The Mortifications

by Derek Palacio

  In the days that followed, the Encarnacións and other townsfolk helped the grief-stricken family salvage what they could. Uxbal wrenched hot nails from charred siding. Soledad scrubbed blackened pans pulled from the ash. Isabel and Ulises gathered from the garden vegetables the smoke hadn’t touched. They worked as long as there was light.

  At dusk they walked home, and one evening they left Uxbal behind to continue the work. Halfway down the road, Ulises remembered, Isabel tripped on a stone, her body—then still the mirror of his own—collapsing like a cut sail. Soledad lifted her from the ground, and her face was clay, the dust of the road clinging to the skin wet with tears. Soledad hushed her daughter and with her hand wiped Isabel’s chin. Seeing the dirt on her own fingertips, Soledad slid her thumb across Isabel’s dirty cheek and then touched the girl’s head. She turned to Ulises and smiled. She asked him to come closer. He came to her side, and she reached out. On Ulises’s forehead Soledad made the sign of the cross. She brought his hand into her own and took the children home.

  At Delfín’s insistence the mourning lasted seven days: a three-day wake before the interment and a three-day vigil afterward. The public came during the first seventy-two hours, because word had spread that a bald woman had died and her husbands—she was rumored to have two—were feeding any and all visitors. Soledad’s body, after the mortician had finished his work, was displayed in the main room of the house. The coffin was blue, because it was the only color available that was not white or red. Guests lined up at the front door, and they were allowed into the house six at a time. There were whole families, groups of young men, single women, and old crones. Hungry boys came to the house by foot or on their bikes, and the yard was a mess of rusted two-wheelers.

  Willems, the gentleman that he was, had gone to tell Uxbal the news, but the old man was already standing at the edge of his bed when the Dutchman gently tapped open the bedroom door.

  Will you help me bury her? Uxbal asked.

  —

  The family wore whatever white they had. Ulises took shirts from his father’s moth-ridden closet and found clothes for himself and the other men. He dressed Uxbal, taking great care to make the old man presentable. He trimmed the few hairs still trying at the back of his neck, and, borrowing soap and shaving cream from Willems, he used the straight razor on his father’s face. Ulises splashed him with aftershave, tucked in his shirt, knotted a tie for him, and managed even to buff his shoes. In the end, Uxbal appeared like an aging ambassador. Delfín dressed Isabel in a white skirt and light blue blouse, which was too large for her and swallowed her torso entirely. They stood as a family just beyond the casket and the makeshift kneeler where visitors bent down to pray. They shook hands with the people of Buey Arriba and kissed strangers on the cheek. Even Uxbal did this. For the entire wake he and Henri stood side by side in front of the casket, and not a person could tell who was the lover and who was the husband.

  By the second day, Ulises and Delfín had achieved a passable rhythm between cooking and accepting guests. Breakfast was skipped in favor of lunch: meats, tomatoes, cheeses, coffee, bread, and dates. For dinner each night Delfín roasted fish and potatoes, which could be cut into thin slices and served on hard rye with red peppers, tomato paste, and vinegar. There was coffee in the evening as well, and neither Delfín nor Ulises slept for more than four hours a night.

  Oddly, Isabel was only awake four hours a day, from noon till late afternoon. She told Ulises she’d not been well on the mountain. I didn’t think I could bear this, she said. But then I was afraid if I came down, I might break my promise to myself to leave.

  But you won’t? Ulises asked.

  We will see.

  Ulises examined Isabel’s pale face and saw a life barely tethered to the world. She was trying to buck the compulsory love of parents and children, and Ulises imagined this to be an arduous, perhaps impossible, effort. He heard his dead mother saying, I left my voice in Cuba, which reminded Ulises of Isabel’s unborn child, a forgotten thing or, if he was honest with himself, a person he willfully forgot.

  How are you feeling now? he asked Isabel. He eyed the baggy canvas shirt she wore. Is everything all right with the kid?

  It’s hard to tell, she replied.

