Free Firefly by Severo Sarduy Page B

about to part, he would wake up in tears.
    One day his feet nudged a few of the documents as he awoke, and he realized he could read the lawyers’ letterheads and even their signatures. No one had taught him. Unless you could call it teaching when the big-shot lawyers, laughing and tugging on his earlobe, would point at a letterhead and shout out syllable by syllable the surname printed there. The day he first arrived on the arm of the black Santeria priestess, Munificence showed him Christ on an alphabet card all dog-eared and yellowed.
    â€œThe rest is too hard for you,” she said and, as if she wanted to make sure no one could reach it, she stuck the abecedary between the leaves of the acanthus molding on a false column, a fleetingly popular stucco ornamentation in what once had been the impeccable front room of the lower floor. “I’ll teach you,” she added peevishly, “one letter a day.”
    But he never got any follow-up ABC’s, nor did he manage to decipher the intricate ink symbols on his own after he managed, high on a folding stepladder, to steal the dusty rolled-up card from amid the Corinthian foliage.
    With the same security – that irretrievable feeling which emanates from innocence and which all knowledge corrupts – with which he had once pronounced “decimeter, centimeter” perfectly without knowing its meaning, like a spell against fear, he now took hold of a quill pen lying on the desk next to the recamier.He moistened the moldy tip in the depths of an inkpot; all that remained was a thick, dirty, black paste, like sediment from medicine or extract from poison. On a vellum paper envelope he sketched several laconic and authoritative squiggles without a clue as to their meaning: something, no doubt, that he had better remember.
    He spent that day imagining inscriptions, which he visualized distinctly in his mind’s eye on a red background, embellished with arabesques and gold filigree.
    From the drawer of a mortgage broker he stole a notebook with big cottony pages, wide margins, and horizontal turquoise lines; from the satchel where a tax official hid his clutter, he snitched a pencil. He slipped them both carefully into the front pocket of his trousers. He felt the binding of the notebook rubbing against his sex, the iridescent seam like a soft piece of mother-of-pearl caressing him throughout the day, while he, docile lackey, hurried down the long corridors of the office building.
    Afternoon again came to an end in Plaza del Vapor. They had not yet closed the slaughterhouses, the rag dealers, the cinnamon shops. Glowing inside the darkened stores, as if touched by the last rays of sunset, were the silver threads of Indian fabric, the purple of dyes, the misshapen spice jars that still conserved theirfleur-de-lis insignia, old colonial coats of arms, lacquered seals from provincial apothecaries, or the still-legible emblem of the Compañía de Indias. Moneylenders packed away their etched-glass lamps and their strongboxes inlayed with sandalwood, ebony, and jacaranda; a hand with rings over black-gloved fingers unpinned from the edge of a shelf a square of black velvet displaying large irregular coins whose royal profiles were cracked, and another featuring little cellophane envelopes overflowing with vibrantly colored triangular stamps from countries that had disappeared or never existed.
    A squalid apprentice dressed in white, stinking of soy sauce and shellac (his limp and shiny black hair hung down his back) unhooked from an oxblood-red wall a sign that announced in impulsive angry letters, like ideograms, a brief, amenable Cantonese menu. At least that is what Firefly managed, more than read, to guess. Or make up.
    He took an alley that dropped sharply to the docks, as did the storm sewer that ran down its center, where the Indian women, before heading off to the tenements where they crowded in for the night, washed up their offspring, watered