The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  While Nesto gets to work, I walk around the rest of the facility. There are just a few tourist families roaming around, gathering at the big lagoon up front where a trainer is getting ready to do some kind of show. I walk down the stone path toward the back of the property past a pen with the pair of resident sea lions sunning themselves on a wooden platform. And just past their pen, there are nearly a dozen other fenced enclosures, each holding two or three or four dolphins.

  I walk from enclosure to enclosure till I come upon one where a guy in a wetsuit sits on a platform with a dolphin poking out from the water at his knees, doing hand motions to which the dolphin responds with some behavior like nodding or shaking its head, and the wetsuit guy rewards it with fish from a bucket at his side.

  I wander farther up the dock to look in the other pens. Dolphins swimming around, some just parked by the dock with an eye on me or another visitor, others doing quick loops around the fence periphery. In another pen, two mother dolphins swim with their babies in their slipstream, and I stand for a while watching them press against each other, slicing through the soft gulf tide penetrating the holes of the fences.

  I’d tell Carlito about this place if he were still alive.

  When he died, the hardest thing to get used to was the end of his phone calls. I could count on them once or twice a week. The buzzing recording of the prison announcing a collect call from an inmate, my accepting the charges, then his voice: “Reinita, hermanita. Tell me about the world.”

  He joked that I was his scout, his eyes on the outside, his little guerrera on the front lines. I felt like an informant, relaying to him entire conversations I had with other people, a fuller kind of gossip because he’d have me set scenes, describe a place in detail. He trusted my vision of the world, the way I told stories with my own judgments interspersed, because our first impressions of life had been shaped together; we’d been taught the ways of humanity by the same misguided tribe, were fruit of the same knotted and twisted family tree, and had walked through the world together until he lost his place in it.

  He feared he couldn’t picture life beyond the prison walls anymore, that his memory was unreliable, and said he was forced to live in his imagination like any loco in an asylum. In prison he could watch some TV and movies, but it only made him more aware of his shrinking picture of life and the fact that he’d likely never walk under the open sky again.

  I knew he gave up some of his rec time to call me. The prison chaplain once advised him that if he declared himself a smoker, he could negotiate to get an extra thirty minutes in the kennel each day. But that would require me to deposit even more money in his commissary account, and I was already putting in as much as I could afford just so Carlito could buy bags of chips, cookies, or powdered soups, anything to avoid eating the prison food, and so he could keep calling me collect, though the calls always cut out before we’d have a chance to say good-bye.

  They let Carlito have a CD player with headphones. But he told me his ears had become so sensitive from the solitude that even listening to music was painful. He talked to himself, he confessed to me, something he used to think only the most pathetic insane people did. He didn’t get to interact with the other inmates since he was permanently in segregation. Most inmates only got put in solitary for days, weeks, or months, not years, but committing a crime against a child put him at the bottom of the prison hierarchy, and if left among the main population, chances were he’d be dead in an hour.

  But the tedium of his confinement was so unbearable that Carlito once told me he could spend hours biting his arms, palms, thighs, calves, any part of himself he could reach, testing the threshold of his pain, until he made a solar system of pink and purple spheres across his body, dabbled with red pinpoints in places where he managed to puncture the skin, just to see how long it would take for the teeth marks to fade from his flesh.

  And when the marks cleared, he would do it again.

  Dr. Joe told me those in segregation sometimes act out, saving their feces or piss to ambush the guards with, deliberately clogging their toilets with shit, or flooding their cells with water from the faucet.

  “You remove an individual from society and they lose their ability to be social. Normal behavior falls away.”

  “So why do they do it?” I’d asked him. “Why do they put them in solitary?”

  “Someone long ago figured out it’s the worst kind of punishment.”

  Ignoring inmates was one of the guards’ favorite games, but at least it wasn’t as bad as when they were really in the mood for cruelty, locking inmates in a lightless storage room with no food or toilet for days. Other times, since the guards were heavily rotated, the new guys often forgot to let Carlito out for his scheduled kennel time, to make a phone call, or even to give him his mail.

  “It’s the monotony that’s so destructive,” Joe told me. “For some in solitary, the only constructive activity they can come up with is to plan their own suicide.”

  I used to think I was the only person Carlito ever used his phone time to call, till he let it slip that there were a few women he had regular conversations with on the phone. Women who’d gotten his photo and profile off one of those Internet directories where strangers can write to inmates. I looked up his profile myself and there was my brother, in his prison reds, crouched against a gray concrete wall, a headline under his photo: Looking for a friend. I thought women who seek out attachments to a convicted murderer when they don’t have to must be some kind of nutty, but Carlito said they were like angels, and in a way, those lonely women, feeling irreparably wronged by life themselves, were like prisoners too.

  When the jail turned his cadaver over to Mami and me, they also gave us a box with all his possessions, junk he’d accumulated during his prison life that hadn’t been confiscated: a small radio, a photo album I’d made for him, books he’d held on to rather than donated to the prison library. There were also the letters from women, but I wouldn’t read them. Even if he was dead, I thought Carlito deserved his privacy.

