The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  By June, Ulises realized he would need a new wardrobe. Dressing for an awards ceremony in Isabel’s honor, he could not fasten the top button of his white oxford, and crossing his arms strained the fabric around his shoulders. The ceremony took place in St. Anthony’s cafeteria, which had more room than Jude the Apostle’s. There, Ulises sat uncomfortably upright alongside his mother and Willems while a low-level administrator, a tall man with narrow shoulders, expounded upon the many good works of his sister. The bulk of his comments centered on what he called the little acts of mercy by Isabel, namely the scrubbing out of bedpans and the fluffing of pillows, and he seemed instructed to avoid, if possible, too much mentioning of Isabel’s presence during the hours of death.

  Sister B was in attendance as well, and she sat next to Isabel to the right of the podium, looking as if she might vomit into her lap. Ulises was tempted to go to the nun at one point, but Isabel was summoned to the stand to receive her plaque—the number of her volunteer hours, 944, etched onto the brass plate—and to lead the small audience in a closing prayer.

  However, Isabel did no such thing. Plaque in hand, and speaking clearly into the microphone, Isabel said: I’m wasting my time with those bedpans. It’s the dying who need me, not the lazy candy stripers. I am finished with these chores, which I think is fair, considering the hours on this plaque. From now on, I’ll only visit with the terminally ill or those painfully on the brink. They don’t want fresh pillows or clean floors or to watch TV. They want to die, and it’s my responsibility to help them do so.

  Sister B promptly vomited. Ulises’s shirt tore, and the room drew a collective breath.

  The earth, Ulises whispered to no one, was without form and void. It was a verse he remembered from Genesis that had syntactically troubled him for some time. Was it that Earth was without form and therefore void? Or was Earth without form and also—paradoxically—without void? But watching Sister B cover her mouth, seeing the old nun stifle the noise of her vomiting, it seemed perfectly clear that the line meant what it said, that in the moment before the universe was born—though to say that itself was also ridiculous, there being supposedly no moments before God’s Universe, before God’s Time—what was there was less than nothing, because nothing was an idea, was a presence, and God had not yet created it through the manifestation of its exact opposite, something.

  And though the moment Ulises endured just then was rife with sounds and somethings—the muffled gurgling of Sister B, the droning soda machines along the cafeteria’s eastern wall, the PA system paging doctor so-and-so, a tapping foot, the legs of a chair scraping linoleum—what was the same was the terrifying threat of a voice disturbing the halted second; the terrible idea that an awful or awesome noise would eventually flood the vacuum, and what followed could not be undone. The idea that the world could not be unmade. Ulises reached for his mother’s hand, but Soledad’s palms were pressed to her neck. She was saying something he could barely make out. Her lips moved in a whisper: Oh, shit.

  It was a community reporter who spoke next, jumping out of her chair and asking, Does the hospital endorse this sort of behavior, Miss Encarnación? Are the hospital and the church now advocating assisted suicide? How many people have you already helped kill themselves?

  The last question inspired the rest of the audience to their feet, and the head of the nursing staff rushed to Isabel’s side, trying in vain to speak through the microphone over the din of the crowd.

  Please take your seats, she said. Please take your seats. Please take your seats.

  The administrator who had organized the event shouted over the head nurse, No one has been killed!, which accomplished nothing. He shouted, That’s not what she meant!

  Naturally someone shouted back, What did she mean? How does she help the dying?

  Who is in charge of the hospital volunteers? the community reporter asked. Who oversees their efforts? Has anyone witnessed what she does with the patients? How many victims are we talking about? Are there other volunteers like her? How many?

  A woman said, My mother is upstairs and has cancer.

  My cousin’s brother-in-law was in a car accident, a man said. He has a tube in his throat in the ICU.

  Someone said, God save us.

  The community reporter cried, Are the nuns trained to kill? Do they have medical backgrounds? How liable is the Church?

  Isabel moved away from the podium, and the hospital administrator reached out to grab her by the arm. Watching, Soledad screamed, and Ulises returned to the world, rushing to his sister’s side. The administrator, perhaps realizing Ulises’s height or width or maybe his torn shirt, let her go.

  Ulises gathered Isabel into his arms and made for the door.

  Please, everyone! the administrator yelled. Please just take your seats!

  —

  At first they tried to take Isabel home, but the community reporter had made enough calls that when they arrived, a small mob of journalists had congregated at their front door. Willems drove the car in circles around the block in silence until Soledad, her face still white, asked Isabel: Love, what did you mean by all that?

  Was I not clear? Isabel said. She stared blankly out the window.

  What are we to do with you now? Soledad asked.

  The convent, Isabel said.

  Isabel was silent the rest of the way, and no one asked any further questions. Ulises and Soledad feared, each in isolation, that to question Isabel was to somehow question God, a feeling that, despite their lapsed faith, they could not ignore.

  The convent was a granite building with high walls and an outer gate, stuck between a blood bank and a condemned gymnasium. The family found Sister B waiting for them in a cloister outside the convent’s modest chapel. She seemed to have recovered from vomiting, and they were taken aback by the nun’s confession that she’d dreamt of the awards ceremony the night before.

