The Cigar Roller Read online

  The only personal item left in the room is a card the nuns sent him for his last birthday. It sits on the far corner of the dresser top where he can see it only if he is resting with his face away from the window. It says Many Blessings on Your Birthday in golden script on a lavender background around a bouquet of wildflowers. The card, when he can see it, reminds him of Julia, who remembered everyone’s birthday, especially his, and would prepare a feast of all his favorite foods, perhaps roast a pig if she had the money for it, and have the boys sing him birthday songs. Friends would stop by and drink with him and exchange jokes. There was the one about the lady on the bus who placed a bag of needles on the seat next to her and several about two drunks at the bar and one about the little boy, a friend of Pepito, at school picking his nose and another about a man trying to get a room at a hotel, and many featuring Quevedo. He cannot remember the jokes themselves, only their casings. When he could speak, he didn’t have to remember them. They poured out of him one after the other and his friends, unable to contain their laughter, begged him to stop. Julia stood in the background, too modest herself to join the group but smiling nevertheless, and Amadeo made it his challenge to make her laugh, which she would do quietly so no one would notice. Only then would he stop. There were times when he pulled out the domino set, and then the guests stayed until dawn of the following morning. Some struggled home, their heads filled with rum, their pockets heavy with money; others went straight to the factories to make back whatever they had lost.

  Amadeo hears a bell ringing down the hall. There comes the beggar, lost in a place of no money. Here is the sybarite, trapped in a place of no pleasure. Fish out of the sea? Bell and a drum. The boy slices the lizard down the belly. What’s inside? Mother feeds him soup and stale bread, a real bounty; then he goes to the well for water, cold fresh water from the belly of the earth. The bucket plashes cymbal-like and sound comes floating up like smoke. Water tastes like dream, dream of the ceiba, pig snouting the black earth, dream of his mother in her death throes. Cup of water, heat of afternoon. A breezeless day, like lead, the night in retreat with affliction and relief. At last, he tells himself, I can rest, no longer having to wait on her. Death rattle came, so slight it felt more like an exhalation, a sigh of relief. Mouth stayed open. He pushed the jaw closed and wrapped the head with a handkerchief. Later came the questions from relatives—what was the hour? Run over by a fruit vendor? Where were you? All he wanted was to go far away from her room. Then the call again that never stopped, even from the other side, Amadeo, bring me coffee, followed by the beating of wings, an angel trapped inside a steel cage. Amadeo, bring me my coffee, again and again, he wanting to drown her in coffee. Give me those sweet lips, Amalia. Spread them open like that, like that. In the dream she says yes, I will. In the dream he wants to feel her next to him. Yes, Amalia says, whatever you want. Like butter melting, he thinks waking, and sees the dresser before him resplendent, alive, and he on the bed like a white island. Amalia? Amalia went back to her town to live out the life that lies between hunger and tedium.

