The Cigar Roller by Pablo Medina

Author:Pablo Medina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2005-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Amadeo is a wild dog roaming the night. When he isn’t searching for a domino game he is searching for a cockfight, when he isn’t searching for a cockfight, he is looking for a woman. Amadeo wants to find whatever makes him feel alive, away from the domestic Sargasso that threatens to drown him. On one of those nights when a cold wet wind is blowing from the north and there are no cockfights or women anywhere, he sees a girl sitting in the Parque Central with her parents. They, too, have been driven to the city by the endless warring and Amadeo takes pity on their ragged clothes and the startled forlorn eyes of people not used to the city. He walks on to the other end of the park then circles back to where the family is sitting, introduces himself, and says he knows a place where they can stay the night, which is not true. He leads them out of the park into the city down Calle Reina thinking he will have to take them home to Julia and she will become angry again, how dare he bring country strangers to stay at their house! Then he remembers a roller at the cigar factory whose mother runs a boarding house twenty blocks from the park close to Vedado and he takes them there, hoping there are rooms available. The girl, Ana, is fourteen, dark haired with big blue eyes that give off a wild, piercing energy. As they walk her bony arms begin to shiver from the cold. Amadeo has a sudden urge to bring her close to him. Her shoulders seem so frail they would crumble from the weight of his arm. They are in luck. His friend’s mother has two rooms on the first floor behind the kitchen. Amadeo pays for a week in advance against the protests of the father, who wants no charity. Would you rather have your daughter catch her death in the cold, Amadeo asks him in a friendly enough manner. His eyes, sharp and filled with authority, are fixed on the older man who has no option but to shake his head and turn away.

Amadeo’s vision glazes over and he loses focus of the things in front of him—the pictures of the clown and the mountains, the pine veneer dresser. This happens to him sometimes when he is remembering. Only the past is clearly before him. If he hears anything—Nurse singing under her breath, for example—it becomes a part of what he is remembering. And so he hears Ana singing in Nurse’s falsetto the same songs Nurse knows. He visits the rooming house once a week at first, to make sure Ana and her parents are all right. The father is selling candy on the streets; the mother irons for the landlady. It is okay, Amadeo thinks, that he is fond of her. Ana is like a younger sister to him. They sit on the edge of the bed while

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