Published: February 01. 2010 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

We join the story of Amadeo Terra at its end. Confined to a hospital bed or strapped to a chair, he’s lost his body to a stroke. His wife is dead, his lover long ago abandoned him, his two surviving sons are willing to split the bill for his hospital but haven’t visited in years. And there isn’t much to visit; Amadeo is diapered and fed baby food from jars by a recalcitrant, heavy-thighed nurse, his sole communication blinking, which is often ignored. But his mind is very much alive, and its graceful, articulate loops form the body of “The Cigar Roller,” by Pablo Medina.

In its way, this is the story of a man discovering himself, uncovering himself, because he has no other choice. In life, Amadeo was the sort of man who lived by his instincts, by his appetites, which were of the red meat/bordello stripe. He worked his way up the hierarchy in the cigar factories, first in Cuba and then in Tampa, starting as a kid with a broom and ascending to roller; an artist, really, responsible for the pleasure of others and not without his ego. Cigar rollers, he thinks, must have delicacy and strength, a clear mind and passion, must be able to roll hundreds of cigars precisely the same shape, size and weight, and then “you give it up, you let the smoker smoke.”

And in his hospital bed, he remembers the chew of smoke in his mouth, the pleasures of coffee, of women. Memory is his only movement left. “His memory is his God. As long as he has it he has his life, lived and relived as often as he wants.” We dip back into his life organically rather than chronologically. Medina is crafty like a poet in his associations and linkages, in the way reality and memory and fantasy twine and intertwine. Amadeo thinks, “Something is happening inside his body he doesn’t like, groups of people gathering on street corners, in parks, upset at some political unfairness, a stolen election, a breakdown of the system.” His stomach is literally upset, but too, his mind casts back to the unrest in Havana that brought him and his young family to Tampa to start their lives anew.

But not all Amadeo remembers he wants to relive, and how do you escape a mind that is your only company? When faced with the details surrounding the death of his youngest son, Amadeo begins counting his blinks, first 100, then 1,000, again finding that place where the motion and its repetition become more than the sum of their parts, a kind of desperate ecstasy in and of itself.

There is something of the philosophical parlor trick to this book. The question Medina always seems to be exploring: how little living does life require? How little action makes a story? Amadeo never rises from his bed, never rights his wrongs, but in the vast landscape of his mind, he is a hero, in the flawed, active, classic sense of the word.

Pablo Medina is the author of two other novels, a memoir and several books of poetry, including a bilingual edition of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Poet in New York.”