MAÑANA - Part Five: El Último Capítulo

He did not write the name. The reading stopped.

The cabinet over the second post warmed on Tuesday and gave its knock and then gave nothing else, and the six sat in the dark for forty minutes with their coats on and their breath showing, and at a quarter to eleven the hum went out. On Friday the same. The Tuesday after that, four of them came, and they sat, and it did not read.

Nando waited in the alley afterward with his hands in his coat.

"What does it want," he said.

Aurelio had the pencil and the back of a company card and he wrote a name, and turned it so the light from Fourteenth Street fell on it.

"Whose."

He did not write that.

Nando looked at the card a while. He had a whisper left. He used all of it. "My sister's husband is on the machines in the north building. He has never sat still for a book in his life." He put his hand out flat, the way a man does at a gate on a Friday. "Write his."

The alley was cold and the shipping door stood open behind them and the building had nothing in it but the boiler.

"You have six on that page," Nando said. "Nobody made you write mine."

---

Ofelia was at the table with the ledger open when he came in on the sixth of April.

She had it turned to the back page. Beside it lay the copybook, open to her own column, and the two of them had the same shape: dates on the left, one thing written on the right. She had put them side by side without saying anything about it. Esteban sat in the other chair with his hat on his knee.

"He read them to me," Ofelia said. "Six names, and the dates you took them in."

Aurelio stood in the doorway with his coat still on.

"You will not answer me, so I stopped asking." She turned the copybook around. The last entries ran in a hand that had gone small to fit the page. Feb 9, Tues, out at 8, home 4:20, no voice at breakfast. Feb 12, Fri, same. Mar 3, Tues, spoke twice all day, both to the children. "I brought it to a man who reads for his living. I could not read what it added up to."

Esteban turned his hat a half turn on his knee.

"She came to my room," he said. "She read me the column and I read her the six names, and neither of us has slept much since. I have known three of those men for twenty years." He looked up. "It is asking for another one now, is it not. That is why it stopped."

Aurelio took the pencil out of the ledger's spine and set the card on the table and wrote, and turned it around, and it said Ramón.

Ofelia put her hand flat on the copybook and left it there.

"He goes to my cousin in Key West on Saturday," she said. "The boat leaves at six. He does not know why and he does not need to know why, and if it is a name that thing wants, then let it want a name that lives down at the end of the keys."

"It will still be a name," Esteban said.

"Then it will be a name that is not in the room."

Esteban got up and put on his hat and took a package out of his coat and put it on the table, and it was the second volume, green, with the ribbon out of it.

"Then somebody else had better hold the place," he said.

---

They put Ramón on the boat at six on Saturday with a bag and a letter and the name of a street in Key West.

He talked all the way to the dock. He talked about the man in the next cell who sang and about the lawyer who came twice and about what he would say when he got back, and at the rail he stopped and looked at the two of them standing on the boards.

"Who died," he said.

Ofelia straightened his collar. Aurelio took the knotted handkerchief out of the pouch and put it in the boy's hand and closed his fingers over it with both of his, and Ramón looked at it and then at him and did not open it, and put it in his shirt pocket, and the boat went out past the shrimp docks with him still talking to a man who had come up beside him at the rail.

---

On the third Friday in April, Hays kept the galera running until seven.

The orders were good. The machines in the north building had gone to two shifts in February and there was talk that the hand floor would go to piecework in the summer, and the men rolled under the brass with the windows dark since half past five.

Otero was at the gate when Aurelio came in at nine.

"They keep the north building lit till two now," he said. "Every night this month. Watchman over there won't say what he does with himself." He hooked the chain. "Man ought to have something to do at night."

Aurelio made his eight and nine o'clock rounds and punched the clock at the shipping room, at the stair head, at the selectors' room, at the galera door, and then he sat down on the end of his bench with the lantern out, and the six came in one at a time through the shipping door and took the benches around him.

At ten the cabinet warmed.

"Is the line filled," the voice said.

Aurelio opened the ledger on his knee. He had filled it on Wednesday, in the paid column, in his own hand, which was sure with numbers, and he had put the date beside it the way he had put a date beside every line for nineteen years.

He held the page up toward the cabinet in the dark, which was a thing no one in that room could see and the room did not need to see.

The hum steadied.

"That is your own name," the voice said.

He put the ledger down on the bench beside him.

"You are already in the room," the voice said. "You have been in the room since November."

Aurelio took the second volume out of his coat and set it on the bench. The cover had the cold of the room in it and the ribbon had gone soft where his thumb had been keeping it. He opened it at the ribbon.

"You have four words," the voice said. "You spent two of them at the gate tonight."

He put his finger on the line where the ribbon lay.

"Read then," the voice said.

---

He read.

What came out of him was not enough to reach the second bench. It came out in pieces, in the register of a man breathing on a window, and it stopped where his breath stopped and started again where he could start it, and the words came apart in his mouth and he put them back together and went on, and it took him a long time to get down a sentence that Esteban would have carried to the back wall without lifting anything.

The six turned toward him.

Nando, who had a whisper, leaned in. The man beside Nando leaned in. On the fourth bench a man cupped his hand behind his ear the way a deaf man does at mass, and the room angled itself a half inch off plumb toward the end of Aurelio's bench, and Aurelio got the second sentence out and started on the third.

The cabinet took it from him at the fourth.

It came in on the same word, at conversational volume, unhurried, sure of the sentence before the sentence arrived, and it read the third sentence and the fourth and the fifth. It read with him, half a syllable ahead, the way a strong singer carries a weak one, and then it was simply the one voice in the room.

The six turned back toward the second post. They did it the way men turn toward the thing they can hear. Nando was the last of them, and he stayed a moment longer than the others, looking at Aurelio's mouth still going, and then he turned too.

Aurelio kept reading.

His finger moved down the page under the ribbon and his lips shaped the words and there was nothing behind them at all, and above him the voice went on into the chapter where the last man opens the door and finds out who has come, and it gave the man at the door his own voice in a tone of great sweetness, and across the yard the north building had its lights on, and somewhere in it a cabinet was warm over a floor with its own benches and its own list and its own man to keep it.

The ledger lay open on the bench beside him. His name was in the last line of the paid column.

At the bottom of the page the voice reached the end and waited, and Aurelio's mouth reached the end and waited, and then both of them went on.

 

~End~