The Mortifications (12 page)

Uxbal's letter was a wave carrying with it the blue sound of Isabel's youth. It was written in the language of clay, a saltless bread on her tongue, and it filled her ear as honey poured into the chambers of a nautilus shell. It returned Isabel to Sundays at the packinghouse in Buey Arriba and to her father's wet lips, his thrilling hot breath. It put her on a bench with other young girls, their white blouses gray with sweat. It stirred an old memory and asked a familiar question.

My love, I hope you know how much this God has given you. Forty days he prayed and fasted in the desert, which isn't much time at all in the scope of things, but the body is a weakness, and it doesn't take that much to break it, to untangle it from its needs. Eventually, when it's hungry enough, it consumes itself. The Gospels say Christ met with the devil out in the sand, and he was tempted with food and water and power. Can you imagine food or water as a temptation? Maybe some of the tomatoes in our garden, because they're so sweet? Everywhere else in the Book the Lord commands travelers and strangers to be taken in, to be cared for, to be given food and water and a place to rest. So here the devil does the Lord's work, and it is a sin, a temptation against the master plan. God contradicts himself, doesn't he, Isabel?

What would you have done if Christ refused you? You are in the desert, and you see him, hungry and sunburned, his face gaunt and his shoulders low. You see how red his feet are, the tops of them like boiled lobsters. His eyes are human eyes and nothing special. You expected to see or hear God, but here is just another man.

And you realize this: he disgusts you. The body is repulsive. It smells terribly. The skin is like wet paper that breeds disease. His breath is raspy. It rots like the guavas in the back. That's what you find if you go into the desert: human filth. But still you do what God has commanded. You serve him. Or you try to, and he tells you to go away. He won't take your water or your bread. God banishes you from him.

We think this story is about the devil tempting our faith and us. We think we're the one in the desert. We want to be the Christ; and we want to show God how we cast the devil aside. That we're stronger than our bodies, or that our faith won't crumble because of tongues and stomachs.

But we're not Christ in that story. We have no powers. We could not turn stones into bread if we wanted to. If we threw ourselves off a ledge, no angels would break our fall. We would die.

Here is the truth: we are the devil in the desert. We are the ones at the Lord's side, offering him our bread, the same bread I'm still digesting. The same bread we, a few minutes ago, called the Host. It was his body we ate, or so we think and hope and pray, but we now know that in the desert the body, even Christ's, is worthless. It becomes the thing by which we tempt Jesus.

Here's another lie: we think we want Jesus to be wholly human. We think we want him to suffer not for a single afternoon on the cross, but for a lifetime and in all the ways we have suffered. We think we want Christ to want for food and to believe God has abandoned him, not just for one day, but for weeks, for a time sufficient to cultivate lasting fear. We think we want Jesus to be as unsatisfied with this world as we all are.

The real sin of the devil in the desert is not that he offers Christ bread, but that he reminds Christ that he is God. He wants to see Jesus as God, not Jesus as man. This is us. This is you, Isabel; this me, your father; this Rosa next to you; this is Carlos, her father; this is Lupe, her mother; this is Nestor behind you; this is Zava, his wife, and Mona, his daughter; this is us. We think there is a lesson in God's suffering, something that reveals the plane of Earth we share with the Creator of all things beyond the Earth, with the Maker of stars and planets and galaxies and atoms and dust and light; the notion that we can be Christlike. But that is absurd. His suffering is a ruse; it lasts for a flash in the length of eternity, which is the time line of God. He has no sense of time. It means, in the fat scheme, nothing to him.

The sin is in the knowing. The sin Christ confronts in the desert is the knowledge that his body is useless and, dangerously, how easily he can dismiss it. He will see how tiny a thing he is doing. He will know how small he is as a human being, how little he can change the world as a lump of flesh. The moment he knows, he can and will and should let it all fall away. He will enact the right of a God on Earth; he will make food from stone. He will shake water from the clouds. He will walk into a city and take it.

So we must—are you hearing me, Isabel? Don't cry. This is the Good News—turn away from God as the Almighty. We have to burn into our hearts Christ the human, Christ the weak. We think we do this, but we don't. We make Christ strong and powerful, because we fear the hard work of a weak and human Christ. Because though it is a pathetic few hours for the Creator, three hours on a cross terrifies us. Because we are afraid of the pain and hunger, and we want to save Jesus in the desert in the selfish hope that he then does the same for us. We want to barter our way back to paradise.

