The Mortifications (31 page)

For two years Ulises lived and worked on a sugarcane plantation outside Santiago alongside other dissidents, army deserters, accused homosexuals, true homosexuals, embezzlers, political adversaries, freethinkers, students, and thieves. During the first three months of his incarceration, he attended a weekly class meant to rehabilitate his broken socialist spirit. The instructors, as they were called, interrogated him each time with the same questions: Where are your other men? What was your plan? What is your revolution?

Each time Ulises answered, I'm alone. I had no plan. I'm poor. I want to survive. I could not conquer a child. The revolution is over, and I have lost.

The instructors had never seen a spirit so broken on arrival. They deemed him rehabilitated and dismissed him from the class. Still, he was part of the dissidents' ward and kept in solitary confinement. He was not allowed to write or send letters. He was not allowed to have visitors, except charitable nuns or government officials.

In the fields Ulises was twice worked nearly to death. Both times he had been uprooting foul cane stalks blighted by beetles. Both times he was taken to the infirmary and given saline, cold packs, and aspirin because he was such a good worker. By the middle of his second year he'd been placed in charge of a small gang, and the fields they oversaw produced the most consistent crop.

When the camp began to swell with new inmates, Ulises was put in charge of more men. He asked where the prisoners were coming from, and a guard told him that the Berlin Wall had fallen. Socialism was dead in Germany, which meant it could die elsewhere, and the president wanted any remaining counterrevolutionaries, confirmed or rumored, detained.

The influx also resulted in Ulises's transfer to the general population, where at last he was placed in a cell with three other men, all of them new to the prison. They acted tough, eyeing him meanly and stealing his bedsheets, but Ulises ignored their bravado. That, coupled with his size—the consistent food and work had returned width and muscle to Ulises's depleted frame—meant they took him for something like a disinterested murderer and let him be. The quiet ones, they said, are always the craziest.

It was another year before Ulises realized he could write a letter to someone now that he was out of solitary. He did, but then he wasn't sure where to send it. In the end he mailed it to the United States, to Willems's offices in Hartford, with the help of a guard who had a sister up north. Six months later he received a reply in the form of an unsigned business letter: Uxbal had died three weeks after Ulises was taken. He was buried next to Soledad. Isabel left Buey Arriba shortly thereafter and disappeared.

The letter, though on Willems's stationery, was not written by Willems, but by the acting manager of Henri's tobacco operation. The Dutchman had taken an open-ended leave of absence from the company, and the manager—the only person in contact with Henri—was handling his correspondence. According to his reply, Willems had departed Buey Arriba after Soledad's death, though not without first leaving behind some money for Delfín, who somehow managed to live on. Presently, Willems was traveling the world collecting rare tobacco leaves, and every few months a small box arrived at the Hartford offices with a carton of cigars hand-rolled by Henri himself. The carton came with instructions to sell the cigars, which, the instructions stated, breathed a blue smoke purer than air, at ten thousand dollars apiece. The labels on the cigars were also handmade, and the stogies were called Imperial Soledads. The letter finished quickly with an apology for Willems's inability to respond directly, and it included a cream-colored insert that Ulises presumed would come with the cigars, should someone be carelessly rich enough to purchase an entire box:

These cigars are of the finest quality and meant for travelers. They should be smoked as a way to remember something familiar, something left behind; they should be smoked in such a way that a traveler never becomes accustomed to a place, that a placeless nostalgia overcomes him, and he is forever traveling, which is the plight and joy of the traveler, removed always from friends, family, familiar terrain, acquainted mountains and hills, beloved faces, a river of a man always.

Two more years passed. The Soviet Union collapsed, and Ulises was released from jail. He was let out not for his good behavior, but for his growing skills. With the dissolution of the European socialist bloc, Cuba was on its own economically, and the government moved swiftly to subsidize its people. More than anything it had lost a trading partner, and the price of sugarcane plummeted. An official from the Ministry of Farms and Agriculture met with Ulises to discuss his role in what the president was calling the Special Period in Time of Peace. He wanted Ulises to run a new farm, or a series of new farms, that grew something besides sugarcane. The official wore burgundy wing tips with delicate stitching along the sides, and they reminded Ulises of his steel-toed dress shoes, his first gift from Henri, his first boots.

