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lying naked in his empty amphitheater. Using the pendulum, he explored without touching her trembling body.When the rotations accelerated, he would place his right ear on her skin and listen to the blood rumble in her veins, and then he would continue roaming until he returned to the sound of her breathing, the whoosh of her lymphatic fluid, the creaking of her cartilage against the calcium in her bones: the entire infinitesimal swamp of life itself.
    Thus he was able, without the lamentable impediment of culinary effluences, to sniff every bit of her, to breathe her in slowly, to assess her skin with his sense of smell, even the most humid and hidden parts, the very walls of her sex; he could hear the dull roar of the hairs of her pubis under the lobe of his own ear. And all this without anyone knowing, not even she, exposed as she was, unknowingly, to radiesthetic inspection – thanks to a small menstrual retardation.
    Once he figured out who these prostration professionals were and why they had come, Firefly set to convincing himself of the gravity of his own illness. As a cover he devised a rigid catatonia and perfected it to such a degree that the doctors were faced with a wide-eyed wooden doll, gaze fixed on the zenith, a thread of transparent purple saliva drooling from his lips. Flies did not disturb him, nor did the handbell rung by the nun who dispensedthe cane juice, which was so piercing and shrill it made even the moribund tremble.
    In examinations of the parents and sister, which the experts undertook straight off, the pendulum’s spin was sluggish, stumbling, knotted like the speech of a drunk. Such lethargy could be caused by anything, since magnetic disturbances often overwhelm sensitive bodies in the aftermath of a hurricane.
    More revealing was the radiesthesic map of the aunts, the three of them wrapped in the same hypnosis, as if huddled under the red sealing wax of a single blanket. Very useful, it must be admitted, was the light interrogation that accompanied the auscultation, with responses obtained via screams in the ear, shakings, and slaps across the face.
    They then turned to Firefly.
    To the astonishment of the specialists, the copper cone spun normally up the length of that wooden body, but when it reached his heart the device jumped like a frightened rabbit: it stopped abruptly, remained still a few seconds, then began spinning crazily in the wrong direction. Clearly, the blood beat mightily and flowed in torrents through that pretend cadaver.
    Isidro and Gator looked at each other, both suspecting the same thing. The herbalist turned and faced the garden, apparentlyintrigued by the plants; in reality he wanted to meditate on this enigma, which he intended to solve on the spot.
    Then he swiveled back toward the bed of the petrified boy. Once more he scrutinized the stiff. “Precocious catalepsy,” the experts declared in unison, though, smelling something fishy, they remained unconvinced.
    Once the verdict had been pronounced, Isidro and Gator sat down on either side of the cot. The chubby one pulled the pendulum from the right-hand pocket of his trousers and suspended it in the air, observing it calmly, as if he wished to confirm the impeccable operation of the laws of gravity.
    In his mind, Gator went over the various tonics or revivifying potions, all based on a French wine, Château des Mille Tremblements, mixed with rum and raw sugar, which he could insist the young patient, despite his inert, practically wooden state, drink through a cinnamon straw.
    Isidro, while studying the pendulum’s easy swing, peered at the melon-head with the astuteness of a caged bird, careful not to let him know he was being watched. Gator meanwhile was fascinated, or pretended to be, by the minuscule purple flowers that grew between the bricks, a practically extinct species that sprouted there alone due to the aseptic nature of the place. Inreality, he was eyeing cataleptic Firefly from