Firefly (2 page)

The storm that soon materialized gave rise to the fragile fast-talker's second phobia. And his most shrewd “performance.”

It all began with a big party; island parties are sad and tumultuous. The women wore pants (they had started the day haggard
and short-tempered, drinking highballs and reading their horoscopes), plush kerchiefs on their heads and on their feet big wooden clogs like stilts to keep them high and dry.

Neighborhood bands were blowing. What reigned was the sort of disorder, the sort of dirty-undershirt impudence that happens on days of national mourning or general strike. Without the least hint of shame, the drunks sitting on street corners opened bottles of beer in full view (which they later tossed into the storm sewer) and guzzled them with a queasy grimace and in one long swill (taunting hand in the air, all lit up) to keep them from getting warm.

The old blacks had carried their flimsy little domino tables into the street to escape the stale dank heat that sticks to your skin between gusts. Straddling unsteady chairs, they banged their tiles down with such fury that it seemed they would sink the whole board. They cursed,
swearing they would have a white woman
; they spit on the ground; they drank alarmingly long gulps of harsh rum while awaiting a fresh breeze.

Every hour, they tuned into the weather report from the observatory. On the radio, a meteorologist priest offered contradictory indications of the tempest's trajectory. Firefly, needless to say, interpreted for his sister (the only one accomplished at deciphering the boy) the cleric's convoluted predictions, which,
while both cautious and learned, avoided with precise paraphrases any possible mishap.

“The hurricane's path,” the priest asserted in a metallic voice made for the big-time microphone as well as the pulpit's echo, “traces a spiral opening up from its origin. Before it peters out it will head north, like migrating birds after the thaw. The danger lies in the voracious calm of the vortex, that innermost silence that announces the second lashing. Of course,” he concluded modestly, “no hurricane travels on rails, so regarding the time of arrival . . .”

The sister, best known as “the Galician mouse” because that is how she dressed up for burials or when they were alone at home or to alleviate the no less funereal boredom of school assemblies and carnival celebrations, followed every detail of Firefly's hand signals with her questioning eyes, while the adults, gigantic puppets in clean clothes with brusque gestures and grating voices, drank endless cups of linden-flower or basil or peppermint tea to appease the anticipated nervous collapse.

At noon, grave and furrow-browed, the family and those close to them gathered in the weaving room, near the window whose panes had disappeared under a striped black-and-white convolution, crucified with tape and court plaster against the winds. On the great mahogany cabinet they tuned in the station of the
observatory. Listening to the cleric's gongoristic dispatches, they made conflicting calculations to deduce the possible hour of the disaster.

The sister tiptoed close and touched Firefly affectionately on the shoulder, seeking an explanation with the deference of a dog putting his paw on his master's thigh and nudging with his head in pursuit of a lump of sugar.

“Bats,” the melon-head then whispered into her ear, lingering on the sound with the gravity of one who has found the solution to an enigma. “Bats flew by.”

They looked at each other then with astonishment.

Both paled.

They heard on the roof, light as acrobatic cats, new blasts of air.

In one holy amen the hurricane blew in like an Aeolus possessed. The sea turned wild and the crests of the waves soared as if spewing great wads of spit against the colonial façades on the far side of the street. Birds screeched, flying low to the ground. The palm trees began to bend until their crowns touched the roofing tiles.

Holding the circular shutter of the oxeye that usually ventilated the room open just a crack (they never opened the window, nor do I think they could have: the heavy sliding bolts were merely a decorative whim of affected architects), each by turn
contemplated and conveyed to the rest, openmouthed and dying for news, the windswept panorama that surrounded them.

One by one they climbed a folding stepladder and used all their strength to hold the shutter tight and keep a devastating gust from slipping in and sweeping away the paintings, the faded map with Gothic letters and a single continent, and the central spiderlike copper chandelier strewn with the stubs – soft stalactites – of old tapers.

People were still in the street. The raconteur on the perch with a stiff-as-a-board disparaging style critical of everything was one of the aunts; the other two, from below, punctuated her lapidary phrases with cunning adjectives and empty sneers, which they wielded like amulets against fear.

