Now I feel myself blushing, Soledad said.
What’s thrilling about it?
Soledad paused a moment. Throwing away my body, she said.
Doing what you want with it, the psychologist said.
She said, Maybe that’s too simple.
Of course it is, but you haven’t yet told me how.
—
Willems also visited a counselor, but not the same one as Soledad, a distinction his counselor pointed out right away.
It didn’t seem like a good idea, Willems said. I thought it might make it harder for Soledad if she knew I was talking to the same person. Like I was telling our secrets, confessions a therapist could use against her.
Has she done something wrong? the counselor asked.
No, of course not. She’s ill. I just mean it would seem unfair. If her counselor knew things ahead of time, I feel like he or she might come to certain conclusions. Then it might not matter what Soledad is saying. Maybe a diagnosis would already be under way.
Did you tell her counselor anything before their session? Did you write anything down on the intake sheets?
Yes, I think so.
What did you write? the counselor asked.
That our situation feels different now, Willems said. That we don’t interact the same way. It feels like our connection is askew.
Anything else?
I mentioned our lovemaking has changed.
I saw that. Very different, it seems. Do you feel that was a betrayal somehow?
I had not considered it one.
But, the counselor said, you didn’t want to share the same counselor.
No, that didn’t seem like it would be helpful.
So really you didn’t want to betray her trust more than you already had, the counselor said.
I know that’s not an accusation, but it feels like one. But I see your point. Yes, talking about our problems to the same person would have felt wrong. My version might have skewed the truth. This is her illness, not mine.
So she can talk freely? the counselor said. She’s allowed to betray your trust because she’s the one who’s ill?
Am I afraid she’s telling our secrets? I hope she is. I hope she’s talking about everything she needs to.
What do you think it would be like if you were talking to her psychologist right now instead of me? What if your session came right after hers?
I believe I’d have a hard time with that, Willems said. I’d feel as though the psychologist would know too much about me, or that he’d know the same things I did, which might be unsettling.
How come?
I don’t know. Actually, isn’t it obvious? No man likes the idea of another man having intimate access to his wife.
But you two aren’t married.
Maybe I’ve come to think of us that way, Willems said.
You think you’ve earned that distinction, the counselor said.
We have been through a great deal of pain together, and I can’t imagine leaving her.
Is that love or marriage, though? You seem to love her very much, but marriage, if I am being overly simplistic, is someone accepting that love completely. Do you feel completely accepted by Soledad?
I don’t think she would do the things she does with me with someone she does not accept. I think that our strange behavior is possible because of our closeness.
And before? Before the new kind of lovemaking, did she accept you then? Or is this now the moment you feel brought in entirely?
I don’t know. There wasn’t a time stamp on our relationship before. She wasn’t dying yet, and we were happy. She does seem to be letting go of herself. But I can’t say if she’s giving up or giving herself to me. I’m not sure she knows what’s happening, which is why we’re here.
This, for you, is maybe about commitment then. You are asking yourself if this is her proposal to you.
Maybe, Willems said.
Do you worry about her past, then? The manner in which she left her legal husband?
No.
Have you ever met her husband? the counselor asked.
No, never spoken with or seen the man. The closest I’ve come is a letter he wrote to his son.
The counselor asked what Willems thought of Uxbal.
Nothing really, Willems said. I can’t picture him in my mind. I’ve hung around his son enough that you’d think I’d be able to extrapolate something, but I haven’t. At best, he is the man who gave Soledad children. At worst, he is the man who hurt her.
Who are you in all of this?
The man who deals with her pain.
Do you think about the letter often? the counselor asked.
I think about it the mornings after sex.
The rough sex?
Yes, Willems said. After the rough sex. I think to myself, there is a man shouting out into the void. There is a man who knows things about the woman I am with that I do not. Soledad has said before that her husband and I are not too dissimilar in some cases. Our best parts, she’s said, often line up.
The counselor said, You have all these years together now that her husband doesn’t. Don’t you think you know some things he does not?
