Firefly (10 page)

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.

Suddenly he was shaken by an absurd hunch, the very possibility of which was enough to disconcert him: Could this be
the charity-house chapel that was always closed up, except when a young priest aired it out between Easter and Saint John's Day, and he had arrived by another entrance?
^*

He understood then, in a way as inescapable and true as death, that he lacked something inherent to life, something so obvious that others did not even know they had it: a sense of direction.

At a fork in the road he had no idea what to do, just as he had no idea what to do when faced with the ritual – no doubt second nature to others – of sex.

He sensed in an opaque way, as if he had received an unspoken but fatal warning, that he would always be lost, disoriented, lacking an interior compass, as if the entire Earth were a laborious labyrinth or a perverse mirage of movable walls someone had contrived just to get him lost, to bring him down.

A grizzled and toothless old woman in rags distributed with careful disequilibrium, like she had been dressed to play a
leprous beggar in a sacramental rite, came noiselessly toward him. Hanging by its feet from her right hand was a dead canary, which she set down delicately, perhaps afraid she might harm it, next to a little basket.

“Madam,” Firefly addressed her, his voice quavering, fearing maybe he might spoil the offering of the bird.

“What?” the mendicant in disguise answered grudgingly, smoothing her matted yellowish-white mane and breathing deeply, as if offended by an unpardonably foul remark or a flouting of the most common courtesy.

“What chapel is this?” Firefly chanced, like someone who dares to utter a blasphemy or a provocation.

“The chapel of the Virgin, can't you see?”

“But . . .”

“But what?”

“Those monks . . .”

“They're singing, can't you see?” and she turned her back, annoyed by what she considered morbid ridicule or pretend curiosity.

Then he was forced to realize further, from this very evidence, that he would never have anyone to orient him, that for others his deficiency was like a vice, deliberate and embraced with malicious delight, that ought to be outlawed and exterminated.

He felt blindfolded and alone at the center of a grotesque, cackling circle spinning around him. People delighted in his being lost, the way his aunts had delighted at his defecation.

His body, the laws of his body, gave people the urge to laugh.

The canticles faded away.

But the dull hum of the vowels from the invocation remained hanging in the air like a vocal residue: reversed and inaudible, yet precise.

And now, after a pause in which they were still and silent, the monks, like brothers after a separation, like blood relatives after a long absence, hugged and kissed one another, celebrating a ritual reunion, a holy day, or a resurrection.

Visible through the windows, and at the same time reflected in them, were the monks' scrawny bodies: white robes, knotted ropes, crude wooden crosses. The starry indigo sky of the chapel met the reflection of the lawn's burned greenery and the precarious squirt of water. A very fine line, broken and red, marked the border between them.

Superimposed on those reflections, Firefly now saw senseless images whipping by, the way it is supposed to happen seconds before death. Swollen, splintered, warped, colors and shapes morphing, one image becoming another, turning monstrous,
distorted, helix-like, gilded: in the foreground, occupying the entire windowpane, a gloved hand with ringed fingers spread wide pulling down the coins . . . in the background, fragile and fleeting minutiae, mosaics viewed underwater, dots and streaks (the hookers' rigid, black-dyed kiss-curls) . . . the notary's drawer that opened with a yank . . . a gleaming light swinging and spinning before his eyes (the pendulum) . . . Ada's perfume . . . a target . . . the wrinkled face of an old woman like doodles in beeswax . . . the taste of
crème de vie
. . . a hand on his sex, large and pink like gum . . . the chamber pot sliding down the cistern . . .

“What they call writing,” he then said to himself, “must be just that: to be able to make some order out of things and their reflections.”

One by one, the monks genuflected before the altar, crossed themselves, and began to leave.

“If I could write,” he continued, “I could make things appear and disappear as they really are instead of the jumbled way they look in the window, all mixed up with their reflections.”

The chapel was empty. Still he dared not step in. An intensity, an invisible texture in the air held him back. To enter would be to violate the memory the room held of the silence and, earlier, of the meditations and voices.

He remembered that he still had the stolen notebook and
pencil in his pocket. He pulled them out and on the first page drew a few shapeless scribbles, grotesque ideograms, which he aligned vertically. Then he erased them and replaced them with others equally inept. God knows what they might be. But for him the meaning was utterly clear:

^*
Have you ever heard of bibliomancy? It's a form of divination that one can turn to only a few times in life if it is to “work,” and that consists of opening the Bible at random and pointing to a line without looking at the page.

