the readers. The introduction of the microphone, then of radio programs, replaced the platforms with control booths, and the readers had to learn to add in salsa music, sports results, and reports on Castro’s glory; but no one ever questioned their choice of books. While the practice of reading aloud died out everywhere else, because of industrial mechanization or, since the 1930s in Mexico and the United States, the advent of strict censorship, it continues in Cuba and Santo Domingo to this day. Ever since, they have read the big hits of the nineteenth century, but also Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas, Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo, García Márquez, Agatha Christie, Pablo Neruda, Stephen King, Alejo Carpentier, Ernesto Guevara, Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Proust, Kipling, Schopenhauer, D’Annunzio, H.G. Wells, and even Pierre Grimal’s Greek Mythology!
Dulcie’s knowledge on this subject was inexhaustible. One day, in December 1903, in Ybor City in Tampa, the reader at the José Lovera factory finished the novel that had been holding the cigar makers spellbound for a month. Before taking his break, he offered his audience a list of ten works; among the suggested titles was Paul de Kock’s The Cuckold. Many of the workers immediately objected to this reading, considering it immoral. The other half of the cigar makers protested the opposite, and without anyone having read the book in question, the whole workshop flamed up over the suitability of the reading. At the head of the two parties, which clashed verbally until closing time, Jesús Fernández and Enrique Velázquez were the most aggravated. The night did not help at all, and they met with the same frustration the next day at the Lorenzana, the bar where they were wont to eat a quick bite before work. Insults came flooding out, humiliating and disproportionate, then threats, likewise so excessive that they forgot to use their fists and went straight for their weapons. A .38-caliber for Fernández, a .44 for Velázquez. They fired simultaneously, point blank. Both hit in the chest, they staggered away from each other, still firing. A second bullet struck Fernández in the stomach, a third ripped Velázquez open at the groin, the others missed their targets as the two men collapsed. They died at the same time, not pausing in their insults for a second.
That truth is stranger than fiction is a well-known fact, but that fiction can alter reality just as directly is what the people at the José Lovera factory learned the next day from the mouth of their reader, when the story of the shoot-out joined the ranks of the news stories in the Tampa Morning Tribune.
Out of respect for the deceased, The Cuckold was pulled from the list; the cigar makers agreed upon The Human Beast for their next reading, and life went on.
Let us leave Holmes and Grimod to gather their thoughts and discuss the curious passengers on this ship of fools, and follow Canterel after he left his companions behind and passed through two cars to get back to his room.
As he entered the last hallway, he saw the little man with the blue glasses, who was trying to open the door to his compartment.
“Hey, you there!” called Martial. “Might I ask what you’re doing?”
“You can see very well,” the man responded with a very strong Belgian accent, “I’m trying to get into my cabin, but the key isn’t working . . .”
“What is your cabin number?”
“Car 6, Cabin 15.”
“This is Car 7 . . .”
The man apologized profusely, doffed his hat, and hurriedly decamped. This person certainly appeared nothing short of fishy, but in his defense, thought Canterel, the numbers of the cars were so poorly indicated that anyone would have trouble finding his way around.
Once in his room, Canterel undressed to take a shower. Although it was much less spacious than the one installed in his automobile, the bathroom he was using was roomy enough for proper ablutions with hot water, a luxury that seemed to him quite natural in a steam engine where soot always managed to grease up your skin. His sessions with the chest expanders and in the bicycle room had left him dazed; his shower perked him up without quieting his mind. As soon as he had donned evening wear, he opened the two panels of his travel pharmacy, a walnut-wood box containing numerous phials with glass stoppers; from the drawer at the bottom, he pulled what he called his “wine list,” a notebook where he meticulously recorded the medications he took and the effects he felt from them:
Sunday, February 10th. 17 hrs: 6 Phanodorms; 6 more around 1 hr 30 in the morning. Slept 4 hrs.
Monday the 11th. Rutonal at 4 hrs 30; 3 at 6 hrs. 18 total for 3 hrs of sleep.
Tuesday the 12th. 4 Soneryl at 17 hrs; 4 at 18 hrs 30; asleep at 22 hrs, then 13 during the night. Slept 12 hr 15, outward euphoria.
Wednesday the 13th. 1 bottle Neurinase, little effect.
Thursday the 14th. 20 Somnothyril; 1 bottle Neurinase, no lunch, euphoria all day.
Friday the 15th. Rutonal at 9 hr = 34. 3 hrs sleep, wonderful euphoria.
Saturday the 16th. 2 bottles Veronidin. Anxiety, little sleep. Muddled euphoria.
Reading this last page, he decided on fifteen Rutonal tablets, waiting to see what happened. Opium, alas, gave off too strong a smell in the car; other travelers had complained.
Seated at the corner of the bench, Canterel took out his chronograph and once again verified that the time did not correspond to the brightness outside. This whole train was catching up to time; or outrunning it, which amounted to the same thing in terms of the floating sensation that the phenomenon produced. Rather pleasant, he admitted, stowing the timepiece in his pocket, not to be brought back to the present until their arrival.
He had made his first big trip as a child, accompanied by his mother. An intellectual, recently widowed and so eccentric that she seemed English, Marguerite had decided one day that she could no longer do without taking a trip to the Indies. She had hired a yacht and crew, convinced a dozen friends to come with her, and set off for Cannes, with her head chef, her chambermaid, and the ebony casket in which she kept her dresses. After several weeks of pleasant cruising, this little world saw the port of Bombay on the horizon. The ship was only a few cable lengths away when his mother asked someone to pass her a pair of binoculars. She scanned the coast for a moment, twisted her mouth as if she had just heard a sour note at a concert, and turned to the captain.
“So this is the Indies!” she said, handing him the binoculars. “No use disembarking, Monsieur, give the order to turn around, please; we’re going back.”
The guests had expostulated against this folly, then grown angry; the yacht had tacked about and set a course for France. For the whole return voyage, his mother had stayed cloistered in her cabin, accepting the presence of only her son and, every evening from ten to midnight, her paid companion, who would read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to her.
Blood will tell, thought Canterel, setting his forearms down on the armrest that he had just hooked to the nickel bar of the luggage rack, a device shaped like a swing that allowed him to rest while maintaining decent posture. His face turned to the window, he watched the taiga pass by for a moment, then closed his eyes. The landscape, too, was a mental thing.
Three cars away, Lady MacRae missed nothing that passed the window she looked out of. Already dressed
