The Mortifications (21 page)

Isabel pushed her palm into her stomach to see if she might feel something, though she knew she wouldn't. Like Adelina and Augusto talking through their hands, begging for answers—Who are our parents?—and not finding any. Feeling nothing, it struck Isabel that her child, the girl, when she was older might want to know who her father was. She might want to seek him out one day. She would have the same questions as the mute rebel offspring, and Isabel couldn't stop her from asking. The righteous anger came back then, because Isabel saw Uxbal in bed, heard him telling her what to do, even after she'd come back to him and he'd abandoned his faith. Isaac like a lamb, Isabel as dumb as a sheep, Abraham as obedient as a blind cow. What could she tell her little girl that would put an end to the searching? What could she say to a young woman that would keep her from looking? A man could be found. She, of course, knew this.

Six men, however, might not be found. Six men, like seeds cast into the wind, might spread so far apart that it would be nearly impossible to track them down. Especially six men who did not want to be found. Who were accustomed to their isolation, who would not see their face in a child even if God whispered the truth into their ears. Six rebels, Isabel thought, are better than two. I would not know. I could not know. When she asks, I could just say, I'm sorry. I don't know. It's impossible to know. You don't really have a father. Not in the way most people do. But you have a mother, and she loves you to death.

It was nearly dusk when the truck pulled into Las Tunas. Ulises and Simón, as payment for the ride, helped the soldiers transfer cargo, loading a hundred boxes of gauze bandages onto the trailer. Ulises asked where the soldiers would sit on the ride back to Santa Clara, and the young one said they would stand at the rear. They would make a game of it and try to shove each other out the back.

The young soldier invited Ulises and Simón to a bar where the food was cheap and there was a jukebox. It was dark and windy out, and the soldiers said it would rain overnight as the hurricane slammed Havana. One of the men said a prayer at this and crossed himself. He had been the one playing the guitar on the truck, and Ulises realized that the songs he'd heard on the ride were religious tunes, string variations of Catholic hymns.

Inside the bar, the musician said grace over his food, and when the young soldier, the jealous brother, noticed Ulises studying the guitarist, he said, Paulo wanted to be a priest, but he was too dumb. He couldn't keep track of all the saints' names or the dates of their deaths. Doesn't have a mind for books.

St. Cecilia's got him, Simón said.

She did, because Paulo, after only a few bites, had gone over to the jukebox to study the record list. Ulises thought the man must have had a song already going in his head, because he tapped out a beat on the floor, but the song he paid for was a leisurely ballad between two lovers living on the opposite sides of a bay who sang to each other across the water.

Paulo thinks all ballads are really about God, the young soldier said. He says to read Song of Songs.

The food was passable, and Ulises ate in silence. Simón spoke to the bartender about a ride farther east, but the barkeep couldn't help, though he did have an aloe plant growing behind the building, and he offered a branch to Ulises for his sunburn. The soldiers drank slowly but steadily, such that hours passed but no one really got drunk. Some girls came in later in the evening and danced alone between a pair of tables. A few of the soldiers approached them. The girls looked very young, but their makeup was pretty, and one of them had a blond dye-job that wasn't terrible.

At one point the girls stopped dancing and started singing. They surrounded the jukebox and crooned about a
campesina
who grew peppers in her yard and whose husband died one day in a burning field of sugarcane. The widow cut stalks from the burnt crop and pressed her own juice, stewing it with her peppers. She gave the peppers to men she knew were not faithful, and they returned home to their wives. The blond girl sang the loudest. Like her hair, her voice was not terrible. The other patrons in the bar had quieted, and Ulises saw that even Paolo seemed impressed, so much so that at the next song he asked her to dance.

The other reason why Paolo could never be a priest, the young soldier said: a girl with a decent voice makes his dick hard. You imagine that in church? The priest's robes with a little pop at the crotch?

She looks too young, Simón said.

Country whores, the young soldier said.

Paolo was pulling the blonde closer to him, but the song was too fast, and she kept dancing away.

Kids playing dress up, Simón said. She's going to slap him if he doesn't give up.

Paolo left the girl after the song ended, but a couple of numbers later he went and touched her on the shoulder, which made her jump. She looked scared, and Paolo smiled as best he could, but then she said something, and he grabbed her by the arm. The blonde's friends started yelling. The bartender told the young soldier to do something. The young soldier shook his head but didn't move.

What if that was your sister? Ulises asked.

