The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  The train rolled directly into the morning light as it headed east. Packed with bodies, the railcar was already hot, but soon the metal roofs were baking, and the cars filled with steam. Ulises began to sweat, the few hairs left on his head curling, his sunburn swelling. He felt a throbbing in his scalp and was certain he’d burned his scar even uglier. The throb became a tapping, and Ulises realized it was not the sunburn but a small finger poking the tissue. He turned and saw the little black boy who’d been asleep in his mother’s arms, now standing on the seat. The woman slept. The boy seemed to want to smile, to see if perhaps Ulises would play a game with him. Ulises touched his scar, and it was tender, as though it were still an open wound.

  The boy said, Quemado—burnt.

  Ulises told him yes and no. He said the sun made his scalp so red, but it was an accident that first cut him. The boy’s hand wavered, and Ulises nodded. The boy put his thumb on the scar and turned it in circles.

  Be gentle, Ulises said. But the boy pressed his finger into the scar, which made Ulises yell. The mother woke and grabbed at her son. She spoke too fast for Ulises, and Simón turned to help, but before he could explain, the mother and her son were pushing toward the rear of the car. Ulises called out his apologies.

  What were you doing? Simón asked.

  The kid wanted to touch my head, Ulises said. It seemed harmless. Do you think she’s going to stand the rest of the way?

  Her choice, Simón said.

  Ulises stood and tried to find the faces of the mother and son in the mass of upright passengers, but he could not. I didn’t imagine them, Ulises said.

  Sit down, Simón said. You’re going to make people nervous.

  I remember that boy from somewhere, Ulises said.

  Impossible.

  Suddenly, the train was slowing. It came to a stop, and a conductor walked through the cars, instructing the passengers to disembark. The train, he said, was headed back to Havana for another shipment of supplies before the storm hit.

  Out on the platform, Ulises and Simón discovered they’d only made it as far as Santa Clara. Simón asked around, and miraculously he found a squad of soldiers headed as far east as Las Tunas. He and Ulises could join them if they didn’t mind a hot, bumpy ride in the back of a transport truck.

  In the cargo hold a soldier brought out a guitar and began to play while the rest of the men smoked cigarettes and chatted as best they could over the grinding engine. Some soldiers requested songs, and the musician asked Ulises and Simón if he could play something for them, but Ulises’s stomach churned, and he shut his eyes after saying no thanks. A young soldier slid over to Ulises’s side and pushed a cigarette into his hand.

  The nicotine is good for the nausea, the young soldier said. He asked Ulises what he and Simón were doing that they had to travel during a hurricane.

  Visiting family out east, Ulises said.

  A visit? the soldier asked. Come on, man. I’m not the CDR. I’m just talking.

  The CDR, Ulises said. I remember them. Neighborhood watch?

  And I thought you were a tourist, the soldier said. I should have guessed otherwise since your Cuban is so good. Yes, neighborhood watch, or something like that. Mostly they tell on you when you say shit about the government. Committee to Defend the Glorious Revolution and whatnot.

  My sister is missing, Ulises said. We think she’s in Buey Arriba. I’ve come to take her home.

  What’s his name? the soldier asked.

  Whose? Ulises asked.

  The guy your sister ran off with. The macho who thinks he’s got her away from you.

  Our father, Ulises told him.

  Fuck, the soldier said.

  It’s not like that.

  Still, the young man said. My Nicanora, she’s older than me, but she tried scooting off to Jaronu with this black guy who’s about thirty kilos bigger than me. What could I do? I joined the army. Four weeks’ training, then I was assigned. First break, and I got my whole platoon to go to Jaronu. We beat the crap out of the guy and then took a nice dip in the ocean. Brought my sister with us to Playa Santa Lucia. Beautiful beaches. Then she fucked one of my buddies there. I told them to get married, and they did. Three kids, and they’re all right, because he made sergeant. You got an army with you or just that guy?

  Just me, Ulises said.

  I hope your papa’s ill, the soldier said. Girls love their daddies.