An entire family was fleeing under a glossy white waterproof tablecloth. Arms open wide, the father held two corners of the protective rectangle aloft. The tablecloth shivered furiously, as if shaken by choleric titans; the crying progeny huddled underneath. They banged on every door they found, pleading for shelter.

An aunt, from below, sarcastically: “As if they hadn't had plenty of warning about the calamity! As if the silverware hadn't started turning green three days ago and the dogs hadn't lost their appetite and sense of direction! Well, since they paid no heed, let the wind carry them off!”

The other, farther up, after a moment of silence: “Nothing, nothing's happening and that's the worst of it. An insufferable calm . . .”

Then it was Firefly's turn to be the reporter. And it was not that he was already privy to the objective – in reality, sarcastic and vile – world of adults; no, more that he had his own eloquence, his own precision, for moments like this. Such a mature child for his age! The proof: an inured Rosicrucian who once ran into him in the street touched his forehead and exclaimed, “Here shines a light, the light of intelligence!”

So the melon-head climbed laboriously up the stepladder. His sister seemed to hold him up with her gaze. He reached the lookout. Under the rain, the city was like a weaving with diagonal stripes and all the colors pulverized, glued onto a white cardboard backing.

Little did his supposed fluency serve him. It turns out that sometimes, faced with what has to be said, words seem to soften and hang, flaccid and dripping saliva like the tongues of the hanged. What Firefly saw through the oxeye, as they say, had no name. He opened and closed his mouth like a harpooned porgy, trying to convey the scene to the inquiring chorus. But nothing came out. I'll try to say it myself, in the most neutral way I can to avoid any possible
humiliation of that speechless boy
.

The wind blew with such force it sliced off the eaves. Roofing tiles flew by, red stains, like pomegranate seeds in the gray of the rain; they smashed against the plinths and the ceramic façades. Hail beat against the big swathed window with a raucous metallic rat-a-tat, minuscule tin drums.

That much Firefly was able to recount – in his own way of course, and in a stuttering stammering fashion – to the gathering that longed fervently for cleverness and received his words with a thousand mocking sniggers. What he could not recount is what happened next: how one of the roofing sheets first opened up like the blade of a jackknife, and then slid down and took off, a leaf of zinc that flipped halfway in the air and shone like a silver dagger before diving straight down like a bolt of lightning . . . and slicing off the head of a black man running with a suitcase in his hand.

In the illusions of the circus (Firefly had gone to a matinee performance of the Santos y Artigas), the head cut off at a drum roll settled imperturbably back on the neck of the plump albino woman who undertook this remarkable exploit daily; that of the black man under the hailstorm fell smiling onto the suitcase that the decapitated body continued to hold.

Firefly tried to speak, but could not. His right hand rose and fell, again and again, like someone chopping down a tree. He had become mechanized, a windup toy, voiceless.

Then he felt something not only invade him icily through his feet, tying all his nerves in knots, but mix in with his very body, spilling out all over, like a shroud of sweat and cold.

He looked away from the blood-spattered circus, but it was too late: his legs trembled, his teeth chattered like castanets, he stared off into space like someone cross-eyed or hallucinating, hearing voices. The stepladder itself began to wobble, as if a benign earthquake were shaking the foundations of the house, rather than a hurricane its rooftop.

Seeing him like that, so stricken and mute, his face mottled with streaks spreading like angry little snakes, the family, as always when faced with a defenseless rara avis, redoubled its cruelty.

The aunts launched into a derogatory dance – because a little boy must not go soft – and the cackling cripples, like deboned Graces, parodied his vacillations and silence by mamboing in unison while emitting chortles, cachinnations, and stuttering shrieks.

The father kept repeating, “For the love of God, for the love of God!” yanking on the tip of a Havana with his teeth and draining compulsive cups of cognac.

The mother worked the empty spinning wheel and began to sway senselessly in a rocker piled with cushions, the haunt of parturient she-cats.

The sister took him by the arm to help him climb down the last steps. She whispered in his ear, affectionately, “How about some linden-flower tea? Or the
Golden Book of Animals
to take your mind off it?”

