Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

LaAurora too came to an end. And yet the readings were not forgotten. As early as 1869 they were
resurrected, on American soil, by the workers themselves.
The earliest known sketch of a lector, in the Practical Magazine, New York, 1873. (photo credit 8.1)
The Ten Years War of Independence began on October 10, 1868, when a Cuban landowner, Carlos Manuel
de Céspedes, and two hundred poorly armed men took over the city of Santiago and proclaimed the
country’s independence from Spain. By the end of the month, after Céspedes had offered to free all slaves
joining the revolution, his army had recruited twelve thousand volunteers; in April of the following year,
Céspedes was elected president of the new revolutionary government. But Spain held strong. Four years
later Céspedes was deposed in absentia by a Cuban tribunal, and in March 1874 he was trapped and shot
by Spanish soldiers. In the meantime, anxious to disrupt Spain’s restrictive trade measures, the U.S.
government had loudly supported the revolutionaries, and New York, New Orleans and Key West had
opened their ports to thousands of fleeing Cubans. As a result, Key West was transformed in a few years
from a small fishing village into a major cigar-producing community, the new Havana-cigar capital of the
world.
The workers who immigrated to the United States took with them, among other things, the institution of
the lector: an illustration in the American Practical Magazine of 1873 shows one such lector, wearing
glasses and a large-brimmed hat, sitting with legs crossed and a book in his hands while a row of workers
(all male) in waistcoats and shirtsleeves go about their cigar-rolling with what appears to be rapt
attention.
“El lector” by Mario Sánchez. (photo credit 8.2)
The material for these readings, agreed upon in advance by the workers (who, as in the days of El Fígaro,
paid the lector out of their own earnings), ranged from political tracts and histories to novels and
collections of poetry both modern and classical. They had their favourites: Alexandre Dumas’s The Count
of Monte Cristo, for instance, became such a popular choice that a group of workers wrote to the author
shortly before his death in 1870, asking him to lend the name of his hero to one of their cigars. Dumas
consented.
According to Mario Sánchez, a Key West painter who in 1991 could still recall lectores reading to the
cigar-rollers in the late twenties, the readings took place in concentrated silence, and comments or
questions were not allowed until the session was over. “My father,” Sánchez reminisced, “was the reader
in the Eduardo Hidalgo Gato cigar factory in the early 1900s until the 1920s. In the mornings, he read the
news which he translated from the local newspapers. He read international news directly from Cuban
newspapers brought daily by boat from Havana. From noon until three in the afternoons, he read from a
novel. He was expected to interpret the characters by imitating their voices, like an actor.” Workers who
had spent several years at the shops were able to quote from memory long passages of poetry and even
prose. Sánchez mentioned one man who was able to remember the entire Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Being read to, as the cigar workers found out, allowed them to overlay the mechanical, mind-numbing
activity of rolling the dark scented tobacco leaves with adventures to follow, ideas to consider, reflections
to make theirs. We don’t know whether, in the long workshop hours, they regretted that the rest of their

