The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  In bed, Soledad still could discern traces of liquor on Henri’s breath, a sour odor at the edge of his lips. He rolled in the sheets but did not wake. Seeing him turn over, seeing his pink nipples, Soledad was reminded of a question she’d never asked him: what did he do when Rute stopped smelling like Rute? She’d not asked on their walk, because the inventory of his mother’s aromas had been enough to make Soledad’s heart clench, but in the days that followed, she’d found herself wondering, almost hourly—and not without some awareness of her estranged husband, the estranged father of her children—what would a little boy have done under the circumstances? What does a boy do when his mother disappears? When he has so little power?

  Pushing the blankets farther down, Soledad stroked Henri’s abdomen.

  What did you do, Henri, when your mother was nearly gone? Wake up just a little and tell me.

  Do when? he said without opening his eyes.

  When Rute passed.

  When she died? I cried. I cried and cried.

  Before she died. When her smell had changed but before she went. Did you do anything, or did you just stay away from her because she no longer smelled like your mother? Were you afraid of her?

  No, Henri said slowly. He kept his eyes shut. I wasn’t afraid of her, but I was afraid of her smell. I wanted to see her, but I couldn’t be too close, or I would start to sob. I thought I would start smelling like her, and that maybe I would also die, even though I was already too old to think those silly things.

  You were a little boy.

  My fear made me irrational.

  Did your father make you go to her? Soledad asked. Your poor mother must have wanted you nearby.

  He did sometimes, Henri said. Mostly, he let me stand by the door and watch the two of them talk. My mother understood, and she wasn’t hurt by it, I don’t believe. She would put on a smile when I was watching. She wanted to coax me in.

  But you wouldn’t go, Soledad said. I can see your body crumpled against the doorframe. I can see you crouching by the threshold. Did you watch her die like that?

  My father eventually figured out what was bothering me, so, no. Instead, he had the room filled with potted plants and flowers. He thought he could mask the smell.

  Did he tell you why?

  Yes and no. He didn’t say it was for my sake but gave another reason. He said my mother wanted all the plants inside. He said she missed walking outdoors and in our fields and that she wanted to close her eyes and pretend she was still outside in the sun.

  Do you remember the plants?

  Henri rolled toward Soledad and said, Red and yellow hibiscus, flowering consolea cacti, oriental lilies, pink lotuses, purple maypops, melon cacti, two overlarge tree ferns, a handful of baby tobaccos, and at least eight white orchids.

  Did he get them all at once?

  No, one or two every couple of days. He picked them himself.

  Soledad looked away from Willems and toward the orchid on the bedside table. The morning light was expanding, thickening, and the plant cast a long shadow on their bedroom floor. If she looked elsewhere, she could see the other flora crowding their quarters: some lilies, some bougainvillea, some irises, some yellow frangipani, some cacti, some tobaccos, some other white orchids.

  Where did he get them from? Soledad asked.

  From the land near our fields, Henri said.

  In Gonaïves?

  No, the fields were farther east, near the Petite Rivière. We grew our tobacco near the Montagnes Noires, a smaller range south of the Massif du Nord. The farms were on the western slopes.

  Where they would catch the rain.

  Yes, Henri said.

  Like the hills here in Hartford, Soledad said, and she remembered touching the almost-waxy fibers of the lovely Connecticut survey maps.

  It’s a lovely idea, she said.

  The scent of flowers?

  No, she said. Bringing the world to her. You planted the valley in her bedroom. You resurrected a landscape.

  My father did.

  Naked, Soledad slipped out from the sheets. Her skin, she saw, was yellow in the orange daybreak. She rubbed her hands together and touched her neck. She left the bedside and went to a potted cactus atop the dresser. The cactus was not in bloom, because it was winter. Her fingers pressed on the thorns, but the skin was callused from her years of typing and did not break.

  It’s too cold to be out of bed, Henri said, sitting up. Let me get you a sweater. Or come back to this blanket.

  Did it work? Soledad asked.

