The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  It was God, she believed, who had kept her awake the past few days, and He’d done so with the grating breath of the two mute children. At first it was Augusto whose snoring seemed heavier than usual, and one night Isabel sat up by his side thinking he was sick, because he made sounds like a tide drawing back from the beach too quickly. She worried that his spirit was leaving his body. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. Suddenly conscious, Augusto eyed her suspiciously, as if she were the one experiencing an illness. Through the low light of the moon he said her face was blurry and pale like a grub. He counted accurately the fingers she held up to his nose, and Isabel thought, He’s just tired, and she told him to go back to bed. More nights passed, and Adelina began to breathe her own strange noise, something like a whistle from a boat from across a lake. Isabel couldn’t understand how Augusto slept so soundly so close to his sister’s face, his nose just inches from Adelina’s cheek.

  Isabel’s head began to ache. Her muscles were tender, and her body was slow to move. Always awake, she spent hours in the chapel reading through Ulises’s Bible scrawl and praying for relief, but the noise, even away from the children, seemed to follow her. She also felt a turning in her abdomen, and there was blood sometimes when she urinated. Isabel cried, thinking she’d teased God with her thoughts of Sarah, and she began to worry that He had come ironically through the mouths of Adelina and Augusto to take her baby away.

  In Leviticus she read, If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days…all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness…Every bed on which she lies, all the days of her discharge, shall be to her as the bed of her impurity.

  Isabel purified her lean-to as best she could, washing the clothes she slept in and tidying the space. With a rock, a shard of soap, and a bucket of water, she scrubbed the canvas of her cot until the fabric strained clear liquid. She bathed herself twice a day in the mountain creek, and on the days she saw a beige discharge in her underwear, she kept clear of the chapel.

  But eventually the noise settled into Isabel’s bones, where it throbbed tectonically, and she relinquished the children to her brother.

  In the hours after they were gone, she listened to the swifts and mosquitoes and goatsuckers outside the lean-to’s door, and after some time the night took on the kind of blackness only possible under clouds and jungle canopy. The dark offered Isabel a sense of solitude, but that was temporary, and the space of the shack soon felt cavernous, which made her feel small and pitiful, a fish in the ocean. At first Isabel had thought she’d removed the children from her presence, but she realized that what she’d really done was ban herself from their company.

  She was alone for three nights, the children at the foot of Ulises’s bed, before her brother asked, Why do you keep sending them to me?

  I can hear Him again, Isabel said.

  Who? Ulises asked.

  God, she said. He’s using the children now. He’s using them against me.

  What does he say?

  He says that I should be alone.

  Is this the baby? Ulises asked. Are you feeling unwell? There might be something wrong, and it’s causing you pain.

  Ulises reminded her of the geriatricians at St. Anthony’s. They had a talent for speaking evenly to the distressed, for hearing the irrational pains of the elderly without blinking. Then they would start moving backward, trying to carry with them the old, worried mind that saw ghosts in arthritis, karma in broken hips, and penance—some manifestation of guilt—in a clogged ear. He was being kind, Isabel thought. And, like the doctors, he wanted to know first that she wasn’t dying, that her body was sound, before he entered the space of her thinking.

  I don’t think so, Isabel said. I feel all right otherwise. There’s just a noise that comes with them now, and it’s unavoidable. Maybe you’re right, and it’s a phase of the pregnancy. Maybe it will pass.

  Ulises let her be, and he kept the children away from Isabel during the day as well as the night. This surprised her, because her brother had only ever doubted the things she’d heard or thought she’d heard. But in his distance she found a change in Ulises’s being: he had given her the space to follow what signs she perceived. It made her throat tighten in a sickly way and her depression deepen, because the more she meditated on the noise flooding her ears, the more she felt her separation from the children as a break from all things. She had once imagined being in Cuba with the father of her dreams, and now she was in a jungle with the father of her dreams, the brother of her America, and the children of her rebel promises. She was surrounded. But suddenly she could not stand these people, her father’s words, or even the children’s sour breath, and the pain made a quarantine of her lean-to. She was alone, and the loneliness got worse as those who could cure it hovered at the edge of her vision. I’m a leper, she thought, and she felt acutely the baby turn inside her. Isabel wondered if the girl, once she could hear, would hear the same things. She wondered if bringing the girl into this camp, where there were so many creatures making so many different sounds, was as dangerous as leaving her alone on the side of a mountain. At once she understood the terrible noise: she had to leave this place and these people behind, including her brother.

