The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  —

  Ulises awoke while the morning was still gray, and he awoke not because he’d had enough sleep, but because he smelled calcium hydroxide in the air. He knew the odor from his childhood, from the sugar refinery just east of Buey Arriba. The compound was used to purify the crystals, and it made the air drifting into Buey Arriba heavier. Ulises remembered walking outside on summer days when the wind was barely there and feeling as though to breathe was to lick the earth.

  Getting up from his hotel bed, he went to the window, and he saw the same smoke from the night before. There was a refinery nearby, and that fact made Ulises restless. He wanted to hurry and get to Buey Arriba. It was the first time he’d been eager to arrive. He was sick of the journey, and everything he saw or smelled now would have a similar effect on him, reminding him of home, though he wasn’t there yet. When Simón finally awoke, he told Ulises to be patient.

  We have to find a phone line, Simón said. Or, at least, a messenger, remember? Your mother needs to know you’re alive.

  They found neither in Bayamo. The phone lines were still down across the country. The hurricane had turned toward Florida, but it first had ravaged Havana and the northern Cuban coast. No one in Bayamo was worried, though. The city would suffer only heavy rains. Still, people sat outside on their porches, and most businesses were shut down, as though the storm was inevitable. At the post office, which was open but nearly empty, an older worker told Ulises and Simón to go to Santiago if it was urgent. They could send word by boat to Port-de-Paix in Haiti, where there were American hotels.

  Ulises said to Simón, I’m going to Buey Arriba.

  Take the horse, Simón said. I’ll find a ride.

  I have a much shorter way to go. You take the horse and go to Santiago. Then you can come back more quickly.

  Simón gave Ulises some of his money and another shirt to put in his sack. He said, Take care, and Ulises thought then he sounded just like Orozco, low and informal, as if they were parting at the end of a workday. Or Simón was the shadow of Orozco, the part Orozco was forgetting each day he was away from Mexico and his mother.

  The forty kilometers to Buey Arriba were not hard to walk, as Ulises had been sitting for what seemed like weeks. His legs felt good, and with his hat, sunglasses, and sunblock he could manage the heat. It was afternoon when the road, populated by a few stray farmhands on pony-driven carriages, brought him to the lake outside Buey Arriba. The body of water, a reservoir, if Ulises remembered right, had no name, and it was the mountain runoff of the rains that broke across the northern face of the Sierra Maestra. Ulises stopped to eat some of the bread he had purchased in Bayamo, and he cooled his feet in the lake water, as they were swollen from the long walk. The river that fed the lake began in the mountains, somewhere near Pico Turquino, which had on its peak a bust of the national hero José Martí. Uxbal had taken Isabel and him up the mountain once. They had hiked along a narrow, one-way road halfway up the range before scrambling to the top.

  Uxbal had said, That’s José Martí.

  The bust, however, had been installed out in the open, and the face, after so many years, had been worn away except for the eyes, which were deep set because Martí had been small and gaunt. Uxbal had let neither Ulises nor Isabel touch the bust, but he’d made them cross themselves and kneel in front of the figure before they turned and headed back down.

  From its border, the town seemed no bigger than Ulises remembered, but it was louder. There was an abundance of Russian trucks, and the ones that passed nearby had cargo holds full of dirt or manure. For a moment Ulises thought he’d made a mistake, but he looked in all directions and remembered quite clearly the warehouse being the last building out of town and the river not far off; it was where the workers would eat their lunches. The residents of Buey Arriba raised cattle, which could be heard lowing in all directions, and Ulises remembered cows outside of Sunday service. He saw a band of oxen in a small field beyond the packinghouse and remembered how loudly they chewed their grass. It was never quiet in Buey Arriba, Ulises heard his mother saying, because the cows are always hungry, which was why the tomatoes grown locally were called oxhearts instead of tomatoes, their shape something like an overgrown strawberry.

