The Cigar Roller

by Pablo Medina

  At first it was different. Even if they thought of their father as so much brainless matter, they came to the home and tried to distract him with talk of their lives. Rubén discussed poetry and recited some of his poems out loud to his father. Amadeo didn’t understand them and wished he could speak so he could tell Rubén he was wasting his time; he would never be as good as Martí. Pastor, the middle one, is married to a leggy blond from Ohio who used to bring him peach pies he couldn’t eat because they made him gag. He has a daughter, who is studying to be a doctor. She visited only once and taught Amadeo to speak with his eyes. One blink means yes, two means no. Three blinks means thirst, four means hunger. Five means pain, which is meaningless since pain is not something he can feel in his condition. Six is doctor. Seven is change me. Eight and nine he forgets and ten means help, but no one in Santa Gertrudis has had the patience to wait for him to blink ten times, and so he does not even try. All the thinking has made him drool but Nurse is uninterested in wiping him. If you want to make a mess of yourself, go right ahead, she says. You should be ashamed, acting like a silly baby. A grown man, she says, and leaves.

  Amadeo is alone again. He can think without interruption, he can remember what he did and what he did not do. Sometimes he remembers things as they actually happened; other times he changes them. He doesn’t care anymore what is true and what is not, if he sees events now as they happened then. No one is listening. No one is here to correct him. If he is an elephant on Monday, so be it. If he is an insect on Tuesday, who is there to tell him he is not? He can drool, he can shit again, he can be a killer of men, a seducer of women, he can be an old man lying helpless in bed entertaining himself with stories. He can remember the time he spent seeking his fortune, making the money that is the real measure of a man, his first job sweeping the cigar factory floor in Pinar del Río. He can remember learning by watching the rollers in their benches, silently, never asking any questions because they would give the wrong answer just to throw him off. Cigar rollers are like that. He took tobacco home, practiced through the day and night until he could roll a perfecto with his eyes closed. He remembers moving to Elpidio’s house, Elpidio with his caramel skin and green eyes who taught him the shape, the spirit of the cigar, without which it is simply a bunch of rolled tobacco like the Indians used to make. Amadeo became a stripper and made sorter in a year. No one had ever risen so fast in the factories of Pinar del Río. Still, they refused to give him a bench. So he worked for Elpidio who ran a chinchal, what they call a buckeye in el Norte, from the house. The time came when Amadeo didn’t need the miserable salary they paid him at the factory. If he stayed it was because he got his tobacco for free. In those days it was considered beneath the rollers’ dignity to have their allotment of tobacco weighed at the beginning and end of each day as happened later after the weight-scale strike. Whatever was left over was there for anyone to take, and Amadeo took what he needed. War broke out in 1868 in Oriente and soon spread to Pinar del Río. Amadeo’s father, a Canary Islander with the disposition of a mule, thought his son would run off with the rebels at the first opportunity, and so, the next year he sent Amadeo to Campeche, where a cousin of his owned a hemp factory. Amadeo remembers his father putting him on an oxcart with a family of six who were escaping the ravages of war for the relative safety of Havana. The head of the family, a tobacco farmer from San Juan y Martínez, told Amadeo that he had just had his farm burned by a column of voluntarios. The family had been assigned for reconcentration but escaped the voluntarios and were now headed for the capital where he hoped they would be safe. This hope was not shared by the others and Amadeo remembers now the drawn look of fear on the faces of the women, coupled with resignation and a several-days-old hunger. Amadeo remembers, too, the dim look on his own mother’s face as they parted—she was never an affectionate woman—and the weak wave of her hand as he climbed on the cart.

  For a week they lumbered through the countryside, traveling east after the sun went down to avoid detection by the warring factions. With him Amadeo had brought a sack of food his mother prepared containing several cans of sardines, hard-boiled eggs, lard crackers and a bottle of well water, which he shared with the farmer’s family until the provisions ran out. He went hungry for the first time in his life. He saw the faces of the dead, lying contorted on the ground or hanging from the trees. Not one of them was smiling or at peace or happy or sad. All of them were vacant, graceless, drained. They drove past a small child abandoned on the road and when one of the women asked the driver to stop, he said, if he’s got the fare he can get on, if not, he can wait for the next driver. As they moved on, Amadeo threw his last cracker in the boy’s direction. The cart reached Havana three days later, an hour before the ship sailed for Yucatán. The captain, an old friend of his father, it turned out, had to bribe a harbor official who claimed Amadeo’s papers were not in order.