  Not much later Ulises listened as Isabel said to him in her beautiful voice, When Uxbal dies, I’m leaving here. I’m leaving you as well. I’ve already left Ma. I can’t stay behind, and I can’t know you anymore, neither for my sake or yours, but especially for this kid.

  I don’t understand, he said.

  If I know you after this, Isabel said, or if I keep taking care of Adelina and Augusto, there will be a path back to this camp. If she wanted to, my daughter could trace her way back to this place and back to these men. Then she’ll know how she was made. She’ll know how I abused her. She will know how I abused you, how Uxbal abused me, how we both left our mother in America to die. If I leave when Uxbal dies, and if she doesn’t know you or these children or Ma or Willems, then I can tell her that I had a family once but I lost it. I can tell her the truth, which is, I don’t know who her father is. She can grow up without my mistakes hanging around her neck. She won’t have to ask herself the questions about her parents, why they were so ruined, and is that a part of who she is.

  She’ll want to know, Ulises said. She might go looking still.

  Not if there’s no reason to, Isabel said. Not if I ruin this place in my mind and refuse to speak about it.

  You’re ashamed, he said. That’s all. You’re ashamed of how she was conceived. She’ll forgive you if you tell her.

  I can’t tell her these things. They’re too painful. It’s too much to ask a person to understand.

  It’s easier to disappear? To forget us?

  I won’t forget you, Isabel said. Not with that face, which looks like Uxbal’s more and more every time I see it. I could never forget that chin, that nose, those lips. But I can’t give those eyes to my daughter.

  —

  In Ulises’s mind, history had collapsed into an echo; the Encarnacíon family was dismantling itself once again. His sister claimed she was the one slipping into isolation, but Isabel’s child would carry her blood, so it was Ulises, in the end, who would be without kin, who was losing father, mother, sister, and future in the same scythe of time.

  He got drunk. Specifically, he couldn’t sleep at night following his sister’s revelation, and, leaving Augusto and Adelina alone in his lean-to—abandonment was also part of the cycle—he was drawn to the fireside conversation of the rebel men who sometimes stayed awake sipping liquor, which he quickly learned was guaro, the same transparent liquid Granma had given him. There, in a fog of gray smoke, he drank more than his fill.

  It took Ulises some nights to realize that Uxbal was also present at the bonfires. The old man was still killing himself with drink, as Ulises saw firsthand on evenings when his papi crawled out into the darkness to guzzle the booze. Saying nothing, Uxbal reached for the jug, and the other men ignored him until he fell asleep.
When the embers faded, they drew sticks to see who would put him to bed. Uxbal made an appearance once every three nights, and in his sadness, Ulises could not help but stare into his father’s glazed eyes, to dwell again in the anger he’d spent most of his life harboring for the man. He thought terrible things: holding his papi’s face into the fire, beating him senseless with a stone, cutting his wrists, biting off his ears, even crucifying him on the royal palm behind his shack.

  But the more he watched Uxbal, the more Ulises saw an old man who’d spent the majority of his last years abandoned, who’d not really known his family, who had a vision of the people he said he loved—mother, son, daughter—but whose ideal he could never reconcile with the truth. What Ulises understood when he was drunk, when he was too hazy to plot the murder of his father, was that Uxbal’s life was somehow his own: Ulises had been alone for so long, so distinct from his mother and sister, that he also could not call himself part of a family. When they’d left the father in Cuba, they’d left Ulises as well.

  We’re tomatoes on the same rotten vine, he eventually thought.

