The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  I felt the inescapable noise of intercoms and alarms and howls and whispers permeating the prison walls and bars that kept him from ever getting real sleep, the hard boot steps of the guards checking his cell every fifteen minutes, the fluorescent overhead lights that never went completely out.

  I stopped bathing as much to keep up with the three ten-minute showers my brother was permitted per week.

  Even as I eventually let myself sleep, I kept the lights on in my bedroom to remind myself of my brother’s suffering and often only let myself rest on the floor because my brother slept on a thin plastic-coated pad set on a concrete slab with only a prickly blanket for cover.

  I had a fear of forgetting, as if I ever could.

  I saw my mother, with her patchwork amnesia about our father, the way she tossed out memories of Carlito too, and I thought, someone has to remember, for the sake of our family, if only to tell someone else one day what was, what could have been, and what never will be again.

  And there were the dreams.

  I think I was born having nightmares. My mother tells me I refused to sleep as a baby, fighting off fatigue by crying until my body gave out, and even then, my sleep was always short-lived and I’d awake in screams, a look of terror on my face.

  The nightmares have stayed with me all my life, but I’m not afraid of them anymore, like an old film on repeat, scenes from our family’s darkest moments: a baby dropping from a bridge, my brother’s face when he received his death sentence, the sounds of our mother’s wails filling our house.

  Sometimes I dream of my father. Though in the dreams he’s not my father but a man who looks like him and is calling my name from far away.

  I dream of the old house; me, a child, sitting on the dirt patch my mother called a garden even though it refused to give her any flowers, digging into the soil with a plastic shovel, pulling out worms and lining them up as if I were reuniting them. Sometimes I would dare myself to eat dirt. Mami warned us that children who ate dirt grew up to be crazy, but I did it anyway, stuffing a handful into my mouth, telling myself she would never know.

  I dream of Cartagena. Of playing in the grimy streets with my brother, of him leading me by the hand up the hidden steps to the roof of Abuela’s building where the whole city stretched out in front of us and we could see as far as La Matuna and Getsemaní. Or when he’d take me down to the third floor to spy on Doña Gabriela, who had regular male visitors. From the stairwell we could hear them grunting, pounding against the furniture, and we’d laugh and imitate them, watch the men as they came out of the apartment and wobbled down the stairs rubbing sweat from their foreheads with a kerchief, and then we’d give them dirty looks when we saw them at Mass at Santo Toribio on Sunday mornings, sitting among the church pews with their wives and children, and receiving Communion.

  I dream of my grandmother. How she used to sew blouses for me with embroidered flowers on puffy sleeves while my mother watched, and when the blouses were finished and she gave them to me to wear, she would tell me she loved me better than anyone else in the world while my mother looked on, shaking her head.

  For years, when we were small, Mami would talk about going back to Cartagena to live, as if this North American life were just some interlude and we ended up here by accident. But when we’d ask, “When, Mami? When are we moving back?” she would never give an answer. When Abuela died, instead of keeping her apartment in the family like Carlito and I begged her to do, Mami sold it and said now there was no need for us to ever return.

  I didn’t miss Cartagena anymore in my waking life, but in my sleep I still longed for it, and sometimes wandering those city walls in my dreams was the only peace I got.

  In the old house in Miami, I’d wake with the feeling of a hand on my chest, my eyes open to the murky blue half-light of my bedroom. Everything quiet, though still feeling noise all around me, through my ears, behind my eyes, under my skin.

  In the cottage, I fall asleep slowly, counting the sounds of the night animals—crickets, frogs, squealing raccoons, a cat in heat somewhere beyond the coco plum trees.

  But mine is still a loneliness that shakes me from my sleep.

  I can forget my solitude all day, through my working hours, through errands, the evening housecleaning ritual I’ve made up for the cottage.

  Yet night remains a tomb, when I’m most vulnerable, lying down for rest without distraction.

  Only this body and that darkness, the whispers of the never-ending noche:

  You belong to no one. No one belongs to you.

  Nesto says he never knew silence until he came to this country, that there is no quiet to be found in Havana. In his barrio of Buenavista in the high folds of the Playa district, he lived in a concrete house that tunneled from the street down a long corridor with a patio and garden running alongside it, home to a mango and an avocado tree. It was a good house, he says, in a not-so-good neighborhood, a reparto people would never go to if they didn’t have to. The house had belonged to his mother’s father, who owned a grocery store until it was seized by the Revolution. But he and his family had been eager to support what was then believed to be a democratic turning of the tide, certain it would be an improvement from life under Batista, when streets in every neighborhood echoed with screams from the dictator’s secret torture chambers, bodies of the executed left lying on sidewalks for days as warnings against dissent.