Yes, yes.
I don’t mean to be crass, the counselor said, but do you think he’s ever bitten her on the ass?
Willems said, You’re right, of course. Unless this is some older version of Soledad. Unless this is who she used to be when she was with him. Which means I’m the one still learning how to touch her. I feel like she is leading me on, sometimes, but I can’t figure out why. She used to want me, but now she wants something from me. It’s like we’ve started all over again. As if we’re just now at the beginning.
—
On the streets of Havana, Inez kept touching Ulises’s elbow as she guided him. Inez also touched him when they changed directions, when she read from the plaques they came upon, when they slid between parked cars. She slipped her arm into Ulises’s, and he thought this was a custom of the city. At one point a truck rushed by, nearly nicking their heels as they passed an alley, and Inez put her hand on Ulises’s chest. She touched him enough that Ulises forgot that he was on a tour and acted as though they’d stumbled upon one another as old friends do sometimes. Yet this was a friendship of a different sort, more like an old devotion resurrected, as if Ulises had pined after Inez in childhood. Her fingers—mariposa stems compared to his thumbs, thick as mangrove roots—kept finding his knuckles or palms or shoulders. They put him at ease, and by nightfall he asked her questions he’d not ever thought to ask a woman.
You told me you’re not from here, Ulises said.
I’m from the east, Inez said. Near Palma Soriano.
The country? he asked.
A bit like the country, she said, but not entirely. On the edge of the wilderness, maybe.
That’s where my family is from, Ulises told her. He told her Buey Arriba was also on the edge of rough country, but he realized he was only guessing. He said, Anyway, there are mountains just to the south, and I’ve known people to get lost in them.
I didn’t think you were a native, she said. You have an odd accent, and you don’t seem like you grew up here. You’re too big for this city. You take up the entire sidewalk. Is this your first time here?
It’s my second time to Havana, he said, but I don’t remember much of the first. I was young. I’m looking for my sister. She’s left our family, and we think she came through Havana. We think she’s gone back to Buey Arriba.
I’m sure you’ll find her, Inez said. The towns out east are much smaller. There are fewer people, and they all know one another. A different sort of place than Havana.
I was told that, Ulises said. He asked, Why did you leave?
For school and work, she said.
There are no museums in Palma Soriano? he asked.
There are more here.
And your family?
Still there, she said.
Do you make it back?
I don’t, she said.
Inez took Ulises by the forearm and asked him if he was hungry. The rum had long since worn off, and he said yes. She took him to a barrio just east of the fading Chinatown, and they slipped quietly into a restaurant serving tuna wontons, ham sandwiches, greasy noodles, mangoes, glazed herring, and plantains. Inez did not eat nearly as much as Ulises, but she sat as close to him as possible, and once or twice she touched his leg, though when Ulises looked up at her, she’d turn away. She seemed to be making a decision about something that did not concern him, and he found himself jealous of whatever thought kept her attention from him. He wondered if he’d somehow offended her. There, perhaps, was another reason for her migration to Havana, a troubling background his questions had evoked, but the notion only intensified Ulises’s attraction to Inez, the possibility that she too had left her home without much choice. He felt his thumbs throb and his lips sweat, and he could not keep himself from looking at the shape of Inez’s neck or smelling the gasoline musk she’d acquired from their long afternoon of walking the city and dodging ancient diesel pickups.
I miss my women, Ulises thought. He knew the sentiment was a little perverse. Inez’s presence was not the same as his mother’s or sister’s. He also knew, however, that he’d spent his entire life between those two women, one far ahead of him and one just behind, and there was no separating their DNA from his, no way to extract genes from the skin or memories from the mind. Reflected at the bottom of his empty glass were his face and his eyes, both offshoots of his sister’s, both products of his mother. He began to understand his family, the Encarnacíons, in the same way he was beginning to understand his mother’s body: short on time. He felt an urge for Inez, but in that urge was the strange, regenerative force of procreation, and Ulises thought of a future when he had daughters who looked like Soledad and Isabel. But he could not parse exactly between the want of his body and the longing he had for his family. I’m fucked, Ulises concluded, and he ordered another beer.