  Consequently, Ulises experienced a brief but ecstatic period of self-destruction. He began sleeping during the day like his father, remaining unwashed like his father, cursing God like his father, and wishing he would die like his father. The alternative—to live alone or, at least, be left behind—seemed more miserable. This public self-abuse led to one particularly wet night when a few of the rebel women ventured from their shacks. It seemed like the first time Ulises had laid eyes on them; truthfully, the women might have been there all night and every night before that. As a group, they had a tendency to cut their hair short, almost as short as the men’s, which kept Ulises from telling them apart most of the time. Also, it didn’t take much guaro before Ulises’s world began to blur, and the faces he saw in the flickering darkness dissolved into gray or blue masks adorned with wide black eyes. The clear liquid had a way of distorting Ulises’s recent memories, so that he awoke mornings-after with a throbbing jaw, swollen knuckles, and only the firm recollection of his first days in camp, which, as a result, made him sadder, because, at least then, he had just recently found his lost sister. On the other side of raising Cain, he awoke to the painful realization that he’d come so far only to lose Isabel for good. He carried this melancholy with him throughout the day, throughout his hours with Adelina and Augusto, until it was night again and he could sterilize his brain with another dirty milk jug of guaro.

  On that particularly wet night, the evening on which Ulises noticed that both sexes sat around the fire, he felt something familiar to the attraction he’d held for Inez. The rebel women were smaller than he remembered—or maybe it was that their size shrank in the shadows of the firelight—but just the same, he drank with them for some hours. Then, later, when he was truly drunk, when his brain had been washed and his mind was blank again, he reached for them. At first they kept a distance, but as the embers dimmed, they yielded to the sexual energy of the camp, to the carnal undercurrent Isabel had started long ago with Efraín. More so they gave in to Ulises’s face, which was actually Uxbal’s, which they perhaps remembered as strong once, which they liked seeing again on a younger man, which gave them a false sense of hope.

  Eventually, Ulises went with two of them, a Sofia and a Lena, to an abandoned shack, where he kissed them both. They asked about his sister and her child, and they wondered why he and Isabel had come to the camp. They wanted to know why they stayed when Uxbal was nearly gone.

  Ulises said, It should be obvious. We’re starting over. My sister and I will repopulate the mountains, and when there’s enough, we’ll return to Buey Arriba. We’ll take over the town.

  Sofia asked, Is your father done?

  Zeus and Hera were brother and sister, Ulises said. Zeus destroyed Cronus, who was the son of Uranus, and he became the father of the gods. Hera was the goddess of marriage, and my sister has married all your men. She gave birth to countless deities.

  What about Zeus? asked Lena.

  I told you, Ulises said. He was the father of them all.

  Lena and Sofia laughed and then began undressing him. But Ulises was too drunk to become aroused, so he spent the first half of the night kissing and licking the women, satisfying their reignited wants. At times he would move back from the two of them, and they would kiss each other. Then they would take turns trying to stiffen his penis, and it became a game they played, Lena first kissing softly his scrotum and massaging his ass, Sofia then fingering his anus while plunging her tongue into his ear.

  You two are marvelous, Ulises said, but still he couldn’t get an erection. They resorted to rougher tactics, Lena slapping at the tip of his penis while Sofia ground her clitoris unkindly on Ulises’s face. He could barely stand it when Lena forced her fingers into his rectum, and for a moment he seemed to feel something in his groin, but the sensation, a shot that went up his spine rather than down his length, dissipated.

  Thankfully, he was also too drunk to smell their bodies, to notice the dirt under their eyes or crusted into their nostrils. They had hair everywhere as well, and Ulises kissed their oily armpits while pulling tenderly at the dense curls blanketing their crotches. No one asked what the others wanted, and they could not stop themselves, though their energies did wax and wane, which meant Ulises experienced brief moments of unconsciousness during which he imagined having his own children, seven of them, seven boys. Each of them he would send out into the world to find his sister, their aunt.