Ulises said, I can grow tobacco.

We need to feed our people, the official said.

Ulises suggested tomatoes.

Fine, the man said. Then he asked, Where would you like to go?

Ulises thought of the whole island, but then he was exhausted by the idea of learning some new place, relearning another Cuba, so he said, Buey Arriba. The soil is fine, and it gets plenty of rain.

Upon his return to Buey Arriba, Ulises miraculously discovered Delfín—who looked exactly the same—living with two children. In strange accents, they asked her who the stranger was. Ulises saw their hands flutter when they spoke, even when they whispered, and after some discussion he realized they were the mute orphans, Augusto and Adelina, from the rebel camp. They must have been six and seven years old, respectively, and though they were much taller than Ulises remembered, they were still very thin. Delfín told Ulises they had shown up in her garden one day like moles out of the ground. This happened a year after Uxbal had died. At the time they still could not talk, but now they sounded like Delfín, which meant they could communicate but were barely intelligible. Ulises told Delfín he was moving in, to which she replied, Thank God. The next morning Ulises found her dead, lying faceup, arms crossed, eyes open, mouth set in a frown, atop her bed quilt, the sheets clean and unwrinkled.

She waited for you, Adelina told Ulises, her gray eyes wide and searching.

Me? Ulises asked.

Augusto grunted.

Ulises began to teach the children to speak a better Spanish, and after some time, he even started teaching them English. Apparently, Delfín had read to them from the Bible every night, even the gruesome bits regarding fire and brimstone, and Ulises continued this tradition, because it made the children feel safe around him. They fell asleep faster, sometimes all of them falling asleep together in the same bed. When Ulises translated the Spanish Bible stories into English, they were twice as fascinated. They did not know God could be heard another way.

At the same time Ulises went about constructing a tomato farm. With government funds, he procured six hectares of the Buey Arriban plain west of the nameless lake and just north of the national forest's boundary line. He hired men in the town to build trellises, and he took from Delfín's garden roots with which to start fresh vines. He drew water from the lake and contracted local pig farmers for manure. He grew only oxhearts. In a year, he had his first harvest, which was small but consistent. He spent his most of his hours in the field or with Augusto and Adelina, and he had no other companions.

At night he began leaving the children alone in the house so he could visit Buey Arriba's one bar, which was little more than a room filled with the lonely men who worked his farm. They were good-humored, but they wanted to fraternize away from the boss, and many of them came and went, because the work was hard. If there were any women left in Buey Arriba, they did not socialize at the bar. The women, Ulises had been told more than once, were leaving the island again, escaping with their families and daughters to other countries.

On the anniversary of Delfín's death, Ulises and the children decorated her grave with flowers and small wreaths woven from palm leaves. They beat the ground around her headstone with fresh petals to attract the zunzuncitos, and they ate roasted swordfish. The meal reminded Ulises not of his mother's death, but of Delfín herself. As Adelina and Augusto forked flakes of white meat into their mouths, Ulises saw the old woman scurrying about the kitchen, filling pots and cutting bread. The spices on the fish also stirred in Ulises's nose the memory of Delfín's scent, and he began to cry in front of the children.

Augusto said, Do you miss Granma?

Yes, Ulises said, but really it was more than that. Ulises missed not just the presence of the old woman, but the presence of all women. He felt an ache in his body, and he counted the days since he'd last seen a pair of hips shaking through the house, his house, any house.

From a pig farmer in town Ulises rented a shabby pickup truck. With it he drove all the way to Havana. He parked off of Avenida de Santa Catalina and ignored the jeers from passersby who called him a bumpkin. He walked up and down the street searching for a building with white paint and gold trim, but he found none. He drove home. For the next four months, Ulises went to Havana once every four weeks.

