The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  Isabel watched as her father drew a long breath—as if he’d been holding air the entire time it took to explain himself—exhaled, and closed his eyes to sleep. She moved to his side, closed the unbuttoned gap of his dirty green cotton shirt, and kissed him on his dry lips. She touched his clammy chest and found it faintly rising. She put her fingers to his mouth, above the lips she’d just tasted, and felt a cool air. Isabel watched Uxbal for an hour, until he no longer looked like a man or her father, until he was simply a quiet, ailing body.

  A breeze came into the shack, and parts of the walls shook. The scroll above Uxbal’s head turned in the wind, and the old shoelace holding it to the ceiling coiled and looked ready to tear. Almost every day she wrote to him on these scrolls, asking, Where do you hurt? and almost every day Uxbal said back to her, I am fine. Touch my forehead. It’s cool. I am fine. Feel my dry, happy palms.

  Uxbal coughed suddenly, but he didn’t wake, and a minute later his face was so still that his sagging skin was like a mask. It reminded Isabel of the cloth covering the stranger’s mouth in the chapel and of the chapel’s overwhelming silence. It was then that Isabel realized the Lord would take her father from the mountaintop; she had returned there to see Uxbal die, and his lips, his nose, his shut eyelids, his chin and beard—they made the face of God.

  Uxbal began to snore, his whitish lips slipping back to show his yellow-gray teeth, the soft palate of his throat trapping air. This was Uxbal after years in the desert. That skin, those bloodshot eyes, and those thinned-out limbs: they were her father’s remains. But unlike Christ, Uxbal, after death, would not be reborn. His skin would not heal itself. He would not regenerate into a Second Coming. The desert, Isabel saw, is for men and women—and she thought now of the other rebels in the camp crawling toward the same undignified end—a place to let the body go. It is a place where the elements, the sand and sun and dryness, are as stark as the breath of God, as overwhelming as His silence, the underlying question being, always, When, when, when?

  Isabel waited till the following morning after he’d slept, when he was his freshest and his eyes stayed open for the longest stretches, to write in the dirt, How often do you pray?

  Not ever, Uxbal said. But my life is a sort of prayer. I keep going even though I don’t feel like it. His voice was as loud as it had been since her arrival, perhaps louder: this neglect was the thing he was most certain of.

  Isabel suddenly craved the air outside. She moved to the opening of Uxbal’s shack and saw the sunlight through the canopy, but it was still early, and the forest floor was dark and blue. She could feel moisture budding on leaves and a mist trying to rise. She wondered whether her father was awake now because he had finally slept enough, or because this was the time of day that most reflected his condition. She wondered if it put him at ease to see the world hushed.

  Uxbal moved in his cot, and Isabel heard his stomach churn. His body released some gas, and it seemed to Isabel that his bulk of flesh was doing exactly what it was supposed to: it persisted in the world or, at least, attempted to; it survived. Isabel thought, This is the world of sound. His…His is not. She wrote another question in the dirt: What about the men and women?

  I think some of them still believe, Uxbal said, but I can’t tell. For a while we thought we were being searched for. That the CDR was coming for us. For a month, maybe a year or two ago, the same helicopter would pass over the range three times a day, each day at the same hours. Five in the morning, then one in the afternoon, and the last time at six in the evening. Sometimes the evening flight would come later, when it was dark. They had a spotlight, but its trail was always a straight line. I don’t know if they were sweeping the land or just following the peak. It might have been a tour of the hills, but then again it might have been the military. We took a vow of silence.

  Who did? Isabel wrote.

  The whole lot of us, Uxbal said. It was practical. If there was a helicopter, why not a scout? Why not a forest ranger? Why not a troop sweeping just for the sake of sweeping, just for practice?

  Was this your idea?

