Soledad took her son’s hand and squeezed it. I missed you dearly, she said.
I tried to write. I’m sorry. I haven’t forgotten you.
This place is beautiful, isn’t it? I’m sorry I took you away from it.
Together they slept.
Later Ulises was roused by the midday heat, though Soledad’s body seemed cold. She was still breathing, though her breaths were slow, impossibly slow. Ulises let her be, and he went and found Willems in the garden, inspecting the tomato plants. The man looked terrible, red in the face and overwhelmed, as if the air were too heavy to breathe.
Where’s my father? Ulises asked.
Sleeping in the other bedroom. He hasn’t woken up since we got here. These are fine vegetables. I don’t know how the blind woman keeps them.
What does my mother want? Ulises asked.
To die here, the Dutchman said. She’s not said anything to that effect, but I can’t imagine her making it home again. I think she wants to die on the island with you and Isabel by her side. I think now she’s trying to forget she ever lived in Hartford.
The Dutchman walked around a trellis sagging from excessive fruit, the same trellis Ulises had fixed when passing through those weeks ago. He touched the wood and then plucked six tomatoes from the upper half of the vine. The wood straightened a tiny bit.
I have lost your mother, Willems said.
You have not, Ulises told him. She came here to find us, or at least one of us.
She told me once she’d never return. She told me Cuba was a dream she’d had, and she hoped never to dream it again. I don’t think she lied to me, but in the past few weeks it’s been as if the dream has taken over her mind. The drugs and her illness, of course, have something to do with it, but I think more than anything she wanted to close the wound she opened between Hartford and here. It’s been open much too long, and now she’s ready to give up.
Ulises thought that Willems was himself exhausted. He was being cruel because of what he also stood to lose. But there wasn’t any anger in his voice, and Ulises had to admit that his mother seemed more at peace here in the old house, more centered in Buey Arriba, than when she was sick in Hartford.
My mother loves you, Ulises said.
I know she does, the Dutchman said. But she hasn’t forgotten this place, and she can’t forget your sister. They’re the same, you know. I used to think they were different, but they’ve always been the same.
You’re driving yourself insane with this talk, Ulises said.
Willems sighed. Your mother will stay alive until she gets to see Isabel again. She wants to tell her daughter how sorry she is more than she wants to walk on Earth. Then she’s going to leave us, you and me.
—
When he awoke, Uxbal was in desperate need of a bath, among other things. Here Delfín emerged from her protective stance by Soledad’s side and followed the men into the other bedroom. They were deciding who should wash Uxbal. Ulises took a swollen hand and lifted it. The bones felt hollow, like a bird’s. This, he knew, was worse than a week ago, and though Ulises had not aided his father nearly as much as Isabel had, here he discovered a physical intimacy between them: Ulises possessed a working knowledge of his father’s body, and if he were to die this minute, Ulises might claim he understood best the man’s last hours of physical life. He felt like a midlevel authority over Uxbal, a deputy minister or a floor manager.
Delfín, however, did not want him to touch the old man, and she tried, with her hands and her low, butting head, to push Ulises away from his father’s body. Only after a long, muttering rant did she allow him, under her supervision, to first carry and then bathe his father in the basin. Ulises remembered his own visit to the house not so long ago, and he knew this was somehow Delfín’s territory, the bath and the bathing, Delfín something like a priestess at a forgotten oracle. Ulises would have liked to let the woman take Uxbal herself, but it was clear she was too old, though at one point she did help, scrubbing the man’s backside as Ulises lifted Uxbal out of the water so that all his sacred parts could be cleaned. They also dried his body together, and before putting him back to bed they fed him water and orange juice. He was in a daze, and he touched his skin perplexedly, and Ulises knew he’d forgotten the feeling of soap and clean water. By the end of the day, husband and wife slept on opposite sides of a wall.
Simón watched the whole process. This is hurtful, he said that night, but I think we should dig a grave. It’s only going to get hotter. Once your father goes, it will be difficult. He seems closer than your mother.