  Amadeo was in Campeche two years, long enough to buy his way back to Cuba to confront his father for having sent him away, but by then the old man had died. When he got to the house there was only his mother, silent and inscrutable, slowly dying of malnutrition. The interminable war was raging and there was little food to be had in the provinces. Mamá, he said, I’m home. But it was like speaking to a stone. He went out and bought a loaf of stale bread and tried to have her eat it. When she finally opened her mouth such a pestilential odor came out that he was revolted and had to turn his face away. He tried to find a doctor for her that day and the next but the three that he spoke to wanted more money than he had. He even went as far as threatening the last one, who pulled a pistol from inside his coat and put it right between Amadeo’s eyes. The doctor pulled the trigger but the gun jammed, then he quickly slammed the door and locked it behind him and Amadeo was left standing on the porch, urine dripping from his pant cuffs onto the imported Italian tiles. Amadeo’s mother survived the war and the starvation as she had survived all the misfortunes in her life, by waiting them out. Ten years later, nearly blind from cataracts, she met her fate under the wheels of a fruit vendor’s wagon.

  Amadeo senses that his body is drying out and turning to dust. His instinct is to raise his head and look for himself but, of course, he cannot do this. He lowers his eyes as far as they will go. All he sees is the mound of his body covered by white sheets, underneath which, he is certain, his extremities, his torso, his organs and his bones are slowly becoming dust. He can feel it floating over the bed in pink and yellow layers. Is this how death comes, in a dissolution of the corporeal self, in a desiccation of fluids and dispersion of matter into the air? Nurse enters with her clinking jars of baby food and her vacant disposition. Amadeo closes his eyes, makes believe he is still asleep. Mr. Terra, wake up, Mr. Terra. She has put the tray on the rolling table and is pulling the sheet off him. In one swooping motion it flies up like a sail catching wind and dispels the clouds that have risen from him. She moves him this way and that, wipes him with a wet towel, puts on a fresh diaper, pulls down his robe, and cranks up the bed so she can feed him. This time there is no mango, but he is unwilling to fight her and so he opens his mouth willingly and lets her spoon into him whatever she has brought. Nothing he recognizes. In two minutes she is done and congratulates him on his cooperation. She wipes his face, gathers the tray and leaves. Amadeo cannot think of anything just then. Something is happening inside his body he doesn’t like, groups of people gathering on street corners, in parks, upset at some political unfairness, a stolen election, a breakdown of the system. More people gather and the outrage grows, followed by a rallying cry. The crowd spills onto the streets. A boy throws a Molotov cocktail at a police wagon; someone else sets fire to a mound of refuse. Leaders materialize out of nowhere. Now the mob is running down the streets of the city breaking windows, throwing rocks, screaming. Old men are trampled, baby trams upended. Amadeo can feel it in his body. There is a volley of shots from a contingent of army regulars who block the boulevard. Several young men fall. The people are angry and blind with rage, Deat
h to the Spaniards, Death to the King, ¡Viva Cuba! Amadeo opens his mouth to scream for help and a fierce jet of food shoots out and lands on the white snow of his belly. He closes his eyes, exhausted. He can feel his heavy breathing, his heartbeat in his ears, the curfew siren sounding, the random shots, the black smoke rising from buildings torched by the mob, the grave-like quiet of the streets broken only by the sound of waves washing up on shore.

