The Mortifications Page 11

  The flame on Henri’s cigar had gone out entirely, and he tossed the chewed stogie into the sink. He walked up to Soledad and took her into his arms. She shook her head for a few brief moments, but then she put her chin on his crown.

  Whispering into her breasts, Willems asked, What do we do about this letter? It doesn’t mean anything to me if it doesn’t mean anything to you. And what do we do about last night? What was last night?

  A revival, Soledad said, mercifully, after some time. We noticed each other again.

  Is that good or bad?

  It’s neither. It’s the state we’re in. We’re seeing if the same life can be lived twice. If the same love can be felt twice.

  Soledad looked up and saw the effects of her words on Henri’s face. He seemed ready to collapse, and she thought to herself, We’re pitiful people. We’re both deceived.

  Will you take me to bed? she asked. I’m tired. I want to lie down. I want to be next to you.

  Yes, he said. And he took her up.

  Isabel finally handled the letter during her brief return from Central America. She was home only for two weeks before leaving again, but she found the note immediately.

  No one told me, she wrote on her pad, showing it to Ulises.

  He thought for a moment. I don’t think we knew how, he said. And there’s nothing to tell. He’s in the same place we left him.

  Isabel wrote nothing else, and if she had a reaction to the letter, it did not register on her face or in her eyes. She appeared to Ulises to be in shock, or else undergoing a reaction beneath the surface. Ulises knew how well Isabel could be like that, a creature who experienced the external world internally. Or, he wondered, maybe for once she needs words to carry grief out of her body, but she’s denied herself the privilege. Ulises winced, thinking she might yet have one more thing—he did not want to call it a cross—to bear; but then he thought, She’ll go to Mass and pray about it. If she needs something more, she’ll ask for it with her pad. She’s not one to go without the things she needs.

  But then, two months after its arrival, the letter went missing from kitchen table. The note vanished entirely, and no one said a thing.

  The effect was like the wind escaping a room, leaving behind an unnatural but welcome calm. It was the silence that follows rain, a quiet that begged for noise. The kitchen was again a livable space, and when it was clear that the letter might not return—a week passed without a sighting—Ulises sat down, skeptically, cautiously, one afternoon at the kitchen table for a snack. As large he was, he’d been eating his food in his bedroom or the living room. It had become a hassle not only squeezing his broad shoulders through the narrow German doorframes of the house, but then also carrying with him a mess of plates and silverware. It had been a long day of study, and Ulises’s eyes were tired from reading; he was hungry. Having cut an apple and sliced some cheddar, and having poured himself some of his mother’s rum, he was about to stumble toward the blue couch in the living room. Looking through the doorway, though, he saw again the two palms abutting the sofa, saw their leaves impinging on the armrests. To hell with it, he said. He pulled a chair out and dropped his plate onto the kitchen table. He took a drink from his half-full glass, and when nothing but silence followed, he sat down and relaxed.

  Ulises spent the next three evenings doing the same, and on the third evening he added a cigar to his routine, which in turn drew Willems into the kitchen. It had been some time since the two of them had smoked together at the kitchen table, and Willems, remembering with fondness Ulises’s insistent questioning, asked the young man if he could join him.

  Why not? Ulises said. It still smells like the two of us in here.

  Ulises went to the fridge and brought Henri his own beer, and for two hours they smoked and drank in silence until Willems started speculating about the upcoming season, quoting what he’d just read in the Farmer’s Almanac and gauging the predictions against what he hoped for his crop.

  It took Soledad longer to reenter the space, two more days, than it did Henri and Ulises, but their laughter—they could crack jokes again at the kitchen table—teased her downstairs and to the kitchen doorway. Seeing her, Willems tried to coax her in with a glass of gin and some smoked salmon he’d brought home that night, but she hesitated.

  Thank you but no, she said.

  We’ll be here, Henri said. How loyal the Dutchman was, how endless his devotion seemed to her. He would wait forever if I let him, Soledad thought. She felt both relieved and annoyed at the possibility.

  But after another day of eruptive laughter, Soledad could not stay out of the kitchen. Those were the sounds of life rattling against the refrigerator door, the cupboards, the small window above the sink. Alone upstairs, Soledad had begun to think she could hear the plants growing, so she crept out of her bedroom and sat down on the topmost stair to eavesdrop on her son and her lover.