  Sundays are happy days at Santa Gertrudis. If Nurse is up to it, she will have Orderly move the patients out of their rooms and park them in their chairs or gurneys along the wall. The relatives visiting their nearly departed arrive in the afternoon after lunch and the hall fills with their laughter and their condescending talk. Usually there is at least one birthday to celebrate and the kin will bring balloons, paper hats and a cake, which the patients, those who still have stomachs, will be allowed to taste. Today is not unusual. Someone on the other end of the floor has survived yet another year and the family, loud Cubans all, have come not just with cake but with black beans and rice, pork, fried plantains, and a bottle of rum. Several of the children are chasing each other and running in and out of the patients. A small girl with pigtails hides behind Amadeo’s chair and when one of the bigger boys finds her, he pushes the chair out of the way and nearly topples Amadeo over. Nurse and Orderly are too involved with the party to notice. Nurse is holding a huge plate of food while Orderly is drinking out of a plastic cup normally used to give patients their medicine. Amadeo’s mouth starts to water and he is desperately trying to keep from drooling. He can smell the food and he can taste the rum. Someone is playing a guitar and singing and a man with a thick black mustache is pouring another round of drinks. If they would only get closer, if they would only let him taste, if he could only get up and dance with the little girl. Next to him is a woman with a smile on her face. She seems frozen in a state of permanent joy. Her eyes are closed and she is taking short deep breaths as if she were about to start hiccuping. Across from him is a man wearing a hunting cap. He is standing motionless with arms at his sides waiting for a bus, it seems. The lady who calls out for Mari is nowhere to be seen or heard. As the relatives of the other patients come and go they look with concern to the end of the hall where the party is in full swing. Some grumble under their breath and whisper to their companions, Don’t they realize this is a place of rest, who do they think they are, when in fact the last thing their relatives need is rest. They don’t dare approach the Cubans, Amadeo is convinced, because they think that loud people are by nature aggressive. Instead they stand next to their parents or grandparents and speak to them in gay tones that mask an almost palpable anxiety. Suddenly a young woman whom he doesn’t recognize is standing in front of him. He has not received a family visitor since Rubén came with his wife and spent the whole time talking about a poet Amadeo had never heard of, Carlos Williams, what kind of mixed-up name is that. The young woman has a heart-shaped face and dreamy black eyes. She speaks to him in Spanish in a voice so sweetly tempered and graceful he is reminded of Julia. There is nothing like the sweetness of the Cuban woman. He thinks this in English but he means la dulzura, a quality that is so hard to describe in English because it is so sorely lacking in the women here. As naturally as she has started speaking, the young woman wipes the drool from his face with a birthday napkin and begins to feed him cake. It has real whipped-cream frosting and is as soft and moist as he has ever tasted. It is filled in the middle with guava jelly of the homemade kind, he can tell. All he needs to do is press his mandibles together several times and the thing dissolves in his mouth in such a festival of taste that his eyes water. The young woman is saying that he reminds her of her uncle. Does your uncle think about tasting you when he eats cake?

  Amadeo’s diarrhea starts later that afternoon after all the visitors have gone home and he is back in his room watching the sunset through the slatted window. It begins with the usual drum roll in his intestines, but this time there is no revolution, just a slow release like a river flooding vast surrounding areas with silt and mud until all you can see are the tops of trees. That is the first movement. Two hours later there are bombs bursting, a trepidation of trumpets, a fanfare of farting, and a deflation of his bowels accompanied by odors so overpowering they make him gag. He cannot believe there is so much sulfurous rot inside him, he cannot believe how much pestilence, how much base matter, liquid and pervasive, is coming out of him. If someone were to walk into the room they would think Amadeo has just returned from hell. Nurse II will not be by until midnight and so he must lie in the fetid pool of his own wastes barely able to breathe. He calms himself down with the thought that it is better it all come out of him now than in the morning when Nurse returns. The third movement is a dam bursting, a huge wave of brown water sluicing through a valley taking everything with it—houses, trees, whole mountains—leaving behind it total devastation and the quiet of the grave. There is no smell with this one. Amadeo is exhausted and he falls asleep clinging to the depleted island of his own body. When Nurse II comes in at around 12:30 she says Dios mío with such distress that it wakes Amadeo. Nurse II, usually all business when she washes him, keeps saying Ay, ay, under her breath and turns her face away when it comes time to wipe him. Before leaving she sprays room deodorizer over Amadeo and says a final Dios mío as she turns off the lights.

