The Mortifications Read online

  What does that mean? Ulises asked.

  It means we promised to marry whomever our fathers asked us to, and to stay chaste until that day.

  And if you refused?

  Nothing. But they would ask us again the following week.

  Realizing that Isabel had, of course, said yes, Ulises wanted to know how many times she’d had to be asked before relenting.

  Twelve times, she said.

  You were twelve then, Ulises told her. It wasn’t a real promise.

  It was clear to Ulises then that Isabel’s faith in God was nothing more than the logical attempt to keep her promise to their father. Uxbal, lost in Cuba, could not marry off his daughter. The only decent thing to do was to swear off all men and then wait for miraculous word from the island. The decent thing was to become a nun.

  You weren’t there, Isabel said, which made Ulises burn. The day I promised, I was filled with something fierce, and it hasn’t left me since. I think I’m just realizing it now.

  —

  Ulises approached his mother right away, first out of anger, but then out of pity for his sister, who he believed was throwing away her life on a coerced promise to a madman. He gave a speech to Soledad in their cramped kitchen while she prepared her morning coffee and rubbed her hands awake. She looked tired and sat down at the pitiful table next to their ancient refrigerator. It was the first time he’d spoken to her about their exile since coming to Hartford.

  Isabel thinks she’s some Virgin Mary, he said.

  Soledad’s faced hardened. She’s always been close to God, she said.

  She’s entering the convent because of Papi, not because of God. Do you know what she promised him?

  Of course, his mother said.

  If Ulises had thought his righteousness afforded him a position of power over his mother, then he was entirely mistaken. She said of course not to admit her guilt or treason, but to reaffirm the fact that she’d made a decision and not simply fled the island on an emotional whim. Hearing his mother’s clipped response, Ulises thought of his sister, who’d made a decision, albeit a warped one, and his father, who’d decided not to leave with his family. Clearly, no one was in charge.

  Do you think I took you from Cuba simply for a better life? Soledad asked.

  It’s what you told me, Ulises said.

  It was partly the truth, she said. The other truth is that there wasn’t even the possibility of a so-so life in Cuba. The poor were no longer allowed to just be poor—they also had to be wretched—so if we were going to live in a shack and grow our own crappy tomatoes, why not do it here? Here we can pretend to be happy, and no one cares.

  Papi wanted to be happy too, Ulises said.

  There you are wrong, because your father needed us to be miserable or, at least, to pretend to be miserable so that others would join his stupid cause. No one starts a rebellion when you can make salsa and brew your own beer and sit outside all night with one candle and tell stories. Revolution derives from discontent, my love.

  And what about Isabel? he asked. Are you just going to let her keep living some fantasy about fulfilling her promise to Papi?

  I don’t think I can do much else, she said. I took her away from him once, and I think that’s as many separations as she’ll allow.

  She’s going to rot away in a habit, Ulises said. This made Soledad tear up enough that she had to place her coffee mug on the counter and scratch at her eyes.

  It took everything to leave Cuba, she said. I brought her here without asking, and I don’t think I can ask anything so big of her again. But the same goes for you, if that’s any consolation. You can do what you like here in America, and you’ll have my blessing.

  I don’t think that should include screwing yourself, Ulises said.

  Soledad did not mention to her son that perhaps she’d made a mistake. It was 1985, after all, halfway through the year, and the Soviet bloc seemed sound and sustainable. Soledad’s prediction, one of the cornerstones of her evacuation theory, had proven untrue. As a result, the mother of two transplanted Cubanos had come to believe she no longer possessed the wisdom necessary to guide her children in the larger matters of their lives. They were on their own, and they should follow fate, or whatever they eventually perceived as destiny. In any case, she would not stand in their way, which is why she approached her daughter the afternoon after her argument with Ulises to tell her: You have all my blessings. I know God makes you content.

