Firefly (he always noticed the trifling and missed the essential) noted that she spun in the opposite direction to the priestess. The silk of her dress sparkled with a bluish glint in the square, like a standard in a procession.
“What are you doing here so early?” Firefly asked.
“I was at a masked ball at the Colonia Española, and I gave my tutors the slip so I could take a stroll on my own. Would you like me to show you something? A place like no other. If you come, you won't regret it.”
She gave him a tremulous wink of her waxy eyelids that was meant to be mischievous. Then she touched his shoulder lightly in a gesture suggesting complicity, which to Firefly felt like the caress of a scorpion.
The skinny girl did not knock on the door; she shoved it open.
A descending spiral staircase came into view; it had no banister, nor did it appear to ever end. Down below reigned a greenish penumbra populated by indecipherable murmurs: black wings or poisonous elytra.
The descent seemed interminable.
Skin-and-bones went first, whirling frenetically and shouting gleeful encouragement, which her nasal twang and the metallic timbre of the echo transformed into incomprehensible whines.
The train of her dress, always just a few paces ahead of Firefly, slithered over the stone steps like a lizard, only to reappear a spiral farther down.
Someone was descending ahead of them. Firm, confident steps perfectly at home. Suddenly a skid, something scattering on the floor â papers, a document, sheets flying. Silence.
Down, down they went.
But they found nothing.
At the end of that around-and-around, they came upon another door, this one covered with cushiony cockroach-infested bottle-green padding. It had a window.
Vulgar and determined, the runt opened it with a resounding kick.
The room had a high vaulted ceiling and a circular floor with inlaid bronze lettering. At the apex of the cupola was a brilliant porphyry dove. More doves decorated the rest of the ceiling, progressively diminishing in size and intensity of color from the tops of the walls to the zenith, the highest ones reduced to faded freaks, formless dull amoebae.
Red-and-purple tapestries covered the walls.
In their dense weave, amid bits of thread coming loose at the edges, stains from the humidity, holes, and burn marks, were scenes Firefly could not comprehend: a chubby white blond woman, naked, her skin iridescent, was licking the hard orange bill of a gigantic duck with greasy blue feathers, standing tall and proud like a billy goat. Down the neck of the bird slid fresh raindrops or dew; in his eyes shone a spark of desire more human than animal.
Framing that twisted coupling were garlands of orchids and sprays of royal poinciana blossoms, among which weird rollicking hybrids performed acrobatic feats: pairings of dissimilar beasts, grotesque graftings that defied understanding and parodied reason.
Atop the pistils of an open flower, alighted a flying shrimp with bat's wings and a crown; between two leafless branches soared a mouse with fins, driven by a boat propeller.
In the tapestry's upper-right-hand corner, as if breaking free from the woof and weft, a hummingbird reigned in fixed flight.
Seated on the little wicker chairs found in rural or impoverished churches, sullen old men trembling with impatience waited in silence, several of them in
dril cien
suits and straw hats that they spun nervously in their laps when they were not crossing and uncrossing their legs.
Firefly remained motionless behind the door, which had swung shut, contemplating that viscous spectacle: The rectangular glass window deformed the faces, flattening cheekbones and noses, as if someone had taken sandpaper to them.
“About time, little madam, about time,” exclaimed the most pallid and potted of the old crocks. “All the blessed night waiting for you. And now that you're here at last, you've come, if I understand correctly, empty-handed. Isn't that the case?”
A dry little cough made him shudder.
“Not at all, gentlemen, not at all,” the scrawny girl answered, feigning offense. “Surprises await. But please, a little patience.”
“Surprises? At this point?” replied the elderly man with a hint of incredulity. “So, where are they?”
“For the time being,” the withered girl responded as she backed away, “keep your eyes on the waterfall, that always calms the
nerves. And have some coffee with a nice glass of cold papaya wine.”
She let out a cackle and stepped toward a folding screen set up on the other side of the room.
