The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  —

  The letter, written in Cuban, read,

  Dear Ulises Encarnación, descendant of the island’s east, my estranged son, and author of the article The Present State of Our Seeds This Season,

  They used to grow tobacco in the hills south of Buey Arriba, but the land is now a national forest and closed to agriculture. Still, Europeans come—Western Europeans mostly—because they think some plants remained untouched in the forest, growing in the shade, forgotten to all except the adventurous. There is a myth that the hills just south harbor the secret tobacco of Cuba that never leaves the island and that it is the purest and most delightful of any leaf ever grown. The Germans and the Dutch come most frequently, and it was a German carrying in his pocket a glossy magazine that bore your article. It was beautifully written, and I wonder if our Sundays at church—Do you remember that rickety packinghouse? It remains to this day—had some part in the fluidity of your language. Gospels rarely sound so cohesive, but your report on the recent world crop was enchanting. Should I take some pride in your talents for farming? I’ve been eating tomatoes since you left, which is to say, I miss you and your mother and your sister very much. The contributors’ notes at the back of the magazine didn’t say much, and what is New England? I can’t imagine my family there, and I want to know much more than just what you are writing these days. Your mother let me go entirely, and I could not keep track of you beyond Miami; did she think I would reach up into Florida and drag you screaming back to Cuba? The German left me your magazine in exchange for some directions into the forest as well as a few pesetas. I bought some fish with the money, and I spent the afternoon reading and rereading your article while eating grouper. I’m not poor, but I only have what I need. How did you get your hands on a Flor de Cano up there in New England? How did you know the draw of its smoke? Do you really find that leaf from the Philippines as luxurious? That its vapor rises just as gingerly as its Cuban counterpart? I can’t imagine your mind. It’s been gone from here for so long, but the flavor of our dirt is stuck on your tongue—that much I can tell. Would you write me back? Will your mother allow? God bless you and your sister, and God bless your pen.

  —Uxbal

  The letter had come from Orlando in a package from the chief editor of Fuego del Mano, in the third month of Isabel’s absence. The editor had received the note at his office and forwarded it, along with other fan mail, to Willems in Hartford, and Henri eventually brought it to the kitchen table on which Ulises read the words of his father’s hand. Besides the voice of Uxbal, which sounded musty and aching in Ulises’s head, what most surprised him was the efficacy of the Cuban mail system and the fact that the letter had reached him at all. The paper was still crisp, and the squat sentences seemed to have been written just yesterday: Uxbal alive and breathing, as though he’d sent a heartbeat through the post.

  Soledad unconsciously crossed herself when she saw the letter’s signature. She’d come home from work and discovered the single sheet on the kitchen table and Ulises alone in the living room.

  He found us, she said.

  He didn’t, Ulises told her. One of my articles found him. Did you read the letter?

  Yes, she said. It sounds just like him.

  How?

  Soledad sighed. He writes as though he were the mayor of Buey Arriba, as if he’d just shown a German dignitary around the town and taken him for drinks. He talks bigger than he is. That’s your father. Does Henri know?

  I don’t think so, Ulises said, though he was the one who brought it over. In any case, you should tell him.

  I will.

  Did you think he was dead?

  I didn’t think anything.

  Did you hope he was?

  No, of course not, said Soledad, looking stricken.

  Are you happy he is alive?

  I suppose I am, she admitted. How do you feel?

  Ulises looked at his mother. The same. The same as this morning. It doesn’t mean anything that he’s written, I don’t think. Except that he’s alive, I guess. For a long time I thought he was a ghost.

  If you did, it was because of me.

  Ulises shrugged. It doesn’t matter.

  Are you going to write him back?

  No.

  Should I throw it out?

  Just leave it where it is for now.

  She did, which was how Willems came to read the letter. He said it was not addressed to him, but Ulises gave him permission to read its contents when he saw Henri staring at the note while smoking in the kitchen. The letter seemed to have the greatest visible effect on the Dutchman, more so than on the mother or son, who were incapable of reacting to it, perhaps perpetuating the belief that Uxbal was gone—the vague gone of many possibilities: death, poverty, distance, estrangement, disinterest—by simply not handling it, not treating it as real.