  He stopped talking to light himself a cigarette, and Ulises watched how he held the stick in the corner of his mouth, just like Willems, who could buoy a cigar with just his bottom lip.

  What did you do before the army? Ulises asked.

  Cut cane.

  Do you like it?

  Cutting cane?

  No, riding in these trucks and building barracks and wearing fatigues, Ulises said.

  It’s all right, the soldier said. We have more time off than most. I meet a lot of women around the island. A lot of cheap smokes.

  I grow tobacco in the States, Ulises said.

  No shit, the soldier said. How do you like our cigarettes?

  You don’t toast the leaves long enough. They’re chalky because of it. Ulises looked at his cigarette, which had gone out, and then he asked, What did you say to your sister? To get her home?

  Nothing, the soldier said. I told you, we beat the shit out of that black coño. You don’t ask the girl; you just take away all her reasons for staying.

  I’m not going to beat up my old man, Ulises said, but he was quiet then, because he’d not called Uxbal his old man in a long time, not since he was a boy on the island and there were other friends he ran with who had their own old men to watch out for. I haven’t seen him in years, he said.

  The soldier could barely pinch what was left of his cigarette.

  Better for you, he said. No love lost. You just go and tell him straight up. He’s probably got some gray on him now. A man starts to weaken after thirty-five, so you’ve got him there. They teach you that in the army to remind you how few years you’ve got to be a strong soldier. They’d prefer it if we were smart soldiers, but who’s going to listen to that when they’re eighteen and feeling fine?

  How old are you? Ulises asked.

  Twenty-three. The soldier laughed but then stopped and said, You’ve got to do the talking, man. Don’t let your father start. Fathers know.

  Know what?

  They know all the mistakes you’ve ever made, because they made them first.

  My father used to be a rebel, Ulises said. But that was years ago.

  Rebel for what?

  I’m not sure. He didn’t love the revolution. I think he thought the island would turn out differently. Can I have another smoke?

  The soldier gave Ulises another cigarette and then lit one for himself. The two of them watched the road from out of the back of the truck. It was wet. The soldier said it was supposed to be a highway, but this stretch no one had ever finished. It had rained that morning, and so the dirt was mud, and the tires spun out every hundred feet or so as the driver tried to pick up speed. The sun was way up high, and though the morning steam had burned off, it was replaced with the sweat from the soldiers and the Caribbean humidity that never went away despite the winds coming from the gulf.

  Are there rebels still? Ulises asked.

  Some, the soldier said. But they’re crazies. They live alone and steal food. They don’t talk to nobody. Mostly they think the army is going to revolt against the Líder, and they’ll join when it happens. Bunch of stupids waiting for something to come that already came. Missed the boat, you know?

  My mother said the army used to raid the hills once a month. Like checking for mice in the walls. They’d set some fires and smoke out the rebels. She said it was how they cleared the cane fields of snakes.

  Not anymore, the soldier said. The CDR finds rebels, if there are rebels to be found, then they call us, and we pick them up. We don’t go hunting for them anymore.

  If my father is still a rebel, I c
ould turn him in, Ulises said.

  The soldier threw his butt out the back of the truck and shook his head.

  That would be bad, man.

  What happens to rebels? Ulises asked.

  They go to rehabilitation camps for two years. Then they go to work in the cane fields. Between cuttings they build roads.

  My father grew tomatoes when we were young, Ulises said. He could work in a field.

  The soldier shook his head. After five years they would execute him. They would wait five years to try him in court, and when he was beaten down and done, then they’d put him in front of a judge. He would confess on paper, if you know what I mean, and then they’d take him out back of somewhere and shoot him. You don’t want that for your papi. You’d go crazy yourself knowing what you did, maybe kill yourself after a while. Or you’d get some dumb idea in your head that you could make up for what you did. You could start your own revolution in your father’s name. Then you’re just another coño waiting to be picked up by the CDR. Then you’re just as bad as your pops.

  —

  The day after Isabel took Guillermo, Uxbal denounced his daughter during his bath.

