The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  Ulises cataloged all the things in his life that had been displaced—his home, his family, his sister, his language, his sense of Cuba—and he was scared that this was his only response to the world. In the semicircle he saw his pain vicariously, some students weeping, some burying their faces in their hands, some holding each other, and he began to understand how deep his well of grief actually was. Ulises read, My misery has been my teacher, and it was a verse that spoke of his sister, the sounds in her head—would she say in her heart?—and the painful throbbing of her eardrums, but now it perhaps applied to him as well, as if he, Ulises, had at last been offered his own inheritance, his own sort of burdened calling. Uxbal had summoned him, a voice from the dark that was Cuba, and was that not as good as being touched by faith? Wasn’t that the same question Uxbal had asked his daughter when she was just a child: will you come back to me?

  For just a moment it brought Ulises a joy he could not recall experiencing, some version of fatherly love, but the letter, with Uxbal’s mayorial tenor, his carefree tone—as if Soledad had taken Ulises and Isabel to a cousin’s in Santiago and not to another country—was a vessel, and it had carried Ulises to the rim of a whirlpool, to a point where he could look down and see how black the tapering center was. He had forgotten, willingly, his father and home—Ulises read, For I don’t deny I did the murder—but now he could sense the truth that Isabel, his twin, his counterpart, had perhaps always known: the heart sustains when the mind relents; the heart remembers what the mind forgets.

  Soledad was herself adopting another cache of memory, though in a different basement. She had descended into the chancery of the Hartford County Courthouse, where a sprawl of fungus was rotting away, among other things, the shelved topographical maps of Hartford County. An archivist from the Connecticut Circuit Court Records Preservation Program had inspected their holdings and flatly said, There’s too much mold. You have to cut out the diseased walls, maybe even the studs. You’ll certainly have to evacuate. This fungus could be everywhere.

  Soledad took up the project the day after Uxbal’s letter arrived. After a week, Willems said, I’m waiting up nights for you.

  There is mold everywhere in that basement, she said, and we can’t afford to hire someone. Anyway, I don’t trust anyone else to do the work.

  Soledad was a proud woman, and she realized this every time she saw the Dutchman’s face. She knew Henri was waiting for the moment he could watch her reading Uxbal’s letter. He lurked in the dark with the hope of seeing exactly what he was up against, how badly the scribbled words had further maimed—ever since the canyon rim, the hollow kiss—what had come to seem like an eternal affair.

  But rather than admit the limits of her own heart, how they were challenged first by her offspring and then by the husband of her native abandonment, Soledad moved the contents of the chancery into the courthouse attic and threw herself into buckets of bleach and piles of fetid maps.

  Though it was winter and the attic was not insulated, it was the only available work space. The ceiling was extremely low, but Soledad was just short enough that she didn’t have to stoop when working. She set up two space heaters to fight the cold, arranged a fan to circulate the air, and found a parka to wear while dabbing bleach onto speckled records. The fan was mostly effective, but the stench of chemicals lingered. Oddly, Soledad found she didn’t mind the odor. Instead, she recognized a pleasure in the dulling of her senses, the muted nose, the tasteless tongue, eyes that stung and had to be shut. She forgot herself, forgot the scent of her hands, the feel of her teeth, the need to eat. She worked.

  Soledad sponged her way through a decade of birth certificates and expired business licenses before reaching the topographical maps of Hartford County. They were beautiful: yellowed quadrangles checkered by parallels and meridians that, she quickly realized, surveyed all of Henri’s leased properties. Curious, she placed the topographical maps under the translucent county tax folios, which she’d found in a separate box; she wanted to see where, exactly, in that scheme, Henri grew his tobacco. Tracing her fingers around the boundaries of his land, she immediately saw his well-contrived decision to grow Habano leaf solely on the western, cloud-gathering sides of Connecticut hillocks. She also felt the distinct possibility that Henri must have, at one point, handled maps such as these when looking for fields to lease.

