The Mortifications: A Novel - Hardcover

Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella How to Shake the Other Man was published by Nouvella Books. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, and serves as a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.

9781101905692|excerpt

Palacio / THE MORTIFICATIONS

the land

Ulises Encarnación did not believe in fate. This may have been a by-product of the sailor’s name his father, Uxbal, had given him and the fact that Ulises detested ocean horizons—­they were impermanent and appeared like waterfalls over which one could cascade into death. More likely his disbelief was a consequence of how Ulises was taken from Cuba as a young boy by his mother, Soledad, as a member of the now-­infamous 1980 Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal had wanted the family to stay despite their poverty. They did have a sturdy house with a garden, tomatoes when others didn’t, but Soledad saw in Ulises a mind for school, and she worried about the state of young, pensive boys in Cuba. Bookworms were considered faggots, and though she did not think her son a homosexual, the state might, and she cringed at the thought of him in prison or, worse, at a rehabilitation camp.

There was also Ulises’s twin sister, Isabel—­or Izzi, as they sometimes called her—­a young girl who sang in church, which could be done anywhere, and who seemed unattached to Buey Arriba, meaning, she might not remember much of Cuba if the family left right then. Soledad preferred to wrench two children out of one culture and into another before the Soviet Union collapsed, which she wrongly predicted would happen in 1985. Uxbal warned them they would not find a home so nice in the States. Kingdoms, he said, are hard to come by. He was so certain of his position that he’d tried holding his daughter ransom, locking Isabel inside the country house with him. Soledad was able to retrieve the girl only by holding Ulises hostage in return. Sewing shears in hand and pressed to her son’s jugular, Soledad swore to Uxbal that unless Isabel walked out the front door, suitcase in hand, his bloodline would die.

It was then, at the age of twelve, that Ulises learned there were no goddesses of the loom, that people could not be, simultaneously, vessels of fate and free will. Destiny was a consequence of irreparable action and, in the case of his childhood relocation, his determined mother’s forced evacuation. Outside their country house she’d whispered in his ear not to worry, but there was a blade against his neck, and why would his father have slipped Isabel so quickly out the door if Soledad had not been serious? Aboard an overcrowded lobster boat, hunched against the back of a car thief and wedged between his mother and sister, Ulises immigrated to the United States, rubbing his throat the entire time. He felt close to dying then, not sure he could trust his mother anymore, and he would forever associate that fear with the farthest stretch of water he could see over the hull of a boat looking north of Cuba, where he saw nothing but more water.

It surprised Ulises that from Miami they took a train north to what the Americans called New England. Soledad’s distant cousins lived in Miami, close to Sunny Isles, and he assumed they would make a large, loud Cuban family together. This was Ulises’s second train ride, the first the journey from Buey Arriba to Havana. Uxbal had once told his son a story about his own first train ride, from the farmland hills of the Sierra Maestra to the southeastern coast: a little black boy had been seated on the bench in front of Uxbal, and Ulises’s father had never seen such hair before. He was five, the boy perhaps the same age, and Uxbal did not hesitate to reach over the bench and touch the tiny curls. He was mesmerized. The black boy shouted, though, and the mothers stood and grabbed for their children. Ulises’s grandmother took Uxbal into her arms, from which perch Uxbal craned his neck to see his victim. The little black boy watched Ulises’s father from over the bench like a boy at the zoo, Uxbal the animal in the cage. What did Ulises’s grandmother say to his father? Don’t be such a shit.

Ulises asked his mother then why they were going farther north. There are too many Cubans in Miami, Soledad told him, and Ulises, struggling to recall the point of his father’s anecdote, realized how far away he was being taken and how quickly his mother wanted him to forget Uxbal.

Are we going to New York? he asked.

A little farther north, his mother said. My second cousin knows some people in Connecticut.

Are we going to speak Spanish there?

Among ourselves, she said, but English with the new friends we make.

As a young woman, Soledad had been a nanny for British missionaries. She spoke English with a terrible accent.

Will you still sing to me at night? Ulises asked.

I left my voice in Cuba, she said, which Ulises understood as, I can’t, because it will remind me of the island.

Do you hate Papi? Isabel asked.

I will never forget your father.

