The Mortifications (20 page)

Is this where you want to have a child? Uxbal asked.

Answer me. Was it all just shit?

I remember believing.

I think that you were happy to see me because you were alone and because I was so different. You were happy because you thought the girl you'd taken to church hadn't come back, and you wouldn't have to deal with her promise.

Uxbal opened his eyes. That's all finished now, he said.

The vow was mine, not yours. And I've only just arrived.

Uxbal seemed to shrink then, into an even smaller man. His head sank farther into his shoulders, his neck shriveling like a worm in the sun.

It was then that Isabel understood she couldn't remain this close to her father. She had been giving herself away to him her whole life, and his voice was the sound
she'd
waited in silence for. But he spat condescension at her as she gently scrubbed the scent of excrement from behind his knees. That his words could shake her still deeply frightened her.

And despite having broken almost all her vows, Isabel wanted desperately then her Catholic God. Uxbal spoke as though his daughter was bored—which to Isabel meant purposeless—and wanted, on a strange mountain range on an island she'd long since nearly forgotten, another kind of new terrain: fleshy, alive, pulsing, unclean. As if this were the place, because it was itself already ruined, to reach out in all directions and experiment unabashedly with filthy otherness. As if she were done with the sharp, righteous spirit she'd been honing her entire life.

The bath unfinished, Isabel abandoned Uxbal and wandered the decrepit camp. Ants canvassed the mountaintop, marching in black veins up and down the walls of every shack. The bugs dripped through the wood and into the damp spaces where she knew humans waited in silence for nothing. She heard, faintly, hands slapping at the flies that lazily came and went from hut to hut to feast on dead skin and earwax and dried snot and the oils of an unwashed beard. All around her the settlement was decaying back into the forest: the woolly undergrowth threatened in all directions; a whitish cloud circled perpetually around the peak; lyonia overran the small clearing between the shacks, the rebels' footsteps not enough to wear the ground down to dirt.

Of the vacant shacks, Isabel chose the one with the fewest bugs, the sturdiest frame, and the most light when the door was open. The space inside was not large, perhaps the size of a priest's vestry, and the roof sagged toward the back. But the floor was even, and the rear wall had been nailed to a wide royal palm, which meant it could survive a passing storm. Clearing out old clothes, a broken chair, a fabric-less cot, and a scattering of beetle husks, Isabel went about making a chapel in which to pray, a place for God in a place He seemed unconcerned with.

Days passed, and Isabel began to worry that someone had died in the shack, because when she was inside and working—plugging holes in the walls with clay she dug from the mountain streams, lashing fresh palm fronds to the underside of the roof—shadows flickered noiselessly across the open door. She'd look up and see nothing, hear nothing. To ease her superstitions, she began to sing as she worked. She found she loved the tenor of her voice. The cords in her throat shook evenly. They had been resting for so long, they seemed to have an uncommon strength. And perhaps it was the years spent listening so attentively to hymns in church, but somehow Isabel could carry a tune.

Isabel was not being haunted, however; she was being watched by two of the rebel children, a boy and a girl. They'd heard her songs and were enchanted. While the adults of the camp, Uxbal included, shied away from Isabel's voice, the two children, the youngest among the group, could not help themselves and pressed their bodies against the outer clapboards of the chapel-in-progress. They sought out the wood's cracks and hollow spots so that they might hear more clearly the unnatural and bewitching sound of the outsider.

Isabel discovered them on a day when the girl tripped on a root outside the shack and, being a child, began to cry. The boy abandoned her and ran off. Isabel, finding the girl outside and bleeding from her big toe, picked her up and brought her inside. There was a post at the door that Isabel had hacked away at with a rock and into which she'd wedged a scooped piece of bark. She'd poured water into the bowl and in the mornings blessed herself with it, making the sign of the cross. Cradling the girl's heel, Isabel dipped the bleeding toe into the makeshift font and washed away the soil and grass. She examined the toe for the depth of the cut and saw that it was only a nick. Using the underside of her shirt, she put pressure on the bleeding skin and stanched the blood. The girl looked up at her, and Isabel was caught off guard by the blankness of her eyes, as if she'd not been taught how to be held, how to be so close to a larger body, or how to be close to another face without disturbing it.

