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had the aunt’s soothing and unknowingly revelatory request . . . Another linden-flower tea! Evidently, the crafty barracuda had given his family a sleeping potion, a diabolical concoction that he himself had not drunk, but whose effects – the scoundrel – he pretended to suffer.”
    â€œYou criminal!” Isidro sputtered through clenched teeth. He pointed mercilessly at Firefly and hurled the pendulum to the floor amid a scattering of terrified nuns.
    â€œYou monster!” Gator echoed from the fountain, where his botanical ruminations had led him to the same conclusion at the very same time.
    From the hospice wing across the courtyard, cupping their hands to their mouths and parting the mosquito nettings to reveal faces waxen or enraged, the lepers immediately began to howl “To the stocks!” though they had no clue who was being accused, or of what.
    Have you seen the little kid in that Goya tapestry bobbing up and down on a tablecloth being shaken by four peasant women? Or those Chinese acrobats who bounce like beads on a tautstring? Well, though it seems unbelievable, Firefly jumped just like that from the simple cot that sheltered him, no tablecloth, no taut string, as soon as he saw the outstretched, outsized arms of the radiesthesist and the herbalist coming at him like gyrating tentacles about to strangle him.
    â€œThat leap settled it.” The obese one is now speaking without slides before a packed classroom. He waves the pendulum about like a pointer; nothing interrupts the sepulchral silence of the place but pencils and sighs; the devotees record with the former and concur with the latter the professor’s all-encompassing evidence. “And it proved beyond any doubt that the energy contained in a ‘catatonic simulation’ can, via that hysterical conversion noted by Charcot, be transformed into ‘agitation tremens.’ There have been cases,” he says, the mangy dog punctuating his sentences by rustling the beaded curtain, while a stink of potato soup wafts in from the kitchen, “of Teresian nuns, hardly acrobats, who went straight from ecstasis to compulsive flexion: drooling, their eyes glassy, they’d bend over backwards . . . until their heads touched their heels.”
    Let’s leave the culpable extra-large cranium hanging in the air for a moment before he completes his fall. A moment to analyzethe situation, to unravel if possible the Gordian knot of this “familicidal” personality, as the Diario de la Marina put it in their apt headline, yet “vulnerable, even fragile, ever affectionate, at times exemplary.”
    Whoever is innocent, or believes himself to be, defends himself. Whoever retains some trace of purity, a surviving smidgen of his original decency, answers the accusations. But he who is wholly guilty, or who suspects as much, can do nothing but remain silent, hide his face, dodge insults, flee.
    The poor melon-head figures his error is indelible and he is lost for good; that is why he leaps the way he leaps. Reproof and self-disgust are what give rise to his bounding energy. Nothing else. It is the “urgent, urgent” need (he repeats the word to himself) to become somebody else that explains his sudden ability to jump.
    So much so that he can visualize his own body hanging there. And he feels it so sullied and blameworthy that it has become no more than a charcoal silhouette, a dirty rag, a useless black burden. Better to let himself fall, allow himself to plummet as if he were still astride that fecal cistern. Allow himself to slide toward his mother, run into her open arms, hear her voice next to his ear: “It’s all over now, it’s all over now.”
    He lands back on the cot as the accuser and his pal, who is brandishing a bunch of purple plants, followed by several breathless and blood-curdling nuns, close in on their prey. Purulent fingers point at him once again: “Make him pay for