A seminarian with very fine whiskers dusted the minuscule gold-and-red chapel every Sunday.
To reach the street on their way to school, the girls raced impetuously through the first floor of the offices, zigzagging around the furniture buried in paper: “A sip of vinegar,” Munificence told them about that bit, “which you'll have to endure.”
Not knowing exactly why, Firefly began spying on the pupils, though he could only devote himself to that solitary pleasure after six in the afternoon. Once he was old enough, the melon-head spent his days in frenetic, breathless races between the offices and
the corner store, a Mozarabic tray in hand bearing stained and tottering little glasses of coffee with condensed milk, croissants, pastries dripping with clear syrup, mille-feuilles, sacred-heart cakes, Morón cookies, and candied guava, brilliantly red like garnet, crowned with little squares of fresh cheese.
He also went for tobacco and stamps, Dutch quarto paper, envelopes, change, the afternoon papers; he cleaned the offices redolent with ink, picked up the trash, swept the shelves with an ostrich-feather duster, and using two legal documents even shined the shoes of the scriveners who would stop by their cubicles always in the morning and always in a hurry to consult certain records and tear up others, erase names and numbers or change them for what they had scribbled on little slips of paper, which they would simply paste over the old ones.
Munificence set him up in the document depot so that he might make something of himself and thus be saved from hunger, orphanage, plague, alcohol, and women.
He received considerable tips, for sure, but much more in the way of taunts and abuse. The lawyers with their black leather briefcases did not hesitate to reproach him with a slap across the cheek for coffee grown cold along the way, for a wormy piece of fruit, or even for lack of deference in the way he was obliged to address them.
Once they had left for the day, and Munificence had slid the three bolts closed, he would watch the swimming goldfish, hide his face, and cry.
Among the frisky girls, Firefly quickly zeroed in on one, plumper and whiter than the rest, with red hair and large violet eyes. She smelled terrific: of powdered lavender and mothballs.
He saw her again early one morning in her school uniform: white blouse, Prussian blue skirt with a ribbon at the hem, high patent leather shoes, and a stack of rag-paper notebooks cinched to her back; she held the straps taut with her thumbs in front of her breasts. Despite the load, she walked erect, looking straight ahead, like an Indian from the highlands with a cargo of coca leaves.
Firefly raced to the front room for a closer look; she was sliding open the bolts on the wooden door. Her fragrance wafted toward him, not lavender now but ground-bee honey, which is sweet and dark and heals all, but whose wax can block your ears and make you deaf.
She had her red hair pulled back and tied at the neck with a strip of mauve felt; gray stockings, like a nun's, clung to her legs. Now that he had her so close, the scent of lavender returned like the first time, and he understood that
he loved her for her aromas
.
Munificence's other pupils were just as pretty, and their big teeth and clean unadorned ears even reminded him of his aunts, but none of them smelled like her. Munificence did once, when she gave him the
crème de vie
.
Firefly approached and timidly touched the backpack of notebooks. “What's your name?”
“Ada,” the redhead answered grumpily, as if she were being pestered by a buzzing insect.
“Hada?” the melon-head considered. “That's not the name of a real person, it's a storybook character.”
“And what's your name?” the squirrel retorted before closing the door in his face.
“Firefly.”
“Firefly?” she asked with a smirk from the sidewalk. “That's not the name of a real person, it's a bug.”
The next day a loud ruckus startled him.
The yelling from deep within the charity house came closer, imprecations, insults, and threats which Firefly could not make out but which echoed around the yard, causing the quintessentially quarrelsome and meddlesome notaries to lean out the windows and even to empty an ashtray full of disgusting butts onto the caterwauling women, and then bang it in a conga rhythm on the blue windowsill.
Munificence had taken hold of one of the youngest and weakest students, a girl in uniform but strangely barefoot. She had her by the arms, as if she were a rabid beast about to bite.
The prisoner squirmed, kicked every which way, bit at her executioner's wrists to try and wriggle free.
