The grand seigneur of that couple was the Gentleman from Paris, who dressed in a black velvet cape in the suffocating heat of the island summer, his chest armored with ancient newspapers and magazines, and who spouted an ardent prosopopoeia featuring backwards tropes worthy of Lezama or of Chicharito and Sopeira, which he proffered in impeccable Castilian diction.
His unhinged partner was the Marchioness, a splotchy-skinned, gray-haired black woman with an easy stride and Versailles-esque manners, the play protégé of witty dissolute ladies and even of real marchionesses (to the degree the woody worm-eaten branches of insular heraldry allowed), who dressed her in outlandish attire left over from presidential balls or some bash at the Tropicana where the gowns had been ordered from the finest of Erté’s disciples.
At the far end of that dump for architectonic and human ruins rose a solitary and dilapidated tower, the incongruent remains of a fortress that turned out to be indefensible or had been simply abandoned by commanders who were insolvent or had been relieved in mid-construction, to which several flamboyant volutes had given a vague Antillean Gothic look. No one went near it, nor did anyone even mention it (and when they did it was with their fingers making the cross), to the point that it was presumed haunted and cursed.
He spotted the girls right away, at the end of the alleyway. There were two.
They were seated on folding chairs on the sidewalk, but backwards with the chair backs between their open legs. Their brocade outfits dragged on the ground; they wore pierced hoop earrings that reached their shoulders and tortoiseshell hairpins perched on the crowns of their heads. The tight black spirals of their kiss-curls outlined a lattice of rigid volutes on their foreheads and temples. The edges of their purple lips were underscored with a line of black. Their eyelids were two half-moons of trembling aluminum that flashed up and down like the fins of frightened fish.
A sour stench of sweat, beer, or rancid semen emanated from the interior of the sleazy dive behind them, along with a bluish blinking from the jukebox, drunken laughter and shouts, and a roll of raucous castanets.
“Are you ready to try it out?” one of the sparkling hussies murmured at once, fluttering her eyes for effect and pointing to his crotch.
“Do you know what it’s for?” added the other. And she let out a stentorian cackle, stamping her heel on the ground and spreading her legs even farther apart. From the sidewalk she picked up a glass half full of a light green phosphorescent liquid, which she knocked back. She shook her head as if to pull herself together, snorted, and collected the tortoiseshell clasp, which had rolled to the curb. She shouted back into the bar, asking for more “fresh herb.”
Her dancing partner was smoking very thin cigars, the ends of which she tapped, like a woodpecker opening a hole in a tree, against an oversized cigarette case encrusted with shining costume jewels in the shape of a hammer and sickle.
“A present,” she explained to Firefly without him asking a thing, “from the captain of a Russian ship that broke down at the refineries in the port and now – nothing lasts forever – on his way back to Kiev.” She sighed. “Katalavenis?” she added, chuckling, and she lit another Partagás Culebrita.
From the square came the screech of a streetcar, and from a radio nearby the first chords of a tune.
The voices and guitars hung suspended for a moment in the air, along with a whiff of hot coffee, before being lost amid the bells of women selling java, the cries of vendors, and the blaring of car horns:
You like Carola, yes you really do,
Here’s a song from the hills
To dance when it’s just you two
Feeling every thrill . . .
“Go on in,” the gaudy smoker practically scolded, once she had settled down. “No charge for the first time. And above all,” she added, pointing to her bewildered double with a grimace of repulsion, “don’t go with this strumpet. She’ll do it all hurry-scurry and wrong. ’Cause that’s what she is: a fiendish she-devil.”
The room was vaster than could be imagined from the street. A life-size Saint Barbara encased in glass with her feudal battlements and her tin sword reigned in a back-wall niche next to a wrought-iron window. Beyond those black arabesques lay a yard filled with pots of flowering geraniums, a stone staircase, and an artesian well with a bucket and pulley.
A very thin strip of palpitating red neon outlined the niche’s upper arch and extended in a straight line, interrupted in two tiny spots by electric wires, along a shelf filled with bottles, casting on the mauve wallpaper an orange glow in the shape of an awning that faded progressively as it reached up toward the rosette on the ceiling. Flies were drawn to that incandescent thread to immolate themselves with a zap of electrocuted elytra.
The scarlet mantle of the virgin saint threw a shadow on a stemmed bowl of ripe apples continually replenished at her feet.