  This was the edge of a confession. She thinks she’s lost the child, Ulises thought, and it made him feel the worse, guiltier, as if his sister’s past and future had dissolved all in a night. The child’s conception had been something of an impossible phenomenon, but every other plan of hers had come to fruition, and Ulises had assumed the child would be same: the baby, by the will of his sister, would, of course, be born. For the first time he thought that Isabel’s desire to escape was perhaps not the worst thing ever, that maybe it was even necessary, considering what she’d seen and suffered.

  He wanted to take her in his arms then, but she looked on the verge of shattering, so, instead, Ulises kissed her on the cheek and said, Go back to bed. Sleep. The procession will take all day, and it’s going to be hot and sunny.

  The funeral procession wound through Buey Arriba, turning around corners and cutting through alleyways erratically. According to Delfín, there was a traditional path through the streets, and the casket had to be carted on a makeshift gurney the entire way. Two family members at all times had to be touching the wooden box. The wreaths from the house were carried by volunteer children twenty meters ahead of the procession, and a boy on a bike was hired to ride ahead and call out the coming of the dead. The townspeople seemed slow and tired, sluggish with all the food they’d eaten in the last three days. They came lazily to their front stoops. As the casket passed by, Ulises led the way. Isabel was on his arm, and Delfín was a step back with a Bible in her hand. Miraculously, Willems accompanied Uxbal behind them all, their hands touching the blue lid.

  The people from Buey Arriba gathered the flowers from their houses and tossed them at the casket. A few young girls laid palm leaves in front of the procession, and they dried quickly under the sun, crackling under the feet of the pallbearers. Delfín told Ulises where to turn and take the procession, and halfway through the day they’d arrived at the nameless lake. Delfín went to the water and soaked the scarf she had worn around her shoulders. She returned to the group and squeezed the lake water over Ulises’s hands and then over the casket. She said a prayer that reminded Ulises of the baptismal rite. Delfín knelt and crossed herself, and then she told Ulises to lead them all home.

  They sang the body into the grave that Ulises and Simón had dug for Uxbal. Uxbal asked when and who had dug the hole, and Ulises lied to him, saying Simón had hired some men from the town. The grave was big enough for a man in a modest coffin, which meant it was wide enough for a woman in a beautiful coffin, which is what Willems had purchased for the woman he’d come to Cuba with. The lowering of the box by rope took twelve men and ten minutes.

  When called forth to recite a eulogy, Willems tapped Uxbal on the shoulder, signaling him to speak. But the old man simply kissed Willems on the face. I did not deserve her, he said. Or my children.

  It was as fine a thing as Ulises could imagine him saying.

  Isabel was the first to throw a palmful of dirt into the grave and onto the coffin. Ulises was next, then Willems, then Delfín, and, last, Uxbal. The men who’d helped lower the casket began to fill in the rest. It grew dark out. Isabel went to lie down. Simón took leave of the family. Willems, realizing perhaps for the first time that he would sleep alone for the rest of his life, began to weep, and Delfín took him aside. Ulises and Uxbal, who was still standing, who had not sat down the entire day, watched as the grave was filled to the brim with rusty soil.

  You dug that grave for me, didn’t you? Uxbal asked.

  Yes, Ulises said. We thought you would die first.

  My sorries, Uxbal said. I’ve failed you again. The old man hobbled away.

  Delfín came out of the house with a bouquet of chalice vine in hand. She walked to the place where the headstone would eventually be
set, and she brushed the flower heads across the dirt. She did this around the entire grave, in a long oval.

  She said to Ulises, The hummingbirds will come. Good luck.

  The next three days were for the family to pray together for their lost love, but only Delfín spent hours in front of Soledad’s grave with a rosary in hand. Willems stayed mostly in his room or went walking in the direction of the mountain range. He came back sometimes with wild tobacco leaves and a calm look on his face. Isabel prayed quietly next to Soledad’s deathbed. Uxbal remained in his room, and with the funeral ended, he seemed devoid of all his strength again, though he was still coherent, and sometimes Ulises could hear him to talking to Isabel. He wanted to know where she had come from. Had he been in a coma? Had he been hit on the head? Delfín told Ulises that on the seventh day of mourning, the third night after the interment, the family would eat a meal together. They would break bread and eat veal. Ulises asked Delfín where she would get the calf, but the old woman ignored him. Ulises told Uxbal about the dinner, and the old man nodded.