  Yes, he said. I am the leader. He closed his eyes, then opened them, and said, We didn’t speak to one another for a year. We made up signals with our hands. Didn’t I tell you this? I thought we’d already talked about someone’s hands. Maybe yours. Maybe I was teaching you our signals. They’re not afraid of you, the others. They are just being quiet. They might talk to you if you press them, if you want. They keep their distance because I’m sick, because I told them to. You’ve seen their forms. They’re no better off than I, except that they aren’t ill. I don’t want to infect them all. I told them not to touch me. I might have told them to not even touch one another. Silence and abstinence go hand in hand in this camp.

  How do they worship? Isabel asked.

  If they pray, he said, they do it in silence. My guess is that they do it alone. I never got around to making signals for prayer. I always said them in my head until I didn’t. I haven’t taken Communion since I’ve been up here, though that has more to do with a lack of bread than with faith. Truthfully, I’ve forgotten the prayers myself. They seem now like words for another time. Don’t write them out, if that’s what you’re thinking. I won’t say them even if you remind me. It would feel like begging God.

  She wrote, Are you afraid to ask for something?

  I know the answer, her father said.

  Isabel thought, This forest is a spiritual wilderness. This is not my sermonizing father. I have maybe met the devil out here.

  She watched Uxbal curl his toes.

  Or, she thought, I waited too long. I have just missed him.

  Uxbal seemed ready to sleep again. He said, Hand me those papers, will you? I want to read them some more. Maybe I will finish them today.

  Isabel untied the hanging scroll and placed it in her father’s shaking hands. He was gentle with the stack and counted the pages before reading them. Despite having been hung, the sheets were damp and the paper stuck together. But Uxbal was patient, as though time did not exist, and his eyes widened as he realized how many pages he held, how full the sheets were of Isabel’s writing.

  His lips moved as he read, and his eyelids slid halfway down his eyeballs. There was so little light in the shack that Isabel didn’t know how her father could read her minuscule script, but as she watched, the answer was slowly—perhaps letter by delicate letter. A pair of flies entered, one pestering Isabel, the other Uxbal. When the one circling his face landed on his ear, he didn’t flinch, and Isabel understood where her solipsistic focus came from, the way of thinking she had that obliterated the world. It reminded her of the prayers she’d said for Daphne Bergmann, and then Isabel wondered if her father’s patient reading was a novena for his own death. They were cruel thoughts, and they made Isabel shake. She had to bite her tongue to stop her trembling, which might lead to sobbing, which threatened to lead to woeful speaking.

  Since that night and every day after, Isabel wanted to beg God for her father’s life, but she knew then that the most merciful thing to ask for was his death, and that she wasn’t prepared to speak aloud, certainly not as the first words to break her silence with. Uxbal had forgotten that God on Earth passed between the mouths of people, through prayers and hymns, through the eating of the flesh, through singing and saying the Lord’s name; yet that was what she’d surrendered in order to see him again. Mostly, Isabel felt betrayed; she’d been keeping God since she was young, been one of the virgins with the flames, and she’d fed that flame all her oil, every glistening drop, only to find Uxbal living in darkness and herself incapable of calling for salvation.

  —

  The vomiting had made Isabel’s mouth dry, and she left the camp to walk west toward a nearby brook that, swollen from the runoff of morning condensation, tumbled into miniature waterfalls. Alone at the stream, she was reminded how little anyone else in the camp, not just her father, moved. She knew that the others, the men and women and children, were equally hung
ry, and she knew that her father’s state, his apathy, might have as much to do with a lack of food as it did a lack of spirit. Her father’s body was evidence enough of atrophy, but Isabel also knew that, without nutrients, one’s sensation of hunger began to wane, meaning that a person couldn’t tell anymore if he or she was dying. It was unimaginable how long Uxbal and his rebels had managed to exist, especially when all manner of things could wipe them out in an instant: a hurricane, a landslide, a wayward hiker, a convoy of soldiers, one soldier, a deeper famine, an infestation of mosquitoes, a heat wave, Uxbal’s illness, a second illness, a fatal flu carried into the clearing on the feathers of a bird.

