Firefly remained doubled over, looking at his own dirty shoes wrinkled like two old skins, his darned socks, the perfect geometry of the joins between the floor tiles, and then the door by which Ada had gone out, the open bolts that perhaps still retained the warmth of her white hands.
He wanted to race after her, to find another pretext to touch her. But a sudden pain caught him in the middle of his chest, a vicious lack of air. He heard whistling when he breathed, felt he was suffocating. It was obvious his heart was about to give out. To recover, he had once been told, he needed a bowl of hot soup made from the turkey buzzard that soars so high. But for the moment all he had was choking, hacking, lack of air. Ada was air. He unbuttoned his shirt. Something told him not to move, to try to breathe deeply and slowly, to think of something else.
It was useless. Ada was air. And she was far away.
He was about to keel over and split his head on the tiles, when he heard the sudden squeal of the hinges.
He looked up. Through the gap in the half-open door Ada’s head appeared, looking for him.
“Thanks,” the redhead shouted.
And she slammed the door shut.
It was morning. Yet it seemed to him that the day was ending, that the light was retreating and abandoning the furniture, the room, every little thing bit by bit. He understood then that what he lacked was not air or a clear view of things or Ada’s body. The something missing was much more vast and obscure, something neither close at hand nor far away, rather running parallel. The work of doing without was incessant: gnawing, gnawing. The nocturnal rumbling of rats terrified by the flood after the hurricane. Hardworking rats, devouring the wood in the fireplace.
He recalled the house by the sea, heard the roar of the waves, saw a great lamp of tarnished copper swinging in the center of the room; the luminous green of the fireflies went dark. Now, lack flooded everything. Even Ada’s body. It gnawed at everything, contaminated everything. It soiled every existing thing with its inanity.
“Firefly! Firefly dear!”
From the mezzanine, Munificence was calling him.
A STABLE THOUGHT BETWEEN
TWO BOUTS OF LUNACY
The days went by, each identical to the one before, in gloomy treks for café con leche and candied guava. Identical, but not for him. He kept up his nighttime vigil, rubbing his sex against the silk, and his ridiculous daytime frenzy. But he was no longer his old self, rather somebody else, somebody plagued by doubts. Not about Ada’s feelings, or the possibility he might be the victim of a sick joke, or what lay behind the notaries’ despotic abuse; no, rather doubts about the munificence of Munificence, for example, about whether everything came down to its appearance or its reality.
So he took up spying, but not like before. He no longer knew what to spy on, or whom. For days on end, throughout the interminable rainy season, in the endless owl-filled nights.
Until one evening by the fishpond, when the lamps were going out, he saw that one second-floor notary office remained lit. He could make out, yes it was she, Munificence’s silhouette behind a tulle curtain, then Ada’s looking inhibited, timid. And then those of two men, one short and stout, likely in shirt and tie, the other taller and gawky, briefcase in hand.
No doubt about it: It was them.
But why were they here?
As powerfully as he had needed air, he sensed he was about to find out. Up to that moment he had lived in the clouds, without happiness but also without worry. He cared more now about learning the truth than about breathing: What were they doing here, the accusers who had unmasked his make-believe at the hospital?
Several thoughts battered him, each of them unbearable.
Isidro and Gator, if indeed it was them, had come for him. They would gag him and haul him off to a dungeon and put him on bread and water for the rest of his life. They would hand him over to the lepers so they could spit on him and rub their purulent stumps in his face. They would auction him off as a child slave, naked in the market, covered in sores; a sugar baron would buy him, just to whip him.
Maybe the maniacal fat guy was looking for fresh dupes for the pendulum demonstrations in the darkness of his amphitheater. He did not really understand what that was all about, but in his heart he knew it was something devious, unspeakable.
Like a feverish shudder came the thought that they might take Ada’s body away from him, that over it they would dangle the morbid rotations of the copper cone with its mortuary shine and its iridescent gyrating like a sick lightning bug.
He wondered how they had discovered him, tracked him down, why his parents had not come, and who had brought the redhead into it. Or perhaps — and this possibility rocked him with the violence of vomiting — it was she who had tipped off the inquisitors.
What was the truth? What was Munificence’s real work? Could it all be a simple coincidence, a joke, an entertainment of gods with nothing to do, something akin to when two children from the same family die at the same moment in different places? The two bigwigs — he continued to feed this fond hope — might have simply dropped by for a visit, or on some complicated secret errand with the notaries. There was nothing to fear. Ada’s presence was just another coincidence. She would soon leave, discreetly. And so would the interlopers. The lamp would go out. He would hear the piercing squeal of the door closing, Munificence’s footsteps heading off to the charity house.
Everything would return to its stifled monotony, smooth and unbroken, like a flat polished surface; everything would again occur at its predetermined hour: the punctual departure of the pupils, the morning sun on the ceiba tree, the fish darting amid the mossy rocks, the voices of the busy weavers from the basket workshop, the horn of a car in the street, the wind, the wind.
But it was not to be. The lamp remained lit. A few interminable minutes passed. Suddenly the visitors stood up together, seemingly compelled by something. They began to wave their arms about as if they were tossing a rag doll or a stinking stuffed animal that Firefly thought he saw somersaulting in the air. The same thoughts from before came rushing back, now twisted or deformed, in fragments. He sensed they were speaking about him. He had no idea why now again he saw the white wooden house by the sea, abandoned this time, devoured by the salt air, invaded by sand; a door on the left bore a wooden sign with what once must have been gilt letters: THE PAVILION.
Another thought suddenly accosted him, this one concise and urgent like an order. He ran to the charity house, crept into the kitchen, and headed toward the yellow cupboard where he knew Munificence hid the crème, and as if wanting to accumulate transgressions (nothing was more forbidden to him than entering the pupils’ lodgings), he forced it open with a swift kick. In one long draft, he slugged back all that was left in the bottle.
He stared, contemplating the tall, empty, misshapen bottle, dull as if it had donned a coat of plaster, quivering alongside a gray crock also blanched, the bottle drained of everything, in the grip of something he knew all too welclass="underline" fear.
He scrutinized the mustard yellow of the cabinet, the assortment of painted birds fluttering around fruit, the bouquet of golden flowers.
He felt the alcohol running through his veins, making its way out from the center, a fire blossoming inside his body; the diminutive red petals were a rain shower falling slowly over a city to set it aflame, to calm it down.
The objects on the table, the bottle and the crock, seemed less frightened, as if they had regained the security of the hand that had molded them, the calm of the potter’s wheel from which they had emerged, the certainty of a day guided by the parabola of the sun. They seemed to be filling up, not with texture or color but with themselves, their own voices, or the muted echo of their being. He watched them now, face-to-face, as they took on their own essence, coincided with their own shapes, teemed with themselves.