The butt of the adults' ridicule gave no answer. He fled sobbing to the kitchen, hunched over, hiding his face.

Once in the kitchen, using the cloth for drying the porcelain, he wiped away two big tears.

The buffeting winds were barely audible in there, but the brass pots hanging from the wooden rafters tinkled.

He counted the members of the family.

He prepared cups of linden-flower tea. For all, except himself.

He sprinkled them generously with rat poison.

With the utmost care, he laid them on a tray.

“So no one will know I'm afraid.”

^*
“The sandpiper dies blind,” says Gustavo Guerrero. A fisherman from Laguna de la Restinga, on Margarita Island in Venezuela, once told him their eyelids get scorched from all that pecking in salt water.

Around a fountain, as if drawn by its cool waters, the feverish patients lie under archways on wobbly cots with no more accoutrements than a few mosquito nets of coarse tulle rolled up on spindles during the day and unfurled at night to reach the brick floor.

Beside the beds stand large copper pitchers for their ablutions, as well as bowls, enema hoses, white ceramic jars with green unguents, a sieve of vein-hungry leeches swimming over one another, and an archipelago of cotton swabs stained with pus, saliva, and blood. Farther off, an amphora of wine. A crystal vase with an iris.

Muscular nuns with ruddy cheeks and severe mannerisms make their rounds under the archways in a perpetual scurry and always in the same direction, collecting refuse and tendering
salves and consolation, or little wool sacks with camphor stones, which they slide brusquely under the pillows.

Carefully, they close the eyes of the moribund and tie their jaws up with white cloths so that rigor mortis will not catch them by surprise; they give the thirsty salt to suck; they oblige those suffering boils or anemia to gulp a gelatinous and searing fish soup, which they shove at them with an enormous wooden spoon.

So heavily starched are the edges of their polyhedral cornets that the patients fear getting sliced open when the nuns go rushing by, busy as leaf-cutter ants throughout the night.

In the courtyard, next to the central fountain and spattered by its spray, stood a whipping post. Sick children frolicked around it and leaned contentedly against it, like someone playing on a swing unaware it was once a gallows.

The seven recent arrivals occupied an entire side of the square formed by the archways framing the courtyard. Firefly was in front. Wearing loose trousers, he lay on an unmade cot with a very heavy pillow across his feet.

The rest of the family floated in limbo, laughed in dreams, snored in chorus, praised or battled invisible interlocutors, caught a glimpse perhaps of the paradise to which all believers aspire and which often takes the form of a garden in full bloom.
The chief and only physician of the provincial hospital called on two retired luminaries of the island's medical community and begged them to join forces to decipher the enigma of this family, delivered from the recent disaster only to be plunged into a bottomless and immutable “post-cyclonic hypersomnia.”

Let's watch the two healers from behind, strolling along a promenade bordered by royal palms up to the doorway, where the doctor greets them with only a simple embrace then points the way with a gesture of therapeutic impotence.

But, before we go on, who are these providential practitioners? To us, they appear as if in yellowed photographs or old faded postcards, surrounded by their appurtenances, their favorite gadgets, like peasants at a fair with the wooden cigarettes, desiccated cockatoos, sailors' caps, or tin rings, all provided by the photographer and yet true to the subject's identity.

First Gator, the herbalist, who collects the most paraphernalia.

Gator is wearing what looks like a dark blue suit with white pinstripes, round wire-rim glasses, and a silk tie decorated with tiny four-leaf clovers. His shoes are made of his own skin.

More worthy of mention is the place where he makes his appearance: in an orthopedic chair. Not that he is crippled, not at all; though he is lean and olive-skinned, long and bony, all
obtuse angles and kinks, there is nothing unhealthy about him. His sallow disjointed face and that habit of sliding his index finger from his upper lip to his cheekbone are just his normal peculiarities. This phyto-practitioner, or herbalist to be more precise, has conserved (no one really knows why) all the therapeutic artifacts of bygone days when, rather than obey nature in its tortuous designs, he set his mind to using the most polished and austere of mechanical devices to oblige it to follow his own.