Four Lilies

On Sat­ur­day night I dreamed about a sor­cer­er. He was dressed like sor­cer­ers al­ways dress in tales, with a black gown and a high point­ed hat. There were half moons and sil­ver stars print­ed on the gown and hat. The sor­cer­er was very thin, very old with a bony point­ed nose and a very long, very white beard. And the im­por­tant thing about it all was that he told me the se­cret for­mu­la of in­vis­i­bil­i­ty. Ob­vi­ous­ly I dream these things be­cause my Dad’s a phar­ma­cist and I’m used to hear­ing about for­mu­las.

As soon as I woke I jot­ted it all down on a piece of paper and went look­ing for my friend Marce­lo to share it with him. We shut our­selves up in the lab be­hind the shop and got to work on a reg­u­lar army of flasks, test tubes and stills, pour­ing from one to the other all the acids and pow­ders and other muck the place is full of and heav­en knows what they are used for. We got re­al­ly en­thu­si­as­tic and, to tell the truth, didn’t fol­low the sor­cer­er’s recipe any more: we’d taken off and were using our own ini­tia­tive adding more and more in­gre­di­ents, main­ly until we’d got a huge flask filled with a thick, black, boil­ing liq­uid. Marce­lo stirred it with a wood­en spoon and poured some of the liq­uid into a test tube.

Then I pulled my lit­tle dog Lucas over, by force be­cause he tried to get away as best he could, so I held him down by the nose and made him drink the whole test tube full. The glass was very hot to my fin­gers and Lucas opened his eyes very wide. When I let him go it was very odd, he gave some­thing like a se­ries of coughs and sneezes, then was still, bare­ly breath­ing. Marce­lo and I watched him for over an hour but noth­ing no­tice­able hap­pened.

“It isn’t a pre­scrip­tion meant for dogs,” I said when I saw that Lucas was dead.

“Well,” Marce­lo an­swered, “let’s see if the wiz­ard’s spell works on us then.”

We filled the test tube twice, and first I, then he, drank a good deal of that black, steam­ing liq­uid. Some­times it tast­ed like cough syrup, other times like sul­phur or gun­pow­der. Marce­lo, as Lucas had done, choked a bit and sneezed sev­er­al times, but in my case my eyes filled with tears and I felt a blaze of fire in my face and in my stom­ach.

Very pa­tient­ly we wait­ed for an hour, then an­oth­er, and an­oth­er. Since we could see that noth­ing was wrong with us, we went to watch TV and had to admit the sor­cer­er had made fools of us.