Of Women and Salt Read online

  María Isabel woke one night to the sound of boots crushing through vegetation and the light patterns of lanterns dancing on the walls. She peered out the window, careful to remain hidden as best she could, and made out dozens of men in the unmistakable blue-and-red of the Monarchy, their lapels bearing the colors of the flag. They carried muskets and swords, their faces drawn and weary, and she saw, faintly, what looked like dried blood on the breeches of some.

  She couldn’t sleep that night and clutched her body, heard the first far-off thud of a rifle, her mother waking across from her and coughing in fits all night. They spent two days like that, huddled in the shadow of their bed platforms, as though behind wooden shields. Cries and shots, metal hitting metal, men whose anguish echoed through the noise.

  On the third day, Aurelia ran a fever, and María Isabel held her in her lap, wiping her face with a washcloth and whispering prayers to Nuestra Señora de la Caridad as her mother broke into cold sweats. On the fourth, the fighting stilled. Just as penetrating as the sound of sudden war had been, so, too, was the intensity of the quiet that followed, the stench of rot. They hadn’t eaten in days, and so they rummaged through cans of sugared guava and fruta bomba and tomato they’d prepared months before, María Isabel spooning slivers into her mother’s mouth as she lay supine. And when she was sure the silence persisted, María Isabel ventured out along the path she walked to work each day, now clogged with wisps of smoke, the smell of charred palm. She needed to find food. She needed to find her neighbors. In the distance, she could see fire, and she prayed silent gratitude it’d spared her home. She walked and walked through the quiet, listening for other people, for signs of life. Only the rustling of sugarcane and saw grass answered her calls.

  Then, as she made a turn toward the riverbank where she did the wash each Sunday and bathed in the sun, she stumbled over what felt like a log anchored in the grass. She looked down and screamed.

  A man, his open eyes to the sky and his mouth a permanent expression of disbelief, had his neck impaled by a sword, the pointed end emerging on the other side. Thick, coagulated blood pooled around his head and flies swarmed the wound. María Isabel looked up, past him, and saw it—a field of dozens of men just like him, left rotting in the heat, their innards and flesh unrecognizable, one giant mass of scorched meat, and as a final insult, a hog chomping through the remains, its face and teeth smeared in dark blood. She recognized the face of a fellow tobacco roller.

  The grass quivered with María Isabel, oblivious to the carnage to which it bore witness. It began to rain and she stood there until a stream of red forced a jagged path to the river. Then she ran in her dress, torn and muddied and soaked, calling out to her mother as when she was a child, calling out to the giant unheeding span before her, and fell at the door of their home, her sobs heavy.

  That night, her mother died.

  * * *

  Nothing was the same after the skirmish in Camagüey. Porteños y Gómez emptied to a third of its workers, the rest dead in the slaughter that had visited them or fleeing to la Florida, chasing rumors of tobacco factories offering refuge in exile. Don Gerónimo left, and Porteños, the owner of the tabaquería, began to oversee the work himself. The mood sobered, the readings changed.

  On the first day back in the workshop, after the weeks of burials and rebuilding, Antonio took the lectern and announced that they would suspend the usual reading of La Aurora, as the rebellion had delayed its delivery to Camagüey. They would finish Les Misérables after the lunch hour, and they would begin another novel, one by a Cuban writer, that morning.

  María Isabel could not bring herself to look up at him. She concentrated instead on each roll of the leaves, on making tighter and tighter bundles.

  “Cecilia Valdés,” Antonio began, “by Cirilo Villaverde.”

  Her hands shook. Tighter rolls, she told herself. Tighter rolls.

  “‘To the women of Cuba: Far from Cuba, and with no hope of ever seeing its sun, its flowers, or its palms again, to whom, save to you, dear countrywomen, the reflection of the most beautiful side of our homeland, could I more rightfully dedicate these sad pages?’”