  Isabel accepted Soledad’s blessings with grace but without excitement. Her decision making was an act of power, so maternal permission, though welcome, was unnecessary. Isabel did, however, request to no longer be called Izzi. She found it an infantile nickname for a young woman who now followed a higher calling. Soledad agreed, and with that the conversation was finished. In the end, the brief discussion did more to free Soledad from the guilt of her decision to leave Cuba than it did to free Isabel to pursue her religious inclinations, and from that day on Soledad no longer invested herself so deeply in her children’s pursuits. She attended fewer Latin Club readings for Ulises, and she asked Isabel to start ironing her own dresses for morning worship.

  More important, Soledad met someone.

  —

  Henri Willems was a Dutch horticulturalist who, in the early 1980s, was attempting to grow Habano tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley. At the time he met Soledad, he had loose but legal land agreements with a majority of the family-farm operations southeast of Hartford. The region already had a long history of growing Broadleaf for cigar wrappers and binders, and New England Native American tribes had been growing Brightleaf for centuries. Willems thought that, with enough diligent care and oversight, one might cultivate Habano tobacco in the rough northeastern climate.

  The farmers whose lands Willems had leased thought he was crazy; the Habano strand was too tropical for the temperate Connecticut weather. But Willems came from money—his great-grandfather Jacobus Willems was the first to take Sumatra tobacco to Holland, where, in 1860, he formed the Gonaïves-Sumatra Tobacco Exchange—so the growers weren’t too concerned with how Henri squandered his wealth. They did, however, take issue with the elaborate shading structures Henri began to erect on their prolific topsoil. The tents were nothing new to tobacco cultivation, but together the farmers opportunistically sued Willems for breach of contract, arguing in the Hartford County Courthouse that Henri had leased the land for farming, not for construction. He’d have to renegotiate if he wanted to grow and build on their plots.

  During the hearing, which Soledad did not attend, Willems gave an impassioned speech about honoring the agricultural legacy of the Connecticut River Valley. He spoke about his travels abroad, his search for a place where the Habano leaf could be resurrected. According to him, the plant had suffered a continual decline ever since the beginning of the deathly AmeriCuban embargo. Less tangentially, he argued that nearby landowners did not regulate the vine-staking that occurred on their leased vineyards. He finished his monologue with a plea: the Habano leaf was a masterpiece of God’s creation; mankind was a better animal for smoking and cultivating it; Cuba had become a wasteland where the leaf would soon go extinct; his mission in life was to keep the regal plant from fading into obscurity.

  The court found in favor of the farmers.

  It was Soledad’s diligence that eventually brought Henri Willems into sight, as once a week she reviewed the transcripts prepared by the courthouse’s junior stenographers. At home and with a glass of white rum in hand, Soledad found the horticulturalist’s transcribed story both beautiful and sincere. She was most taken by Willems’s brief discussion of Cuba as a decaying wasteland, a view she shared, though it had the effect of making her both heartbroken for and disgusted with their pitiful house back in Buey Arriba. She was so moved, she attempted the following day to have the verdict overturned by discussing the case with the district attorney. The lawyer said he could do nothing, but Willems should take the ruling as an opportunity to build processing p
lants or whatever else he might like dirt cheap. Soledad fashioned a letter that advised the horticulturalist to do just that and included a clean set of transcripts—typed freshly on a Smith Corona SL 480 that had come with her promotion—should Willems ever need them.

  Lastly, Soledad slipped a note into the package in admiration of the man’s vision. She noted a romantic tone to his rhetoric—your speech was more impassioned than most of the pleas for child custody I sometimes read at night—and she praised his efforts to preserve something authentic of Cuba—you’re brave to save the things others would leave behind. She sealed the large envelope with her thumb after licking the wide upper flap, but she chose, in the end, not to clean the faint smear of purple lipstick her lips had left behind. She mailed the package and waited, though not entirely certain of what she waited for.

  It turned out to be a Sumatra-tobacco plant, three feet tall and rooted in a wide, circular, rose-colored cachepot. It arrived with instructions for setting the plant in front of a window receiving at least six hours of direct sunlight a day and nursing the leaf to four feet tall, at which point it should be relocated outdoors, ideally beneath the shade of an older-growth walnut. The only spot in the quaint Encarnación house for such a gargantuan weed was in the living room, and with Ulises’s help, Soledad relocated the pot from the front stoop to the one window in that space not blocked by a radiator. By Ulises’s estimation, the leaf wouldn’t last a month.