People, take each other's hand. Isabel, take Gabriela's hand. Take Celia's. Hold each other. Right now I could say to you, It will be all right. Trust in the Lord. Trust in God. But I need you to be scared. I need you to understand the weight of this promise and the fear that accompanies it. You have heard me and all these men speak to the power of God. But today I wanted to say the things I have not yet said. I wanted to tell you about the fear and the pain that is coming. I hope I have been clear. I hope you feel in your chest and heart how sad a thing I am asking of you. I am asking you to feel pain, a tremendous pain, to wallow in your bodies, to dedicate your bodies to the most human purpose, the bringing of souls into this world.

I love you, Isabel, but do not do this for me. If today you make a promise, you give yourself over to a filthy, dusty Jesus. Christ was a human, so we can and should also be human. What you promise us, then, is not the birth of just another rebel, but of another human, another Christ. You give us another savior.

It did not bother Ulises that perhaps he'd been fated to return to Cuba. His father had never left, so going back to the island had always seemed a vague though improbable possibility. Still, bobbing in the wake of Isabel's disappearance, disoriented by the long boat journey, and traumatized by the image of his drained, flat-chested, post-surgical mother, Ulises pushed forward with an intransigent focus that allowed him to ignore what Soledad had actually asked him to do: go home. He arrived in port tired and tan and nauseated, having wanted to see the island approach from the ship's bow. After vomiting his small breakfast, Ulises hired a taxi to take him to his hotel, where he shut all the blinds in his room and slept for forty hours in a bed that was too short and too narrow for his body, waking only to drink water, order and eat room-service tomato salads, and use the toilet. In Havana, he was to do two things: visit the local order of the Sisters of the Holy Resurrection and meet with a man named Simón, a cousin of Orozco, who had agreed to help Ulises get to Buey Arriba.

When, on the third day, Ulises finally emerged from the hotel, he was greeted by an oppressive heat, which seemed to push out into the city streets all manner of people. Ulises heard German being spoken, saw girls heading to school with scarves under their collars, and thought all the beggars were dressed as itinerant farmers. Havana's population slid beneath a dull fog, and the added mixture of military vehicles and chrome-fendered limousines further unhinged him.

Ulises felt that the city existed in some sort of time warp, but it wasn't trapped in the 1950s the way those postcards with the rusted Bel Airs might suggest. Rather, it seemed disconnected from time altogether, as if it had removed itself from Earth's revolutions so long ago that those rusted cars were not the detritus of a better past, but the haunting machinery of a disturbing future.

It's the sun, he told himself, which he had not forgotten in the mind but clearly had forgotten in the skin. The light of day was overwhelming, and this was different from Hartford, where June, July, and August were all haze, a smothering cloud. He made a joke to a passerby about the summer heat in Havana. The man laughed at him, saying, This is the
only
season, which made Ulises feel like a foreigner, the blood in his heart not his own.

He hailed a taxi, which took him to the Church of Christ the Savior. He discovered that the church was a sort of tourist attraction—a horde of Italians were taking pictures—because of a minor miracle supposed to have taken place on its steps sometime in the seventies: a deaf child had fainted near the doors, and when he awoke in the hospital later, he could make out sound in his right ear. At the entrance, Ulises approached a small man collecting donations for the site and asked to see the Mother Superior. My sister is missing, he said. The man went to fetch the nun.

Ulises waited at the door, and people began to confuse him for the foyer attendant, so he found a pew and sat down. But he felt out of place among the handful of supplicants, and he lowered a kneeler to the floor as gently as he could. The church was a castle compared to the packinghouse in Buey Arriba, the only place in Cuba he had ever prayed. Still, his legs were too long for the space beneath the bench; they knocked against the kneeler behind him, so he turned at an angle, facing not the altar but the tabernacle situated in the eastern transept, a small nook flooded with reddish light.

