The Cigar Roller

by Pablo Medina

  He has been dying a long time, longer than they all thought possible—the doctors, the nurses, his sons with the quizzical stares and their hands on their wallets. They come to him when he least expects, taking him back, moving him forward, peering into his eyes and wondering what is left inside. Where is the switch he can throw to make those faces disappear, those voices grow silent? When he first came to Santa Gertrudis they removed all the mirrors out of his room and put up pictures instead: a teary clown, a vase of lime-colored flowers, a mountainscape that does not resemble any mountains he has ever seen. The clown is warping, the flowers are drooping, the snow on the mountains has yellowed. He remembers a child’s picture of a horse done in crayon. The horse is red with a green tail and yellow nostrils. A cowboy dressed in black has just gotten off the horse and points the gun at the white sky where a bird is flying. He can’t remember which of his sons drew the picture or if he himself did or if he is just now making it up. He remembers one of a mother holding a staff, of a bishop leering. Best of all, he remembers a naked woman reclining on a couch. Her hands, folded behind her head, are hidden by thick curly hair. She is not afraid to show her body—her armpits, her perfect breasts, the line of down from her navel to her pubis—and she looks brazenly out at the man beyond the frame. She lets him know that she could, momentarily, rise from the couch, get dressed, leave the room, as easily as she could take him in her arms.

  Sometimes his memory is animated. A door opens in his chest and he walks through to a scene or event he is part of. This kind of memory has a dreamlike quality. For example, he is now standing with Julia on the porch of his Ibor house watching a group of men heading toward his house. At the head are Julio Mendoza and Obdulio Brito and behind them is Chano, talking with a smaller man next to him. The small man walks as if he were floating over the ground, turning his head and nodding in response to someone’s comment or grabbing another man’s arm in solidarity. Look, Amadeo says to Julia, Martí is coming to our house. Julia recognizes all the familiar faces and in their midst the small man, looking very much like photogravures she has seen—the thick mustache hiding his mouth, the broad forehead, the deep determined eyes, the look of a man who knows he will die soon, the look of a poet. She is surprised how frail he seems—a strong breeze could pick him up and send him flying. Julia leans on her husband and grabs his arm. Why, she asks. I don’t know, he says. Perhaps he needs a quiet place to rest. The group stops in front of the porch and Chano introduces Martí to Amadeo and Julia. The poet is poorly dressed in a wrinkled black suit. His fingers are slender and delicate, still bearing the ink stains of that morning’s work. Martí shakes hands with Amadeo then turns his attention to Julia. He takes her hand in his and brings it to his lips. Pase usted, Señor Martí, she says after waiting a moment for her husband to speak. Dígame Pepe, por favor, he says, que aquí todos somos cubanos, as if being Cuban puts them all on the same plane. Julia smiles and allows herself to respond, Pero usted es el más cubano de todos, the most Cuban of all, a statement that everyone likes and reaches Martí’s pride, for he straightens his shoulders and his face broadens with a smile. What does it mean to be Cuban, Amadeo thinks. It is not a question he has spent much time pondering. Sometimes it comes from inside, a place that no one can change or alter. Sometimes it comes from the way he responds to a woman walking past or an urge for coffee, a cigar, a joke. Sometimes he will hear Spanish spoken a certain way or listen to music when Nurse II turns the radio to the Spanish-language station. Once they played an old bolero and he thought his heart would burst out of his chest with longing—añoranza—for his native land and his people. His people, he still thinks of them that way. Mostly in Santa Gertrudis he is not Cuban, no matter how much he wants to be—he is alive, that’s all, devoid of the things that make him one way or another. But Amadeo is remembering that most Cuban of men sitting in his living room in a most un-Cuban way: quiet and withdrawn while the other men argue and gesticulate and try to impress each other with their political fervor. When Julia approaches Martí with a demitasse of coffee, the poet awakens from his mood and his face lightens. Amadeo notices that his hand lingers under hers as she passes him the cup and that his wife seems pleased by this. Then Martí sits back on the chair, lost in the labyrinth of his thought. It is an image that has stayed in Amadeo’s mind until the present day—the poet ruminating—and he has never been sure if it was a mere pose or if that is the way poets are. What does Amadeo know about poets? Nothing, except that they spend a lot of time thinking, like his son Rubén in New York.