A large curved window of thick glass, like a jeweler's loupe, interrupted the succession of tapestries and their grim copulations, and distorted the view of what lay beyond: a Japanese garden, complete with squares of raked sand, bonsai trees, and a waterfall, the whole of it stretched like elastic at the edges, bulging in the center, and excessively illuminated by footlights of all colors.
Despite the glass window, the chatter in the room, and the cushiony covering on the door, Firefly could hear water splashing faintly.
Evaporation created a perpetual rainbow, smooth and motionless, above the polished rocks and the dwarf bushes that embraced the extremes of a little wooden bridge lacquered in red.
A sudden squeal of hinges suggested the inverted tower they were in had a hidden, surely minuscule, entry on the side opposite the spiral staircase.
There was silence.
Steps behind the folding screen. Firefly could make out a few voices in the distance, unrecognizable.
More silence.
In the room, someone getting up knocked over one of the little chairs, which smacked sharply against the floor like a whip or a slap.
Slow steps echoed under the vault.
In front of the suddenly animated audience (murmurs and exclamations were promptly repeated by the domed ceiling), right there, dressed in white, stood Ada.
The sight of her came and went instantaneously in Firefly's eyes, because all he could perceive was his heart exploding, something in his breast shattering into a thousand pieces.
“My god,” was all he managed to think. “My body's so faulty and frail, how could I possibly endure such pain?”
He tried to breathe, but his chest was already a well filled with poison.
His bronchial tubes were made of glass and they wounded him as they splintered. He was freezing, he thought about his sister, he needed air. In trying to breathe, he emitted a high-pitched whistle tasting of rust and unbrushed teeth.
He was drenched in sweat. He smelled the foul odor of his own perspiration. His knees trembled.
That was when one of the venerable gentlemen, with an abrupt
gesture as if making a superhuman effort to break a spell or a tableau vivant, stepped forward from the enraptured group and reached the place where the girl selected for the ritual, perhaps by now resigned to it, awaited.
With the tip of his index finger, carefully, as if he did not wish to offend her, almost with diffidence, he touched her on the forehead.
And he tasted a drop of her sweat.
Ada was pallid. An involuntary tremor seemed to take hold of her starting from her hands, a sudden iciness rising from her feet. Who knows why she sent her gaze upward; perhaps she did not want to face the men's eager eyes resting unctuously on her body, their moist maneuvers.
Always carefully, delicately, as if he did not wish to offend her, the
ocambo
slid his index finger along the borders of her lips, and then, with medical proficiency, pulled down her lower eyelid.
He turned to face the spectators.
And he nodded his head.
Another man, fat and jolly, egged on by the first, came toward her in short hops, like a tomeguin finch.
Finally he mustered his aplomb and caressed Ada's hair, paternally, affectionately, gazing at her with pity. He let the brilliant red
strands slide through his fingers, admiring their texture and color. With almost exaggerated care, he pulled one out. He held it by the ends and stretched it, apparently to test its elasticity.
He then turned and rejoined the eager clan of lustful men.
“To survive,” Firefly told himself straightaway, an order dictated by blind prenatal instinct, “I must convince myself that nothing I am seeing or hearing is true. Soon I will realize that I am dreaming, and I will feel the cool varnished wood of the recamier against my feet, the silk rubbing against my sex, and my sex staining it white. That's reality. None of this exists. If I don't believe that, I'm done for.”
He woke up in a beer hall by the harbor, ignorant of who had brought him there or why. They had set him down in a wicker rocking chair, which was still swaying gently.
Before him was a tall frigid wall mosaic: a brutally realistic portrayal of a big band made up of skeleton musicians perched on kegs of beer or clambering with their pointy elbows and knees up pyramids of chilled bottles overflowing with foam and bearing soggy labels for Hatuey and Polar.
The rumba-dancing skeletons tooted on bamboo flutes, sashayed their sharp hips, strummed raspy guitars with long fingernails black as oxhorn. Several of them chugged entire bottles; others, their empty eye sockets peering at the recipe instructions engraved on a rolling pin, prepared a succulent punch that they
adorned with slices of pineapple, gigantic olives, glazed cherries, and even little Chinese parasols that they stuck into a yielding mass of chunky ice cubes.