He thought of the Eucharist inside, which he'd not tasted in years, and he imagined a severed leg instead of a wafer of bread. It was a game he used to play at morning Mass when he was younger, imagining all the body parts of Christ the other children were eating. It reminded him of Tantalus's stew, and Cronus, and all the men or gods who ate other men. Debts being paid, Ulises thought, and he saw then his mother's breasts in the tabernacle. He felt the need to cry, but instead he began to recite Latin exercises under his breath. Eventually, he found it easier to simply speak in Latin, which had been the language of school services, of Mass at St. Brendan's, which is how Ulises got to praying. And though he started with the Lord's Prayer, he quickly slid into more specific supplication: Ulises asked the Lord to stop disturbing his sister, to perhaps grant a pardon on her faith and then, if there was time, to keep his mother alive that Soledad might see her daughter again before passing away. The invocation seemed to admit the death of his mother or, at least, that things looked bad, which, of course, they did, so Ulises started over, praying for good weather in Hartford and for kind doctors to attend to his mother. But in doing so, his skepticism returned, and he realized that to keep amending his wants, if he kept asking for less and less, he eventually would ask for nothing and never be disappointed. This, maybe, was the real difference between him and his sister: Isabel could be disappointed by God, but Ulises could not. It made him feel small and young again, a child in a space suddenly monstrous. It was in that state that the Mother Superior, a broad woman who introduced herself as Sister Espinosa, came upon him.

Your sister stayed here two nights, she said. One to rest and one to pray.

What condition was she in? Ulises asked.

Troubled, maybe, or just tired. She was at our door very early in the morning, and she hadn't eaten in a while. We fed her, and then she slept for most of the first day. She smelled terrible, and we had to convince her to shower. It took us half a day to realize she was mute and to give her a pencil and some paper.

A vow of silence.

She didn't mention it, Sister Espinosa said. She eventually told us she was a novitiate elsewhere. We offered her a new habit and some of our clothes, but she wouldn't take them. Your sister is not an easy woman to reason with.

She has her own faith, he said. It looks like yours but is something else altogether.

It's stronger, she said. On the second day we had no services, because no one would enter the church while she was praying.

Why not? Ulises asked.

She seemed possessed, the nun said. Well, not exactly possessed. Shaking possession. But people saw her from the door, and something made them stop. They congregated at the entrance, and when they realized she wasn't going to finish praying anytime soon, they gave up on Mass for the day.

Did she tell you where she was going? he asked.

She didn't even tell us she was going until right before she left, Sister Espinosa said. I thought she might stay longer. I thought she was purging herself of something.

Ulises wondered if this had been the place where Isabel's faith was tested, whatever that meant, against the loss of himself and his mother. He realized he wanted it to have been a struggle for her to go. Or because he had never been able to demand much of Isabel, he wanted the church to be a place where she had, at least, considered them, if only briefly.

We did give her a backpack, Sister Espinosa said. She asked for one.

What did she take with her? he asked.

Mostly food, but also a sweater, a shirt, and a bar of soap. We gave her some boots as well, and she left us her slippers.

She was leaving the city, Ulises said. She was heading east to Buey Arriba.

I think she was heading into the woods, Sister Espinosa said. No one wears boots in the city. Miraculously, we had a pair to give her.

What kind of boots were they?

The kind for cane cutters. Thick soles and an ample toe. Your sister was desperate for them. She reminded me of the campesinos south of Camaguey or northwest of Santiago, the ones along the coast right after the revolution. When they heard that Batista had fled to Miami, they cheered, and then they started asking for things. Sister Espinosa put her hands together. She said, I am very old to remember that era.

She crossed herself once and kissed her fingers.

There are two Cubas, she said, the one in the city and the one in the country. Your sister seemed to want the latter. The cities are cramped, and there's only room for one kind of Catholicism, but there's more room and fewer churches out east and away from the highways. Out there no one is going to tell you how to pray. That's how your sister prayed, as if she were on her own with God.

So the faith falls apart the farther east I go, Ulises said.

It fans out like a wave and runs over everything, but only enough to wet them, to give them a taste of God. They substitute the rest with what's around, chapels or not.

Leaving, Ulises put another donation for the church in the box at the entrance, and the man by the door tried to shake his hand. It was bright outside, sometime after lunch, and the city was napping. Despite the efforts of a cabdriver, it was difficult to find an open restaurant. The driver said it would be at least another hour before the gears began to grind again and to maybe order something from room service at the hotel.

At the front desk there was a message from Simón: a hurricane was coming, and though he would be late to Havana, he would meet Ulises at the Blue Dolphin for lunch the next day. Ulises asked the hotel desk attendant about the hurricane, and the man politely said, yes, there was often a hurricane coming, but the hotel had only to close its shutters and lock its doors in preparation. Only when the winds blew over one hundred kilometers per hour did anyone really take notice.