  Not an exact vision, she said, but Isabel was there. In her hand she’d held a book the same size as the plaque, and she spoke to a crowd. Sister B blushed and said, It was too much to see it wide-awake. God has never spoken to me before, not in such a direct manner.

  Ulises thought the nun had been brainwashed by his sister. Isabel could convince anyone of anything through the resolve in her voice. A book, Ulises knew, was not a plaque, and what did she say in the dream? Why would God send a message to a forgetful old woman? Soledad, however, did not turn so quickly to skepticism; she was more concerned with her daughter than with her daughter’s words or an aging nun’s visions. She held Isabel by the shoulders—gently, as though the girl were a new creature, or had a new, fragile body, afraid, almost, to disturb the fabric of Isabel’s modest blue sleeves—and listened to what Sister B had to say, and she nodded sheepishly at the suggestion that her daughter take refuge in the convent.

  Isabel has done nothing wrong, Sister B said, but what she said will confuse everyone. If she stays here, we can protect her.

  Protect her from whom? Soledad asked. The press?

  The public, Sister B said. They will want to know if the Church allowed a young girl to put untended hospital patients to death.

  For how long? Soledad asked.

  Until they stop asking for her, Sister B said. Which they eventually will.

  Have they begun? Willems asked, and it was clear that the idea of leaving Isabel at the convent was strange to him as well as Ulises.

  The phones were ringing when I returned, Sister B said. And the bishop is on his way.

  —

  So began a second schism in the Encarnación family. It was swift and unrelenting. There was the geographical separation of bodies—Isabel stored away at the convent, and Ulises and Soledad back at the house—but there was also the division of blood, the son not wholly convinced of the sister’s religious commitment, the mother convinced only and obsessively that her daughter’s exile was her maternal fault. Soledad was a failed Catholic, but she couldn’t help comparing herself to Mary, the Mother of God, a woma
n she thought of as stupid for abdicating her only offspring to a waking nightmare. Privately, she feared that Isabel was just as lost, that she’d watched her go without an argument.

  Willems, for his part, was quiet on the matter and spent his time consoling Soledad. Never did he feel so distinct from the Encarnacións as he did just then, and it was a testament to how close and small the Encarnación triangle truly was that the Dutchman still hesitated to throw his hat into the ring. But he was determined to engage the family tangentially—namely, to distract them. He started by suggesting to Soledad that she take her first vacation. They would travel west to the Grand Canyon by train. The trip would be long, it would take them to a place as contrary to Hartford as Willems could imagine, and it would bypass Soledad’s acute fear of flying.

  Soledad agreed, but only if she could see the news die down in the papers. The reporters remained vigilant outside their house, lurking with notepads, cameras, voice recorders, swarming the mother and son in the street: Are people now safe? Was the Death Torch put away where she could no longer molest the dying? Should she be put farther away, perhaps in a prison rather than a modest but comfortable convent?

  Feeling trapped inside the house, Soledad resurrected her sewing kit and began stitching a new set of clothes for her daughter. In the first week of Isabel’s absence, she had tried to cart from home to convent the girl’s entire wardrobe, but Isabel claimed that the T-shirts and corduroys she owned were too childish among habits and ankle-length skirts. The new wardrobe would be a gift, a reminder to Isabel that she was loved and wanted at home, and that the choice, the devotion to God, was still hers to make.

  Ulises thought of his mother’s actions as permissive and enabling, and he chastised her in the early mornings before going out to the tobacco fields. Willems had put Ulises in charge of four leased farms that summer, hoping to distract him with work the same way he distracted Soledad with their imminent holiday.

  You only encourage Isabel when you bring her those clothes, Ulises said. She wants to stay at the convent. The Death Torch, even when the fervor has died down, will not come home.

  Don’t call her that, Soledad said. She needs to know that she doesn’t have to choose between us and God.

  She already has, Ulises said. He quoted Matthew: Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

  Bullshit, Soledad said.

  And she would say no more on the subject, would change rooms to escape Ulises’s persistent nagging, and that left Ulises with no one but Willems with whom to discuss the matter of his sister. Over cigars, the two men formed an evening routine: Ulises would broach the subject of Isabel’s devotion, questioning the veracity of her faith, and Willems would deflect.

  We can’t tell people what to do or how to live, Willems would say. We can’t be afraid of what we don’t understand. It’s not your sister’s job to explain herself.

  But those careful responses even Willems grew tired of, which is how he came to bring with him several cigars instead of just two, thinking he could stanch Ulises’s obsessive rants by plugging stogie after stogie into the young man’s mouth. Ulises, recognizing immediately Willems’s tactic, decided to coax the man into a discussion of himself rather than force one about Isabel.

  It was July, the vacation now postponed until August, when Ulises, lighting a Maduro, asked, What about your mother?

  She was Portuguese, Willems said. Her name was Rute. She came from a fishing village not far from Coimbra, somewhere at the mouth of the Mondego River. Her father was a merchant, and they came to the Caribbean for the same reasons most did: for easy wealth. They traded mostly sugar. My mother met my father in Cuba, where he was recruiting workers. He took her to Amsterdam for the first two years of their marriage so he could close the company offices in Bovenkerk. They were relocating the whole enterprise to Gonaïves. They had me during that period.