  The Dutchman, however, swelled in the presence of the letter, and Ulises sensed a heat blossoming inside the man. He was, after all, his mother’s lover. Willems began to work furiously about the house, first warming and then condensing; he spent an afternoon trimming and repotting the absurdly tall tobacco plant in the living room and then spent the next week populating the house with smaller plants—some new tobacco leaves, a few diminutive shrubs, other flowers, everything tropical—as if trying to complement the original gift of the old Sumatra leaf with a miniature forest.

  Yet as soon as all the available space in the house was colonized—every windowsill, every empty ceiling corner, every bare tabletop—Willems seemed to come to a complete halt. He went back to smoking cigars in the kitchen at night, but now with the lights off, which he claimed was soothing and reminded him of smoking in secret as a twelve-year-old on his grandfather’s back porch in Haiti. Ulises joked with Soledad that her lover had been transformed into a cigar-store Indian, puffing away as silently as a wooden statue next to the black-iron range. It took Ulises some time, maybe a week, to figure out that Willems was not actually enjoying the quiet darkness but staring at the letter through the blackness—he wanted to see the thing without confronting it, without having to reread Uxbal’s sturdy, palpable script. The letter, Ulises realized, was not just word from Uxbal, but proxy for Uxbal. For once, the Dutchman had to battle the presence of the husband amid his love for Soledad.

  It’s just a letter, you know, Ulises told him.

  I know, Willems said. But I’m no different than any other man, and it’s difficult not to be jealous. The man is absent for six years, but all he has to do is write a letter, and he’s returned?

  Time was what Henri had been wrestling with all those years. He’d thought he just had to wait for Ma to forget everything or let it go, and now, now he had to play the helpless adulterer who’d fallen in love with the cheating wife. The thought upset Ulises and forced him to understand the potency of the letter, because since when had his father been the moral standard in any equation? Since when had Henri been at fault or his mother guilty of anything but moving on? Ulises thought of removing the letter from the kitchen table, but to dispose of the sheet would have given it a past and a history—the letter was read, the letter was thrown away—and things left behind, things intentionally forgotten, he knew, had a way of coming back.

  Uxbal’s correspondence stayed on the kitchen table for three more months. The kitchen was susceptible to low drafts, and the fluctuating temperature of the room, due in part to the sporadic radiators—hot to cold, damp to dry—crinkled the graying fiber. The ink, a cheap, charcoal ink, began to fade. Soledad and Ulises, though always aware of the presence of the letter, had, since its arrival, taken their meals in the living room, and eventually they both managed to incorporate the missive into the general appearance of the house; it became another part of the kitchen table, which was a mainstay of the kitchen, which each could navigate with his or her eyes closed. The letter dropped entirely into the background.

  But, of course, the note was never completely out of mind—there were days Ulises could not study
or read inside the house, the proximity of the letter forcing him to the university library, where he could better tolerate the whispering of his peers—There’s the Titan; How did the Titan get that scar on his head?; The Titan talks to no one—than the silent presence of his father’s handwriting. In the dim basement of the library’s western wing, at a table between the etymology stacks and a retired, bricked-in fireplace, Ulises engaged in a lonely study of Greek and Roman myth, though he worked in reverse, starting with the most recently published texts and articles on the subject and moving backward in time. He found a welcome distraction in the multitude of voices, in the interpretive curtain between him and the original works in Greek and Latin; more truthfully, he felt he didn’t have the energy to translate, and he found solace in the number of pages he could consume when they were written in English. The ease with which he navigated this second language was, in his mind, an affirmation of his place in Hartford, evidence of a past, perhaps of a father, he’d successfully left behind. Ulises feared in secret that the letter from Uxbal was his own calling, though a silent one as opposed to Isabel’s auditory warning, but it heartened him to know that he’d had to ask his mother to translate the Cuban words for glossy and grouper. The words, like the father, were foreign to him, and at a distance Ulises believed himself safe.

