Free The Mortifications by Derek Palacio Page A

Sunday.
    Soledad felt an angry heat rise in her. According to doctrine, she said, a person dies and goes to hell if they don’t cannibalize the Christ. A form of coercion, in my opinion.
    The bishop nodded and then turned to Isabel. You can come back whenever you like. The doors are always open.
    Soledad did not speak to her daughter, simply took her by the arm and led her to the car and then home. She’d not wanted to argue with the girl at the steps of the altar or under the influence of the cloister walls. She’d requested an office meeting solely for some semblance of neutral territory, but the bishop, not affording her even that, gave her no choice but to drag Isabel back to the house and confront her in the place she’d abandoned.
    Back at the house and in the living room, Isabel remained silent. Ulises listened to his mother’s urging from the kitchen, occasionally cracking the door to watch. He understood that in the girl’s mind she
could not
speak, bound as she was to the Highest Being. Instead, she provided Soledad with a note she’d written beforehand, but the only words written on the tiny slip were
Please, Mother.
    How are you going to exist in the world? Soledad asked. How are you going to communicate with people? They’ll think you’re a mute charity case, a dumb girl because you can’t speak. What about school? I don’t understand how you can even pray.
    But then Soledad moved into her own pain, her own guilt, holding out her hands the entire time as if the daughter could take back the failures of the mother.
    Can’t you speak for just a few minutes? Just long enough to explain to me why? Are you sick of talking? Were you not being heard? Did I not listen?
    Isabel’s large eyes widened in response to Soledad’s desperation, but the girl’s lips remained shut. Eventually, she tried to sign for her mother as way of explanation or, perhaps, apology.
    Hot and frustrated and growing hoarse, Soledad slapped at the hands, screaming. My daughter is not an idiot mute! Slapping her once gave her permission to slap her again. Talk! Soledad shouted. Talk! She slapped Isabel on the hands until the girl put them behind her back, and then she slapped the girl twice across the face, the second time hard enough that Isabel’s lip split. Finally her mouth opened, but only wide enough for her tongue to lick at the blood. Soledad stepped back, and the habit framed her violence nicely, an oval face dissolving into a rounded jaw, a red seam splitting the chin into halves.
    Soledad had lost, and she knew it. She slipped to her knees, and Ulises watched as his mother begged forgiveness from his sister. Soledad cried, and Isabel ran her fingers, her delicate and expressive fingers, through her mother’s hair. For Ulises, it was the final tilt of all things gone askew, the mother kneeling before the child, seeking redemption.
    Isabel stayed at the house that night for the last time. She and Soledad sat quietly next to each other on the couch in the living room without talking. Eventually, Soledad handed her daughter one of her stenographer’s pads. She asked questions and waited patiently for written answers, listening to the pen on the paper, a switch dragged through sand. She found herself wishing that she’d taught her children the art of shorthand when she first learned it, but she could not have imagined a need for it then.
    Over the course of the night and well into dawn, Isabel satisfied her mother’s curiosity: yes, the convent was a wonderful and spiritual place to live; in fact, it took only a week for silence to feel natural; no, it was not because of her mother that she’d made the vow of silence; yes, she wanted to continue her work with the deaf children of Hartford; yes, she was happy. As happy as she had ever been.
    And by the time the sun rose and Ulises was searching out his boots for another day in the fields—his work hours would lessen soon, the summer almost finished, the harvests coming in,