  Making for the town center, Ulises passed by the shell of the old packinghouse his father used to work at, but it was empty, and all the window glass had been knocked out or, more likely, stolen. Nothing remained, but Ulises was compelled to make a tour of the hollow structure.

  The interior, which had the appearance of a factory cleared out by a flash flood, smelled of cat urine, and the floor was stained a greenish pink from the thousands of broken guavas spilled over the years. The light pouring in through the open windows illuminated the dust Ulises’s boots kicked up, and behind him he left a trail of faint footprints. Because there were no chairs or tables or even a front desk—hadn’t there been a desk with an old man once who checked you into work?—Ulises had trouble remembering the orientation of the room. He couldn’t tell which end of the building he was at, whether he walked through the loading zone of jam-packed guava crates or whether he was near the spot of the old picnic benches, the three splintered tables the congregation would slide against the walls to make room for Sunday Mass.

  But then Ulises saw the wide trucking doors in front of him, where the guavas were stacked on pallets strung together with fresh twine before being trucked out east or down south. Behind him, then, was the area for prayer, and Ulises, walking to the other end of the structure, thought maybe he saw the scratches on the northern wall where his father or someone else’s father or someone else entirely would hang their homemade cross on Friday afternoons after work let out. It would stay there until Monday morning, when the first man to work would take it down and the cavernous building was transformed again into a place for monotonous labor.

  This was the first place in which Ulises had ever heard the Bible read aloud. The congregation had used a French translation, and there had been a celebration when someone stole—from a tourist? a missionary? a traveling horde of nuns?—a copy of the King James. Though the workers weren’t fluent in English, they, at least, knew more of it than French, and the first Sunday they read aloud the English text, the packinghouse had never been quieter, all ears open, all mouths shut. It was hot because it was always hot, but some force arrested the air that day, and the only wind came from the mouth of the man—it wasn’t Uxbal, maybe a foreman, maybe another shift leader—slowly making his way through the Gospel According to John. Uxbal had sat on a bench, a wooden plank across several crates, leaning against the eastern wall. Overwhelmed by the reading, he had rocked on his ass, his head dipping in agreement every few words or so.

  Ulises thought, This is what Simón was talking about.

  But, strangely, his sister wasn’t present in the memory, and he wondered, Did she have a fever that day? Had the last of the tomatoes needed picking, else they would have gone bad? Had she disobeyed Uxbal on some issue? Had Uxbal wanted only his son that Sunday morning? The last guess was, of course, the least likely, and there existed suddenly the possibility that the righteousness Ulises had wedged between his sister and himself had corrupted his memories of Cuba.

  He approached the northeastern corner of the packinghouse. The walls were made of corrugated sheet metal, now rusted and flaking. Gently, Ulises traced a thumb along one of the raised spines, and he noticed a series of hash marks near the ceiling. The markings, he then remembered, had been the congregation’s Holy Calendar. The nicks in the metal tracked the seasons of the liturgical year—Ordinary Time, Advent, Lent, the Triduum, Easter—and each scratch had a hole at its end where a tack had been plugged to mark the day. At his feet Ulises saw a scattered handful of tiny black nails.

  Simón had said to Ulises, You won’t need her, and now Ulises thought he really understood: he could stop seeing this place through Isabel’s relentless wanting.

  I could just let her go, he whispered.

  He exited the
packinghouse to find the sun low in the sky and the cattle settling into evening meals of grass and weed. Looking toward the Sierra Maestra, he thought of his childhood home and its orange roof, and he decided it would be the only place in Buey Arriba his sister might go. The house was on the south side of the town, as close to the edge of the national forest as possible. Ulises walked in that direction.

  The property was beautiful, and Ulises was inexplicably certain it had always been that way. In his childhood, the house had been walled in year-round by a series of trellises straining against a singular but seemingly perpetual tomato vine. The trellises somehow remained, sagging with oxhearts. The house itself, which he’d assumed would be cracked and falling apart, appeared freshly whitewashed. Hungry, Ulises plucked a tomato from the vine and bit into it. It was delicious, though a little underripe, and he took another bite. He turned the fruit over in his hand. Half the inside was still yellow. He wished to God he had some salt or basil.