This is the weight of a child once she's left your body, Isabel thought. This is what my daughter will feel like.

Isabel did not know why she assumed her baby—if she was pregnant, though she could not know just yet—would be a girl. But it seemed logical as she held the rebel child in her arms, her presence a natal omen of sorts. The girl reached up and put her dirty fingers on Isabel's lips. She pinched the lower lip, and Isabel drew back her face, telling the girl, Don't do that.

The girl stopped immediately, and this Isabel was familiar with, children who could understand what you meant when it was said straight at them but who couldn't say anything back. The girl reached again, but this time her hand found the throat, and the grubby fingers caused Isabel to cough. The girl was startled, and her vacant expression gave way to wide eyes, as if she'd understood something, and she pressed her palm against Isabel's windpipe.

Sing, Isabel thought, and she sang about the Blessed Mother.

The girl stayed near Isabel all afternoon. She sat on the dirt near the back of the chapel where Isabel was busy lashing together a cross from two pine branches. Isabel sang everything she remembered, and, watching the girl intermittently, she saw that the child preferred slower songs with drawn-out vowels and simple harmonies. The girl is drawn to time, Isabel thought, sound spread out over seconds. Isabel remembered Uxbal's mandated silence, and she thought the girl was craving somebody's words again.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
People were not people, Isabel thought, unless they communicated.

The girl watched her as well as listened, and she seemed to know what Isabel was going to do before she did it. She could read bodies, see the future in a bending knee or predict the action of the hand in a single twitching thumb. But watching a body is not the same as feeling it. Isabel recalled the deaf children at the convent who listened to pop songs by pressing their palms onto the stereo speakers in the rec room. They felt the music. The rebel girl's mouth hung open as she listened, and she maybe wondered if her own throat might be capable of such noise. It was clear that it been a long time since she had been spoken to. After a few hours the girl seemed tired, and eventually she lay down, closing her eyes. Isabel stopped singing, but the girl sat back up, and Isabel had to go on.

Isabel made only slow progress on the chapel. Using an old cot, discarded nails, and a few boards from another collapsed hut, she fashioned an altar. For kneelers, she stuffed grass into the old T-shirts she'd found and tied off their ends. Stumps and rotting planks would do for pews, though there was only room for three benches in the entire shack.

Throughout all this, the girl—once the novelty of Isabel's voice waned—helped as best she could, though she was small, couldn't lift much, and walked with a limp. She, like Uxbal, was clearly malnourished. Isabel continued to sing but also began to teach the girl things. She taught her how to bless herself when entering the chapel, how to kneel before the cross, and how to hold her hands in prayer. She tried to teach prayer in the general sense, but the girl's expression remained blank throughout the explanation. The child still couldn't or wouldn't speak.

One day the boy came to the chapel with the girl, and he knew how to cross himself, kneel, and hold his hands in prayer. The girl had taught him, or maybe he'd asked what went on inside the shack with the singing woman. When Isabel sang, he listened just as intently, and sometimes he would rock in place. His hazel eyes were more expressive than the girl's, and whereas she fell into a trance at each song, he seemed to experience brief states of ecstasy.

Isabel didn't know what to call them. When it had been just she and the girl, she could speak, and it was obvious to whom she spoke. The boy confused things. Eventually, Isabel went to Uxbal. She still didn't want to see him, but she had, very quickly, grown attached to the children. Their presence was restorative, and Isabel, wanting to feel again like her old holy self, found interactions with the boy and girl reminiscent of her work with the deaf in Hartford. In their presence she was suddenly an authority again, a force for change in their lives. Uxbal was, of course, still festering in his shack, and though he had managed to finish washing himself, his feet, knees, and hands were dirty again, which led Isabel to think her father had since fallen out of bed once or twice. It pained her, but she didn't ask him about his health and instead demanded the children's identities.

