Firefly (12 page)

He was fleeing not the driver's convulsive chortles or his licorice stench but that lethal, insufferable image gnawing at him from the inside, emptying his eyes.

He crossed a square, where the cobblestones were drenched as if there had been a sudden shower, then an avenue lined with
royal palms, their wilted crowns bowed by a northerly gust. He passed under the elevated trestle made of black wood where the trains from the provinces came in, and he sensed the sharp odor of cane syrup and that red-streak fungus that sours the stalks.

Going over a drawbridge, he heard his own footsteps echoing on the creaky planks as if they belonged to somebody else.

He reached the docks.

What came to mind was an etching that adorned the office of one of the notaries, amid the clammy file folders: a bird's-eye view of the port of Havana. Two contorted angels in the upper corners held a ribbon with a name and a date waving in the island's strong steady breeze . . .

The wind leaned on the masts, tried to carry off the twisted sails. In the anthill of the docks reigned a restlessness, the sleepwalking chaos that precedes any major disembarkation.

Hordes of rodents, relying on some infallible and gregarious intuition more accurate than all telegraphs put together, had invaded the port's every pipe and sewer the night before, where they awaited the scent of dry grain to launch their assault.

Dropping anchor was a Spanish brigantine from the African coast with a cargo of pure unmixed blacks, who would deliver, according to the prayer in that morning's
Diario de la Marina
, “with the strength of their arms, linked to the fabulous grinding machines of the mills, a decisive boost to the nascent sugar industry.”

As the ship rubbed up against the pier, the air was inundated
with the rank odor of rot pouring from the hold: a stench of putrid sweat, foul drinking water, rancid urine, spoiled milk, open wounds, and brine.

In between the captain's commands shouted in a thick and despotic Castilian could be heard the creak of the hawsers, the exhilarated cries and euphoric swearing of the sailors on board, and, farther off, the moans of the slaves, the wails, the nasal voices now in exile scolding the gods of the earth for having forsaken them, for leaving them and their families and their animals defenseless against the profiteering gangs of pale-faced traffickers.

Everything was agitation amidships, hither-thither, hurry-hurry. The crewmen, half naked, desiccated, and feverish, ran to the bridge and contemplated the city jubilantly; they pointed at the yellowed and twisted features of the palatial buildings as if these were mirages from their deliria during the passage, or as if they recognized them and were confirming the accuracy of the engravings they had been shown in the mother country to beguile them with the pageantry of America. Then they turned the other way, toward the pink towers of the churches and the light green crowns of the royal palms that swayed like cool sprouting grass the length of the port's boulevard. They ran singing and whistling back to their cabins and tossed bucketfuls of water at one another,
swabbing their pale sopping hides now that they no longer had to go even without drinking to make the water last.

Naked but for a cassock with gold braid and buttons that poorly dissembled his well-endowed nether parts, a blond sailor – his long hair agleam like a sulfur flare in the island sun – ran back and forth to the gangway where he piled up his gear: a sack of nougats from Alicante and Jijona whose lumpy riches, the whites and browns of almonds and green walnuts and ground-bee honey, stuck out through the mendings in the fabric; a jug of red wine that projected a trembling amethyst gleam onto the wood of the deck when its owner placed and steadied it as if it were the fragile beaker of an alchemist; a rustic musical instrument, like a violin made of unsanded wood, with an outsized homemade bow; and, finally, a fuming minuscule simian that immediately clambered to the top of the pile and glared every which way while emitting the vainglorious growl of a vigilant proprietor, threatening and rapacious.

Like wildfire in a dry cane field, news of the arrival spread the length of the archways of the port district, where, stacked in a sticky dream of pan sugar and rum, evicted from every tenement, there lived whores during Lent, scarred lepers, vendors of lottery tickets awaiting the jackpot, Soviet advisers, Indians
selling sticks of sugarcane and mammees and jerked beef in clay crockery, and a few blacks recently freed, singing country songs and sniffing snuff.

Industrious if still hardly white-skinned landowners in search of grinding hands for their future plantations began crowding the docks, along with belligerent sugar-mill managers and eager traffickers. In the uproar, slavers of all tints mixed in with the layabouts and natterers who always hung around the port hoping for a chance to get in on the leftovers of some big scam or the trickle-down from some contraband trade protected by the governor.

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.”

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.

Only the gulls, always quick to ingest the refuse with which the fishing families polluted the waters, vied for the houses. They
nested on the roofs and soon covered them with their excretions, forming veritable hummocks, irregular and grayish-brown, like bloated towers that at dusk turned the abodes into fossil outcrops or whimsical dunes or mosques dreamed up by demented architects.

Narrow semicircular canals, imperfectly laid out, formed a sloppy labyrinth through the neighborhood. The big houses were scattered according to the capricious law of mudslides or whatever potential opportunistic builders might have seen in preexisting rubble. Anemic laky waves, seemingly roused by some distant shudder, now and again agitated the dense waters and caused them to glisten like tarnished aluminum, ashen gray.

Firefly, frantically seeking the place where two canals meet, hurried down the rickety boardwalks that zigzagged from one sprawling house to the next, but the semicircles never converged. Having forgotten fatigue and hunger, he now ignored the cool downpour that began to pelt the mudflats. He thought about the yard with the chamber pot, shaded by the red flowers of the royal poinciana, so cozy and warm, and then, as if everything were bubbling up in his memory, he recalled the hospice courtyard and the spray of water from its fountain. The stocks did not come to mind.