The Mortifications (7 page)

Soledad had lost, and she knew it. She slipped to her knees, and Ulises watched as his mother begged forgiveness from his sister. Soledad cried, and Isabel ran her fingers, her delicate and expressive fingers, through her mother's hair. For Ulises, it was the final tilt of all things gone askew, the mother kneeling before the child, seeking redemption.

Isabel stayed at the house that night for the last time. She and Soledad sat quietly next to each other on the couch in the living room without talking. Eventually, Soledad handed her daughter one of her stenographer's pads. She asked questions and waited patiently for written answers, listening to the pen on the paper, a switch dragged through sand. She found herself wishing that she'd taught her children the art of shorthand when she first learned it, but she could not have imagined a need for it then.

Over the course of the night and well into dawn, Isabel satisfied her mother's curiosity: yes, the convent was a wonderful and spiritual place to live; in fact, it took only a week for silence to feel natural; no, it was not because of her mother that she'd made the vow of silence; yes, she wanted to continue her work with the deaf children of Hartford; yes, she was happy. As happy as she had ever been.

And by the time the sun rose and Ulises was searching out his boots for another day in the fields—his work hours would lessen soon, the summer almost finished, the harvests coming in, and the university reopening after Labor Day—Soledad had begun to anticipate her daughter's responses, had begun to only ask yes or no questions, attributing emotion and feeling to the nodding or shaking by paying close attention to her daughter's face. Soledad, melancholic though determined, seemed to make up for five years of unchecked freedom and thin vigilance by learning to communicate with her daughter in just one night. Words no longer clouded the space between them, and it was the closest they had ever been to understanding each other.

Reading faces became their secret language. Soledad, in the presence of her mute, holy daughter, became comfortable with silence, and Isabel learned to decipher her mother's twitching lips. They communicated constantly in the presence of the other: during Sunday dinners, during the walks Soledad and Isabel took together, often holding hands, and during the rare occasions when Isabel would sit and watch her mother sew late into Sunday night. The unnoticed consequence of their communion, however, was a melancholic haze that shrouded the whole house when Isabel was away. In between visits Soledad preferred absolute silence, creating a daily loneliness in which she could relive the unspoken conversations she'd had with her daughter.

Ulises, busy with school but not wanting to lose a grip on his field work, was not home enough to break the long spells of noiselessness. Willems was also away, traveling throughout the Caribbean and Asia, looking to replenish his stock with newer, stronger, more robust plants. By the start of October, two months after Isabel took her vows, the Encarnación household was as solemn as a funeral parlor, and its members passed through its doors as spirits between headstones.

In truth, the only outward appearance of life at the time was to be found in Ulises's body, which was undergoing another growth spurt so great, it seemed fueled by his mounting envy. He was jealous of Isabel, of the new attention his mother put upon her, and he could say nothing to his mother that would pull her fully out of the quiet in which she found refuge. So his limbs and his torso—perhaps feeling the void of love with greater sensitivity and urgency—responded with a swelling and lengthening that should have garnered the young man more notice. He wanted to be seen. Following Soledad and Isabel's reunion, he sprouted five more inches and added two more stones, bringing him to six-foot-seven and 260 pounds. He was not monstrous, but he'd started feeling cramped inside the quaint New England home. It got to the point where he could not sit comfortably at any of the rickety kitchen chairs long enough to even smoke a cigar. So, rather than lumbering about the house and disturbing the peace, he decided to dedicate his bulk to the tobacco fields.

To escape the diminishing quarters, Ulises arrived at the fields every day one minute after sunrise, worked till noon, went to the university for late-day classes, and returned to the fields to labor until dark. Consequently, he made no friends at school, but he was a local figure of interest, known not only as the brother of the Death Torch, but also by a nickname of his own. With his large head and wide mouth, he smoked tiny cigarillos, which all but disappeared between his enormous lips, such that he appeared to breath fire naturally, exhaling blue smoke like a dragon. The classics professors, who considered him an exceptional student, endearingly referred to him as the Titan.

In the fields he went about his tasks with obsessive perfectionism. In early September, he had replaced all the glass in three greenhouses by hand; a month later, he'd begun sifting rocks from the soil with a portable, handmade, grated trench bucket; and one month after that, he was rebuilding entire shading structures on his own. It was November then. Only a few men were kept on during winter's cold months—Ulises made sure one was Orozco—so he often worked in isolation.