  Later that day Martí would give an impromptu speech in front of the Martínez Ibor factory urging all Tampa Cubans to support the cause. Among those listening was Rubén, who was so inspired that he followed the poet to New York and waited for the invasion of the island to materialize. By the time the war finally erupted in 1895 and Martí sailed for Cuba, Rubén had forgotten all about his patriotism and was himself engaged in the thankless pursuit of trying to be a poet in a city that breeds poets only to devour them before they reach maturity. His mother tried to steer him away from a life of misery with fervent letters about the dangers of the big city and the difficulties of a poet’s life, which she knew all too well. When that didn’t work she pleaded with him that he was staining the family honor (what honor, he had asked her in one of his rare letters home, and received no answer). In Amadeo’s mind Rubén was a worthless fool. He is following in Martí’s footsteps, Julia told her husband. A real man makes his own footsteps, Amadeo said through his cigar. He is a dreamer, she said. At his age I was working sixty hours a week. He is our son. Don’t be so hard. Amadeo did not respond. He took in the smoke, savored it, and let it out. He liked being hard. That was years ago, before Rubén found that woman who, according to Julia, turned his life around. Amadeo didn’t see that much of a turnaround. His son merely went from being a poet to being a college professor and promptly forsook his language, his roots, and his family. Now he can’t be bothered with his own father, except for sending the monthly stipend he and his brother pay to keep Amadeo out of their lives.

  Amadeo does not know what he wants. He is waiting for night to fall, day to come. He is waiting for a presence or an absence, for a train to stop and pick him up. He is waiting for Nurse to feed him mango. Sometimes he gets tired of waiting and he remembers the morning before dawn when he was walking home from the cabaret and three men dressed in sloppy military uniforms pushed him against a wall, put a knife to his neck, and told him they were watching him. Your life is hanging by a thread, our thread, one of them said. Why had they stopped him? And why hadn’t they killed him then and there? He hadn’t asked these questions then, but he is asking them now. He had given money to the cause. He attended meetings and pledged to join the rebel militia in Pinar del Río. Others who had done the same had been killed on the spot, left on the street with their throats cut for the passersby to gawk at on their way to work. Julia thought it was all foolishness and did not believe him. You might as well not have come home. It is true, he insisted, but she just nodded her head as she put a plate of food on the table and went on with her housework. A man who doesn’t know how to dance doesn’t know how to fuck, the cabaret dancer said—no sabe singar—and he nervous at the bar hoping she would pass him by and flirt with another. He remembers her moving to the drums, he remembers her hand on his as he lit her cigarette and the sidelong look of a creature of the night. What did he know? He was twenty, falling out of love with his wife. Papi, the dancer said, take me home with you, still holding his hand well after the cigarette was lit. There was something irresistible in her voice and the way she licked her painted lips, he so full of desire he let himself say, whatever you want, mami, and ran his hand between her legs. Her sex was hot like melted butter, the pubic hair bristly and tough, and as he rubbed she kept spreading her legs wider. He remembers that. His memory is his God. As long as he has it he has his life, lived and relived as often as he wants. He remembers, he can do nothing but remember, water spray
ing his face, the keel cutting the waves, knife at the throat, his bed moving, someone he doesn’t know pushing it out of the room, a hungry child by the side of the road, the ocean—deep indigo—bottomless grave, sirens, firemen, people running past him in the hallway. Where is Nurse? And Orderly and Garrido and Chinese Lady and Sor Diminuta? Things pass by, doors, doors, Christ crucified, nurses, patients, other beds, and he is outside the building. Everything okay, someone says, firemen inside, everything okay. Amadeo sees a cloud crossing the blue sky and he can’t tell if it is a real cloud or the cloud of his memory. As a boy he played soldier on the front porch. His mother, seated, on a rocking chair, embroidered flowers on silk while singing an island air she had learned as a girl in the Canaries. The setting sun painted the walls amber and the winds of Lent brought the dust of other parts of the world. Bang, bang, I killed you, he said pointing a broomstick at an oxcart passing by. His mother kept singing the air that dropped her into a bottomless past. Bang, bang, now he shot at a passerby. Bang at a bat and bang at the sun, bang, bang, at his father riding back from the fields on his sorrel mare. Later after dinner when his father’s head lolled while he sat on his wicker chair, Amadeo came behind him and pointed at his nape. It was no longer a game. Bang, bang, I killed you, he said to himself and at that moment his father’s head fell to his chest, but to the boy it was not from sleep but from death. His mother in the next room sang her Canary air.