But then Ulises considered that it might just be the heat and the city, the excitement of being a solitary man for the first time in his life. Havana was an aphrodisiac inasmuch as the weather, the low-hanging moisture, kept shirts loosely buttoned and feet mostly bare. He remembered his steel-toed boots back home and how tight he would tie them in February to trap the heat. Beneath the table he could see Inez’s toes wiggling, and though Hartford summers were damp, they had an end. Willems had once told Ulises that on the hottest days in Cuba the laborers drank steaming coffee from the moment they woke straight through to the end of their shifts to keep their sweat up. One was cooler if one was a little clammy, and it occurred to Ulises that the only way to sleep at night in Havana, besides vomiting oneself to exhaustion, was to find another body and sweat it out together. And where Ulises had expected the city to dull a little in the evening, to rest quietly in the welcome dark, the streets were, instead, filled with the humming of a thousand electric fans all spinning at once. His hotel room, he recalled, had two fans, and the restaurant they were in had six. On their walk he’d seen a twirling blade atop almost every windowsill, as if Havana planned to take a large, collective breath as soon as the sun set. The sea breeze, he imagined, was wonderful at night, and it took a mechanical effort to bring that moving air into houses and bedrooms.
The waiter brought Ulises another wet glass of pale beer, but before Ulises could take it from the man, Inez asked, May I? I’m not thirsty enough for my own, but a sip would be wonderful.
Ulises watched as Inez drank from the glass, and he saw some of the grease from her lips smudge the rim. She picked up a napkin, and he thought she would wipe away the stain, but, instead, she used the cloth to soak up the condensation. With the damp rag she wiped her forehead.
Like living in a rain cloud, she said, and she laughed a little at her own joke.
She swiped the napkin across her cheeks, and then she pressed it against her chest. Ulises watched as the smallest trickle of water ran down her sternum and into her blouse. Ulises wondered at the effort it would take to bring Inez back to his room, but then he realized he had no idea where they were anymore, and she, perhaps fortunately for Ulises, would have to walk him home. He had never been alone with a woman who wasn’t his mother or sister, and this he knew was partly due to his size and appearance. The scar on his head was magnified by his bulk, and the two together afforded him as much solitude as he could want, a condition he’d grown so accustomed to that he’d barely ever noticed the few women who populated his introductory classics courses at the university.
Moreover, his earliest memories of sex were filled with his mother and Willems’s moaning, and alongside such noise he had endured the distinct and overwhelming asexual silence of his sister. Yet drinking his beer and looking at Inez, Ulises saw how unafraid of him she was; she might have been even arrogant in front of him, speaking knowledgeably about Havana, sometimes, as if he was a younger man or a cousin of hers. At the same time, she was flirtatious, though Ulises couldn’t tell if this was intentional or accidental. He couldn’t classify the difference between their erratic arm-locking and the dictatorial manner in which she sometimes pointed out landmarks or told him where to turn. But above all that, she didn’t shy away from him or his body, and though that was a far cry from attraction, it was still fresh territory for Ulises, a place in which he could talk to a woman—and it felt like he was meeting a woman for the first time, unfair as that was to his mother or sister—as though he had no body, or as though his body was no longer a wall between him and routine conversation. And when Inez did seem to flirt, when she touched him for no reason, all of a sudden Ulises was a man—again, as though for the first time—because he was wanted. He began to think, as the girl stole yet another sip from his lemon-colored beer, that sexuality was a gift given from one person to another, that desire begat desire in a way that was both more subtle and permanent than he’d ever imagined.
After Ulises paid for dinner, Inez did lead him back to his hotel. Outside, clouds had gathered in the sky above the harbor, and on their walk it rained in little spurts. The air smelled of salt and fish, and just enough precipitation fell to wet their clothes for Ulises to offer Inez a towel from his bathroom. He told her he could also ask the front desk for an umbrella if she’d prefer. Inez refused the umbrella but accompanied Ulises upstairs.