  My father’s indoor garden?

  Yes. Did you go back to your mother?

  No, Henri said. It brought me into her room, which smelled wonderful. It was summer and hot, and the flowers were very alive. Because we were indoors, their soil never dried out. They had the heat and the moisture, and the flowers they grew were tremendous. Our house never smelled so wild. But if I got close, if I moved within a foot of my mother’s face, there again was the strange scent. It wasn’t gone. It just held itself closer to her body.

  What did you do?

  I got as close as I could.

  And then?

  And then she died.

  —

  The following night Henri waited up late for Soledad in the kitchen. He found himself in the same position—despite the long night of renewed passion—he’d been in over the past two weeks, leaning against the refrigerator while eyeing Uxbal’s letter and preparing for a drawn-out smoking session.

  The lonely smoking was a new nightly routine, one he had unconsciously developed in the aftermath of the missive from Cuba. It required two cigarillos and a short cigar. The two cigarillos he would smoke first—they were fresher, and the leaves were not as choice as those he used in his cigars. Their flavor was brighter and lacked a depth of flavor or, rather, a depth of finish—the smoke was the same going out as it was going in—and puffing through them with abandon gave his hands something to do while his mind settled. By the time he’d smoked his way to the stogie, he could feel in his brain a gentle nicotine wash, not enough to get him fully buzzed but enough to allow his thoughts to expand instead of contract. The smoking occupied him till ten, at which time he’d end his kitchen shift and retire upstairs to read in bed.

  Henri’s constant occupation of the kitchen, however, was not the declaration of war Soledad had assumed it to be. It was the exact opposite; instead of rage, an exceedingly familiar sense of misery had filled Willems when he first read Uxbal’s note. Somehow the letter, for Henri, was an auditory experience, and without any effort he could hear Uxbal’s tenor, distinct and overglamorous and fulsome. The letter was about Ulises, but it was sent for Soledad, and Henri remembered from his own upbringing the manner in which offspring sometimes become conduits for want, another means of engaging a reluctant, distant partner.

  Henri’s own mother used to chew his father’s tobacco behind his back. Rute was the first to give him a taste of the weed, though what she had told Henri about it was different from what she’d said to his father, Adlar. To her husband she’d say, I am freeing spirits, but to her son she’d say, Don’t be afraid of this. You can’t be afraid of this. It’s just a plant. What your grandfather did was terrible, but tell me, do you taste any blood in that leaf? Of course not. Your father is hurt, but you shouldn’t be also. Henri knew that his mother, with her thin, desperate face—she’d been a swimmer in her youth—was really saying the things to him she wished she could have said to his father. She had a tremendous wanting for Adlar’s redemption, and she poured that desire into the ears of her son.

  His father had been no different, especially at his mother’s deathbed. A man who’d taught him the infinite depths of cautiousness, Adlar had said to Henri, the moments before Rute passed away from cholera, When you go to kiss her good-bye, don’t be afraid of the smell. It’s still your mother’s body, I promise you. Her skin smelled like fish, and Henri saw the soiled sheets, what looked like rice-water staining the cotton but what he knew
was her diarrhea. His father had wanted to say, This is the terrible curse; you have to see and know it. Henri knew that his father’s greatest regret was not convincing his mother that such a thing existed and believing that it had taken her for that very reason.

  But, unlike his father, Henri had not even bothered with establishing what was or wasn’t real, which is to say, he’d explained the past—Rute’s death, the fields in Haiti—to Soledad, but he’d made no effort to validate it. He had always presented his family’s story as a nuance of his being, a quirk, a strange but mild obsession. But thinking now on Adlar’s regret, Henri wondered if he’d been mistaken, if he’d brought a silent hex to his love with Soledad. Perhaps he should have warned her. Perhaps he should have looked her in the eye rather than at the toes of his steeled-toed wing tips when saying, But my grandfather didn’t listen, and all those slaves died. Maybe then she would have said something more than How strange and sad. Maybe she would have pressed him a little harder, and he would have explained with more resolution how he was, indeed, afraid, and it was a fear he couldn’t manage, a terror he had no means to control, so he plodded through it with abandon. He should have told her that to love him was to walk with him along a cursed tobacco row, and one might sink into black soil if one wasn’t careful. But she might have also passed him off for crazy, and there would have been no love to speak of, not even a love to curse, a possibility he believed to be, in retrospect, even more depressing than their current predicament.