  Antonio’s voice carried the workers through that dismal morning. It spoke of the Spanish and creole social elite; love between free and enslaved Black Cubans; a mulata woman, her place in their island’s history. Even so, the author creole, an influential man. Not so unlike the other authors. After a lunch of hardened bread and bitter coffee, alone in her now empty home, María Isabel returned to hear a continuation of Les Misérables.

  The days went by like this. Nightmares and crying fits gave way to tired collapse. And for whatever reason, possibly loneliness, possibly realizing she had no one left in the world, a month later she waited for Antonio and said, “I am not Cecilia Valdés.” And then, “I would be honored if you would read to me from any text.”

  * * *

  Once, as a child, María Isabel had accompanied her father to the city center of Camagüey to deliver baskets of a plantation owner’s coffee yield to a market vendor. She watched wonderstruck as wealthy Spanish families paced the city’s promenade, the women with their parasols and flouncing petticoats of fine linen, the children playing with hoops and sticks, and carrying schoolbook bundles. At the market, she watched enslaved women trail white women and gather their purchases, how the Spanish women would point and the Black women would gather, their dresses more like the countryside smocks she was used to.

  She’d asked her father then, pointing to her skin, “Where are the people like me?” He’d hushed her with a smack. Children did not speak their minds, he reminded her. Children did not ask, children answered. Children did as they were told.

  Now she knew the answer. The women were here, in these fields, some free and some not, some passing as creole. The not-so-whispered dictate of enslavers: mix to mejorar la raza. Spanish men, your violence is a favor, your violence is bettering the race of this colony. So that someone like her could be told, you are not Black. You are mulata and mulata is mejor, and maybe your future generations will blanquear, closer and closer to white, take on the dictate as their own. Some plantations kept enslaved people, and peasants who earned their keep on small plots of land tended others. For their own reasons, the peasants and enslaved people, the guajiro farmers and criollo landowners, they all hated Queen Isabel II.

  In the final days of war, the reports through the provinces grew more and more dire: public executions, entire villages burned to the ground, formerly free Black farmers forced into slavery. People were hungry, famished. Disease spread and wiped out whole families, whole prisons filled with mambises fighters. Their heroes were dying.

  And still each day during lunch, for an hour, Antonio and María Isabel sat beneath the shade of banana leaves for reading lessons. Antonio read her poetry from Cuba’s orators and political theory from European philosophers. Karl Marx, other men. They often debated. He taught her to spell her name, held a quill in her shaking hand as she formed loops and curves over a small scroll, and though she could not decipher the letters, she saw in the marks a kind of art, a kind of beauty.

  “I have a special reading,” he said one day. “Today, in the afternoon. A treat for the workshop.”

  “You’ll not read from Les Misérables?” They were on the last volume, and its reading seemed the only event worth anticipating in those dark days when every sound of hooves brought fear of more loss.

  “Yes, but first, a special reading.”

  María Isabel was still the only woman in the factory, now shrunken. The other rollers were fathers and husbands but also children whose hardened demeanor belied their innocence, who smoked puros larger than their hands. María Isabel knew to count her blessings—some of these boys had also lost entire families, had grown into men over one bloody night, had woken up the guardians of younger siblings, bellies rumbling.

  “Today brings a rousing announcement,” Antonio said from the lectern as the workers settled back to their desks. �
��One of our own great thinkers in exile in New York, Emilia Casanova de Villaverde—leader of the women’s independence movement and wife of the famed author of Cecilia Valdés—wrote to Victor Hugo. Our beloved señora Casanova de Villaverde informed señor Hugo of Les Misérables’ popularity in this, our tobacco workshops, that bring Cuba’s artisanship to the masses. She informed him of the lot our women begin to occupy—how their hands, too, have taken up the work of men as they seek to liberate our island. I have in my very possession, a translation of Victor Hugo’s remarks to his faithful admirer Emilia Casanova de Villaverde—and to you, the people of Cuba.”