Fuck you, the young soldier said, but he got up from his stool.

He went over to Paolo and took him by the arm, which prompted Paolo to swing for the young soldier's face, which led to more blows. Together they knocked over some chairs, but in the end they fell to the ground, the young soldier—the bigger of the two—atop Paolo, and they seemed drunk at last. Finally standing, Paolo wrapped his arm around his friend and mumbled apologies. The girls were long gone.

Dragging Paolo out the door, the young soldier called out to the bartender, Smokes, water, whiskey!

The bartender put the drinks and half a pack of cigarettes in front of Ulises and said, They can smoke in here if they like.

Outside, the young soldier took the shots from Ulises and gave both the waters to Paolo.

That wasn't my sister, he said.

Have a smoke, Ulises said. He pulled a stick from the pack and tapped it against the box, lit it, and passed it along.

He did the same for Paolo, who instead of thanking him said, We were talking while we danced. She kept asking me where we were going, what we were doing, which cities I'd been to. She asked if I could take her in the truck with us, and I said, of course not. One girl and twelve men? I asked her what she thought that would be like, and she said fantastic. I told her that we couldn't take her, but she wasn't having it.

I'm sorry about your face, the young soldier said. Your nose looks like shit.

Paolo waved his hand in front of his face to clear the smoke, which hung like a mist because the night was so humid.

He said, They think you're out having fun all the time. They don't know how sore your ass gets on that bench in the back of the truck. It's a miracle we can walk after driving around all day. You just want to stay somewhere for a little bit, not keep running around, and they want to start a fucking voyage across the island.

Ulises recognized boredom in Paolo's face, the appearance of having done the same thing over and over again until it was reflex.

You get in a lot of fights? Ulises asked.

Some, he said, but this guy always takes me down. He's not the first subofficer, but he leads. He kept Salvo out of jail once for hitting a girl.

Same story, different asshole, the young soldier said.

Do you get tired of it?

It's my lot.

The infantrymen slept in the truck, but Simón got a room for Ulises and himself just above the bar. It was the bartender's apartment, but because he worked all night, the space was free until the morning. There was a bed and a cot, and Ulises pleaded with Simón to take the bed. He eventually did, and Ulises climbed into the cot, his limbs hanging over the edges, and turned out the light.

Soldiers are a boring bunch, said Simón.

They were drunk, Ulises said.

They're bored, so they pick fights.

The young one seemed sincere. We're probably around the same age.

He was the worst, Simón said. Some romantic ass. Poets and warriors, equally annoying. They go looking for trouble, and then they whine about it.

Ulises said, That's not new:
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate…

What's that? Simón asked.

The first line of
The Aeneid.

Isn't that about a soldier who abandons his city?

Yes. But then he starts Rome.

And then Rome burns, Simón said. I'm old-fashioned, but people belong in the fields. The plants are supposed to die, so they can come back. Bananas are perennials. They die ever year, and you get used to it. You don't worry about things going away.

That soldier was worried about his sister going away, Ulises said.

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever,
Simón quoted.

I didn't think you went to church, Ulises said.

Only when I visit my mother, though sometimes the Bible comes back like this. When I'm with her, I can't forget it. In Mexico, I could recite the whole book.

Isabel reminds me of Cuba, Ulises said. When I see her, I see our father. I remember our old house. When she's gone, it's harder to picture the place. I could draw pictures of my father's tomato vines if Isabel were at my side.

You won't need her in a day or two, Simón said. You're going to see it all again.

In the morning Simón left Ulises halfway through breakfast to see about a bus. There were rumors that the hurricane had turned north toward Florida, so the island was coming out of its hole. No one knew for certain, however, because the TV and radio signals were still a jumble of white noise. When Simón returned to the bar, he came with a horse. The buses were coming, supposedly, but not a soul knew when, and the distance to Bayamo was only ninety kilometers. They would be there in a day and half, and Buey Arriba was only forty kilometers from there.

Where did the horse come from? Ulises asked.

There's a lot in town for loose animals. Because of the hurricane.

The storm hasn't landed here, Ulises said.

The animals run ahead of the weather, from west to east. And no one's going to chase a horse across the island.

The horse had no saddle, but Simón said they would go to town and purchase some blankets, and they only had to suffer for a day and a half anyway. In town they also bought Ulises a baseball cap, a new pair of sunglasses, and a bottle of sunblock. Simón told Ulises to tie his glasses around his neck with a string, both because the horseback ride would be bumpy and because sunglasses were easy to pickpocket.

