The Mortifications (25 page)

Have you ever touched the dead? Isabel asked. No, not once. Have you been at the side of a person who's not hungry because their brain has removed from its consciousness the idea of eating to stay alive? Of course not. Have you smelled a body that's half given up? Do you know how soft the skin gets when the insides begin a long shutdown? You tell me Ma is dying, but she's survived two chemo treatments. I'm not going to leave this place again because of something that is only partially true. She could live. What will be the story then? I'll be stuck there forever again. Are you going to drag me out of here if I refuse? I'm here with Papi, and you could have stayed in Connecticut with Ma, but you didn't. Don't be angry with me because you left her behind.

You can't see her anymore, can you? Ulises said. Ma is gone from your brain. You want to talk about forgetting, but you see my face, and the only thing reflected back to you is Papi. Can you close your eyes and even imagine her? You used to sit face-to-face for hours and talk through those insane notebooks. You used to touch her face with your fingers and trace her nostrils with your thumbs. If you think I'm angry, I am. But so are you. And it's because of this shithole on the mountain. This is the ridiculous dream. This is the promise you've been made to keep. And it isn't nearly enough. Maybe this is why the baby. There's nothing else here, so you're going to take from it what you can. Because leaving is the same as telling yourself that God and Papi were wrong.

If you have that baby, there's no chance on Earth of getting off this island. Don't you remember how hard it was to escape in the first place? Do you think they'd ever let you escape twice? That baby will be a part of the Cuba that was always, in its memory, this way. It won't know a different world, and it won't want to leave the way we did, or the way Ma wanted to. Papi wanted you to birth more rebels, but this kid's going to be nothing of the sort. He'll be a Cuban of the now, which isn't nearly as angry or desperate. Hungry and poor, yes, but a son of the revolution. You're going to give birth to the wrong kind of revolutionary. And he or she will never leave, which means you won't either.

If I have the child here and I can't leave, then I'll stay, said Isabel. And if we are found out, I'll also stay.

She got up from her chair and walked over to Ulises. She took his hand and put it on her stomach.

You're going to be here forever, Ulises said. You'll never come home.

I am home, she said. I never should have left.

Should I be feeling something? he asked. Has it started kicking yet?

It might, but maybe not. Don't press so hard.

You can't raise a child in a place like this, he said.

Papi won't last that long. I'm leaving here when he's through.

So it's the showing him that's important. You got here, and Papi told you to leave, and now you're having this kid out of spite. Would you really do that? This isn't about God or faith, is it, Izzi? You're just screwed up like the rest of us, and you need to fuck someone else up to make the world a little more palatable.

Ulises watched Isabel's eyes darken. This was the fissure that had begun in Hartford, the underground split in the bedrock that now crossed the Florida Straits and cut his sister's heart in two, the schism that made her ideal world—faith and family—all but impossible. Her pain, so much more evident than it had ever been, so much on the surface of her skin, reminded Ulises of his mother, whose pain had eventually manifested itself in her breasts, had at last needed to claim something real and substantial from the woman's body as opposed to just her psyche, heart, and soul.

I'm sorry, Ulises said. I told you that Ma is dying, but you're right. I don't really know anything. I lied to you. The farther away I've gotten from her, though, the more I think she won't survive.

Our family doesn't fare well across distances, Isabel said. I thought when I finally saw Papi, something would come rushing back into me. But nothing did. He was a stranger to me.

You sound ill, Ulises said.

I'm not. I'm just angry at myself for holding on to memories.

Ulises heard in Isabel's voice the end of things. Her face grimy and covered in a film of gray dust, she was an unclean spirit come to weakly portend the expiration of days.

Ulises asked, Which shack is he in?

Uxbal sat up in his cot, his back against a wall, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Though he was awake and puffing, his body appeared arranged, like a corpse exhumed, taken out for study in a lab or at a coroner's office somewhere and then returned to the casket, all the limbs reset at burial angles. The old man was thin under his baggy clothes, but his head was large and bald, and his neck had a fierce thickness to it. It was as if Uxbal had preserved the primary parts of his younger self, at a cost to his torso and limbs. But Ulises only had to look him in the eye to see the much-enduring father of his memories.