  A few days after he hanged himself, one of those women called the house.

  “I know you’re his sister,” she started. “I haven’t heard from Carlos in a few weeks. I called the prison but they won’t tell me anything.”

  “You haven’t seen the news?”

  “I’m in Utah.”

  I told her Carlito had died but before I could go on she whimpered, “They killed him! I knew something like this would happen. He told me they were poisoning him. He was afraid to eat or drink.”

  “He hanged himself.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The warden told me they found him in his cell.”

  I had begun to wonder how the cord didn’t tear from the beam with the force of Carlito’s weight, how he could have remained dangling like they said, or if they’d found him on the floor, choking, or already dead.

  “Did you have an autopsy done?”

  “No.”

  “They’re lying to you. They killed him. I know it.”

  She started to cry and I thought about trying to console her but just said I had to go.

  After I hung up, I considered her words.

  Carlito sometimes talked about how it cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep a single inmate in prison and his execution would cost taxpayers even more, so it was cheaper to keep him alive than to kill him. Still, he never said anything to me about being poisoned. I guess it wasn’t totally out of the question. I knew the guards had a thing for exacting revenge, like the time I made the mistake of openly referring to one of them as a “guard” and he became indignant as he reprimanded me. “We are corrections officers, ma’am, not security guards. We are law enforcement.” I said I was sorry for the mistake, even though what they called themselves made no difference to me, just like they could call the building Carlito lived in a “correctional facility�
�� instead of a prison or even a purgatory, but I guess my apology didn’t come off as sincere enough because that guard kept Carlito from calling me for a week.

  Carlito knew I kept a record of every instance of incarceration injustice and prisoner mistreatment for the sake of his appeals and stays of execution even though most of it couldn’t be proved since it was always his word against an officer’s.

  He’d never mentioned anything about being poisoned.

  I wondered whom he’d been trying to protect: the woman on the phone or me?

  I still feel the impulse to report to my brother on life on the outside. Sometimes I narrate things in my mind as if he can hear me—always the good things, never the bad—because I can never shake the feeling of not wanting to disappoint him, even if it means embellishing or inventing the world as I see it.

  Look where I am, Carlito. Look where I’ve taken my life.

  Look at this ocean, and these animals. Look at these baby dolphins, the way they swim tight with their mamis.

  Look at this sky, feel that sun, smell that air, taste that salt.

  Forgive me when I hate you.

  Don’t think I’ve forgotten you, hermano, even if you’ve forgotten me.

  I take you everywhere with me.

  I’m still your little guerrera. I’m still your Reina.

  THREE

  Years ago, back in Havana, Nesto says he sometimes felt so confined in the city that when he couldn’t afford to put gas in the car, rather than take a guagua, he’d stand by the road haciendo botella, waiting for a local car to give him a ride on its way out of the capital, with nothing but the clothes he wore and a few pesos in his pocket. On one of those trips, he started on Avenida Maceo and caught a lift in a Pontiac to the Vía Blanca highway. The other people sharing the ride got off at the Playas del Este or Guanabo, but he stayed on, wanting to go as far as he could out of Havana.

  They only made it to the Bacunayagua Bridge before the car broke down and all the travelers had to make their own way. But Nesto didn’t look for another ride. Instead he walked down from the mirador point overlooking the canyon that sank into the Straits flushing toward the Matanzas province. There were no defined trails on the slope of the hills, just some slightly foot-worn paths made by the few people who lived down in the valley. He walked and walked until he came across a bohío in a clearing near the shoreline. An old man sat in a block of shade under the grass roof overhang with a scraggy dog curled like a horseshoe at his feet. Nesto greeted him and the old man asked what he came down there for. Nesto wasn’t in uniform so the old man knew he probably wasn’t with the police, but he could have just as easily been undercover. Nesto told him he’d just come to take a look around, and asked if the old man minded if he stayed by his hut to rest for a while.

  Nesto stayed for four days. He says most of the time he and the old man hardly spoke, just navigated their shared space in silence. The old man invited him to sleep on the floor of his hut, and gave Nesto a blanket and a bag of frijoles to use as a pillow.

  During the day, they went for walks together. Took hikes up into the Yumuri Hills, and down toward the rocky inlet where water poured in from the Atlantic. Here, where the ocean pushed through two slabs of land, one could forget, at least for a little while, that they lived on an interminable island, with a coast that led nowhere but back to itself. A small, solitary body of earth, strangled by its own umbilical cord.

  On the third day, Nesto admitted to the old man that the reason he’d come this way was that he wanted to feel like a boy again, free to wander, to get lost. He was a husband to a girl he hadn’t particularly wanted to marry, father to a boy he hadn’t been ready for. He wouldn’t trade any of it, he said, because the reward of the love one has for a child is far too great to ever give up, but there were days when he woke up to the ever-burning Cuba sun with a feeling that his life had been stolen from him before he was even born. Not by the marriage or the improvised family, but by his mere existence on that island—pilfered and poached centuries over, until its latest incarnation, as a museum of failed ideals and broken promises.