  Looking closer, Soledad saw that the sheer folios were marked with the faint residue of oily fingertips; they might glow if she held them up to the light. She felt, suddenly, the urge to lick the paper but didn’t. Instead, she turned off the fan so that she could press her nose to them and breathe in the smell of cheap leather and citrus perfume.

  The aroma, along with the milky hue of the paper and the ghostly fingerprints, brought to mind a memory of Cuban adolescence, of young men petting their groins and offering Soledad a string of pearls to wear around her neck. She had been disgusted then, but not without curiosity, and there once had been a night when she’d asked Henri to finish himself along her chest so that she could see the color of his fluid. Henri, though, had blushed and then refused, said simply, No, and asked her if she would turn over.

  Up in the courthouse attic, Soledad still felt a little angry with Willems for that evening, a little cheated by his sheepishness. She did not know why, exactly, except for the fact of his refusal, how he’d kept some fraction of his body from her possession. Her desire, she knew, was juvenile; it spoke to the kind of love without a future, the sort of aimless sex that only happens outside marriage. Yet, surprisingly, Soledad could feel her body even now respond to the idea of Henri’s semen on her skin, the vision of it streaking her brownish nipples. She understood, suddenly, that if Willems were there at her side, she would try to take him. But even that was a lie; she would take only his skin. And that made her terribly sad, terribly aware of the depth of her own selfishness. She had not thought that she could take more from him.

  That night, Soledad felt incapable of leaving the courthouse, as walking home meant seeing the orange glow of Henri’s cigar burning in the void of their kitchen. Instead, she worked through a moldy stack of sewer plans. At some point she began to hear mice moving in the walls, and to keep them away, she sponged bleach-infused water along the attic’s baseboards. She worked for another hour before feeling the long day in her shoulders and the hours of dabbing in her wrists. Close to midnight she fell asleep at her table, the sponge not far from her face.

  Sex dreams about Henri were not uncommon. Often they were sweet and vague, visually fuzzy, though reminiscent of the last place they’d had sex. Under the fog of cleaning fumes, Soledad dreamed her nipples were being rubbed as she lay inside a sweaty tent, which meant she was remembering her and Henri’s riverbank fucking. The air was humid in a way uncharacteristic of the Grand Canyon, however, and there were noises outside the tent’s flap that implied a flock of birds was circling their small canvas enclosure. In the dream Henri did not seem to notice, and he circled the palms of his hands around Soledad’s nipples to the point of pain. Soledad did not stop him, and when they started to bleed, she pushed Henri aside and rolled on top of him. He licked her chest. She found his penis with her right hand, and she slid it into herself.

  The episode lasted longer than usual, both the act and the aftermath: Soledad’s orgasm was a century long in her mind, as though there was time to forget the pleasure and then remember it again; and afterward, when they were both exhausted, both covered in blood and sweat, the dream persisted. It went on long enough for Soledad to sleep within the dream, to be dream-conscious of sleeping, and to wake up again to the flocking birds. She asked Henri to go outside to see what was there—it had gotten hotter since the dream began—but Henri refused. The sound of rain had been added to the noise, as well as mosquitoes, but Soledad knew those biting pests were rare in the park. She tried to sleep, but then she smelled manure and told Henri that a mule must have shat near their tent. It’s a jungle out there! she yelled. Henri grunted without waking, wo
uld not open his eyes no matter how hard Soledad slapped his arm, and eventually she peeked outside the tent herself. But when she looked, there was nothing but the black canyon, a cold breeze, and a sliver of the starry night sky just beyond the rim. Soledad felt herself shaking. She awoke in the courthouse attic, her nostrils burning, to a night janitor pinching her ear.

  —

  Henri was in bed but wide awake, and when Soledad knocked over one of the many potted plants growing in their bedroom—an orchid not doing so well, now bent like an arthritic finger from too little light—he sat straight up.

  Be careful, he whispered.

  I’m sorry, Soledad said. I’ll clean it up in the morning.

  Let me, Henri said.

