The Mortifications (8 page)

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.

The letter, written in Cuban, read,

Dear Ulises Encarnación, descendant of the island's east, my estranged son, and author of the article The Present State of Our Seeds This Season,

They used to grow tobacco in the hills south of Buey Arriba, but the land is now a national forest and closed to agriculture. Still, Europeans come—Western Europeans mostly—because they think some plants remained untouched in the forest, growing in the shade, forgotten to all except the adventurous. There is a myth that the hills just south harbor the secret tobacco of Cuba that never leaves the island and that it is the purest and most delightful of any leaf ever grown. The Germans and the Dutch come most frequently, and it was a German carrying in his pocket a glossy magazine that bore your article. It was beautifully written, and I wonder if our Sundays at church—Do you remember that rickety packinghouse? It remains to this day—had some part in the fluidity of your language. Gospels rarely sound so cohesive, but your report on the recent world crop was enchanting. Should I take some pride in your talents for farming? I've been eating tomatoes since you left, which is to say, I miss you and your mother and your sister very much. The contributors' notes at the back of the magazine didn't say much, and what is New England? I can't imagine my family there, and I want to know much more than just what you are writing these days. Your mother let me go entirely, and I could not keep track of you beyond Miami; did she think I would reach up into Florida and drag you screaming back to Cuba? The German left me your magazine in exchange for some directions into the forest as well as a few pesetas. I bought some fish with the money, and I spent the afternoon reading and rereading your article while eating grouper. I'm not poor, but I only have what I need. How did you get your hands on a Flor de Cano up there in New England? How did you know the draw of its smoke? Do you really find that leaf from the Philippines as luxurious? That its vapor rises just as gingerly as its Cuban counterpart? I can't imagine your mind. It's been gone from here for so long, but the flavor of our dirt is stuck on your tongue—that much I can tell. Would you write me back? Will your mother allow? God bless you and your sister, and God bless your pen.

—Uxbal

The letter had come from Orlando in a package from the chief editor of
Fuego del Mano,
in the third month of Isabel's absence. The editor had received the note at his office and forwarded it, along with other fan mail, to Willems in Hartford, and Henri eventually brought it to the kitchen table on which Ulises read the words of his father's hand. Besides the voice of Uxbal, which sounded musty and aching in Ulises's head, what most surprised him was the efficacy of the Cuban mail system and the fact that the letter had reached him at all. The paper was still crisp, and the squat sentences seemed to have been written just yesterday: Uxbal alive and breathing, as though he'd sent a heartbeat through the post.

Soledad unconsciously crossed herself when she saw the letter's signature. She'd come home from work and discovered the single sheet on the kitchen table and Ulises alone in the living room.

He found us, she said.

He didn't, Ulises told her. One of my articles found him. Did you read the letter?

Yes, she said. It sounds just like him.

How?

Soledad sighed. He writes as though he were the mayor of Buey Arriba, as if he'd just shown a German dignitary around the town and taken him for drinks. He talks bigger than he is. That's your father. Does Henri know?

I don't think so, Ulises said, though he was the one who brought it over. In any case, you should tell him.

I will.

Did you think he was dead?

I didn't think anything.

Did you hope he was?

No, of course not, said Soledad, looking stricken.

Are you happy he is alive?

I suppose I am, she admitted. How do you feel?

Ulises looked at his mother. The same. The same as this morning. It doesn't mean anything that he's written, I don't think. Except that he's alive, I guess. For a long time I thought he was a ghost.

If you did, it was because of me.

Ulises shrugged. It doesn't matter.

Are you going to write him back?

No.

Should I throw it out?

Just leave it where it is for now.

She did, which was how Willems came to read the letter. He said it was not addressed to him, but Ulises gave him permission to read its contents when he saw Henri staring at the note while smoking in the kitchen. The letter seemed to have the greatest visible effect on the Dutchman, more so than on the mother or son, who were incapable of reacting to it, perhaps perpetuating the belief that Uxbal was gone—the vague
gone
of many possibilities: death, poverty, distance, estrangement, disinterest—by simply not handling it, not treating it as real.

The Dutchman, however, swelled in the presence of the letter, and Ulises sensed a heat blossoming inside the man. He was, after all, his mother's lover. Willems began to work furiously about the house, first warming and then condensing; he spent an afternoon trimming and repotting the absurdly tall tobacco plant in the living room and then spent the next week populating the house with smaller plants—some new tobacco leaves, a few diminutive shrubs, other flowers, everything tropical—as if trying to complement the original gift of the old Sumatra leaf with a miniature forest.

Yet as soon as all the available space in the house was colonized—every windowsill, every empty ceiling corner, every bare tabletop—Willems seemed to come to a complete halt. He went back to smoking cigars in the kitchen at night, but now with the lights off, which he claimed was soothing and reminded him of smoking in secret as a twelve-year-old on his grandfather's back porch in Haiti. Ulises joked with Soledad that her lover had been transformed into a cigar-store Indian, puffing away as silently as a wooden statue next to the black-iron range. It took Ulises some time, maybe a week, to figure out that Willems was not actually enjoying the quiet darkness but staring at the letter through the blackness—he wanted to see the thing without confronting it, without having to reread Uxbal's sturdy, palpable script. The letter, Ulises realized, was not just word from Uxbal, but proxy for Uxbal. For once, the Dutchman had to battle the presence of the husband amid his love for Soledad.

It's just a letter, you know, Ulises told him.

I know, Willems said. But I'm no different than any other man, and it's difficult not to be jealous. The man is absent for six years, but all he has to do is write a letter, and he's returned?

Time was what Henri had been wrestling with all those years. He'd thought he just had to wait for Ma to forget everything or let it go, and now, now he had to play the helpless adulterer who'd fallen in love with the cheating wife. The thought upset Ulises and forced him to understand the potency of the letter, because since when had his father been the moral standard in any equation? Since when had Henri been at fault or his mother guilty of anything but moving on? Ulises thought of removing the letter from the kitchen table, but to dispose of the sheet would have given it a past and a history—the letter was read, the letter was thrown away—and things left behind, things intentionally forgotten, he knew, had a way of coming back.