  For submitting to the cause and keeping in line with the new property redistribution policy, the family was able to remain in their house in Buenavista if they gave up their beach cottage in Guanabo, and it became Nesto’s mother’s, where she lived through three marriages, three children, and now, three grandchildren. Nesto says it was a malleable enough house, like everything else in Cuba. Walls could be added to make more rooms, the long house extending, growing wider, like bacteria: a second floor added above, a separate entrance created to make room for the widowed aunts, the children and cousins displaced by divorce and broken affairs. Just like that, a simple family house becomes a commune, full of voices, footsteps, doors opening and closing, and outside, a row of houses enduring the same overcrowding, a simple street becoming its own restless city.

  He says life in Havana was a series of house swaps, permutas, since buying or selling property was still illegal, and he’d only left his mother’s home in Buenavista to move a few streets away, to live in the house that belonged to the family of his new wife, who he married at nineteen.

  “You’re married?”

  I’m surprised he hasn’t mentioned it until now, though maybe I shouldn’t be.

  We’re sitting on the deck outside the Lobster Bay Inn, picking over our last bits of stone crab from the permanent all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. It’s an obnoxious spread made even tackier by holiday lights, miniature snowmen adorning the display, employees in Santa hats; artificial reminders that it’s holidays season in the tropics.

  “I was married. It ended a long time ago.”

  Before I can ask anything further, he turns the question on me.

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “No way.” I don’t know why I’m embarrassed by the question.

  “Nobody ever wanted to marry you?”

  He’s teasing me and I know it. I turn away from his grin to a table of tubby tourists with plates piled high with crab legs and seafood slaw.

  “No,” I say, coolly. “Nobody ever wanted to marry me.”

  He pinches my arm the way Carlito used to do to get my attention.

  “I’m sure somebody wanted to marry you. You just didn’t know it.”

  Later, I follow him back to his place, where we sit on the patio outside his door, on a pair of shaky plastic chairs planted half in the sand facing the ocean. It’s getting chilly so he lends me a sweatshirt so I won’t have to go back to my car for mine. He’s been anxious because there’s hardly been any work for him t
his week—few calls for anything to be fixed. And this is the high season, just before the holidays. If it’s this quiet now, he worries about what will happen when the snowbirds go back up north. He lives simply and frugally enough that I wouldn’t have thought it an issue until he tells me about the clan of people he supports back home, waiting for their monthly remittances.

  I say something about hearing that everything—food and necessities—is provided for over there, but his expression dims and he says that’s a myth, what’s provided by the government is only enough to keep hearts beating, not to keep people from hunger or from suffering through sickness.

  “That’s not a life.” His voice falls so low I can barely hear it over the tide. “It’s not a life at all.”

  When it’s dark, he shows me his room, a block carved out of a row of identical efficiency apartments, with a low ceiling, gray as a puddle. His bed, a futon covered with a blanket and a coverless pillow, an old armchair pushed into a corner beside a stack of worn books. A guitar rests upright in a corner and I notice a small stack of photos atop the sole wooden dresser.

  The bareness between the painted-over concrete walls reminds me of how I’ve always imagined my brother lived during his years away from us. But Nesto has a pair of windows. Carlito told me all he had was a three-inch-wide slat carved out of the thick wall angled toward one of the gun towers. He could only see out of it if he stood on the toilet and crooked his neck so far to the left he thought it might snap.

  I sink into Nesto’s armchair while he pours me a glass of coconut water made by the same old guy who prepared the guarapo de caña, then fumbles through his only cabinet to see what else he can offer me to eat even though I insist I’m not hungry.

  “I’m guessing she was pregnant,” I say.

  “Who was pregnant?”

  “Your wife.” The word wife feels strange on my lips. “I mean, the girl you married.”

  I try to sound half-bored by the topic already, not like it’s something I haven’t stopped thinking about since he mentioned it at the restaurant.

  He nods. “She was.”

  “You’re a father.”

  “I am.”

  “To how many?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  “Both with her?”

  He laughs. “Yes, both with her.”

  I watch him shake a bag of plantain chips onto a plate. He brings it over to me and finds a place on the floor at my feet, his legs crossed.

  I can’t picture him holding a child.

  Nesto is thirty-five. Seven years older than I am now. As night seems to swallow the ocean outside his window, I wonder what he was like at nineteen, the age he became a father. I listen as he tells me about the girl who was his high school love, whom he’d first met at fifteen during one of his required stints at Escuela al Campo when the whole school was transplanted to the Pinar del Río province for forty-five days of tending government crops—potatoes, coffee, strawberries, tomatoes—farming for the State in exchange for their “free” education.

  “Yanai was so pretty even the teachers were trying to be with her. I was a skinny, shy thing. And she was much whiter than I was. Not as white as an egg, more like flan or bread crust. But still much lighter than me and people always reminded her of this—‘¿Qué tú quieres con ese tinto?’—I didn’t think she would ever want to be with me. But she did.”

  By eighteen, he’d grown into an athlete, went to do his military service, and was assigned to guarding the gate of a general’s home in El Laguito, where mansions once inhabited by Havana’s wealthiest families were now the homes of pinchos, high-ranking military officials. It was during a visit home, in his second year of service, that Yanai became pregnant. Their mothers agreed they should marry and he and Yanai agreed, for the sake of the baby—a son they’d call Sandro after a Brazilian musician Nesto once saw perform—and because they loved each other enough, and because there was no reason not to.

