red and was covering his nether parts to ward off the clutch. The redhead raised his hands to his head, then jerked his right thumb at his mouth to indicate to the somber acolyte the drunken cause of such immoderation.
Inside, a cockpit was the first thing that came to Firefly’s mind. It was a big circular wooden structure open to the tiled roof with a chandelier in the center. Along the outer edges, crudely sewn folding screens made of nun-gray sugar sacks formed slapdash cells that hugged the walls haphazardly, shabby little rooms that looked ready to collapse at the slightest jostle.
Gigantic tree ferns: that was what stood out in the middle. A fern jungle, whose wrinkled leaves sheltered the fraying damask and gold threads of a curved sofa. Two white platforms, each with lateral stages like those used for Olympic champions, flanked this ridiculous piece of furniture.
In the middle of each cell – now that the gloom had dissipated and he could see – lay a large wicker lounge chair, sagging or wobbly, and next to it a night table of the same weave bearing a glass, an ashtray, and an oval bottle filled with mint liqueur.
“Gentlemen, please be seated,” the tattooed man invited. “The booths are individual. I shall bring you ice in a moment.”
Off he went down a hallway, but not before encouraging Firefly, who by all appearances looked terrified. “And you, young man, don’t be so afraid of being seen. Here no one gets eaten. You can have a wonderful time all by yourself; everyone minds his own business and that’s all there is to it . . . One thing, and don’t ever forget it since you’re new: one looks but one does not touch. Plaisir des yeux,” he added, snooty and churlish, no doubt quoting some madame who had once visited the island.
He returned shortly, distributed the ritual refreshments, and carefully closed the folding screens. In the damp, soiled fabric crisscrossed with stitches only a single slit remained, offering a view of the improvised stage.
The moment the partitions shut, Firefly felt a gratuitous fear of being closed in, just as one day in the shade of the royal poinciana he had felt afraid of being out in the open.
The discomfort was very familiar; he resigned himself to suffering it once more.
A few tambourines sounded.
The ferns moved slightly, suggesting a wayward bird flitting from branch to branch, or an impossible sea breeze breaching the wall.
It was neither: parting the greenery were big strapping young mulattos crowned with laurel wreaths and garbed in light-blue Greek tunics and sandals. The youngest, a good-looking buck, held aloft a lyre.
They occupied the platforms, exhibiting the Ionic manners and sepia poise of an old Sicilian photograph.
On the highest stages on either side of the sofa, somber teenagers pretended to play the sistrum, like Arcadian shepherds lost in the bog, whose noxious vapors kept spoiling the scene. On the lateral platforms, seated without much conviction, practically loafing, the tambourine players officiated.
The refreshments, like some vegetarian’s transgression, all contained pork: soaked in honey, wrapped in guava or basil leaves, fried rinds or with cassava, each of them flecked with the fresh greenery of Spanish fly.
Firefly tried to wipe off the snacks, but the pinching bitter taste still came through. So he drank an entire glass of the mint liqueur, warm – the waiter, of course, had forgotten the ice.
The tambourines stopped.
A teenage girl appeared, practically a child, a mulatta with green eyes and cinnamon skin. From chin to ankles she was covered in dense necklaces, thick amber charms, golden seashells, and fresh sunflowers, so many that her body seemed bent under the weight. They had painted her eyebrows with cinnabar, her cheeks with eggshell. Her mouth was white. She smiled. She was a mahogany sculpture, loaded down with offerings, rising amid the big adolescents in profile.
As soon as they saw her, the brown boys began fondling themselves, as if the mulatta’s body, beyond being a display of purity and nakedness, was the cue for an encounter among boys, the go-ahead for a slight shock. More: for an orgy.
In the middle of the stage, a tall fleshless man with sharp bones and a sallow complexion, shuffling awkwardly in sandals, handed the lads little tubs or rather pouches sheathed in snakeskin and overflowing with fresh green crushed herbs, moist and poisonous.
He distributed the soft containers, then with his index finger he caressed his own upper lip out to his cheekbone, apparently trying to remove an invisible stain, or to smooth the rough edges of an ugly scar.
It was Gator.
And the fat man at his side, wrapped in a sticky toga, his feet bare and swollen, could be none other than Isidro.
During a break from the tambourines, Firefly heard, or believed he heard, a conversation between the two weasels.
“What’s up?” Isidro yelled, gesturing wildly, flushed by the herbs or by the porky refreshments with Bacardi. “Hasn’t the new one shown her face?”
“I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with her,” Gator answered hotly. “She should be here any minute.”
“So what are you going to call her?” asked Isidro mischievously.
“Hada. Her real name.”
“We’ve got to change that.”
In that in-between zone, when surfacing from sleep but not yet fully awake, images can get condensed into words that seem entirely made up of sounds or silences. Just like that, Firefly, his face pressed against the slit in the grimy folding screen, saw: THEY TRICKED YOU.
The piercing whistle of the letters shattered his eardrums, wove a red-hot net inside his body that set him aflame.
Then something even more powerful than those tiny blazing threads shook him from stem to stern. Another image, as unreal and as substantive as the previous, appeared on the very same stage: Ada naked, offered up for ogling, the pretext for the old weasels’ solitary fondling.
He felt a bitter wave rise into his mouth, green like the herbs, weedy and rank. He tried to think about another green: the ceiba tree next to the fishpond, filtering white vertical light. A lethal lava burned in his stomach. Then he saw the girl seem to look up at the heavens, or at the glass chandelier that occupied their celestial place on the cockpit’s ceiling. Her eyes were opaque and dry, her gestures dull, her steps awkward and slow.
The big boys, without interrupting the tambourine beat, dipped the tips of their fingers into something gooey at the bottom of the little sacks and licked them as if they were secretly sucking on nectar’s essence.
Gator approached the young woman. Carefully, almost respectfully, performing the prescribed ritual of a sacred ceremony as it were, he spread that thick golden jelly extracted from the hearts of herbs on the tips of her breasts, on the barely shadowed triangle of her sex.
&
nbsp; Firefly closed his eyes. He surprised himself by praying for the very first time in his life: “Dear God, please make all this a hallucination, a drunken mirage, let me awaken right now somewhere else, let the name I heard not be Ada’s, let it not be her, let it not be that they auctioned her off in the tower for this, let none of this be real.”
Then, as if possessed by a reckless demon, Gator grabbed the dark pouch from the youngest of the tambourine players and buried his entire hand in it. He spread the stuff all over his own sharp features, trembling, licking his palm, caressing anxiously, almost voluptuously, the invisible scar on his cheekbone.
Soon he raised his hand in the air, where it shook Parkinson’s- like while he sketched something out or signaled a terse order. His glistening fingers quivered with infinitesimal movements, each independent of the others: five henchmen utterly liberated.
Now Firefly thought he saw – or maybe it was the mint liqueur – Ada’s body superimposed on the mulatta’s, confused with hers as if they were but one.
She looked like a sleepwalker.
She moved among the performers with a sluggishness that was supposed to be lascivious and was just dreary, to the point of being nightmarish.
She wiggled her hips in a drowsy dance, her blank gaze following a dot that floated in the air and fell in long swoops like a dying bird.
Firefly began to cry.
Gator’s consorts did not touch the sleepwalker while she slid among them, nor did they even look at her. They continued beating their tambourines and with the tips of their fingers they groped their own nipples, as if they were checking how hard they were. They laughed again and again.
What – the question set Firefly’s body atremble – were the occupants of the booths doing when she approached the folding screens and they could almost touch her, could breathe in her aroma through the slits?
Firefly Page 10