  Do you still pray? Ulises asked. Or did that die with the revolution? He said this kindly, as if he too had suffered a great loss with the disintegration of the rebel camp.

  God is only as tall as the tomato vine, Uxbal said.

  Ulises understood his father in this way: God lives only where there is life. Then his father cried, and Ulises did not know how to console him.

  The meal was somber but sprawling. There was veal, as Delfín had promised, as well as lamb. But there was also guava paste, knuckle bread, mint jelly, yams, a white bean soup, baked carrots, garlic yucca, white rice, goat cheese, small bits of sweetened ham off the bone, deviled eggs, and fried plantains. There was so much, Ulises could not catalog it all. Sitting down at the table, he stared bittersweetly at the feast, neither hungry nor interested, and he saw a similar look on his sister’s face. Willems was smoking a cigar, and, despite Delfín’s nagging, he would not put it out. Uxbal either stared at his own lap or was asleep.

  But Delfín was undaunted, and she served first a spinach salad and then a sprout casserole. She ate the food in front of her in silent bites and told them it was tradition that every member of the family taste every dish offered. Ulises couldn’t tell if this was true or if Delfín’s pride had been hurt by his slow mouthfuls; regardless, he shoved more casserole and spinach into his mouth. Isabel did the same. Willems, still smoking, said the casserole was delicious.

  Uxbal did not lift a finger. This was a problem, because dishes had to be served in order, and one course had to be finished before the next began.

  They would wait, Delfín said, for Uxbal. To eat ahead was bad luck for the dead.

  Papi, Ulises said, try the sprout casserole. It has tomatoes in it.

  Ulises, sitting next to Uxbal, held a fork in front of the old man’s mouth for fifteen minutes before he finally took a bite. Ulises did the same with the spinach salad.

  Uxbal nodded after the salad, as if to say he liked it, and Isabel said, There’s plenty more, Papi.

  The mood at the table lifted, and each dish Uxbal tasted was another miniature cause for celebration. In this way they moved through seventeen plates, through all the cheese and rice and ham and, finally, the veal. After the meat, though, came the bread, and Delfín, splitting a loaf into fifths, recited the Our Father. She passed the bread around, and this alone Ulises did not have to feed to his father, who took the piece in his palm as though it was the body of a dead bird. He kissed the bread before eating it, and Ulises, seeing this, did the same. They had finished the meal. The ordeal was done.

  It was only in the silence that followed the feast that Ulises heard footsteps trudging through the garden. He stepped outside. In the twilight he saw four men and a boy. The men were dressed as soldiers, and the boy looked familiar.

  Is this him? one of the soldiers asked the boy.

  Ulises squinted in the gray light. It was the boy with the bike from the first time he’d worked in the garden for Delfín.

  What’s going on? Ulises said.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  The soldier turned to Ulises and said, This boy saw a bald man at this old woman’s house who’d not been here for a long time. Then there was a large meeting here.

  There was a wake and a funeral, Ulises said. My mother died.

  We are looking for Uxbal, the soldier said. We know he’s come back to the house. He used to live here.

  What do you want him for?

  He’s a counterrevolutionary, the soldier said.

  Ulises turned and looked at the house. He saw Delfín at a window. She watched through the glass.

  Let us into the house, the soldier said.

  The boy stepped back behind the soldier. Ulises heard a humming by his mother’s grave. He thought of his father in the dining room and the bites he’d taken during the meal, small and finicky like a child’s. In his mind he saw his father naked after a bath, his hands swollen and red. He saw his sister walking not toward the house but away from it, one hand bearing a torch, the other touching her abdomen, the last place she’d gone to for hope or faith or whatever, the last place that had failed her. He did not see Willems. He imagined Delfín dead. He knew then, no matter what, that he would never see them all again, that to stay himself was to witness the final sinking of their lives into the soft red soil behind the modest country house.

  Ulises said to the soldier, You’ve come for me. I am Uxbal.

