Firefly by Severo Sarduy

the tree rodents they kept in cages, and spread on the cobblestones the rags theyhad pounded with their fists and then wrapped, still moist, in the filthy rucksacks they carried on their backs.
    The fork to the right was less inviting: ruins of those big neoclassical homes with Corinthian columns, frontispieces, and fleur-de-lis heraldry that sugar magnates coveted back in the early republican era, today the domain of fiery red brambles, lizard colonies, single-minded mice, and two tramps. Beggars were simultaneously reproach and entertainment in the city’s older neighborhoods, which accepted them as eccentric residues of the twisted fauna engendered by the Machado dictatorship, when a person’s daily ration was a “blond with green eyes” – a plate of rough flour with two slices of avocado.
    The grand seigneur of that couple was the Gentleman from Paris, who dressed in a black velvet cape in the suffocating heat of the island summer, his chest armored with ancient newspapers and magazines, and who spouted an ardent prosopopoeia featuring backwards tropes worthy of Lezama or of Chicharito and Sopeira, which he proffered in impeccable Castilian diction.
    His unhinged partner was the Marchioness, a splotchy-skinned, gray-haired black woman with an easy stride and Versailles-esque manners, the play protégé of witty dissolute ladies and even of real marchionesses (to the degree the woodyworm-eaten branches of insular heraldry allowed), who dressed her in outlandish attire left over from presidential balls or some bash at the Tropicana where the gowns had been ordered from the finest of Erté’s disciples.
    At the far end of that dump for architectonic and human ruins rose a solitary and dilapidated tower, the incongruent remains of a fortress that turned out to be indefensible or had been simply abandoned by commanders who were insolvent or had been relieved in mid-construction, to which several flamboyant volutes had given a vague Antillean Gothic look. No one went near it, nor did anyone even mention it (and when they did it was with their fingers making the cross), to the point that it was presumed haunted and cursed.
    He spotted the girls right away, at the end of the alleyway. There were two.
    They were seated on folding chairs on the sidewalk, but backwards with the chair backs between their open legs. Their brocade outfits dragged on the ground; they wore pierced hoop earrings that reached their shoulders and tortoiseshell hairpins perched on the crowns of their heads. The tight black spirals of their kiss-curls outlined a lattice of rigid volutes on their foreheads and temples. The edges of their purple lips were underscored with aline of black. Their eyelids were two half-moons of trembling aluminum that flashed up and down like the fins of frightened fish.
    A sour stench of sweat, beer, or rancid semen emanated from the interior of the sleazy dive behind them, along with a bluish blinking from the jukebox, drunken laughter and shouts, and a roll of raucous castanets.
    â€œAre you ready to try it out?” one of the sparkling hussies murmured at once, fluttering her eyes for effect and pointing to his crotch.
    â€œDo you know what it’s for?” added the other. And she let out a stentorian cackle, stamping her heel on the ground and spreading her legs even farther apart. From the sidewalk she picked up a glass half full of a light green phosphorescent liquid, which she knocked back. She shook her head as if to pull herself together, snorted, and collected the tortoiseshell clasp, which had rolled to the curb. She shouted back into the bar, asking for more “fresh herb.”
    Her dancing partner was smoking very thin cigars, the ends of which she tapped, like a woodpecker opening a hole in a tree, against an oversized cigarette case encrusted with shining costume jewels in the shape of a hammer and sickle.
    â€œA present,” she explained to Firefly without him