  Those men are disgusting and probably sick, he said. You shouldn’t touch them. Who knows what diseases?

  Upright on his cot, he smelled not only of body odor, but also of weeds, an aroma Isabel was never able to wash completely from his skin. She was kneeling at his side and scrubbing the rough gray surface of his kneecaps when he started chastising her. His tone was suddenly like that of his preaching days: caustic, sharp, arrogant, and bullying. It put a fire on her tongue.

  Is anyone among you sick? Isabel asked. Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

  Uxbal didn’t answer, but he reached out and gripped the hand in which she held the washcloth.

  Your voice, he said, and he closed his eyes. He could not look at her and hear her at the same time. He shook, but Isabel thought it was only the cold water on his knees. She took her hand out of his and let Uxbal slump back onto his bed, half-washed, half-covered in soap.

  Why did you put me up on a crate when I was a kid? Isabel asked. Were you really interested in the future of Cuba? Or were you scared that Ma was already leaving you? Were you scared of being alone, so you asked me to do something that might bring me back? Aren’t these the things you asked for?

  Is this where you want to have a child? Uxbal asked.

  Answer me. Was it all just shit?

  I remember believing.

  I think that you were happy to see me because you were alone and because I was so different. You were happy because you thought the girl you’d taken to church hadn’t come back, and you wouldn’t have to deal with her promise.

  Uxbal opened his eyes. That’s all finished now, he said.

  The vow was mine, not yours. And I’ve only just arrived.

  Uxbal seemed to shrink then, into an even smaller man. His head sank farther into his shoulders, his neck shriveling like a worm in the sun.

  It was then that Isabel understood she couldn’t remain this close to her father. She had been giving herself away to him her whole life, and his voice was the sound she’d waited in silence for. But he spat condescension at her as she gently scrubbed the scent of excrement from behind his knees. That his words could shake her still deeply frightened her.

  And despite having broken almost all her vows, Isabel wanted desperately then her Catholic God. Uxbal spoke as though his daughter was bored—which to Isabel meant purposeless—and wanted, on a strange mountain range on an island she’d long since nearly forgotten, another kind of new terrain: fleshy, alive, pulsing, unclean. As if this were the place, because it was itself already ruined, to reach out in all directions and experiment unabashedly with filthy otherness. As if she were done with the sharp, righteous spirit she’d been honing her entire life.

  The bath unfinished, Isabel abandoned Uxbal and wandered the decrepit camp. Ants canvassed the mountaintop, marching in black veins up and down the walls of every shack. The bugs dripped through the wood and into the damp spaces where she knew humans waited in silence for nothing. She heard, faintly, hands slapping at the flies that lazily came and went from hut to hut to feast on dead skin and earwax and dried snot and the oils of an unwashed beard. All around her the settlement was decaying back into the forest: the woolly undergrowth threatened in all directions; a whitish cloud circled perpetually around the peak; lyonia overran the small clearing between the shacks, the rebels’ footsteps not enough to wear the ground down to dirt.

  Of the vacant shacks, Isabel chose the one with the fewest bugs, the sturdiest frame, and the most light when the door was open. The space inside was not large, perhaps the size of a priest’s vestry, and the roof sagged toward the back. But the floor was even, and the rear wall had been nailed to a wide royal palm, which meant it could survive a passing storm. Clearing out old clothes, a broken chair, a fabric-less cot, and a scattering of beetle husks, Isabel went about making a chapel in which to pray, a place for God in a place He seemed unconcerned with.

  Days passed, and Isabel began to worry that someone had died in the shack, because when she was inside and working—plugging holes in the walls with clay she dug from the mountain streams, lashing fresh palm fronds to the underside of the roof—shadows flickered noiselessly across the open door. She’d look up and see nothing, hear nothing. To ease her superstitions, she began to sing as she worked. She found she loved the tenor of her voice. The cords in her throat shook evenly. They had been resting for so long, they seemed to have an uncommon strength. And perhaps it was the years spent listening so attentively to hymns in church, but somehow Isabel could carry a tune.