  It’ll crowd out the window and die thirsty for sunlight, Ulises said. The sky is too gray here.

  Some green in this house is wonderful, Soledad said.

  But now the room is too dark.

  Nonsense, she said. It’s just breaking up the light.

  Because it’s so large, Ulises said. Because it’s absurdly big.

  Not so big, Soledad said, but certainly extravagant. Plentiful. The leaves brim over, you could say. It’s like living in a palace now.

  The horticulturalist and the auditor began dating immediately.

  —

  Of Henri Willems, Ulises was uncertain. The man had what his mother referred to as a country chin, a square-cut jaw that finished flat instead of round. He seemed honest, which Ulises drew from the man’s routinely plain attire, a necessity of doing business in the city and walking farmland in the same day. Willems’s shoes were the thickest wing tips Ulises had ever seen, and Ulises had to admit that he was impressed when the horticulturalist showed him the custom steel toes he’d had cobbled into the hand-stretched Spanish leather. Just the same, Willems was pasty white, three inches shorter than Soledad, and his Spanish, when he braved speaking it in front of the family, had the strangest accent, a lingering stress falling on the final syllable of each sentence, which gave all his remarks the sound of a question.

  He reminds me of your father, Soledad said when Ulises asked why she felt such a steady attraction to the European. This could not have surprised Ulises any more than it did. At first, she said, I thought it was his demeanor. He’s a very confident man, and when he talks about tobacco—I don’t know—it’s ravishing. And when he talks about Cuba—do you know he’s been twelve times?—it’s as if he is seeing the same island that I am, which is a starving place, and if only we could unearth the fields again…but that’s idealism, impractical, which is why Henri is here with the Habano, which is why you and I and your sister are here in New England. Some things need to be saved even at the cost of paradise. Henri understands that.

  You’ve never called Cuba paradise before, Ulises said.

  Soledad thought for a moment and then agreed. It’s Henri, she said. He reminds me of the treasures one could have in Cuba. I had forgotten.

  That’s what Papi used to do, Ulises said.

  Only the best version of your father did that: the man who planted tomatoes outside our house and made salads with them at night and would eat them plain off the vine. That was the man I loved. His hands were in the soil when you were young. When we left, he was trying to grow a rebel government, a new hierarchy, and those things aren’t real in the end unless everyone believes them to be. Henri’s cigars are real whether I smoke them or not.

  Ulises shared his mother’s response with Henri himself. Measured as the horticulturalist was, he simply said, I’m a fortunate man if your mother considers me the best version of the love of her life.

  I think it means she could leave you at any moment, Ulises said, and I think that would be unfair. I think she’s walking around in some fantasy about who you are or, at least, who she wants you to be. I think she’s feeling guilty still about leaving my father alone in Cuba.

  I would expect as much, Willems said. It wasn’t an easy thing your mother did. And if she ever leaves me, then she leaves me, but I’m taken with her and will believe it when she says it’s me she wants.

  What happens when you sleep together? Ulises asked. Aren’t you afraid she might close her eyes and think of my father?

  We’ve already consummated our relationship, Willems told Ulises. And though this is sacred ground, you’ve already broached it. So let me just say, she seems satisfied.

  In reality, they were both right. Willems was a steady, mechanical lover, and Soledad’s satisfaction stemmed from the combination of his consistency and the off chance that she might sometimes taste Connecticut dirt under his fingernails, a token of the fields and her abandoned husband, though it can be said that her concept of Uxbal had evolved into something more mythic by then, less a distinct person and more an archetype of her ideal counterpart.

  Please don’t think of me as the aggressive type, Willems said to Ulises, but the first night we saw each other, the inclination was mutual.

  Ulises considered the history of his mother’s sex life: he assumed that, since they’d arrived in the States, she’d not been with a man until Willems. That was five years of physical famine followed now by two months of feast. But how could his mother love a shadow, even a better shadow, of her distant husband without reservation? That meant moving, in some sense, backward in time. What had the gap been for if not for the last stage of abandonment? If not for forgetting? Ulises tried to imagine Uxbal during that half decade, what he must have been doing all that time. He also tried to imagine his father before they’d parted, but his memories were hazy at best.

