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.
Three of them—slender, mustachioed men with handsome faces. They were there to deliver an official edict from the governor. The workers knew better than to stare, but María Isabel could see their rolling pause, could see how they all strained to hear.
Antonio folded La Aurora and placed it on the lectern as Porteños read the scroll before him and the soldiers watched. Porteños said the words under his breath and guided his fingers across the lines. Then, hand on the back of one of the soldiers, he guided them out the door, where they continued to huddle and speak in whispers.
“Gentlemen,” Porteños said with a nod. The door’s closing echoed through the workshop.
“There will be no more readings,” he announced, matter-of-fact.
Antonio kept his eyes to the ground when Porteños led him out. María Isabel could hear them speak outside but could not make out the words. Antonio sounded agitated, and Porteños seemed to calm and admonish him simultaneously. Then, silence, just the brusque click of Porteños’s heels as he reentered the workshop and walked back to his desk.
Everything in María Isabel told her to go after her husband. She closed her eyes and silently repeated the words that had carried her through past weeks: We are force.
She stood. She tucked her chair into the desk and walked out the door, knowing she’d never walk through its arched entryway again. A handful of workers followed. Porteños didn’t even bother to look up.
They knew they risked their lives. But María Isabel and Antonio had ceased to care. Something greater than themselves swam in their blood; this would be their war.
Each day, when the workers who remained at the workshop had their lunch hour, María Isabel and Antonio met them in a clearing in the middle of a sugarcane field. Antonio struggled to receive copies of La Aurora now that Porteños y Gómez no longer employed him, but he rode into the city every few days to bring back other news. They made the trek to their meeting spot with a bundle of books each, philosophy texts and political manifestos, mostly. The workers repaid them with yeasty bread, with fat sausages, with cauldrons of ajiaco. On Christmas eve, they even slaughtered a pig that roasted for hours. Every day at noon, they lit their cigars and took a place on dried palm that lined the ground. They nodded and clapped at passages that inspired or put to words that which they all felt.
And María Isabel learned to read more each day. Now that she had empty time at home, she sat with Antonio for hours, and when all had gone to bed, she ran her fingers over crisp pages by candlelight until the stub wore to darkness.
But still, they were dark days for her, filled with hunger, with panic, with mourning, even as she celebrated a secret: she was pregnant, her belly beginning to swell and round. She’d known for months before she shared the news with Antonio or his mother; she’d known even before she walked out of Porteños y Gómez. But she had kept quiet because marveling at what a life could be felt tenuous when death sank its tentacles into everything else. When she finally told Antonio, he lit up like wildfire in a field of grass, deepened his resolve to resist the terror the governor’s edict had staked in their minds.
But Antonio didn’t want her making the trip to the clearing with him any longer. He urged María Isabel to rest, take shade. Her mother-in-law agreed and made hot compresses of cheesecloth and cotton for her aching back, told her to mind her priorities. For a few days, she listened to them and stayed in the comfort of their homey cabin, stewing beans and embroidering a baby bonnet. But even in her state, she yearned to leave. She made the trips until her ankles could no longer tolerate them. And then she put aside all her housework and read for hours.
She could now string letters into words. She marveled at the magic of it all, how human beings had thought to etch markings on stone to tell their stories, sensed each lifetime too grand, too interesting, not to document. She placed one hand to her belly and felt the something in her move and stretch as if seeking its own freedom, felt as if the whole world were her womb. She wanted to write her own words. She wanted