In front of that garish yet graceful display â scrubbed daily with coal-tar cleanser, or at least so it looked â sporting an indifference or impudence not uncommon among errant and nocturnal people who drift through life with no fixed port, the coachman suddenly appeared. Unbuttoned and unshaven, he looked sleepless, like someone returning from a wake where they served no snacks or from a girl's fifteenth birthday party.
“So, just like in fairy tales . . .” he whispered straight off, coming overly close to Firefly's ear to win an unwarranted confidence, the telltale move of a rascal or a pickpocket. His foul breath flooded the air repeatedly like a haze of bagasse. “What happened afterwards?”
“After what?” Firefly rubbed his eyes.
“After we saw each other, you big oaf.” The driver adopted an exaggerated air of mock astonishment. And he began to dig around his teeth with a toothpick.
“This morning . . .”
“Come on, man! You know we saw each other yesterday morning,
or doesn't time mean anything to you? Tell me, what happened after that?”
“After . . .” Firefly managed to mumble, but somehow he could not wake up entirely or articulate anything without tripping over his tongue.
A big, smooth-skinned mulatta with green eyes steamed across the beer hall toward the back room or the kitchen. She was dressed as a rumba dancer in a skirt with starched flounces; her belly showed and colored ribbons embellished her billowing sleeves. Around her head was an assembly of metallic curlers held tight by a hairnet with plastic coral-hued flowers.
Struck perhaps by something she had forgotten or needed urgently, she came to an abrupt halt beside a chest, immense and dark like a varnished casket, mahogany with copper hinges. She lifted the lid and, struggling to hold it open, pulled a phonograph from the depths. There was a record already in place, with the attentive and alienated dog of His Master's Voice. Using the fairly rusty lateral crank, she wound it up. Then the scratchy voice of Rita Montaner blossomed.
“Tell me! What's the big mystery?” The coachman stood to take off his black vest, as if he were suddenly suffocating from the heat.
“After that, I went to the tower.”
“What tower?”
“The Gothic tower. An elderly girl took me. Down below there's a garden all tiny and wrinkled. There's a red bridge and a waterfall. Old men go there in the morning. They raffle off virgins.”
The driver's guffaws echoed all over the beer hall, bouncing off the enamel of the tiles. “Listen to the things this chump thinks up! He's got flowing water in the tower! And if that weren't enough, a virgin nowadays!” He exploded in a scornful cackle.
Firefly flew up from the rocking chair as if someone had dumped it over. He ran for the door, his steps stumbling and awkward, a puppet blind to whoever was pulling the strings. He lunged for the exit like he was desperate for air. Or the truth.
He tripped, recovered, reached the street.
The rumba dancer opened her eyes wide and crossed herself before slapping her open hand on her forehead â the curlers vibrated with a dull tinkling. “Praised be the Holiest!” And she hurried to the bar.
On the beery wall tiles Firefly's shadow had shrunk as he distanced himself from the rocking chair. It looked like a magnet had drawn it to the edge of the mosaic and then deformed and compressed it into a squat fleeing sphere, bluish shot through with blood-orange streaks, vitreous.
The coachman's, on the contrary, loomed larger when he got up with a glass of anisette in his hand, a crosshatched silhouette in the center of the wall superimposed on the case of beer where a skeleton, wearing a crown of orange blossoms and a veil undulating in the breeze, played the harp.
Both shadows abruptly dissolved when the rumba dancer sent the bar's lights into a violent blackout.
Filled with the inextinguishable energy that comes from realizing you have been played for a fool, Firefly continued running down the street. He had no idea why the image he could not shake, even for an instant, was not that of the ignoble auctioneer Munificence offering Ada's innocent body to the highest bidder, rather the opposite, that of Munificence the generous benefactor who had taken him in, the charity-house mentor faking purity, putting on airs,
lying
. “With all the discipline and order she insisted on in the charity house,” he said to himself, “there was no way Munificence could be unaware of this open leak, this depravity.”