MAÑANA - Part One: La Tribuna

The Count had been in Paris for a month of afternoons, and the galera rolled faster when he was winning.

Aurelio could have told anyone where they were in the book without looking up. Nineteen years at the same bench had taught his hands the leaf so well that his eyes were free to rest on the tribuna, the way every pair of eyes on the floor came to rest there sooner or later. The platform stood eight feet above the benches, its turned legs the color of dark honey. Esteban Cala sat upon it in his good vest with the book open on the rail, and below him three hundred chavetas kept their small tin time against the cutting boards, tack, tack, tack, a sound Aurelio had long ago stopped hearing except when it changed.

It changed when the story tightened. It was changing now.

"«El conde se inclinó,»" Esteban read, and the tapping thinned across the room like rain letting up, "«y su frente tocó la mano que temblaba.»" Mercédès had come to him at night. She had crossed Paris alone to beg for the life of her son, and she was the only soul in that city who knew the Count's true name, and Esteban gave her voice a smallness that made big men set down their knives.

Aurelio rolled. Under his fingers a wrapper leaf lay back along the bunch and sealed itself with gum tragacanth and the pressure of a thumb that had made this exact motion some four million times. On Fridays the ledger came out of his coat and the quarters came in, twenty-five cents a man, week over week, year over year, the floor's reading accounts kept in his own hand, which was sure with numbers and slow with everything else. The men on the floor made the cigars. Their quarters paid for the voice.

At the aisle's end Mr. Hays passed with his watch open in his palm, glanced up at the tribuna the way a man glances at the weather, and went out the far door without writing anything down. Aurelio had settled long ago what the watch was for. The reading hour was the one hour the company did not own, and Hays liked to know its exact size.

That was the first week of November. On the seventh, a Saturday, the parade went down Seventh Avenue with red bunting and a drum, and on the eighth Ofelia's sister stood in their kitchen with her hat still pinned on and said the police had taken seventeen, and Ramón was one of them.

Ramón was nineteen and had a laugh that ran ahead of him into a room. Aurelio had taught him dominoes and then, regretting it, had spent six years losing to him. Ofelia poured her sister coffee and the two women sat at the table with their hands around the cups, and neither of them drank, and the steam went up between them and thinned out and was gone. The youngest of the children came to the doorway, read the kitchen the way children read a kitchen, and took the other two out to the porch without being told.

Aurelio walked to the jail on Monday with a dollar and cigarettes and was told visiting was suspended. The man at the desk said it without looking up from what he was stamping. Aurelio stood a moment, watching the stamp come down and lift, come down and lift, then walked home the long way, past the factory, where the windows at that hour held the last light like something being poured off, and did not go in.

The quarters came in slower after that, and they came at the gate now, at dawn, coin already out of the pocket before the building, as if the men had decided something without holding a meeting about it. Not fewer. Slower. A man held the coin a half second longer before it left the hand, and one of them, Nando from the third row, turned his over twice as if checking the year on it, and said, not to Aurelio exactly, "They read the names in the paper like a box score."

"Names are free," Aurelio said. "It's the rest that costs."

On the second Friday, Ramón's mother was at the gate before him with her son's quarter in a knotted handkerchief. The bench had been empty six days. She put the coin in Aurelio's palm and closed his fingers over it with both of hers, and stood while he braced the ledger against the gatepost and set the name in the paid column in his sure hand, the same as every week, the pen not slowing anywhere in the line. She thanked him twice.

He wrote the amounts in the ledger. The column came out even, as it had come out even through the '20 strike and the fever year. Whatever else moved in Ybor, this column held. He carried the pouch to the café on Fifteenth where Esteban took his coffee after hours, and set it by the saucer, and Esteban nodded thanks with a voice that off the platform was just a man's voice, medium-sized, a little grained at the edges. The platform made it carry. Or the listening did.

"How far will you take them tomorrow?" Aurelio asked.

Esteban's thumb rode the ribbon that hung from the book like a vein. "To the door of the study," he said. "No further. She has come to ask him for the boy's life. Let them sleep on the question of whether a man can hold twenty years of winter in his chest and still open his hand." He looked at the pouch without touching it. "Seventeen," he said, in a different register. "Muchachos."

"One of them is my wife's sister's boy."

Esteban was quiet the length of a full breath. "Then I'll read the appeals column first," he said, "before the novel. So the floor hears the lawyers are working." He said it the way another man might offer to carry something heavy up a stair.

Two collections after the parade, the galera had learned to listen with the top of its head. Word came down the benches without anyone saying it loudly. The manufacturers had met at the Centro; then it was denied; then it was the association rooms downtown; then it was denied. Twice, men no one knew came up the aisle in city suits, stood under the tribuna during the news hour with their hats on, wrote nothing, and left. On those days Esteban read the market reports at length, the crop numbers out of Havana, the price of leaf, in a voice as flat as a scale. The floor rolled through it without a click out of place, three hundred men performing the sound of an empty room.

But in the afternoons the novel went on, because the committee had chosen it and the committee had not unchosen it. Aurelio was the committee's treasurer. The presidente was old Baldomero from the selectors' room, and between them and the secretary they had voted the Dumas in June, out of a shortlist argued over two Sundays with a heat that families reserved for weddings. Aurelio had raised his hand for it. He had never read it. He had heard perhaps two hundred hours of it read, which he had come to believe was a different and possibly larger thing, and when the vote carried he had entered the purchase of the three-volume set in his ledger, four dollars ten, spine to spine the exact green of a beetle's back.

