Severo Sarduy - Firefly

Firefly closed his eyes, took a deep breath like the prelude to a sigh, recalled what he had felt when the porcelain chamber pot slid down the cistern with him hanging on to the handles, besieged by his aunts’ chortles in the purple shade of the cockatoo-filled royal poinciana, until the basin smashed against the floor. He felt it again now: a cramp making its way up through his tummy.

It was nighttime. He was at the beach. The water was oily, warm, and black; sea wasps swam about. Flying fish sailed like daggers from one wave to the next. He let himself drift, facedown in the water. A cool breeze caressed his back. From the shore, his sister called to him, “Firefly! Firefly!” But he paid no heed. The voice was unreal, too far off, or maybe imitated by somebody else. Nothing mattered more than this sense of abandon, this languorous release to the waves.

Now, the upper hand descended as well, sliding under his belt, caressing his ass. He felt the outsized fingers resting on his skin, three on one of his cheeks, two on the other. Then, the longest fell carelessly into the crack. Now he felt two fingers on one side and two on the other, the long one going a bit deeper with each oscillation, rubbing the cleft as if by accident. Suddenly, the manipulator flipped him over so he was faceup, panting; her hand slipped in his fly, and then her warm, moist tongue.

He was in a barbershop full of cracked mirrors and jars topped with long rubber tubes and pestles for pulverizing alcohol and amber. It smelled of Arabic gum, rubbing oil, old men. It might have been his first visit to the barber.

“Have you ever seen it?” one of the mulatto barbers asked jokingly while peeking at Firefly out of the corner of his eye. He was taking care of an old gray-haired guy in the next seat who had a toothpick between his lips and a shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons open to his navel.

“What?” answered his big-bellied partner, feigning interest while he stirred a pot of foam and brushed light touches of soap on his customer’s throat.

“The crack,” the brown-skinned man clarified in a suppressed whisper, faking unease, as if this were the first time they had ever exchanged this tomfoolery.

“What crack?”

“Come on, in your behind.”

“No, never.”

“Oh. ”

“So, how do you do it?”

Here the lewd tutor glanced again at Firefly, perhaps to indicate that the perverse instructions were meant for him.

“You put a mirror on the floor. ”

“And then?” Big-belly had stopped shaving and was listening, his razor motionless against his customer’s throat, surprised, exuding innocence, as if this were his first exposure to the perplexing procedure.

“Well, then,” continued the impudent mulatto, “you squat on it.”

Firefly had felt a weight on his chest. Now, while the plump girl’s finger ran around the edge, poked about, now to slip in, now to touch the inside, and now that the oscillation, the soft undulation emanated from that finger, he felt the same pressure again, as if all the bifurcations of the bronchial tree were swollen shut and the air was stuck at the crossroads, incapable of choosing a path, until it lost its usual clarity, became charred and deadly.

While he shuddered, sweated, believed he was going to lose all his blood through his sex, while everything spilled out into the indolent hand, the two girls chatted happily, untouched by the novice’s astonishment, pleasure, anguish. The whores challenged each other with demented riddles, wild and repetitive like scratched phonograph records.

“I want something but I don’t know what it is.”

“I know. Let me tell you. Is it something sweet?”

“Yes. ”

“Cold?”

“Yes. ”

“White?”

“Yes. ”

“With rum?”

“Yes.”

“ Crème de vie !”

When he came back downstairs, he noticed the jukebox in the dance hall was playing. Dull goofy music flowed from the machine. Handclaps and castanets. Dancing in front of it, illuminated by the greenish glow from the buttons, was a very thin child dressed only in a white linen cloth tied around his waist. When he raised his hands to snap his fingers, all his ribs showed. He followed the rhythm but was distracted, absent, staring into space, as if his true self were somewhere else and he was only repeating to exhaustion the steps from a lesson. His skin was brown and dry. His incredibly long hair swung when he turned his head, or when he tilted forward and then unexpectedly to the side or back. With his narrow white feet he kept time on the cool tiles.

Firefly remained silent, riveted.

He thought hard about Ada.

And he cried.

By the time he left, everything had changed. It could have been a different day.

The jukebox was quiet. The little Gypsy, now completely naked, was asleep on his white cloth spread on the cool of the cement floor in one corner of the room. It looked like he was listening to a seashell.

The street was silent and deserted. Either it was already getting light or the sky was strangely heavy and white. The paving stones glistened as if it had rained.

A greenish smoke from hookahs clogged with red crud wafted through the window grates and from under the doors of the Chinese stores. A passerby could hear the raspy sound of frail bodies moving on reed mats.

Back to the storm sewer marched the Indian women. Slowly, in single file, bent under their rucksacks or under layers of white gladiolas, which they carried from the edge of the city to sell in markets before the sun wilted the blooms.

The gulls that nested amid the broken panes of clerestories in colonial palaces, or in abandoned pigeon coops on the roofs of the mansions of exiles, returned to the masts and to the first garbage offered by early-rising sailors, on-board scullions.

From behind a weathered door, which looked to be on its last legs, made of darker, denser wood than most, came the sound of canticles.

Firefly figured a believer was tuned in to the Vatican radio station, attending from afar, as often happened, the canonization of some pious islander or the promulgation of an incendiary encyclical on the nascent, forbidden church of liberation.

Following an old habit, almost by reflex, he pressed his ear to the wood above the cast-bronze knocker (a lion’s head with a ring in its nose, its mane combed and even), whose chill he felt against his cheek.

The door swung open on a dark corridor.

Cautiously, Firefly made his way in. The corridor led to a cloister with rudimentary but ornate columns on which small tiles, bits of coral, coins, fishing lures, and pieces of colored glass all sparkled in the rising sun like tiny golden mirrors.

The capitals of the columns featured shaggy demons vomiting flames, or angelic priests whose smiles the mildew had transformed into sickening grimaces.

A sunburned lawn that looked to be made of spiky metal wires instead of grass covered the little garden, interrupted by bald spots of clumpy, rusty, red dirt.

From the fountain in the middle (the same decorative trinkets as on the columns depicted gorgonian faces, but they were incomplete, one-eyed, worn away) rose, intermittently, a feeble, foolish spurt of water.

They filled a chapel painted blue with gold stars, on the far side of the garden, across from the doorway where Firefly had come in. They were dressed in rough white robes, the hoods folded back, their faces olive-skinned and severe.

Moving slowly, deliberately, they broke bread on a bare altar, the only ornamentation a simple wooden cross.

Wrapped in her purple mantle, a slant-eyed virgin twisted in on herself like a fiery S looked down from a wooden ledge; gold outlined the concentric folds of the fabric at her knees. The lateral predellas were occupied by the donors, counts from Jaruco, kneeling in prayer.