The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  Did she really walk the seawalls?

  Just a myth. When Isabel learned that de Soto was dead, she sold all their lands, abandoned Cuba, and returned to Spain. I’m sure she died comfortably in Madrid. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t faithful.

  Inez asked Ulises what else he’d like to see, and he told her to show him whatever was best and nothing very political. She told him that was nearly impossible. She spoke of the Culture Department and pointed out that even the Palacio they were currently touring had been the governor’s mansion during the island’s colonial period.

  You don’t sound very fond of the city, Ulises said.

  I’m not from here, Inez told him. I’m going to university. I study Caribbean art history.

  You seem to know everything.

  Ulises was immediately embarrassed, because he found her attractive, but what he’d said was condescending and empty. Had he not been so sunburned, he thought she would have clearly seen him blushing, but all she said was thank you.

  What else? he asked.

  Inez took him to the Plaza de Armas, La Habana Vieja, and even the Catedral de San Cristóbal. Ulises had no interest in the Cementerio de Colón or the forts guarding the harbor entrance. They walked between squares and avenues, briefly flirting with a length of the Malecón seawall, but then decided to head inward toward the city’s center, where Ulises said the surroundings seemed more recognizable. He even began to think there was a chance he would remember something of his last brief visit.

  But though the streets were rife with statues and small shops and memorial plaques, Inez told him every inch of concrete was crumbling. Every day, she told him, another building collapsed. The municipal workers, the contractors, the laborers, could not keep up with the decay. She pointed to a fresh apartment complex abutting a dilapidated church. There, Ulises saw that the sacred walls were caving in.

  —

  Two days before his departure, Ulises had hugged Soledad to the point of pain, as if he could not get close enough. There was air between them, the physical space where her breasts once were, and she knew he sensed that absence.

  She said to him then, It’s all right. I’ve already forgotten them.

  Bullshit, he answered.

  She shook her head. It could have been worse, she told him. It could have grown somewhere hard to reach, like my spine. Or it could have been stomach cancer. It could have been in my face, and you might not have recognized me after surgery. I could have lost an eye or maybe my throat from smoking with Henri. I’m lucky.

  But despite those rationalizations, and with her son about to leave, Soledad began to feel more desperately her mounting losses. A son in Connecticut, she knew, was probably worth two children in Cuba. But she also knew from being a courthouse auditor that the world was plump with routine loss, and rarely was it the stolen-from who pled a case; lawyers and counsel—surrogates—were always speaking for the aggrieved. The Bible said as much, and this Soledad couldn’t ignore, because the pages recovered alongside Uxbal’s letter, a few sections from Judges, remained in a plastic bag atop her nightstand. She read them every night before falling asleep: Now after the death of Joshua it came to pass, that the children of Israel asked the LORD, saying, Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first, to fight against them? And the LORD said, Judah shall go up: behold, I have delivered the land into his hand.

  Soledad wondered if her daughter had memorized the verses, if she read them inside her head—maybe while sleeping on a boat between Central America and Havana? Maybe while walking through a hot city she hadn’t seen since she was a child? Maybe when spotting the green hills behind the whitewashed house?—and if they gave her strength. Soledad closed her eyes and saw their home in Buey Arriba, the green countryside replete with cattle. Her vision wasn’t nostalgic but primitive. It’s an old, old place, she thought, and she remembered the weather of Oriente, the steady climate, the thermometer mercury peaking almost always around twenty-six degrees Celsius. But she knew that Cuba had only the illusion of constancy, and Soledad could not see her daughter entering that space again with ease. A person can’t go back to paradise, she thought.

  Yet Soledad also remembered the heat rising off the black backs of wandering cows, an appealing warmth when compared to the always-tepid air of St. Anthony’s chemo ward. There, in a slick vinyl chair, pale beige machines pumped her full of chemicals. They whirred next to her ears as she suffered for hours the journey of poison through her veins, and they put her in a state of disgust for the modern era. And though anyone would prefer the hot grass of Buey Arriba to an angiocatheter, Soledad, for a brief moment, felt her heart cut in two, one half troubled with regret, the other grateful to discern maybe the same draw homeward, the same current, that Isabel swam in. It felt like commiserating.