Ulises went to Delfín and tried to explain to her as much, but she seemed to already understand what he wanted to say. She brought him close.
You changed on me, she told him. But now I’ve got you. You’ve come back to bury yourself. You don’t want to rot out in the open.
Ulises took Delfín’s words to mean that he was, in her mind, the future ghost of Uxbal. Uxbal’s body, in contrast, was emptied of spirit. The ship has no captain, Ulises thought.
He and Simón found two shovels in a closet. They followed Delfín out to the garden. She led them away from the river, afraid that a grave near water could be washed out. She brought them to a patch of wild portulaca, the leaf being what Delfín had served Ulises the first night he’d stayed with her. The patch was as wide as six men, and there Delfín instructed them to dig.
They were glad to work in the dark, because the air was already damp, and, come morning, the rising sun would boil the heat from the ground. Ulises felt as though they were digging atop a volcano, and at any moment they would unearth a stream of lava. They took turns, because the grave they dug was narrow. They made only enough room for one body. Ulises saw this and said something to Simón, and the two agreed they should make the ditch wider despite the hours it might add.
We should leave room for, at least, a modest coffin, Simón said.
He and Ulises dug until all the insects—the mosquitoes, the gnats, the ants, the horseflies—were awake and biting at their shins. They dug until the sun came up and the sky was blue. The sky, in Ulises’s mind, had not been blue for weeks, but he was back down on the plain, the watershed of the mountains, and the clouds that huddled over the range dissipated into vapor once they slid past the peaks.
After washing, Ulises went to see Uxbal, but he was fast asleep. He went to his mother and found her sitting upright in her bed with her eyes closed. The gown she wore lay flat across her chest, and Ulises’s was struck, then, with the idea that he knew Uxbal’s hands better than his mother’s new body. Opening her eyes, Soledad caught him staring. She unwrapped the red scarf that Delfín had draped around her head.
We have the same haircut now, she said to Ulises.
Ulises watched the scarf fall across his mother’s left shoulder, and on her scalp was stubble like that on a man’s face.
Come touch it, she said.
Ulises walked over to his mother and placed his hand at the back of her skull. He allowed his fingers to graze the skin, and to his surprise the hair was downy, like burst cattails in a swamp.
It’s growing back, she said. The doctor said it would, but I didn’t believe him. I don’t know why. I think I was preparing for the worst. The air here, it’s heavier, but I like it. Not so biting. And the humidity helps with my breathing.
Ulises said, You look wonderful, Ma. He asked, Do you know who is in the other room?
Your father, Soledad said. I heard you and Delfín bathing him last night. It sounded slow, if that makes any sense. I mean the time, not the image I saw in my mind of your father being washed. It’s hard to explain. What I really mean is that I feel his body settled against the wall, and that took a long time. That’s the movement I’m referring to, so I don’t know why I mentioned the bath. Maybe it’s because the bath reminds me of children and then of having a child, and his body against the wall is like a boy growing inside me. The boy is finally settled. Do you see?
I’m not sure what you mean,
Ma.
Ulises thought Soledad was reacting to the morphine, but she was wide-awake. He was also reminded of Isabel, alone on the mountain and absurdly pregnant. He thought to tell Soledad just then, but he did not.
I’ve carried him with me, your father, Soledad said. I told you I’d never forget him, and I haven’t. So he’s been growing. That’s what happens when you don’t forget. I should have divorced him, but instead I’ve been seeing him through poor Henri, which makes me a liar and a thief. I’ve stolen things from Henri.
What things? Ulises asked. If he’s given them to you, it’s not stealing.
So much time, she said. Do you know I can hear your father breathing? Not through the wall, but in my chest. Your father has spent a lifetime willing us home.
You’re speaking nonsense, Ulises said. He is an old man. He’s closer to death than you are. You’re saying these things because you feel guilty, because you don’t want to die having driven away your daughter and having left your husband.
Do you know why I came here? Soledad asked.
No, he said.