  Amadeo is outside a long time. He hears the distant sound of cars whooshing by on the highway. The afternoon passes, night falls, and the crickets start singing. Parking lot lights bathe the branches above him in milky light. The wind catches them and he hears the leaves brush against each other. Dark up there above the lights, the smell is the sea where, in daytime, motorboats race back and forth. Up in the branches something is stirring. He doesn’t know if it is real and of the moment or if his memory is playing tricks again and whatever is moving from branch to branch is a creature from the past inserting itself in the present—a mapache from Campeche, a jutía from Cuba, an opossum from Florida. It’s bigger than that, more like a panther, and he imagines it leaping onto his bed and eating his useless toes. The hours pass and he no longer hears the whoosh of cars on pavement. Tree shadow. Blue light from the parking lot. Smell of briny sea. He can feel his breathing. He can hear his body. Finally, his bed moves out from under the tree’s canopy and up above he sees clear sky with a few stars visible through the glare of the parking lot. He wishes Santa Gertrudis had burned down. He wishes he were a boy again next to his father in a fallow field across from the house. It has rained the night before and the wagons passing by earlier on the way to the cane fields have left deep furrows on the road. Amadeo is barely able to lift his legs over them. His father has given him two fat guinea hens to hold. The guinea hens dangle heavily from his hands. They flap their wings and cackle wildly as he crosses the road, taking care to lift his leg fully over the furrows. Just as he thinks he has made it safely across he relaxes his left leg and lowers his foot, which catches on the lip of the last furrow. As he falls his arms spread out in front of him and he lets go of the hens, which run off in opposite directions. He gathers himself quickly and turns to see his father on the other side of the road staring at him, then he hears his laughter and Amadeo laughs too, a deep laugh that arises from a place inside him that has no fear. He remembers days like this, when his father was just his father, and they would go to the grove back of the house and share an orange and the old man would tell him stories about life in the Canary Islands. His people were so poor, he said, that the children ate dirt to fill their stomachs and they survived on a bowl of chicken soup every night, that’s all, no meat or potatoes, just soup and fried bread for months on end. Amadeo remembers their farm, its long silences, its vast sky, the unbearable heat of summer, the vegetation like a green blaze, the red earth underfoot like dried blood—sangre seca—and the moonless nights when the darkness was as thick as ink and he would float in it not sure who he was or if he was. He feels that way now.

  Maybe he has imagined being left behind under the tree, imagined his room as well and himself paralyzed on an imaginary bed being taken care of by imaginary beings, drooling imaginary spit, breathing imaginary air, seeing imaginary spiders, fighting an imaginary God. Maybe he has imagined his whole life from birth to the present moment. Maybe he is not real but an invention of someone else’s imagination.

