The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  But the conclusion didn’t amount to much; Ulises could have come to the same truth at the dinner table and saved himself a season’s worth of time. Over pork loin, rice, spinach salad, lentil soup, and turkey breast, Willems spoke to Soledad about the pains of his day and the progress of his crop, going so far as to outline the ever-shifting agricultural outlook for the week—the leaves will swell in this sun, the dirt will dry in this heat, the humidity will thicken the stalks, et cetera. At the same time he would comment on the tenderness of the brisket or the flexibility of the asparagus or the merlot’s bouquet. Ulises had trouble associating him with his father, who seemed to dwell only in abstractions, in faith and politics. He decided it was the absence of Uxbal in Willems that Soledad found captivating. She was in love with the void.

  —

  But then, on a late November evening, Willems revealed himself at dinner. As was the custom, Isabel said grace before the meal, and the others, despite being essentially agnostic, humored her, bowing their heads and waiting out the lengthy benediction. Ulises, sore in the neck from a day of tilling, looked up to see Willems mumbling under his breath. The Dutchman was praying, something Ulises had never expected from a man who routinely put his nose in the mud, and the moment Isabel whispered, Amen, he turned to Willems and asked, What are you praying for?

  Willems looked caught in a lie, or, at least, embarrassed. He glanced at Soledad, who shrugged. The man sighed. Turning to Ulises, he said, The tobacco.

  My grandfather had indentured servants, Willems confessed, former slaves and Indians, and they built our farms on the smaller islands of the West Indies. One on Cuba, also. They’re the ones who picked our leaves and rolled our cigars. There was a cholera outbreak on one of the islands. According to my father, the servants would go out into the fields healthy and strong but return glassy-eyed and sluggish. A day came when twenty men and three children died in the fields. My father tried to persuade my grandfather to do something, to lug in fresh water, to clean the bunkhouses, to isolate the ill, but he refused. It was time for the harvest, and he simply imported more men, more Indians, some Chinese. The city health inspector quickly learned of my grandfather’s negligence, shut down his farms, and burned all his tobacco fields along with the bodies of the dead. My father broke ties with the family and started his own tobacco company, but he would only make cigarettes. He said cigars were tainted. He said he had dreams, and in the dreams when he smoked cigars, the souls of the dead would seep out of them and haunt him for the rest of his life. I think they did anyway. My grandfather, at least, went mad. He died alone in a poorhouse. So this will sound ridiculous, but I sometimes worry that the fogs from my cigars are the souls of good people, and I say a little benediction for them.

  But you’re not afraid of ghosts, are you? Ulises asked.

  I’ve inherited my father’s fear, Willems said, but also my grandfather’s constitution. I’ve yet to have my father’s dreams, but I also don’t want to ignore the dead. He paused. I know, he said. It’s all ludicrous.

  A man divided, Ulises thought, and the pain of the division was clear on Willems’s face. Ulises had never seen him so uncomfortable, and it was obvious that Willems couldn’t reconcile his patriarchal past with his pragmatic present: he was the most careful man on the farm, and when he touched his seeds or smelled his dirt, it was with reverence. Ulises had assumed the affection was for the product itself, the finished Colorados and Obscuros, but in reality it was for what might be there, what was possibly buried in the soil. But the logic was irregular. Yes, the Dutchman was his father’s son, but these fields were not the Antilles.

  Poor man, Soledad said, and her sincerity prompted a memory of Uxbal for Ulises: his father splitting their tomato harvest in two, one half for the church and one half for the family. Ulises recognized that Soledad now looked at Willems similarly. Uxbal grew tomatoes for his family and his revolution, and Willems grew tobacco, rolled cigars, for his livelihood and for fear of inherited haunts. And in that wistful look of his mother, Ulises finally understood the connection between the Dutchman and his rebel father; both men were inclined toward reason and fancy, and the tension of opposing forces, the power of separate wants, perhaps more powerful even than his mother or sister’s unidirectional wanting, was the origin of each man’s exceptional gusto.