  He ate the rest of the tomato, plucked another, and ate it as well. He sat on the ground and was tired, because the taste was so delicious and familiar. He recalled how impossibly thin Uxbal could slice a tomato, so that the cuts were translucent and Ulises could put them over his eyes and they would turn the sky a rosy hue something like a Caribbean sunset. He recalled how his mother ate tomatoes as though they were apples, the juice on her chin, and how she would spit out the seeds. It felt as though he’d forgotten everything. Then he heard a strange voice, the voice of an old woman calling to him, and he looked up. The sound came from a body shuffling in his direction, and it called out to him, Uxbal! Uxbal!

  In Hartford, Willems bought Soledad a television set. They put it in the bedroom so Soledad, who had never been in the habit of going to the movies, let alone watching TV, could do something between sleeping, medicating, therapy, and sex. Up until that point newspapers had sufficed, but now she found she couldn’t concentrate long enough to read an entire article anymore. The stories, always so political, always so objective and distant, were about as distracting of her pain as watching tobacco grow in August. After seeing a few episodes of As the World Turns during a chemo session in the hospital’s treatment clinic, she was hooked, and she asked Willems if they could get a set.

  At first she and Henri watched shows together, mainly in the afternoon after long, violent sessions of lovemaking that left them both bruised and not a little dazed. The silence that followed, which previously had been pregnant with their doubt—what has become of us?—now was interrupted by the intersecting lives of Nancy Hughes, Lisa Grimaldi, Barbara Coleman, Holden Snyder, Lucinda Walsh, et alia. Willems fell asleep to fitful dreams more often than he caught whole shows, but Soledad could not take her eyes from the screen. Her watching developed into an obsession, and one afternoon she started scribbling furious notes into her stenographer’s pads. While Henri napped beside her, she categorized all the players in the drama, recording with unnecessary detail their loves, losses, and reincarnations. This became her daily routine.

  Willems, when he realized what she was doing, took her cataloging as a positive turn. He thought maybe she was reaching for her old life, the one in which she codified the world with shorthand and loved him. Half-awake, he asked her to show him what she’d written, but she told him to wait for a commercial.

  When the episode ended, Henri said, I almost forgot how your notes look. These might as well be hieroglyphics.

  I don’t want to miss anything, Soledad said.

  It all seems a bit tedious, he said. I wonder what you’re getting from this. Maybe you’re thinking of going back to work?

  I’m not.

  You seemed to have found some of your old energy.

  It doesn’t take anything for me to scribble on a pad. What are you worried about?

  I’m worried that you’re not getting enough rest.

  I don’t believe you. But if you’re serious, you could fuck me harder, and then I’d be more tired at the end and could nap with you.

  Henri got up from the bed and put on his pants.

  He said, That’s a cruel thing to say.

  Soledad slipped back under the covers. She felt hot. She felt the urge to touch herself, and she did.

  I’m sorry, she said. That was mean. What are you really saying? Come back to bed and tell me. Or, better, come here and kiss me again.

  We were sharing this, together, you and I, Henri said.

  Sharing what?

  Your dying.

  We’re the only ones here, Henri. You’re the only one watching me die.

  Soledad took her hand from her crotch. She pushed her hair back, and when her hand passed by her face, she could smell herself.

  You think I’m finally dying? she asked.

  I worry that’s what this means. You’re acting like those notes are private. So maybe you’re retreating from our life together, or from life altogether, in anticipation of going. Do you want to be alone right now?

  I want you here, Soledad said. Note-taking is an old habit. You’re asleep, and I’m awake, and I’m a little less alone with the TV on, but my fingers can’t sit still. All it means is that I’m awake. I’m not nearly as far away as you fear I am. I’m just at the edge of the bed, waiting for you to wake up.