  A murmur overtook the workshop, and Porteños lifted his head from his accounting desk on the second floor to note the disruption. But all were silent and attentive as Antonio unrolled a large scroll whose black ink filtered through the fibers in the light.

  “‘Women of Cuba, I hear your cries. Fugitives, martyrs, widows, orphans, you turn to an outlaw; those who have no home to call their own seek the support of one who has lost his country. Certainly we are overwhelmed; you no longer have your voice, and I have more than my own: your voice moaning, mine warning. These two breaths, sobbing for home, calling for home, are all that remain. Who are we, weakness? No, we are force.’”

  María Isabel’s hands shook, and she tried to still them, tried to still her rage.

  “‘Consciousness is the backbone of the soul. As the conscience is upright, the soul stands; I have in me that strength, and it is enough. And you do well to contact me. I will speak up for Cuba as I spoke up for Crete. No nation has the right to hammer its nail over the other, not Spain over Cuba nor England over Gibraltar.’”

  Antonio trailed off, and María Isabel looked up to see Porteños stomping across the overlook and down the stairs, his face red and sweaty, the workers silent as he grabbed the papers from Antonio and commanded him to read from Les Misérables and only from Les Misérables.

  Everyone had feared Porteños’s arrival. Workers whispered that he’d broken the legs of an insouciant servant, that he knew about cigar factory strikes in the US and said he’d shoot anyone in his own workshop who dared complain.

  “You are not to incite our workers with the imbecile ramblings of European artists with little understanding of the practical labor our good people perform!” he yelled.

  Antonio looked at the crumbled scroll in Porteños’s sun-spotted hand. He muttered what sounded like an apology, turning so that María Isabel could see only his back. Her hands trembled so fiercely now that the tobacco fillings scattered across her lap.

  Antonio turned, spun the pages of the book on the lectern, adjusted his glasses. He read from Les Misérables as though no disruption had taken place. He didn’t look toward María Isabel once that day and rode off before she could meet him by his horse. And the words of Victor Hugo to Emilia Casanova de Villaverde reverberated through her that lonely night: Who are we? Weakness. No, we are force. She wished he’d read Emilia’s own words.

  * * *

  Each week, there were fewer and fewer rollers in the workshop until only two dozen remained. Some had grown ill from diseases that spread after the fighting—obvious as they grew sallower each day, as they stopped smoking because of the labored breath that followed. When they stopped showing up, María Isabel assumed they had died or grown so sick they could no longer work. Others continued to save their earnings to secure their place on the private ships and dinghies that trekked to Tampa. The war made trade difficult too. Fewer cigars made their way out of the eastern provinces, though demand did not cease.

  Antonio took on a different tone—seeking the most uplifting news from La Aurora to highlight, the paper finally reaching them, and suggesting novels that detailed adventurous quests, dramatic romance. When Les Misérables concluded, Antonio never mentioned Victor Hugo again. Voting stopped too. Now Porteños approved the readings, which Antonio spread across his desk each dawn, and María Isabel could sometimes hear whispered objections from Antonio quelled by a slammed fist on the table.

  But at lunchtime, as they ate fruit and salted meat beneath their tree behind the workshop, Antonio shared his reserves. He read to her from Victor Hugo’s second letter, printed in the paper—this one addressed to all the people of Cuba—in which he preached abolition and praised the Cuban rebellion against colonial rule, sending encouragement to the rebels whose numbers increasingly waned. Sometimes she cried at Hugo’s words. More than once, Antonio gathered her as María Isabel shivered and shook in his warmth. She had found in Antonio a friendship she hadn’t thought possible with a man, he of a gentler variety, seeming to relish in María Isabel the same spirit most sought to smother.