  Staring at Uxbal’s letter, Henri understood that the man’s want was more visceral and bodily, more base and carnal than the abstract belief systems of Henri’s parents and himself. When Willems heard the bereaved husband’s voice—shot with syrupy pain, like rum—say, I’ve been eating tomatoes since you left, he saw the man alone in a dark room gingerly licking a Brandywine. In the next line, I miss you and your mother and your sister, the man had wedged his wife between his kids as a means to buffer his longing. But the longing was there still, and only a man like Willems, the other man, could see through those words to the bodily intimations. Were they vulgar? Not exactly. The tomato was, no doubt, a part of Uxbal’s landscape, pedestrian to him, maybe growing in a garden by his house. Uxbal’s problem was that he’d treated Soledad like native produce, a natural occurrence. He’d believed Cuban dirt and sun would keep his wife going. When it couldn’t, she left.

  But had Henri nourished Soledad as best he could? Even if Henri had, he still suffered the same as Uxbal: they shared the same ache for the same woman’s body. Some of Uxbal’s words felt exactly like his—the flavor of our dirt is stuck on your tongue—and Henri, thinking of his first kiss with Soledad, for a moment feared that the husband could see him there, standing in the kitchen. As if he and Soledad’s transgressions were somehow apparent to the world.

  All this even when he and Soledad had found each other’s bodies again. He had not been exactly drunk the previous night, but on the far side of drunk, the downward slope of blurry meditation. A day later, the memory of that sex now had the feel of ambiguous sensation, as though Soledad’s touches had not been focused anywhere, as if the pleasures were spread unevenly across his body. And the Dutchman remembered his performance as that of a narcoleptic, a slow but somewhat fidgety presence in the bed during which he constantly awoke to what was happening: his eyes growing wide with Soledad’s breast in his mouth, a rush up his spine when her hands gripped him behind the knees, and the brief certainty that sex could cure hangovers and drunkenness when she, on top of him, turned around and brought his penis—miraculously, inexplicably erect—inside of her. He remembered talking afterward, but still, that was like swimming in the ocean, a narcoleptic floating. Eventually, he’d said to hell with the struggle and fell asleep, slipping under. And now the memories of that night evaded him like eels in the surf, were in a manner quarantined from one another. They were a school of fish divorced, and he could not, in the end, merge them into a singular experience. Willems didn’t know what to do with that.

  The Dutchman wondered if Uxbal had the same troubles with his recollections of Soledad, if she was also breaking apart in his mind. He almost wished he could take Uxbal by the hand, thinking: Perhaps I should be the one to write him back.

  It was at this point that Henri considered Isabel. For once, he and she had a thing in common—empathy for the madman. For a moment Henri feared he might be crazy as well, Isabel also. But, no, he still couldn’t fathom Isabel’s decision, the promise to her father; he had a hard enough time with her promise to the Church. And why would any father, real or saintly, ever ask for that? Henri had an image of Isabel in his mind just then, complete with the crucifix she wore around her neck. Not a cross but a miniature crucifix, with the Lord’s body gone to waste and everything. Then Henri thought, If Christ taught us anything, it’s that the body is carnivorous; it needs another to go on living. Henri chewed on his cigar. Maybe, though, he was just talking about men.

  That was when Soledad entered the kitchen.

  —

  Henri fumbled for the light.

  It’s all right, Soledad said. You don’t have to. I’m fine with the dark.

  Would you like a smoke? he asked. He scoured his pockets, hoping he’d brought an extra cigarillo by chance.