  For two years Ulises lived and worked on a sugarcane plantation outside Santiago alongside other dissidents, army deserters, accused homosexuals, true homosexuals, embezzlers, political adversaries, freethinkers, students, and thieves. During the first three months of his incarceration, he attended a weekly class meant to rehabilitate his broken socialist spirit. The instructors, as they were called, interrogated him each time with the same questions: Where are your other men? What was your plan? What is your revolution?

  Each time Ulises answered, I’m alone. I had no plan. I’m poor. I want to survive. I could not conquer a child. The revolution is over, and I have lost.

  The instructors had never seen a spirit so broken on arrival. They deemed him rehabilitated and dismissed him from the class. Still, he was part of the dissidents’ ward and kept in solitary confinement. He was not allowed to write or send letters. He was not allowed to have visitors, except charitable nuns or government officials.

  In the fields Ulises was twice worked nearly to death. Both times he had been uprooting foul cane stalks blighted by beetles. Both times he was taken to the infirmary and given saline, cold packs, and aspirin because he was such a good worker. By the middle of his second year he’d been placed in charge of a small gang, and the fields they oversaw produced the most consistent crop.

  When the camp began to swell with new inmates, Ulises was put in charge of more men. He asked where the prisoners were coming from, and a guard told him that the Berlin Wall had fallen. Socialism was dead in Germany, which meant it could die elsewhere, and the president wanted any remaining counterrevolutionaries, confirmed or rumored, detained.

  The influx also resulted in Ulises’s transfer to the general population, where at last he was placed in a cell with three other men, all of them new to the prison. They acted tough, eyeing him meanly and stealing his bedsheets, but Ulises ignored their bravado. That, coupled with his size—the consistent food and work had returned width and muscle to Ulises’s depleted frame—meant they took him for something like a disinterested murderer and let him be. The quiet ones, they said, are always the craziest.

  It was another year before Ulises realized he could write a letter to someone now that he was out of solitary. He did, but then he wasn’t sure where to send it. In the end he mailed it to the United States, to Willems’s offices in Hartford, with the help of a guard who had a sister up north. Six months later he received a reply in the form of an unsigned business letter: Uxbal had died three weeks after Ulises was taken. He was buried nex
t to Soledad. Isabel left Buey Arriba shortly thereafter and disappeared.

  The letter, though on Willems’s stationery, was not written by Willems, but by the acting manager of Henri’s tobacco operation. The Dutchman had taken an open-ended leave of absence from the company, and the manager—the only person in contact with Henri—was handling his correspondence. According to his reply, Willems had departed Buey Arriba after Soledad’s death, though not without first leaving behind some money for Delfín, who somehow managed to live on. Presently, Willems was traveling the world collecting rare tobacco leaves, and every few months a small box arrived at the Hartford offices with a carton of cigars hand-rolled by Henri himself. The carton came with instructions to sell the cigars, which, the instructions stated, breathed a blue smoke purer than air, at ten thousand dollars apiece. The labels on the cigars were also handmade, and the stogies were called Imperial Soledads. The letter finished quickly with an apology for Willems’s inability to respond directly, and it included a cream-colored insert that Ulises presumed would come with the cigars, should someone be carelessly rich enough to purchase an entire box:

  These cigars are of the finest quality and meant for travelers. They should be smoked as a way to remember something familiar, something left behind; they should be smoked in such a way that a traveler never becomes accustomed to a place, that a placeless nostalgia overcomes him, and he is forever traveling, which is the plight and joy of the traveler, removed always from friends, family, familiar terrain, acquainted mountains and hills, beloved faces, a river of a man always.

  Two more years passed. The Soviet Union collapsed, and Ulises was released from jail. He was let out not for his good behavior, but for his growing skills. With the dissolution of the European socialist bloc, Cuba was on its own economically, and the government moved swiftly to subsidize its people. More than anything it had lost a trading partner, and the price of sugarcane plummeted. An official from the Ministry of Farms and Agriculture met with Ulises to discuss his role in what the president was calling the Special Period in Time of Peace. He wanted Ulises to run a new farm, or a series of new farms, that grew something besides sugarcane. The official wore burgundy wing tips with delicate stitching along the sides, and they reminded Ulises of his steel-toed dress shoes, his first gift from Henri, his first boots.