The Mortifications (16 page)

He asked Inez, Do you know for sure that your ex-husband has children?

No.

Then how can you be so certain he's happy? That he has a growing family?

Inez shrugged.

The longer you stay away, he said, the larger his family grows.

Don't preach to me about going home, she said. Your sister is still missing, and here you are in Havana, sleeping with a hooker.

I leave tomorrow afternoon, he said.

Inez faced the window. Most likely sooner, she said. The wind is picking up.

Ulises looked out the glass and saw a clothesline across the street struggling to remain attached to a wrought-iron balcony. Two dresses hung from the rope, and as Ulises watched the line swing in the intermittent gusts of wind, one of the dresses was blown away. Then the line snapped altogether, and it began to rain.

Are you going to stay in the city? Ulises asked.

Yes, Inez said. I doubt they'll evacuate us now. It's too late.

The windowpanes shook against the moving air outside, which seemed to be gathering strength, but then it stopped, and even the rain ceased.

There will be sirens in a moment, Inez said.

Is it that close? Ulises asked.

No, they just mean to turn on your radio.

There was a small radio on the bedside table, and before Inez reached it, Ulises could hear the sirens calling, a series of long, low wails. Inez tuned the dial, but all Ulises heard was static. They waited a minute, and then the static was cut off by an echoing voice. The voice said that local brigades were preparing for evacuation and that people should make their way along designated evacuation routes to designated evacuation sites. The city would flood, but there was time to safely and methodically exit. But first prepare yourselves. Do not forget water bottles, and pack extra medicine of any sort if you have it. There will be food and cots. There will be heat if it gets cold. The inhabitants of Havana will be cared for. Wait for further instructions.

Who's speaking? Ulises asked.

That's Castro, Inez said. If we had a television, we could watch him predict the pattern of the storm. He likes talking in front of maps. He refers to hurricanes as a bad bit of weather.

You seem to treat it as such, Ulises said.

Inez looked at him and said, I should go. I have to get food and water before the flooding starts.

How long do you think the city will be underwater? he asked.

Three days. It should be two, but the city sewers are old and drain slowly.

You'll be alone for three days in an apartment, Ulises said. I'd get lonely, or claustrophobic, if I had to stay inside for that long.

Ulises got out of bed and put on his pants, but when Inez said she did not need him to walk her out, he left his shirt on the floor. Moving around the room, he felt very hot, and when Inez touched him before leaving, she said, You're badly sunburned. You should cover your head in damp towels. It's going to hurt tomorrow. Your skin feels about to burst.

Ulises touched his scalp and winced. The skin had tightened, and he could feel the same effect on the back of his neck.

I didn't notice it until just now, he said.

You were preoccupied, she said.

She let him kiss her before she departed, for free this time, since he'd already paid her, and she was careful not to press her fingers too roughly into the side of his face, though Ulises felt an ache in the fingertips and thought, I'm sick with women. But then Inez left, and Ulises went to the bathroom, where he soaked the two washcloths hanging on the rack. He lay down again on the disheveled bed, made a mask of the wet towels over his chin, cheeks, forehead, and scalp, and after a while he managed to sleep.

Isabel awoke with a sudden need to vomit. She had been dreaming of God making promises to Sarah. Outside her wooden lean-to the forest was loud and black, and the mosquitoes bit at her ankles and ears. She retched as quietly as she could, trying to muffle the odd sound of her hiccupping, and she spat and wiped her greasy lips.

She considered Sarah in the tent laughing at God, disbelieving the child he'd promised Abraham. For months now, the matriarch's story had crept into Isabel's thoughts. She had been hearing His sound slipping through the canvas flap in response to the old woman's amusement, the voice an angry rush of floodwater.

It was night in the rebel camp, and one couldn't see the ragged shacks circling the brief clearing between a bamboo grove and a wall of sabicu trees. Isabel closed her eyes and saw the faces of two men, two rebels. One had a scar above his right eye and a long, blunt nose. The other had eyes of different colors, a brown iris and a black iris, and a small mouth missing three bottom teeth. Just days ago, Isabel had gone to bed with each of them, despite their filthy skins and body hairs thick with grime.
The Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as He had promised.

Isabel tried again to keep from retching. She remembered their breathing, their heaves as they were astride her. It was miraculous that either of them had finished, had come inside her, so starved were their bodies. The rebel camp—populated by four other men, six women, and a handful of children—was a wasteland where food was scarce. Exhaustion was a state of being, and Isabel had been nervous to touch the two men with any sort of force. They had both floated above her, working their hips and scraping their knees toward an uncertain climax, and Isabel had tried not to look too long into their wild eyes, pupils dilating as though they were remembering past miracles. Rather, she'd focused on their rib cages, flexed against their thin, pale skin, threatening to tear their chests apart, to spill the contents of their abdomens. With both men she'd thought, Not a bone to spare, and she'd worried their intercourse would be for nothing. That she'd not be as blessed as Sarah.

