Severo Sarduy - Firefly

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.

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.