  He turned on a lamp near the bed and went to scoop the disturbed soil back into its pot. Soledad watched and saw immediately that he was a little drunk. He walked slowly and rigidly, and she smelled alcohol in the air. Yet she also saw how incredibly cautious Henri was with the plant; he didn’t touch its roots, and he was careful to hold the orchid only at the base of its stem. The soil he patted down with his thumbs while cradling the pot between his palms.

  It should be fine, he said. Soledad saw him run a finger across one of the orchid’s purple-white spurs and then across a bruised labella.

  I’m sorry, she repeated. She had no doubt the flower would die. I suppose if you’re going to wait up for me, I can turn on the light anyway.

  You could come home earlier, Henri said. It wouldn’t be so dark. We could go out for a meal. You don’t look well, you know? You don’t look like you’ve been eating anything.

  Is that why you’re always waiting for me in the kitchen? Because you want to feed me?

  Their bedroom already reeked like a garden—burst pots smelling of grass, rotted flower petals, the airy dust of pollen—but with the freshly scattered dirt, the air grew mustier. Underneath that was Henri’s stinging breath—brown liquor, if Soledad had to guess—and in her mouth it all had the feel of wet chalk. Soledad looked around while Henri looked at her. She swore she could see the plants trying to breathe but not getting enough oxygen.

  Could you open a window? she asked.

  Henri cracked the pane nearest his side of the bed.

  Wider, she said. He lifted the window higher, and the heavy air left the room. Henri began to shiver; he rubbed his chest and said, the Bird of Paradise won’t last very long.

  Soledad felt her nipples harden beneath her blouse, which reminded her of the dream from earlier, the agonizing eroticism.

  You’re not even wearing a sweater, he said, and Henri approached her slowly, took her left hand in his right hand and squeezed her knuckles with his thumb. The blood in your body is moving away from your limbs, he said. You’ll get sick.

  Henri pulled her against his cold chest, a place that felt foreign at the moment, but Soledad felt her thighs tense nonetheless. Henri was making excuses to touch her—a very masculine process, she thought. It was so Catholic of him. For Henri, candid desire carried a stigma. But despite the tender draw, Soledad felt the depraved want under his skin. He took her hands in his and massaged her typist’s knuckles. He followed the hollows between her bones as if they would tell him how much farther apart he and Soledad could drift. He touched her as he would his tobacco, trying to see the future, trying to predict the next spring and the length of his leaves.

  Henri is a beautiful man, Soledad thought.

  She was certain, as he let go of her hand and found her hair, that his search was in earnest—it was not the shallow satisfaction of a craving. He genuinely was after her heart, almost as if he knew what it was worth, as if he could weigh it in his palm. He had an ego after all, bold enough to believe he was capable of loving her not just once, but twice, even after a fall, which in Soledad’s mind made him godly or, at least, forgiving.

  The space between them was warming now, their collective breath heating each other’s neck. Soledad’s nipples were still hard, but now she felt the blush of arousal, the hot collarbone. She remembered their first time, an evening spent in one of Henri’s greenhouses, the same one in which Ulises would later sort seeds, and she remembered the wet heat, the humidifier installed above the entrance door that treated the incoming air, and the clean feeling of moving through a filtered mist. She remembered the dirt under his fingernails as he showed her soil samples and explained exactly what kind of mud and sand—a loamy, slow-draining mixture—he’d put into the pot of the Sumatra leaf he’d given her. In the greenhouse he had her smell it, but she refused to sprinkle it on her tongue as he did onto his. Now, in the frigid bedroom, as Henri’s hands moved toward her spine, she remembered the lovely, playful thing he’d said then—Please, have a taste—as he leaned into their first kiss. It made her want to touch him again, and she did.

  It was afterward, the steam of their cooling bodies fogging the glass of the open window, when Henri lazily traced the curve of Soledad’s back with his middle finger. She was lying on her stomach, and Henri, rejuvenated by the sex, sat up beside her. He’d already joked about her long body, longer than his, and while Soledad contentedly buried her face in a pillow, he told her about the black swallower, a tropical fish that lives 1,500 meters below the surface of the ocean.