  That night Ulises and Isabel were kept awake by Willems and their mother’s exceptional gusto, the intensity of their lovemaking rattling the master-bedroom door. In the kitchen, Ulises and his sister waited for the session to end, but it lasted longer than expected. In the dark, Ulises told his sister that he thought Willems and Uxbal shared the same space in Soledad’s heart.

  Because he sees ghosts? Isabel asked.

  Because he sees something that’s not there, Ulises said.

  This they both agreed upon: Soledad’s mad love for Willems, the evidence as loud and steady as roosters at sunrise. And they were both right. Up in the bedroom, Soledad rocked atop her Dutchman suitor with her eyes closed, and what she saw centered in that void was a faceless man rolling cigars next to a tomato vine, the symbolism trite and obvious, though arousing just the same. And, to be fair, she felt not that Willems had stepped more fully into her husband’s shoes, but that he had stepped closer to the vision of her ideal man she had been cultivating ever since her departure from Cuba. Gasping, Soledad didn’t know if Willems had finished with her, and so she reached for his penis, but he grabbed her hand and simply bit her neck. Over their slowed respirations they could hear the children retiring to their rooms.

  For the next three months, Isabel couldn’t sleep at night due to an incessant noise in her ear: the echoes of Soledad’s carnal ecstasy. However, the sexual nature of the wailing didn’t bother her. Since the previous summer, Isabel had spent the majority of her free time volunteering with Sister B of the Sisters of the Holy Resurrection order at Jude the Apostle Hospice Center, a restored insane asylum turned health-care facility that was a part of St. Anthony’s Hospital. The center suffered a lack of funding and a transient staff, so Isabel helped Sister B clean out the rooms of the recently deceased. On more than one occasion Isabel found and then disposed of the pornography of the newly dead. Over time she saw enough Call Girls and Gent to think that the greater purpose of sex was pleasure or, at least, to hypothesize which scenarios were at the root of her mother’s wailing. She had the same reaction to the magazines that she’d had to the boys of St. Brendan’s, which was none. Isabel was discovering in herself a clinical perception of the body. She stopped short of associating that cold distance from passion—or her love of the cold, or her penchant for a bodiless mind and soul—with her past promise to Uxbal, though she could say, with relative certainty, which of the female or male magazine subjects were objectively plain or gorgeous.

  Still, her mother’s wailing never left her brain, and during the day Isabel fidgeted despite the lack of sleep. The joys of her devotion—the continued and exacting prayer, the studying of the Third Spiritual Alphabet, the service with Sister B, the college-level books on the evolution of Catholic theology, even the Eucharist—all seemed to lose their flavor. She maintained the same diligence in her endeavors, but they brought her no satisfaction, and she could not understand how her faith could so quickly fail her. She wondered for a time if she’d possibly misheard the Lord. She often thought back to the day she’d promised herself to Uxbal and Cuba, and she remembered the guava crate she’d stood upon, a box made of newer wood but held together by rusted tacks, and she could not recall the fierceness of her conviction.

  While skating at Opal’s Lake one afternoon, Isabel tried reliving the memory second by second, but after a time it changed. The pride on her father’s face was transformed into disgust, and she misremembered her father spitting and raising a hand at her. She was possessed by regret and remorse—she had forsaken the cause and Cuba—and she wanted to feel the slap of his hand against her head. She did not understand why, but she felt with absolute certainty that she’d s
inned against him.

  But then there was a commotion at the other end of the pond. A boy had fallen through the ice, and a mob of children was trying desperately to save him. Isabel saw hands reaching into the water, and she rushed to help. The boy had fallen under completely, but he bobbed in the water, and eventually his arms and chest flopped onto the ice. The other children grabbed at his pants and belt, but it was not until Isabel gripped the boy’s jacket at the shoulders and they all pulled in unison that his legs emerged. His lips were already blue, and he mumbled that he could not feel his toes or ankles. He said his chest was cold, and he’d wrapped his arms so tightly around his body that Isabel, knowing he would die if he stayed in the wet clothes, could not pry his limbs away. Two girls ran for the nearest house and phone, and Isabel found herself kneeling alone next to the boy, the other children forming a loose circle around them. When he tried to speak, the circle closed in on them, but when he started rolling around because he said he could not feel his legs at all, the children backed away.