  Soledad was grateful, though, to have something of her daughter’s, maybe even the girl’s last prayers before going home, and she got into the habit of delivering verses to the plants in her house when Willems was not around. While Henri was out running errands or talking to doctors or even napping because the night before she’d kept him up with her vomiting, Soledad recited Bible lines emptily, not wanting to understand their meaning but to pretend her voice was Isabel’s. March on, my soul, with might! But because of the chemotherapy, Soledad’s throat was often sore, her voice weak, and what she heard when she spoke was more noise than song.

  When she couldn’t sing, Soledad found herself touching the places where her nipples used to be. Slipping her hands beneath her blouse, she’d trace her thumbs across the fresh equator of her chest. She’d pull the fabric away from her collarbone and squint, briefly imagining mammary glands, two sumptuous hills, eight more pounds of flesh.

  Hands pressed to her scars, Soledad was learning how to miss Ulises as well as Isabel, a doubled longing that mocked the stitched-together plain of winter-yellow skin that now blanketed her sternum. She often reminded herself that though she could have sent Henri—a traveler, a free wanderer, a Haitian citizen, a devoted man, a relentless man—she chose Ulises for his eyes, which were her own. She wanted their glinting familiarity to draw Isabel out of her foggy, abstract faith and back to the skin and bones of her family.

  But, truthfully, Soledad couldn’t bear to ask another thing from Henri. She should have, before the cancer, before Isabel’s disappearance, set him loose. She should have told him to go. She should have told him to save himself. But Henri had more resolve than most people figured—here Soledad remembered the farmers and their lawsuit against the Dutchman—and the cancer was like a promise to him, an opportunity. Where the sex had failed to ignite, they now had the cool, intimate relationship of a caregiver and his charge: Henri helped Soledad to and from her therapies, he washed their bedsheets, and in the shower he helped her reach the nether-regions of her long, luxurious back. He even dried her hair, slowly, with a thick towel instead of the cranky blow dryer, patting at her gray and black strands and not saying a word when they came away with the cotton.

  At the same time, Soledad couldn’t ignore the fact that she wanted him at her side. Her actions were gutless; she was in need, and he would allow himself to be abused. But, oddly, her demands on his day—nearly all of his work hours, save a few phone calls to his office and his greenhouses—were also something of an apology. Soledad was offering Henri, the more and more she worried about it, the last pathetic minutes of her life. To have asked him to go to Cuba would have been a passive sort of dismissal, the same as whispering, This is the start of your going away from me.

  The aftermath of that decision, the choice to cling to the Dutchman, however, fostered a restless guilt in Soledad’s body, and this she could somehow discern from the whole host of side effects—cracked fingernails, swollen toes and knuckles, constipation, memory loss—she suffered from the chemotherapy. The guilt was perhaps the only thriving element under her skin, and it flared like an itch at her elbows and behind her knees, sometimes in her shoulders and ankles. And despite he
r fatigue, Soledad felt the urge to pace around her room during the day, an impulse to lift plants off windowsills just to release the brief but sharp flashes of anxious energy somehow expressing itself in her joints.

  More important, the doctor had told her that her sexual appetite—something that had already seemed lost, absent as her draw to Willems—would disappear for a while, but it had, in fact, resurfaced. Amazingly, she felt it reemerge in the empty space where her breasts should have been, as though she were experiencing phantom limbs. Sometimes she was certain she could even feel the tips of phantom nipples. Her long periods of rest became punctuated with brief moments of inexplicable physical ecstasy. She would wake from a nap, sit up in bed with her eyes shut, and as long as they were shut, she could believe without a doubt that she felt the weight of a woman’s chest bearing down on her torso, pulling forward slightly her shoulders as her breasts once did. She’d not dare touch herself but waited, instead, sometimes for an hour, for the sensation to fade.

