The Shadow of the Shadow Read Online Free PDF

cover for him by carrying more than their
share of the work and leaving the easiest jobs for him, but it was no
easy thing to avoid Maganda's "all-seeing" eyes. The foreman made
his way between the looms, repeating obsessively:
    "I'm all-seeing. Nothing escapes me. Maybe you think you can
fool the boss man, and maybe sometimes you can, but you can't
fool me, you lazy sons of bitches. I'm all-seeing."
    Tomas Wong liked the noise inside the factory, the thick
humidity of the air, the smell of the dyes. As a carpenter, he wasn't
tied down to a machine but could move freely around the big
building, setting a wedge, building a bench-or, like right now,
making shipping crates that would travel around the world in the
hold of some ship.
    "Come on, Chinaboy, take it easy, will you? Look at your hand.
Let me cover for you," said Martin, taking the heavy hammer from
Tomas and driving in the big double-headed nails.
    A ship, a ship roaming the high seas, never stopping... except
every now and then to fish for a few words, always in a different
tongue, always with a different meaning.
    "Nostalgia,"he thought to himself. "Too damn much nostalgia.
Too many memories. You can't live on nostalgia and secondhand
news," and instead he tried to think of a way to get back at Maganda
the foreman.
    He'd had it on his mind since a week ago when, at the end of
the day, the management had tried to strip-search him, Martin and Indalecio, the three carpenters at the Magnolia Textile Mill in
Contreras-supposedly because tools had been disappearing from
the factory shop. And, of course, they'd refused to go along and
there'd been a ruckus at the factory gate. They got their way in the
end, and ever since the "all-seeing" Maganda had been trying to
get even.

    The Chinaman's swollen hand was as good a pretext as any,
and Maganda spent the whole day egging the Chinaman ontightening the screws. The "All-seeing" got a special pleasure out
of picking a fight with the workers, humiliating them one by one.
He was the kind of man who needed constant affirmation of his
own existence, his power. In those turbulent years in the textile
industry, he found his place as the perfect battering ram on behalf
of an owner class locked in a fierce and violent confrontation with
the unions.
    The Chinaman left his two companions hammering away
at the crates and walked over toward the warehouse to see if the
wood had come in for the repair of two old broken-down looms.
    At the warehouse door he ran into Cipriano, mill mechanic
and the union's general secretary.
    "What's up, Tomas? How've the bourgeois dogs been treating
you lately? I noticed Maganda's been giving it to you all morning
long."
    "I sclewed up my hand," said the Chinaman, as if that explained everything.
    "Been rearranging faces again, eh?"
    The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders. He wasn't much of
a talker. He let other people tell his stories for him. It seemed
as though his friends were always hearing about his adventures
secondhand, if at all, from people who'd known him in other
places. At other times.
    "Leave it to Tomas to be like one of those inscrutable
Orientals," thought Cipriano, quoting the reporters from El
Universal, which at that time was leading a massive campaign against the tongs, Chinese gangs that controlled the clandestine
gambling houses and opium dens on Dolores Street.

    "Don't forget about the meeting tonight," he said. "We're
going to talk about the dance and solidarity action with the strike
at the Magdalena mill."
    The Chinaman nodded and walked on without any hurry. The
factory was divided into three giant bays and a pair of warehouses,
all arranged around a large flagstoned patio in front of the offices.
The shop space, poorly illuminated through small windows high
up on the walls, enclosed 350 workers and 10 foremen. According
to custom, the factory's French administrators never set foot
inside while the mill was in operation. They only