I have done it twice in my lifetime, at moments of great need. The first came up Matthew 2:12 (The Flight into Egypt): “And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.”

This is a call to seers: What was Saint Matthew trying to tell me?

Fresh salt air, reeking of the sea. The purplish-blue shadows of things seemed to swirl around him, as if a crazed moon were spinning about the sky. Or maybe what had changed was his own body, inhabited now by somebody else.

Down the shining cobblestone street came a skeletal black calash driver with chiseled cheekbones, at this hour already dressed in his vest and bowler hat. He stepped lightly, almost weightlessly, practically floating over the paving stones. With his right arm he pushed a loose cartwheel; in his free hand he carried a whip. The wheel bounced on the stones, wobbled, continued downhill.

When the coachman passed Firefly, he gave him a surprised look, as if he recognized him and wondered what he was doing out there at that time of day.

Cautiously, at a distance, like an affectionate and obliging mother, someone was following the driver.

Firefly first recognized the starched white housedress, which ruffled open in the humid morning breeze like an immense day lily; then, shining just as white, the necklaces, small friendly sea-shells whose rattling he thought he could discern; and finally, the bright silk turban: the black Santeria priestess had found him again.

In her hands she carried a lantern, its light extinguished, its glass stained from smoke, as if she had been using it all night long on her travels.

“You are going to discover something beside the water,” the mother of saints told him at once. Her voice was that of a woman who had just swallowed a sip of honey.

“How do you know?”

The priestess rattled her necklaces. “And what's more,” she added smiling, “it'll happen soon. You'll never go back home after seeing what you are about to see.”

She half turned on her heels, like someone finishing a dance or jubilant at having completed a mission. She raised her hand and called to the coachman. Firefly understood neither the name she called out nor the language she spoke.

They greeted each other with a salutation Firefly had never seen: mother's right shoulder touched the driver's left, then they repeated the same gesture in reverse.

They disappeared up a cobblestone alley between two pink churches. In the fragile light of dawn, the two figures against the sparkling bluish paving stones fresh with dew had the precision of a mirage: morning's white lingering note, ephemeral messengers who vanished before the sun could devour everything with its leprous cruelty.

The churches' symmetrical façades glowed like unfinished metal when the first orange rays of the sun touched the broken volutes and the gross adipose angels shaking maracas on either side of the doors and beside the crumbling triangle of lintels, where invading rats had found all the amenities of refuge.

Firefly took a few steps. The joins between the cobblestones wove an awkward tangle, a perspective drawing of short drab lines that stood out against the leaden gray of the rilievos and receded progressively toward the horizon between the two churches.

He was meditating on the priestess's words and on everything in his life that seemed confused, ominous, and impossible to decipher. His story was a frayed tapestry with no apparent pattern, seen in a dream.

He felt someone touch him on the shoulder.

Startled, he turned around. He had not heard anyone approach.

Next to him stood a strange being somewhere between senile childhood and long-lasting decrepitude, maybe a girl whose face was parchment-like from premature wrinkles, or perhaps an elderly woman whose skin was smeared with wax or powdered eggshell. She was tiny, fragile-looking; her body had either not yet reached maturity or was already desiccated, skin and bone, and had preserved at the end of her life, like an archaeological relic, some aspect of her youth. She was wearing a long, baggy dress made of shining silk, within which she seemed to float. She was barefoot. Her feet were bony and pointy, and against the paving stones they looked like two porgies. Her hair was straw-blond, maybe newborn fuzz or maybe gray, dyed with peroxide and saffron. A flimsy tiara made of hammered silver or tin held and adorned her lustrous scalp.

The lips of the apparition parted in a hint of a smile or a grimace. From the depths of her foggy pupils streaked with ash this emaciated being glanced his way. “Would you like me to show you something?” she accosted him without the least preamble. “Something you will never forget?”

“Who are you?” Firefly managed to mumble as he stepped
back, terrified by the possibly angelic, possibly demonic, certainly supernatural specter.

“You don't recognize me?” the horror responded with derision. Her voice was fluty and nasal; her phrases ended with a piercing rasp. “Take a good look because I haven't changed. Don't you remember the day Munificence on a whim kicked me out of the charity house? Ah, now you see who I am!” and her voice exploded in a gravelly chortle.

She raised her skirts and spun around, slender and supple.