Firefly Read Free

intelligence!”
    So the melon-head climbed laboriously up the stepladder. His sister seemed to hold him up with her gaze. He reached the lookout. Under the rain, the city was like a weaving with diagonal stripes and all the colors pulverized, glued onto a white cardboard backing.
    Little did his supposed fluency serve him. It turns out that sometimes, faced with what has to be said, words seem to soften and hang, flaccid and dripping saliva like the tongues of the hanged. What Firefly saw through the oxeye, as they say, had no name. He opened and closed his mouth like a harpooned porgy, trying to convey the scene to the inquiring chorus. But nothing came out. I’ll try to say it myself, in the most neutral way I can to avoid any possible humiliation of that speechless boy .
    The wind blew with such force it sliced off the eaves. Roofing tiles flew by, red stains, like pomegranate seeds in the gray of the rain; they smashed against the plinths and the ceramic façades. Hail beat against the big swathed window with a raucous metallic rat-a-tat, minuscule tin drums.
    That much Firefly was able to recount – in his own way of course, and in a stuttering stammering fashion – to the gathering that longed fervently for cleverness and received his words with a thousand mocking sniggers. What he could not recount is what happened next: how one of the roofing sheets first opened up like the blade of a jackknife, and then slid down and took off, a leaf of zinc that flipped halfway in the air and shone like a silver dagger before diving straight down like a bolt of lightning . . . and slicing off the head of a black man running with a suitcase in his hand.
    In the illusions of the circus (Firefly had gone to a matinee performance of the Santos y Artigas), the head cut off at a drum roll settled imperturbably back on the neck of the plump albino woman who undertook this remarkable exploit daily; that of the black man under the hailstorm fell smiling onto the suitcase that the decapitated body continued to hold.
    Firefly tried to speak, but could not. His right hand rose and fell, again and again, like someone chopping down a tree. He had become mechanized, a windup toy, voiceless.
    Then he felt something not only invade him icily through his feet, tying all his nerves in knots, but mix in with his very body, spilling out all over, like a shroud of sweat and cold.
    He looked away from the blood-spattered circus, but it was too late: his legs trembled, his teeth chattered like castanets, he stared off into space like someone cross-eyed or hallucinating, hearing voices. The stepladder itself began to wobble, as if a benign earthquake were shaking the foundations of the house, rather than a hurricane its rooftop.
    Seeing him like that, so stricken and mute, his face mottled with streaks spreading like angry little snakes, the family, as always when faced with a defenseless rara avis, redoubled its cruelty.
    The aunts launched into a derogatory dance – because a little boy must not go soft – and the cackling cripples, like deboned Graces, parodied his vacillations and silence by mamboing in unison while emitting chortles, cachinnations, and stuttering shrieks.
    The father kept repeating, “For the love of God, for the love of God!” yanking on the tip of a Havana with his teeth and draining compulsive cups of cognac.
    The mother worked the empty spinning wheel and began to sway senselessly in a rocker piled with cushions, the haunt of parturient she-cats.
    The sister took him by the arm to help him climb down the last steps. She whispered in his ear, affectionately, “How about some linden-flower tea? Or the Golden Book of Animals to take your mind off it?”
    The butt of the adults’ ridicule gave no answer. He fled sobbing to the kitchen, hunched over, hiding his face.
    Once in the kitchen, using the cloth for drying the porcelain, he wiped away two big tears.
    The buffeting winds were barely