She said yes though she meant perhaps; wedding vows had long ceased to signal escape. She said yes because she had nothing left, and a learned man seemed as hopeful a prospect as she could conceive. And she sensed that he, too, sought a conciliation through marriage. In María Isabel, Antonio had found a way to flee without lusting after other shores, had found a reason to feign a braver face each day. She knew and, despite the weight of it, accepted her role as liberator of a frightened man. María Isabel thought it had always been women who wove the future out of the scraps, always the characters, never the authors. She knew a woman could learn to resent this post, but she would instead find a hundred books to read.

She moved in with Antonio’s mother, a widow, and his unmarried sister. They were kind to María Isabel, but she knew they couldn’t fathom why she continued to work. When she came home each afternoon to her mother-in-law rocking on the porch with a fan in her hand, María Isabel avoided her stare.

But how could she explain that the workshop had become deliverance? That mending her husband’s chemise or pounding boiled plantains in a mortar without words, all the words from the workshop, would beat her mind to submission?

She cried for her mother, for her father, for her own lonely self as Antonio slept. She reached for him and wondered if the temporary relief of warm hands to grasp her own, trembling, was love. And she whispered the words often for comfort: Weakness. No, we are force. Now, they were her words.

The day the readings stopped was a sunny one, a bright one. Where she had struggled to see the leaves before her, that day a faint veil of light floated over each desk. The air was so thick, so humid, María Isabel barely needed to moisten her leaves.

She’d heard the mambises wore thin, that dreams of taking La Habana faded. She’d heard of families disappeared, of martyred fighters, of generals exiled throughout North America. Peace was coming, she could feel it, though peace meant surrender, slavery, so many dead for nothing.

Antonio was reading from the permitted sections of La Aurora. Its editors grew more abstruse each issue—they never mentioned freedom or uprising or war. But they spoke of self-determination. They spoke of culture as a means of liberation. They criticized slave owners and urged abolition. They told the workers to hold on.