The Cigar Roller

by Pablo Medina

  It has been quiet for several days, but suddenly the woman across the hall is screaming again. He has never seen her but imagines her pale and toothless with white hair splaying in all directions. She smells like the old do, like he does, of urine and the crust of decay, of dried-out flesh and worn-out skin. Her legs have been amputated and cataracts blear her vision. Her vocabulary has been reduced to ten words. Someone named Mari has placed her here, after being driven crazy by the old lady at home and driving her husband crazy and her children and all the aides that came and went crazy over the years because they couldn’t deal with Mari, Mariii, come here, repeated constantly, brainlessly, from the moment of waking to the moment of sleep. What anguish Mari must have gone through to contradict her vow that she would never abandon her mother in a nursing home! She would take care of her at home, she would have her own room, she would die surrounded by family. Mari, Mariii, come here and Mari is nowhere to be found because early on she was so ashamed, so pained by her visits that she stopped coming altogether. Eventually, just to make her life a little easier, she found other things and people to occupy her. A few times a month thoughts of her mother creep into her mind and prick her conscience. Her eyes spring a few tears, she blows her nose and goes on with her day. Mari, Mariii, come here. Forget it, Lady, Mari is at work or attending her granddaughter’s piano concert or fixing dinner for her husband. Mari is not coming, and she will not come until she receives a phone call telling her we are very sorry, Mrs. Mengana, your mother passed away early this morning. We would like you to come immediately to make the necessary arrangements. Mari will be guilt-ridden, devastated. Her husband and children will console her. Abuela couldn’t live forever, she died peacefully, in the hands of God, etc. They will not notice (her tears are so copious, her face so twisted by grief) that underneath it all, Mari is relieved. She can now take a deep breath and live her life without the burden of her mother. Because, you see, although she is far away, she can hear you calling, she can hear that screechy voice of yours like a hoarse jackass, Mari, Mariii, as clearly as I can hear it, and once you die, she will no longer have to listen to it. Just as I long for you to die, Mrs. Fulana, so does your daughter. One day, if I happen to be unlucky enough to outlast you, I will no longer hear your voice and then I will know you are gone, and it will be quiet here again, and I can think of how my sons have turned their backs on me.

  People are always leaving Santa Gertrudis and Amadeo knows perfectly well what that means. First, there was Chinese Lady. Then out went Arialdo, who hated women. He would ride the wheelchair into Amadeo’s room and tell him all the despicable things his mother used to do to him when he was a child. He rolled up his sleeves and showed Amadeo the multiple scars on his arms, the consequences of his mother’s peculiar love. Round face, sharply pointed eyebrows, bulging sleepy eyes. Frying onions made him swoon, perfume made him choke. He disappeared the first year of Amadeo’s stay, when he still believed that patients left Santa Gertrudis because they got better. There was Apollonia, who walked around with a constant headache and whose face was always broken out in hives—she was allergic to life—and Garrido whom he has not seen in some time, and others, nameless mostly, who passed by his room or whom he saw in the common hall when Nurse still took him there. Just before he falls asleep he remembers a vast expanse of sugar cane, he remembers the still air, the sun beating down on the red earth and far off in the distance a ceiba tree that was haunted by the spirits of murdered slaves. Summer stillness, summer heat, time at a standstill, a loud buzzing in his ear. He remembers turning around, he remembers a hummingbird hovering inches from his nose.