  Yet, as Ulises moved through those classics texts, he understood only half of what he read; he had no specific knowledge of the verses referenced, and he skipped the elaborate, half-page-long footnotes entirely. The result was a glancing comprehension of the arguments and interpretations. Ancient Greece and Rome were little more than dreams or, more accurately, another man’s dreams. Ulises better imagined maps of the fallen empire or vague sketches of the boundaries of the Mediterranean than he did colossal temples stacked above stone or wine-dark water. Olympus itself was more cloud than mountain, and it was the first time in Ulises’s short life that he truly felt displaced and uprooted. The language of the ancient world was a field he’d plowed for years, and yet there he was, unwilling to taste the soil in his mouth.

  The distance could not, did not, last, and the sensation of reading so much so fast became a rote exercise. Ulises began again to feel the weight of his family’s circumstance reassert itself. Another man’s thoughts were not enough; he wanted another man’s story, though not just a version of the story but the original—or as close to it as he could come, and this Ulises could blame on the Dutchman, the man who’d taught him the demands of an empiricist—so that he might mill and process the raw Greek and Latin words as he saw fit. Ulises remembered Willems with his nose in the dirt; he remembered the Dutchman’s dress shirts, always a copper tinge around the cuffs, the product of his hands gripping soil and leaves, the dirt and tobacco oil dyeing slowly, over time, the white cotton-polyester blend.

  The impulse also reminded Ulises of his first years at St. Brendan’s and the afternoon hours he’d spent translating and critiquing St. Jerome’s Vulgate. He didn’t understand then but understood now that he possessed an inclination toward remaking the world or, at least, reconstituting a version of the world that suited his liking. He knew in his heart that he had to attribute this, if attribution were necessary, to his father, the man still attempting, perhaps, to recast an entire island to his liking. My mother, Ulises thought, transcribes the world. She records reality. And I didn’t know Willems yet. It’s Uxbal who’s always wanted to change things.

  Ulises began with Virgil’s Georgics and Horace’s Odes. He then read, in a matter of three weeks, beginning to end, The Deeds of the Divine Augustus, The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle’s Categories, The History of Herodotus, Shield of Heracles by Hesiod, Livy’s The History of Rome, Appollonius’s The Argonautica, and Sophocles’s Antigone. It was Aeschylus who made Ulises cry, The Oresteia he could not handle. The language, of course, he found beautiful and captivating, but he couldn’t reconcile either Agamemnon’s original sin or the subsequent slaughter of mothers and sons. He read the trilogy all the way through in one sitting, and he wet every page with his gargantuan tears. Yet when he was done, he couldn’t bring himself to read something else; he had an urge to cry further, and he decided to read the trilogy again. He cried through two more passes, and then he read until his eyes began to dry, until he could read aloud a line or two without buckling in his wooden chair.

  Eventually, he sought to read the whole thing aloud, start to finish, without a single tear, as if to repeat the story to a point of literary, psychological, and expressive death. The words, he hoped, as he heard them and spoke them, would be stripped of their definitions and become something of an incantation. There were monks, he knew, who did this, who destroyed language through repetition, who estranged familiar noise for religious purposes.

  Ulises was unsure of his exact purposes, but around the tenth reading he felt his mind enter a white space in which the sounds, the utterances, turned to murmur. Sitting in a wing chair in front of the bricked-in fireplace, he imagined the play he read aloud traveling in waves at the retired hearth and bouncing back, scrambled, in the direction of his ears. It was a loop or a current, and perhaps, Ulises thought, this is where the monks got lost in their prayers. This is how they escape the world. Had he needed to describe the sensation, Ulises would have said, This is what they mean by speaking in tongues, but it’s not another language altogether. It’s the same language, but you’ve forgotten what it means, which makes it a mess, and people think you’re somewhere else, that a ghost has taken you over.

