Severo Sarduy - Firefly

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 skeletal 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.”