Firefly (3 page)

His house – floral lamps, arabesque banisters, opaline stained glass in that mother-of-pearlish vegetal style, all curves, which exaggeratedly typified art nouveau in the colonies – is brimming with dried plants in tiny envelopes of all colors, and crammed with the jumbled remains of all that clinical hardware, whose lines, authoritarian in their rectitude, interrupt the slow impinging curl of the crystal volutes.

Carpeting the bathroom are the most ludicrous of tiles made of bright ceramic, each containing dried eucalyptus leaves, bitter melon, nettles, or star apples in their two colors. The sink overflows with a greenish infusion made of cashew seeds, which keeps away wrinkles and gray hair. Two swan beaks are draining in the bidet.

This veggie-doc eats at a table with a well for a charcoal fire,
covered by a dragonfly-and-lily patterned cloth, in the center of which sits an opaque, oval-shaped Galle vase filled with iridescent lilies. In a crosshatched physiotherapy mirror he spies on his own moves, as if they were those of a twisted competitor in a feverish game of crepuscular solitaire. He lays out the cards on a dissecting table.

Gator, as the assiduous reader would have noted by now, lives alone, but it is as if he were married to himself. He is a dreamer given to meditative mulling, for whom daily plant collecting, undertaken with the strabismic gaze of someone tracking the meandering flight of a butterfly with damp wings, is a search for primogenital purity or the unpredictable diversity of the planet.

Early in the morning, in an ablutionary reversal of his rural peregrinations, he masturbates, flipping through a French magazine filled with naked bodies and brief captions.

Then the dissident medic examines himself in the crosshatched mirror and organizes his thoughts about the day's practice, about using a burning mustard plaster to pull the malady out by the root. And with daily devotion, almost fear, he revisits the album of “Sicilian photos” by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, his secret mentor, his role model.

Today's exertions have exhausted him. He opts for a brew of
guasima bark, which he sips through a cinnamon straw. Once again he contemplates his unclothed image in the mirror as he wished never to have seen it. He touches the back of his hand to his incipient, rather white beard. With his index finger, he caresses his upper lip and then out along his cheekbone, tracing as if there were a straight line marked on his skin. He decides, at least for today, not to shave. At this juncture he no longer cares if they laugh at him, point at him in the street, and shout, “Gator's got a beard!”

Among the baron's yellowing photographs he selects one for unhurried contemplation that is particularly lascivious: two Sicilian lads, Hellenized with laurels and sandals, are about to touch breasts; between them, hieratic and naked, an adolescent girl in profile gazes at the heavens.

Isidro is the one who teaches anatomy. He lives surrounded by diligent attendants. For strictly pedagogic reasons, and with the compulsion of a bulimic foreseeing scarcity, he collects cadavers, which he bargains for at the morgue when no one is looking.

He is obese. When he returns from his lugubrious bazaar he stinks of formaldehyde and body odor. He shuffles about in battered flip-flops that the corner cobbler and his big mulatto make for him, not without plenty of teasing and a bit of remorse,
deforming exquisite Italian shoes with hammer blows so that his swollen feet will fit and even find some consolation under that pile of blubber.

So pervasive was the anti-dictatorial chaos in Upsalón U, so predictable the daily rallies, muggings, knifings, and gunfights, and so precarious and early-morning the formal medical schooling, that sawbones-in-training would come by the dozen to the mouse-infested grotto Isidro had built in his own home so that he could share, with those willing to pay, his Frenchified skills in the pestilent art of dissection.

At sundown in the homespun lecture theater, wearing starched white lab coats and exhibiting the manners of unctuous bishops (“Medicine is a priesthood”), they received the anatomical rudiments that years later would earn them a license to heal.

Armed with a pointer, a series of colored slides, and a memorized translation of Testut's
Anatomie
, duly peppered with apothegms from Mesmerian electricism, the tub of lard projected diagrams of the alternating current that secretly joins the pylorus to the cardiac orifice, the voltaic arc that leads from auricles to ventricles, or the intermittent magnetism that simultaneously communicates and divides the two hemispheres of the brain. He had sketched these intensities on the transparencies as perfect
discontinuous curves, like those made by iron filings between two magnets or under the rotation of a cone-shaped pendulum.

