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