  Drenched in her own excited sweat, she’d say to herself, They’re hallucinations, really wonderful hallucinations.

  But she didn’t ask her doctor about them, and she didn’t tell anyone, neither Henri nor Ulises, about the episodes. She wouldn’t admit they were anything but the natural expressions of a body losing itself, the sane, expected motions of a system in shock. She told herself repeatedly, The dreams will fade. This phase will pass.

  Yet Soledad found she could not keep her resurrected libido a secret from Henri. In bed and despite how upside-down she felt from the second round of chemotherapy, she turned her desires onto the Dutchman. Her hands were relentless in the dark, and they found not only the Dutchman’s penis, but also his armpits, his anus, his earlobes, and his nipples. Soledad discovered an extreme pleasure in twisting the Dutchman’s areolas with her thumb and middle finger as a way to rouse him in the middle of the night, and grasping at his chest while suffering blindly the phantom weight of her absent breasts was satiating in a way that Soledad could not understand. If she believed in religion still, she might have called it a religious experience, though the joy of it was too consistent, too regular, for anything she would ever attribute to God.

  Sometimes Henri shot up in pain, and once, just once, he’d instinctively punched her in the side of the head—he was only half awake and had no idea what he was doing. This somehow encouraged rather than deterred Soledad, and she found she welcomed the pain, the throbbing consequence. As a result, she made it her mission to provoke the Dutchman whenever she wanted his skin, to not only get him hard, but to bear down on him like a hurricane. The trials of her body, its aches and weaknesses, were, as a result, sacrificed to the gust of pleasure the memory of her chest had blown. Each midnight romp became a mixture of pain and suffering and undeniable, utterly unpredictable satisfaction.

  For Henri, it was as if the Holy Ghost was entering the bedroom in the middle of the night to abuse his whole being. It was as if he was being burned alive by a strange faith, and under the sheets he whispered or shouted, Jesus God! Regardless, he let Soledad do whatever it was she wanted, and often enough he was aroused; feeling isolated for so long from her, he was eager to oblige.

  But Henri found that Soledad wanted not only to make him hard, but for him to then turn on her, to take over the act. She might slap his erect penis and then moan when he was rough with her neck or pinched her clitoris. It was cruel, Willems thought, and not to her but to him; their lovemaking had turned into a reciprocating submission of the will, and this was not the equitable love he’d grown accustomed to. He could only imagine—and this from remembering the slow death of his own mother—that in the darkness of life giving out, that one wants more than anything to be taken over, to be overwhelmed. It was a way of letting go, and if something, God or belief or ghosts, swept in to carry you off, then there was another life to go to. It was a test of faith, and Soledad’s faith, Willems believed, was so fierce and violent because of how long she’d kept it submerged. In the absence of Isabel and Ulises, Henri thought it had awoken, and it seemed to want to make an offering of both her body and his. The Dutchman had not forgotten the quiet, unresolved disturbance between them, but he was also amazed by the limitlessness of their consensual torture. They had come to an implicit agreement in bed, in the wet, earthy air of their plant-ridden bedroom: the body could not last, it would not last, and therefore it was ripe for sacrifice.

  Willems mentioned this to Soledad’s doctor. He was afraid Soledad might wear herself out, that she was busy fucking when she should have been convalescing. He was also afraid of himself. A few nights past he had not only turned Soledad over in bed but had reached around her side and grabbed, with not a little force, the scar tissue of her chest. He’d never done this before, and it made Soledad heave. She’d cried out, but when he let go, she took his hand and pressed it harder into the scar. She’d liked it, and so had Willems, but the gesture had opened a door, and before the night was over, he’d pulled out a tuft of her hair, grasped her neck hard enough to bruise the skin, and bit her in the ass; they had not known it till the morning, but he’d broken the skin, and the sheets were streaked with Soledad’s blood. Willems was terrified. He felt as though his body were succumbing in some way to the cancer. Soledad’s form was retreating before his eyes, and with her permission he’d gone about reclaiming it. Willems had never felt so powerful. He’d also never felt so shamed, so childish, trying to hold on to something that was clearly in the early stages of decay, as if he could hold Soledad back from the pit of death.