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nbsp; He imagines himself laughing right now, loudly, uproariously. An ocean of shit has just come out of him, all the result of a little cake in the afternoon, fed to him by a beautiful young woman who had only his happiness in mind. Happiness in mind. That’s what he feels. Empty, dehydrated, floating in midair like a balloon over the bed, over the hospital, over the city, over the sea, next to the soaring black birds with the scissor tails. From here he can see everything—the fishermen on their boats, swimmers on the beach. He can look down on the street where he lived, his last house set back on a corner lot. He can float over la casita that Julia fixed, where the boys became men, and the Príncipe de Gales factory where he worked. Close by is Casa Cuba and the Centro Asturiano. The people there are strangers to him. All his friends are dead, his sons spread throughout the country. Amadeo is no longer floating but back on his bed, Julia standing at the foot, hair loose and disheveled. He wants to tell her to fix herself, he doesn’t like to see her like that. He wants to say she should change her dress for one more becoming. He wants to ask why she’s so pale. I’ve been waiting for you, he says, which is as close as he can come to affection. He asks about Albertico, but as much as he wants to hear her voice she won’t respond because she is a figment of his imagination, a specter released from his mind in the middle of the sordid night. One blink and she’s gone. Alina, the daughter he had with Amalia, appears in her place. She has the face of the woman who fed him cake and turned his entrails inside out. She is smiling and offers him a spoonful of cake. Move to the side of the bed, he wants to say, and she does. Just as the spoon is inches away from his mouth, she drops it on the bed and it rolls off his body to the floor.

  Alone in the dead morning hours Amadeo is overpowered by longing—añoranza is the Spanish word that first comes to his mind—for all that has rolled off him to the ground beyond his reach: cake, Julia, island, past. He is looking out the window of his childhood to the road that passed by there, red and rutted by the wheels of cane wagons. The sun is setting over the mango trees across the way and off in the distance the hills have turned a hazy blue. The birds have stopped singing and the cocuyos are flying about, their green lights going on and off. He hears the baying of his father’s pack mule, the snorting of the pigs in the sty, and his mother’s voice riding over, Muchacho, get away from the evening air—el sereno, she called it—before it enters you and ruins your blood. Amadeo is waiting for his father to come home riding his sorrel mare, whistling a guajira if he is in a good mood or silent if he’s not, which means Amadeo will have to hide until he goes to sleep. Get away, muchacho, his mother says again. Who are you waiting for every night? For him. Amadeo hears the first owl cooing over the house. When the night comes it will be so dark he will not be able to see his hand in front of his face. Then he will be safe. His mother goes on doing whatever she does in the back room singing her song, Y cuando te veo pasar, se me pone el alma tan fría que voy corriendo a la mar para ponerme tranquila. Bang, he wants to shoot his father. Bang, bang. His mother was a dark woman with faraway eyes. She cared nothing for the new world her husband brought her to. He is a monument to death, your father is, and his voice is the echo of the sea, the deepest grave.

  Amadeo wants the cake and his mother’s hand and his father’s voice. He wants his boyhood in the country, he wants the city that made him a man, he wants that man he was when he first met Julia. He wants the sea, wants to be island and salt water, wants to be the city that braves the waves. Añoranza, slow return of what he lost and didn’t know he had. In him now, the sweet smoke of absence. Out of him so, tobacco and the island. Chano once told him: Abandon what you want and you will find it in you. That was after the cigar factory burned down and the land on which it stood smoldered for weeks afterward. What Chano meant then, Amadeo thinks, is that his desire is his making. He is the sea, he is the island and water and city, he is the women he loved, beer he drank, cake he ate, cigars he made. Man he was then, man he is now. When Amadeo found him in the arms of one of the girls at La Matancera, Chano said, Loving her I love myself, then had a drink of rum. Why do you gamble if you do not want for money, Amadeo asked him once at a card game. Everyone in town knew the game was fixed. Only fools played there. Money is my monkey, Chano said. I make it dance, it makes me dance. What is your monkey, Amadeo? Amadeo wanted to answer cigars but he had developed a temporary allergy on his hands that made them crack and swell with blisters. Doctor told him he had to change professions. For a long time he pondered the question and then he thought he found the answer when the War of ’95 broke out. He joined the PRC, Martí’s party, volunteered as a mambí and was sent to a training camp in Ocala for six weeks. When he returned Julia was beside herself. Men playing war, she said over and over again, men playing war while their families starve. The expeditionary force, much smaller than anticipated due to financial problems, left without Amadeo. Martí was killed a few weeks later in Oriente. Amadeo, whose hands had gotten better and whose money kept getting smaller by the day, went back to his cigar rolling and waited patiently to be called up, urging his fellow cigar workers to support the cause with money and provisions. He drove Julia crazy with the Friday night meetings he held in their living room and risked having the house raided by police for hiding weapons and munitions for the revolutionaries. In ’98 the United States joined the war against Spain and the thing was over in a few months. Amadeo’s disappointment was such that he took $1,000 he was holding for the PRC, rushed to the cockfights and lost half; then he went to La Matancera and spent the rest on cheap rum and cheap whores. When he returned home, Julia had dinner ready for him. Everything was as it had been before.