Venturing in from the yard, up to the wrought-iron window, and then into the room itself in small wary leaps, looking all ways at once, a tomeguin finch came to peck at the fruit.
The stone staircase led from the purple yard up to the whores’ bawdy hideaway.
As Firefly approached the first steps, an overpowering feeling of humiliation gripped him.
Andalusians were supposed to be lookers, lovely and clean, glowing, funny and fat-cheeked, but when he climbed the stone staircase and entered their garret crammed with shelving, Firefly saw these two were pasty and out of shape, caked with gaudy make-up and stinking of patchouli. And what could be said of the faux-Spanish decor? Sets of three- or four-board white shelves covered every wall, the end pieces drilled full of holes like delicate Mozarabic lace and each shelf chockablock with large costumed dolls in iconic flamenco postures that sent the flounces and petticoats of their teeming trains swirling down in a froth of vivid glowing colors.
Their little removable porcelain arms were bent backwards, revealing blackened rusty joints at the elbows and wrists; their fingers were set in various gestures; their dainty faces, incredibly white masks with long shining curled eyelashes and perfectly symmetrical arched eyebrows, seemed to be watching from the depths of their big opalescent glass eyes. They winked, astonished or flirtatious, whenever the chubby girls rocked them in their cushiony arms. Their cute little mouths were minuscule crimson hearts. Reigning over them, upright and flexible as a bulrush, was a string-puppet toreador.
“It’s so hot!” one of the plump girls exclaimed as she let loose her hair. She placed the mother-of-pearl clasp on one of the shelves, at the foot of a frolicking chanteuse.
She shook her head vigorously, as if she had just emerged from a dip in the river.
The liberated locks opened into a rigid fan, like the marble curls of a Greek athlete, old-fashioned and taut.
“Feels like we’re going to suffocate,” the other added, pulling her dress over her head in one fell swoop.
She rolled it up and threw it furiously to the floor, like a rag.
All that was left were high-heels and a shining whalebone corset whose struts shaped and held her, a Venus about to burst from abundance or excessive bliss.
The three of them looked at one another against the multicolored cascade tumbling from the shelves, all red polka dots, stiff flounces, bows, and ruffles. One, corseted and majestic like a saint in a rural procession; Firefly, in his little white outfit and his narrow leather tie, a Texan at a fair; the other, crowned and circumspect, displaying her double chin like a turtledove at its most lyrical. While the latter stroked the cheeks of the novice with the tips of her purple nails, she tendered monosyllabic gurgles of voluptuousness in a husky, diabolical basso profundo.
“Well, what do we do now?” asked the trembling cowboy swinging his head from side to side to contemplate one after the other his good-natured corruptors.
“Now?” they asked back in unison, and they glanced at each other in astonishment and unleashed the hoarse gravelly cackle of hardened smokers or fools at the end of a zarzuela. “Sandwich!” they decided conci
sely.
Firefly gaped at them perplexed, doing his best to untangle the libidinal riddle, but the arduous mental effort was short-lived: one of the brutes, making use of all the potent and wide-ranging strength in the giant pistons of her arms, pushed him down onto the cot.
He fell face-first on the old quilt, whose aroma he recognized straightaway, immobilized as he was by his abuser’s brawny mitts: it smelled of old witch’s fingers, the way Munificence’s did when she got mad and started smacking her pupils and her knuckles would turn red and hot. Could that pitiless plotter be the mother of these pseudo-Sevillians? And if that were the case, why were they not living at her place, capable as they seemed, sewing and singing, instead of pursuing such a strange line of work?
Facedown on the stinking coverlet, sniffing the threads, gnawed at by the impatience and fear that overtook his body like lashings of hail, Firefly awaited the surprise of sex.
He did not have to wait long.
While one of the deflowerers held him down with her big hand, the other, at once conscientious and distant, efficient as a hired mourner at a moneyed wake, stuck her fingers in his pants at the waist without undoing the button or the belt. That soft flat hand, warm, shaken slightly by brief tremors, as if the chubby girl’s breathing or talk were rippling through her entire body, was like the silk of the recamier: smooth, ready for a rub, both comfy and tense against his sex, alongside the notebook and pencil still in his pocket.