  Amadeo overhears Nurse in the hallway singing along with the radio. Her voice, flat, off-key, enters him like a tiny worm of emotion and awakens in him a vestige of physical desire. Music he never thought of as an end in itself but as a way of seducing a woman, an enticement to buy lottery tickets, or as background to elephants dancing in the circus. Now music is a crux. He feels an overwhelming sense of longing for his childhood; it doesn’t matter how unhappy it might seem in retrospect because then it was neither happy nor unhappy. It was childhood: the pain of his father’s lashings, the dogs having sex behind the larder, the toads jumping on his thighs at night as he crossed the backyard, the day he stood on his toes on a water barrel to see the circus women dancing to trumpets and drums. He remembers the dark bellies beaded with sweat, the blur of hips, the laughter, the hands twirling in the air like butterflies. The song went, Lamartina Lñpez se tragñ una lagartija, en la noche se dormía y en el día se entendía con un mozo de los buenos y una vieja matutina. Once a year the circus came to San Juan y Martínez. It traveled in its own train bringing hundreds of crates and caged animals from every part of the world. The train stopped at the cattle depot and unloaded its cargo, after which the circus troupe paraded down the main street to the other side of town where it set up its tents in a field that once belonged to Arturo Longo, the town butcher, a man of legendary appetites and evil reputation. Amadeo watched from the corner of Martí and Palma Streets as the performers passed by, dressed in exotic costumes from Africa and the Cochin-China, eating fire, performing magic tricks, and tumbling from sidewalk to sidewalk. He remembers a girl his age with white patent leather sandals, her body moving with the confidence of an adult, her lips painted red, her eyelids painted blue. Amadeo could feel his heart in his throat, his hands trembling, sweat building in the small of his back. A marching band came by, the musicians dressed in military uniforms discarded from a European war, followed by carts bearing an emaciated tiger, a mangy bear, and two declawed lions in their cages, which were opened at different points during the traverse so that the trainer could enter and put his head inside their mouths. At the rear were two elephants driven by a man people called the fakir because he wore a turban and a silk cape. He prodded the pachyderms with a long stick and yelled at them in a language Amadeo could not understand and that filled him with wonder about the ancient mysteries of the Orient. But it was the women dancing with the girl at their center that he thought about in the sleepless nights following the circus’s arrival. He saved all he could during the year in order to buy a ticket and when he didn’t have enough, he stole the rest from a tin can his mother kept under the bed. His last year in San Juan y Martínez the circus came as usual in late October but the girl wasn’t there. In her place a small dog dressed like a clown did foolish tricks. Amadeo’s head rattled with the broken glass of disappointment and in his mouth lingered the raw metal taste of shame.

  He remembers overhearing the men at the corner talking of the woman who had sex with a donkey and the ex-slave who could break a stack of twelve lard crackers with his foot-long penis. And you, boy, what do you want? It was the carpenter who built his father’s weasel traps. Amadeo looked down at the ground and said nothing. Mind your business and go back to your toys, the man said and continued describing how the hawker announced el Negro Tulún and his African penis and the black man appeared dressed in a white robe. The hawker stacked the crackers carefully on a stool and el Negro Tulún disrobed exposing his black hose, which he swung in an arc and shattered the crackers from top to bottom. I’ve never seen anything like it, said the carpenter. Amadeo’s mind was filled with thoughts of the gypsy girl which blended with images of el Negro Tulún and the donkey woman. It is always the same with guajiros, country people, Amadeo thinks, drawn to the lowest examples of human behavior. Country people, his father used to say, then sell them anything they would buy—straw hats, leather boots, slab bacon and yuca, brooms, buckets, cough syrup made from kerosene. He wrote everything in his little book and waited for payday when the guajiros stood in line to pay their bills and buy firewater and rum with the leftover money. Amadeo’s father grew rich from the guajiros, but he threw his wealth away on endless sessions of necromancy run by a blind woman who had learned her black art in the capital. Boy, move away or I’ll smack you a good one. Amadeo didn’t move. He was waiting for the circus to pass, hoping to see somet
hing that would erase his longing and confusion, when the carpenter’s big meaty hand came in his direction. Amadeo arched his head back and the carpenter’s hand swung past. The carpenter lost his balance and almost fell, then he came back swinging awkwardly with the other hand closed in a fist, this time catching Amadeo on the temple with such force that the blow lifted the boy off the ground and threw him against a wall. When Amadeo came to, the parade had gone by and the crowd at the corner had dispersed. Through the buzzing in his right ear he could hear the far-off sound of the circus tents going up.