  The bell is not beggar or sybarite but priest. He is coming down the hall offering communion to the patients, accompanied by a dwarf dressed in cassock and surplice who rings the brass bell and who suffers from elephantiasis of the testicles. Amadeo doesn’t know this, but Chano once told him of this horrifying ailment and now Amadeo is determined to apply this diagnosis to the dwarf. Otherwise, why does he walk with his legs spread out like so? Of course, most of the patients have not the wherewithal to accept or decline the flesh of Jesus Christ. They lie on their beds or sit on their chairs staring at the nothingness, or, in Amadeo’s particular case, at a wood veneer dresser. If their mouths are open, the priest will simply place the host on their tongues as he does every morning in church, oblivious to what harm it may cause once it is swallowed. If their mouths are closed, he will have the dwarf, who has a hand like an industrial vise, press on their mandibles until they part. Amadeo knows the drill all too well so that by the time the priest and his helper reach his room, the bell so loud it seems death is at hand, Amadeo’s mouth is open to take in the thin round wafer that he will attempt to savor with every one of the taste buds that remain on his tongue. Because his room is the last one on the floor, the priest will often sit on the visitor’s chair by the door and rest, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his forehead and asking the dwarf, who never seems to say a word, to get him a cool glass of water from the nurse. The priest is a youngish man with a broad forehead and small ears that swoop outward from his face. He sits with his back perfectly straight. Today the dwarf returns balancing a glass of water on one hand and, on the other, a cup of coffee much of which has spilled onto the saucer. Thank you, Rigo, you are a saint. The priest removes the stole and drapes it over Rigo’s shoulders. The dwarf smiles at Amadeo who can barely see him from the corner of his eye. He can’t tell who the real freak is, or if all three of them are. Consider yourself fortunate, Rigo, the priest says motioning to Amadeo, that you are not in his condition, unable to speak or move or even think. This man’s life has been reduced to the simplest essence, and it is in that fashion that God loves him: simply, essentially. This last statement annoys Amadeo. It should be obvious to the priest and everyone else who enters his room that he is as full of life as the next fellow. Let us pray for him, Rigo, that God may see fit to take him out of his misery. Misery, Amadeo thinks. He never thou
ght of himself as miserable. He wants to hit the priest, send him flying back to his church. To add insult to injury the dwarf walks over to Amadeo’s leather chair by the window, climbs onto it, and sits, his legs hanging from the edge. Amadeo blinks no repeatedly; then he begins to drool and fart with rage. Look, Rigo, the priest says in a sanctimonious tone, the poor man is having a fit. Get the nurse and I will stay here and pray. When the dwarf returns with Nurse in tow, a froth of spittle has formed on Amadeo’s lips. Nurse turns to the priest and says that he should not be concerned about Mr. Terra. He is a problem patient, he will not cooperate, he drools and messes himself constantly. If I could cooperate I would, Amadeo thinks. If I could walk out of here, I would. The priest looks up to Nurse who looms over him like a fleshy Matterhorn. He stands with some difficulty, for Nurse has not given him enough space to maneuver himself out of the chair; then he goes over to the bed, mumbles a Latin prayer that Amadeo cannot understand, and makes the sign of the cross over him. He retrieves the stole from Rigo’s shoulders, shakes his head and thanks Nurse for the coffee. As he is leaving, Amadeo farts and Nurse gives him an annoyed look.