  Isabel knelt on the ground and scooped a handful of water into her mouth. As she drank, she tasted algae and limestone. She was thirstier than she’d first realized. She drank until her stomach was full and began to ache. The stretching of her abdomen seemed suddenly effortless, as if this were a world where everything was easily given over.

  The bloat brought to mind Efraín, the rebel with a scarred brow, and she remembered with amazement how she’d made a sacrament of his body. She hadn’t asked him in advance if he’d like to touch her, and she had not attempted anything close to seduction. Instead, she did as she had always done and simply took what she wanted.

  She’d found Efraín by the very same mountain stream, the source of all the camp’s water, and—silently, of course—she slipped her hand into his as softly as she could. She led him back to the circle of shacks, to a deserted shack, and there she hung a dirty blanket across the doorway behind them.

  Uxbal had said to Isabel from his death cot, I know the answer, which was the same as saying, Forget your promises; He won’t hear us. The act that was Isabel’s Providence became, then, not the apex of her faith, but a new question against it: would her faith die with her father?

  Quickly, though, as quick as a swelling vein, as quick as a gasping lung, as fleeting as the first sensation of skin inside skin, the act also became the answer. A child, a speculative infant—and maybe it had now begun; maybe Efraín, as his sweat mixed with the dust in the air, as his penis stiffened against Isabel’s agitating thigh, was not entirely empty—could now be a renunciation of the past. If Uxbal was without God, he was not fit to be her father. His parenthood would be replaced by her own. She might break all her vows, but not the first.

  And that was how Isabel eventually began to speak again, not because of Efraín but because of his naïveté. Their sex was rough and unpleasant; he was afraid to touch her, so she had to grasp at him, and they struggled through the awkwardness of losing one’s virginity. He couldn’t read her hands and made no effort to read her face, so he stumbled and went too fast, and he hurt her without understanding how.

  I am Christ in the desert, Isabel told herself, and I am not forgetting my body, which makes me human. I’m not forgetting my own wet skin.

  Efraín’s skin tasted like mushrooms, and there was a layer of oil atop of it that made holding him difficult. His black hair was long and covered his dull brown eyes, and his beard, somehow hard and brittle, scratched her neck. The cross she wore slipped behind her back when Efraín, finally alive enough to utilize his hands, pushed Isabel down. As he spent the last of his strength slipping inside her, she felt the blunted crucifix dig into the soft spot between her shoulder blades. By the end, Isabel decided that she’d not sleep with him ever again, no matter how badly she wanted a child.

  What Isabel truly began to fashion beneath Efraín’s thin frame was a calling for the brokenhearted, and as soon as she realized this—sometime after Efraín but before Guillermo—she felt she could see into the future, which was dark. She was not entering a dark night but a dark century, at the very least some ill-defined set of dark years. The child, when it came, would be a living scar, a private Christ, and if she followed it through the length of decades—away from the mountaintop, away from Uxbal, away from his failed path—then, she hoped, she might find God again, who, she was beginning to think, had rightly forgotten her father.

  It was a prodigal path and an exceptional trial, but Isabel felt, for the first time, something like a finite person, because she understood she could not love God again—not after the cold years in Connecticut, not after these days with a decaying father, not after the degradation of all her oaths—without first abandoning Him. Faith, she thought perhaps at last, was the space between broken promises and the will to return, and there was nothing more Isabel wanted in the world than the desire—physical, sensual, sexual, atomic—to eventually return to God.

  So, wanting nothing more from Efraín, she took Guillermo. Because he was older, he was rougher. He seemed to know what he was doing but didn’t care, as if she’d offered him a body without a soul, a human doll, and what first was a rush of excitement—Guillermo’s hands around her ass, then suddenly at her anus—became a violation, a probing that didn’t respond to her clenching buttocks. Isabel struck his face. He scowled and asked her if she’d brought him to the shack just to fight.

  Breaking the highest of her vows, she said to him, I want a child. I don’t want you to throw me around.