  Behind the workshop, Antonio read to her from La Aurora, too. More and more each day, Porteños disallowed large portions of the lectors’ newspaper in the factory. He was impartial to both sides of the war, but his were commercial calculations. Business was failing yet Porteños held on, sure that the Spanish would win, that resolution would come and, with it, a return to prosperity. So he held on, feigning loyalty to his gubernatorial overseers. And María Isabel began to realize why he censored La Aurora—the editors grew more alarmed at the repression overtaking the country each day. They denounced the tobacco factory owners who had banned the practice of lectorship as impeding the progress of culture, keeping workers calculatingly ignorant. Porteños determined to prove them right, she thought.

  “They are careful not to write in favor of the rebels,” Antonio said to her. “But the intimation is obvious.”

  The day Antonio asked her to marry him, a storm of fat, thick rain surprised them beneath the tree, and they ran for shelter under the roof ledge of the workshop. No one was around—not even Porteños, who went home to the plantation for his meal. Soaked, she unfastened the pins in her hair and let her curls loose around her face. He raised a hand to a sodden lock, and she pulled away, unable to look at him. She knew he was enamored of her; that much was obvious. But they had never spoken of marriage, and though he knew there was no one to ask for her hand, she knew little of his family, of his plans. Increasingly she grew wary of his intentions, wondered whether he saw in her a passing amusement and little more.

  He bent before her, holding his hat, his own hair glistening with rain. “I know I have little fortune to offer,” he said. “But I love you and promise I always will.”

  She said yes though she meant perhaps; wedding vows had long ceased to signal escape. She said yes because she had nothing left, and a learned man seemed as hopeful a prospect as she could conceive. And she sensed that he, too, sought a conciliation through marriage. In María Isabel, Antonio had found a way to flee without lusting after other shores, had found a reason to feign a braver face each day. She knew and, despite the weight of it, accepted her role as liberator of a frightened man. María Isabel thought it had always been women who wove the future out of the scraps, always the characters, never the authors. She knew a woman could learn to resent this post, but she would instead find a hundred books to read.

  * * *

  She moved in with Antonio’s mother, a widow, and his unmarried sister. They were kind to María Isabel, but she knew they couldn’t fathom why she continued to work. When she came home each afternoon to her mother-in-law rocking on the porch with a fan in her hand, María Isabel avoided her stare.

  But how could she explain that the workshop had become deliverance? That mending her husband’s chemise or pounding boiled plantains in a mortar without words, all the words from the workshop, would beat her mind to submission?

  She cried for her mother, for her father, for her own lonely self as Antonio slept. She reached for him and wondered if the temporary relief of warm hands to grasp her own, trembling, was love. And she whispered the words often for comfort: Weakness. No, we are force. Now, they were her words.

  * * *

  The day the readings stopped was a sunny one, a bright one. Where she had struggled to see the leaves before her, that day a faint ve
il of light floated over each desk. The air was so thick, so humid, María Isabel barely needed to moisten her leaves.

  She’d heard the mambises wore thin, that dreams of taking La Habana faded. She’d heard of families disappeared, of martyred fighters, of generals exiled throughout North America. Peace was coming, she could feel it, though peace meant surrender, slavery, so many dead for nothing.

  Antonio was reading from the permitted sections of La Aurora. Its editors grew more abstruse each issue—they never mentioned freedom or uprising or war. But they spoke of self-determination. They spoke of culture as a means of liberation. They criticized slave owners and urged abolition. They told the workers to hold on.

  And the workers did. Each day they took their stations and nodded at one another, transmitted courage in furtive looks. They walked past the empty workstations and blessed them. They gave up more of their pay to the lector, knowing there were fewer of them; offered fruits and bread to the skinniest among them; placed thicker cigars and fuller offerings of rum before the saints in their homes. Antonio’s words comforted.

  “‘To Youth,’ a poem by Saturnino Martínez, in today’s La Aurora.”

  Oh! Dance not—Beyond the distant mountain

  See how it appears

  A fierce cloud which, blurring the horizon,

  Announces a tempestuous storm is near.

  The Spanish militia fighters did not make a large production of their arrival. A knock. Señor Porteños looking up from his perch. The workers met his eyes. He dashed down the stairs, wiped his face.