What are their names?

The girl, he said, is Adelina. The boy, Augusto.

Who are their parents?

I don't know, Uxbal said. They might not be here anymore.

Who feeds them? Isabel asked. Who takes care of them?

It seems you do.

She went to Efraín, who thought she'd come to sleep with him again, and he had his shirt off before Isabel could get a word out.

No, she said, and her voice, as with Guillermo, frightened him. He sat on a cot in the shack he shared with three of the other men and shrank into himself.

Whom do Adelina and Augusto belong to? Isabel asked.

Efraín shook his head and shrugged.

You can talk, Isabel said, so talk.

But he didn't. Terrified of her, he curled into a ball on his cot and covered his ears. She tried Guillermo as well, but he just whispered, I don't know, and he walked away.

Adelina and Augusto loved the sound of their names, and Isabel worked them into songs. She was aware that doing so turned them into sheep and that they would follow her blindly when she called them. But she abused her power only to teach them things, namely the sign language she still knew. Because they could read bodies, they could very quickly read hands, and as soon as they grasped the language, the basic motions and elementary symbols, they could talk to each other even from distance, something they did constantly. Isabel understood that they were like infants, though they were probably four and five. Having learned a new way to disturb the world, they could not stop.

There was another consequence to this education: they began to ask questions, and sometimes Isabel could not sign and speak to them fast enough.

Adelina asked, Can we have more food? Where did you come from? Why does your Spanish sound that way? How come you don't talk to the old man anymore? What is prayer? Why do we wave our hands around when we enter the chapel? What does that sign mean? Why are hummingbirds so small?

Augusto asked, Why did you come here? Do you have children? How did you learn to speak? Do the other adults know how to sign? Why won't they sign with us? How do you know the old man? Is he dying? Did you come here to build this chapel? What happens when you pray? What is God? Can I have a new shirt? Will you teach me to sing?

The both of them asked, Are you our mother?

Isabel told them, I'm sorry. I'm not. I don't know who is.

It was the first answer she could not give them, and she saw on their faces that speaking, through one's hands or mouths, did not really mean one knew anything more, that it wasn't really knowledge. It was the first time she'd disappointed them. She sang them to sleep that night—they shared a shack with two bedrolls instead of cots—but as they listened, they stared at the roof, and they shared the same blank expression, meaning they were, without a doubt, siblings, something Isabel offered them in exchange for parents.

He is your brother, I think, and she is your sister, Isabel said. You look too much alike not to be related. But it was nothing they hadn't already sensed, and Isabel had to leave them that night with the same hunger she'd suffered all her life: a desire to understand where they were from and why.

Alone, Isabel went to the chapel. She did not feel tired, only guilty for what she'd done to the children, which was give them a voice through which they could discover that they were hungry and lacking. She felt slightly ill and imagined it was morning sickness. She thought about the new cells possibly multiplying inside her, breaking apart in order to propagate, dividing and making space for bones and veins, layering like mud. Her sense of gestation, she knew, was more biblical than biological, but still she reveled in the idea of the Lord working his hands into her womb, perhaps in the same fashion he had with Sarah or Mary, and molding from her own flesh a new human. Yet, where before she had been righteous of God, she now, with the smell of the rebel children lingering in her nose, felt dangerously culpable for the hypothetical baby. Her decision had not been exactly rash, but the cost of her new calling had become a human life.

She wondered if Sarah knew what the Lord wanted of Isaac so many years down the road. Isaac, Isabel remembered, meant
laughing one,
but Abraham, not Sarah, named his son. Perhaps he thought it was a joke as well: Abraham a hundred years old and having a newborn boy. What could an old man teach a boy that young? Descendants as many as the stars, but on whose back would that universe be built? Until the final moment, until the angel intervenes, on Isaac's back or, at least, on his chest. His blood flowing from the wound God told Abraham to inflict. The children like lambs. Hypocrisy and lunacy all at once. Isabel thought, I am a part of this.