In Hartford, Ulises learned to wear a hat, coat, and gloves, but the cold didn’t bother Isabel as much, and she learned to ice skate wearing just a scarf and jacket. The family moved into the South End, near a shallow pond called Opal’s Lake that was reliably frozen by December. During their first winter, the first winter of their lives, it snowed twice by late November, and Isabel was drawn outdoors in a way Ulises found unnatural. Often she’d visit the pond to skate, and there she’d let the snowflakes pile onto her shoulders and melt into her hair. Izzi’s gone a little crazy with the move, he thought to himself. He told his sister, One day we’ll find you in a block of ice.

I didn’t think I would like it, she said. Sometimes I can’t feel my neck, or my hands get numb. I forget I have a body. It’s not like Cuba, where you’re always sweating and the sun won’t let you forget your skin. I can spend the time thinking of other things.

Ulises fought the weather by never stepping out into it. He imprisoned himself like a cloistered monk in their new house, a cloudy German Colonial with a white, claustrophobic kitchen and iron radiators. Each room in the heavy house was its own lonely cell—­the doors were made of hardwood and were as dark as volcano mud—­and Ulises got into the habit of closing all the doors all the time, ostensibly to trap what little heat he found steaming from the cast-­iron accordions, which were in every room, placed always under a low, milky window. The house in Buey Arriba had either window screens or nothing, not the double-­paned slabs of this strange New England monastery. The shifting pipes, the moaning wood: it all reminded Ulises of hurricane season, the only time of year their old house had cause to shake. He had trouble sleeping and complained to Soledad.

The house is rocking you to sleep at night, his mother said.

It reminds me of the lobster boat, Ulises said.

For work, Soledad found a position as a stenographer at the Hartford County Courthouse, and she found a Jesuit school for her children to attend. It was more expensive than public school, but Soledad possessed a bias for religious education; she thought it more rigorous and demanding and, therefore, more effective. At St. Brendan’s, the priests were old white men who gave Mass in Latin every day, which Ulises found exotic and beautiful, though he was not at all interested in the actual dogma. He enrolled in Latin courses, and the old white priests believed they’d found a Spanish Lamb whom they could mold into an orator. He had a gift for the dead language, could speak it better than English, though he learned that quickly as well. At school he wrote short monographs on the value of St. Jerome’s Vulgate, which the priests insisted be printed in the student newspaper. The other boys teased Ulises, but they were more jealous than condescending. Ultimately, he was gracious with his gift, holding study sessions with his classmates to show them how certain nouns declined.

Isabel proved even more devout in her studies. She remembered her prayers from back on the island, and the nuns were impressed by the precision of her memory. In Cuba, the Encarnacións had attended Mass as a family until Soledad learned that the flat-­roofed packinghouse where services were held was also a rebel meeting place. It was Isabel who’d brought this, accidentally, to her mother’s attention—­she once carried home a typed manifesto denouncing the ills of communism, copies of which had been distributed during the adoration of the Holy Eucharist that happened after Mass the last Sunday of every month. Soledad found it ridiculous that rebels still existed almost twenty years after Castro’s ascent; at that point, one accepts the world, or one leaves it. But Uxbal continued to attend services, sometimes sneaking his daughter away with him, which made Soledad furious and Ulises confused.

In New England Isabel memorized whatever new devotion the nuns taught her. By sophomore year, she was leading the whole school, grades six through twelve, in perfect Morning Prayer. Ulises would translate his sister’s words into Latin in his head, and at home he would recite to her his translations, asking which she found more beautiful. Sometimes she preferred the Latin to the English, but she always finished her answers with a Spanish caveat; the Cuban Our Father was the prettiest song she’d ever heard. When she sang it, her eyes would close, and she would wring her hands, as if she were at Mass on Sunday and reaching for her father’s palm. It was obvious to Ulises that his sister was never as happy as then.

Soledad continued her sabbatical from Mass and instead spent her Sundays practicing for the intricacies of the county court system. As a stenographer, she made a good salary; she’d been a seamstress as well as a nanny in Cuba, and her dexterous knuckles adapted well to the keys. While Ulises and Isabel were at church on Sundays—­the priests and nuns kept tabs despite the five weekday services the children attended—­Soledad practiced her shorthand skills on a creaky, borrowed stenotype, copying at length either Isabel’s history book or Ulises’s English primer. She was quick and smart, and the work and the New England cold helped her put at bay—­in a manner not unlike her daughter’s—­the humid Caribbean climate. Yet she could not forget the region entirely. The courthouse was on Washington Street, at the end of which was Columbus Green where stood a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus, a gift to the city from the Italian-­American Society. Seeing the pale-­green metal figure, Soledad recalled the famous words attributed to the sailor and taught to every child in Cuba: the island, he had said, was the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen. She woefully agreed, and in those moments she suffered brief but bright memories of verdant hills, rotting fruit, overflowing rain gutters, and cowherds glistening with sweat. Hartford she understood as a machine, a contraption she might force herself into, but its clamor, all the life of the city, coalesced into a fugue noise, such that she felt herself submerged in a fugue state. This, however, provided more relief than alarm. She could move through the New England landscape without memory, a circumstance she found freeing.