Like his mother, Ulises became accustomed to the quiet, though the quiet was much different in a field, where one still heard the sounds of the smaller creatures, a murmur often lost under the hacking of shovels and blades. Ulises dwelled on the spirits Willems worried might be trapped in his tobacco. Though the idea frightened the Dutchman, it comforted Ulises, and he imagined a sense of camaraderie between him and the handful of ghosts he began to believe were left behind with each harvest.

Yet ghosts are of little use in the physical world, and Ulises learned this the day a shading tent collapsed on him. Walking the rows in gargantuan strides, he tapped a hammer against the corner braces of every tent he passed, listening for the hollow sound of a two-by-four gone south of sturdy or the creak of braces about to give way. Being as strong as he was, however, Ulises struck the wood of one frame much too hard and much too fast. The hammer cracked an entire plank in half, and the whole apparatus came tumbling down. Two crossbeams butted him in the head, one knocking him out, one catching his skull at such an angle as to carve an eight-inch gash into his scalp, from which he bled profusely. Ulises half awoke sometime later to a figure tugging on his arm, and he was alarmed at the sight of an angel, who, he feared, was trying to lift him from Earth and carry him toward death.

In reality it was Orozco, who wrapped Ulises's body in fallen tarps to keep it warm as he went for help. Orozco had been working in an adjacent field and saw a gap in the row of shading tents, ultimately finding Ulises unconscious in the soil. What Ulises believed were angel's wings were white canvas tarps, and the confusion produced in him a longing for his sister, an affection he'd not felt since her silencing. For all her worth as a would-be nun and possible aide to the archangel, where was she at the hour of his death? If he was to slip back into the earth, why wasn't she the one to shepherd him?

Ulises's injuries, a cranial laceration and a minor concussion, required bed rest and thirty-one stitches. But ten hours after his accident, Ulises also developed a fever, and the doctors began a series of intravenous antibiotics in case something from the soil had seeped into his blood. For the concussion, he was kept awake for the first thirty hours of his hospital stay, a time during which two nurses cut his hair and then shaved his head so that the ER surgeon might sew back together his bifurcated scalp.

When all was said and done, he appeared to have a tremendous vein snaking across his skull through which all the blood flowed into his brain. The surgeon was blunt during follow-up: You're going to have a scar, and you won't grow hair there anymore. Ulises reached up to touch his head, but the surgeon wouldn't let him.

Soledad was at his side immediately, and he shifted in and out of consciousness to find her constantly praying at the foot of his bed. She'd recently begun attending Mass again in order to see Isabel more often. They met neither before nor after the service; Soledad went only to witness the vision of her daughter, strong and Catholic, and to confirm the supposed contentment of her calling. It turned out that old habits were resurrected easily: Soledad recently had been calling out the Lord's name with greater and greater regularity. And, much as with her work at the courthouse, Soledad did nothing halfheartedly. To see her pray again was to see a blinded pianist remember all the keys by touch and rediscover the joy of Chopin. In prayer, she was as still as an icon, but the air around her vibrated as if her supplication could not exist without disturbing the world.

Ulises, under medication and not yet forty hours out of trauma, saw not his mother prostrate at the foot of his wide hospital bed, but instead hallucinated his sister sometime in the future, looking firmly into the weakness of his human form and responding with an equal force of faith and certainty, the arrogance of her prayer almost ceding his body to death, knowing it would claim something greater from the resulting dust.

It was only on the third day after the accident that Ulises regained his sense of time and place. By then, Isabel had visited him twice while he was unconscious. The first time, she startled the nurses who saw and remembered her, but they relaxed once they learned that the brother of the Death Torch was in the hospital, assuming that if she took a life, at least it would just be one and just one of her own. On this third visit, she'd brought to the hospital a small band of deaf performers. They were, apparently, Isabel's prodigies, and since October she'd converted her deaf service into deafness training, all her children being transformed from a strange, disharmonious choir into something like a military unit she dispatched throughout Hartford and across western Connecticut. Of course, they could not hear their own moaning, coughing, farting, slurping, sneezing, et cetera. What she taught them specifically was how to sign the words and lyrics of various religious plays and hymns, even some Christian operas from the eighteenth century.

More amazing, Isabel had taught her children—despite their inability to hear themselves—how to be quiet, absolutely quiet, as if in an attempt to merge the world of their deafness with the physical world around them. The effect was so striking that the children, when they visited nursing homes, high school auditoriums, hospitals, and once a prison, managed to bring audiences into their silent universe rather than entering themselves into the ruckus of life.

