Firefly by Severo Sarduy

in its daytime hideout, the bell tower of the cathedral.
    Amid damp green-and-yellow pyramids of freshly woven baskets, the Gypsies were cooking their lunch of dense phyllo pastries stuffed with olives.
    Had he dreamed it all, like the white wooden house by the sea, like the phosphorescence of the lightning bugs above the sand? Was it simply delirium, a trumped-up story both gratuitous and meticulous, contrived by drink? Or were they fooling him again, making fun of him, callously playing with his frailty? But why?
    He decided to search on the sly for some clue, some trace, convinced that if the visitors had been real they must have left a mark. Likely more than one, since the assault he half saw had seemed so real.
    He perceived – but it was immaterial, indemonstrable – the dark emanation of the events like the tenuous impalpable shadow that remains in a room after a crime and which no one can point to but some people find unbearable.
    Quietly he climbed the stairs to the office illuminated the night before. He was welcomed, as usual, by a fat-cheeked lawyer wearingblue-tinted bifocals and a gold watch chain, holding his head in his hands, either the victim of a migraine or lost in the twists and turns of some extortion.
    â€œA café con leche really hot and a ham-and-cheese sandwich,” the man yelled at once. And he angrily pounded a yellowed document with a sealing-wax stamp, as if he meant to punch a hole right through it.
    Firefly did not obey the order; on the contrary, he advanced a few steps toward the center of the office, observing everything, scrutinizing each object, searching for a sheaf of papers out of place, a fold in the rug, a sliver of glass. There was nothing.
    â€œWhy aren’t you on your way?” the lawyer scolded. “Are you in limbo or what the hell’s wrong with you?” Then suddenly changing his tone, he chuckled. “Ah, I forgot. My mind’s somewhere else.”
    He held out a one-peso note.
    Firefly left the office. His eyes scoured the floor. He heard them summoning him with a bell and with shouts from the other offices. But he paid no heed; he did not even go for the litigator’s order.
    He was looking for a sign. More: for proof of his sanity.
    Repeatedly, he went up and down the stairs. He combed the mezzanine. He returned, under the pretext that they had nochange, to the scene where it all supposedly occurred. Nothing. And yet . . .
    Disheartened and exhausted, he was about to give up the search and accept it was just alcohol playing tricks or mind-games spun by his imagination. He was ready to sink to the floor in tears, ready to head back to the yellow cupboard, when amid the chaos of the threadbare furniture on the first floor, on the leather of an easy chair people had to brush past to get to the door, he found, still fresh, no older than a night, a trickle of blood .
    Now everything seemed linked, definitive: overlapping causes connected to consequences by indestructible bonds, like animals devouring and regurgitating one another from now until the ultimate extinction. Everything was crystal clear. Yet by late afternoon doubts accosted again him. Maybe it had been he himself, drunk, who had been wounded? Maybe the blood was old? With the same minute care with which he had scrutinized the office, he inspected his body in the mirror, millimeter by millimeter, an archaeologist of his own skin.
    Nothing.
    The following day he took to drink once more.
    And the day after that.
    At first he fixed the yellow cupboard so Munificence would not notice the break-in, and he doctored the crème , reducing its alchemy with equal measures of harsh rum and condensed milk, but found it insipid and repugnant and stopped straightaway. Then, with his morning coffee he would search the pantry for bottles of beer he could hide among the dockets and then sip bit by bit in furtive paper cups between his hurried and irritating errands.
    At six in the afternoon, when