To see you. To tell you to go home. I shouldn’t have asked you to come here, not for me or for your sister. I saw the hurricane on TV, and I knew that if you didn’t come back then, that you had found her. I knew that you wouldn’t come back without her, but I think I also knew, in some way, that she’d never come home. All of which meant you weren’t ever coming home.
Ulises began to cry.
You should leave all of us, Soledad said. You should leave us all here.
—
That night Ulises got drunk with Willems out in the garden, the loamy expanse of which curled around the house from front to back. The tomato vines—buoyed by the patchwork of low, A-frame trellises—slunk in all directions, but yellow wildflowers choked the grass near the forest, and the cabbage beds closest to the brook had gone entirely to seed. In the kitchen they’d found a jug of the fermented cane juice, but it smelled rancid, so Willems paid a man to go to Bayamo for some decent cigars and two bottles of rum. Together, they drank and smoked and picked tomatoes to eat when they were hungry, spending most of the dark vigil in the abandoned, mushroom-scented rows by the stream. Willems periodically went to check on Soledad, and, contrary to what Ulises might have thought, the Dutchman seemed stronger for his belief that all was lost or, at least, that his and Soledad’s affair was coming to a close. He was not necessarily in good spirits, but he was not a wreck either. He’d slept for most of the afternoon, and his skin had returned to a thin cream color.
The island is good for me, the Dutchman said. I haven’t been back in a while. These cigars are second-rate, but they’re better than what we grow in Connecticut.
Ulises had told Willems about his mother’s ramblings. At one point Ulises called them delusions, and the Dutchman reminded him that delusions pass unless they are believed. His mother seemed firm in her statements. Willems then poured Ulises another glass of the rum and told him he was a better man than most, the best son he’d ever come across, and the only brother to really ever give a damn. Ulises saw that the Dutchman’s flattery was superfluous but also genuine. The man had entered into an off-balance clan—which he said more than once—and he drunkenly congratulated Ulises on being the sole survivor of an insane asylum. Sympathizing with the Dutchman, Ulises told him, not unkindly, that to fall in love with another man’s wife was no consolation.
I thought I was cursed, Willems said. It took your mother’s insanity to bring me back here. You’re older than you look.
It was sometime before or after midnight when the two of them, half in a daze from nicotine and alcohol, heard a confluence of voices coming through the windows of the house. They stumbled inside and stopped in the hallway, and what they heard was two people singing. Simón had left for the night, staying somewhere in town, and Delfín could not possibly sing with such clarity. It was Uxbal and Soledad. They were serenading each other through the walls, singing a danzonete. It was a slow song about Jesús Cristo feeding some peasants some fish. As Soledad’s voice gained momentum, vibrations registered in Ulises’s throat. Her sound was not great, but it was melodious, and it made Ulises jealous. What he wanted, then, was to curl up at the feet of his mother and fall asleep to her song. But, slightly drunk as he was, he made to enter his father’s room and tell him to shut his mouth and let Soledad rest. Willems grabbed Ulises by the arm before he could take a step.
Let them be, the Dutchman said. This is what your mother has been dreaming about in her sleep. I’ve lain awake next to her and listened to this for weeks. She’s consumed by it, so let her have it.
She’s not insane, Ulises said.
Her mind and her body are finally in the same place, is all, Willems said. She doesn’t know Hartford anymore. Thinking she never left Cuba will be the nicest way for her to die. And she’s his wife.
It was the truth, and it made Ulises unbearably sad, because it meant Soledad had first been a wife and a mother only after—he had no claim on her. He looked at Willems, who had brought her back to Cuba. He seemed to have even given her back to Uxbal. He could make no claims either. The Dutchman was clearly flustered, pained to have to listen to this, but he seemed to know that holding on was a worse fate than letting go. Ulises retreated to the kitchen, and somehow this woke Delfín, even though the singing had not. The old woman came out of her room and told Willems to go and get some water, but he ignored her and went back outside.
The body is going, she said to Ulises. It sounds strong, but it will be done soon. You can bury yourself proper.
