The Mortifications Page 7

  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 fr
iction 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.

  The fever subsided not long after Willems’s visit, and Ulises was sent home on the seventh day after the accident. He was told to wait two more weeks, the time remaining until Isabel’s departure, before returning to school and work, and he spent those days watching Soledad finish what sewing projects she could for her daughter. Isabel was not around, having decided to fast and pray in seclusion for the remaining days leading up to her trip. Ulises couldn’t be certain, but he felt again that he’d grown while asleep at the hospital, his body taking the mandatory rest as an opportunity to further expand itself, and at home he had to stoop through doorways to pass between rooms. His legs no longer fit beneath the kitchen table, and he had to take all his meals in the living room, where he could stretch out along the couch. He and Willems removed half the furniture from his bedroom—an armoire, a bedside table, and a student’s desk—so that a new bed, an eight-foot-long modified king-size, could be brought in.

  And because his clothes no longer fit, Ulises continued to wear the few oversize hospital gowns he’d brought home with him, which meant he never left the house and constantly nagged Soledad for specific foods (sandwich bologna, not roast beef), drinks (two-percent milk, not cream), and books (not the Edison translation of The Eclogues but the Rinhhauser). He was quickly a cranky, bent-over, ill-tempered convalescent, and when Soledad mentioned this to Willems—He thunders around the house like a bull, and he startles me, he’s so damn big these days—the Dutchman brought to the house more seeds, and then fresh leaves, nascent stalks, and new cigars, some from the old farms, some from upstarts, for the patient to evaluate.

  My friend loved the pages I sent, Willems told Ulises. A few more and he said he would publish your stuff as an article in his magazine. Something like a futures report.

  Borrowing his mother’s Smith Corona, Ulises spent the next twelve days emptying himself onto the page. At the hospital, writing had been a task, an effort in recall and scrutiny. Yet at home, Ulises found it fluid and unconscious. He labored at the keyboard continually, which helped him pass the days of unbearable waiting—it helped Soledad as well, the noise meaning she always knew where in the house he was—and when he went to bed at night, he had no trouble sleeping, as if his mind had run a long, winding course that afternoon and had no energy for dreams.

  As he wrote closer and closer to the Monday Isabel would leave, he began to notice the same lightness of the mind he felt at night entering his limbs and muscles during the day. It was not a feeling of weakness or exhaustion, and what exactly overcame him he could not say, but the more he wrote, the less inclined he felt to return to the tobacco fields. He understood that he would, of course, go back to work in a short while, but the passion for digging trenches and carefully counting seeds was waning, and in reality that did not bother him. In the mirror he now saw a different sort of person than he’d been. He’d begun to think of himself as a man when in the hospital he found the patient’s gown too small to close completely in the back, and a nurse blushed at his walking, ass on display, to the bathroom without realizing it; she’d smothered a laugh, and he’d known why immediately but was not ashamed. He was a man larger than expected, a bald man because to grow out his hair looked ridiculous along the sides of the wound, and, most strange, a man empty in the eyes. Ulises’s pupils had somehow attained a particular leanness to their black color, a thinning of the ink toward the center that troubled and intrigued him. This, he knew, was not an illusion, something only he could see through his knocked skull, since sometimes Soledad would look into his face and walk away breathless. She would say to Willems, It’s like looking into a cow’s eyes, or the eyes of a fish. We should take him back to the hospital for an MRI.

  —

  And then came the day they had all awaited: the final family dinner, when Isabel came to the house and broke her fast. It was a Sunday evening, and by then Ulises had written almost two hundred pages. The articles were neither connected always nor suited for publication as a book, but it was a magnum opus of tobacco wisdom and cigar science that stunned Willems and, in the end, hollowed out Ulises entirely. He wondered, after a quiet good-bye from his sister and the sobbing of his mother, if this was what Isabel felt when she’d thought the direction of her life had gone askew, if this feeling of knowing the world so absolutely—he knew nothing as well as tobacco and cigars—but without any passion was what drove her into silent pursuit of a firmer
Providence.

  Meanwhile, Henri’s editor friend published fifty of Ulises’s pages in Leaf and Fire and sent the rest to other trade magazines—Tobacco Connoisseur, Cigar Aficionado, A Fumar, Seed and Plant, Fuego del Mano. After his follow-up with the ER surgeon, Ulises still hadn’t gone back to the fields, and he stopped smoking altogether, though he did return to school after purchasing an entirely new wardrobe. With his sister gone, his mother at work, and Willems careful not to push, Ulises spent most of his days locked in his room reading his books for class. For the fall he was enrolled in composition, introductory Greek, and two sections of Latin, one a linguistics course and the other a literature course. He ignored his science and composition texts but read, with the slow eye of a monk translating the New Testament, Wheelock’s Latin, Ancient Greek Language, Horace: A Legamus Reader, The Works of Ovid, Homeric Greek, and Virgil’s The Aeneid.

  The surgeon had told him he was fine. He’d said the stitches would come out soon, in about three more weeks. Yet Ulises felt he’d entered a period of waiting that was not connected to his body. He was not depressed or sad or without appetite, but he was without agency. He was a stone, he felt, at the top of a hill, but there was nothing, somehow nothing, to nudge him down into the valley. So he sank into his luxurious new mattress, read his Latin texts, and waited for another life to come.

  Waiting, however, was not just Ulises’s plight. It was a disease Soledad also embraced, though the life she waited on was simply in another country, and all the mother wished for was Isabel’s safe return; on bolder nights she even prayed for the return of her daughter’s voice. But in the way a congregation of diseased people makes a colony from isolated illnesses, the Encarnación household resumed its melancholic state through the combined apprehensiveness of its inhabitants. The anticipations of mother and son, vague and indefinite, rolled into one, and the house pulsed with their uncertainties. It was as quiet as it had ever been, and nothing grew in that silence, and Willems, when visiting, often felt in the air and the woodwork a stagnancy akin to the inert soil of an overused acre. The daughter gone was like the sun dropped from the sky; but, no, it was more than that. Seeing the same listlessness in Ulises, Willems felt that something greater pressed down on the remaining Encarnacións, and, unlike the previous hush, this particular noiselessness was, perhaps, the precursor to some hellish weather rather than the denouement of a terrific, passing storm.