  Poking Soledad’s hip he said, It’s got a belly that looks like a tumor or a pregnant gut, and it can eat a fish larger than itself. Like me, he said.

  If that’s your part, she said, then what kind of fish am I?

  I’m not sure, but something prehistoric. The first of its kind.

  I’m not that old.

  You’re long, like something that’s been around quite a while. Something that had the space to stretch out before there were other fish to bump into.

  You’re still drunk, aren’t you? she said.

  He pinched the side of her breast, and she slapped at his hand. What do you think you’re doing?

  Running the ridge, he said while walking his fingers down her vertebrae from nape to buttocks.

  You’ve done that before, Soledad said, but she could not remember when.

  I’ll keep doing it, Henri said. He put his hand on the small of her back, and he left it there till she fell asleep.

  —

  For some hours, Soledad slept well and without dreaming, but she awoke in the gray light of predawn to the smell of plants and a chill in her feet. She and Henri had forgotten the open window, and the blankets on the bed had twisted around Soledad’s shins, exposing her feet up to the ball joint of her ankles. Her toes were numb. She worked the blanket back down, and while upright she heard Henri’s soft exhalations. He was a quiet man awake or asleep, and she had to put her hand on his chest to really know that he was breathing. Touching his naked skin—the cold did not seem to bother him—she thought of the sex they’d had hours ago and the gentle talking afterward. In retrospect their lovemaking had been satiating if not memorable, but there had been an easiness to their conversation, and it was like the beginning of a new stream, rain from a storm gathering unsurprisingly into a flow.

  Henri suddenly rolled over, and there was the pale skin of his back, a colony of bronze freckles across his left shoulder blade. There was the near white skin of his armpits, the ivory of his underarms. There was the trail of his spine. Soledad remembered then the first time Henri had touched her back and said running the ridge. It was the night he first told everyone about his ghosts. It was the night he opened himself to the family. It was the night of that epic fuck.

  Though she’d never shared the phrase with Henri, that was the name Soledad had given the phenomenon of their lovemaking that evening; she could not think of a physical act past or present, with Henri or Uxbal, that had had such a direct, immediate effect on her person, and she could not recall another memory that put her body in such a muted state of ecstasy by merely closing her eyes and recalling it. And despite her religious skepticism, Soledad knew that epic fuck was somehow biblical: it was—in the short panorama of her and Henri’s lo
ve—the sacred mound, the temple on the hill, the font of their mutual faith in each other. It was the night she’d fallen from heaven to Earth for Henri Willems.

  What had been epic was the conflation of two things: the feeling that Soledad had engaged a love beyond Uxbal, a proposition that had seemed, after the long path from Buey Arriba to Hartford, nearly impossible, elusive at best; and, more wondrous, the genesis of Henri as the next phase of a man she’d only ever dreamed of, the man of salvage, the man who followed the man of ruin. Henri, as Soledad had understood it that night, had looked upon his own troubled family history and said, I’ll take the weed but leave the ghosts behind. Or, at least, he was attempting to, which was as much as she’d ever hoped for in coming to Connecticut.

  Soledad bent down to Henri’s still face and put her lips to his ear. She bit his lobe, and when his face moved, she said, I think you’re using the same tricks on me. I think you hope our love is a Hindu nightmare. You want to play it again, Henri.

  He mumbled, What are you saying? You’re talking in your sleep.

  The night after that epic fuck, Soledad recalled, she and Henri had gone on one of their evening strolls through Hartford and talked, as they sometimes did, of their pasts. In the wake of Henri’s confession at dinner, Soledad had asked him about his mother and what it had been like to watch her die. Her nose close to Henri’s cheek, Soledad remembered the way he had talked of his mother’s smell, the manner in which the change of her scent had been the most alienating. What did she smell like before she got sick? Soledad had asked. Hot laundry, dry mud, verbena, and damp cedar, Henri had said.