Not tired, Ulises ordered two sandwiches from the hotel kitchen and took them on a walk down to the harbor. This was not the harbor through which he'd left Cuba, though of that moment in time Ulises only remembered the throng of escapees. They carried with them lumpy pillowcases, packed in a hurry and spilling clothes, money, papers, and photographs. There was one man who'd written prayers on his body. Aboard the boat, he took his shirt off in the sun, and Ulises could read across his chest incantations to the Holy Mother, his begging for calm waters. He remembered also the lighthouse in Mariel, set on the western side of the harbor. In Havana, the lighthouse was part of an old Spanish fort, and it guarded the eastern bank.

By midafternoon, a mixture of tourists and natives populated the white sidewalks and the lovely paths along the seawall. Ulises stopped at a street vendor and bought a pair of sunglasses before finding a café. He ordered rum and Coke, as well as some paper and a pencil, and wrote a letter to his mother and Willems while sipping his drink in the shade. He would call them later, but he'd been told phone calls to the U.S. were not affordable and the connections often failed. The clerk at the hotel told him the mail was more reliable despite its sluggishness.

In his letter Ulises recounted his safe journey to Cuba and even noted for Soledad the strange awareness he'd felt when he approached Havana by boat. He left out his seasickness but detailed his conversation with Sister Espinosa, though he did not mention the boots. As Ulises pictured his mother in his head, Soledad grew weaker by the second. She aged with every imaginative act, and he felt himself attempting to take the burden of Isabel from his mother's shoulders completely. He believed it would not be wholly unacceptable for her to die—when had he come to this conclusion?—with the belief, no matter how improbable, that her daughter could be brought back. Ulises ordered two more rum and Cokes as he finished his letter on a bright note, mentioning Simón's message at the hotel and stressing the fact that Sister Espinosa had known exactly who Isabel was.

The rum came, and this time the waiter left the bottle of Havana Club on the table, and when Ulises asked him if he could purchase an envelope nearby, the young man returned with one for free. Ulises, feeling a bit drunk but pleasant in the shade, watched a weather vane atop the Castillo de la Real Fuerza. The weather vane was in the shape of a woman, a flag in one hand, some sort of branch in the other. Curious, he leaned over to disturb the two women at the table next to him, one a thin brunette in a long skirt, the other tall and pale despite the sun.

What's the meaning of that weather vane up there? he asked, pointing.

They told him the statue commemorated the wife of the explorer Hernando de Soto, who was also the seventh governor of Cuba. When de Soto went to explore North America, his wife had supposedly waited for his return by walking along the harbor wall every day for four years, and when she heard he'd died of a fever along the Mississippi River, she died four days later.

One of the women said, She was faithful, you know?

The women explained how the weather vane was a replica. The original had been blown down in a storm and was now on display at the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, home to the Museum of the City of Havana. Before the waiter collected Ulises's rum bottle—now empty—one of the women grabbed it and tapped its label. Ulises saw that the rum's logo was the same figure.

What was her name? Ulises asked.

Isabel de Bobadilla, she said.

At the museum, crowds of tourists shuffled about the courtyard, and Ulises watched as bookish guides directed whispering pods through the arcade and into various rooms. He saw that the second story had a beautiful limestone façade, and embedded in the limestone were any number of marine fossils, which made Ulises think—though this likely had something to do with the rum—that Cuba was a bandage on the ocean, a floating scrap. I am on a ship, Ulises said to himself, and as if by command his legs wobbled at the knees. He stumbled slightly and made his way to one of the pillars that upheld the arches of the arcade, and he leaned against the column.

A hand touched his shoulder, and a woman asked, Mister, are you all right? Would you like some water?

The woman appeared young at first but was maybe even older than he. But I
look
much older, Ulises thought, and he touched his head and found sprouts of hair there. He'd cut it back before he'd left, but it had been days, and the patches that still grew out, the little forest surrounding the ridge that was his scar, were taking root. The skin was also hot. Ulises pressed a finger into his scalp, and he felt a tingle. How long had he been walking around outside? How long had he been burning under the sun? He patted his pockets and found his wallet, but his new pair of sunglasses was missing. The girl waited for his answer. She wore a yellow blouse, a red handkerchief, and a long skirt. She had pretty dimples and green eyes, and Ulises wanted to think she looked like Isabel, but that was entirely untrue. She was rounder than his sister, not really plump, but the shape of girl who ate regularly and slept well.