At the foot of Ulises's hospital bed that day, they lined up in two rows of four, a rush of noiselessness entering the room with their silent, cloudlike steps and the airy gestures of their muted hands. On a portable stereo Isabel inserted a cassette tape and pushed Play. But Ulises quickly lost track of the operatic music from
The Road to Gethsemane,
entranced as he was by the flawless synchronicity of the children's hands. When they finished, he was too astounded to clap but shouted,
¡Gracias!
Spanish had returned to him more quickly than English. Isabel shuffled the choir back into the hallway.

Alone, his sister handed him a note. It said that her work was taking her to Guatemala, where the deaf had little public charity to support them. Because she could speak Spanish, she was going to help establish a school funded by the Church, and she was leaving within the month.

Why you? Ulises asked. You're still brand-new at teaching.

His sister removed a stenographer's pad from the large pocket at the side of her initiate's habit and began to write.
It's time for my service to take me outside the convent, but no one in the city will have me. I'm still the Death Torch to too many people here. The bishop says it takes longer to forget the moments that scare us than the experiences that enrich us. I need to go somewhere I'm not known.

So you have to leave the country? Ulises asked. Will we ever see you again?

I don't intend to make Guatemala my home.

Have you told Ma?

She's praying on it.

You've drawn her back in. You could stay.

Isabel smiled quickly, and Ulises acknowledged to himself the weakness of his suggestion, the way in which he, too, was learning to accept her decisions without much friction or, at least, without an abundance of resentment.

Perhaps in gratitude for the brevity of his countermeasures, Isabel offered Ulises another note, this one typed out ahead of time, the sum of it confessing to her brother that her silence was a new calling, another sound she was responding to—namely, her own voice. The note described the high, painful pitch that resonated in her head every time she spoke at length. It told how during Mass Isabel eventually had had to whisper the
Our Father
just to make it through, and how the tone of her throat caused her stomach to turn if by accident she stubbed her toe and had to cry out. She said the noise was worse than the echo of her mother's moans, and only after a day of complete silence did the clatter in her brain subside.

Ulises was surprised to think his sister might fear something—anything, really—considering her faith, and the realization softened greatly the blow of her imminent departure, which, if he understood her correctly, was not just another act of religious devotion but was also essential to her endurance. But he remained unalarmed, likely a result of the morphine, and he considered for once that the situation might truly be out of Isabel's hands, which meant he might believe in God or God's plan. But that was nonsense. The drugs are keeping me sedated, Ulises told himself, and he folded the note in his hands and looked at his sister, who scribbled something else onto her pad and held it up for him to see:
You're too tall for this bed.

Willems arrived at the hospital by the middle of the week, and he brought with him a smattering of the seeds he'd gathered while abroad. He stormed the hospital flustered and in a sort of whirlwind, worried more so than the doctors that Ulises's fever was a precursor to death or insanity; the Dutchman's father, fearing always his own father's legacy, fretted over the spread of bacteria from one body part to the other, thinking eventually that the grandfather's mental instability had derived from migrating molecules of cholera that had somehow managed the journey from the small intestine to the brain. Willems, again unable to fully ignore the superstitions of his patriarchy, stayed at Ulises's side for two full days, asking the dazed patient to evaluate and write reports on the seeds he'd brought back from his travels. The doctors, Willems said, know diseases from textbooks, but there are simpler ways to diagnose them: decreased cognitive function was a sign of bacteria in the brain.

For forty-eight hours Willems diligently studied the curve of Ulises's penmanship and the clarity of his sentences, searching for any sign of rational decline. None came, and in addition to relief—Willems could not imagine a world in which his lover's son died because of an accident in his fields, some residual effect of his grandfather's calamity—he felt an unexpected pleasure in the reports Ulises provided. They were beyond detailed, and they included a sensory experience of the seeds that rivaled culinary reviews he'd read in the
Hartford Courant.
Ulises's reports also drew upon his Latin training, using scientific nomenclature for certain plants and strains, which gave authority to his judgments. The accounts were also speculative at times, and these were the Dutchman's favorite parts, for Ulises would conjecture the conditions under which the seeds had been cultivated, going so far as to guess the climate of their upbringing and the particular wetness of the season in which they were formed. The guesses were part myth, part horticulture, and Willems, besides being certain that the boy's mind was sound, was also convinced he'd discovered another layer to Ulises's natural talent and passion for tobacco cultivation. In a fit of pride, he even mailed a few pages to an old acquaintance, an associate editor at the trade magazine
Leaf and Fire.