The swarthy Esteban Lavandero was, as always, at Tabio's side, his fierce Moorish face twisted with pain and love. He stood behind the girl secretary, one black hairy hand resting on the carved headboard of the ancient bed, his ears cocked for every word which came from Tabio's pale lips.
Tabio's wife and two doctors in white coats stood on the other side of the bed. The prim white collar of her dark dress matched the streaks of white in her long black hair. Her luminous mestiza's eyes, swollen from quiet weeping, were now bright and clear, and when Anibal Tabio looked to his wife after turning a particularly telling phrase in his speech her generous lips parted and she smiled at him the way she had smiled to reward his earliest writings three decades ago.
"The great North American martyr to freedom, Don Abraham Lincoln, a man of great dignity whose humor was the humor of the people from whose loins he sprang, was a man who many years ago described such neutrality. Lincoln was not a neutral in the struggle between slavery and freedom. And when some fool insisted that most Americans were neutral in this struggle, Lincoln replied with the anecdote of the American woman who went for a walk in the woods and found her husband fighting with a wild bear. Being a neutral, this woman stood by and shouted, 'Bravo, Husband. Bravo, Bear.'
"And then, Lincoln said ..."
"Don Anibal," one of the doctors said, gently, "I must implore you ..." The restraining hand of Tabio's wife made him stop.
"It is no use, doctor," Tabio smiled. "At a time like this, if a President can speak at all, he must speak to his people. Tonight you will type my speech, and tomorrow you can bring the microphone right into this room, and right from my bed I shall talk to the people. If I am to die in any event, it will not matter much. And if I am to live, doctor, the speech will not kill me."
Simon, who was standing next to Hall in the doorway, whispered that Tabio's eyes were too weak to distinguish them at that distance. They started to walk toward the bed on their toes, and Hall, glancing at Tabio sitting up in the old bed in a white hospital gown surrounded by the burly Lavandero and his wife and son, was suddenly struck by the similarity of the scene which was before him and the Doré engraving of the death of Don Quixote. It was all there, even to the faithful Sancho Panza figure of Lavandero, and at that moment Hall knew why Spanish savants had for hundreds of years written scores of books on the true significance of Cervantes' classic. Here were the two great impulses of the Hispanic world, the fragile, gentle, trusting dreamer of great new horizons and at his side the broad-backed practical man of earth who threw his strength into the effort of implementing the dreams and making them the new realities. Here was the visionary Juarez and the young soldier Porfirio Diaz, when the warrior was still a man untainted by his own betrayal of a people's dream. Here was the romantic poet José Marti and one of his durable guerrilla generals, Maximo Gomez or Antonio Maceo, whose white and black skins, blended, would have yielded a skin the color of Lavandero's. (Was it any wonder, then, Hall thought in those fleeting seconds before Tabio recognized him, that Tabio as a young exile went to Cuba to write a biography of Marti while his faithful fellow-exile spent the same months in Havana writing an equally good study of Maceo?)
At that moment Tabio saw Hall. "Viejo!" he said, happily. "Mateo Hall, a good friend and thank God never a neutral. Señorita, give him your stool. Come, sit down, Mateo."
Hall took his hand, tenderly, for fear of hurting him. It was a thin hand, bony and fleshless; cold, as though Death had already touched it.
"Viejo," Tabio said. He might have been genially scolding a favorite child. "Say something, old friend, and don't sit there staring at me as if I were already a corpse. Tell me about yourself, Mateo. We've come a long way since Geneva and Madrid and the day they fished you out of the ocean, eh?"