Tabaquera
Excerpt from "Stranger in the Barrio"

by Frank Urso

I’m thirteen or fourteen and see a jar stuffed with tobacco leaves. “Ma, what’s capa doing in the refrigerator?”

“It’s good leaf, Franche. Leave it alone.”

“Going to make cigars at home?”

“No, no, need it to allow me to meet quota.”

“I never see Aunt Felicia put capa in her refrigerator.”

“That’s ’cause she’s fast. She doesn’t care what she puts out.”

“Won’t it smell up the refrigerator?”

“It stays pliable in there,” she says.

“Like lettuce?”

“Something like that, so don’t try to smoke it. They’ve been giving out terrible capa at the factory. It cracks easy because the weather has been so dry,” she says in Sicilian.

“How about if they catch you, Ma?”

“They won’t.”

Capa is the Spanish word for tobacco leaf. I never question the name or its derivation. It is just how things are, but the word means cape or cloak in Spanish. I never think of cigars wearing a cape or a cloak, but I guess they do. Preoccupation with cigar making is all I hear at the dinner table night after night. There are no discussions of world affairs, civic affairs or anything much above the ghetto level. It is part of the isolationism illiteracy puts on the table for ghetto children to eat, and the less Papa knows about something, the more passionate and opinionated he is. My parents don’t realize the impact. How can they? They know no different, but I am constantly being told how much better I have it than they did, and I do. I’m not working in a cigar factory and never will.

At age twelve, my mother decided six years of schooling was more than enough for her. She could read and write at grammar school level and that put her above most of her peers. She was one of the lucky ones and didn’t know it. Her father wanted her to continue school, never insisted she quit, but she did.

“Too shy to start a new school,” she’d said to me, and when she told her father she didn’t want to continue he said,

“If that’s what you want, Maria? I’ll get you a job. Your mother can teach you how to roll cigars at home while I search.”

It was what Mama expected, and her mother did not object. It was what all the girls of her generation did—work, get married and have children.

She tells me stories about the factories, about how it was when she was a girl.

“Franchito, they hid us in store rooms and in men’s restrooms, depending on the sex of the inspector. Truant officers came unannounced. It made me feel I was doing something wrong. Woodrow Wilson did it when he passed child labor laws—made it illegal for poor people to work. Now the government has passed another law to keep cigarmakers out of work.”

Mama’s concern is minimum wage, a new requirement imposed on factories. America does its best to quash piecework, but factory owners find loopholes. They impose quotas.

“Filippo, I don’t think I can make 175 cigars every day,” Mama says. “Not with bad leaf.”

“Well, make what you can, Mary. We’ll get by,” Papa says.

“Ma, that’s over 3,000 cigars a month,” I say.

“I had a good year last year, Franche—rolled close to 40,000,” she says.

I shake my head at the numbers.

“If I could get a better paying vitola it would work out to minimum wage, and I won’t get fired.”

Papa says, “Talk to the capotasso, Mary. He’s not going to want to lose you. You roll such beautiful cigars.”

It’s about cigars again. I eat broccoli mixed with fragmented spaghetti and a tad of olive oil and Romano cheese on top—another form of minestra. Minestra is eaten with every conceivable bean and vegetable. The most common are: lentils, fava beans, red beans, collard greens, string beans and broccoli.

“How’s a better paying vitola going to help?”

“Well, Franche, figure it this way. Minimum wage is based on an eight-hour day, so divide how much money I make by piecework by eight. If it comes out to minimum wage or more, I’m okay.”

“Hell, Ma, you’re still getting paid by piecework.”

“It’s worse, because I have the pressure of meeting a quota to make it appear they are paying me minimum wage. If piecework comes out to less than minimum wage—I’m fired.”

Slowness is not Mama’s only problem. Another problem happens to her when she’s laid off for more than a couple of weeks and then returns to work.

It’s midday, a summer day, and I’m sitting on the front porch. I see Mama coming home for lunch. She runs up the front steps.

