The Mortifications Read Online Free

called Cuba paradise before, Ulises said.
    Soledad thought for a moment and then agreed. It’s Henri, she said. He reminds me of the treasures one could have in Cuba. I had forgotten.
    That’s what Papi used to do, Ulises said.
    Only the best version of your father did that: the man who planted tomatoes outside our house and made salads with them at night and would eat them plain off the vine. That was the man I loved. His hands were in the soil when you were young. When we left, he was trying to grow a rebel government, a new hierarchy, and those things aren’t real in the end unless everyone believes them to be. Henri’s cigars are real whether I smoke them or not.
    Ulises shared his mother’s response with Henri himself. Measured as the horticulturalist was, he simply said, I’m a fortunate man if your mother considers me the best version of the love of her life.
    I think it means she could leave you at any moment, Ulises said, and I think that would be unfair. I think she’s walking around in some fantasy about who you are or, at least, who she wants you to be. I think she’s feeling guilty still about leaving my father alone in Cuba.
    I would expect as much, Willems said. It wasn’t an easy thing your mother did. And if she ever leaves me, then she leaves me, but I’m taken with her and will believe it when she says it’s me she wants.
    What happens when you sleep together? Ulises asked. Aren’t you afraid she might close her eyes and think of my father?
    We’ve already consummated our relationship, Willems told Ulises. And though this is sacred ground, you’ve already broached it. So let me just say, she seems satisfied.
    In reality, they were both right. Willems was a steady, mechanical lover, and Soledad’s satisfaction stemmed from the combination of his consistency and the off chance that she might sometimes taste Connecticut dirt under his fingernails, a token of the fields and her abandoned husband, though it can be said that her concept of Uxbal had evolved into something more mythic by then, less a distinct person and more an archetype of her ideal counterpart.
    Please don’t think of me as the aggressive type, Willems said to Ulises, but the first night we saw each other, the inclination was mutual.
    Ulises considered the history of his mother’s sex life: he assumed that, since they’d arrived in the States, she’d not been with a man until Willems. That was five years of physical famine followed now by two months of feast. But how could his mother love a shadow, even a better shadow, of her distant husband without reservation? That meant moving, in some sense, backward in time. What had the gap been for if not for the last stage of abandonment? If not for forgetting? Ulises tried to imagine Uxbal during that half decade, what he must have been doing all that time. He also tried to imagine his father before they’d parted, but his memories were hazy at best.
    I don’t remember my father the same way my mother sometimes does, he confessed to Willems. I don’t really remember him much at all. But my mother and sister can’t seem to forget him.
    That’s because sons have a tendency to become their fathers, Willems said. There’s nothing to remember when you assume another man’s life. It just becomes your own.
    Ulises thought the horticulturalist was talking about fate, and he asked, What did your father do?
    He was a tobacco farmer, Willems said.
    —
    A nagging fear took root in Ulises that he was headed in the same vague direction as Uxbal; that is, toward
oblivion and nothingness,
as Soledad had once described it. He was terrified not only to think that he might become his father, but also that he had no idea what that meant. More troubling was how his mother seemed so certain of Willems, the apparent resurrection of Uxbal. Ulises could not see what his mother saw: his father, as best he could remember, was a tall man with broad shoulders and a thick neck, bald from an early age, a