  Catharsis, Ulises thought, but even then he knew that wasn’t the right term for what was happening. He was reading Aeschylus, now for the sixth day, beyond catharsis, beyond a point of purification. Emotion had emptied out of him, but around the twenty-third reading he noticed a diminished sense of sorrow: he was performing—it was a performance after all, an out-loud reading of a dramatic narrative—The Oresteia to a point beyond pain. What had first moved him to tears had dissolved into that blank part of his brain, but the white background of that mental cavity eventually gave way to a stream of green and blue hues.

  Is this, Ulises asked, the ecstasy? Is this where the monks end up once they stop wandering through the chant?

  Ulises thought of Isabel, who claimed she could not ignore the sounds in her head, and he felt, perhaps for the first time, tremendous empathy for his twin. He could open his eyes and clearly see the oak table at which he worked or the low, square, stone ceiling of the library basement or the stunted, load-bearing Doric columns interspersed with the stacks, but he understood that he was, at the moment, in a different place, and the place had descended on him. He thought of his sister, who seemed trapped in this world or, at least, saw his world—the city of Hartford, the university, the tobacco fields, their quaint colonial kitchen—always through the filter of this condition, these invisible walls of sound, this state. Ulises wondered if Isabel had ever seen the world another way. He realized, then, that maybe what she feared most in life was an unencumbered view.

  Ulises went on like this for thirteen days, and only twice did librarians ask him to read silently to himself. When they asked, they asked meekly, and Ulises thought it was because of his size, but really his voice—a tenor born from a mother’s Cuban accent, a teenage American English, and an abundant, consistent dose of Catholic Latin—sounded so strange and carried so beautifully throughout the library basement that it seemed a shame to ask him to stop. More important, Ulises had drawn a crowd by the thirteenth day, and the audience—at first just three to four other classics students, though soon enough also a handful of sophomore dramatists as well as a modest pod of junior rhetoricians—through their presence and rapture, legitimized Ulises’s performance. The crowd, which continued to grow in spurts, seated themselves at a distance from Ulises, forming a long semicircle around his wing chair.

  Don’t sit so close, they told one another. It might disturb the Titan.

  Instead, they reclined comfortably against columns and dusty bookshelves, a
nd they were as silent as the dead while listening to Ulises’s passionate telling. Even on days when Ulises’s voice was nearly gone, when he had to whisper-speak the drama, the audience kept its distance, which in a short time had come to exemplify a sort of reverence, something like the void between preacher and congregation, an unspoken agreement that Ulises spoke from a place of power not to be breached by onlookers. Those who stayed to the end, those who heard The Oresteia from start to finish, suffered a sort of delirium afterward, the aftereffects of a subtle, deep drug, and when they talked about what they’d heard, they said things such as, I was amazed, even though I couldn’t understand a word, and, He’s a natural at whatever that is. Enrollment for spring classics courses surged.

  Ulises noticed the crowd, could not possibly read without feeling some of its pulse, but their presence swelled at around the same time that Ulises began again to hear the meaning behind The Oresteia’s beautiful words. He had passed through to the other side of the story, to the place where he could understand denotations again and could string together the tragic narrative, but the pain of doing just that was gone. He could read aloud, But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no, not from others but from them, their bloody strife, without weeping, while also understanding the exact nature of that strife, while also seeing Agamemnon’s bloody robe. Ulises read the verses, What do I call this? What fine words will do?, and whereas, before, the lines had overwhelmed him, he now possessed them. He had read the tragedy beyond catharsis and into ownership, a power not unlike the power to name things, the power of defining a substance or an object or a person or feeling with cold, precise words. The shift occurred imperceptibly to Ulises but showed itself in his voice, which rose exponentially after the twenty-seventh day. The crowd discerned the uptick in volume and, to some degree, trembled in its wake. They cried at his reading, shaken, perhaps, by his tone, as if dislodged from an ambiguous daze. When Ulises saw their red eyes and heard their noses blowing, he thought, I’ve given the story to them. But then he thought longer and harder and concluded, Those were my tears last week.