Firefly (14 page)

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.

She looked like a sleepwalker.

She moved among the performers with a sluggishness that was supposed to be lascivious and was just dreary, to the point of being nightmarish.

She wiggled her hips in a drowsy dance, her blank gaze following a dot that floated in the air and fell in long swoops like a dying bird.

Firefly began to cry.

Gator's consorts did not touch the sleepwalker while she slid among them, nor did they even look at her. They continued beating their tambourines and with the tips of their fingers they groped their own nipples, as if they were checking how hard they were. They laughed again and again.

What – the question set Firefly's body atremble – were the occupants of the booths doing when she approached the folding screens and they could almost touch her, could breathe in her aroma through the slits?

Then the dancer, perhaps following a discernible route known by all, approached his screen and Firefly could only look into her eyes and feel his own well up.

“Ada,” he said between sobs, believing at that moment it was her, “how could it be?”

The girl, who undoubtedly could barely hear over the tambourines drowning out his voice, and who in the most obvious way possible was looking anywhere but at the slits, paying the booths not the slightest attention, seemed nevertheless to understand him. Her eyes paused for a moment, rapt, fixed on something in the emptiness and (this is what Firefly believed) she also began to cry.

A thought struck him in the midst of that tumult, the coup de grace: Suppose his own sister were one of the “models” in these repugnant tableaus?

Suddenly he lashed out with his fist against the screen, against the insufferable image of that body, sullied and naked, dumped into a feeble life of sleepwalking for the
ocambos
.

The hulking contraption collapsed. Beyond the flattened wreck of scrap wood and rags, abruptly in place of the vanished mulatta who must have been hauled off, stood Gator shuddering with rage. A smear of cinnabar on his forehead made him look even more misshapen than usual.

“Man is the shit of the universe,” Firefly told himself. And he stopped punching.

It was useless. On his other side, like a spring released, stood the Dahomean servant, this time carrying not a snack but an enormous maul, like a ritual weapon wrapped in bandage tape. The white strips, Firefly realized immediately, were stained light brown from dried excrement or coagulated blood.

Gator's face, observing the coming reprimand from a few steps away, turned deep violet, became elongated, convulsive (or at least that is what Firefly saw, in what may not have been a nightmare, although it obeyed the same rules); his harelip mouth opened and closed in an inaudible wail.

The tambourine players picked up the pace of their banging and thumping, filling Firefly's ears with a frenetic, deafening drumming intended to drive the listener crazy.

“You see this?” was all the befuddled famulus said to the harried fly. “You want it up your ass?” He brandished the maul, then paused for a threatening moment. “Or would you rather I split your skull in two and dump you overboard so you'll rot in the swamp, you faggot bastard?”

Firefly did not answer. He looked quickly and for the last time toward the center of the room. Just like the mulatta's beforehand, the bodies of Isidro and Gator had evaporated. He had the sudden
impression that everything was calming down. Fed up with one another, or with the pointed one-act farce they probably put on every day, the boys were lying on the floor, sandals off, using their tambourines for pillows; they had stopped their caressing and each lay alone, his Greek tunic wrapped around him like a comfy nightshirt.

Firefly recalled the time as a child in the leper clinic when he jumped like a windup toy to launch his awkward flight and got spattered with the lumpy noxious liquid from an enema. He felt trapped and alone. He saw himself sliding down the cistern on the chamber pot. He felt watched as he shat, the butt of the furious ruffian's ridicule.

And he took off, running crazily toward the middle of the cockpit, toward the ferns.

He bounded over two of the exhausted ephebes, who turned over with vigorous snores, like disturbed animals, and ended up sleeping in each other's arms.

Beyond two plaster columns he crossed a stuffy storage loft held up by cardboard boxes and crammed full of tunics. Through a door open a crack, he spied the sea.

He ran along the wooden pier. He looked back. No one was following.

He thought he heard the tambourines start up. Or maybe it
was the motor of a far-off boat, nocturnal defectors trying, despite the radar's watchful eye, to escape the island.

He breathed deeply, looked up at the heavens filled with stars gathered in calm spirals.

Only then did he notice he was injured. He could not say when it happened or what had caused it: his arms and feet were bleeding.

“These wounds,” he said out loud, “will not heal. They are
the marks of mendacity
, the signatures on my body of disgrace.”

A putrid stench rose up from the swamp. Iridescent white animals, creeping and viscous, somewhere between lizard, eel, and snake, wriggled over the weeds and bare patches of the bog.

A bolt of lightning traced a golden ideogram on the horizon.

The reptiles wrapped themselves around each other with short snapping sounds, knotted themselves to each other in repugnant couplings or petty scuffles, entanglings they then tried to undo with slippery somersaults and spastic contractions.

Everyone deceived. Everything nauseated. But deep down, he told himself, he was thankful: he had seen the true face of man, his essential duplicity, his
need
, as unquenchable as hunger or thirst, for trickery, for wretchedness.

Now he knew people were capable of anything: of selling off father and mother, of turning over to the Inquisition and the stake
the one they were pretending to protect. Capable of treachery, of usury with their loved ones. Of lies.

He lay facedown on the creaking dock.

He put his head over the edge.

To throw up.

He swore he would return to exterminate them all. And himself along with them, and thus cleanse the universe of so much dung. He certainly knew where to get rat poison and how to mix it with rum so no one could tell.

He turned over on his back.

In the sky, the fiery constellations seemed to spin.

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