Firefly Read Free Page B

and olive-skinned, long and bony, allobtuse angles and kinks, there is nothing unhealthy about him. His sallow disjointed face and that habit of sliding his index finger from his upper lip to his cheekbone are just his normal peculiarities. This phyto-practitioner, or herbalist to be more precise, has conserved (no one really knows why) all the therapeutic artifacts of bygone days when, rather than obey nature in its tortuous designs, he set his mind to using the most polished and austere of mechanical devices to oblige it to follow his own.
    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 ofguasima 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