  Isabel was not being haunted, however; she was being watched by two of the rebel children, a boy and a girl. They’d heard her songs and were enchanted. While the adults of the camp, Uxbal included, shied away from Isabel’s voice, the two children, the youngest among the group, could not help themselves and pressed their bodies against the outer clapboards of the chapel-in-progress. They sought out the wood’s cracks and hollow spots so that they might hear more clearly the unnatural and bewitching sound of the outsider.

  Isabel discovered them on a day when the girl tripped on a root outside the shack and, being a child, began to cry. The boy abandoned her and ran off. Isabel, finding the girl outside and bleeding from her big toe, picked her up and brought her inside. There was a post at the door that Isabel had hacked away at with a rock and into which she’d wedged a scooped piece of bark. She’d poured water into the bowl and in the mornings blessed herself with it, making the sign of the cross. Cradling the girl’s heel, Isabel dipped the bleeding toe into the makeshift font and washed away the soil and grass. She examined the toe for the depth of the cut and saw that it was only a nick. Using the underside of her shirt, she put pressure on the bleeding skin and stanched the blood. The girl looked up at her, and Isabel was caught off guard by the blankness of her eyes, as if she’d not been taught how to be held, how to be so close to a larger body, or how to be close to another face without disturbing it.

  This is the weight of a child once she’s left your body, Isabel thought. This is what my daughter will feel like.

  Isabel did not know why she assumed her baby—if she was pregnant, though she could not know just yet—would be a girl. But it seemed logical as she held the rebel child in her arms, her presence a natal omen of sorts. The girl reached up and put her dirty fingers on Isabel’s lips. She pinched the lower lip, and Isabel drew back her face, telling the girl, Don’t do that.

  The girl stopped immediately, and this Isabel was familiar with, children who could understand what you meant when it was said straight at them but who couldn’t say anything back. The girl reached again, but this time her hand found the throat, and the grubby fingers caused Isabel to cough. The girl was startled, and her vacant expression gave way to wide eyes, as if she’d understood
something, and she pressed her palm against Isabel’s windpipe.

  Sing, Isabel thought, and she sang about the Blessed Mother.

  The girl stayed near Isabel all afternoon. She sat on the dirt near the back of the chapel where Isabel was busy lashing together a cross from two pine branches. Isabel sang everything she remembered, and, watching the girl intermittently, she saw that the child preferred slower songs with drawn-out vowels and simple harmonies. The girl is drawn to time, Isabel thought, sound spread out over seconds. Isabel remembered Uxbal’s mandated silence, and she thought the girl was craving somebody’s words again. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. People were not people, Isabel thought, unless they communicated.

  The girl watched her as well as listened, and she seemed to know what Isabel was going to do before she did it. She could read bodies, see the future in a bending knee or predict the action of the hand in a single twitching thumb. But watching a body is not the same as feeling it. Isabel recalled the deaf children at the convent who listened to pop songs by pressing their palms onto the stereo speakers in the rec room. They felt the music. The rebel girl’s mouth hung open as she listened, and she maybe wondered if her own throat might be capable of such noise. It was clear that it been a long time since she had been spoken to. After a few hours the girl seemed tired, and eventually she lay down, closing her eyes. Isabel stopped singing, but the girl sat back up, and Isabel had to go on.

  Isabel made only slow progress on the chapel. Using an old cot, discarded nails, and a few boards from another collapsed hut, she fashioned an altar. For kneelers, she stuffed grass into the old T-shirts she’d found and tied off their ends. Stumps and rotting planks would do for pews, though there was only room for three benches in the entire shack.

  Throughout all this, the girl—once the novelty of Isabel’s voice waned—helped as best she could, though she was small, couldn’t lift much, and walked with a limp. She, like Uxbal, was clearly malnourished. Isabel continued to sing but also began to teach the girl things. She taught her how to bless herself when entering the chapel, how to kneel before the cross, and how to hold her hands in prayer. She tried to teach prayer in the general sense, but the girl’s expression remained blank throughout the explanation. The child still couldn’t or wouldn’t speak.