Have you seen the little kid in that Goya tapestry bobbing up and down on a tablecloth being shaken by four peasant women? Or those Chinese acrobats who bounce like beads on a taut string? Well, though it seems unbelievable, Firefly jumped just like that from the simple cot that sheltered him, no tablecloth, no taut string, as soon as he saw the outstretched, outsized arms of the radiesthesist and the herbalist coming at him like gyrating tentacles about to strangle him.
“That leap settled it.” The obese one is now speaking without slides before a packed classroom. He waves the pendulum about like a pointer; nothing interrupts the sepulchral silence of the place but pencils and sighs; the devotees record with the former and concur with the latter the professor’s all-encompassing evidence. “And it proved beyond any doubt that the energy contained in a ‘catatonic simulation’ can, via that hysterical conversion noted by Charcot, be transformed into ‘agitation tremens.’ There have been cases,” he says, the mangy dog punctuating his sentences by rustling the beaded curtain, while a stink of potato soup wafts in from the kitchen, “of Teresian nuns, hardly acrobats, who went straight from ecstasis to compulsive flexion: drooling, their eyes glassy, they’d bend over backwards. until their heads touched their heels.”
Let’s leave the culpable extra-large cranium hanging in the air for a moment before he completes his fall. A moment to analyze the situation, to unravel if possible the Gordian knot of this “familicidal” personality, as the Diario de la Marina put it in their apt headline, yet “vulnerable, even fragile, ever affectionate, at times exemplary.”
Whoever is innocent, or believes himself to be, defends himself. Whoever retains some trace of purity, a surviving smidgen of his original decency, answers the accusations. But he who is wholly guilty, or who suspects as much, can do nothing but remain silent, hide his face, dodge insults, flee.
The poor melon-head figures his error is indelible and he is lost for good; that is why he leaps the way he leaps. Reproof and self-disgust are what give rise to his bounding energy. Nothing else. It is the “urgent, urgent” need (he repeats the word to himself) to become somebody else that explains his sudden ability to jump.
So much so that he can visualize his own body hanging there. And he feels it so sullied and blameworthy that it has become no more than a charcoal silhouette, a dirty rag, a useless black burden. Better to let himself fall, allow himself to plummet as if he were still astride that fecal cistern. Allow himself to slide toward his mother, run into her open arms, hear her voice next to his ear: “It’s all over now, it’s all over now.”
He lands back on the cot as the accuser and his pal, who is brandishing a bunch of purple plants, followed by several breath less and blood-curdling nuns, close in on their prey. Purulent fingers point at him once again: “Make him pay for his crime! The devilish monster! He tried to poison his own family!”
The hairless Chinaman bounces like a doll stuffed with sawdust. Weak. Utterly without strength. And the tiny bit that remains he draws on to run.
He crossed the courtyard diagonally. The accusing shouts of the lepers fell on him like a rain of hot stones and ash through which he barely managed to move; a very familiar paralysis began to take hold of him, like tetanus rising up from his feet. Urging himself on, he tried to reach the tiled door but felt his legs refuse. Then he tried to scream. As in a dream, he opened his mouth, sent air rushing from his throat, from his chest, from his belly. He pushed hard. Nothing came out.
It seemed to him undeniable that his body had become superfluous, a useless excess, morbid, better eliminated so the world could recover its equilibrium, its original harmony. It was as if something or someone were urgently demanding his exclusion, his eradication in the pursuit of cleanliness and an ideal of order. He imagined the peevish gesture of an immaculate muscled hand, flicking from some untainted marble a disgusting insect, a larva, a crazy man’s spittle, something abject yet visible, a focal point attracting everyone’s gaze like a magnet: that which must be extirpated.
From the lepers’ wing, clutching it as best she could with her two bleeding stumps, an old woman with a nose devoured by cankers tossed a basin at him, rubber enema hose and all, filled with sour wastewater that spattered him and provoked an irrepressible desire to throw up. Then another of the decayed women who had seen it all raced to her bed, bawling insults or mocking scorn in a mousy singsong, and quickly returned with a rotten mango, which she also threw at him.
Fortunately, Firefly had by then crossed the threshold and was in the front yard of the hospice. At the last moment, he turned to look back at the ward that held the catatonics. He had the fleeting impression that his sister was waking up and glancing around uneasily, looking for him.
Little by little, the city had begun to recover from the storm. Storekeepers, between sobs, totted up their losses.
He was in the street. It was morning. From a nearby market came the calls of fishermen; pushcart wheels squealed on the paving stones. Harried planters crowded around a slaver. They tasted the sweat of the black women, bargained, then packed them into carts and carried them off to distant sugar mills to be deposited in malodorous barracks. Also reaching him in the little square, like stampedes of color, were beams from the rising sun reflected off the awnings that covered the kiosks: yellow canvases that returned the light or spread it across the limestone façades, on pyramids of mammee or pineapple. In the middle of one golden stall, the breeze undid little piles of purple and red powders for offerings.
Surrounded by the throng, he felt the useless dross of his body, the sensation that he was dragging about a stain or a burden from which he could not free himself. Guilt surrounded him like an opaque aura; an invisible leprosy devoured his skin. He was hungry and thirsty. He wanted someone to play with. To see his sister. He recalled his father’s footsteps in the corridor of the house, the early clattering of his mother in the kitchen, the owl that from the garden ceiba tree awakened him each night, the far-off strumming of guitars, the misplaced steps of singing drunks. He yearned for a long deep sleep. He wanted to die and be born again, to return to the state that precedes birth and succeeds death. He wanted to de-exist. To become somebody else.
He found himself lost among the vendors in the little square, amid a tumult of shoppers, passersby, fleeting nuns, cabin boys, leering quadroons, pickpockets, card sharks, knife-sharpeners, witch doctors, medical astrologists, herbalists, swindlers, and slaves. He knew not where to go or what to do. One thing he did know for sure: Never again would he have a home or a family, a place of origin or repose. Flight had cut off his roots, thrust him into an exile with no return. Although he had only just left them, his mother’s lap, his sister’s voice, a bed covered in gifts, and, upon rising, the smell of bread with salted oil and a mug of coffee, it all seemed very distant, like a fuzzy recollection, almost like a dream.
He was weak, trembling, his skin mortuary pallor. He felt someone was about to grab him by the scruff of the neck like a cat and hoist him up into the void, then let him fall from on high and smash against the paving stones, just to watch the bits of his brain and blood bounce.
He huddled against a marble fountain with four dolphins, whose cool jets he tried to reach. Beggars pleaded for crumbs and even doubloons from the calash drivers done up in frock coats and bowler hats; a Manila shawl slipped off the shoulders of a Creole lady and fell into a pile of horse manure.