But when Isabel was certain something had passed from their bodies and into hers, she'd turned quiet and grateful. The hot air of their lungs escaped them in a rush of acrid breath on her face, on her neck, and the men held themselves like statues. It was, she'd decided, the presence of God, the same stillness He had brought inside the tent with Sarah. Afterward the men shivered with cold, but Isabel sat still, listening to the quiet between their gasps, believing, out of faith rather than evidence, that miracles were born from dire circumstance, from under duress: Sarah the aging mother and Eve the cribbed offspring of a diminished, anesthetized Adam.

A wind came through the encampment, and Isabel opened her eyes. The nausea subsided. She still could see mostly nothing, but she knew which direction to walk if she wanted to find either one of those two rebels, which shacks were theirs and where on the floor of each they slept. The first one she'd gone to, the one with the scar, was probably the younger. His name was Efraín. He'd groaned at the very start and was unable to control the volume of his panting. He had clearly never slept with a woman before, and he'd barely kissed Isabel before pulling off her boots. It had rained that day, and Isabel had hoped the running water would hide their noise. But Efraín couldn't contain himself. He shouted as he entered her, as he finished, and Isabel realized that the young man didn't have the strength to have sex and temper his voice at the same time.

She slept with these men while Uxbal lay sickly, holed up alone in a bamboo hut like a waning emperor. What are you doing? he asked her the night following her tryst with Efraín. Everyone heard that racket.

She'd said nothing.

Speak to me, he'd begged her, but she wouldn't.

Isabel had been at the camp for over a month by then, and she hadn't said a word to anyone—not even to Uxbal when he cried at seeing her thin, dehydrated face coming out from the forest that first time at the twilight hour. She'd not expected to remain silent. She'd thought her voice would come charging back from its hibernation the moment she saw her father. He'd said to her, You've come like a vision. She took his hand and kissed it.

He was weak then, walking with a stick, and he was even weaker now, in bed most of the time. His breath and body shared the same rancid odor, as though his skin were fermenting. His canvas cot smelled like sugar-water gone sour, and he'd lost all his molars. He told her he was not well but had suffered worse, though soon he was begging her to speak, claiming that to hear her voice would give him strength. In response, Isabel could only shake her head. In the dirt of his shack she wrote,
I took a vow.

Why? he asked her. Why? You're torturing me. I haven't seen you in years, and finally I can touch your arm and look at your eyes. But I can't believe my senses if you don't talk. I don't know if it's really you if I can't hear your voice.

Isabel wrote him notes but ran out of paper fast, filling up in just a matter of weeks the five stenographer's notebooks she'd brought. She wrote incredibly small letters on the page, but some were so tiny, Uxbal could not read them. His eyes were going too. On the cardboard flap of one notebook she scribbled, Why are you ill? What have you got?

I'm old, Uxbal said. I don't know. It could be just a cold. It could be something else.

Isabel knew he was worse than that.

Uxbal asked her a thousand questions, and she responded to each one, writing twenty notebook pages on her time in the United States, her brother, her mother, and the Dutchman. She wrote extensively about her work with children. She wrote about God. Gathering the pages, Uxbal rolled them into a tube and tied them together with a string. He hung them from the roof of his shack so they wouldn't get wet and fall apart. He read them every evening before the sun set, and then he and Isabel would sit next to each other, holding hands. She would pray, and Uxbal would stare at his daughter's fingers and say, They look like your mother's. But your arms are long like mine.

She wanted to say something back, but she felt she didn't have the words with which to break her vow. At times she wasn't sure she had a voice anymore, and she prayed to St. Paul, whom God had told to preach:
Be not afraid, but speak.

Isabel didn't know what she was afraid of. Sarah, she decided, had been afraid of dying. She'd been an old woman, and it was dangerous, what God had promised her. It might have killed her. It might have broken her open and left Abraham with a son but no wife to nurse him. Miracles are dangerous, Isabel thought, and she'd always considered her vows minor miracles, the incredible effort necessary to stay hushed in such a loud world. It would be another sort of miracle for her to break the silence. She wasn't sure Uxbal understood what it was he was asking of her when he said, Speak!

Of course, Isabel could see that it pained him; he called out to her relentlessly, and she saw that he was made weaker by the effort. His body was a testament to frailty: it farted when he napped after meals, it stank when he sweated, which was all the time, and it refused to digest enough food to nourish him completely. When he was short of breath, Uxbal would reach for his cane and push himself up against the wall nearest his cot, coughing gray phlegm into his hands. Often he would struggle, and those were the moments Isabel drew closest to him; she would slide her long arms under his sticky pits, her chin dipping behind his damp clavicle, and lift him with a delicacy she'd acquired as a hospital volunteer. Sometimes she would even press her palm into the small of Uxbal's back, forcing the old man to push his chest out and make more room for his gasping lungs.

In most ways he reminded Isabel of the lost causes of St. Anthony's and Jude the Apostle, the nearly gone bodies she'd visited by candlelight. His shack was as spare as a hospital bedroom, and even the cot with its aluminum frame echoed the steel bedrails of a gurney.