  The doctor said, You love her. This is strange but not unnatural. You want to keep her.

  She’s not mine to keep, Willems said. She’s not a possession.

  Our bodies, the doctor said, are not the people we love. And it seems she wants you to keep at it. If it makes her feel better, I’d keep doing it.

  Willems shook his head.

  Maybe also schedule a few sessions with a counselor, the doctor suggested. It doesn’t sound like she says much about it, and sometimes it’s helpful to just talk about these things with no real goal in mind. Just describe the circumstances, characterize it, define it, and whatnot. Perhaps schedule a few sessions for yourself as well. These situations are often harder on the family. They’re the ones left behind.

  A week later and in a psych-ward office smelling faintly of sawdust, a psychologist asked Soledad how she was feeling lately.

  I miss my children, she said. The chemo is fine. I know what to expect this second time around, but I miss my son and my daughter. They’re twins. That’s from their father’s side; their father’s mother had a twin sister. Mr. Willems is not their father. That man is in Cuba still. Ulises was born a few minutes before Isabel, but you’d think she was the older one. I don’t know whether birth order really means anything, though perhaps it’s different when twins are involved. The house was quiet before they left. One of them, my daughter, doesn’t speak. She can but chooses not to. I wish sometimes that the difference between them being home and away was more obvious. I keep expecting to walk through the kitchen and see one of them. I can’t believe the silence means what it means. Does that make sense? It sounds like nonsense when I say it aloud.

  The psychologist asked about the condition of Soledad’s body: did she notice any difference in reaction to the second round of chemo compared to the first?

  Yes, I do, Soledad said. I am awake at night constantly. The first time through I slept like I was already dead. My body, I think, was in a state of shock from all the drugs, and it just wanted to shut down completely between sessions. Sitting up for hours for the treatment nearly emptied me. As soon as it was over, though, I started to feel remarkably better. The tumor hadn’t left, but my body was acting like it had. They originally thought I’d only be strong enough for one round. But here I am, and this second round is a different world.

  The psychologist wondered what Soledad thought about all night when she was awake.

  My body. I’ve nev
er been so aware of what my body feels like as I am now that I’m stuck in bed. Before when I slept, I had favorite positions, places I liked to put my arms and legs. But now that I’ve been altered, I can’t find the same spots. My arms lie differently without breasts. Sleeping on my chest isn’t painful but it is odd. And I don’t like sleeping on my back at all.

  The psychologist got to the point: new appetites?

  I just want to be tired again, Soledad said. Our sex used to be wonderful, but it didn’t ever exhaust me.

  We could try sleeping pills, the psychologist suggested.

  I suppose. But that won’t really make me tired, will they? They’ll just shut down my brain, put a fog over it. My body will still feel the same. I take enough pills as it is.

  Do you think, the psychologist said, that this is something you should share with Mr. Willems?

  I don’t see how Henri would benefit from knowing this, she said. To be frank, he hasn’t stopped himself from being rough with me. Even if it does disturb him, it doesn’t stop him. But if he knew what it was I was after, I’m sure he’d suggest something else. Taking up a sport or longer walks or something without any adrenaline.

  What was the sex like before?

  Loving. Or passionate. It was heated, but nothing like this. This feels necessary or, at least, necessary if I want to stay sane. Before it was mostly pleasure, mostly another way to enjoy each other’s skin.

  Do you still find Mr. Willems attractive?

  Yes, she said, though to be frank, I am more interested in what he’s capable of doing to me than I am in exploring his flesh. It sounds like I’m testing him, doesn’t it? To see what he’ll eventually do.

  Do you think, the psychologist wondered, he could really, truly hurt you? In a matter that goes beyond play?

  Soledad thought for a moment. Only if I asked him to.

  It’s exciting, the psychologist said.

  What is? she asked.

  You smiled just now, he said. You said if I asked him to, and you smiled just a little bit.