  Sometimes you fall in with a woman and there is nothing you can do. Your brain says here and that’s where you stop to tie up your mule, convince yourself that she’s the one and you marry her. She may not be the most beautiful or the best housekeeper or the hottest in bed. No matter. You dismiss the superlatives. And so it was with Julia. She understood him and she knew what it meant to be a cigar maker, as good as could be found on the island. And she had character. She learned when to stay out of his way and when to stand up to him. She grew to know, as if she was clairvoyant, when his moods were about to strike before he did. One month he would take up gambling and lose two, three thousand pesos at the cockfights. Two months later he would go on a drinking binge that lasted three days and come home broken and helpless. She would be waiting for him with a plate of rice and vaca frita. Despite what he told himself then, it occurs to him that Julia was never wrathful but mistress of a silence that carried all she could ever say to him. The silence became intolerable and he filled it with his guilt. Julia never spoke about her unhappiness because she had no time for it. For him only tobacco brought happiness.

  Even now, he thinks, if he could get his hands on some leaf, a chaveta, a rolling bench, he could do it, and he imagines himself spreading out the binder leaf on the table, taking some filler in his left hand and shaping it not too tightly, not too loosely, then placing the filler on the binder and wrapping it, working it to the right shape. When he is done with that, he gets to the most delicate part of the operation. He takes the moist wrapper leaf and stretches it out on the bench as far as it will go without splitting, so thin it is almost transparent; he puts the bound filler on the wrapper and starts to wrap quickly and carefully at an angle, cutting excess as he goes and keeping the left hand rolling, always rolling, carving a half moon on the final strip to cover the tip. After many years of practice he can roll as he breathes, with an instinctive economy and delicacy of movement. His hands are angels, his hands are sparrows, spiders, arañas tabaqueras. Just then Nurse enters and makes a mock-horrified face at all the half-digested food on his stomach. Mr. Terra, Mr. Terra, what am I going to do with you? A cigar maker has nothing if not his hands and a clear mind. The reason for the hands is obvious. The clear mind he needs in order to keep his independence and know his friends from his enemies. Mr. Terra, I am tired of having to change you every few hours. You make me work double time. They don’t pay me enough, Mr. Terra. He could have followed Julia back, he could have left everything behind once again, and started over in Havana, the city he loved, but by then he had Amalia. He thought he loved her more, he thought he had at last found the woman he needed, but she was just young and eager. Julia was old and tired, dried out with work and grief after the death of Albertico. Amalia was plump and full and moved like a filly. She was a lake in bed, she was snake and seal and storm and swamp, she was a cloud on fire. Julia went and he stayed behind and then she died. Nurse has pushed his body to the side so that she can pull off the soiled bedding. With his face buried in the pillow he cannot breathe and tries to get her attention by blinking several times. He sucks air in through his mouth but all that enters is the pillow cover, he is breathing cotton, he feels the world blackening and then, for the first time in almost five years, a sound comes out of him, between a groan and a scream. Nurse rushes to the side of the bed and pulls him back into light and air. His eyes are burning, his head is about to explode, but he can breathe. Nurse holds his head with both her hands. Mr. Terra, Mr. Terra, are you all right, she says out of breath herself. Mr. Terra, she is rubbing his chin, lifting his head, Mr. Terra, are you all right? Julia, his mind is stuck on Julia. Mr. Terra, your eyes. More food comes, but this time it oozes out of him and flows down his cheek. Mr. Terra, Mr. Terra. Julia, he remembers her steady eyes, her small strong hands, the curve of her neck, her thick black hair. He can do nothing but remember, the cloud of dust floating over his bed, settling on the sheets. Nurse is frantic. She rushes out of the room and for a few minutes Amadeo is alone. In his imagination he is not afraid, but his mind is firing. He remembers the first time he saw Julia in her father’s bodega, standing behind the counter, slight and diaphanous. He bought what they had: five pounds of bacalao, three pounds of beans, ten pounds of cornmeal. Their first kiss was behind her parents’ garden. He was walking her home from the store. He grabbed her by the arm and stopped her. He said her name and put his lips awkwardly on hers. What, she said pulling away softly and smiling. He tried to kiss her again but she turned her face. What, she asked again. He was eighteen. She was fifteen.

