The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  You wrote me a letter, said Ulises.

  We couldn’t build outside of Buey Arriba without communicating with one another, Uxbal went on. The government has communication. They had—still have—the telephone lines and the electricity. They had the mail too, but the mail was vulnerable, even if they were censoring it. You still needed men and women to sort the letters, to box them up, put them on the right truck, and send them to the right towns. In those towns you still needed individuals with individual backpacks to carry letters from door to door. Those people had to be locals. The maps we had of the country, the few of them, were old, and half of them were incorrect entirely. And the Leader wanted to rename so many towns and places that the good maps wouldn’t last. They’d have to be redrawn with the new names, the new places. He was defacing the country with the legends of Martí, using the old poet’s name to make Cuba seem new when it was the same old. But that was all on the official maps, which didn’t mean anything to anyone who wasn’t in Havana, especially not the local correos, which were staffed by people who’d never left their towns, let alone kept track of what the government was calling them. But they knew where everyone lived, and there weren’t many lists. When a new carrier came to train on a route, he or she just walked around the neighborhood all day with the retiring carrier. They did this for months until the new person had a clue. They had maps, and they looked at them sometimes, but from the 1970s on, it seemed like a new map came out every other week. The whole town renamed, or parts of it renamed, in honor of some dead Communist from Russia, or some smaller city erased because the land, sunk low in a pretty valley, could be used for sugarcane. What I am saying is that there were men we could talk to, and young women, who delivered our mail, who might carry mail secretly for us between Buey Arriba and anywhere else.

  But everything is slower here, so we had to wait a long time to even start recruiting a carrier. The idea was to get one man in one correo, and he might then turn another and another and another until we owned the post office. Then we could make outreaches to nearby towns, to those carriers who make the slightly longer trips. It was not a terrible plan, but it was a tedious one, especially since neither I nor the others received much mail then. Who was sending us letters? Who could we write to? And we never knew where the censors might read our letters. We didn’t know if there were censors in Buey Arriba or if they only worked in the larger cities. We wanted to believe they were concerned only with the mail that left the island, especially the stuff heading for Miami, but we were also too scared to test those theories, for someone to drop off a red-hot warning flag and see who came to town asking about the unsigned missive begging for money and complaining about the regime.

  But I had the house still—I’m sure it’s still there, though who knows who’s inside now, whether or not someone’s taken it, whether or not there’s an old lady still guarding it for me—so I was the one to wait every day for the post, for a guapo with a lip that had clearly once been cleft. You could see the scar below his nose, which is not to say the surgeons hadn’t worked a miracle, but in the sun all day, I imagine, walking from door to door, the tissue hardens and darkens. He wore an old baseball hat, but the brim was cracked, and it only ever covered his eyes. I used to offer him lemonade, which he always declined. And the mail that came was so little, I had to make up reasons to write to folks. I had to give people reasons to write me back. I wrote to newspapers praising the new names of towns or suggesting other ones. Sometimes they would print my letters and send me a free issue. I wrote to cousins I thought still lived in Santiago, sure that if they were dead or gone that, at least, the letters would come back. They never did, nor did I ever hear anything. I wrote to Russian musicians. Sometimes in Buey Arriba the radios would snag signals for long enough that we could listen to operas or the music of the ballets happening in Havana. I’d send them fan mail, and once I did get a letter back from a conductor on tour in Holguín. He said he’d love to take his music to the country and have people sit on the grass and listen. I wrote him again and again after that, but, nothing. Eventually, though, maybe after a year of those charades, the guapo learned my name and took a glass of lemonade.

  And eventually he saw my wedding ring and asked about your mother. I told him she and you all were gone and that I was afraid to write a letter because the censors would see it headed to Miami, to your mother’s cousins, and they’d come for me.

  The guapo said to me, You’re right. They would. I wouldn’t feel right about carrying such a letter for you either. It would be like carrying your death sentence, and you would have written it yourself.

