MAÑANA - Part Three: Capítulos Gratis

The list went up on the eighteenth, three typed sheets under glass beside the man door.

They read it the way they had read the notice, in shifts. This time a man had to find himself, and then everyone he had ever sat near. Aurelio was on the first sheet. Baldomero was on the third. Nando was on none of them, and stood at the glass a while after the others had gone in, moving his finger down the second sheet twice, and then a third time, at the pace of a man checking arithmetic he already knew was right. His bench was across the aisle from Aurelio's.

Otero unhooked the chain at ten minutes to seven and did not look at anyone as they passed, which by then was the ordinary way of it.

At seven the music started.

It came out of the four cabinets at once, wired to one another and to whatever the office had chosen, a dance band with brass in it, and it filled the galera the way water fills a shape. Nobody had said anything about it. The foreman had turned a knob in the office and the room had a sound in it, and the sound was there when they picked up their chavetas and it was there through the morning without a pause except when the record changed, and it was pleasant, and it was loud enough that a man at the next bench had to be leaned toward.

By ten the floor had learned what it was going to be. You could work in it. You could think in it. What you could not do was hear one voice in the middle of the room and take, all three hundred of you, the same breath at the same time.

They rolled. Production for that first week ran eleven percent over the same week the year before, which Mr. Hays wrote on a card and posted by the time clock.

---

The company kept two watchmen after the doors opened, one for the north building and one for the galera side, and Aurelio's slip was renewed for Tuesdays and Fridays without his asking.

He had a bench again and a wage again. He stood at the window while Hays wrote the dates on the new slip, and he watched the pen make the numbers, and he heard himself say that Tuesdays and Fridays would be fine.

"Approved," Hays said.

That was a Monday. On Tuesday he made his eight o'clock round and his nine, and at ten minutes to ten he sat down on the end of the bench in the dark with the lantern out.

The cabinet over the second post warmed and gave its small knock, and the reading came back exactly where it had left it.

It was the chapter where the Count begins to give things back. Aurelio had never heard it. Nobody in that room had ever heard it, because the bell had rung, and here it was, in a voice that took the long sentences at their full length without hurrying to the end of them and let the short ones fall like a chaveta set down on the board. Mercédès had her answer. It was not the answer she had asked for, and the voice gave it to her at three minutes past midnight in an empty factory to one man sitting in the dark with his hands turned up on the bench.

When the chapter ended the voice did not stop. It did what a lector does with the ten seconds after a chapter, which is talk.

"You have not paid for this," it said.

Aurelio's throat worked. He did not use it.

"A man who repeats everything he hears is trusted with very little," the voice said. "The next chapter is longer. Say nothing at your house tonight. On Friday you will hear it."

Then the hum went out of the cabinet, and the building had the boiler in it and nothing else, and Aurelio sat for a while and then got up and made his eleven o'clock round, punching the clock at the shipping room, at the stair head, at the selectors' room, at the galera door.

Ofelia was awake when he came in. She had the lamp turned down and the copybook open and a pencil in her hand, and she asked him how the night had gone.

"Quiet," he said.

---

The hoarseness came in on the Thursday.

It was nothing. Men had it in December every year, from the leaf dust and the cold coming in off the water and the stoves. He worked through the morning and at the noon whistle he asked the man at the next bench to pass the gum pot and had to ask twice, and the second time he leaned in and put more behind it, and it came out with sand in it.

On Friday night the chapter was as long as it had promised and the voice took two hours over it and did not hurry once. He got home at four. He slept until eleven and woke with his throat full of something that would not clear, and on Sunday at the table he answered the children in a voice like a hinge, and Ofelia looked up from the pot and looked at him and did not say anything at all.

On Monday when he came home from the floor his coat was on the nail and his supper was on the table and Ofelia said, "Thursday at four you are at the clinic. I put your name down. Ramón's mother is taking the little one so I can come with you."

"It's the dust."

"Then a man will say so on Thursday and I will write it down and we will both stop thinking about it." She set the bread in front of him. "Do not tell me it is the dust again. Tell me on Thursday, in front of him."

The doctor at the Centro Español was thorough. He looked at Aurelio's throat with a light and had him say ah and had him count backward from twenty, which took a while, and pressed under his jaw with two fingers on each side. He asked whether there was pain and there was no pain. He asked whether there was blood and there was none. He asked what work he did and wrote cigarmaker, and asked what else, and wrote night watchman.

"There is nothing in there," he said. "Warm salt water. No shouting."

In the street outside Ofelia took the copybook out of her bag, and Aurelio saw that she had started a new column on a clean page at the back, dated, with the day of the week beside each date, and one word or two beside that. She wrote Dec 24, Thu, nothing found while they stood there, using the wall.

"What is that," he said.

"It is the same thing I do with the children."

"They're children."

"Then I will stop when you tell me what happens on Tuesdays and Fridays," she said, and put the book back in her bag, and took his arm on the way to the corner the way she had taken it for twenty years, and neither of them said anything the rest of the way.

---

Christmas came and went and left the floor with three days of orders and the machines in the north building running two shifts.

The music played. In the second week of January the foreman started leaving a cabinet on during the noon half hour, and the men ate under it, and the talk at the benches went on under the music now instead of over it, and the room heard less of itself than it had in December.

Mr. Hays came through on a Wednesday with two men from the manufacturers' association and stopped at the head of the aisle and said, loud enough to carry over the brass, that this was the quietest floor in Ybor and the cleanest numbers he had seen since '28.

Nobody at the benches looked up. Aurelio drew the breath for something and it went out of him as breath and nothing else. Baldomero, four rows over, had a piece of spindle turned to a handle for his knife now, honey-dark, with the varnish worn off one side of it where his thumb went.

Aurelio rolled with his mouth shut. He had stopped offering things across the aisle because it cost him to say them, and when the men in his row talked he gave them a nod and kept his hands moving on the leaf, and by the end of January there were men on that floor who had not heard his voice since Christmas and had not noticed, because the music was on.

On the last Friday in January the reading ran to the end of a chapter at half past one. The ten seconds went by. Then the voice did not talk about the novel.

"You keep an account," it said.

Aurelio sat with his hands on the bench.

"Nineteen years you carried it in your coat. You wrote what each man paid and the column came out even. You are the only one who knows how that is done."

The pouch was in the coat. It had been in the coat since November, seventy-three quarters and the one still knotted in its handkerchief, and it had gone with him to the bench and home and to the clinic and back.

"There is room on this floor for one more," the voice said. "One. The bench across from you is empty on Tuesdays. Bring a name to it and I will read to you both. After that there will be others."

The lantern was out. Above him the cabinet was warm, and the grille cloth over the speaker was the color of weak tea in the dark, and the conduit went down the wall in its straight line that followed nothing the building had.

"You do not have to decide tonight," the voice said. "Keep the list."

The hum went out. The boiler ticked below the floor. Aurelio sat on the end of the bench in the dark with his throat closed and his hand already inside his coat, past the pouch, touching the ledger, and the pencil was in the crease of the spine where he always kept it, sharpened, because he sharpened it on Sundays. Across the aisle the bench stood with its cloth folded on it, the way it had stood since the eighteenth.

 

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