Woman of Light (44)
—
The radio station was down a set of crunched granite stairs capped in metal, through a dim hallway, past a bathroom with the door open to the toilet, and in an oblong room with a smaller room of glass built into a corner. As they stepped forward, Luz realized a man was sitting inside the glass room, a single lamp beside him on a wide green desk with an enormous radio with many nobs and wires and lights. The man wore headphones over his frizzy hair. He was seated cross-legged, calmly grasping a chrome microphone in his left hand. From where Luz stood, it almost looked as though the man was arching a bow, sending arrows into the air. It was only upon hearing him that Luz realized it was Leon Jacob, a man whose voice she’d heard a hundred times but whose face she’d never seen.
The papers are calling it a hero snake. You hear me right, ladies and gentlemen. The snake is not a sandwich but a Hercules, our very own FDR in a reptile no less. And for those citizens of Denver who say “But where are our Baby Face Nelsons and John Dillingers and pretty Bonnies and poor Clydes?” Well we have ’em in the fallen of this story. An unlucky bank robber with an unremarkable name, stopped in the act by a vigilante rattlesnake. Someone come get your pet.
David knocked on the glass. Leon ignored him for several seconds until David fished from his briefcase a piece of paper, which he held to the glass and knocked once more. Leon looked, this time removing his headphones. He stood and opened the door.
“Don’t tease me,” he said. “Thought she was afraid to read it on the air.”
“She is, but remember Celia said we could always get someone else.” David waved to Luz. “Now we have someone else.”
Leon gazed at her. “Comrade?”
David said, “My new secretary, Luz.”
“Lightbringer,” said Leon. “How do you do?”
Luz shook his hand. He was shorter than she had expected, and when she glanced down Luz realized that Leon had only one leg, the other ending below the knee, his dark green trousers tied in a knot. Everyone knew Leon had been a radioman in the war. He was blasted with machine-gun fire emerging from the trenches. “Injustice is suffering,” Leon sometimes said on the radio, and Luz figured he knew a lot about that.
“When do you want to do it?” he asked David.
“Now, on the three o’clock. Encourage people to show up to the next protest, outside the capitol.”
Leon clicked his tongue. He removed his circular glasses from his face and blew on them before wiping the lenses on his woolen shirt. “All right,” he said. “That might work.” He returned to the glass room, letting Luz and David know he’d signal them when he was ready for her.
Luz took a seat beside David in the larger room on an old sofa with several red wine stains. The subterranean windows were small squares close to the ceiling, a slice of afternoon light falling into the basement. Lizette and Alfonso sometimes made fun of Leon, said he was an idealist, out of touch with reality, but a lot of people from a lot of different neighborhoods had started listening. To people like Leon, a new world was possible, a city where the poor weren’t evicted or made to line up for hours for cold soup, where women weren’t forced to sell their bodies for cow’s milk and men weren’t killed on factory floors. Maybe, in some ways, Luz agreed with people like Leon. Still, she was nervous to read the note on the radio, but David assured her they wouldn’t use her name or mention anything about her at all.
“Like borrowing,” he said. “We are borrowing your voice to help people.”
Luz nodded, gripping the statement from Celia in her hands, both the original and the version she had typed in English.
“Think of him like Diego,” said David.
Leon waved from inside the glass room, signaling for Luz. David patted the top of her hand before Luz entered the chilly space. Leon was perched beside the radio knobs, lights glistening over his glasses. He showed Luz how to flip on the mic, turn down the sound in her headphones, where she should speak and how loudly. Leon examined the document, turned it over from Spanish to English, reading through each side.
“After you finish reading the statement in English,” he said, “I’ll let listeners know where to march tomorrow, and when I’m done I’ll bring you back on to read the note again, but this time in Spanish. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” said Luz. “I can, but I think I’ll need some practice.”
“Practice on the air,” said Leon with a smile, and handed her a glass of water. “Don’t drink it when we go live—it’ll pick up your gulps.”
Luz grimaced and looked over the note, silently moving her lips as she practiced reading aloud. Leon flipped on the radio receiver. A red light blinked in the booth. Leon announced that he had a very important message, a statement read by an individual like themselves, a girl of their background, from a neighborhood just like theirs. He gazed at Luz and with his index finger motioned for her to go.
Luz inhaled, the microphone catching hints of fear before she steadied herself, dashing into speech. As she read, the statement seemed to slip away from the page, Celia’s words pushing into the air and forming a blanket of weight. Luz imagined her voice and Celia’s riding together through the wind, landing in living rooms and workstations, Estevan’s life entering the minds of all who listened. Luz read and spoke and thought of Diego in the fields, his body arched over crops, his face badly scarred. How close had he been to being murdered like Estevan? How close was Luz to having no men left in her family at all?