The Cigar Roller

by Pablo Medina

  * * *

  It is the day of San Juan and a man is hanging from a tree. His face is tinged red from a bonfire a few feet away. To the right of Amadeo someone is cheering; to his left a roller he knows but whose name he cannot remember is lighting a cigar, carefully singeing the tip with the flame before taking the first puff. A third man he has never seen before pokes the hanged man with a stick and makes him twirl, then hits him across the back as if he were trying to break a piñata. Cabrñn italiano, Amadeo hears. Scab bastard. And the phrases are coming out of his own mouth, a vacuous anger building in his chest. He wants to kill every strikebreaker in Tampa, hang them from every tree so they know who owns this town. Have no pity on the enemy. That is what he tells Julia that night when he gets home while she rages at him for letting it happen, for not having the courage to save an innocent man. You killed him, you coward, she says. Only his wife can speak to him that way. I did not, he answers with too much defensiveness in his voice. You’re as guilty as the man who whipped the horse. The man’s face, he thinks, was blue wax, tongue between his lips and a ridge of skin the rope raised under the jaw. They say men get an erection when they are hanged but Amadeo refused to look down there. Pobre diablo, he probably didn’t know what a scab was. Amadeo cannot erase the hanged man from his memory. The face becomes his son’s. He cannot erase all the darkness around him and Julia walking into the kitchen and his boys beyond the darkness where he cannot reach them.

  Suddenly Amadeo is lifted out of the bed and into his chair. Mr. Terra, he hears Nurse’s dim voice. Mr. Terra, it is a beautiful day outside. Orderly, too, says something but it is unintelligible. Amadeo sees the sunlight on the water and he wants to be alone. He wants the company of the dead. It is the living who refuse to enter the world of darkness. They are leaving, Nurse and Orderly are leaving and he is seated by the window where he can observe the clouds, gray and white, thousands of clouds passing over the water that wants to be blue but is never quite that color. The sea is a song that repeats itself. The clouds tilt their heads to listen. Amadeo remembers a boy from their neighborhood who sang day and night to erase, he said, the sadness of the world. One day he left to seek his fortune and never returned. People leave, death comes near. That was long ago when Amadeo was a young man and he was beginning to learn the limits of his happiness. After two years of marriage, he took any opportunity to leave the house and get away from Julia and her incessant talk about the curtains, the settee, the leak on the kitchen roof, the grocer’s bill, the room they were planning to add to accommodate the child coming in six months, the blocked well pipe, the mousetraps under the floor boards, the featherbed she had ordered, the rocking chair she bought on credit, money worries, morning sickness, and all the other things that occupy a woman within the confines of her household. He would walk to the end of the block after dinner and light his cigar. Sometimes he met a neighbor and they would have a chat. That’s how he met the boy and heard his songs about the fragrance of gardenias and the pains of love. Other times he watched the volantas clop by driven by well-dressed gentlemen and their carefree ladies. He observed the confident manner in which the men clutched the reins and urged the horse to go faster while the women held their hats and laughed. His wife was home pregnant and the world was rushing by. Once, after the sun went down, he walked past the corner two blocks to where the street curved and headed downhill. The smell of war lingered in the air but the night was peaceful, all the houses dark except for one at the corner where a light was flickering. He heard singing and, getting closer, he realized it was the boy’s voice coming from inside. He sat down on the wooden sidewalk and listened. It was a song about lovers walking on the beach and the waves washing over their feet. For a moment the tune entered him and rushed through his veins. The hair at the back of his neck bristled and his ears burned. Then the music stopped. He stood and looked down at his shoes, dusty and cracked, and realized he was as exposed as a man can be in the city on a moonless night. At home he couldn’t stand the boredom, the possibility of the present repeated into a future without end. Up above the sky was filled with stars. Around him the city lay silent. Some force he could sense but could not name kept him from falling through the ground and disappearing into the earth. It was like being inside someone else’s dream and he became afraid he would never leave it. Amadeo knocked several times on the door. He wanted to talk with the boy, make sure the singing had not been an invention of his needy brain. No one answered and he never heard the tune again. Instead there is Nurse and her screechy voice, the radio in the hall from which come muted ballads and tinny dance tunes. Julia never sang or hummed but sometimes she whistled and sometimes, when she didn’t think anyone was looking, she danced by herself in the kitchen or out in the garden. Amadeo remembers her swaying hips before the tomato plants and he wants to laugh, but the lips won’t spread, the laugh won’t come. He drools instead and this time Nurse, who is in the room cleaning up, rushes to the side of the bed and slaps him across the face. Amadeo is stunned. His eyes want to pop out of their sockets; they fill with tears. He is looking through a red tunnel at her; he burns white hot. Truth is, the slap has had its desired effect and he has stopped drooling. Nurse looms over him saying nothing, but in her posture and demeanor are all the words she will ever need for this moment: Mr. Terra, sir, you have led me to this. I have cleaned you time and again, Mr. Terra, you have no one to blame but yourself. She turns away and leaves the room. Amadeo hears the swish-swoosh of her massive thighs rubbing against each other as she retreats until the sound disappears and there is only the beating of his heart and the memory of the memory of the song about lovers on the beach or later, much later, mixed in somehow with that, the music of cheap bars he frequented where women danced for him stripping off their clothes one piece at a time, their bodies glistening with sweat, their laughter drowning out the music and he throwing money at them until he had nothing left but an empty space in his chest where the winds of his betrayal blew. Where is the girl now who danced to the drums? Where is the boy singing in the night? He went out in search of a richer life but he came home with smoke in his hands, the smell of women on his body, the taste of liquor in his mouth. Nurse wiping the rolling table, Nurse slapping him, Nurse apologetic. She reappears with Orderly who is carrying a plastic tube attached to an enema bottle. Nurse spreads Amadeo’s legs while Orderly inserts the tube. They are enjoying this. Amadeo can see it in their faces. The solution is poured into him and he feels a rumbling inside like a temblor in his entrails, then all of him coming out as if a dam had burst. What he loses: fecal water pouring into the basin. What he gains: space for more.