  There was no past, no future, only the repeating days, dawn and the arrival of the daily mission to secure the family’s dinner. His dreams lay on the other side of an invisible bridge, but every bridge he came across, just like the famous Bacunayagua, which Cubans believed to be one of the Wonders of the World, led nowhere but back to itself.

  That’s why he left his city and his family that day without a good-bye, without letting them know where he went or if he’d ever come back. It wasn’t the first time—after all, he was a son of Ogún, the lonely orisha who dwells in the forests from whom he inherited his need to flee, to clear new paths—and of course, it was hard to get very far on the island and he’d always come back so he didn’t fear his family would worry too much; a neighbor or official would have notified them if he’d been arrested or worse. He didn’t expect it would be the last time he wandered off either. It was the price of finding a little solitude and silence, for the illusion of freedom even if just for a short while.

  The old man listened to Nesto and when he was done he shook his head at him the way Nesto imagined his own father would have done if he’d lived to see his son grow into a man.

  “Compañero, how do you think I ended up here forty years ago? Go back to your family. And think twice before you ever leave them again.”

  In the days after Christmas, I am restless. I wake before the sun, just a little while after I’ve managed to fall fully asleep. With no job, vacant hours swelling my day beyond scouring classifieds, submitting job applications, I spend time with Nesto, in between his repair calls, waiting for him in the truck when he’s on a job.

  I consider going up to Orlando to see Mami. I picture her hugging me as if we are old friends, bringing me into her home, showing me the new things she’s bought, sitting me down on her new department store sofa, and offering me tea off a tray in the rehearsed way she practiced in the years of my childhood, when we’d sometimes get visits from social workers the school sent to check on my and my brother’s well-being. We were mostly normal children, but in class, I tended to go silent when spoken to and a school therapist tried to convince my mother I had selective mutism, while Carlito had a habit of back-talking his teachers, kicking over desks, and storming out of class, and they briefly tried to diagnose him with some kind of rage problem. But that was nothing; we knew boys his age who were already throwing punches at the principal, pulling knives on the lunch ladies, flashing guns they kept in their lockers, and getting sent to juvie.

  In junior high a guidance counselor started calling me into her office, convinced I was being victimized or at least coerced by the older boys who trailed me in the halls trying to get me to ditch class to go fool around with them in the boys’ room or behind the school gym. The lady didn’t believe me when I told her not to worry, that everything I’ve ever done I did because I didn’t mind it, not because someone forced me. I had this idea that it was on the older boys to teach us younger girls what to do with our bodies, the same way they taught us how to dance salsa and merengue at block parties and asados.

  I could tell I’d stumped her.

  The school board required us to go see a therapist a couple of times. We each had to talk to the guy, a grandfather type, individually and then the three of us went in together, but I don’t think he got very far because, even back then, none of us were dumb enough to trust a shrink, and we eventually stopped going.

  When Carlito was arrested, the papers mentioned those things. He was never a full-fledged delinquent but there were enough flags in Carlito’s past and people willing to be quoted for articles, saying there’d always been something “not right” about my brother, árbol que nace torcido, jamás su tronco endereza. But Carlito had been the one to graduate from high school and even go to college and get a good job, so what if people who knew him would later say
he shot up like a palm tree, only to fall like a coconut.

  I didn’t get so far. My grades were okay and I hung out with both the remedial crew and the jocks. But halfway through senior year I dropped out. It was right after the Christmas break and I was tired of it all. Mami and Carlito didn’t try to talk me out of it. They both said that this meant I had to find a full-timer to earn my keep. Till then I’d just swept hair off the floor of a salon after school and on Saturdays. Mami was pretty good in school herself when she was growing up, even wanted to be a teacher, but that took time and teachers didn’t get paid much in Colombia, always going on strike, and she had to work to help her mother maintain their home; they were women on their own ever since her father left them for another family in Turbaco and the stepfather that came after him got stabbed to death over some money he owed, which Mami always counted as a miracle. She said life doesn’t wait for education, and work is always the answer.

  The same guidance counselor who’d tried to convince me I was victimized by the junior high boys was now an assistant principal at my high school and, after I quit, she came by the house trying to persuade me to reenroll. She didn’t say I was smart or anything, she just said that I could do better in life than be a dropout. But I told her I’d had enough. I’d get my GED and start cosmetology school. If I’d been smarter about it, maybe I’d have put in some time trying to date athletes or drug dealers like other girls I knew and get myself set up that way. But I’ve never been what they call forward thinking.

  In these in-between hours, I think about those faces from my old life.

  Universo, the summers in Cartagena when we’d disappear together, sneaking off on his scooter to the beaches in Bocagrande and Castillogrande, when he’d tell me, like he was an expert, one of those fancy newspaper columnists or TV news commentators and not a kid who barely finished bachillerato, that the sand and sea were dark around Cartagena’s edges because it was contaminated, not from the volcanic ash or even from the pollution of cargo boats and coastal factories, but by the blood that pooled together on its beaches from all over the Caribbean, the million souls lost on the journey to these shores. “It’s a sea of death,” Universo said. “But the water remembers what civilization tries to forget.”