Free Firefly by Severo Sarduy Page A

clasp’s needle to achieve some symmetry.
    Fatso slipped pieces of ice between the girl’s lips.
    The afternoon heat had become suffocating and dense. A salty breeze wafted in. A bolt of lightning streaked the sky.
    Ada opened her eyes.
    They were about to carry on when suddenly they heard something bulky collapse on the first floor like a landslide. Then silence.
    Munificence went slowly, noiselessly to the door. She yanked it open and went out fuming.
    Down the stairs she went, stamping furiously on each step. When she reached the lower floor she could contain herself no longer. “As if I hadn’t had enough!” she shrieked. “As if I hadn’t had enough! Now Firefly’s out cold!”
    â€œLethargy cubensis ,” diagnosed the intern, excessively learned like all apprentices, “a typical case.”
    He glanced out of the corner of his eye at the spot where his idle supervisor stood beside a Victrola, listening attentively to a scratchy record and swinging a stethoscope in his hand.
    Firefly lay on a low cot between two cabinets of surgical instruments, duly burnished and classified, displayed on glass shelves. The sharp edges of the aluminum bistouries and pincers sparkled in the stale and morbid air of that municipal clinic located next door to the charity house, a refuge of the penniless and the thunderstruck, where lowly students aided renowned physicians in the most trivial or unpleasant sanitary tasks.
    When anyone ran down the hall or strode by like a boxer or a boss, the instruments of incision vibrated with a tiny tinkling.
    Anatomy charts and silent-film posters covered the walls. Besides the nasal sound of the record player, there was rumbling from a water pump, chirping from a few birds, and, closer by, the groans of a patient.
    Munificence, seated on a wire stool and reading an old copy of Hola , awaited the intern’s verdict.
    Firefly swiveled his right hand back and forth, signaling from his cot, “I’m not great.”
    â€œWe’re going to do a blood test,” the assistant clarified, addressing Munificence. He overarticulated the words, the way one shouts to someone far away or speaks to the deaf.
    Firefly felt like he was naked and alone in a marble room, covered with an ice-cold sheet. From head to foot.
    The intern opened up the cabinet and pulled out a syringe and a tourniquet. He raised the syringe in the air and held it to the light, slowly pushing and pulling the plunger to see if it was working. He went over to Firefly, who watched him, sweaty and frozen.
    He wore a white cap secured at the forehead with an elastic band, and a doctor’s coat, open and starched. Below that, a shirt and a silk tie with painted dragonflies and big golden blooms held in place by a clip. Baggy pants, tied at the waist and ankles with white cords.
    â€œMake a fist, real tight.” He tied the tourniquet around Firefly’s upper arm. “Think of something else.”
    Firefly heard a loud buzzing in his ears.
    Then the voice of his sister. But he could not tell what she was saying.
    Nor what happened after that.

P OEM FROM P LAZA DEL V APOR
    He spent his final charity-house days absorbed in his pious part as the gofer, the errand boy on permanent probation, the flunky bargaining for brownie points for an improbable posterity. He gave up his nocturnal snooping, slept naked and forsaken, his feet propped up on the varnished mahogany volute of the recamier, which could no longer contain both him and the disarray of disheveled dockets. Now he dreamed and it was always the same: He was saying goodbye to his mother in a place divided by walls made of thick fractured glass; he reproached her for allowing him to leave (as if something that happened much later were occurring at that very moment), for not insisting he stay on at home. He felt the warm maternal skin of her arms and face so singularly close that he was convinced they were real. When they were