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body was excluded from the reading ritual; we don’t know if the fingers of those who could read longed
for a page to turn, a line to follow; we don’t know if those who had never learned to read were prompted
to do so.
One night a few months before his death circa 547 — some thirteen centuries before the Cuban lectors —
Saint Benedict of Nursia had a vision. As he was praying by his open window, looking out into the
darkness, “the whole world appeared to be gathered into one sunbeam and thus brought before his eyes”.
In that vision, the old man must have seen, with tears in his eyes, “that secret and conjectural object
whose name men have seized upon but that no man has ever beheld: the inconceivable universe”.
An eleventh-century manuscript illumination showing Saint Benedict offering his Rules to an abbot.
(photo credit 8.3)
Benedict had renounced the world at the age of fourteen and relinquished the fortunes and titles of his
wealthy Roman family. Around 529 he had founded a monastery on Monte Cassino — a craggy hill
towering fifteen hundred feet over an ancient pagan shrine halfway between Rome and Naples — and
composed a series of rules for his friars in which the authority of a code of laws replaced the absolute will
of the monastery’s superior. Perhaps because he sought in the Scriptures the all-encompassing vision that
would be granted to him years later, or perhaps because he believed, like Sir Thomas Browne, that God
offered us the world under two guises, as nature and as a book, Benedict decreed that reading would be
an essential part of the monastery’s daily life. Article 38 of his Rule laid out the procedure:
At the meal time of the brothers, there should always be reading; no one may dare to take up the book at
random and begin to read there; but he who is about to read for the whole week shall begin his duties on
Sunday. And, entering upon his office after Mass and Communion, he shall ask all to pray for him, that
God may avert from him the spirit of elation. And this verse shall be said in the oratory three times by all,
he however beginning it: “O Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise.” And
thus, having received the benediction, he shall enter upon his duties as reader. And there shall be the
greatest silence at table, so that no whispering or any voice save the reader’s may be heard. And
whatever is needed, in the way of food, the brethren should pass to each other in turn, so that no one
need ask for anything.
As in the Cuban factories, the book to be read was not chosen at random; but unlike the factories, where
the titles were chosen by consensus, in the cloister the choice was made by the community’s authorities.
For the Cuban workers, the books could become (many times did become) the intimate possession of each
listener; but for the disciples of Saint Benedict, elation, personal pleasure and pride were to be avoided,
since the joy of the text was to be communal, not individual. The prayer to God, asking Him to open the
reader’s lips, placed the act of reading in the hands of the Almighty. For Saint Benedict the text — the
Word of God — was beyond personal taste, if not beyond understanding. The text was immutable and the
author (or Author) the definitive authority. Finally, the silence at table, the audience’s lack of response,
was necessary not only to ensure concentration but also to preclude any semblance of private
commentary on the sacred books.
Later, in the Cistercian monasteries founded throughout Europe from the early twelfth century onwards,
the Rule of Saint Benedict was used to ensure an orderly flow of monastic life in which personal agonies
and desires were submitted to communal needs. Violations of the rules were punished with flagellation,
and the offenders were separated from the fold, isolated from their brothers. Solitude and privacy were
considered punishments; secrets were common knowledge; individual pursuits of any kind, intellectual or
otherwise, were strongly discouraged; discipline was the reward of those who lived well within the
community. In ordinary life, the Cistercian monks were never alone. At meals, their spirits were distracted
from the pleasures of the flesh and joined in the holy word by Saint Benedict’s prescribed reading.
Coming together to be read to also became a necessary and common practice in the lay world of the
Middle Ages. Up to the invention of printing, literacy was not widespread and books remained the
property of the wealthy, the privilege of a small handful of readers. While some of these fortunate lords
occasionally lent their books, they did so to a limited number of people within their own class or family.
People who wished to acquaint themselves with a certain book or author often had a better chance of
hearing the text recited or read out loud than of holding the precious volume in their own hands.
There were different ways to hear a text. Beginning in the eleventh century, throughout the kingdoms of
Europe, travelling joglars would recite or sing their own verses or those composed by their master
troubadours, which the joglars would have stored in their prodigious memories. These joglars were public
entertainers who performed at fairs and market-places, as well as before the courts. They were mostly of
lowly birth and were usually denied both the protection of the law and the sacraments of the Church.

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Troubadours, such as Guillaume of Aquitaine, grandfather of Eleanor, and Bertran de Born, Lord of
Hautefort, were of noble birth and wrote formal songs in praise of their unreachable love. Of the hundred
or so troubadours known by name from the early twelfth to the early thirteenth century, when the fashion
flourished, some twenty were women. It seems that, in general, the joglars were more popular than the
troubadours, so that highbrow artists such as Peter Pictor complained that “some of the high ecclesiasts
would rather listen to the fatuous verses of a joglar than to the well-composed stanzas of a serious Latin
poet” — meaning himself.
Being read to from a book was a somewhat different experience. A joglar’s recital had all the obvious
characteristics of a performance, and its success or failure largely depended upon the performer’s skill at
varying expressions, since the subject-matter was rather predictable. While a public reading also
depended on the reader’s ability to “perform”, it laid the stress on the text rather than on the reader. The
audience at a recital would watch a joglar perform the songs of a specific troubadour such as the
celebrated Sordello; the audience at a public reading could listen to the anonymous History of Reynard
the Fox read by any literate member of the household.
In the courts, and sometimes also in humbler houses, books were read aloud to family and friends for
instruction as well as for entertainment. Being read to at dinner was not intended to distract from the joys
of the palate; on the contrary, it was meant to enhance them with imaginative entertainment, a practice
carried over from the days of the Roman empire. Pliny the Younger mentioned in one of his letters that,
when eating with his wife or a few friends, he liked to have an amusing book read out loud to him. In the
early fourteenth century the Countess Mahaut of Artois travelled with her library packed into large
leather bags, and in the evenings she had a lady-in-waiting read from them, whether philosophical works
or entertaining accounts of foreign lands such as the Travels of Marco Polo. Literate parents read to their
children. In 1399 the Tuscan notary Ser Lapo Mazzei wrote to a friend, the merchant Francesco di Marco
Datini, asking him for the loan of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis to read aloud to his sons. “The boys
would take delight in it on winter evenings,” he explained, “for it is, as you know, very easy reading.” In
Montaillou, in the early fourteenth century, Pierre Clergue, the village priest, read out loud on different
occasions from a so-called Book of the Faith of the Heretics, to those sitting around the fire in people’s
homes; in the village of Ax-les-Thermes, at about the same time, the peasant Guillaume Andorran was
discovered reading a heretic Gospel to his mother and tried by the Inquisition.
The fifteenth-century Évangiles des quenouilles (Gospels of the Distaffs) shows how fluid these informal
readings could be. The narrator, an old learned man, “one night after supper, during the long winter
nights between Christmas and Candlemas”, visits the house of an elderly lady, where several of the
neighbourhood women often gather “to spin and talk about many happy and minor things”. The women,
remarking that the men of their time “incessantly write defamatory lampoons and infectious books
against the honour of the female sex,” ask the narrator to attend their meetings — a sort of reading group