  Her voice disturbed Guillermo, who, like the rest of the camp, had thought she was a mute. She surprised herself as well; her sound was deeper than she remembered and low, and the words came slowly but clearly from her throat.

  Do what I tell you, she said.

  Guillermo, frightened at the depth of Isabel’s voice, nodded, and from then on she placed his body where she wanted it, told him what rhythm to keep, and positioned his hands where they felt the most natural to her. When she spoke, his body responded; his shoulders moved, his lips parted, and his legs flexed. She made him shudder, and then she herself found some pleasure in the sex.

  Ulises awoke to a pounding at the door. He assumed it was a bellhop coming to tell him that the evacuation had begun. Instead, it was Simón, Orozco’s cousin, who’d bribed the front desk for Ulises’s room number so that the two of them might catch the last train leaving the city that morning. Simón looked very much like Orozco: short and broad, tan and dried out. He told Ulises to get dressed and to pack the smallest bag he had with money, two shirts, and all his papers. The rest they would have to leave behind.

  Have you ever seen a city after a flood? Simón asked.

  Ulises told him no.

  It’s a sloppy circus, he said. When we come back, the animals we forgot are desperate and loud. The streets sound like a domesticated jungle.

  Thank you for coming, Ulises said.

  Orozco is fond of you. But what’s wrong with your face?

  Sunburn. I got drunk and fell asleep.

  Simón leaned closer to Ulises. I think in a short while you’re going to be in a lot of pain.

  The passenger car was choked with standing evacuees. Fighting their way through the crowd, Ulises and Simón found their bench between an older white couple—tourists—and a black mother with a young boy. Ulises watched as the mother calmed the child by gathering his small body into her arms and forcing the boy’s face into her neck. Ulises remembered Soledad’s scent as a mixture of cologne and hair spray. Her neck, the last time he had seen it, was gaunt, ravaged by chemotherapy.

  What happens to the telephone lines when a hurricane hits? Ulises asked. My mother will think I’m dead.

  The connections are worse than ever, Simón said.

  She’ll pass away, Ulises said. She has cancer. She could die, and I wouldn’t know it.

  Orozco told me your mother is strong. She’ll hold on to the last. She won’t go before she knows at least one of you is coming home from Cuba.

  What can we do?

  We’ll see about a mail boat out west. We can send something to the Dominican Republic and from there, up north. How is your face?

  It feels like a canvas sack, Ulises said.

  Later, as the train lurched past the city limits, Ulises’s stomach began to ache.

  I have to throw up, he said.

  People moved o
ut of Ulises’s way, and a ticket checker opened the door for him with a look of sympathy. On the platform Ulises tried to expel whatever was left in his stomach from dinner the night before, but he only managed to spit up a yellow sauce. The sun was rising, and a mist carpeted the rails. Ulises saw that they were nearing swampland, and in the distance he could see the high grass give way to wetter ground, turning into a river. He breathed deeply, and the sickness subsided, though his knees wobbled as he returned to the car.

  My sister doesn’t know anything about our mother’s cancer, Ulises said to Simón. She’s disappeared for more than half a year.

  You’ll tell her?

  I hope to, but I’m afraid she might not care. I think she’s been forgetting us for a long time now. I don’t know if she’s capable of hearing what I have to say.

  Simón said, Orozco’s mother lives with mine in a house in Ingla Solsta. He only visits once a year. His mother is shrinking—dying, really—but it’s impossible for him to know how fast. He hugs her the moment he arrives, but he can’t remember exactly how much she weighed the last time he was there. He can see that she’s smaller, but the degree of which he has no clue.

  That’s terrible, Ulises said.

  I have to tell him eventually, but I’m not sure he’ll believe me. That’s not something a person wants to know.

  Ulises struggled to imagine the moment he’d tell Isabel why he’d come. He could hear her say, I will pray for her, and that was the same as, Lord, take this from my hands.