On the twenty-sixth, a Thursday, the floor was the fullest it had been all month. Word had traveled that Mercédès would have her answer. Men who had been laid off came and stood along the back wall with their hats in their hands, unpaid, unentitled, and nobody sent them out.

Esteban climbed the tribuna at two. He did not hurry. He poured his water, set the ribbon back with a touch like a man moving a sleeping child's arm, and lifted the book, and the tapping fell away to almost nothing, to the sound the room made under the sound, which was breathing.

She was still in the study. The lamp between them. Twenty years between them. Esteban read her plea in that small voice that made the big men go still, and read the Count's silence in a silence of his own that he could hold longer than seemed possible for a man of sixty-one, and the floor leaned into it, three hundred bodies angled a half inch off plumb toward the northeast corner of the room, and she rose, and she crossed to him, and she called him by the name no one else living was permitted to use, and said, "Edmundo—"

The bell rang.

It rang twenty minutes early by every watch on the floor and it went on ringing longer than the hour had ever needed, a foreman's arm visible through the office glass, working. Esteban held the ribbon in the page. For a moment the floor stayed leaned toward him, plumb not yet recovered, and Aurelio watched him look down into the galera and take, with his eyes, a kind of count.

"Mañana," Esteban said. It carried to the walls with nothing behind it raised.

The benches straightened. The chavetas went into their cloths. Going out, the men passed under the tribuna in a slower file than the hour warranted, and more than one hand rose and touched the turned leg by the stair, the place where the wood had gone glassy from forty years of hands, a spot the size of a coin, darker than the wood around it in the way a coin is darker after enough thumbs.

Aurelio touched it too. He had never once thought of himself as a man who did that.

Friday morning the doors were open early, which was the first wrong thing, because Otero the gateman guarded his key like scripture. The second wrong thing was the quiet. Aurelio knew the galera's seven-o'clock sound the way he knew his own stairwell in the dark: benches taking weight, the first tack of the first chavetas, somebody's cough. What came out to meet him in the entry that morning was a quiet with sawdust in it.

Cut oak reached him before sight did. Fresh, sweet, a carpenter's smell, a smell he liked in every other room of the world.

The tribuna lay in the middle aisle in pieces the length of stove wood. The rail that had held the book was down flat with its turned spindles snapped to different lengths, and the eight-foot legs had been sawn, sawn through twice each, the honey-dark wood showing its pale inside grain at every cut like a thing that had never once been touched before this. Sawdust drifted the floor in a fan. Whoever had done it had swept the small pieces into a neat pile beside the stair that no longer led anywhere, and the broom stood against the wall with the work, and that, the broom, was the detail Aurelio's eyes kept returning to and could not file.

Men filled the entry behind him and stopped the way he had stopped. Nobody crossed the line where the boards began until Aurelio crossed it. He picked up a length of the rail that had held the book and set it against the taller of the sawn legs and held it there, the cut faces not meeting, the angle refusing, wood that had been one thing declining to be it again, and he held it until the refusing had traveled all the way up his arms, and then he laid the rail on the neat pile, squaring it to the stack without deciding to. The room filled to two hundred, to three, in a silence with a current in it, and Aurelio stood with his hand flat against his chest through his coat, over the pocket where the ledger rode, pressing.

Old Baldomero came through the crowd with his selector's apron still around his neck. He looked a long time. Then he bent, with the difficulty of his knees, took up one piece of a spindle no longer than a hand, put it inside his apron, and walked back out through the men, who parted for him, and did not stop walking.

That was all the speech anyone gave. The floor turned itself around by benches, west rows first, an unrolling motion like a wave running back off sand, knives never lifted from their cloths, and poured out through doors meant for a tenth of the flow, into the street, where the morning shift of the factory across Fourteenth was already out on the bricks and standing. By nine, Seventh Avenue was shoulders from curb to curb as far as the water tower, and the trolley sat still in the middle of it with its bell dinging small and useless, and no one moved out of its way.

Aurelio stood in the crowd's slow drift with his neighbors' backs pressing his shoulders in the shapes of a hundred small tides. It was Friday. The pouch in his coat held Thursday's count and the week's quarters, taken at the gate at dawn as the men now paid them, seventy-some coins riding at his ribs with their particular dragging weight. Each step of the crowd swung the pouch a little against him, tap, and tap.

Somewhere behind him a man was reciting the seventeen names in a low voice, over and over, a rosary of them, Ramón's in its place each time. Somewhere ahead a woman's voice was asking a question of the crowd at large, the same question at intervals, and it took Aurelio three intervals to make out the words over the crowd's sea-noise, and when he made them out he found no man near her was answering, and he did not answer either, and could not have said what his answer was.

"¿Y ahora quién nos habla?" she was calling. And now who speaks to us?

The pouch swung, and tapped. On Fifteenth Street, in a rented room, the book stood shut on its table with the ribbon holding the place, and the last syllable of the Count's true name was still in the air, unanswered. The woman was still asking. The crowd carried Aurelio forward at its own pace, toward the water tower, his hand pressed flat over the coins.

To Be Continued...