Firefly by Severo Sarduy Page A

short drab lines that stood out against the leaden gray of the rilievos and receded progressively toward the horizon between the two churches.
    He was meditating on the priestess’s words and on everything in his life that seemed confused, ominous, and impossible to decipher. His story was a frayed tapestry with no apparent pattern, seen in a dream.
    He felt someone touch him on the shoulder.
    Startled, he turned around. He had not heard anyone approach.
    Next to him stood a strange being somewhere between senile childhood and long-lasting decrepitude, maybe a girl whose face was parchment-like from premature wrinkles, or perhaps an elderly woman whose skin was smeared with wax or powdered eggshell. She was tiny, fragile-looking; her body had either not yet reached maturity or was already desiccated, skin and bone, and had preserved at the end of her life, like an archaeological relic, some aspect of her youth. She was wearing a long, baggy dress made of shining silk, within which she seemed to float. She was barefoot. Her feet were bony and pointy, and against the paving stones they looked like two porgies. Her hair was straw-blond, maybe newborn fuzz or maybe gray, dyed with peroxide and saffron. A flimsy tiara made of hammered silver or tin held and adorned her lustrous scalp.
    The lips of the apparition parted in a hint of a smile or a grimace. From the depths of her foggy pupils streaked with ash this emaciated being glanced his way. “Would you like me to show you something?” she accosted him without the least preamble. “Something you will never forget?”
    â€œWho are you?” Firefly managed to mumble as he steppedback, terrified by the possibly angelic, possibly demonic, certainly supernatural specter.
    â€œYou don’t recognize me?” the horror responded with derision. Her voice was fluty and nasal; her phrases ended with a piercing rasp. “Take a good look because I haven’t changed. Don’t you remember the day Munificence on a whim kicked me out of the charity house? Ah, now you see who I am!” and her voice exploded in a gravelly chortle.
    She raised her skirts and spun around, slender and supple.
    Firefly (he always noticed the trifling and missed the essential) noted that she spun in the opposite direction to the priestess. The silk of her dress sparkled with a bluish glint in the square, like a standard in a procession.
    â€œWhat are you doing here so early?” Firefly asked.
    â€œI was at a masked ball at the Colonia Española, and I gave my tutors the slip so I could take a stroll on my own. Would you like me to show you something? A place like no other. If you come, you won’t regret it.”
    She gave him a tremulous wink of her waxy eyelids that was meant to be mischievous. Then she touched his shoulder lightly in a gesture suggesting complicity, which to Firefly felt like the caress of a scorpion.
    The skinny girl did not knock on the door; she shoved it open.
    A descending spiral staircase came into view; it had no banister, nor did it appear to ever end. Down below reigned a greenish penumbra populated by indecipherable murmurs: black wings or poisonous elytra.
    The descent seemed interminable.
    Skin-and-bones went first, whirling frenetically and shouting gleeful encouragement, which her nasal twang and the metallic timbre of the echo transformed into incomprehensible whines.
    The train of her dress, always just a few paces ahead of Firefly, slithered over the stone steps like a lizard, only to reappear a spiral farther down.
    Someone was descending ahead of them. Firm, confident steps perfectly at home. Suddenly a skid, something scattering on the floor – papers, a document, sheets flying. Silence.
    Down, down they went.
    But they found nothing.
    At the end of that around-and-around, they came upon another door, this one covered with cushiony cockroach-infested bottle-green padding. It had a window.
    Vulgar and determined, the runt