  Amadeo is a wild dog roaming the night. When he isn’t searching for a domino game he is searching for a cockfight, when he isn’t searching for a cockfight, he is looking for a woman. Amadeo wants to find whatever makes him feel alive, away from the domestic Sargasso that threatens to drown him. On one of those nights when a cold wet wind is blowing from the north and there are no cockfights or women anywhere, he sees a girl sitting in the Parque Central with her parents. They, too, have been driven to the city by the endless warring and Amadeo takes pity on their ragged clothes and the startled forlorn eyes of people not used to the city. He walks on to the other end of the park then circles back to where the family is sitting, introduces himself, and says he knows a place where they can stay the night, which is not true. He leads them out of the park into the city down Calle Reina thinking he will have to take them home to Julia and she will become angry again, how dare he bring country strangers to stay at their house! Then he remembers a roller at the cigar factory whose mother runs a boarding house twenty blocks from the park close to Vedado and he takes them there, hoping there are rooms available. The girl, Ana, is fourteen, dark haired with big blue eyes that give off a wild, piercing energy. As they walk her bony arms begin to shiver from the cold. Amadeo has a sudden urge to bring her close to him. Her shoulders seem so frail they would crumble from the weight of his arm. They are in luck
. His friend’s mother has two rooms on the first floor behind the kitchen. Amadeo pays for a week in advance against the protests of the father, who wants no charity. Would you rather have your daughter catch her death in the cold, Amadeo asks him in a friendly enough manner. His eyes, sharp and filled with authority, are fixed on the older man who has no option but to shake his head and turn away.

