Firefly Read Online Free PDF

his crime! The devilish monster! He tried to poison his own family!”
    The hairless Chinaman bounces like a doll stuffed with sawdust. Weak. Utterly without strength. And the tiny bit that remains he draws on to run.
    He crossed the courtyard diagonally. The accusing shouts of the lepers fell on him like a rain of hot stones and ash through which he barely managed to move; a very familiar paralysis began to take hold of him, like tetanus rising up from his feet. Urging himself on, he tried to reach the tiled door but felt his legs refuse. Then he tried to scream. As in a dream, he opened his mouth, sent air rushing from his throat, from his chest, from his belly. He pushed hard. Nothing came out.
    It seemed to him undeniable that his body had become superfluous, a useless excess, morbid, better eliminated so the world could recover its equilibrium, its original harmony. It was as if something or someone were urgently demanding his exclusion, his eradication in the pursuit of cleanliness and an ideal of order. He imagined the peevish gesture of an immaculate muscled hand, flicking from some untainted marble a disgusting insect, a larva, a crazy man’s spittle, something abject yet visible, a focal pointattracting everyone’s gaze like a magnet: that which must be extirpated.
    From the lepers’ wing, clutching it as best she could with her two bleeding stumps, an old woman with a nose devoured by cankers tossed a basin at him, rubber enema hose and all, filled with sour wastewater that spattered him and provoked an irrepressible desire to throw up. Then another of the decayed women who had seen it all raced to her bed, bawling insults or mocking scorn in a mousy singsong, and quickly returned with a rotten mango, which she also threw at him.
    Fortunately, Firefly had by then crossed the threshold and was in the front yard of the hospice. At the last moment, he turned to look back at the ward that held the catatonics. He had the fleeting impression that his sister was waking up and glancing around uneasily, looking for him.
    Little by little, the city had begun to recover from the storm. Storekeepers, between sobs, totted up their losses.
    He was in the street. It was morning. From a nearby market came the calls of fishermen; pushcart wheels squealed on the paving stones. Harried planters crowded around a slaver. They tasted the sweat of the black women, bargained, then packed them into carts and carried them off to distant sugar mills tobe deposited in malodorous barracks. Also reaching him in the little square, like stampedes of color, were beams from the rising sun reflected off the awnings that covered the kiosks: yellow canvases that returned the light or spread it across the limestone façades, on pyramids of mammee or pineapple. In the middle of one golden stall, the breeze undid little piles of purple and red powders for offerings.
    Surrounded by the throng, he felt the useless dross of his body, the sensation that he was dragging about a stain or a burden from which he could not free himself. Guilt surrounded him like an opaque aura; an invisible leprosy devoured his skin. He was hungry and thirsty. He wanted someone to play with. To see his sister. He recalled his father’s footsteps in the corridor of the house, the early clattering of his mother in the kitchen, the owl that from the garden ceiba tree awakened him each night, the far-off strumming of guitars, the misplaced steps of singing drunks. He yearned for a long deep sleep. He wanted to die and be born again, to return to the state that precedes birth and succeeds death. He wanted to de-exist. To become somebody else.
    He found himself lost among the vendors in the little square, amid a tumult of shoppers, passersby, fleeting nuns, cabin boys, leering quadroons, pickpockets, card sharks, knife-sharpeners, witch doctors, medical astrologists, herbalists, swindlers, andslaves. He knew not where to go or what to do. One thing he did know for