  Yet soon enough Soledad was watching two episodes in a row, both the current day’s installment and the rerun of the show from the day before. Watching the rerun, she would fact-check yesterday’s shorthand. Rarely would she find an error, but she did find some joy in adding to the basic who, what, where, and when potential whys and hows. She began to keep exhaustive lists of characters, not only of their roles and the telling details of their faces (hooked nose, chinless jaw, angled eyebrows, soft shoulders), but also any inferences she felt comfortable making (sleeps late in the day, avoids heavy foods, prefers taller men, never exercises for more than thirty minutes, has trouble sharing). On weekends, when As the World Turns didn’t run, she transcribed her notes, which she realized were becoming unwieldy family trees overripe with exorbitant personality sketches.

  It did not take long for the soap opera to infringe upon the sex. More and more frequently, Soledad would stop in the middle of prodding and biting and pinching and roughhousing and say, It’s one o’clock. A greater distance emerged between her and Willems then, as Soledad seemed to be fucking Henri simply because she thought he’d come to expect it. But every day when the magic hour struck, she’d unceremoniously unfold herself from whatever position they were in, crawl to the edge of the bed, and turn on the television set. There she’d sit entranced, notepad and pencil in hand, the volume turned up needlessly high.

  One day, when again As the World Turns loomed but their fucking wasn’t finished, Willems considered hitting Soledad, and not in the passionate though moderately painful way in which they’d struck each other up until this point. Briefly he thought he might actually strike her face and leave a mark, a black eye perhaps, just to test the adrenaline, to see if he was boring her, or to see if she wanted him to have her at all, if that meant anything anymore.

  Willems did not hit Soledad, but as she pulled away from him, he said, Tell me who your favorite is.

  Favorite what?

  Leading man, he said.

  I don’t have one.

  I’ve seen you touching yourself sometimes during the show. Seth? Holden? Dusty?

  Have you been reading my notes? Are you pretending to sleep? And I don’t touch myself. That’s probably what’s going on in those dreams of yours. You shake unbelievably sometimes when you’re napping. I can barely write in a straight line.

  Let me guess, he said. It’s Holden.

  Soledad went to the bureau to retrieve her pencil and stenographer’s pad.

  You sound jealous, she said.

  Sometimes I’d like to forget what we do to each other in bed, Henri confessed.

  We don’t have to have sex if you don’t want to, she said.

  She approached the television set but didn’t tur
n it on.

  I want to, but I’m not sure I can keep going this way. I feel cut up, like you’re pulling my body apart piece by piece, until you’ve used everything from my eyes to my asshole.

  You don’t push me away when we’re under the covers.

  I’m trying to understand what it is you want.

  I want to touch you. I want to watch TV. I want my children to come home.

  No, I want to know what it is you will want, Henri said. I’m trying to understand what happens if you wake up one day feeling healthy, free of pain, the cancer disappeared into remission. What are you going to say to me then?

  I won’t imagine that place, Soledad said. Honestly, it’s too fragile. I don’t want to dream about it, only to never see it come to pass.

  Then where are you now? he asked. Where’s your head, if not in the future? If it’s not looking past the day Ulises and Isabel come home?

  It’s here, only ever here. I’m having sex with you, every day at the same time. I’m watching my show, every day at the same time. I’m watching these people come, go, and return to the same place. I can’t handle anything more than right now.

  You’re saying you’re stuck? Henri asked. We’re stuck in the moment right before you die?

  Soledad put down her notes. She returned to the bed, where Henri was still naked, where a fold of blanket hung loosely over his crotch. Where his hands trembled in his lap.

  I’m sorry, love, she said. I’m sorry you’re sick of this. You should be. It must be exhausting. You’re my cook, cleaner, bather, gardener, lover. You offered yourself to me, and I’m afraid I took you. All of you. But I’ve got nothing to give back. I should have said this already, before the cancer happened, but you should desert me. You can’t keep pouring yourself into me without feeling the loss.

  We haven’t tried everything, have we? Henri asked.

  Soledad said, Look at me. I’m not a body that can be replenished anymore.