  Yes, that would be nice.

  Henri discovered two sticks in the left breast pocket of his jacket. He lit one with a match, got it smoking, and handed it to Soledad. Their knuckles touched, and Henri remembered picking up girls as a chubby teenager with cigarettes he’d stolen from his father.

  Are you afraid of me? Henri asked.

  What would I be afraid of? Soledad said.

  That I would go to Cuba and find him. Make some vague threats about having had his chance and blown it to shit. I’m not an American citizen. Or an exile. I could leave at any moment.

  I can’t imagine you doing that, she said.

  Would it make a difference?

  He, of course, meant something else entirely, and Soledad understood this. The dark room let him talk, and it did the same for her. She could say things as long as she didn’t have to say them to his blank, open face. Soledad was struck by how tragic a situation they were in if they could not look each other in the eye. But she also knew she was capable of hurting him. What she feared now was that she might hurt him further, happily and willingly, in an attempt to see what kind of man might fight back, to test her recent theories on the state and constitution of Henri Adlar Willems.

  You’re afraid of the wrong thing, Soledad said.

  So I do have something to be afraid of.

  Not this letter, she said. Not my ex-husband.

  I didn’t know that you two had gotten a divorce.

  Soledad took a long drag from her cigarillo, and the end lit up like an orange lightbulb. For a moment Henri could see her lips.

  I could leave you in a similar fashion, she said. It would feel just as real. It would feel like I divorced you.

  But that would be admitting that once in the past you loved me. You’d also be confessing to the end of our affair. Is it over?

  Nothing is ever over, she said, and Soledad was imagining Uxbal walking through Henri’s fields and Henri writing letters from her old house in Buey Arriba. She thought of herself in two places at once, and the barely thought-out decision she’d made a long time ago to try to love someone again. She suffered a vague but rising guilt, the painful recognition that she’d, just maybe, transposed an old love onto a new man—not just her love of Uxbal, but her love of men and what she hoped to take from them, as well as her love of Cuba, of an island, and what it meant for her to be locked to another body that was equally locked to the land. She wanted those things then, and she wanted them now, and being the same person meant she might always make the same mistakes, might always step into this sort of love with this sort of man.

  Hearing his voice, measured as always, Soledad could not blame Henri without blaming herself. His cigar, which seemed mostly out, still
gave off the mild stench of burnt spice and slow-burning flowers. She thought, It’s the kitchen also; it’s been a puff box for weeks now. The bread in the breadbox probably tastes like smoke, maybe even the ice cubes in the freezer. Soledad realized that she’d not set foot in the kitchen in just as long, because the space now had the feel of ceded ground. But she also knew she hadn’t fought to keep this territory. As she looked for Henri’s shape in the dark—she saw the slow movements of hands in and out of pockets, the dullest embers where his jaw should be—she considered everything she’d willingly surrendered to Henri: the notes from his courthouse appearance, the free legal advice of a district attorney, a seat at the table during Sunday dinner, of course the tiny kitchen, the windowsills, corner spaces and nightstands for his plants, her own nostalgic yet painful recollection of Cuba, time and space with her children, time and space that had once gone into their rearing, time away from her daughter, her only son who went into the Dutchman’s fields, plumbed his trade, and grew the same reparative tobacco. And herself. She’d given herself to him—not in an unusual sense or a dramatic, exceptional, singular sense—but in the way that all affections are a mutual submission of wills. Soledad thought to herself, I’m guilty, too—sacrificing everything for a diseased love affair.

  Do you mean to say this sort of thing will keep happening? Henri asked. More and more letters from Uxbal?

  Soledad snuffed out her cigarillo in the sink. She ran the faucet and tried to watch the ash glide into the drain.

  I mean that we don’t have to work so hard to rebuild our lives, she said. It’s all the same life.

  I don’t understand you.

  I’m married, and I’m in love with you. I’m in Hartford, and I’m surrounded by the tropics. I have a daughter, and I’ve lost her. Soledad began to cry.