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 concisely.
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?