  I like the taste of this one, Ulises said. Sweet, I think.

  Willems puffed and explained, The leaves are from the base of the stalk, so it’s milder. You have my taste in cigars, which is for soft.

  Where is your mother now?

  She passed away a few years after my father started making cigarettes. Cholera followed us between farms, and it tracked her down. Don’t exhale so quickly. Take smaller breaths, and let the smoke rise into your sinuses.

  What was she like? Ulises asked.

  She was not handsome—neither was my father—but she was sweet and firm, like a fisherman’s kid, and she could cook.

  Can you bring a darker one next time?

  All right, said Willems.

  Ulises took a small breath and let the smoke filter through his nose. Did she share your father’s fears?

  No, Willems said, but she respected them. Still, she told me not to be afraid. I think now she was much stronger than I often gave her credit for.

  She never thought your father was crazy?

  A little, Willems said. It would have been hard to deny his paranoia. But her caution manifested itself in smaller actions.

  Willems shook the ash from his cigar into a coffee mug on the kitchen table.

  For instance, he said, she never smoked my father’s cigarettes. In fact, she stole leaves openly from his fields and chewed them rather than rolling them. For his sake she wanted to spit souls back into the ground where they belonged.

  She loved your father very much, Ulises said.

  They were perfect together, Willems said, and then the Dutchman began to cry. He said, Your mother and I are not the same, though. I think I’m losing her already.

  She’s hurt by Isabel’s decision, is all, Ulises offered.

  I’m afraid your sister only intensifies a dark spot between us. I can’t seem to fill it.

  She loves you, Ulises said.

  Only a part of her does, Willems answered, wiping his face. The other part I’ve never had much of a hold on. Don’t you feel the same about your sister? She’s two people; one you know and possess, and the other, which is the greater part, pulls her away from you.

  I suppose you’re right.

  You should visit her, Willems said, snuffing out the rest of his cigar, adding, Sooner than later.

  It was true; Ulises had yet to visit Isabel at the convent, and that night, with the cigar’s nicotine buzzing through his skull as he slept, he dreamt of Willems in a field crawling away from Soledad, as if in retreat, a weak smile on his face. Ulises awoke thinking the dream a premonition. The Dutchman’s words the night before were not just sad but were also a warning, something to do with cowardice and negligence.

  Ulises decided he would visit Isabel.

  —

  The convent was cheerless and unnecessarily austere, like a museum, with a benchless cloister and brittle grass fading to brown. Ulises met Isabel in a small study, and she wore a sweater Soledad had knit, a dense wool top something like military attire.

  Where have you been? she asked him. Her voice was unusually soft; she was almost whispering.

  It’s been hard coming here, Ulises told her. The press was outside for the first few weeks, and then Henri put me in charge of some fields. I’m also in charge of a group of laborers now.

  You’ve grown.

  Ulises looked at his arms. Summer in Connecticut was muggy: Ulises wore a loose undershirt and some canvas shorts, and the gray cotton was tight across his chest. I’ve been outside, he said.

  I’ve been in here, Isabel told him.

  What you wanted. Your speech brought this on, and, considering what you told me last year, this seems to be more of the same. Couldn’t you have waited? Done this properly? You could have gotten in later just the same and kept Ma from hurting so badly.

  I wasn’t doing the right work, Isabel said. It was wasteful, and people were suffering when I could have helped.

  How do you help the dying? They are dying. They’re not going to get any better. They hav
e families to sit by their beds.

  Some do, Isabel said. A lot of them don’t. But you’re right. They’re dying, which is why doctors or nurses can’t help. They need a person to help them pass.

  And that’s your calling?

  No, the calling was Ma that night in November when we couldn’t sleep and stood around in the kitchen listening to her and Henri.

  You don’t have to remind me, he told her. But I can’t imagine God speaking to you through Ma’s moaning.

  That’s not how it works, at least, not for me. You think it’s some message that gets sent, but it’s not words. It’s just a sound, and when you hear it, you can’t unhear it. It stays with you and lives between your ears, and eventually you figure out how to make the noise go away by doing something. You do something, and the noise finally stops. I heard Ma in my head for months, and then when I sat next to that dying boy, I couldn’t hear her anymore. It went away, and I was cold and then hot, but the sound was gone, and I could finally hear other things again.

  You were sick, Ulises said. You were soaked from helping the boy, and an infection got into your lungs. It gave you a fever, and you sweated through some hallucinations.

  I’ve been told that before, Isabel said.

  They went for a walk, but only around the cloister and its lawn. Isabel told Ulises that she had been happy at the convent, but she did miss Sunday dinners at home. She was not allowed to visit with any sick or dying. The hospital had quietly asked her to resign her volunteer post and was undertaking an investigation to ensure that each patient Isabel had visited had died of natural causes. On occasion an ailing person came to her, though none had died at the convent with Isabel at his or her side. Instead, she was now working with deaf children, learning how to sign.