People nailed shut their doors and windows and shrouded their mirrors with black cloths when the screams of the souls reached their ears, because only an incorporeal and tortured army could give rise to such an interminable wail.
“It’s the innocent children murdered by the Inquisition,” they said, “back to demand justice. Their bodies are mangled but those are the voices they had in life, for the voice is all that remains intact after death.”
“What innocents, what horseshit!” Making his first appearance in this story, throwing open the door of the living room, only to slam it shut with a bang that nearly shatters the windowpanes, is the father of the melon-headed chatterbox. “This is hurricane season!”
The storm that soon materialized gave rise to the fragile fast-talker’s second phobia. And his most shrewd “performance.”
It all began with a big party; island parties are sad and tumultuous. The women wore pants (they had started the day haggard and short-tempered, drinking highballs and reading their horoscopes), plush kerchiefs on their heads and on their feet big wooden clogs like stilts to keep them high and dry.
Neighborhood bands were blowing. What reigned was the sort of disorder, the sort of dirty-undershirt impudence that happens on days of national mourning or general strike. Without the least hint of shame, the drunks sitting on street corners opened bottles of beer in full view (which they later tossed into the storm sewer) and guzzled them with a queasy grimace and in one long swill (taunting hand in the air, all lit up) to keep them from getting warm.
The old blacks had carried their flimsy little domino tables into the street to escape the stale dank heat that sticks to your skin between gusts. Straddling unsteady chairs, they banged their tiles down with such fury that it seemed they would sink the whole board. They cursed, swearing they would have a white woman; they spit on the ground; they drank alarmingly long gulps of harsh rum while awaiting a fresh breeze.
Every hour, they tuned into the weather report from the observatory. On the radio, a meteorologist priest offered contradictory indications of the tempest’s trajectory. Firefly, needless to say, interpreted for his sister (the only one accomplished at deciphering the boy) the cleric’s convoluted predictions, which, while both cautious and learned, avoided with precise paraphrases any possible mishap.
“The hurricane’s path,” the priest asserted in a metallic voice made for the big-time microphone as well as the pulpit’s echo, “traces a spiral opening up from its origin. Before it peters out it will head north, like migrating birds after the thaw. The danger lies in the voracious calm of the vortex, that innermost silence that announces the second lashing. Of course,” he concluded modestly, “no hurricane travels on rails, so regarding the time of arrival. ”
The sister, best known as “the Galician mouse” because that is how she dressed up for burials or when they were alone at home or to alleviate the no less funereal boredom of school assemblies and carnival celebrations, followed every detail of Firefly’s hand signals with her questioning eyes, while the adults, gigantic puppets in clean clothes with brusque gestures and grating voices, drank endless cups of linden-flower or basil or peppermint tea to appease the anticipated nervous collapse.
At noon, grave and furrow-browed, the family and those close to them gathered in the weaving room, near the window whose panes had disappeared under a striped black-and-white convolution, crucified with tape and court plaster against the winds. On the great mahogany cabinet they tuned in the station of the observatory. Listening to the cleric’s gongoristic dispatches, they made conflicting calculations to deduce the possible hour of the disaster.
The sister tiptoed close and touched Firefly affectionately on the shoulder, seeking an explanation with the deference of a dog putting his paw on his master’s thigh and nudging with his head in pursuit of a lump of sugar.
“Bats,” the melon-head then whispered into her ear, lingering on the sound with the gravity of one who has found the solution to an enigma. “Bats flew by.”
They looked at each other then with astonishment.
Both paled.
They heard on the roof, light as acrobatic cats, new blasts of air.
In one holy amen the hurricane blew in like an Aeolus possessed. The sea turned wild and the crests of the waves soared as if spewing great wads of spit against the colonial façades on the far side of the street. Birds screeched, flying low to the ground. The palm trees began to bend until their crowns touched the roofing tiles.
Holding the circular shutter of the oxeye that usually ventilated the room open just a crack (they never opened the window, nor do I think they could have: the heavy sliding bolts were merely a decorative whim of affected architects), each by turn contemplated and conveyed to the rest, openmouthed and dying for news, the windswept panorama that surrounded them.
One by one they climbed a folding stepladder and used all their strength to hold the shutter tight and keep a devastating gust from slipping in and sweeping away the paintings, the faded map with Gothic letters and a single continent, and the central spiderlike copper chandelier strewn with the stubs — soft stalactites — of old tapers.
People were still in the street. The raconteur on the perch with a stiff-as-a-board disparaging style critical of everything was one of the aunts; the other two, from below, punctuated her lapidary phrases with cunning adjectives and empty sneers, which they wielded like amulets against fear.
An entire family was fleeing under a glossy white waterproof tablecloth. Arms open wide, the father held two corners of the protective rectangle aloft. The tablecloth shivered furiously, as if shaken by choleric titans; the crying progeny huddled underneath. They banged on every door they found, pleading for shelter.
An aunt, from below, sarcastically: “As if they hadn’t had plenty of warning about the calamity! As if the silverware hadn’t started turning green three days ago and the dogs hadn’t lost their appetite and sense of direction! Well, since they paid no heed, let the wind carry them off!”
The other, farther up, after a moment of silence: “Nothing, nothing’s happening and that’s the worst of it. An insufferable calm. ”
Then it was Firefly’s turn to be the reporter. And it was not that he was already privy to the objective — in reality, sarcastic and vile — world of adults; no, more that he had his own eloquence, his own precision, for moments like this. Such a mature child for his age! The proof: an inured Rosicrucian who once ran into him in the street touched his forehead and exclaimed, “Here shines a light, the light of intelligence!”
So the melon-head climbed laboriously up the stepladder. His sister seemed to hold him up with her gaze. He reached the lookout. Under the rain, the city was like a weaving with diagonal stripes and all the colors pulverized, glued onto a white cardboard backing.
Little did his supposed fluency serve him. It turns out that sometimes, faced with what has to be said, words seem to soften and hang, flaccid and dripping saliva like the tongues of the hanged. What Firefly saw through the oxeye, as they say, had no name. He opened and closed his mouth like a harpooned porgy, trying to convey the scene to the inquiring chorus. But nothing came out. I’ll try to say it myself, in the most neutral way I can to avoid any possible humiliation of that speechless boy.