The other hand, the ham that held him to the bed, open against his back and now lower down, sheltered above the curve of his ass as if its volume coincided precisely with that hollow, began to move lazily up and down like it was squeezing a Turkish pillow or gesturing, “Slow down, slow down.”
Firefly closed his eyes, took a deep breath like the prelude to a sigh, recalled what he had felt when the porcelain chamber pot slid down the cistern with him hanging on to the handles, besieged by his aunts’ chortles in the purple shade of the cockatoo-filled royal poinciana, until the basin smashed against the floor. He felt it again now: a cramp making its way up through his tummy.
It was nighttime. He was at the beach. The water was oily, warm, and black; sea wasps swam about. Flying fish sailed like daggers from one wave to the next. He let himself drift, facedown in the water. A cool breeze caressed his back. From the shore, his sister called to him, “Firefly! Firefly!” But he paid no heed. The voice was unreal, too far off, or maybe imitated by somebody else. Nothing mattered more than this sense of abandon, this languorous release to the waves.
Now, the upper hand descended as well, sliding under his belt, caressing his ass. He felt the outsized fingers resting on his skin, three on one of his cheeks, two on the other. Then, the longest fell carelessly into the crack. Now he felt two fingers on one side and two on the other, the long one going a bit deeper with each oscillation, rubbing the cleft as if by accident. Suddenly, the manipulator flipped him over so he was faceup, panting; her hand slipped in his fly, and then her warm, moist tongue.
He was in a barbershop full of cracked mirrors and jars topped with long rubber tubes and pestles for pulverizing alcohol and amber. It smelled of Arabic gum, rubbing oil, old men. It might have been his first visit to the barber.
“Have you ever seen it?” one of the mulatto barbers asked jokingly while peeking at Firefly out of the corner of his eye. He was taking care of an old gray-haired guy in the next seat who had a toothpick between his lips and a shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons open to his navel.
“What?” answered his big-bellied partner, feigning interest while he stirred a pot of foam and brushed light touches of soap on his customer’s throat.
“The crack,” the brown-skinned man clarified in a suppressed whisper, faking unease, as if this were the first time they had ever exchanged this tomfoolery.
“What crack?”
“Come on, in your behind.”
“No, never.”
“Oh . . .”
“So, how do you do it?”
Here the lewd tutor glanced again at Firefly, perhaps to indicate that the perverse instructions were meant for him.
“You put a mirror on the floor . . .”
“And then?” Big-belly had stopped shaving and was listening, his razor motionless against his customer’s throat, surprised, exuding innocence, as if this were his first exposure to the perplexing procedure.
“Well, then,” continued the impudent mulatto, “you squat on it.”
Firefly had felt a weight on his chest. Now, while the plump girl’s finger ran around the edge, poked about, now to slip in, now to touch the inside, and now that the oscillation, the soft undulation emanated from that finger, he felt the same pressure again, as if all the bifurcations of the bronchial tree were swollen shut and the air was stuck at the crossroads, incapable of choosing a path, until it lost its usual clarity, became charred and deadly.
While he shuddered, sweated, believed he was going to lose all his blood through his sex, while everything spilled out into the indolent hand, the two girls chatted happily, untouched by the novice’s astonishment, pleasure, anguish. The whores challenged each other with demented riddles, wild and repetitive like scratched phonograph records.
“I want something but I don’t know what it is.”
“I know. Let me tell you. Is it something sweet?”
“Yes . . .”
“Cold?”
“Yes . . .”
“White?”
“Yes . . .”
“With rum?”
“Yes.”
“Crème de vie!”
When he came back downstairs, he noticed the jukebox in the dance hall was playing. Dull goofy music flowed from the machine. Handclaps and castanets. Dancing in front of it, illuminated by the greenish glow from the buttons, was a very thin child dressed only in a white linen cloth tied around his waist. When he raised his hands to snap his fingers, all his ribs showed. He followed the rhythm but was distracted, absent, staring into space, as if his true self were somewhere else and he was only repeating to exhaustion the steps from a lesson. His skin was brown and dry. His incredibly long hair swung when he turned his head, or when he tilted forward and then unexpectedly to the side or back. With his narrow white feet he kept time on the cool tiles.
Firefly remained silent, riveted.
He thought hard about Ada.
And he cried.
THE URGE TO LAUGH
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 a
bove 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.
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