  Amadeo’s vision glazes over and he loses focus of the things in front of him—the pictures of the clown and the mountains, the pine veneer dresser. This happens to him sometimes when he is remembering. Only the past is clearly before him. If he hears anything—Nurse singing under her breath, for example—it becomes a part of what he is remembering. And so he hears Ana singing in Nurse’s falsetto the same songs Nurse knows. He visits the rooming house once a week at first, to make sure Ana and her parents are all right. The father is selling candy on the streets; the mother irons for the landlady. It is okay, Amadeo thinks, that he is fond of her. Ana is like a younger sister to him. They sit on the edge of the bed while she sings and Amadeo talks about tobacco, his colleagues at the factory, the endless war that no one wants but no one knows how to end. Ana sits with her hands folded on her lap or else plays with a wooden abacus he has brought her. After an hour or two he gets up, kisses her on the cheek, and gives her mother, who is ironing in the front room, some money on the way out. One day Ana puts her abacus down, says she is tired, and lies back on the bed. Amadeo leans over and kisses her, first on the cheek, then he slides his lips over hers. Ana giggles and tries to squirm free but his weight is too much for her. He remembers her fresh young smell and the alabaster skin of her neck punctuated by a few dark moles. He remembers her soft belly and hard breasts, him entering her, Ana whimpering, Ana smiling; he remembers feeling shame afterwards and giving the mother twice the usual amount and walking into the sun-washed alley leading to the street, avoiding Julia that night, vowing to himself not to return to the rooming house but returning anyway. His visits to Ana go on much the same way for several months. Sometimes he brings food for the family, sometimes a dress for the girl he buys cheaply on the street. At home Julia complains that there isn’t enough money to pay bills. She has been using the money they were saving for the baby’s layette to pay the grocer, and the milkman is threatening to stop delivery. Using a system of logic he can no longer remember, he convinces himself that Julia is not suspicious, that her worries have no deeper root. One afternoon while he is frolicking in bed with Ana there is a loud commotion in the other room. Amadeo wraps a bedsheet around himself, opens the door and finds Julia with her huge belly pointing a revolver at Ana’s mother’s head. The mother, who is as frail as a reed and pale as the sheet Amadeo is wearing, stands silently in place. Her toothless mouth is agape and her hands are shaking at her sides. Take your guajira whore of a daughter and get out of the city, Julia says. We will, we will, the mother says, although it comes out sounding like weeo, weeo. Julia then pivots slowly and points the gun at Amadeo. Inexplicably, neither fear nor remorse enters his mind but a desire to know how she has found the rooming house and where she has gotten the gun, a large revolver she holds up with both hands. He is certain that Julia will not shoot him and just as he is about to break into a smile, the gun goes off and a bullet whizzes past his head. She looks at him without saying anything, then lowers the weapon and leaves. Amadeo is left standing in the doorway infected by a paralysis of the will, not knowing whether to laugh or run after his wife. Behind him, Ana, naked and angelic and indifferent, lies in bed picking her navel. Then the mother, gathering all the strength of her wisp of a body, throws herself at him with such fierceness that he falls to the floor. She tries to kick him and misses, tries again and catches him on the thigh. He can hear Ana giggling on the bed and all he can do is pick up his clothes and rush out, sneaking out the back of the rooming house so the landlady won’t see him.

  Amadeo’s eyesight gains focus and he thinks very hard trying to remember how old he was then. He was living in Tampa. No. The war was still going on. He was in Havana. He was twenty-two, twenty-one, Julia pregnant with Rubén or was Rubén already born and she was pregnant with Pastor? He thought he was falling out of love with Julia, but he was just bored with routine. Was that his fault? It is Julia he wants next to him now. He thinks of her as a young woman when the wildness still ran in her and a mere touch of his hand was enough to set her on fire. Dishes were left undone, laundry unwashed, pots on the stove until the burning smell entered the bedroom and woke them from their ardor. If they found the food scorched, they forgot about eating and went back to the feast of their bodies the rest of the night. At dawn they heard the roosters crowing across the city and they laughed.

  Of late Amadeo has been dreaming that he is an aristocrat. He sits on a thronelike chair and doesn’t need to speak because all his needs and wants are immediately known and satisfied by a coterie of servants who surround him. There is one in charge of seafood, another whose specialty is beef, a third who provides the most exquisite liquors. If he wants oysters, a plate of them appears magically before him. If lobster strikes his fancy, along come a pair with huge claws cracked and dressed, surrounded by bowlfuls of drawn butter, aioli, and enchilado sauce on a silver plate; beer, barrels of it, and the best Bordeaux and grand cru champagne. In one version of the dream he has the urge to read and the servants carry him in a palanquin to a library. There, a blind librarian who has read every book ever written is sitting at a table waiting for him. After learning what kind of book Amadeo wishes to read, the librarian walks to the stacks and returns with several Amadeo recognizes—Candide, The Idiot, the essays of Montaigne. Amadeo takes them and begins reading in his bedroom but is distracted by a fantasy in which he is having sex with two young women. Most of the time the dream stops here with the full enjoyment of the abundance that is a measure of his power. Sometimes, however, an old woman appears who sits on a smaller chair next to his and complains about his behavior. The woman’s face is bleared most of the time. In one version she is Julia; in another she is his mother, and, on one occasion, she is both. The dream, which he has had with increasing frequency the last few months, portends no good: a life lived between motherly grief and wifely recrimination. In his life he never worried about these things but went about the unencumbered pursuit of pleasure. He impresses himself with this last phrase, which he can poorly translate into Spanish as la libre búsqueda del placer, or more simply put in Cuban as la jodedera. He worked as much as he had to, like a beast of burden sometimes, but he never thought twice about satisfying his urges when they needed satisfying. Now he dreams about the angel of doubt and the angel of denial and it is when the dream gets to this point that he awakes, breathing heavily and wishing that it were daytime and he would not have to sleep anymore. The dream comes in shards that he pieces together once he is awake. The key has to do with the old woman. If she were not part of the dream he would only take it as some sort of manifestation of unsatisfied desire. In other words, it would be a dream of frustration. The appearance of the two people in his life who tried to curtail his appetites just as the young girls are squirming all over him complicate the dream and make it a source of endless rumination.

