Fiction · Fiction (Translated From an Imagined Spanish)
The Leaf-Reader
In the damp hold of an Ybor City brick building, an elderly woman remembers the Cuba she left behind while stripping the heavy veins from tobacco leaves.
The tobacco arrived from Vuelta Abajo in large, wooden boxes that smelled of cedar and the wet river-bottom of Pinar del Río. Esperanza sat near the high, arched window of the factory, her wooden bench worn smooth by sixty years of her weight. Her job was to strip the thick central vein from each leaf, a single, swift motion of her thumb that sounded like a silk dress being torn in half. The Ybor City air was hot and thick with the dust of the dried leaves, which settled over her eyelashes and transformed her hair into a grey, powdery cap.
Below her, on the factory floor, the reader was sitting on his high wooden platform, his voice rising above the rattle of the rolling tables as he read from a Spanish translation of Victor Hugo. Esperanza didn't listen to the words; she knew the story of Jean Valjean by heart, having heard it four times under three different readers since the great strike of 1921. Instead, she watched the shadow of the water tower creep across the brick courtyard, its iron legs rusting in the salty air that blew from the Tampa shipping channels.
Her thumb was calloused and dark, the skin stained yellow by the nicotine that had long since entered her blood, making her heart beat with a slow, steady roll like a Cuban bongo. She held a leaf up to the light, its brown skin veined like the back of her own hand, its surface still holding the faint grease of the tropical rain that had grown it. She pulled the vein free with a single, sharp jerk, throwing the split halves into the basket at her feet, and reached for the next, her movements as old and necessary as the tide that brought the coal ships into the bay.