  But if all his life is imaginary tobacco is not, not its broad green leaves growing in the slow heat then harvested and set to dry in large shadowy barns. How could he have imagined the process, the treatment of the leaf, techniques of preparation, the rolling, the cutting knife, the factory, the molds, the lector, Ibor City, an art, an industry, a life? Tobacco exists apart from Amadeo Terra and that leads to the conclusion that his life exists beyond his capacity to imagine. Amadeo remembers once hearing a lector read from a book that used a similar logic. I think about tobacco, and if tobacco is the embodiment of natural perfection, I, an imperfect being, could not have thought it up, and it must be that the idea of tobacco must have come from outside of me, from reality; therefore, tobacco exists. And if tobacco exists, then I exist because my thoughts reflect its existence. Amadeo’s considerable mental efforts have exhausted him and he falls asleep. When he wakes he is back in his room. Nurse enters carrying a pan filled with warm water, several towels draped over her arm, a large brown sea sponge and a soap bar, all of which she places with great care on the rolling table. Nurse pulls the covers off in one swoop, unloosens the hospital gown, takes off his diaper and leaves him naked on the bed. He doesn’t care how dirty he is. He wants her to go away so he can sleep and dream he is awake. She begins to bathe him starting with the arms and neck, then the torso, the groin and its obsolete organs, the flaccid belly, the spindly legs and feet. With the same sponge that smells as if she has used it on every patient on the floor, she washes his face and ears. She dries and dresses him, working mechanically, as if Amadeo were a piece of furniture and not a human being. Under any other circumstances her efficiency would astound him. Before leaving she covers him with a blanket. In case you get cold, she says, but Amadeo doesn’t care. He does not feel cold or hot, he feels light and dark, remembers mango, the taste of deep flesh, a mass that turns and turns, whirl of beginning and end, entrance and exit, thicket of thickets, thighs without end, pulpy fruit, sea breeze on his face, tongue and more tongue, trap, triumph, tact, burrow, cave, hole, wound, cunt, tube, papaya, crack, chute, bayou, vertical smile, nether eye, lunar tide, dusk, dawn, seaquake, suckdom, rocket, stick, trunk, whistle, hose, tentacle, dong, cock, dick, tail, sausage, lance, club, prick, penetration, penetration, touch is good.

  * * *

  Julia once said that what attracted her to him was his face, which was, in her view, filled with optimism and devoid of doubt. Amadeo was her insurance against the war that was ravaging the country. What she didn’t anticipate then was how fully she would love him later when things changed and she stopped liking him. It was a crazy war with Cubans on the side of Spain called voluntarios fighting Cubans in favor of independence calling themselves mambises. If the voluntarios who controlled Havana suspected you of being a sympathizer you were done for. If the mambises suspected you of being a loyalist, you would meet a similar fate in their hands. There were delatores, informers, everywhere, and you had to be very careful with what you did and said. When two of his friends were executed by the Spanish government, Amadeo took a machete that belonged to Julia’s father and vowed to kill the first Spaniard he saw. Julia tried to stop him, but his rage was stronger than his concern. Amadeo left that afternoon at four and did not return home until dawn of the following day, drunk and disheveled and without the machete. When his father-in-law asked him what had happened, Amadeo, simmering with unspent anger, shrugged his shoulders and told the older man to go to el carajo, and he could take his daughter with him. Julia grabbed him by the arm and said we are going to find my father’s machete or you can go r
ot in that backwater of Pinar del Río where you were born. Amadeo pulled his arm away and said he was going nowhere. Then find yourself a place to sleep because you are not doing it here in my house. Your house, he said, your house? He was not so drunk not to realize that she was right. She responded by opening the front door with such force that it banged against the wall and cracked the plaster. The old man tried to intercede, telling Julia that it was dangerous outside. That didn’t stop him last night and it is not going to stop me this morning, she said. Amadeo stood uncertainly, glanced at his wife, and decided to take his chances on the street outside. He walked about half a block, never once looking back. Then he stopped, teetered like a tree about to fall, and leaned against a fence post to steady himself and think what he was going to do next: go to his friend Papo’s house or return to his wife, tail between his legs. He held on to the post for some time, using all of his energy to keep from collapsing onto the sidewalk. A half-starved dog slinked by him. As the milkman passed by on his donkey, Amadeo had an uncontrollable urge to urinate. He waited for the milkman to go to the next block, then still holding on, he unbuttoned his pants and pulled out his penis. The stream jetted out in a yellow arc five feet long. He finished and wiped his hand on his pants. Then he heard footsteps approaching. He turned and saw Julia, her face smudged with tears, still very much a girl. Come home, she said with her hands on her hips. We will look for the machete later. It cannot be found, he said. Why not? Because it is not lost. I sold it. You sold it? To buy rum at a bodega. Who did you sell it to? A man who wanted to kill Spaniards more than I did. That machete was worthless, he added. I will buy your father a better one. He came close to her and they walked home together, she holding him to keep him from falling, he trying to stand straight so that the neighbors would not think that Julia had a drunk for a husband.