Severo Sarduy - Firefly

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.

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 yet 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.

The grand seigneur of that couple was the Gentleman from Paris, who dressed in a black velvet cape in the suffocating heat of the island summer, his chest armored with ancient newspapers and magazines, and who spouted an ardent prosopopoeia featuring backwards tropes worthy of Lezama or of Chicharito and Sopeira, which he proffered in impeccable Castilian diction.

His unhinged partner was the Marchioness, a splotchy-skinned, gray-haired black woman with an easy stride and Versailles-esque manners, the play protégé of witty dissolute ladies and even of real marchionesses (to the degree the woody worm-eaten branches of insular heraldry allowed), who dressed her in outlandish attire left over from presidential balls or some bash at the Tropicana where the gowns had been ordered from the finest of Erté’s disciples.

At the far end of that dump for architectonic and human ruins rose a solitary and dilapidated tower, the incongruent remains of a fortress that turned out to be indefensible or had been simply abandoned by commanders who were insolvent or had been relieved in mid-construction, to which several flamboyant volutes had given a vague Antillean Gothic look. No one went near it, nor did anyone even mention it (and when they did it was with their fingers making the cross), to the point that it was presumed haunted and cursed.

He spotted the girls right away, at the end of the alleyway. There were two.

They were seated on folding chairs on the sidewalk, but backwards with the chair backs between their open legs. Their brocade outfits dragged on the ground; they wore pierced hoop earrings that reached their shoulders and tortoiseshell hairpins perched on the crowns of their heads. The tight black spirals of their kiss-curls outlined a lattice of rigid volutes on their foreheads and temples. The edges of their purple lips were underscored with a line of black. Their eyelids were two half-moons of trembling aluminum that flashed up and down like the fins of frightened fish.

A sour stench of sweat, beer, or rancid semen emanated from the interior of the sleazy dive behind them, along with a bluish blinking from the jukebox, drunken laughter and shouts, and a roll of raucous castanets.