Was she a rebellious student, too young for the charity's stern rules? What Firefly saw on closer viewing left him baffled: She was more like an old woman, wrinkled and scrawny, disguised as a pupil. Or the opposite: a withered and pasty infant, prematurely devastated by scurvy or nerves. Her shiny hair was streaked with gray, or maybe excessively blond, washed with chamomile or the peroxide they use as a disinfectant.
“You're expelled!” screamed Munificence, beside herself and mortified. “Expelled!”
Taking as witnesses the students who had followed her from the charity house with their wicker hoops, embroidery needles, and balls of yarn, plus the big-shot lawyers, exhilarated by the melee, who had come down to the landing on the stairs, and Firefly himself, she accused: “She's bedeviled! She's cursed! They caught her in the chapel praying backwards. Under her pillow they found a copper stone, a white-and-maroon necklace, and two seashells. The witch!”
She managed to haul her to the front door.
Then, like a big uncoordinated doll, her face white with eggshell powder or rage, she threw the girl into the street with all her strength.
“You'll see,” the platinum girl screamed from the sidewalk, expending the last of her energy in a death rattle. “You'll see how I take revenge. I leave it all in God's hands.”
And she limped off.
Munificence came back inside. She closed the door and shrugged.
He slept curled up on the recamier, elbows touching knees. In the morning, he would straighten up his bedding of dockets of irreconcilable cases, obtuse demands, or specious suits against unknowns, the trials of which were periodically postponed and for that reason were not to be filed away. Before bed, he would calmly stack the most crumpled documents at the foot of the sofa; the softest ones, those that had been fingered for years and had turned silky like tobacco leaves, made a good pillow. Amid the querulous papers he always fell right to sleep, protected by their cane fibers, by their night of ink. He dreamed about hefty sealing-wax stamps, a squirrel devouring nuts, and also an enormous white wooden house by the sea. Gulls knocked against the windowpanes; the nighttime coast was full of fireflies lighting up
the grass with their phosphorescent lamps. Someone, perhaps his sister, told him something about that pulsating green, something he could not understand. He yelled at her to explain. Then he would awaken soaked in sweat, crying. One night he peed on the recamier.
That imperial couch lay on the creaky floorboards beside the window of a cramped office. From there he could look out at the yard, the ceiba tree and its nocturnal owls, the first rays of sun reflected off the pond, maybe the red stain of a fish, the early-morning departure of the pupils and their punctual return at dawn as the six raucous bells of the cathedral rang out.
Despite his vigilance, it was not sight but sound one rainy morning that alerted him to the nearness of Ada: the toes and heels of the high patent leather shoes tapping across the moist paving stones of the yard. He leaped from the recamier. He rubbed his eyes hard to reassure himself he was not dreaming. No, it was she. From the window he saw her walk toward the offices, indifferent to the rain, erect, proud, gazing at the top of the ceiba as if she were looking for a bird, with that way of angling her shoulders before turning, before tilting the rest of her body and circling the pool, as if she were announcing her trajectory, her destiny.
She stopped abruptly. Her gaze followed the ephemeral rings traced by the fish; she moistened the tips of her fingers in the cool
water and dried them on her blue skirt. She continued on to the front room, thumbs looped in the straps.
Firefly waited a moment. He slept fully dressed, so he smoothed his clothes with his hands, and his hair too, before going after her. He bounded down the staircase, skipping steps like someone possessed.
“Ada,” he said panting, now by the door, “Ada . . .”
“What can I do for you?” And she shook her red hair, which today she wore loose and turned up at the ends like a cabin boy.
“I've got something to tell you . . .”
“I've no time.”
Firefly never knew why what came to mind in that moment, as if he were looking at a photograph, was the explanation Munificence gave him one day about the heart and the blood. He understood there and then the blue trembling he could see in the veins of his arms. That was all he knew of the human body, although at night he would rub himself still clothed against the silk of the recamier, an exercise that never went beyond tedium, never assuaged his fear or even revealed why he felt the urge to do it.