When Adelina asked, he said he had business in the city. Augusto wanted to come, and Ulises promised him another time. During his visits he slept in the bed of the truck, and if it rained, in the cab. During the days, he visited cultural centers and museums. He saw art shows and bought tickets to historical exhibitions. On a Sunday in April, Ulises toured the Arabian House in Old Havana, which was when he finally found Inez.

She was more than startled but said to him, You look really well, but I thought you would have gone back to the States by now. Did you find your sister?

Yes and no, Ulises said. And I live in Buey Arriba now. I want you to come stay with me.

Impossible, she said.

Then let me, at least, sleep with you.

Inez had moved. A hurricane had come through Havana a year ago and flooded the basement of her old building. The trapped water, which was never pumped out, eventually rotted out the foundation. Now she lived in a much smaller studio, much closer to the ground, and the space was lined, floor to ceiling, with books. There was barely room to stand and even less room for sex, but the two of them managed. Ulises paid Inez without asking.

I will see you again, he told her.

The next time he visited, he paid for the entire day, though they only slept together once. Ulises did this for several weeks, and he eventually began purchasing her entire weekends. Yet one Sunday Ulises returned to Buey Arriba and, while undressing in his room, found his money returned to his shirt pocket. He drove back to Havana.

You can stop paying me, Inez said.

There's plenty of space for your books in Buey Arriba, Ulises said. We can add on to the house. We can build you a library.

This Ulises also did without asking, and soon enough he convinced Inez to come visit his home.

She told him, This is no different than the town I grew up in.

Except here I'm a king, and you're not a whore. He said this lovingly.

Inez met the children, whom she liked. They can be yours, Ulises told her, which he knew was a cruel trick, but Inez didn't seem to mind.

They're bizarre, Inez said. Augusto sounds like a caveman priest, and Adelina—she never flinches.

You will love them, Ulises said.

Why do you love me? Inez asked.

Because you don't adore this place, Ulises said. If someday I should say, let's go, I think you would come. Then Ulises proposed to her, but Inez, after some moments, said no.

She told him, This is moving backward. Your house is lovely, but it's a dream I had a long time ago, and it seems like too much work learning to want an old fantasy.

Ulises was, at first, heartbroken, and for a while he tried to forget Inez. But then he felt the urge to explain to her that he wasn't angry and he understood her position. This led Ulises back to Havana, where he spent an entire night sharing with Inez all that had happened to him and his family: his time in Connecticut, the Dutchman's tobacco farm, his mother's dissipating chest, his sister's orgies and religious awakenings, his own sexual episodes, the children he might have somewhere in the world by way of Sofia, by way of Lena, and Uxbal's swollen knuckles. In the end Ulises knew he might have been capable of making Inez happy, but the more he thought about it, the more he found his attraction to her grounded in the way they spoke to each other, which was candidly, without the hint of false satisfaction. Satisfaction—contentment—was a mystery for others to chase. This became the foundation of their subsequent discourse, which some might have called a version of love, and following that long night they made a habit of weekends spent in conversation, interrupted only occasionally with sex. In this way they lived a sort of marriage on the Saturdays and Sundays they were together.

A few months later a superfluity of nuns visited Ulises's tomato farm. They had come to distribute paperback Bibles and pray with the workers, since there was no priest in town. One sister approached Ulises, but he told her he wasn't interested. He said he'd prayed enough for a lifetime. The nun, however, stood fast, and when Ulises eyed her more closely, he realized it was Isabel. She looked beautiful in her vestments, more beautiful than Ulises remembered. He had been, perhaps, as a young man, too annoyed by his sister's decisions to see how well the veil framed her face, how lovely her skin looked against the starched white of her blouse and the dark blue, almost black, fabric of her habit. The contrast softened her olive skin, which seemed firm and hydrated. He thought she looked healthy, though perhaps not happy. They both wanted to cry but could not.