“Franchito, quick, open the door,” she says. “I’m going to vomit.” Ashen, her face hangs on a barf. She darts a straight shot to the bathroom.

“I’ll make telo,” Anna says to her from the kitchen.

I hear Mama vomiting, and my grandmother makes a Spanish herb Latinos call telo, a cure-all. I run into the bathroom and lift Ma’s head and aim it into the toilet bowl. Her eyes bulge with explosive force. Her face is crimson, and drenched in sweat. I hang on to her head, stabilizing it, keeping it on target.

I rip toilet paper off the roll and hand it to her. She grabs it and heaves again and again. Repulsed, I watch yellow liquid gush out of her nose. Angry gastric juices reek acrid, and the strong smell of tobacco emanates from her hair, and a fine spray of barf hits my bare feet.

“Is there anything I can get you, Ma?”

“No, need to lie down.”

She leans on me, and I help her to her bed. She burps, passes gas all at once, and says, “Perdona.”

I pardon her. What else can I do? Her eyes glaze, and I yell for my grandmother. Nonna holds ammonia salts under her nose, Mama’s head yanks away from the ammonia, her eyes open. She sees I’m perturbed. She smiles,

doesn’t eat lunch, lies in the bed a while, and returns to the factory. After two to three days the symptoms abate, and all is back to normal. Mama is reacclimated to nicotine.

Cigarmakers seldom talk about acute nicotine poisoning. None of the women smoke, and it’s accepted as a mere inconvenience.

At the kitchen table Mama says, “Filippo, I can’t eat.”

Papa looks up from his bowl of minestra.

“I just can’t. My mouth hurts,” she says.

“I think they got to come out, Mary,” he says.

Nubbins have replaced her front teeth, protruding just above her gum line.

“Mama, do other cigarmakers chew capa, too?” I say.

“I never did,” Papa interjects.

“It’s a bad habit I picked up trying to make heads perfect.”

“Mary, you got to stop doing it.” 

“Easy to say, but it’s tough to make heads without working them with your mouth.”

“Mary, you got to use the chavetta. It’s sharper than your teeth.”

“When tourists come to watch us work, the capotasso warns us not to put cigars in our mouths. I can’t roll a good one until they leave.”

Mama chews on one side of her mouth. “Factory owners don’t want tourists to see we get saliva on cigars. Rich people are strange that way, Franche.”

“But I thought you use spit to stick wrappers?” I say.

“No, no, we use a special gum. The Health Department is threatening to inspect cigar factories. Say there’s too much TB among cigarmakers.”

“That’s crazy, Mary. It’s not a restaurant. Maybe you’ll have to get a chest x-ray like restaurant workers?” Papa laughs, but Mama doesn’t see his humor.

“They’re thinking about it,” she says.

It’s pain that drags cigarmakers and their families to dentists, severe pain, and it’s usually for extractions. Mama’s front uppers and lowers are replaced with prosthetics. She continues to tear at leaves with her new teeth. She never looks like Mama again, but I say to her, “Sonno naturale, so natural, Mama, so natural.”

I’m sure I commit a venial sin, but in this case, it would be a mortal sin not to lie.

From my porch, I watch cigarmakers trek to factories and back. Lunch and evenings they saunter by. Fast bunch-makers and rollers lead the parade. Slow ones roll out of factories last. Women shade themselves with parasols, and men wear straw hats with stiff, serrated brims, pagliettas. Women and men seldom mix. Women walk side by side and men with men, and solitary workers fix their eyes on sidewalks.

All are creatures of habit, people with monogrammed walks. They appear and disappear predictably each day, sequenced, as if released from a starting gate. When I enter puberty some women change.

My cousin and I sit on the porch. I’m flipping a baseball.

“Frank, here she comes,” he says.

“La Señorita?”

“Yeah, man, ain’t she something?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Look at that low cut. Hot stuff, man, hot stuff.”

“Quick, let’s go play catch on the sidewalk,” I say.