  She took off her jacket and told the boy he had to put it on, but his eyes were vacant, and he kept looking up at the sky. A film ran over them, as if all the blue in his irises had dissolved into a grayish lens. Isabel thought for a moment they might be freezing, that ice clouded them. She touched his forehead, and he blinked, but still he didn’t pay her any attention. His skin was not as frigid as she expected; it felt hotter maybe than it should, as if the body was harboring what warmth it could around his brain in an attempt to keep him alive. She pulled so hard at the boy’s hands and arms, attempting to loosen his grip, that her fingers started to ache. She began to plead with him.

  Let go, she said loudly. You’re going to die.

  His eyes seemed to waver in recognition of sound, but his elbows didn’t budge. Isabel knelt down and placed her lips against the boy’s ear and told him again to let go. His body relaxed but still shook, though she could see some of his fingers uncurl.

  Blood flooded Isabel’s face, and she felt a physical excitement—the word rapture came to mind—and it sang through her skin when her lips stuck to the boy’s ear. It wasn’t the twenty-degree weather; she loved the cold, but here she found the other side to numbness, the very edge between a throbbing heart and a still organ, and the recognition of such a place, this borderland a single breath wide, brought her capillaries to life. She felt her blood in a way she thought her mother felt her own when naked with Henri Willems, the material body melting into a liquid form, and in her mind were images from Gent, women wet with male sweat, glistening white penises, stained garter belts, dirty yellow hair, and stretched thongs; it was not sex but a failing of the mind, Isabel’s body knowing something her brain could not articulate, speaking in pulse and fever because there were no words for this.

  Let go, she said again, and she spoke more slowly, letting her breath fill his ear, letting the throb behind her eyes endure a beat longer. The boy’s arms remained tense, but the skin on his face relaxed, his cheeks drawing down and his chin coming to a rest on the collar of his thick winter coat.

  Isabel removed the boy’s hat with her right hand and continued to breathe into his ear, and she recalled then what Francisco de Osuna had written about God taking a rib from Adam in the Third Spiritual Alphabet: the Lord did not put Adam to sleep to mollify the pain of surgery; he put Adam to sleep so that his transformation was spiritual rather than sensible. The boy, she realized, was going to die in front of her, and rather than worry his final moments with the swapping of jackets, she, instead, should attend to his soul.

  There’s a place where it’s warm outside, she said into his ear, but the ponds still freeze over, and you can still go skating. Or, if you want, you can melt the ice with a touch of your finger and swim under a hot sun. You can skate at night under the moon, and you can skate without getting tired. When you wake up again, she told him, you’ll be in that place. Don’t be scared.

  His blue eyes looked at her, and the film was gone, but then the boy stopped moving. Isabel saw a few hot breaths come up from his mouth in miniature clouds, and soon his lips were also still. Isabel was hot all over, and she was glad she’d removed her jacket, which she laid over the face of the dead boy. Her skin felt incredibly warm, as if she’d sat too long by a radiator, and her cheeks were flushed, her fingertips swollen red.

  Three of the watching girls began to cry, and it reminded Isabel of her mother’s moaning, but it was nothing more than a tonal similarity, and Isabel could not be certain how alike the two wailings were, because her mother’s sound had finally left her head. She heard only the crying girls and perhaps the crunch of boots in the snow, and she was sleepy and tired, which was all she could recall for Ulises and Soledad when she awoke four hours later in a hospital bed at St. Anthony’s. She had a high fever, somewhere dangerously close to boiling all the water in her brain. Soledad was mortified, Ulises silent.

  They told her what the policeman had told them: Isabel had passed out next to the boy, but the other children hadn’t tried to help her. They were scared, because they said she’d taken on a strange look after blacking out, and also, she’d slumped down next to the body of the boy. They also said she was brave for speaking to the boy when no one else would. But the ten minutes her naked face and neck had spent on the frozen pond gave her a chill, and now she was at the brink. Soledad told her she was strong, and Ulises said he loved her.