More important, it was difficult for her to feel sexual in Connecticut, where the air was biting and the sky was low and gray. Soledad was never warm, and she buried herself in wool sweaters, long underwear, layers of socks, high collars, and double-­thick polyester skirts. The clothing blunted the keen passes of courthouse lawyers who found her exotic, who appreciated her dark eyes and choppy accent. She made a name for herself this way, though accidentally. Her children were the shining stars of St. Brendan’s School—­not immigrant filth or the youngest members of the waning Puerto Rican gangs—­and the courthouse administration respected her because she was lovely but not sexually opportunistic. She worked hard, and eventually the district attorney’s office as well as the public defender’s requested her services regularly, even for the most minor offenses.

Yet Soledad was not aware how severe her unintended celibacy was until a young tax attorney quietly asked her to dinner. She declined, saying her son was participating in a debate that evening, and her daughter needed a dress ironed for Mass the following morning. It was obvious then: she’d decided to raise her children with such devotion that she might forgive herself for abandoning the only man she’d ever loved on the rotting island she once knew as Cuba. Despite this, she sincerely enjoyed the work, and during the twins’ junior year at St. Brendan’s, she was promoted past court reporter and straight to courthouse auditor. The title was ominous but the pay admirable.

The following summer, at the age of seventeen, Isabel announced her intentions to enter the convent. She’d spent a good deal of time considering the possibility while gliding back and forth across Opal’s Lake. Primarily, she’d wondered at the detachment she felt from her own skin. Isabel was as striking as her mother, and plenty of Jesuit boys in her class had made a point to smile at her whenever possible. She had noticed, of course, but she’d never responded. She saw in those soft faces little more than juvenile desire, which she understood as superficial, as deep as the grooves she carved into the pond ice with her skates. Eventually, what she’d previously considered a lack of interest, she now strung together as Providence. She had a higher calling, she said, which buffered her heart from the advances of all the well-­mannered, pretty-­lipped boys in her grade.

Despite his sister’s position at school as a sort of religious wunder­kind, Ulises found her insistence on divine intervention hard to believe.

Maybe you just don’t like foreigners, he offered.

Here, we are the foreigners, Isabel said.

This seems rash, he said. What if you promise yourself away and then change your mind?

I don’t see how that’s possible. I’ve already made two simple vows, one of chastity and one of poverty.

You don’t have any money, he said. And the other is a joke.

It’s different when you say them out loud and in church. They mean something more. It’s not just what I don’t want anymore.

The vows are names you’ve given to the facts of your life, he said. They’re not really paths toward God.

And that was when Isabel told her brother about Sundays in Cuba, the months after Ulises stopped attending Mass. The flat-­roofed packing­house had specialized in guava crating, which meant the work had been seasonal. The number of factory hands correlated with the number of red-­green guavas shipping west.

It was a place for drifters, Isabel said. Never the same group of men working, no one ever staying.

A place for rebels, Ulises interrupted, echoing a phrase Soledad had used.

Papi was a rebel, Isabel said, and a recruiter. That’s why we left. Ma found out that I was at the meetings after Mass with him, and she wouldn’t stand for it. It made up her mind.

Ulises could not speak. He was not overcome by astonishment or disbelief but was awash with anger for his mother, who’d lied to him. He was also filled with terrible jealousy. Their father had never spoken of the rebel meetings to Ulises, not a word. Why had he not asked him to join the cause?

What did you talk about at the meetings? he asked.

Recruiting, Isabel said, always recruiting. They were always trying to get more people.

Why didn’t Papi ever recruit me?

It wasn’t part of the plan, she said. We were the plan, the daughters. They were raising us to be rebel mothers, to someday marry and raise rebel children.

They were going to breed an army?

Something like that.

That’s insane, Ulises said. They tried to brainwash ...