Free The Mortifications by Derek Palacio Page B

and the university reopening after Labor Day—Soledad had begun to anticipate her daughter’s responses, had begun to only ask yes or no questions, attributing emotion and feeling to the nodding or shaking by paying close attention to her daughter’s face. Soledad, melancholic though determined, seemed to make up for five years of unchecked freedom and thin vigilance by learning to communicate with her daughter in just one night. Words no longer clouded the space between them, and it was the closest they had ever been to understanding each other.

Reading faces became their secret language. Soledad, in the presence of her mute, holy daughter, became comfortable with silence, and Isabel learned to decipher her mother’s twitching lips. They communicated constantly in the presence of the other: during Sunday dinners, during the walks Soledad and Isabel took together, often holding hands, and during the rare occasions when Isabel would sit and watch her mother sew late into Sunday night. The unnoticed consequence of their communion, however, was a melancholic haze that shrouded the whole house when Isabel was away. In between visits Soledad preferred absolute silence, creating a daily loneliness in which she could relive the unspoken conversations she’d had with her daughter.
    Ulises, busy with school but not wanting to lose a grip on his field work, was not home enough to break the long spells of noiselessness. Willems was also away, traveling throughout the Caribbean and Asia, looking to replenish his stock with newer, stronger, more robust plants. By the start of October, two months after Isabel took her vows, the Encarnación household was as solemn as a funeral parlor, and its members passed through its doors as spirits between headstones.
    In truth, the only outward appearance of life at the time was to be found in Ulises’s body, which was undergoing another growth spurt so great, it seemed fueled by his mounting envy. He was jealous of Isabel, of the new attention his mother put upon her, and he could say nothing to his mother that would pull her fully out of the quiet in which she found refuge. So his limbs and his torso—perhaps feeling the void of love with greater sensitivity and urgency—responded with a swelling and lengthening that should have garnered the young man more notice. He wanted to be seen. Following Soledad and Isabel’s reunion, he sprouted five more inches and added two more stones, bringing him to six-foot-seven and 260 pounds. He was not monstrous, but he’d started feeling cramped inside the quaint New England home. It got to the point where he could not sit comfortably at any of the rickety kitchen chairs long enough to even smoke a cigar. So, rather than lumbering about the house and disturbing the peace, he decided to dedicate his bulk to the tobacco fields.
    To escape the diminishing quarters, Ulises arrived at the fields every day one minute after sunrise, worked till noon, went to the university for late-day classes, and returned to the fields to labor until dark. Consequently, he made no friends at school, but he was a local figure of interest, known not only as the brother of the Death Torch, but also by a nickname of his own. With his large head and wide mouth, he smoked tiny cigarillos, which all but disappeared between his enormous lips, such that he appeared to breath fire naturally, exhaling blue smoke like a dragon. The classics professors, who considered him an exceptional student, endearingly referred to him as the Titan.
    In the fields he went about his tasks with obsessive perfectionism. In early September, he had replaced all the glass in three greenhouses by hand; a month later, he’d begun sifting rocks from the soil with a portable, handmade, grated trench bucket; and one month after that, he was rebuilding entire shading structures on his own. It was November then. Only a few men were kept on during winter’s cold months—Ulises made sure one was Orozco—so he