Firefly Read Online Free PDF Page B

sure: Never again would he have a home or a family, a place of origin or repose. Flight had cut off his roots, thrust him into an exile with no return. Although he had only just left them, his mother’s lap, his sister’s voice, a bed covered in gifts, and, upon rising, the smell of bread with salted oil and a mug of coffee, it all seemed very distant, like a fuzzy recollection, almost like a dream.
    He was weak, trembling, his skin mortuary pallor. He felt someone was about to grab him by the scruff of the neck like a cat and hoist him up into the void, then let him fall from on high and smash against the paving stones, just to watch the bits of his brain and blood bounce.
    He huddled against a marble fountain with four dolphins, whose cool jets he tried to reach. Beggars pleaded for crumbs and even doubloons from the calash drivers done up in frock coats and bowler hats; a Manila shawl slipped off the shoulders of a Creole lady and fell into a pile of horse manure.
    An elderly black woman passing by, dressed neatly in white linen with a silk turban, picked poor Firefly up. She was wearing necklaces, earrings, and bracelets made of tiny shells, also white, which, when she hoisted him higher to caress his head, rang in his ear like the rattles of his infancy, like the maternal murmur.
    â€œI cannot care for you, my son,” she whispered with regret while smoothing his hair with her hands, “because I already have many with what God has given me, and they are waiting at home. But I will take you to a very big and very pretty house with ceiling fans and a refrigerator and everything, where a white woman, kind and clean as only she can be, will give you a little glass of crème de vie .”
    * Thus works clairvoyance. The poor herbalist could not know that with these suspicions, even though later disproved, he was confirming Firefly’s prediction when he heard the dispatch from the observatory and interpreted it as announcing an invasion of bats. Not even the seer himself understands his words – and I say this from my own experience. No science is capable of ordering the abstruse language of vaticinations .

L ACK OF AIR
    â€œMilk,” answered Munificence. “Condensed milk. Two cups.”
    â€œWhat else?” Firefly asked, licking his lips.
    â€œRum. Three tablespoons of rum. And two eggs, beaten. Just the yolks. You save the whites for meringue.”
    â€œIt’ll make you strong.”
    â€œNow, to work. Before bed you’ll get a big bowl of soup with a slice of bread and a bit of bacon. Porridge in the morning. But we’ve got a lot to do. More?”
    â€œI can’t, my head’s spinning.”
    Munificence was sitting with her back against a white stone fireplace, a useless holdover from the turn-of-the-century colonial style that for no reason but overblown pretentiousness had filled the island’s stifling living rooms with cloying volutes and ornate window frames. Two large windows, always open, failedto cool the moth-eaten stacks of notaries’ folders stuck in transit to or from the offices on the upper floor; the shelves were all overflowing with pasteboard notebooks, each threaded by a red marker ribbon, offered up to spiderwebs and dust.
    During the end-of-year drought they called winter, they would close the book cabinets and fill the fireplace with mahogany logs or some sort of aromatic fresh-cut wood that never quite burned and would become a favorite haunt of rats fat as hutia tree rodents, bulimic beasts that went on from that woodpile to lay claim to everything devourable until the next dry season when the decorative mahogany logs would be replaced and the rodents would start in all over again.
    Munificence was enormously tall, a pole for knocking cats off the roof. Behind her back, the “girls” – as she called the innocents forgotten or confined by their parents in the big charity house adjoining the offices – called her