Ulises's first thought: I was right about his condition. It's an act, and the old man is fine. Or, he thought, this posture is an act. He's in terrible shape and sporting a face because he knows I'm here.

Ulises felt a trifle flattered, because here was the giant man of his Cuban myths, and he was putting on a private show. And Ulises was grateful then too, grateful to have this first moment with his estranged father alone. He realized he'd been anxious not just about seeing his sister, but also about seeing her and Uxbal side by side, and he wasn't sure he would have been capable of much in the presence of them both. The truth troubled him, because it made him think of God and Jesus and the devil, the last only ever speaking to the Father or the Son, never braving an appearance before the two together.

Uxbal flicked his half-finished cigarette. A collection of embers landed on the man's belly, singeing the thin fabric of his shirt. Uxbal either didn't notice or didn't care, or he couldn't muster the energy to do anything about it.

This is what I've been wanting, Ulises thought: the full sight of my father in daylight. Uxbal burning.

And then Uxbal's scalp wrinkled, and his eyes squinted, though his hands stayed still. You have your mother's knack for language, he said. But I never imagined that you'd speak Latin.

His voice was like a vapor exhaled from the earth.

Ulises said, No one speaks Latin. It's a dead language.

Your sister told me you loved school, which means your mother knew something I didn't.

It wasn't me you wanted to stay, Ulises said.

I wanted all of us to stay here, including you. Your mother had her ideas, though, and maybe it sounds unfair, but I was willing to let her go if she left me some bit of my family behind. It could have been either one of you, you or your sister.

Isabel needs to leave again.

I'm not keeping her here, his father said. I can barely keep myself upright these days. He coughed into his hands and then took several quick breaths.

What's wrong with you? Ulises asked.

I'm dying, Uxbal said. He added, somberly, I've drunk myself down. Or I've kicked myself loose of the earth. Depends on how I envision the going, whether it'll be a floating off or a terrible sinking down, and that depends on the day. Your sister knows. When she came, I could barely stand to see her. I cried for two days after she arrived. She is both your grandmother and your mother, and when I look at her, it's impossible not to see everyone here, almost the whole family. She is just as serious as I remember, which is wonderful, because I was worried that eventually I would forget. Then I was trying to forget. Less effort.

Ulises discerned a familiar jealousy flooding his chest. He expected Uxbal to say what he remembered of his son, but the old man, who really was not that old but had lived what seemed a rushed life, was lost in his thoughts.

Forgive me, he said. I don't sleep well, and sometimes I doze off.

Do you even remember me?

I don't remember that scar, Uxbal said. And you're darker than I imagined you'd be. You know what I remember? How quiet you were. How much you hated singing, especially at church. You never sang with us, and I teased you because of it.

Ulises did not remember that about himself, though it might have been true. The old man paused to rack his brain for something no longer there. He touched his forehead, the first time something besides his face had stirred, and his right hand looked swollen, as if it had been stung by a bee or a snake.

Your hand, Ulises said.

Uxbal shrugged.

I've seen the giant bees, Ulises said. Did one of them sting you?

They're hummingbirds, Uxbal said. You really have been gone for too long. I should ask you, do you remember me? Or has your mother helped you forget?

I tried on my own to forget, and it wasn't hard, Ulises said. Then I tried to remember, and that was much harder.

You left under traumatic circumstances. Probably easier to forget the whole island rather than just parts. People who've left and come back, they've suffered the same amnesia. It was a phenomenon for a while. I remember seeing it in the papers. I tried to remember you too, and it was also difficult. We never had much in common. Your mother claimed you.

She loved me, Ulises said. She loves Isabel. She'd like to see her before it's too late.

Before what's too late? Uxbal asked.

Ma is dying too.

Uxbal's face sagged, the skin of his jowls curling into mud. He closed his eyes and said, If you're going to take your sister, have her, at least, come say good-bye first.

She won't leave until you die.

I've been trying, Uxbal said.

Together Ulises and Isabel waited for Uxbal to die. Though Isabel had said she'd stay in Cuba, if necessary, for the child, Ulises thought she might not, that with Uxbal's passing might go all her affinities for the island, all her will to remain. He had to wait and see and hope.

