Firefly raced to the front room for a closer look; she was sliding open the bolts on the wooden door. Her fragrance wafted toward him, not lavender now but ground-bee honey, which is sweet and dark and heals all, but whose wax can block your ears and make you deaf.
She had her red hair pulled back and tied at the neck with a strip of mauve felt; gray stockings, like a nun’s, clung to her legs. Now that he had her so close, the scent of lavender returned like the first time, and he understood that he loved her for her aromas. Munificence’s other pupils were just as pretty, and their big teeth and clean unadorned ears even reminded him of his aunts, but none of them smelled like her. Munificence did once, when she gave him the crème de vie.
Firefly approached and timidly touched the backpack of notebooks. “What’s your name?”
“Ada,” the redhead answered grumpily, as if she were being pestered by a buzzing insect.
“Hada?” the melon-head considered. “That’s not the name of a real person, it’s a storybook character.”
“And what’s your name?” the squirrel retorted before closing the door in his face.
“Firefly.”
“Firefly?” she asked with a smirk from the sidewalk. “That’s not the name of a real person, it’s a bug.”
The next day a loud ruckus startled him.
The yelling from deep within the charity house came closer, imprecations, insults, and threats which Firefly could not make out but which echoed around the yard, causing the quintessentially quarrelsome and meddlesome notaries to lean out the windows and even to empty an ashtray full of disgusting butts onto the caterwauling women, and then bang it in a conga rhythm on the blue windowsill.
Munificence had taken hold of one of the youngest and weakest students, a girl in uniform but strangely barefoot. She had her by the arms, as if she were a rabid beast about to bite.
The prisoner squirmed, kicked every which way, bit at her executioner’s wrists to try and wriggle free.
Was she a rebellious student, too young for the charity’s stern rules? What Firefly saw on closer viewing left him baffled: She was more like an old woman, wrinkled and scrawny, disguised as a pupil. Or the opposite: a withered and pasty infant, prematurely devastated by scurvy or nerves. Her shiny hair was streaked with gray, or maybe excessively blond, washed with chamomile or the peroxide they use as a disinfectant.
“You’re expelled!” screamed Munificence, beside herself and mortified. “Expelled!”
Taking as witnesses the students who had followed her from the charity house with their wicker hoops, embroidery needles, and balls of yarn, plus the big-shot lawyers, exhilarated by the melee, who had come down to the landing on the stairs, and Firefly himself, she accused: “She’s bedeviled! She’s cursed! They caught her in the chapel praying backwards. Under her pillow they found a copper stone, a white-and-maroon necklace, and two seashells. The witch!”
She managed to haul her to the front door.
Then, like a big uncoordinated doll, her face white with eggshell powder or rage, she threw the girl into the street with all her strength.
“You’ll see,” the platinum girl screamed from the sidewalk, expending the last of her energy in a death rattle. “You’ll see how I take revenge. I leave it all in God’s hands.”
And she limped off.
Munificence came back inside. She closed the door and shrugged.
He slept curled up on the recamier, elbows touching knees. In the morning, he would straighten up his bedding of dockets of irreconcilable cases, obtuse demands, or specious suits against unknowns, the trials of which were periodically postponed and for that reason were not to be filed away. Before bed, he would calmly stack the most crumpled documents at the foot of the sofa; the softest ones, those that had been fingered for years and had turned silky like tobacco leaves, made a good pillow. Amid the querulous papers he always fell right to sleep, protected by their cane fibers, by their night of ink. He dreamed about hefty sealing-wax stamps, a squirrel devouring nuts, and also an enormous white wooden house by the sea. Gulls knocked against the windowpanes; the nighttime coast was full of fireflies lighting up the grass with their phosphorescent lamps. Someone, perhaps his sister, told him something about that pulsating green, something he could not understand. He yelled at her to explain. Then he would awaken soaked in sweat, crying. One night he peed on the recamier.
That imperial couch lay on the creaky floorboards beside the window of a cramped office. From there he could look out at the yard, the ceiba tree and its nocturnal owls, the first rays of sun reflected off the pond, maybe the red stain of a fish, the early-morning departure of the pupils and their punctual return at dawn as the six raucous bells of the cathedral rang out.
Despite his vigilance, it was not sight but sound one rainy morning that alerted him to the nearness of Ada: the toes and heels of the high patent leather shoes tapping across the moist paving stones of the yard. He leaped from the recamier. He rubbed his eyes hard to reassure himself he was not dreaming. No, it was she. From the window he saw her walk toward the offices, indifferent to the rain, erect, proud, gazing at the top of the ceiba as if she were looking for a bird, with that way of angling her shoulders before turning, before tilting the rest of her body and circling the pool, as if she were announcing her trajectory, her destiny.
She stopped abruptly. Her gaze followed the ephemeral rings traced by the fish; she moistened the tips of her fingers in the cool water and dried them on her blue skirt. She continued on to the front room, thumbs looped in the straps.
Firefly waited a moment. He slept fully dressed, so he smoothed his clothes with his hands, and his hair too, before going after her. He bounded down the staircase, skipping steps like someone possessed.
“Ada,” he said panting, now by the door, “Ada. ”
“What can I do for you?” And she shook her red hair, which today she wore loose and turned up at the ends like a cabin boy.
“I’ve got something to tell you. ”
“I’ve no time.”
Firefly never knew why what came to mind in that moment, as if he were looking at a photograph, was the explanation Munificence gave him one day about the heart and the blood. He understood there and then the blue trembling he could see in the veins of his arms. That was all he knew of the human body, although at night he would rub himself still clothed against the silk of the recamier, an exercise that never went beyond tedium, never assuaged his fear or even revealed why he felt the urge to do it.
Yet he knew that this was what he wanted to talk to her about: the fragility of the body, that miracle. If the heart stops, death comes. That was why he did not want Ada to sleep, ever, so that her heart would never forget to beat.
“Ada, I want to tell you something about the heart.”
“Leave me alone,” the red giant responded. “I’ve already heard plenty of nonsense.”
“Ada. your laces. ”
The very same angel that had guided him down the cistern and out of the hospital now blew these words his way.
“The laces of your right shoe.”
She did no more than stick out her foot and gaze at the mezzanine windowpanes while Firefly kneeled down and tied the laces in a double bow with such tender care it could have been her heart he was touching instead of her shoes. Then he rested the palm of his right hand on the patent leather toe, as if he hoped his sweat would cloud its shine.
Ada pulled her foot back. She turned away. She walked on to the door and slid open the bolts.