  He was nice like that. The guapo himself was not from Buey Arriba but a town near Manzanillo and the coast. I asked him which place he thought was more beautiful, his seaside city or our farmers’ plain.

  He said they were both beautiful. The plains, he said, are easy and close, and you can see the end of things. It’s sometimes nice to witness the edge of a place. Manzanillo slipped into the ocean, and that was nice too, because then it felt as if the city had crawled out of the sea, which gave everyone a reason to spend most of their time at the beach. Houses in Manzanillo, he told me, were mostly for sleeping. I knew then that I could trust him. I gave him a real letter, and he took it.

  Uxbal looked spent. He shifted in his cot. He rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers and spoke through his palms.

  Someone read my letter, and they came back, he said. They brought me a response. It’s here above my head. He looked up and touched his lips. I should sleep.

  Uxbal slept, and Ulises waited by his bed.

  When Uxbal awoke again, Ulises asked, Do you know when you’re awake?

  It’s difficult, Uxbal said. Sometimes the pain is really bad, and sometimes it’s just an ache. It confuses me, and that’s what I am sick of most. I think I want to die.

  You’re ready to die?

  No, said his father. But I want to go. I want to be done with this. You’re my son, aren’t you?

  Ulises nodded.

  That’s confusing, because you look like me with a little more hair. And you’ve been out in the sun, and I don’t wander around much anymore. I can’t keep track of time. Too many hours in this bed. I don’t know who’s outside that door anymore.

  Isabel has been here for months, Ulises said.

  Uxbal coughed. Maybe, he said. You say her name, and I think of someone who’s very sad. Is that true?

  Yes, Ulises said.

  I have dreams of her. She washes my face for me. In the dreams, she touches my cheek as though it were a brown eggshell.

  I followed her here, Ulises said. Ma asked me to.

  Is your mother really ill? Is she going to die?

  Yes, Ulises said. I think so. I’m supposed to bring Isabel home so she can see Ma one more time.

  It seems a really terrible thing just now, asking your child to come home to you so they can watch you die.

  I imagined watching you die, said Ulises. I imagined killing you myself someday if I had the chance.

  I thought the same about your mother, his father said. All the ways I would hurt her if she ever came back. How I would teach you and your sister to hate her. How I’d never forgive her even if she came crawling back to the door in Buey Arriba. Then I started drinking, because it took a lot of energy to think that way. They were the worst fantasies, but every day you were gone, I thought more and more about them. I held on to them more than I did my memories of you or your sister. I had to be drunk to enjoy them. You have to be drunk to hate so freely. When I die, don’t hate me. Or your mother for taking you away. Or your sister for coming back.

  Should I forget everything? Ulises asked.

  No, his father said. That would be just as bad.

  What do I do?

  I don’t know. I never found the answer.

  Ulises sat with his father in silence for an hour, and they both fell asleep. They awoke to someone calling Ulises’s name. The accent was strange, the Spanish spoke
n in a peculiar way, and it got louder. Someone had found the camp. Ulises cracked the door to his father’s shack to see outside, to see who’d come for them, and after his eyes adjusted to the late-day sun, he saw that the screaming man was Willems. Behind him was Simón. They walked slowly into the clearing, and Simón held a machete in his hand. Ulises stepped outside.

  Your mother has come, said the Dutchman. She’s not well.

  Before Ulises could answer Willems, he heard his father’s voice behind him.

  Take me to her. Take me to my wife.

  How did you find the house? Ulises asked Willems.

  He stood with the Dutchman and Simón at the edge of the camp, just beyond the clearing. Uxbal stood at the door to his hut and strained to hear. Willems looked thin and out of place, uncomfortable in the heat, and Simón could not stop looking over his shoulder back toward the circle of shacks.

  Your mother remembered everything, Willems said. As soon as she saw the lake, she knew exactly where to go.

  Ulises turned to Simón. Where did you come from?

  I sent a man to Buey Arriba to find you. When he couldn’t, I told him to go back every three days. Two days ago he found your mother, and I came.