Eventually, the singing waned and became a murmur. Ulises, sitting at the kitchen table, listened as his mother and father spoke to each other through the wall. Uxbal told Soledad what his life had been like after she and the children left, and Soledad spoke of Isabel’s faith and Willems’s tobacco. She mentioned Ulises’s green thumb. They were like old friends but less, like two people who’d happened to share nearly the same life and had only just stumbled upon each other. And though they were in different rooms, Ulises could tell that they spoke as if from across a pillow, which meant they were suddenly talking again like old lovers whose thoughts ran together, who shared secrets because it was like speaking into a mirror. Ulises listened as his parents rebuilt the past, talked their way back toward 1964, when they met, four years before he was born. He heard them erase time and forget whole decades, and he began to sob.
Are you afraid of dying? Soledad asked Uxbal.
No, he said. Just impatient. I’ve been dying for too long now. I wish someone would come and take me.
Don’t say that, Soledad said. You’ve never had chemotherapy. You don’t have a clue what it’s like to suffer through a living day.
What do you hope for from the afterlife? Uxbal asked.
One of the beds creaked. Ulises imagined his mother pressing her lips to the wall.
A nice tomato garden, she said. But no worms to dig out. No mosquitoes to swat. An outdoor bed.
That’s wonderful.
Are you imagining the same? she asked.
No, he said. The ocean. I haven’t been there since I was a boy.
You die and go to the beach.
There is a woman there with me. She is beautiful, and she has a full head of hair like on the night I met her at a New Year’s party when she wore an ugly brown skirt. At the beach she’s dressed the same.
Why would she wear a skirt to the beach? Where’s her swimsuit?
We swim naked, Uxbal said. There are no swimsuits in heaven.
Ulises thought, They are dreaming of a different Cuba.
Willems appeared in the kitchen and motioned for Ulises to come outside. There, the Dutchman pulled him to the edge of the garden.
Do you see it? he asked.
What? Ulises asked.
The light.
Ulises squinted into the dark. His pupils widened, and he eventually saw the faintest glow bobbing in the distance. Coming down from the mountains and ne
aring the house. A flame burning yellow, orange, and red.
It’s a torch, Willems said. Someone is coming.
—
Isabel had come down from the mountain.
—
For the first and only time in his life, Ulises would watch his sister, the Death Torch, assist another person into the afterlife. Hollowed out and wearing more clothes than the warm weather demanded, Isabel bathed, just as Ulises had, before paying respects to her dying mother. When she dressed, however, she dressed in Uxbal’s old clothing, ignoring what Delfín had brought her. Then Isabel and Soledad talked for some time alone. Halfway through the night Isabel called for Ulises to join them. In the room his sister stood by the bed, holding their mother’s hands. Soledad seemed asleep but opened her eyes every few minutes.
God bless, Soledad said. You’re here.
Isabel turned to Ulises. Can you remember the song Faithful We Shall Come?
I don’t know, Ulises said. It’s been forever.
I’m only going to hum it. When you remember the tune, hum it with me.
Isabel began, and the song was entirely foreign to Ulises. He watched in silence as his sister, still humming, pressed her lips to their mother’s bald head. Though he didn’t know the melody, Ulises listened as well as he could, and when he was sure he understood the highs and lows, he made a sound in his throat like singing. His sister looked at him, and he saw some fear in her eyes, and maybe they both understood that it wouldn’t be long now. The song moved toward an end, and Ulises watched his sister’s lips drop the melody and kiss Soledad’s skin. Isabel took in a long, slow breath, and he swore he saw something pass from his mother’s body into his sister’s mouth. But then Isabel exhaled, and whatever had left their mother’s form floated into the air and was carried out the open window by a slow, humid breeze.
—
Ulises remembered a time when he and Isabel were eight years old. A stovepipe, damaged during a recent hurricane, fed flames to the roof of a neighbor’s house, which, in the early morning, burned to the ground. Most of the family escaped, but someone, Ulises was certain, had died. He could not remember who.
The Mortifications Page 27
