Firefly by Severo Sarduy Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œAda, I want to tell you something about the heart.”
    â€œLeave me alone,” the red giant responded. “I’ve already heard plenty of nonsense.”
    â€œAda . . . your laces . . .”
    The very same angel that had guided him down the cistern and out of the hospital now blew these words his way.
    â€œThe 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.
    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 hewas 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.
    â€œThanks,” 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.
    â€œFirefly! 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