The Mortifications by Derek Palacio

Author:Derek Palacio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

Ulises awoke to a pounding at the door. He assumed it was a bellhop coming to tell him that the evacuation had begun. Instead, it was Simón, Orozco’s cousin, who’d bribed the front desk for Ulises’s room number so that the two of them might catch the last train leaving the city that morning. Simón looked very much like Orozco: short and broad, tan and dried out. He told Ulises to get dressed and to pack the smallest bag he had with money, two shirts, and all his papers. The rest they would have to leave behind.

Have you ever seen a city after a flood? Simón asked.

Ulises told him no.

It’s a sloppy circus, he said. When we come back, the animals we forgot are desperate and loud. The streets sound like a domesticated jungle.

Thank you for coming, Ulises said.

Orozco is fond of you. But what’s wrong with your face?

Sunburn. I got drunk and fell asleep.

Simón leaned closer to Ulises. I think in a short while you’re going to be in a lot of pain.

The passenger car was choked with standing evacuees. Fighting their way through the crowd, Ulises and Simón found their bench between an older white couple—tourists—and a black mother with a young boy. Ulises watched as the mother calmed the child by gathering his small body into her arms and forcing the boy’s face into her neck. Ulises remembered Soledad’s scent as a mixture of cologne and hair spray. Her neck, the last time he had seen it, was gaunt, ravaged by chemotherapy.

What happens to the telephone lines when a hurricane hits? Ulises asked. My mother will think I’m dead.

The connections are worse than ever, Simón said.

She’ll pass away, Ulises said. She has cancer. She could die, and I wouldn’t know it.

Orozco told me your mother is strong. She’ll hold on to the last. She won’t go before she knows at least one of you is coming home from Cuba.

What can we do?

We’ll see about a mail boat out west. We can send something to the Dominican Republic and from there, up north. How is your face?

It feels like a canvas sack, Ulises said.

Later, as the train lurched past the city limits, Ulises’s stomach began to ache.

I have to throw up, he said.

People moved out of Ulises’s way, and a ticket checker opened the door for him with a look of sympathy. On the platform Ulises tried to expel whatever was left in his stomach from dinner the night before, but he only managed to spit up a yellow sauce. The sun was rising, and a mist carpeted the rails. Ulises saw that they were nearing swampland, and in the distance he could see the high grass give way to wetter ground, turning into a river. He breathed deeply, and the sickness subsided, though his knees wobbled as he returned to the car.

My sister doesn’t know anything about our mother’s cancer, Ulises said to Simón. She’s disappeared for more than half a year.

You’ll tell her?

I hope to, but I’m afraid she might not care.

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