In truth, Isabel did not speak because she feared she had returned to the land of the dying. It was the familiar, quiet terrain between the here and the hereafter, a place that, through her years of service, had become a language-less region. Isabel thought she could feel a similar desolation around Uxbal's diminishing form. It was not a silence, for all her belief and devotion, she was prepared to test the magnitude of. Was it gathering still? Was it close to consuming him? Or was there time yet? Only once in her long career as a volunteer had Isabel ever disturbed the air of the suffering with her own clean breath, with the echoes of life. Only once in all her 944 hours had she cruelly brought a person back into the world with her careless tongue.

It happened when Isabel was a junior nurses' aide, before she became the Death Torch, when she had signed up for the dark hours of the early morning that no other volunteer could stand. She walked the hallways of the hospital and hospice center between two and six, encountering respirators, soiled bedpans, moaning newborns, and exhausted residents. But she was diligent and fearless, and she was freshly possessed by the image of the blue-lipped boy she'd held at Opal's Lake. It was her devotion that eventually led her, one day, into Room Three of the hospital's southern wing, the children's cancer ward. There, Isabel intruded on a young girl who was wide awake at four in the morning and staring blankly into the half-light with an amber cat's eye. Some disease had colored her iris a thin, gorgeous shade of honey.

Started by a stranger's entrance, by Isabel's quiet gasp, the girl cried out. But then, seeing Isabel's face, the girl said, It's not killing me, just making me go blind. The leukemia is what's killing me.

She was bald, and she sat straight up in bed as though she'd been expecting a visitor. Her hands were busily rubbing her kneecaps beneath the purple hospital blanket. Behind her, the orange glow of a streetlamp slipped through the blinds covering the window.

I'm not scared anymore, the girl said.

Isabel wondered if, when you are dying, do people stop asking you questions like
How do you feel?
or
Are you scared?
The answers are short-lived. She said nothing but walked up to the bed and offered her hand. As the girl took it, she blinked, and Isabel saw again the golden eye.

You startled me when you came in, the girl said. I thought you were one of the night nurses. They come barging in like it's the daytime, like we're not trying to sleep in here.

I'm sorry, Isabel said. I didn't mean to scare you.

The girl, still holding on to Isabel's hand, lay down and closed her eyes. I thought someone had come to my room because I had died, she said. I thought I was watching myself from above.

An hour later, her heart monitor began to chirp. Where is her family? Isabel wondered. The girl's breath stopped. Another minute and the monitor's alarm gave out, some fault in the wiring, and even the baseline hum of the girl's pulselessness was gone. The sun came up, and the room yellowed. The ceiling fan stopped turning. It took a long time for the nursing staff to arrive, and when they did, they entered the room with tired, dipping chins but also bright, shifty eyes. Isabel realized they were grateful the girl had passed; she understood they had been waiting a long time for this.

After the body was taken away, Isabel went and asked a nurse at the desk where the girl's parents were.

They died the year before in a car accident on a highway, said the nurse. An aunt adopted the girl, but she's unmarried and works long hours. She came every night at 6:10 and watched TV with her niece, but the girl was most often by herself.

The nurse was called away, leaving Isabel alone at the desk.

Isabel then did something she shouldn't have: she went behind the nurses' station and peeked into the girl's chart. In the myriad handwritten doctors' notes, she saw the patient's date of birth, the record of her diminishing weight, her fluctuating body temperatures, and the progress of the cancer. She read the shaky, partial prognostications of chemotherapists, of the resident oncologist, of the surgeon who'd cut a growth from the girl's leg. She saw the girl's name: Daphne Bergmann. Tucking the chart under her arm, Isabel retreated down the cold corridor.

Back in the room, Isabel noticed for the first time how empty it had been all along, how devoid of toys or books or even a child's teddy bear. As if all evidence of the world had been consciously removed, possessions somehow a distraction in the final hour. Isabel spent an hour tidying Room Three. She changed the linens on the bed, emptied the trash cans, and dusted the room's surfaces most often overlooked by the cleaning staff: the top of the window frame, the blinds, the space between the headboard and the wall, the inside of the nightstand drawer, and the protruding back of the mounted TV set, which was something like a bulbous gray tumor.

When Isabel was finished, she went to the hospital chapel, a small room in the eastern wing decorated with only a white cross on the northern wall, a vase overflowing with daffodils, and six rows of gray folding chairs. Isabel was surprised to see no specifically Catholic ornaments. In the front row and with Daphne Bergmann's chart at her side, Isabel sat down to pray for the girl and her deceased parents. She said her prayers aloud, because the nuns had taught her to always recite with conviction; there was no shame in asking if what you asked for could be asked aloud.

Because Daphne Bergmann had been young and motherless, Isabel spoke directly to the Holy Mother. She began at first with a Hail Mary but soon realized she didn't have a rosary on hand. Isabel considered a lengthy incantation to God's inscrutability; but the girl had died instead of being resurrected, so Isabel chose against the Sorrowful Mysteries, which gave meaning to death by pulling death itself from the void.

Instead, Isabel settled on a private novena for Daphne Bergmann, one that would last nine hours instead of nine days. She glanced around the quiet room. A novena demanded replication from a printed text. At St. Brendan's, there had often been a Bible passage or a chosen hymnal printed on a pamphlet from which the congregation would read. When one of the teachers had died, they'd used hand-size, blood-red leaflets. But the chapel was empty.