  Today Amadeo awaits, none too happily, a visit from the physical therapist. His name is Joaquín and he usually comes dressed in a white uniform, although about a year ago he entered Amadeo’s room in his street clothes. Earlier that morning one of the patients had thrown up all over his uniform and he had to change back into his tie, jacket, two-toned shoes in which that same night he would go visit his girlfriend. This is the country of vomit and shit, he said to Amadeo as he rubbed his feet. If anybody dirties me up again, I am quitting.

  Time has not been generous to Joaquín. He is bald, and his once athletic body (he was a shot-putter in high school) has fallen into decadence. He has that belly that men develop after forty and that nothing, outside of extreme dietetic practices, will diminish. His round Galician grocer’s face is inhabited by the resignation of the bachelor (the girlfriend didn’t work out). Joaquín comes every two weeks, performs exercises on Amadeo’s legs and arms (raise and bend, raise and bend) and maintains an incessant monologue in which he plumbs the depths of banality while he works on Amadeo’s body. Today, for example, he begins with a highly detailed description of the varicose veins that have developed in his left testicle and are causing him great discomfort. The doctor has assured him that he should not worry, they are benign, but the discomfort persists as does the worry that they presage something much more serious. This is the word he uses: presage. Joaquín is prone to using words that are out of the range of most people’s vocabulary but he hasn’t stumped Amadeo yet. Pretentious to the extreme, it is apparent that Joaquín, being a good bachelor, has no worry but himself. He has a cat named Perico at home, a small unobtrusive pet that fills the void in his life. Amadeo knows more about Perico than he cares—his eating habits, his fear of darkness, the long tail that shakes sideways when he is happy, how he hides under the bed when it thunders and stretches along the windowsill to catch the sun, how he likes to sleep curled next to Joaquín. Better a cat than a floppy mastodontic wife, the type who takes up most of the space her husband would otherwise inhabit. This thought brings to mind Amadeo’s Aunt Concha, greasy and monumental, who spent her afternoons seated in a divan in her house breathing, no, masticating the thick tropical air, complaining constantly about the suffocating heat and cursing the maids whom she kept anxiously fluttering around her. The maids were there to satisfy her wishes: cold water, hot coffee, and the huge pots of food—Madrid tripe, creole stew, Asturian bean soup—that Concha consumed every afternoon. The younger members of the family, for whom corpulence alone did not inspire the respect it did in the old days, called her the walrus behind her back, because in addition to her carnal volume, Aunt Concha had a rather thick mustache and a large mole on her chin from which grew three long hairs. She was married to a man named Filiberto, a clerk at the neighborhood hardware store who lived in the shadows of her corpulence. When he came home late from work, which he did several times a week (he was, by all accounts, a conscientious and dedicated worker), Aunt Concha turned into a great bellows of ire. The pale skin of her cheeks became red and her eyes that once were green, perhaps even beautiful, came out of their sockets swollen, covered with a yellow film. When she could no longer contain herself, she would scream, I smell something! That Filiberto is cheating on me! Of course no one in the family could imagine Filiberto with another woman. He was very thin with an oversized head the shape of a güiro gourd, and his lack of personality inspired much more pity than disdain. The man was forever tormented by Aunt Concha’s insults and sailor’s language and nobody faulted him for arriving home late once in a while, after all business is business, and if the boss says you have to stay late, you stay late. On those nights Filiberto got home after nine, he found his wife boiling on the divan, her great walrus body marooned in the vapors of the living room, exhaling an acrid stench. He listened to her a moment, said his good nights, and kept going to the bedroom where he locked himself up until the following morning. Many years after both their deaths, the family learned that Aunt Concha had been right: Filiberto had been unfaithful to her with a beautiful woman fifteen years his junior who loved him a great deal and gave him everything that Aunt Concha couldn’t provide: peace, pleasure, and four endearing children.