  How is she?

  Exhausted, the Dutchman said. He hesitated a moment. I wasn’t sure we would make it this far.

  We’ll send for a doctor when we get back, Ulises said.

  We already have, Simón said.

  Soledad had come against her doctor’s orders. She wanted to see her children before she died. According to Willems, it didn’t really matter, because her mind was already in Cuba.

  She has lost some of herself already, he explained to Ulises. Or maybe it’s that this half of her has been dormant for a number of years, and it’s now awake again. It’s consuming everything the cancer left behind.

  Ulises tried to imagine his mother’s face, but he could only see the gaunt cheekbones of Isabel. She looked painfully unwell when Ulises went to share the news that their mother had returned to Cuba. He found her sitting rigid in a pew in her makeshift chapel, looking hungry, undernourished, and weak.

  He said to her, Ma is here. She’s come to see you, which is a miracle. But she can’t make it up the mountain because she’s so weak. Come down with us. Come see our miraculous mother.

  Isabel didn’t answer, and Ulises was unsure of what to do. He toyed with the idea of threatening to steal Adelina or Augusto if she didn’t come. But those were desperations born of anger—had she been serious when she said she’d already left Ma behind? Was this part of her zealous promise-making, to say she was done with her mother and then pretend not to hear her name spoken?—and in the end, his greatest desperation was to see his mother, with or without having brought the wandering Catholic home to her.

  Ulises walked around the pew and stood in front of Isabel.

  You’re not a mute anymore. You can’t hide behind your vows.

  Isabel lifted her head, and Ulises saw that she was crying, but the sight of his sister in pain didn’t compare with the urge to hold his mother’s hand.

  It’s not safe, said Isabel.

  For whom? Ulises asked. For your plan? For your guilt? It’s safe for you to live in this shithole, but not to leave it? It wasn’t safe for Ma to come, but she did.

  I told you before, Isabel said. It’s not a matter of love. Will you remind her that I love her?

  No, Ulises said. Then he left his sister alone in the chapel, but not before saying, Don’t forget that forgetting is a sin.

  —

  Ulises did not mention to Isabel the other miracle he’d witnessed. Uxbal had been temporarily resuscitated, returned to a fully conscious, mostly alive human being. And, unlike his daughter, Uxbal demanded that he be taken to Buey Arriba with Ulises. He demanded to see his wife, above all else. Ulises was reluctant to move his father, but the old man was already gathering what clothes he had and shouting for his bamboo walking stick. Ulises observed the cringing face of Willems.

  We don’t have to bring him, he said to the Dutchman. She came here with you.

  I couldn’t be so petty, Willems said, though he was remembering all the terrible sexual fantasies he’d imagined over the past few months.

  Yet seeing the stiff knees of Uxbal, his sunken cheeks, and his cloudy eyes meant, at least to Willems, that there were no villains in the world, only the caricatures we draw of people upon whose backs we wish to thrust our own deficiencies. So they took Uxbal with them, Simón shouldering his shaky weight the entire way down the mountain, and they moved so quickly that they beat the doctor to the house.

  Ulises rushed to Delfín’s room, where Soledad lay asleep in her marital bed, in the first house where she’d raised her children. She lay like a wooden board under humid air, her body curled into an unnatural position that, at first, made Ulises fear she was dead. Delfín sat vigilant in a rocking chair in a corner, and she wouldn’t let him near Soledad. The old woman slapped Ulises’s arms till he left the room, and she shouted after him to bathe himself—something he’d not done in many, many days—before he came back.

  She’s probably right, you know, Willems said to Ulises. Your mother’s not at full strength. She could catch something from you. Better clean up first.