  All the same, Isabel said she was not scared. Her family smiled and thought the fever had hindered her reasoning, because death, after all, is unreasonable.

  —

  Isabel did not die. Her fever broke the following evening, and the color returned to her face. Sister B, who’d come to visit at the request of Soledad, was surprised to find the girl awake and showing no signs of illness. She asked Isabel what had happened—comfort after catastrophe, Sister B believed, came from giving victims the space and time to categorize their pains—but Isabel surprised her again, saying she’d been hollowed out by the fire of the archangel Michael.

  You suffered a fever, Sister B told her, following a tremendous chill.

  My skin was on fire before I fell onto the ice, Isabel said. It was from talking to the boy and touching him when his soul was passing. I’ve been called to sit with the dying.

  Sister B thought the girl was fanatical, but Isabel was steadfast.

  When, after two weeks, she had fully recovered, Isabel knew exactly what she wanted, and she requested a new assignment: to spend her service hours comforting the terminally ill or near dead. Sister B considered denying her the post, but Isabel offered twice the volunteer hours and promised not to neglect her duties as postmortem maid at Jude the Apostle. The nun acquiesced, and a rumor started at school that Isabel was chosen by the Lord to carry dying grandmothers to their graves. The speculation was first of awe but soon was twisted by the non-devout into something more malicious: God forbid the stone-faced Encarnación daughter visit your grandfather at the hospice center or your suddenly sick aunt in St. Anthony’s intensive-care unit, because there was no returning from her charity.

  Consequently, Isabel became the Death Torch, though the moniker wasn’t entirely accurate.

  Her days began before classes, at four-thirty in the morning, when she arrived at Jude the Apostle. She traveled from room to room by candlelight, moving through the hospice center first and the hospital ICU last, praying for the souls of the unconscious or horribly afflicted. She would touch the patients on the forehead or take them by the hand or feed them ice or change the channel on the television, and her classmates never again asked to borrow a pencil or pen from her. Of course, the dying did not always die when Isabel visited, but she was so diligent that unless a body passed during the school day or at night between ten and four-thirty, she was there. By the time the twins finished high school, Ulises’s sister had witnessed ninety-eight deaths.

  —

  Ulises was busy that spring and early summer working in the opposite direction, trying to dra
w life and tobacco from the thawing Connecticut soil. The rumors at school bothered him tremendously, and he found himself defending his sister even though he thought her habit maniacal. He’d not gone so far as to throw a punch, but once he pushed his nose into the face of another senior, a much larger senior, and said he was not above breaking the larger boy’s spine with the swift snap of his neck. The classmate backed off immediately, but Ulises felt the repercussions of his brotherly love at graduation when he realized that people were afraid to approach him and wish him well—he was enrolled in the University of Hartford for the fall—with his sister at his side. There were, of course, jokes about good and evil twins, and next to Isabel in the school auditorium Ulises wondered at how the bad always poisoned the decent and never the other way around.

  It hadn’t bothered him as much as it might have in the past, however. The previous winter, during the time of Isabel’s religious crisis and the flourishing of his mother’s love for Henri Willems, Ulises had steadily lost interest in school and in his classmates. Many of them were excited to start college in the fall, but Ulises, at the time aerating small portions of Willems’s frozen fields by hand, discovered a satisfaction in the tangible results of manual labor. For the first time in his life he had useful arms. They sprang out from his shoulders after three months of cracking ice, digging through frost, and shoveling snow off tobacco rows. They were not especially thick, but they were dense, something like cold rubber when he tensed, and Ulises looked forward to the new planting, imagining two seed sacks, one atop each shoulder, and the glow of the sun on his back. He strained his new muscles every day and was amazed to see how they reacted, how they grew almost overnight. For once he took pleasure in living on the surface of things. He forgot his studies as summer approached, and Latin slid away from him like an oil slick gliding down the slower tributaries of the Connecticut River.