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tired of telling him about the peaceful action of the cigar makers who had preceded her. These women had not been content with “good” authors, they had profited from all books without distinguishing between Dumas and Bakunin by anything other than the pleasure these authors gave them. And the light. It was through their attentive listening that the spirit of revolution had been infused, that a hope had begun to be born. The readings had been banned an incalculable number of times, but each time they had fought to rekindle the fire. In 1870, three hundred of these women, exiles in Tampa, had written to the author of Les Misérables to appeal to his sense of justice; Hugo had responded: “Women of Cuba, I hear your cries. Despairing, you have contacted me. Fugitives, martyrs, widows, orphans, you turn to an outcast; those who no longer have a home call to their aid one who no longer has a homeland. Certainly, we are oppressed; you have lost your voice, and I have lost mine; your voices moan, mine cautions. This is all we have left. Who are we? We are weakness. No, we are strength. Because you are moral strength, and I am conscience. [. . .] All I have within me is that force, but it is enough. And you do well in contacting me. I will speak for Cuba as I spoke for Crete. No nation has the right to hold another under its thumb, no more Cuba under Spain’s than Gibraltar under England’s. One people does not own another people any more than one man owns another man. [. . .] Spain is a noble, admirable nation, and I love it; but I cannot love it more than France. And, if France still had Haiti, the same way I say to Spain: Give up Cuba!, I would say to France: Give up Haiti! [. . .] Women of Cuba, who have so eloquently shared with me your troubles and suffering, do not doubt, your persevering homeland will be paid back for its pain, so much blood will not have been spilled in vain, and one day magnificent Cuba will rise up, free and sovereign among its august sisters, the republics of America.”

      It was as if Jean Valjean himself had replied to them.

      Arnaud lifted his eyes to his collection of cigars. How could he not see them, rolled with tobacco leaves, as if archived within the banded cylinders, as the thousands of pages recited over all the years in the dampness of the workshops. A library of papyrus that, in its admirable disorder, made neighbors of Byron, Mark Twain, Dante, Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, José Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Dickens, Boccaccio, Pérez Galdós, José Hernández’s Martín Fierro, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Blasco Ibáñez, Edgar Allan Poe, Maxim Gorky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Darwin, Émile Zola, Engels, Gustave Flaubert, Pierre Loti, Dostoevsky, Marx, Errico Malatesta, John Stuart Mill, George Sand, Turgenev, Maupassant, Camille Flammarion, Lugones, the twenty volumes of the Young Person’s Treasury or Encyclopedia of Knowledge, the twenty-one volumes of the Collection of Best Spanish Writers, Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, Armando Palacio Valdés, Kropotkin, Chateaubriand, Schiller, Quevedo, Proudhon, Juana Inés de la Cruz . . . This mashing together of “good” and “bad” books was only a tiny portion of what Dulcie had in her head, of that great wave of stories and myths that had broken over Caribbean manufacturing.

      All historians acknowledge this reading craze as one of the engines of the independence of 1898, and then the revolution.

      As unlikely as it seemed, the readings in the factories continued under Castro without any major changes, aside from the allotment of a fixed salary and a civil service status for the readers. The introduction of the microphone, then of radio programs, replaced the platforms with control booths, and the readers had to learn to add in salsa music, sports results, and reports on Castro’s glory; but no one ever questioned their choice of books. While the practice of reading aloud died out everywhere else, because of industrial mechanization or, since the 1930s in Mexico and the United States, the advent of strict censorship, it continues in Cuba and Santo Domingo to this day. Ever since, they have read the big hits of the nineteenth century, but also Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas, Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo, García Márquez, Agatha Christie, Pablo Neruda, Stephen King, Alejo Carpentier, Ernesto Guevara, Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Proust, Kipling, Schopenhauer, D’Annunzio, H.G. Wells, and even Pierre Grimal’s Greek Mythology!

      Dulcie’s knowledge on this subject was inexhaustible. One day, in December 1903, in Ybor City in Tampa, the reader at the José Lovera factory finished the novel that had been holding the cigar makers spellbound for a month. Before taking his break, he offered his audience a list of ten works; among the suggested titles was Paul de Kock’s The Cuckold. Many of the workers immediately objected to this reading, considering it immoral. The other half of the cigar makers protested the opposite, and without anyone having read the book in question, the whole workshop flamed up over the suitability of the reading. At the head of the two parties, which clashed verbally until closing time, Jesús Fernández and Enrique Velázquez were the most aggravated. The night did not help at all, and they met with the same frustration the next day at the Lorenzana, the bar where they were wont to eat a quick bite before work. Insults came flooding out, humiliating and disproportionate, then threats, likewise so excessive that they forgot to use their fists and went straight for their weapons. A .38-caliber for Fernández, a .44 for Velázquez. They fired simultaneously, point blank. Both hit in the chest, they staggered away from each other, still firing. A second bullet struck Fernández in the stomach, a third ripped Velázquez open at the groin, the others missed their targets as the two men collapsed. They died at the same time, not pausing in their insults for a second.

      That truth is stranger than fiction is a well-known fact, but that fiction can alter reality just as directly is what the people at the José Lovera factory learned the next day from the mouth of their reader, when the story of the shoot-out joined the ranks of the news stories in the Tampa Morning Tribune.

      Out of respect for the deceased, The Cuckold was pulled from the list; the cigar makers agreed upon The Human Beast for their next reading, and life went on.

       XV

       The Noh Straddler

      Let us leave Holmes and Grimod to gather their thoughts and discuss the curious passengers on this ship of fools, and follow Canterel after he left his companions behind and passed through two cars to get back to his room.

      As he entered the last hallway, he saw the little man with the blue glasses, who was trying to open the door to his compartment.

      “Hey, you there!” called Martial. “Might I ask what you’re doing?”

      “You can see very well,” the man responded with a very strong Belgian accent, “I’m trying to get into my cabin, but the key isn’t working . . .”

      “What is your cabin number?”

      “Car 6, Cabin 15.”

      “This is Car 7 . . .”

      The man apologized profusely, doffed his hat, and hurriedly decamped. This person certainly appeared nothing short of fishy, but in his defense, thought Canterel, the numbers of the cars were so poorly indicated that anyone would have trouble finding his way around.

      Once in his room, Canterel undressed to take a shower. Although it was much less spacious than the one installed in his automobile, the bathroom he was using was roomy enough for proper ablutions with hot water, a luxury that seemed to him quite natural in a steam engine where soot always managed to grease up your skin. His sessions with the chest expanders and in the bicycle room had left him dazed; his shower perked him up without quieting his mind. As soon as he had donned evening wear, he opened the two panels of his travel pharmacy, a walnut-wood box containing numerous phials with glass stoppers; from the drawer at the bottom, he pulled what he called his “wine list,” a notebook where he meticulously recorded the medications he took and the effects he felt from them:

       Sunday, February 10th. 17 hrs: 6 Phanodorms; 6 more around 1 hr 30 in the morning. Slept 4 hrs.

       Monday the 11th. Rutonal at 4 hrs 30; 3 at 6 hrs. 18 total for 3 hrs of sleep.

       Tuesday

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