In the kitchen beside the amphitheater – between the two rooms, a beaded curtain clicked and quivered from the obsessive pacing of a mangy dog – an oniony and in her own way anatomical woman from Galicia, hair in a double bun and frying pan in hand, slaughtered chickens, fried up shrimp in red sauce, and baked biscuits with butter for the frugal meal of the man in flip-flops.

When he tired of the Galician's coarse dishes, or on Sundays, which she spent on the outskirts of town on the other side of the bay visiting her Dositheus (she would take him a wicker basket with a bottle of papaya wine and two chicken livers with raisins), Isidro would wash up at El Floridita.

“Let me have,” the adipose figure would grunt as he seated himself, panting from the marathon it was for him to get from the entrance to the table, “that drink that carries the nickname of Mary Queen of England and of Ireland who did not hesitate to martyrize Protestants or execute her rival for the throne, plus an archbishop and another three hundred people . . .”

After his first salty sip, the gourmand would concentrate, not so much on the lobster in garlic sauce or the roast suckling pig with guava leaves swimming in cassava, as on the generously
open décolletage of the young Zerlina of a waitress who, ever since his first visit, served him with wheedling chortles and pretended to understand his alcoholic riddles, which for her were boorish allusions to her bust and behind.

At the base of her cleavage, between the two nascent pearly spheres, bulging with bluish reflections à la Rubens, he could spy the diminutive slender lace of her brassiere. When the waitress came by to serve him, the fat man tried to breathe deeply to catch the aroma of her breasts, which he presumed to be tawny and musky, but the insistent odor of the shrimp's orange sauce blocked his way.

Isidro's purely electromagnetic conception of all phenomena had led him to practice radiesthesia: he was adept at the copper pendulum, which he swung over the unclothed bodies of patients, seeking the spot where it shifted or abruptly changed the direction of its rotation.

The pendulum also swung over, who could say why, his deepest fantasies. The fourth bloody mary, which by then he called for without circumlocutions, and the ever more confounding proximity of the waitress, led him without fail to his dominical nirvana: he saw her before him serving his cocktail and at the same time lying naked in his empty amphitheater. Using the pendulum, he explored without touching her trembling body.
When the rotations accelerated, he would place his right ear on her skin and listen to the blood rumble in her veins, and then he would continue roaming until he returned to the sound of her breathing, the whoosh of her lymphatic fluid, the creaking of her cartilage against the calcium in her bones: the entire infinitesimal swamp of life itself.

Thus he was able, without the lamentable impediment of culinary effluences, to sniff every bit of her, to breathe her in slowly, to assess her skin with his sense of smell, even the most humid and hidden parts, the very walls of her sex; he could hear the dull roar of the hairs of her pubis under the lobe of his own ear. And all this without anyone knowing, not even she, exposed as she was, unknowingly, to radiesthetic inspection – thanks to a small menstrual retardation.

Once he figured out who these prostration professionals were and why they had come, Firefly set to convincing himself of the gravity of his own illness. As a cover he devised a rigid catatonia and perfected it to such a degree that the doctors were faced with a wide-eyed wooden doll, gaze fixed on the zenith, a thread of transparent purple saliva drooling from his lips. Flies did not disturb him, nor did the handbell rung by the nun who dispensed
the cane juice, which was so piercing and shrill it made even the moribund tremble.

In examinations of the parents and sister, which the experts undertook straight off, the pendulum's spin was sluggish, stumbling, knotted like the speech of a drunk. Such lethargy could be caused by anything, since magnetic disturbances often overwhelm sensitive bodies in the aftermath of a hurricane.

More revealing was the radiesthesic map of the aunts, the three of them wrapped in the same hypnosis, as if huddled under the red sealing wax of a single blanket. Very useful, it must be admitted, was the light interrogation that accompanied the auscultation, with responses obtained via screams in the ear, shakings, and slaps across the face.

They then turned to Firefly.

