Firefly by Severo Sarduy

back. To enter would be to violate the memory the room held of the silence and, earlier, of the meditations and voices.
    He remembered that he still had the stolen notebook andpencil in his pocket. He pulled them out and on the first page drew a few shapeless scribbles, grotesque ideograms, which he aligned vertically. Then he erased them and replaced them with others equally inept. God knows what they might be. But for him the meaning was utterly clear:
    Poem
    from
    Plaza
    del
    Vapor
    * Have you ever heard of bibliomancy? It’s a form of divination that one can turn to only a few times in life if it is to “work,” and that consists of opening the Bible at random and pointing to a line without looking at the page.
    I have done it twice in my lifetime, at moments of great need. The first came up Matthew 2:12 (The Flight into Egypt): “And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.”
    This is a call to seers: What was Saint Matthew trying to tell me?

D ISILLUSION
    Fresh salt air, reeking of the sea. The purplish-blue shadows of things seemed to swirl around him, as if a crazed moon were spinning about the sky. Or maybe what had changed was his own body, inhabited now by somebody else.
    Down the shining cobblestone street came a skeletal black calash driver with chiseled cheekbones, at this hour already dressed in his vest and bowler hat. He stepped lightly, almost weightlessly, practically floating over the paving stones. With his right arm he pushed a loose cartwheel; in his free hand he carried a whip. The wheel bounced on the stones, wobbled, continued downhill.
    When the coachman passed Firefly, he gave him a surprised look, as if he recognized him and wondered what he was doing out there at that time of day.
    Cautiously, at a distance, like an affectionate and obliging mother, someone was following the driver.
    Firefly first recognized the starched white housedress, which ruffled open in the humid morning breeze like an immense day lily; then, shining just as white, the necklaces, small friendly sea-shells whose rattling he thought he could discern; and finally, the bright silk turban: the black Santeria priestess had found him again.
    In her hands she carried a lantern, its light extinguished, its glass stained from smoke, as if she had been using it all night long on her travels.
    â€œYou are going to discover something beside the water,” the mother of saints told him at once. Her voice was that of a woman who had just swallowed a sip of honey.
    â€œHow do you know?”
    The priestess rattled her necklaces. “And what’s more,” she added smiling, “it’ll happen soon. You’ll never go back home after seeing what you are about to see.”
    She half turned on her heels, like someone finishing a dance or jubilant at having completed a mission. She raised her hand and called to the coachman. Firefly understood neither the name she called out nor the language she spoke.
    They greeted each other with a salutation Firefly had never seen: mother’s right shoulder touched the driver’s left, then they repeated the same gesture in reverse.
    They disappeared up a cobblestone alley between two pink churches. In the fragile light of dawn, the two figures against the sparkling bluish paving stones fresh with dew had the precision of a mirage: morning’s white lingering note, ephemeral messengers who vanished before the sun could devour everything with its leprous cruelty.
    The churches’ symmetrical façades glowed like unfinished metal when the first orange rays of the sun touched the broken volutes and the gross adipose angels shaking maracas on either side of the doors and beside the crumbling triangle of lintels, where invading rats had found all the amenities of refuge.
    Firefly took a few steps. The joins between the cobblestones wove an awkward tangle, a perspective drawing of