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:
Poem
from
Plaza
del
Vapor
*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?
DISILLUSION
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.
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 – 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 h
eart 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.
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