  They’re talking as if nothing’s happened, Soledad said to herself, and the jealousy ran from her ears into her heart, where it settled into her aorta and reshaped itself as longing and desire, the kind of want that makes one capable of poor but magnanimous decisions. She went downstairs.

  Soledad entered the kitchen as Ulises and Henri were finishing a game of pinochle. The Dutchman didn’t flinch when she came in but did offer her a cigarillo. Ulises got up from his chair to give it to his mother, and she and Willems had what amounted to a leisurely smoke. Ulises remained, and afterward the three of them inhabited the small space as if it were the last island on the surface of the ocean. Let’s play another game, Henri eventually said. We’ll make it hearts.

  Isabel came by later in the night, much later, sometime near midnight, and found them halfway through a round. Henri and Soledad faced each other across the table, and Ulises knelt on the floor, because the kitchen did not have enough room for a third chair. Isabel had been too busy with preparations for her trip—heading to church early in the morning and then going right to bed when she got home at night—to have noticed that people were once again populating the kitchen. But instead of asking why they were all cramped together around a game of hearts, she laughed at how large her brother’s hands were, how they dwarfed the playing cards pinched between his fingers. He was enormous, and it was impossible for Soledad or Willems to cheat, something they were both known for; Ulises’s fingers, thick and long, were too large to see around. Isabel stayed and watched, sometimes putting her arm on Ulises’s shoulder, sometimes telling him what to do with his jacks. A subtle excitement overcame the kitchen, that of survivors finding one another post-tempest, and they silently marveled at how superstitious they’d been over the longhand of a distant relative. The rest of the week was nearly pleasant, and when Isabel left again for Guatemala, no one thought of the letter.

  —

  But the letter was only the start of things. Isabel, just like the wrinkled sheet of paper, went missing not long after. She’d been back in Guatemala only a month when the archbishop called Soledad on a Tuesday night in March to tell her that her daughter had gone to bed early one evening and had not been seen since. The phone call was a catalog of worthless findings: Isabel complained one night of stomach pains and retired to her room; she did not appear for prayer the next morning and could not be found in bed or on the school grounds; there was no note; the adjoining church was empty, though a box of Communion wafers was missing; hospitals had no record of a girl of her description seeking medical attention; taxicab drivers did not recognize Isabel’s face in the photographs they were shown; the police learned nothing from the local riffraff; most of the ship captains in the harbor were drunks and had trouble producing passenger lists or docking records; Isabel’s passport was gone, along with half her wardrobe, but the rectory had no money missing; in a church across town, an old habit was found stuffed underneath a pew; a group of Chilean immigrants claimed to have seen a vision of the Holy Mother in a nearby city water fountain.

  Soledad was sick, first of the heart and second of the
body. After the phone call she went directly to bed, and she remained there for three weeks. It was a bizarre quarantine in that she wanted the curtains always open, but no one was allowed on the second floor of the colonial when she napped. She dragged the majority of the plants in the household into the room with her, claiming that the broad green leaves breathed soothing oxygen that smelled like Isabel. Over the radiator Soledad hung all the pictures she had of her daughter, and though they wilted from the dry, rising heat, she would not allow them to be moved. She wore the same bathrobe each day, a dingy purple wrap that either Willems or Ulises would wash at night. Excused from work and school because of Isabel’s absence, the two men spent the daylight hours coaxing Soledad into eating and drinking enough to, at least, survive.

  I’ve let her get away from me, she said.

  There was a fury in her voice, and it was obvious to both men that she blamed herself not only for the wrongs of the past and present, but also for whatever would come in the future. Two more weeks passed, and Soledad grew weaker still, such that even her self-loathing seemed to wane. Alarmed, Ulises and Willems brought her to the hospital against her will.

  It did not take long for the doctors to diagnose Soledad with breast cancer. In the month of her bedridden anguish, she’d failed to notice the lump expanding under her right mammary gland.

  I’m sorry, the doctor said.

  Fair punishment, Soledad said. I lost track of one of my babies.

  The doctor, perhaps accustomed to the strange responses of the diseased, nodded and ordered surgery followed by a round of chemotherapy. He said her chances of survival were fifty-fifty, and she was lucky to not have had a lump develop in her other breast, though both would be removed for safe measure.