Isabel, who seemed to be exercising again her old religious mania, continued work on her chapel. She taught Adelina and Augusto how to weave with palm leaves, and together they crafted baskets, decorative crosses, and book covers for the notebooks, which would become finished Bibles. That task fell to Ulises. He took on the duty of scribe as Isabel recited aloud what she remembered. While he wrote, he watched his sister with the children and admired how she guided their efforts. They too understood that she was pregnant. They often put their ears to her stomach, thinking they might hear something. And as Isabel's stomach grew larger, so did her presence in the camp. The women, normally stoic toward Isabel, began to bring her more food and clothing, and the men began lowering their heads when she walked by. Seeing all this, Ulises came to believe that their reverence was a consequence of the minor miracle of Isabel's conception; that anything should grow or sprout in a camp that had clearly suffered long near the edge of annihilation was a blessing.

And, truthfully, Ulises found himself smitten with his sister. He deferred to her in the making of the chapel and the writing of the Bibles, and he experienced a deep satisfaction in pleasing her. He'd not spent so much time at her side, so much time talking with her, in years, and her decisions were easy to predict. They were always the most practical, and she approached all her tasks with the same Catholic vigor Ulises remembered from her youth.

It reminded him first of Willems and then of himself. He recalled the afternoon hours back in Connecticut he'd spent sorting seeds, repairing greenhouse windows, tilling fields, and tying with twine bundles of freshly cured tobacco leaves. She was as diligent as he in the way she leveled the dirt floor of her chapel and in the way she taught the children new words to sign. She showed Adelina and Augusto how to move and spread their fingers, as though talking was a form of art rather than a necessity, a privilege the world outside the camp possessed. Isabel was relentless, and whereas this had been detrimental when it pushed her away from their mother, there in the camp it was a welcome sight, and she became a mirrored image for Ulises to revel in even though they had grown to look so unalike.

And maybe it was these two children, Adelina and Augusto, who offered Ulises and Isabel a pantomime of their own dynamic. The little girl, Ulises saw right away, was a sweet boss to the young boy, who was not so much scared as always skeptical. He would hesitate much longer than the girl would before trying new things, and she, obliviously stubborn, taught him by force, by dragging him to the chapel, by grabbing his still hands and flexing his fingers when he would not. Or maybe it was that the boy was more easily satisfied. Maybe Augusto did not want so many words to deal with. Perhaps he had enough, or what he considered enough, to be content, and it was the girl who kept asking for more.

It was a beautiful sort of education. Ulises saw that if Adelina learned too much too quickly, if her limb-driven vocabulary outpaced her brother's, then they ceased to communicate. She would speak not only more quickly, but also with a cadre of signs the boy had yet to understand, and the language they briefly shared became a mystery again to Augusto. While Isabel labored at the structure of the chapel and Ulises copied diligently the Psalm of Psalms, the two children would argue in a corner of the shack–cum–house of God. It was obvious that the boy was angry and felt left behind, but his only power was to leave. He would sometimes storm off, and the girl, precocious but in love with the only family she was mildly certain of, would wait ten minutes and then go retrieve him. She'd coax him back into the presence of Isabel, who, needing a break from the manual labor, would make up for Augusto's own brand of stubbornness with her saintly patience. Gently, she'd fill in the gaps of what he did not understand and reintroduce the young man to his sister, to whom he could now express himself again.

These moments were recursive, and eventually Ulises began to expect and hope for and cherish the instances when Adelina, her arms around Augusto's shoulders, or sometimes around his back, or even sometimes holding Augusto like a baby, carried him back into the chapel. It made his heart skip in time, and Ulises remembered that rarely are relationships built on equity, that some half, one person of the two, must always be dragging the other along, must always be teaching the other the new language, the new ways in which they should speak to each other. But Ulises also knew that Augusto was not without his purpose, and he saw how the boy's presence, his scowl or hurt eyes—they could transmit hurt like a television screen, meaning clearly and evidently, with the knowledge that the pain evidenced was happening elsewhere but was very real—kept Adelina's hands from lifting too far off the ground, from forgetting his world, meaning the world they had grown up in together.