  Whether he wakes out of a dream or deep sleep, Amadeo’s eyes are wide open before dawn most mornings and then he waits, first for the song of birds in the trees below, which he can hear when the air conditioning is not running, followed by the lazy light of dawn, which joins with the light from the driveway below and in time overwhelms it. There are the stirrings of the nurses outside and faint conversation between them about domestic matters, dinner the night before or the dress one of them bought for her daughter at the Sears & Roebuck or the latest installment in their favorite soap opera—a story about infidelity and betrayal. The lady across the hall will start calling for Mari and Garrido might come asking for his shoelaces and the world will repeat itself once again as it has done day after day, month after month ever since Amadeo has known it.

  Nurse comes to
day accompanied by Doctor who has not paid a visit in several weeks. He is unshaven and his eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. On his face is the damp pallor of one who has drunk too much the night before. When Doctor leans over him, Amadeo is overcome by his breath, which smells like a blend of formaldehyde and curdled milk. Behind him is Nurse, blond and enormous, blocking the light from the window. Doctor continues the checkup, poking here, poking there, shining a light into Amadeo’s eyes, taking off Amadeo’s diaper—it is soiled, Nurse, let’s get a stool sample—putting on a rubber glove and checking around inside, finally declaring in a voice with a homey affectation, You’re healthy as a young colt, Mr. Terra. The combination of Doctor’s breath and his own feces is making Amadeo nauseated. He can feel his stomach churning upward and sideways and a burning headache spreading across his forehead like lava. As Doctor bends over one last time to use his stethoscope Amadeo’s peristalsis goes into full reversal and splashes on Doctor’s face. Doctor straightens up horrified. Nurse, who has been passive and silent next to Doctor during the examination, shifts immediately into action, wiping Doctor’s face and stethoscope with one of the small hand towels that abound in Santa Gertrudis. Looking helpless, Doctor sits down on the chair next to the bed, takes off his glasses and covers his face with his free hand. It has obviously not been a good day for him, or a good life for that matter, but Amadeo does not have the luxury of feeling sorry for him. When Nurse finishes wiping Doctor, she says nothing, nothing at all as she leads him away. She returns to change Amadeo and leaves immediately. And indeed Amadeo’s punishment seems to be that he is ignored the rest of the morning. It is not until lunchtime, when he is swooning with hunger, that someone enters the room. It is Sor Diminuta, bringing with her a tray of baby food and two of the small white towels draped over her arm. Amadeo is beside himself. If only he could get up and greet her in the proper manner, take her by the arm, ask her how she’s been. He goes through all these things in his mind, has full conversations with her, prepares tea (he puts a little rum in his) and brings out cookies. They talk about the convent, her fellow nuns, about God and the angels, about the heat and humidity of Florida. Amadeo makes a comment about her heavy garment, how rough and uncomfortable it must feel on her skin, how it must make her sweat (perhaps he can insinuate the need for daily bathing in such a climate). Sor Diminuta ignores the comment and instead she asks him about his life as a cigar worker. You cannot have a better life, he says. You work to give others pleasure. Tobacco is the purest product in the world. There were days I’d roll one hundred, two hundred. To make cigars you must have delicacy and strength in your hands, you must possess a clear mind and you must be passionate to make the best cigar. You must be around tobacco many years and practice until whatever comes from your hands is perfect. You give it up, you let the smoker smoke. Even as Amadeo is speaking he realizes that what he is saying must be boring and that he is merely trying to impress Sor Diminuta. If he’d been a glass blower, he’d be waxing poetic about silica. Sor Diminuta is cleaning his body. He stops and thinks and tries to remember what it is like to have a woman’s hands touching him but only Nurse comes to mind with her stumpy fingers and coarse manners. Sor Diminuta is different. She is so small that her hands are like feathery birds running up and down his thighs, moving his testicles and penis out of the way, wiping his anus as one wipes a well-calibrated instrument. He is getting hard now. Sor Diminuta is floating over him in her brown habit, Sor Diminuta is taking him in her mouth, she is sitting on him, rocking back and forth. Sor Diminuta smells like cumin and hay (or was that Julia?), Sor Diminuta is hot, she is looking up to heaven, she is crying out Jesus Christ Almighty, singing, hitting the high notes, the low. She is an angel, a fallen one. She is done cleaning and dressing him and stands over him smiling in her holy nunlike fashion. If she only knew what she has done in his mind. Sabrosona! He blinks yes several times to see if she understands, but blinking is his own impenetrable language and all she does is smile some more and rub his forehead.