  I don’t remember my father the same way my mother sometimes does, he confessed to Willems. I don’t really remember him much at all. But my mother and sister can’t seem to forget him.

  That’s because sons have a tendency to become their fathers, Willems said. There’s nothing to remember when you assume another man’s life. It just becomes your own.

  Ulises thought the horticulturalist was talking about fate, and he asked, What did your father do?

  He was a tobacco farmer, Willems said.

  —

  A nagging fear took root in Ulises that he was headed in the same vague direction as Uxbal; that is, toward oblivion and nothingness, as Soledad had once described it. He was terrified not only to think that he might become his father, but also that he had no idea what that meant. More troubling was how his mother seemed so certain of Willems, the apparent resurrection of Uxbal. Ulises could not see what his mother saw: his father, as best he could remember, was a tall man with broad shoulders and a thick neck, bald from an early age, a pair of glasses perpetually hanging over his chest. Willems had pasty arms and that country jaw. He claimed to have 20/15 vision, and he was short enough to hide behind some of the more impressive tobacco plants he brought to their house, especially that first Sumatra leaf, which had grown another foot since its arrival, doing exactly what Ulises had predicted it would: crowd out the window in the living room with a set of ever-expanding leaves.

  So Ulises asked Willems for a job. His logic was that he could scrape together a father, his old father, from bits of the Dutchman; he could resuscitate memories and eventually recall something of Uxbal besides the portrait lurking about his brain. Willems agreed to employ him, but only out of love f
or Soledad, and Ulises, like everyone else, would need to start at the bottom, working the crops in the field. So Ulises bought three pairs of jeans and a broad-brimmed hat, and on a Sunday in August he was put to work in a Broadleaf field.

  Ulises learned what his mother and sister had known for a long, long time: there is a great power in wanting. In the fields he’d proven himself almost useless; he, like Isabel, had Uxbal’s long arms, but they were unaccustomed to the weight of tools, and soon he was relegated to the nearest greenhouse to sort, organize, and eventually catalog the seed inventory. He was dismayed at first, but when he noticed that Willems checked his seeds more often than he did his dirt, he thought the change fortuitous. The man was often about, and Ulises could study the Dutchman for shades of his father.

  What Ulises had not expected was an industriousness to fill the hours in between Willems’s visits to the greenhouse. Though the horticulturalist came in and out at least twice a day, his stays were brief, ten to fifteen minutes at most, and the hours in between became dark matter in need of mass. Into those voids Ulises thrust his energy, hoping always to accomplish some minor task worthy of Willems’s attention when he arrived. Improving the already efficient operation was nearly impossible, but he did succeed in fine-tuning some minor movements of the Dutchman’s tobacco orchestra: by the end of a month, he’d developed an epoxy resin with which to coat the seed bags, essentially making them invincible; after two months, he’d built a sampling box for new seed varieties, which enabled Willems to better compare texture, smell, and speculative fecundity; by three months in, Ulises had reorganized not just his original greenhouse, but all the greenhouses Willems owned in Connecticut. The Dutchman nodded his head in genuine approval of all this, and, come November, when it was too cold to work the fields any further and the sky was permanently overcast, Willems decided to teach Ulises the finer points of his finished product, to give meaning to the boy’s nascent understanding of its primary parts.

  What did the study yield? As far as Ulises could tell, Willems touched everything: he ran his hand through seeds, fondled the leaves of infant tobaccos, tested the weight of fresh knives for leaf-cutting, passed between his palms small matules, the tiniest leaf bundles, and always balanced the newest cigar on his right index finger as if the tipping point was a symptom of its quality. Willems also smelled everything; it was something to see him kneel in a row of what would become Emperor Maduros and shove his face into the dirt. Often he tasted, and sometimes he even listened, though the listening seemed less scientific; the shaking of seed bags produced a shuffling sound Willems found pleasant. In the end, Ulises determined that his mother’s lover was an empiricist.