The Mortifications Read Online Free Page A

pair of glasses perpetually hanging over his chest. Willems had pasty arms and that country jaw. He claimed to have 20/15 vision, and he was short enough to hide behind some of the more impressive tobacco plants he brought to their house, especially that first Sumatra leaf, which had grown another foot since its arrival, doing exactly what Ulises had predicted it would: crowd out the window in the living room with a set of ever-expanding leaves.
    So Ulises asked Willems for a job. His logic was that he could scrape together a father, his old father, from bits of the Dutchman; he could resuscitate memories and eventually recall something of Uxbal besides the portrait lurking about his brain. Willems agreed to employ him, but only out of love for Soledad, and Ulises, like everyone else, would need to start at the bottom, working the crops in the field. So Ulises bought three pairs of jeans and a broad-brimmed hat, and on a Sunday in August he was put to work in a Broadleaf field.
    Ulises learned what his mother and sister had known for a long, long time: there is a great power in wanting. In the fields he’d proven himself almost useless; he, like Isabel, had Uxbal’s long arms, but they were unaccustomed to the weight of tools, and soon he was relegated to the nearest greenhouse to sort, organize, and eventually catalog the seed inventory. He was dismayed at first, but when he noticed that Willems checked his seeds more often than he did his dirt, he thought the change fortuitous. The man was often about, and Ulises could study the Dutchman for shades of his father.
    What Ulises had not expected was an industriousness to fill the hours in between Willems’s visits to the greenhouse. Though the horticulturalist came in and out at least twice a day, his stays were brief, ten to fifteen minutes at most, and the hours in between became dark matter in need of mass. Into those voids Ulises thrust his energy, hoping always to accomplish some minor task worthy of Willems’s attention when he arrived. Improving the already efficient operation was nearly impossible, but he did succeed in fine-tuning some minor movements of the Dutchman’s tobacco orchestra: by the end of a month, he’d developed an epoxy resin with which to coat the seed bags, essentially making them invincible; after two months, he’d built a sampling box for new seed varieties, which enabled Willems to better compare texture, smell, and speculative fecundity; by three months in, Ulises had reorganized not just his original greenhouse, but all the greenhouses Willems owned in Connecticut. The Dutchman nodded his head in genuine approval of all this, and, come November, when it was too cold to work the fields any further and the sky was permanently overcast, Willems decided to teach Ulises the finer points of his finished product, to give meaning to the boy’s nascent understanding of its primary parts.
    What did the study yield? As far as Ulises could tell, Willems touched everything: he ran his hand through seeds, fondled the leaves of infant tobaccos, tested the weight of fresh knives for leaf-cutting, passed between his palms small
matules,
the tiniest leaf bundles, and always balanced the newest cigar on his right index finger as if the tipping point was a symptom of its quality. Willems also smelled everything; it was something to see him kneel in a row of what would become Emperor Maduros and shove his face into the dirt. Often he tasted, and sometimes he even listened, though the listening seemed less scientific; the shaking of seed bags produced a shuffling sound Willems found pleasant. In the end, Ulises determined that his mother’s lover was an empiricist.
    But the conclusion didn’t amount to much; Ulises could have come to the same truth at the dinner table and saved himself a season’s worth of time. Over pork loin, rice, spinach salad, lentil soup, and turkey breast, Willems spoke to Soledad about the pains of his day and the progress of his