On the road to Bayamo Ulises saw many things. He saw herds of Siboney cows crossing weedy fields between irrigation ditches. He saw abandoned silver mines, the pits often not twenty meters from the road with shallow, green-tinted rainwater collected into ponds at the bottom. He saw what Simón told him were
palenques,
or crumbling, walled-off villages built by escaped slaves three hundred years ago. At crossroads he saw roadblocks stacked along the highway's shoulders, and Simón said they were used to guard the coffee harvest as it was transported east. To keep the caravans from being pillaged, raided for the black market, the military cordoned off the highway and made a road with walls on either side. Ulises saw children carrying sacks of what he thought were stolen beans. On the second day he saw a great lizard cuckoo flitting about at dusk, chasing moths, and when, finally, they were within sight of Bayamo, they were also in sight of the Sierra Maestra, and Ulises saw the hills he'd known as a boy.

There, he and Simón rented a room at the only hotel for miles around—really a hostel, really the second floor of a bakery with a few storage rooms given windows. From their window Ulises saw, in the moonlight, smoke rising from the east, though he saw no fire. Later, from his bed, he saw a painting of Che Guevara on the western half of the ceiling. He closed his eyes, and in that darkness he saw his mother, and he missed her. He saw his sister, and he was angry. He saw his father and did not know what to feel.

Ulises awoke while the morning was still gray, and he awoke not because he'd had enough sleep, but because he smelled calcium hydroxide in the air. He knew the odor from his childhood, from the sugar refinery just east of Buey Arriba. The compound was used to purify the crystals, and it made the air drifting into Buey Arriba heavier. Ulises remembered walking outside on summer days when the wind was barely there and feeling as though to breathe was to lick the earth.

Getting up from his hotel bed, he went to the window, and he saw the same smoke from the night before. There was a refinery nearby, and that fact made Ulises restless. He wanted to hurry and get to Buey Arriba. It was the first time he'd been eager to arrive. He was sick of the journey, and everything he saw or smelled now would have a similar effect on him, reminding him of home, though he wasn't there yet. When Simón finally awoke, he told Ulises to be patient.

We have to find a phone line, Simón said. Or, at least, a messenger, remember? Your mother needs to know you're alive.

They found neither in Bayamo. The phone lines were still down across the country. The hurricane had turned toward Florida, but it first had ravaged Havana and the northern Cuban coast. No one in Bayamo was worried, though. The city would suffer only heavy rains. Still, people sat outside on their porches, and most businesses were shut down, as though the storm was inevitable. At the post office, which was open but nearly empty, an older worker told Ulises and Simón to go to Santiago if it was urgent. They could send word by boat to Port-de-Paix in Haiti, where there were American hotels.

Ulises said to Simón, I'm going to Buey Arriba.

Take the horse, Simón said. I'll find a ride.

I have a much shorter way to go. You take the horse and go to Santiago. Then you can come back more quickly.

Simón gave Ulises some of his money and another shirt to put in his sack. He said, Take care, and Ulises thought then he sounded just like Orozco, low and informal, as if they were parting at the end of a workday. Or Simón was the shadow of Orozco, the part Orozco was forgetting each day he was away from Mexico and his mother.

The forty kilometers to Buey Arriba were not hard to walk, as Ulises had been sitting for what seemed like weeks. His legs felt good, and with his hat, sunglasses, and sunblock he could manage the heat. It was afternoon when the road, populated by a few stray farmhands on pony-driven carriages, brought him to the lake outside Buey Arriba. The body of water, a reservoir, if Ulises remembered right, had no name, and it was the mountain runoff of the rains that broke across the northern face of the Sierra Maestra. Ulises stopped to eat some of the bread he had purchased in Bayamo, and he cooled his feet in the lake water, as they were swollen from the long walk. The river that fed the lake began in the mountains, somewhere near Pico Turquino, which had on its peak a bust of the national hero José Martí. Uxbal had taken Isabel and him up the mountain once. They had hiked along a narrow, one-way road halfway up the range before scrambling to the top.

Uxbal had said, That's José Martí.

The bust, however, had been installed out in the open, and the face, after so many years, had been worn away except for the eyes, which were deep set because Martí had been small and gaunt. Uxbal had let neither Ulises nor Isabel touch the bust, but he'd made them cross themselves and kneel in front of the figure before they turned and headed back down.