Firefly by Severo Sarduy Read Free Book Online Page B

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 thepupils’ 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 well: 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.
    He breathed deeply, free of distress. Fresh air, bluish, pure. The rhythm of his breathing was a far-off sea. The oxygen flowed through him and purified him bit by bit, even his fingernails and hair, every inch of his skin.
    That was it, composure: an intermission between two crises, a stable thought between two bouts of lunacy.
    He returned to the patio with what he thought was a confident step. He did not know how much time he had spent contemplating the bottle and the crock, observing the slow yellowing of the plaster that covered them, the appearance of ephemeral cracks. Though in the time others keep, it seemed to him, it had all happened very quickly.
    The lamp in the office was still on, the window a yellow rectangle cut from the purple night. The four silhouettes remained frozen in the position in which he had left them, no gestures, no movement.
    All of a sudden, with the abruptness of a swat, Munificence shattered the immobility of that wax museum. She had thrown something in Gator’s face; something had struck him, wounded him, perhaps a glass. The herbalist put his hands to his face, to his mouth, as if trying to staunch the blood. Isidro approached with what looked like a handkerchief. Then they rushed out. Gator,one hand still pressed to his mouth, hung on to the fat man’s arm with the other.
    Ada and Munificence sat down across from each other, the tutor in a higher chair, where she looked to be in charge.
    Firefly, liberated by the departure of the visitors, ran to the offices. He panted up the staircase. He knocked on the office door. No answer. Cautiously, slowly, he pushed it open. He peeked inside.
    â€œHave the men gone?” he asked, flushed, bathed in a sudden sweat.
    â€œThe men?” Munificence asked back, surprised. “What men? No man has come here. Besides,” and she slayed him with a reproachful look, “you’re drunk. Utterly, completely drunk.”
    And she shook him by the shoulders to bring him back to his senses.
    He does not know what happened next. Nor where he spent the night. He awoke back in the yard. His hair was wet. To sober him up, someone had dunked his head in the fishpond. He guessed the time by the height of the sun and the noise of typewriters in the offices: twelve noon.
    The owl took off from the top of the ceiba tree and rosevertically, wings spread, white symmetry in the whitened midday sky, and after several ever-expanding circles took refuge