A hurricane is coming, Inez said to him once they were alone—sitting on the edge of his hotel bed. The room was cool compared to the air outside, and someone—a maid, perhaps—had come in while Ulises was gone to turn on his two fans.
You’re the second person to tell me a storm is coming, Ulises said, but no one else seems to know. The clerk at the desk knew nothing when I asked him.
The showers we walked through are the outer rain bands, she said. They stutter like that before a storm hits. There was some time between them, so maybe two days until it’s here.
Inez’s shoulders were wet, and her shirtsleeves clung to her elbows as she spoke. Sitting close to her and with the lights on, Ulises could see that her face, which he had first thought was rounded and full, was really just square. The jaw, which maybe in another kind of light seemed to curve, possessed a sharper line, and it stretched beautifully when she spoke.
What happens here during a hurricane? Ulises asked.
Nothing, except most folks get a day off from work, she said. If the water rises too much, they’ll evacuate the city.
It doesn’t seem like they have plans for an evacuation.
It’s too soon to tell.
Where do you go when they evacuate you?
They send people inland to the sugar plantations, where they set up makeshift dormitories, Inez said. Men in one dorm, women and children in the other if there’s time.
It seems odd that they would separate families.
It was odd to me at first, but it’s to protect the young women.
Have you ever lost your place? Ulises asked.
No, she said. I have a
n apartment not far from here. It’s in a newer building and on the seventh floor. It’s usually safe. Sometimes I don’t evacuate. I’ll probably stay there for this storm as well. The rain was not so bad.
Will you stay there tonight? Ulises asked, and he realized as he asked this, a question about where Inez would sleep, that he could be no worse a coward. He wished that instead of speaking he’d touched her neck and gambled for something more than the curt no he was hoping for.
You haven’t paid me yet, she said.
For the tour?
For the evening, Inez said. She blinked and added, They’ll charge you more if I stay the night.
He said, It’s all one rate, isn’t it?
For couples, yes, Inez answered, but not for hookers.
You told me you were a history student.
I am, she said, but books aren’t free. If you’re worried, I visit the doctor once a month. You don’t want to pay for it?
I feel tricked, he told her. Take whatever you want out of my wallet.
She said, I’ll take seventy, but I deserve more. The money is for what we’re going to do, not for the dinner or the walking together.
I don’t know what to make of that, Ulises said. One led to the other, but you’re telling me you were a separate person for each. Would you have slept with me without being paid?
Of course not, she said. You’re a traveler passing through. Why bother when we talked first about your going east and second about my spending the night?
You worked me, he said.
I could have lied to you, Inez said. I could have slept with you and then left in the middle of the night, taken whatever I wanted out of your wallet. I could have propositioned you from the start. You were nearly passed out, and I would have had every right to drag you straight back to this hotel room, nurse you with more beer, and then take off your pants. Do you think, she asked, that when I work, I sleep with only one man a day? That I walk the streets with every man before I bed him?
Inez stood up at the side of the bed and placed a hand on her hip. She was waiting for him, and Ulises, seeing the rigidity of her pose, was reminded of the Giraldilla weather vane. The severe figure supposedly awaited her husband, but the fleshy, exposed right leg—Inez’s right leg held beneath her skirt, though Ulises could see the faint outline of her thigh pressing through the damp fabric—seemed to call for any man. It lacked modesty, but Ulises would hardly call it vulgar; instead, the iron thigh exhibited the same bravado that Inez displayed. They shared clarity of intentions. But as Ulises thought about it, the truth of the matter—whether or not their walking together had been a scheme or an unexpected joy—became less and less important. He wanted to consider their meal together a brief romance, and the possibility was enticing enough. She had already confessed some affection, and Ulises didn’t know if it was fair to ask her to abandon her role entirely, to ask her to live beyond what were her normal means.
The Mortifications Page 14
