An elderly black woman passing by, dressed neatly in white linen with a silk turban, picked poor Firefly up. She was wearing necklaces, earrings, and bracelets made of tiny shells, also white, which, when she hoisted him higher to caress his head, rang in his ear like the rattles of his infancy, like the maternal murmur.
“I cannot care for you, my son,” she whispered with regret while smoothing his hair with her hands, “because I already have many with what God has given me, and they are waiting at home. But I will take you to a very big and very pretty house with ceiling fans and a refrigerator and everything, where a white woman, kind and clean as only she can be, will give you a little glass of crème de vie.”
* Thus works clairvoyance. The poor herbalist could not know that with these suspicions, even though later disproved, he was confirming Firefly’s prediction when he heard the dispatch from the observatory and interpreted it as announcing an invasion of bats. Not even the seer himself understands his words — and I say this from my own experience. No science is capable of ordering the abstruse language of vaticinations.
LACK OF AIR
“Milk,” answered Munificence. “Condensed milk. Two cups.”
“What else?” Firefly asked, licking his lips.
“Rum. Three tablespoons of rum. And two eggs, beaten. Just the yolks. You save the whites for meringue.”
“It’ll make you strong.”
“Now, to work. Before bed you’ll get a big bowl of soup with a slice of bread and a bit of bacon. Porridge in the morning. But we’ve got a lot to do. More?”
“I can’t, my head’s spinning.”
Munificence was sitting with her back against a white stone fireplace, a useless holdover from the turn-of-the-century colonial style that for no reason but overblown pretentiousness had filled the island’s stifling living rooms with cloying volutes and ornate window frames. Two large windows, always open, failed to cool the moth-eaten stacks of notaries’ folders stuck in transit to or from the offices on the upper floor; the shelves were all overflowing with pasteboard notebooks, each threaded by a red marker ribbon, offered up to spiderwebs and dust.
During the end-of-year drought they called winter, they would close the book cabinets and fill the fireplace with mahogany logs or some sort of aromatic fresh-cut wood that never quite burned and would become a favorite haunt of rats fat as hutia tree rodents, bulimic beasts that went on from that woodpile to lay claim to everything devourable until the next dry season when the decorative mahogany logs would be replaced and the rodents would start in all over again.
Munificence was enormously tall, a pole for knocking cats off the roof. Behind her back, the “girls” — as she called the innocents forgotten or confined by their parents in the big charity house adjoining the offices — called her “the flaming giraffe,” and to gratify her in public they never failed to compare her height to her generosity.
The shoes she wore made her even taller, as did the taffeta suit with vertical white stripes and the faded gardenia pinned high up on her blond hair, which was always braided Venetian style, fashioned into a cylindrical roll and drenched in hair spray: No rebellious wisp could ever break free.
The girls frolicked in spirals around Munificence, playing hand games, pinching each other, stifling sudden fears and giggles; they were big butterflies, sumptuous and mischievous, or red-headed squirrels shaking off the frost after an interminable hibernation.
“Is this your house?” Firefly asked Munificence, handing back the mug.
“No,” the tower replied, “I just come to these offices to keep an eye on things. A fire would be the end of it all, there’s so much paper. My house is in the back on the other side of the yard. It’s the charity home where I take care of these angels.”
Little by little, in the days that followed, Firefly discovered the connections between these two places and the rules that governed each, though he was never sure he grasped their true meaning.
The office building’s big three-bolt door and two large windows faced the street. The ground floor was just a cemetery for unfulfilled contracts, invalid legal papers, and files gnawed by the rats. A pointlessly vast staircase led to a diminutive mezzanine, then on to the second floor, where the city’s shadiest notaries had set up shop. A moth-eaten recamier, used as a depository for old dockets in one of the offices, became Firefly’s nightly resting place.
The purple shadow of a large ceiba tree cooled the office-building yard and spread over the course of the day from a goldfish pond, whose care was immediately given over to Firefly, to a pair of wrought-iron gates. Beyond one of them, in the distance, lay a basket workshop populated by tattered and raucous Gypsies who never paused in their wicker-weaving or their singing; the other gate led to the dormitory, a structure similar to the office building and just as dilapidated and decayed but lacking windows and its own exit to the street. There, Munificence’s pupils kept their bedrooms swept clean and had their sewing workshop, the handful of Singers so well-oiled they made practically no sound; during working hours one could hear the chapter being read out by the reader of the day.
A seminarian with very fine whiskers dusted the minuscule gold-and-red chapel every Sunday.
To reach the street on their way to school, the girls raced impetuously through the first floor of the offices, zigzagging around the furniture buried in paper: “A sip of vinegar,” Munificence told them about that bit, “which you’ll have to endure.”
Not knowing exactly why, Firefly began spying on the pupils, though he could only devote himself to that solitary pleasure after six in the afternoon. Once he was old enough, the melon-head spent his days in frenetic, breathless races between the offices and the corner store, a Mozarabic tray in hand bearing stained and tottering little glasses of coffee with condensed milk, croissants, pastries dripping with clear syrup, mille-feuilles, sacred-heart cakes, Morón cookies, and candied guava, brilliantly red like garnet, crowned with little squares of fresh cheese.
He also went for tobacco and stamps, Dutch quarto paper, envelopes, change, the afternoon papers; he cleaned the offices redolent with ink, picked up the trash, swept the shelves with an ostrich-feather duster, and using two legal documents even shined the shoes of the scriveners who would stop by their cubicles always in the morning and always in a hurry to consult certain records and tear up others, erase names and numbers or change them for what they had scribbled on little slips of paper, which they would simply paste over the old ones.
Munificence set him up in the document depot so that he might make something of himself and thus be saved from hunger, orphanage, plague, alcohol, and women.
He received considerable tips, for sure, but much more in the way of taunts and abuse. The lawyers with their black leather briefcases did not hesitate to reproach him with a slap across the cheek for coffee grown cold along the way, for a wormy piece of fruit, or even for lack of deference in the way he was obliged to address them.
Once they had left for the day, and Munificence had slid the three bolts closed, he would watch the swimming goldfish, hide his face, and cry.
Among the frisky girls, Firefly quickly zeroed in on one, plumper and whiter than the rest, with red hair and large violet eyes. She smelled terrific: of powdered lavender and mothballs.
He saw her again early one morning in her school uniform: white blouse, Prussian blue skirt with a ribbon at the hem, high patent leather shoes, and a stack of rag-paper notebooks cinched to her back; she held the straps taut with her thumbs in front of her breasts. Despite the load, she walked erect, looking straight ahead, like an Indian from the highlands with a cargo of coca leaves.