Chapter 6, Ori, Liberacion

Tiny Clipping of Ori's byline photograph
Marina liked this man Ori running the Liberacion editorial meeting. He had no pretense at all except maybe that one, to have no airs. He wore baggy blue jeans rolled up at the cuff, a baggy plaid flannel shirt, and an enormous wool sweater over everything, a man who did not want his body seen. He had a curly beard and tight curled jet black hair. This was a quick and dirty meeting to introduce the new workers to the procedures for putting the paper to bed. Sandra, whom Marina had just met, was explaining how to strip in corrections. “That's something I'm only going to really learn when I do it,” Marina said. When he listened to Marina Ori turned to face her and looked with focused attention. Could it be her thoughts mattered?
Just as the meeting was breaking up Rodolfo, the one who had been making profound pronouncements from the tarima at City Center park, burst into the room in a long coat and sunglasses although it was past midnight. He waved a manuscript. Ori rolled his eyes. “We just reran one of your old columns. We can't get this one typeset at this fucking hour.” Rodolfo threw down the papers. “Eso no puede ser.” He looked around the room. “Anybody good at typing?” Ori said, “There's more to typesetting than typing,” and went for the papers. Marina got to them first. She picked up the papers from the floor. “Is this the typesetting machine?”
“If you break it you're dead,” Sandra said.
Ori walked Marina over to the huge machine and turned it on. “The keyboard is almost like a typewriter. “All you do is type and call me over when you're done. I'll show you how to format and print.” He turned away, glanced at Rodolfo, and muttered so he could hear him, “Prima Donna asshole.” Rodolfo caught his eye and they all laughed.
Rodolfo's writing was as eloquent as his speech. As she typed she realized it was the speech...
“We are a people who refuse to be defeated. Grito Day belongs to all of us, it is a time to rekindle our fighting spirit, to remember who we are. The Empire, this City, has never managed to make us forget our history. We have never forgotten our true heritage. Islanders who live in the City and Islanders in the Island are one nation. Struggle is our nation, Grito Day is our national day, and the Grito is our manifesto, our constitution, our program.”
She loved these words, these thoughts, words that could save your life, her life. She felt an enormous urge to have her mind meld with Rodolfo's. He strode to her and looked over her shoulder.
“You're the translator Danny sent our way? Can you translate this?”
He looked over her shoulder as she finished typing the original and formatting it the way Ori taught her to do. As the long strips of type emerged from the machine she began to put the speech into English. Rodolfo watched and nodded. “Poetry,” he whispered. “You must be a poet.”
Marina turned to face him and saw a predatory flicker in his eyes that the sunglasses couldn't hide.
She walked away, to the light table where Sandra was ready to show her how to wax and paste up the copy. The layout designs were pinned to a bulletin board.
“Who did these?”
Sandra pointed to Ori who was pasting up the front page at the far end of the table. “He spends hours every Thursday doing the designs.”
A young boy ran into the room followed by a pair of identical twins and a young couple. The boy sat on a rolling chair, spun it a few times and rolled it to a table by the window, his table. The twins joined him. The first boy handed them old fliers from a stack on the table. He took a mug full of crayons and markers and handed a few to each boy.
Sandra ran to his side and kissed him. “Sin saludar!” He looked at her and grinned. “Ay Mami. We've got work to do.” The young couple spoke at once. “Maceo, Maceo.” Sandra hugged first the young woman and then the boy. “Dejalo. I like that he's independent.”
The young woman turned out to be another translator, Laura, and her companero, Ruiz. They came every Thursday after work to help on layout. On Thursdays Laura's mother picked up Maceo in school and took him home with her where he played with Fidel and Raul until Laura and Ruiz came home from work and brought the boys with them to the layout session. The couple looked barely old enough to have children Maceo's age.
Now the atmosphere turned raucous and the jokes flew. Ruiz, who didn't like his first name Rigoberto, was a storyteller. There was a running joke off one of his stories Marina didn't get to hear about his grandmother's cilantrillo patch that involved Ruiz yelling out whenever things got too quiet, “Fuera del cilantrillo.” One day, another day, Marina would ask him for the story.
The children had fallen asleep on a long couch by the wall. Just after four in the morning they were at last ready for the terminaciones, stripping in the dates at the bottom of each page; proofreading one last time. Marina found several errors for which they did not have typeset corrections. Sandra pointed her to a stack of boxes by Maceo's table. “Old boards. You'll have to cannibalize them for words and letters and strip them in as best you can.”
After a half hour of painstakingly stripping sometimes a whole word if she was lucky, or syllables, but often making a word up letter by letter, she realized she had not thought of Jimmy once all night long. She had forgotten to care that he wasn't speaking to her.
Sandra gave a last look at each board and called Ori over. He had gone off to his desk and was working on the next edition's story list for tomorrow's editorial meeting. He studied each board carefully before pronouncing the paper done.
On their way home Sandra with Maceo, and Laura and Ruiz and their twins delivered left together in Ruiz' car (they were neighbors) to deliver the paper to the printer on their way home. Marina and Ori walked out together. They discovered they lived not far from each other, about ten blocks from the offices of Verdad and the Partido.
They walked in silence for a few blocks, looking at the light beginning to dawn over the tall buildings, alone and safe on the street.
“How beautiful the world looks.” Marina turned to face Ori and again he looked at her with that utter attention that made her feel pleased and proud of her own thoughts. He nodded. “There's nothing like the pleasure of being done with good work.”
She thought about what he said. “You're right, that's it. It's a different kind of exhaustion.”
Just then they were passing a 24 hour diner and they looked at each other. They didn't need to speak to decide together to go in and have breakfast.