  When Ulises awoke, he told Sofia and Lena that an army was coming, but really what he wanted to breed was a search party that would retrieve his missing loved ones, even the niece he’d already lost. He kissed the women long after they fell asleep, and later, much later, when the guaro had worn off, he woke them up again, and they took proper turns with him, his at-last erect member a minor miracle, until he was too exhausted to sit up or keep his eyes open. He fell asleep on Sofia’s stomach with Lena’s hand in his, and he slept through the next day.

  When he finally awoke, he hurt like a man who had wounds beneath the flesh. He knew the entire camp had witnessed his bacchanalia, because the eyes of the other women, the older ones, looked away when he passed by, and the men kept a wide berth around him. He went to see Isabel, but she sat alone and silent in the chapel, and she would not answer him.

  I suppose it doesn’t matter if I’m already alone, he said to her.

  Ulises went to bathe in the mountain creek. He let the water run over him until he was cold. The water numbed his hands, and he could barely flex his fingers. He thought of Adelina making the sign for water, a w tapped against the mouth, and he touched his fingers to his lips, which were also cold and, as he imagined them, blue. He thought of the three ways he could speak, two with his mouth, one with his hands, and he wondered whom he would speak to for the rest of his life. Willems? Orozco? Professors? Prostitutes? He couldn’t imagine the world beyond the time of his parents’ deaths, which was also, in a way, the time of Isabel’s death. He could not foresee a way to survive. He decided to go to the only person he knew who might tell him how it was a person lived alone, and how it was a person had a life after his family had abandoned him. He went to Uxbal.

  —

  The old man was in poor condition. He seemed not only to have lost more of his sight, but to have gone somewhat deaf as well. He had a terrible color to his skin, a thin yellow, and his breath filled the shack with a bitter air. Ulises moved to wake his father, but instead he scared Uxbal, who sat up in bed and asked him, Who are you?

  Your son, Ulises said.

  My son? My son was a boy when he left. He lived in his own world, always in his own head. He had a sister, but he ignored her. He was outside a lot, trying always to catch small animals. It took me some time, but I figured out he was trying to catch a hummingbird, one of the zunzuncitos. He built all sorts of little traps and hung them on trees and bushes. He hung them from our windowills. I kept stepping on them. He did that
until he was seven. Then his mother taught him to read, and that was that. There were stranger animals in his books than the hummingbirds. He went outside less, only when I made him pick tomatoes with me. He was slow as shit. Took forever to fill a basket. But he never bruised a single tomato. He was too careful. The same with church. He wanted a Bible, so I got him one, but during service he would just read the Bible. He wanted to make sure no one missed a word, so he wouldn’t pay attention to anyone else. He had a sister, though. She sang at church, loudly. She loved to sing. She had a wonderful voice.

  I still read all the time, Ulises said.

  Uxbal rubbed his eyes and touched his forehead. He said, You look just like me when I was a young man. How old are you?

  Twenty-one.

  Nineteen sixty-one, Uxbal said. The year I was twenty-one. Do you remember it? A terrible year to be a young man. The island was a mess. You couldn’t get a drink, we were all so poor. But it was exciting then too, very exciting. A new nation, we all thought. A great new country coming up. We were attacked—do you remember? But we won. We defeated the invasion. We all had very high hopes. I met my wife a few years later, and we moved to Buey Arriba. We grew tomatoes. Whatever you do, stay with your wife. You might be tempted to leave her sometime, to go off and be with the men and explore another way of living. But that’s a terrible idea. You can’t go wrong following a good woman. I went with rebels. We met in the packinghouse for church and other things. We had a plan, but there was an exodus at an embassy, and the government sent the army, like wasps, through the countryside to squash any more dissidents. They destroyed our packinghouse, and we went to live in the hills. We made guaro for a while and sold it on the black market, but then stealing sugarcane became too dangerous. The government started sending the army to ship the stalks to the processing plants, and those caught stealing were shot in the fields. Uxbal yawned. We hid, he said.