  In the meantime, updates on the search for Isabel came frequently from the church in Guatemala. Girls were sighted who matched the description of Isabel, but they often proved only to be poor or homeless or prostitutes; the general thinking became that Isabel had not been kidnapped or harmed or murdered, but that she’d simply run away. At the hospital the bishop seemed intent on convincing Soledad that that was the case, claiming often that the situation in Guatemala was rather dire, and it would not be unheard of for destitution to drive good nuns and brave sisters away. Isabel would not surrender to the idea of futility, Soledad told the old priest, to which he responded, The devil works in mysterious ways. Soledad asked him not to return.

  Once the search was expanded and made to include the possibility of Isabel’s willful escape, the State Department was briefly involved, engaging as minimally as possible its satellite offices in the surrounding countries. By the time Soledad awoke in the intensive care unit eight pounds lighter, the efforts—interviews with border patrol units, coordination with local police precincts, phone calls to every Central American mortuary—had been expanded to Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Southern Mexico. Nothing surfaced in the other American nations, however, and within two weeks the investigation was again limited to Guatemala.

  Shortly thereafter Soledad began her chemotherapy, and quickly the Encarnacions’ world closed in on itself. The Dutchman devoted all his hours to Soledad, leaving Orozco in charge of operations, and Ulises formally withdrew from the university. Together, the men waited alongside Soledad for word of Isabel, but more so for the final verdict on the mother’s health. They both believed, in secret and without discussing the matter with the other, they could perhaps live without Isabel if it came to that. Hadn’t the girl a long time ago started leaving them? Weren’t they already bracing for the moment she’d say good-bye and mean always? But a life without Soledad seemed damning. However, they also both believed that Soledad’s health was tied to Isabel, and even should Soledad survive the poisons in her body, she would likely die if her daughter simply vanished into thin air.

  —

  During the period between Soledad’s chemotherapy sessions, the Guatemalan authorities paid local fishermen to sweep the shallow coastal floor for clues of Isabel’s disappearance. Miraculously, they discovered a smallish nun’s habit, one that appeared handmade, with a single-sheet letter tucked into the pocket. Stuck also to the letter were a few pages from the King James Bible. The materials were inspected and eventually delivered to Soledad in Connecticut, where she immediately identified her own stitchwork. The letter was what she’d expected: the ghostly missive from Uxbal. The ink had run terribly, but because it had been folded up, a small portion of the signature at the bottom, the Ux, was still clearly legible.

  It meant nothing at first, mainly because Soledad was due for another round of chemotherapy. It had been months since the mastectomy. The doctor had shown the family the most recent X-rays of Soledad’s chest, and despite the majority of clean tissue they found, the physician pointed out a spot where the cancer had metastasized. They’d not seen the satellite darkness before, had not known the disease was still surviving.

  It remains, the doctor said to them, looking genuinely regretful. It’s a smaller clump, but, unfortunately, it remains.

  It was not until the following morning, when Soledad was being rolled into the cancer ward, that she said to Ulises, It remains. The Church remains. Your sister, she said. She’s gone back to Cuba. She’s gone to find your father, because everything is still there. He said as much in the letter, and she heard it. Your sister is going back to him because of her promise.

  Soledad took her son’s hand. Ulises looked into her face—thin, taut, ashen around the eyes, a fine nose, and a beautiful chin, a regal chin—and the waiting was over then.

  I was unfair to her, she said, and I think I am going to be unfair to you. Will you go find her? Soledad asked. I’m too weak.

  Ulises nodded. Though he should have felt torn again from his own life by his sister’s, tossed again by the weight of her existence, he did not. Despite having spent the night in the hospital lobby, he was awake. He breathed calmly, though his mother was at the brink. He squeezed her hand. All right, he said.

  This, he thought, is what people call Providence, feeling capable of what you’re asked to do. If this were always the case, then Ulises would suffer well the term fate, and even though the word was more often a phrase for the damned, he did not feel that way just then. In fact, he felt like moving, like running, when all along he had been lingering still. When all along he had been killing time. But now Ulises thought he knew: he’d been waiting for the chase.

  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.