  That night Ulises soaked in the tub for three hours. He refilled the basin seven times, the water as hot as he could stand it. He rubbed his skin raw with a dingy gray washcloth, and he dug under his toenails with a boiled roofing nail. In front of the mirror he saw what a tremendous animal he’d become over the last few weeks. He had all the parts of a body, but they were so worn and haggard, they didn’t seem to add up to a person. Ulises searched for and found a straight razor in the bathroom cabinet, and after washing it twice, he shaved his face, first chopping at the longer hairs along his jawline and then dragging the blade from neck to chin to cheek. When he finished, he touched his scalp. The hairs there were soft from the long soak, but they were ugly, and he decided to shave his head as well. He felt and eventually saw his scar, and when he finished, he finally noticed how thin he’d become. His skin was a layer of volcanic shale settled over his bones, dry, flaky, ready to come off, and his eyes were as wide as olives, as cloudy as rainwater. He did not look so large anymore but, like his father, resembled a wilted palm.

  Willems and Simón had prepared for Ulises some food, but of course he wanted to see his mother instead. They said that while he was in the bath, the doctor had come. Soledad had awoken, had spoken to the physician, had taken a morphine pill, and was asleep again. He went to her anyway, stopping at the bedroom door and watching her face as she slept. Her skin, in her illness, was retracting some. Miraculously, she’d kept her long eyelashes after the chemo.

  Willems and Simón told him to be patient, so in the kitchen Ulises sat down at the table and ate slowly the meal they’d made. With each bite he was more tired. He asked Willems what the doctor had said. He’d prescribed only the drug for Soledad and not said much else, which Ulises took as bad news. The doctor hadn’t had much morphine, but Henri had bribed the man, and they were left with half a bottle of tablets, maybe twenty in total. Ulises asked about the treatment back in Connecticut.

  Was the cancer gone? he asked.

  They thought so, Willems said.

  Why does she look so terrible?

  I don’t know, Willems said. She’s ill. She’s looked this way for a time now.

  Ulises left the kitchen and went to one of the spare bedrooms to be alone with this non-news. After an hour, he crept to the door of his mother’s room and sat against it. He had not seen Delfín and assumed she was still inside guarding the bed. He was clean now and did not have to wait, but he did anyway, because there were no more excuses, no other means to avoid walking through the door and seeing his mother and discussing with her the last days of her life. Ulises had gone to Cuba because she’d asked him to, because he’d felt as if he was waiting for the mission of his life. Now he understood that the mission was no suc
h thing, was an act of cowardice; he’d been waiting to escape, which meant he wouldn’t have to watch her die. He leaned a little lower against the door to his mother’s room, and then he fell asleep crying.

  He awoke to the humming of bees. In the hallway was an open window, and the morning sky was white. Quickly, though, Ulises realized the sound was not of bees but of the zunzuncitos. He saw two or three of the birds streak past the wire mesh meant to keep the bugs out, and he thought for an instant he could recall a wicker basket he’d once used in an attempt to capture a hummingbird. It had held his mother’s underwear, and he’d dumped the clothes onto the bedroom floor before going outside to hunt. He’d been caught by his mother and spanked. He’d cried, and then she’d rubbed his back. The bedroom door clicked open, and the humming went away. It was Delfín. She motioned for Ulises to enter.

  Soledad was on her side, in the same position as the night before when Ulises first saw her. She looked immeasurably small, as if the radiation had shrunk her body as well as the cancer. Delfín, or someone else, had covered her in several blankets, and Ulises thought the weight of all that fabric kept her from being blown away like a topsail torn from the mast during a squall. The drapes on the windows facing east were open, and shadows from the royal palms outside covered Soledad’s face, which was why Ulises did not see her lips move when she spoke.

  Come sit next to me, she said.

  Ulises did as he was asked. He also placed his hand on Soledad’s shoulder, but after a minute it was not enough, and he lay down next to her. He wrapped his arm around her waist and pushed his nose into the back of her neck. She did not smell the way he remembered.

  Is she alive? Soledad whispered.

  Very much so, Ulises said. But she’s still up in the hills. She won’t come down. She’s given up on us, all of us. But, yes, she’s alive. Papi is not well, but he came. I don’t know if you want to see him.

  What’s wrong with him?

  He’s going to die, Ulises said.