In the midst of this tumult, which ought to have provided some distraction but which in reality perturbed him even more, Firefly’s thoughts returned — the way the threat of dizziness returns or the weedy reek of vomit long after it has disappeared from view — to the image of Ada naked, to the meanness and baseness of the one he had trusted, Munificence, to her unforeseeable wretchedness and duplicity.
Pervaded by that dizzying stench, he understood how he had been manipulated, how he had been used for years and years, nothing but easy prey for the ringleaders, for their poisonous games, their meticulous effort at pretense.
He did not know which he desired more, to be one of the slaves covered in boils and chains about to climb out of the hold and at least make it clear to himself that he was not the owner of his body or his destiny, or on the contrary to walk along the docks until he reached the reefs, where the roaring waves break in furrows, and there give himself over entirely to the sea, to no longer being.
The return of that revolting vision of Ada, which by then he felt obliged to attribute to reality and not, as ought to have been the case, to the clutter of sullied images that cloud a hangover, made the human species seem like irredeemable debris, rubbish. That was it: the dregs, the remains of an ideal creature fashioned in the beginning by some deluded god, and in the end reduced to this prattling pantomime, to this essential filth.
Meanwhile, a few proper ladies began turning up, their faces masked by finely wrought mother-of-pearl fans, who without leaving their carriages sought to acquire newly arrived black girls for domestic service before they could be spoiled by libertarian excesses, or by the lust for suicide and flight that had already ruined the help in more than one palatial home and poisoned the crew in more than one peaceable work camp, thereby populating the already vermin-infested jungle with bloodthirsty Maroons bent on vengeance, primed for murderous raids on the plantations.
The shenanigans that followed put the finishing touch on the mayhem. Amid a storm of blue crates falling every which way, dumped by drunken cabin boys who could not have cared less (a pulley gave way and a big-screen television shattered against a mast), ahead of the slaves themselves, appeared the frenzied salesmen of the coveted merchandise that everyone dreamed of bidding on and profiting by.
Down the gangway came an auctioneer.
His large bare feet were covered with sores and black goop. His tight pants were leather. On his chest the green waving lines of his tattoos, intertwined serpents and ciphers, glistened in the sun like emerald threads. He raised his right hand to ask for silence from the landowners jostling for a spot in a semi-circle around the boarding ramp. Then with the irksome grandiloquence of an Arab storyteller arriving at an oasis, to the four winds he proffered a rotund “Do I hear more?” before reciting seemingly by heart a long inventory of embellished claims for the human product he had brought to market, still healthy despite the seas, robust even, ever potent.
“Big bruiser, nice and dark, dirty, bearded, long-faced Mozambican with tribal tattoos on his face, really wide feet, he’s got all his teeth, sways as he walks.
“Civilized black from the Angolan nation, named Juan, dark as they come, with a bit of a beard, huge, with big eyes.
“Antonio, black from the Coast with three scars on his face and missing the nail on his left big toe, falsetto voice, a dirty-black color.
“Black woman from Angola with plenty of milk, no vices, pretty-faced, slurs her R’s when she speaks. ”
Firefly could not go on listening to the auctioneer, much less to his own morbidly repetitious thoughts. Coming toward him, seeming to surge out of the cluster of slavers, snowy, unpolluted amid the dross, seeking him out with that glassy, pinkish stare he would have recognized anywhere, was the pasty skin-and-bones girl, sent yet again, he told himself, by the harshest orishas, the ones that unmask certain men so they can assail their dim-witted credulity with the intolerable truth.
Her shining dress and her scaly anemic whiteness, the agility with which she slid among the traffickers like a cold-blooded reptile guided solely by the vibrations of her prey, the aureole that surrounded her — all these were accentuated by the sun to the point of hallucination: the unreal that emerges when it is clearest, when it is brightest.
Behind her, the blacks were climbing out of the hold, chained, thirsty; they moaned and squeezed shut their eyes, blinded by the razor’s edge of tropical light. Mice with phosphorescent eyes skimmed along fast as arrows.
Unseeing, unerring instinct having carried her to his side, Firefly could scrutinize her more closely than ever: the livid face and each matted albino lock magnified by excessive proximity or by the sharpness of perception that all repugnance sparks.
He discovered something that until now had escaped him, he could not say why: The scrawny girl had no eyelashes. The discovery left him trembling, as if a deep-sea fish, wriggling, gelatinous, had slithered past him.
Without any reference to what had occurred or even so much as a hello, the elderly child beamed an ironic rictus in his direction, which for her perhaps corresponded to a smile.
“Want to see her again?” her nasal singsong challenged. “Want to know where she ended up? Look for her in the purple house, the one where two canals meet. She’s there, waiting for you.”
The sky once again grew ugly. Tenebrous nimbus clouds, silvery-gray and edged with gold, began piling high in spinning updrafts approaching from the east. Gusts, crafty and freezing, blew in from the north. From the west, a whirling downdraft. To cap it off, from the south came that strange sound the whole city had heard once before a long time ago.
“It’s the souls coming back,” one of the proper ladies averred, forsaking for a moment her mother-of-pearl fan to cross herself.
“It’s not that, your ladyship,” replied the coachman respectfully, though certain of what he was saying and even with a trace of authority. “It’s going to snow.”
THE PAVILION OF THE PURE ORCHID
He believed in the furtive midget’s latest revelation, even if it was offered only for the appalling gratification of mocking him, or for the more benign pleasure of engaging in sheer malice with no risk of reprimand, human or divine.
He fled the port by sea, crossing the thick churning waters of the bay in a rickety launch packed with pilgrims fulfilling promises and with drunks who chugged precipitous cups of oysters on the pier and lukewarm cans of beer during the crossing, which they then tossed overboard to see how they bounced off the propeller’s foamy wake.
He disembarked on the other side of the bay, seized by an excruciating bout of seasickness. Tottering under the archways, he made his way through the barrio of the Santeria priests. Pale young mulattos in underpants and T-shirts, yawning and mussed, used one hand to calm the bulge in their crotches, insubordinate at that hour, and the other to smooth their reddish frizz, stiff and coiled like the strikers on flint lighters, before plunging into sweeping the entire block with thatch brooms, then giving it a soak with buckets of water to settle the “duss.”
The board windows of the vast azure homes were already swinging open to reveal lights inside: fresh candles twinkled on altars surrounded by sky-blue silks, turquoise beads, and little piles of finely ground indigo. He watched someone emerge from a brick courtyard and roam through rooms of assorted colors and clarities.
Firefly made his way deeper into the part of the city where land mixes with water.
Long covered boardwalks painted an intense violet-blue, like they had been rubbed with indigo, were slowly sinking into the swamp. The rambling houses on stilts, which looked to be perforated on all sides so as not to be so stifling, gave the impression they were floating, swaying slightly, hushed, always nocturnal, always alone. They were excessively large for the few who resigned themselves to a life plagued by mosquitoes on those sweltering and pestilent mudflats.