Severo Sarduy - Firefly

Meanwhile, a few proper ladies began turning up, their faces masked by finely wrought mother-of-pearl fans, who without leaving their carriages sought to acquire newly arrived black girls for domestic service before they could be spoiled by libertarian excesses, or by the lust for suicide and flight that had already ruined the help in more than one palatial home and poisoned the crew in more than one peaceable work camp, thereby populating the already vermin-infested jungle with bloodthirsty Maroons bent on vengeance, primed for murderous raids on the plantations.

The shenanigans that followed put the finishing touch on the mayhem. Amid a storm of blue crates falling every which way, dumped by drunken cabin boys who could not have cared less (a pulley gave way and a big-screen television shattered against a mast), ahead of the slaves themselves, appeared the frenzied salesmen of the coveted merchandise that everyone dreamed of bidding on and profiting by.

Down the gangway came an auctioneer.

His large bare feet were covered with sores and black goop. His tight pants were leather. On his chest the green waving lines of his tattoos, intertwined serpents and ciphers, glistened in the sun like emerald threads. He raised his right hand to ask for silence from the landowners jostling for a spot in a semi-circle around the boarding ramp. Then with the irksome grandiloquence of an Arab storyteller arriving at an oasis, to the four winds he proffered a rotund “Do I hear more?” before reciting seemingly by heart a long inventory of embellished claims for the human product he had brought to market, still healthy despite the seas, robust even, ever potent.

“Big bruiser, nice and dark, dirty, bearded, long-faced Mozambican with tribal tattoos on his face, really wide feet, he’s got all his teeth, sways as he walks.

“Civilized black from the Angolan nation, named Juan, dark as they come, with a bit of a beard, huge, with big eyes.

“Antonio, black from the Coast with three scars on his face and missing the nail on his left big toe, falsetto voice, a dirty-black color.

“Black woman from Angola with plenty of milk, no vices, pretty-faced, slurs her R’s when she speaks. ”

Firefly could not go on listening to the auctioneer, much less to his own morbidly repetitious thoughts. Coming toward him, seeming to surge out of the cluster of slavers, snowy, unpolluted amid the dross, seeking him out with that glassy, pinkish stare he would have recognized anywhere, was the pasty skin-and-bones girl, sent yet again, he told himself, by the harshest orishas, the ones that unmask certain men so they can assail their dim-witted credulity with the intolerable truth.

Her shining dress and her scaly anemic whiteness, the agility with which she slid among the traffickers like a cold-blooded reptile guided solely by the vibrations of her prey, the aureole that surrounded her — all these were accentuated by the sun to the point of hallucination: the unreal that emerges when it is clearest, when it is brightest.

Behind her, the blacks were climbing out of the hold, chained, thirsty; they moaned and squeezed shut their eyes, blinded by the razor’s edge of tropical light. Mice with phosphorescent eyes skimmed along fast as arrows.

Unseeing, unerring instinct having carried her to his side, Firefly could scrutinize her more closely than ever: the livid face and each matted albino lock magnified by excessive proximity or by the sharpness of perception that all repugnance sparks.

He discovered something that until now had escaped him, he could not say why: The scrawny girl had no eyelashes. The discovery left him trembling, as if a deep-sea fish, wriggling, gelatinous, had slithered past him.

Without any reference to what had occurred or even so much as a hello, the elderly child beamed an ironic rictus in his direction, which for her perhaps corresponded to a smile.

“Want to see her again?” her nasal singsong challenged. “Want to know where she ended up? Look for her in the purple house, the one where two canals meet. She’s there, waiting for you.”

The sky once again grew ugly. Tenebrous nimbus clouds, silvery-gray and edged with gold, began piling high in spinning updrafts approaching from the east. Gusts, crafty and freezing, blew in from the north. From the west, a whirling downdraft. To cap it off, from the south came that strange sound the whole city had heard once before a long time ago.

“It’s the souls coming back,” one of the proper ladies averred, forsaking for a moment her mother-of-pearl fan to cross herself.

“It’s not that, your ladyship,” replied the coachman respectfully, though certain of what he was saying and even with a trace of authority. “It’s going to snow.”

He believed in the furtive midget’s latest revelation, even if it was offered only for the appalling gratification of mocking him, or for the more benign pleasure of engaging in sheer malice with no risk of reprimand, human or divine.

He fled the port by sea, crossing the thick churning waters of the bay in a rickety launch packed with pilgrims fulfilling promises and with drunks who chugged precipitous cups of oysters on the pier and lukewarm cans of beer during the crossing, which they then tossed overboard to see how they bounced off the propeller’s foamy wake.

He disembarked on the other side of the bay, seized by an excruciating bout of seasickness. Tottering under the archways, he made his way through the barrio of the Santeria priests. Pale young mulattos in underpants and T-shirts, yawning and mussed, used one hand to calm the bulge in their crotches, insubordinate at that hour, and the other to smooth their reddish frizz, stiff and coiled like the strikers on flint lighters, before plunging into sweeping the entire block with thatch brooms, then giving it a soak with buckets of water to settle the “duss.”

The board windows of the vast azure homes were already swinging open to reveal lights inside: fresh candles twinkled on altars surrounded by sky-blue silks, turquoise beads, and little piles of finely ground indigo. He watched someone emerge from a brick courtyard and roam through rooms of assorted colors and clarities.

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.