  He had a daughter with Amalia—Alina, dark-skinned like her mother, with eyes like caimito pits. On Sundays her mother would dress her in white Indian lace and he would take her to the park to show her off in front of his friends, who envied him because he had a beautiful young woman and a daughter like a dark pearl. Then Aurelio Menéndez, the Galician, emboldened by an afternoon of rum, told him in the park that Amalia was a whore who bedded down the first fool who came along. Amadeo took Alina home and came back with his chaveta and attacked Aurelio with such fierceness that strips of flesh were hanging from his face like tobacco leaves from their stalk. After Aurelio came back from the hospital they took to calling him crucigrama because the scars on his face looked like a crossword puzzle. Still, Aurelio’s comment put doubts in Amadeo’s head and those doubts corroded his love. A vision came to him of Amalia braying like a donkey while she was being ridden by the neighborhood barber. No matter what he tried Amadeo could not rid himself of the vision and the reasonable part of him, the one that insisted that Amalia loved him faithfully and would never be with another man, let alone the neighborhood barber, was eventually drowned out. He took to leaving work early, bringing his chaveta with him, fully expecting to catch them in flagrante delicto. He told Amalia he was going on a trip and instead took a room on the other side of town and would show up in the neighborhood disguised as a street sweeper or a knife sharpener. He saw nothing that would confirm his suspicions. The vision, rather than disappearing altogether, actually gained in intensity and mutated into different scenes. He saw her with two men, one white, one black; he saw her with another woman (this was not so bad); he saw her with a dog. He couldn’t sleep; he lost weight. Finally, in a crescendo of outrage, he saw her with Aurelio Menéndez and his crossword-puzzle face, twisted together in bed, groaning and screaming and making such a scandal that the neighborhood boys came to the window to watch. It was as if someone had put a curse on him. Years later he would learn that someone had, but at the time he didn’t believe in curses and so he dismissed that possibility as an invention of his confused mind. In desperation he gathered some of his things and took two thousand pesos he had hidden under a loose tile in the kitchen. Amalia threw herself on him, pleading and begging for him not to leave, but all he saw before him was a whoring witch smeared with other men’s semen. He went to the port and bought a one-way ticket on a steamer headed for Panama. There he walked the streets a few weeks, cleansing himself of the poison that had infected him, and eventually found work in a cigar factory. Tobacco was his salvation. He made enough money to buy a sawmill and two houses, but he knew the moment he got off the ship that Colñn was not a place where he would stay. It was a poor sad city with too many men waiting out their misery. During those four years his thoughts were on his daughter Alina, whom he would never see again, and her mother, who bore the brunt of his madness, but above all he thought of Julia, who’d been everything to him.

  Amadeo opens his eyes and sees Orderly bent over the bed bathing him. He sees his naked belly like a deflated sack
of lard, falling off to the side. The skin on it is pale and veiny and it has lost most of the hair that once covered it. Orderly moves a sponge down each of his legs and as he does so Amadeo’s belly wobbles. Amadeo thinks the body on the bed is no longer his. The flesh and bone are still attached to the neck, but no matter how strongly he wills it, he cannot make his body move. It surprises him that after all these years he still tries. Amadeo Terra is trying. Amadeo Terra is alive and he becomes elated at the thought. The excitement leads him to press his lips together and start drooling. Orderly sees him and calls him a crazy cat spitting all over, making a mess of himself as if he weren’t already in a bad enough situation. Amadeo wants to tell him to go to hell, negro de mierda, but all that comes out of him is more drool, a river of drool sliding out of his tight mouth, running down his chin to the layers of fat around his neck. He wants to drown Orderly with his spit and so much does come out that Orderly is frozen in astonishment. A stream of saliva is spreading out from Amadeo’s chin and wetting the fresh sheets Orderly has just covered him with. For a moment Orderly looks worried, then angry, and he calls Amadeo a sorry-ass motherfucker as he stomps out of the room. Soon thereafter Nurse appears followed by Orderly. Amadeo looks at her apologetically but it does no good. Nurse gives a speech about how he should behave himself, acting like that in front of Orderly and scaring the bejesus (that is the word she uses) out of him. As punishment, she says, we are not going to change your sheets anymore today. You can lie there in your filth. Amadeo Terra is smiling to himself. He feels strong and radiant, as if he had just won a great battle, but what Nurse and Orderly see is the expressionless look of a vegetable.