To the astonishment of the specialists, the copper cone spun normally up the length of that wooden body, but when it reached his heart the device jumped like a frightened rabbit: it stopped abruptly, remained still a few seconds, then began spinning crazily in the wrong direction. Clearly, the blood beat mightily and flowed in torrents through that pretend cadaver.

Isidro and Gator looked at each other, both suspecting the same thing. The herbalist turned and faced the garden, apparently
intrigued by the plants; in reality he wanted to meditate on this enigma, which he intended to solve on the spot.

Then he swiveled back toward the bed of the petrified boy. Once more he scrutinized the stiff. “Precocious catalepsy,” the experts declared in unison, though, smelling something fishy, they remained unconvinced.

Once the verdict had been pronounced, Isidro and Gator sat down on either side of the cot. The chubby one pulled the pendulum from the right-hand pocket of his trousers and suspended it in the air, observing it calmly, as if he wished to confirm the impeccable operation of the laws of gravity.

In his mind, Gator went over the various tonics or revivifying potions, all based on a French wine, Château des Mille Tremblements, mixed with rum and raw sugar, which he could insist the young patient, despite his inert, practically wooden state, drink through a cinnamon straw.

Isidro, while studying the pendulum's easy swing, peered at the melon-head with the astuteness of a caged bird, careful not to let him know he was being watched. Gator meanwhile was fascinated, or pretended to be, by the minuscule purple flowers that grew between the bricks, a practically extinct species that sprouted there alone due to the aseptic nature of the place. In
reality, he was eyeing cataleptic Firefly from askance to see if he was breathing or not.

After these apparently incandescent inquiries, the two focused directly on scrutinizing this child overcome by the excesses of Morpheus. They understood instantly, and quickly exchanged glances out of the corners of their eyes like two accomplice snakes before a defenseless partridge, that something was not spinning smoothly in this strange case of
familial oneiromancy
.

The shining aunts were demanding they be “left in peace,” that they “needed some shut-eye,” believing they were washing clothes on the white stones of a large river during siesta hour, after a succulent codfish stew.

But let's go again to El Floridita, where the two maverick sawbones are now describing how they unmasked, thanks to a well-interpreted remark, the cataleptic's crude pretending. “From that triple swing of the inquisitor pendulum,” the radiesthesist told the openmouthed waiters, including the operatic barmaid, indicating his guest the exemplary herbalist as witness, “had come
inescapable truths.”
He underlined the words syllable by syllable. By then they had spiked Isidro's bloody potion three times over with angostura bitters and celery salt.

The waitress listened wide-eyed and artlessly dribbled across the tablecloth the soy sauce that was to dress a special wheat-germ steak (for the restaurant staff unnatural and evidently emetic) that a skillful cook had prepared for Gator. Before wiping it up, she gave a quick pull on the silk strap that sustained her décolletage.

“That's right,” the herbalist continued, picking up the radiesthesist's long monologue as if they had been rehearsing their entire lives for this dramatic performance: the meeting of minds of two specialists puffed up by what the
Diario de la Marina
was calling their illustrious contribution to solving “the atrocity of the century.” “That's right. No longer could we presume that this was simply the morbid reflex that quicksilver, when corrupted by the hurricane's magnetic disturbances, will project onto vulnerable bodies.”

“No!” Isidro piled on, waving his right index finger in the air. “In a pause between ignoble snores, one of the Fates had assured them: Early in the morning, the family had carefully masked all the mirrors with black brocade.”

On stretched a silence filled with suspense. He looked keenly at the slack-jawed waiters. Another sip. Meanwhile, Gator carried on, exalted by the fascination the duo evoked in the marinated listeners.

“The nocturnal bite of certain bats, as was well known by the
Ciboneys who at dawn would staunch the wounds with saffron flowers, leaves its victims groggy and exhausted. But in this case the insentient victims bore not the least sign of jugular perforation. What's more, knowing that those sucking sneaks always lie in wait, the family had not neglected the home's defenses, making ample prophylactic use of cloves of garlic.
^*
Something, however, and this was our last resort, was affecting the lymphatic flow in each member of the family except the child, whose pendulum map was normal, though we did not have a clue as to what had caused the spell: the bite of a mosquito infected with a lethal virus, mass hypnosis . . . or a cataleptic potion.”