Yet he knew that this was what he wanted to talk to her about: the fragility of the body, that miracle. If the heart stops, death comes. That was why he did not want Ada to sleep, ever, so that her heart would never forget to beat.
“Ada, I want to tell you something about the heart.”
“Leave me alone,” the red giant responded. “I've already heard plenty of nonsense.”
“Ada . . . your laces . . .”
The very same angel that had guided him down the cistern and out of the hospital now blew these words his way.
“The laces of your right shoe.”
She did no more than stick out her foot and gaze at the mezzanine windowpanes while Firefly kneeled down and tied the laces in a double bow with such tender care it could have been her heart he was touching instead of her shoes. Then he rested the palm of his right hand on the patent leather toe, as if he hoped his sweat would cloud its shine.
Ada pulled her foot back. She turned away. She walked on to the door and slid open the bolts.
Firefly remained doubled over, looking at his own dirty shoes wrinkled like two old skins, his darned socks, the perfect geometry of the joins between the floor tiles, and then the door by which Ada had gone out, the open bolts that perhaps still retained the warmth of her white hands.
He wanted to race after her, to find another pretext to touch her. But a sudden pain caught him in the middle of his chest, a vicious lack of air. He heard whistling when he breathed, felt he
was suffocating. It was obvious his heart was about to give out. To recover, he had once been told, he needed a bowl of hot soup made from the turkey buzzard that soars so high. But for the moment all he had was choking, hacking, lack of air. Ada was air. He unbuttoned his shirt. Something told him not to move, to try to breathe deeply and slowly, to think of something else.
It was useless. Ada was air. And she was far away.
He was about to keel over and split his head on the tiles, when he heard the sudden squeal of the hinges.
He looked up. Through the gap in the half-open door Ada's head appeared, looking for him.
“Thanks,” the redhead shouted.
And she slammed the door shut.
It was morning. Yet it seemed to him that the day was ending, that the light was retreating and abandoning the furniture, the room, every little thing bit by bit. He understood then that what he lacked was not air or a clear view of things or Ada's body. The something missing was much more vast and obscure, something neither close at hand nor far away, rather running parallel. The work of doing without was incessant: gnawing, gnawing. The nocturnal rumbling of rats terrified by the flood after the hurricane. Hardworking rats, devouring the wood in the fireplace.
He recalled the house by the sea, heard the roar of the waves,
saw a great lamp of tarnished copper swinging in the center of the room; the luminous green of the fireflies went dark. Now, lack flooded everything. Even Ada's body. It gnawed at everything, contaminated everything. It soiled every existing thing with its inanity.
“Firefly! Firefly dear!”
From the mezzanine, Munificence was calling him.
The days went by, each identical to the one before, in gloomy treks for café con leche and candied guava. Identical, but not for him. He kept up his nighttime vigil, rubbing his sex against the silk, and his ridiculous daytime frenzy. But he was no longer his old self, rather somebody else, somebody plagued by doubts. Not about Ada's feelings, or the possibility he might be the victim of a sick joke, or what lay behind the notaries' despotic abuse; no, rather doubts about the munificence of Munificence, for example, about whether everything came down to its appearance or its reality.
So he took up spying, but not like before. He no longer knew what to spy on, or whom. For days on end, throughout the interminable rainy season, in the endless owl-filled nights.
Until one evening by the fishpond, when the lamps were going out, he saw that one second-floor notary office remained lit. He could make out, yes it was she, Munificence's silhouette behind a tulle curtain, then Ada's looking inhibited, timid. And then those of two men, one short and stout, likely in shirt and tie, the other taller and gawky, briefcase in hand.
No doubt about it: It was them.
But why were they here?
As powerfully as he had needed air, he sensed he was about to find out. Up to that moment he had lived in the clouds, without happiness but also without worry. He cared more now about learning the truth than about breathing: What were they doing here, the accusers who had unmasked his make-believe at the hospital?
Several thoughts battered him, each of them unbearable.