  The therapy session ends after fifteen minutes and Joaquín sits down to dry his bald pate. He is speaking about his apartment, about the weather, about a woman named Maruca in room 503, poor thing, she is spewing blood through her seven orifices. Amadeo thinks there are nine, not seven. He blinks to see if Joaquín corrects himself, but no, he has gone on to another topic that Amadeo cannot quite follow, and now he is talking about his new Ford which has broken down three times in one month, those cars are not good, Buicks on the other hand are the best, but they are expensive, with my salary I could never afford one. Amadeo wants to interrupt and talk about the last car he owned, a green ’37 Buick that was a gorgeous machine and turned everyone’s head as he drove down La Séptima, but even if he could he doubts Joaquín would listen. The truth is life has gotten so expensive I am thinking of getting a job on weekends to make ends meet, especially now that I have decided to remodel the apartment. My friend Alberto the Butcher promised to help me and, you may ask, what does a butcher know about remodeling, but the truth is the boy knows about everything, I mean, I get these awful headaches that used to lay me out flat in the old days, and he gave me the remedy, a plaster of mustard and firewater he learned from his grandmother that I place on the side of the head where the pain is and in half an hour it is gone, I inherited the headaches from my mother, sometimes she would spend a whole week in bed retching from the pain, poor woman, had she only known about the plaster. After they made Alberto the Butcher they broke the mold. He is simply unique. Sometimes he brings me a whole tenderloin as a gift and he cuts it up into steak, beef cubes, a chunk for grinding into picadillo, and a spectacular roast which is a true delight. He does it all in my kitchen, clearing the counter—I am not the neatest housekeeper—and getting right to work with his knife. In half an hour Alberto is done, but he doesn’t stop there, besides a butcher he is a chef d’haute cuisine, and if he is in the mood, he will prepare a pot roast worthy of the most discriminating kitchens in Europe. He makes it look easy, too. He throws onion, green pepper, garlic, laurel, sour orange—which he goes through great effort to get, but it is much better than plain lemon, isn’t it?—cooking wine, and I don’t know what else into the pot; then he adds the meat and cooks it in slow heat. I tell you the man is an alchemist, what comes out of the pot is edible gold. I am taking down a wall that divides the kitchen from the living room to enhance the space. Divisions are anti-aesthetic, aren’t they? Besides, Alberto is making me some shelving for my Lladrñ collection. I mean, I have two hundred figures stored and what’s the use of having a collection if you can’t display it?

  Joaquín might have had a girlfriend in the remote past, but at this point in his life he talks and behaves like a man whose pants are on backwards. Not that it matters much. Amadeo feels nothing that isn’t thought, which is the same as saying essence, coursing through his veins. His life has been reduced to that. It is as if God had played a final practical joke before abandoning him. I am going to take away your body so that you will know what it is like to be pure spirit. And pure solitude, Amadeo adds. I have been told that you don’t need to ask permission of the board in order to tear down an internal wall, Joaquín says. Speak to me about what you feel at night when you are all alone, Amadeo implores him.
But Joaquín is not interested in these things. He prefers to focus on the window treatment he has chosen for the living room windows—a baroque brown and beige pattern he saw in a fashion magazine—and the color of the walls—yellow, with beige trim around the casements. That which he speaks of with such passion—his daily life—is Joaquín’s satisfaction, just as tobacco, which remains in his memory as the source of his passion, used to be for Amadeo. Amadeo concludes that Joaquín is the fortunate one, finding interest in the minutiae of daily life. Joaquín rises from his chair and Amadeo wants to tell him to stay longer, keep talking about his window treatments, the bedspread he bought last week, the exquisite meals he and Alberto share. What is the worth of tobacco? Amadeo blinks several times, as if this meant anything to Joaquín, who pats his forehead a few more times, says, Ay princesa, ¡qué calor! and leaves.