  They tried for ten years to sustain their marriage, through occasional separations, and had their daughter, Camila, until he eventually left Yanai’s house for good and went back to live with his mother and family in Buenavista.

  I thought of my own life and the times I’d been pregnant, and the men, most of them boys at the time, who made those never-born babies with me.

  When I was eighteen, Carlito took me to the clinic. He thought it was my first time but it was really my third. Until the very last minute before they called me in he tried to convince me to keep the baby. He said we could raise it together, that as a family, we’d been through harder things.

  “A baby will brighten things, Reina. Maybe it’s your destiny.”

  “Fuck destiny,” I said, and he warned me not to tempt bad fortune by talking that way.

  Till he got locked up, Carlito was a churchgoing guy. First, with Mami, even when I refused to go with them, then with Isabela and her daughter. They’d sit side by side in one of the front pews. The perfect little family.

  “Don’t you ever want to be a mom?” Carlito asked me that day.

  “Not by some huevón who won’t even talk to me now.”

  When it was over, he drove me home and helped me into bed. I slept for two days.

  “¿Y a esa qué le pasa?” Mami asked.

  Carlito lied, told her I’d eaten some rotten bistec and just to make me some caldo to settle my stomach.

  With Nesto in front of me, talking about his family, I consider for a moment all the times I might have created a family of my own, and where I would be now if I’d let that happen.

  The only certain thing is that I wouldn’t be here now, on this island, with him.

  “Why did you leave them to come here?” I ask. “Your children, I mean.”

  “I didn’t leave them. I just took the first step. So I can throw out the rope and they can come behind me.”

  Nesto left Cuba three years ago but he tells me he’d been trying to get off the island long before that. Like so many, he says, he was just waiting to find a way.

  As a boy he’d dive with the other kids from the rocks below the Malecón, practicing holding their breath underwater, counting the seconds, the minutes that passed, timing each other, seeing how deep each could go, vowing one day they’d be brave enough to swim to La Yuma on the other side of the Straits.

  But life passes quickly, he tells me, even when the days are all the same—especially when the days are all the same.

  One day he was already a man, sitting on the same seawall, watching the younger boys launch themselves from the rocks below as he’d done, taking in the ocean, that slippery surf, thinking of those who died trying to cross, many of whom were the parents, uncles, brothers, and friends of people he knew, who left the island full of hope yet never made it across the water.

  His generation had been raised on horror stories of how bad it was in other countries, how the world, particularly the yanquis, hated Cubans, and if they were to leave and actually make it to a foreign land, they’d only suffer and starve and beg to come back. But by then their assets would have been seized, their identities erased, and in Cuba, the land they’d forsaken, they would no longer exist.

  Through the whispers of Radio Bemba, they heard when bodies washed up on the beaches, bodies of those who tried to get away and failed, and the people who would drift for days in the open sea and touch land only to realize the serpentine current had played with them, taking them far out only to deposit them on another part of the island.

  They’d hear how the fattest sharks in the world are the ones swimming between their island and the Florida shores. Havana’s cemetery is not the Cementerio Colón, he told me; its real necropolis is the ocean floor, covered with the bones of those who went to rest with Olokun, orisha of the deep.

  Even so, when the rods and planks of broken balsas smashed against the rocks or turned up on the sand, a
nd even though getting caught trying to leave could get you a year in prison, it wouldn’t be long before someone picked up the scraps of those broken rafts and used them to build another.

  Nesto was a good swimmer, with strong limbs and large lungs. He knew about tides and currents, and could read clouds and wind as easily as the alphabet. But he respected the sea too much to challenge it.

  If you go to the city of Regla, Nesto says, you will find people at the church of the Virgin that keeps vigil over the ­Havana harbor, placing flowers at her altar, asking Yemayá, orisha of the living part of the sea, to help them find a way across. Nesto went there himself many times.

  “But if Yemayá answered every petition that came to her feet,” he tells me, “the island would be empty.”

  Both his parents were teenagers when the rebels came out of the Sierra Maestra, and they grew into faithful socialists. They were believers in the dreams and promises of the Revolution and wanted their children to grow up with blind devotion to the regime. His mother went from being a grocer’s daughter to joining the literacy brigades in the campo to teach peasants how to read, and later working for the Ministry of Agriculture, helping to broker sugarcane deals with Canada and the Eastern Bloc. His father, the guajiro who joined the army after the cows of the family he worked for in the campo were nationalized, proudly went to battle in Angola and made it back alive only to die a few months later in a crash while riding in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle. Nesto was seven. The family conspired to hide the truth. For the funeral week, he’d been sent to stay at the home of a cousin in Alamar. For another year, the family would collectively lie, saying that Nesto’s father had gone back to Angola. Until he thought to ask, “Is my father dead?” and his mother reluctantly nodded yes.