“Yeah, look at those hips, man.” He watches them swing back and forth like a pendulum.

We notice adult women, real women, see them in a different light of day, different shades, different from immature school girls. We never find out La Señorita’s name, but she’s a Spanish woman, all right, perhaps Cuban, and she walks to and from the factory like clockwork. We christen her La Señorita because of her Spanish style. She sets a new standard. An ardent reference point of sensual attraction brings out feelings we didn’t know existed. Perhaps, it is then we learn the difference between pretty and attractive. Attraction turns out to be a woman’s worth, what counts. Her hips wave at my hormones from across the street. She’s in her thirties, and that’s old to pubertal boys, real old, but she arouses my cousin and me in ways only she can.

She carries a brightly colored parasol and shifts it from shoulder to shoulder, contrasting jet-black hair. She shifts it casually, unintentionally provocative, inadvertently spinning it, cradling it on a bare succulent shoulder. An embroidered, white blouse hangs low, filled to the brim, and sometimes,

it sits cockeyed, exposing one voluptuous shoulder more than the other. She’s typical of our conceptual image of a Spanish señorita. All she needs is a rose in her hair, so I imagine one there. She walks on the opposite side of the street. I throw the ball at her feet. It bounces off the sidewalk into the street gutter, and I run up, bend over and reach for it, looking up gawking, gaze into her eyes, and she into mine.

“Ola, señora.” She’s surprised at my presumptuous Spanish hello.

“Excuse me, perdona señora, pero, I pick up la pelota, perdona. My cousin threw the ball wild.”

“Es o right, Nino. Es nada.” She interrupts motorized hips and smiles, says it’s okay, and I smile.

She’s more beautiful up close than I imagined. She’s blessed with full lips, dark Spanish eyes and a subdued smile. She never walks on my side of the street letting me know she’s not interested in thirteen year olds, yet she continues swinging hips as our eyes follow her out of sight.

“How does she look up close?” my cousin says.

“Great.”

“What did you say?”

“I said she was a most attractive señora.”

“Wow. You said that?”

“Yep.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Naw, she said something. I saw her lips move.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah. Come on, don’t hog it all to yourself. Tell me.”

“She just said I was a handsome young man.”

“No shit.”

“Honest.”

Women grow old in front of my eyes. Most keep walking long after husbands die, and there is no infusion of new blood into the industry. No one takes up cigar making anymore, no one, so back and forth cigarmakers roll in front of my eyes, walking past my front porch. Some wave and watch me grow up. Widows dress in doleful black down to their shoes, contrasting pale, cosmetics-free faces, but those with husbands brandish lipstick-smeared smiles. I just know they’re still making it with husbands in dingy bedrooms. In the nearness of tabaquero huts, occasionally, I hear one moan, and I smile.

Women of the barrio reflect their heritage. Latin women let loose early; soon after a pregnancy or two, they balloon. They wrap their big hips and breasts in print dresses, but in ensuing years, I see matronly forms abandon the garishness of youth, abandon bright floral prints that once draped young buttocks. In time, breasts sag, too, and the back and forth rhythm creates the repetitive beat of a death march. Sturdy and stout, they float by day after day like vintage battleships of the Spanish Armada. And I, well, I wave at them and smell gardenia perfume. Men age, too, but they smell the scent and follow it, and like fireflies, they switch on. Perfume acts like the aphrodisiac Spanish fly. Tired hormones rejuvenate Italian men, too, as they walk in the wake of sashaying hips. Covertly they interject a skip in their shuffle, a Sicilian shuffle, I’m told. It is one Cubans can’t initiate or imitate. In time, husbands die, and black dresses dominate the scene, and colors fade, fade more under sweaty armpits.

Frank Urso, the son of Sicilian cigarmakers in Ybor City, left the barrio at age 23 for medical school. He is a pathologist and former professor of Pathology. His writings have been published in the Tampa Tribune and literary magazines.

"Tabaquera" by Frank Urso appears in Volume 1, Issue 1 of Cigar City Magazine.

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