The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  Or when Universo would take me to his favorite pool hall outside the city walls in San Fernando and he’d play for pesos until he had enough to buy us ice cream on the way home. By the time we’d make it back to El Centro, it would be dark, the prostitutes already out, old-timers standing in doorways of Getsemaní while the younger crop waited by the port or around the fancy hotels hoping to “coronar,” find a foreigner to take them out of Cartagena, and Universo would joke that his mission was to coronar with me.

  Sometimes I wish I’d held on a little longer, but my mother told me from the day I started running around with him in Cartagena that I should never fall in love with a boy like Universo, much less marry him. It would be like going backward, she said, and she always hoped I would at least have enough sense to marry for progress.

  I wonder if he’s still with his wife. If they’ve had kids or bought a house.

  I wonder if he ever thinks of me or if he tries to guess where I went because I never told him.

  What would he say if someone from the old neighborhood in Cartagena were to ask what happened to me?

  Esa Reina. No dejó ni la sombra.

  She didn’t even leave a shadow.

  Sometimes I even think about that dopey shrink, Dr. Joe. He left his job at the prison long before Carlito died, and even though I’d avoided the guy since the night with the dying bird, I asked the friendlier guards by the metal detectors about him, but nobody knew where he’d gone.

  He came to mind again just yesterday when I asked Nesto, why, if he’d been such a reluctant father the first time, he’d gone ahead and had another kid. He’d already told me abortions were just about the only things in surplus in Cuba, and ­condoms—after a shortage in the eighties during which men got used to not wearing them—so plentiful they were often used to substitute as balloons for children to play with, or to make ice packs and sandbags, and during the Special Period, their plastic was even melted down to simulate cheese on pizzas.

  He shrugged. “We both wanted another child, even if we couldn’t stand each other. We went to see a Santero who threw the caracoles and he said we would have a girl. Every man wants a daughter.”

  I wondered if that was true.

  Nesto watched me. I’d hardly mentioned Hector to him, but maybe that’s why he was able to read my thoughts in that moment.

  “I’m sure your father loved you.”

  It struck me because it was the exact opposite of what Dr. Joe had once told me—that the deep weight of sorrow I’d been born with was the unconscious awareness I had that my own father had never loved me, long before my mother even started telling me so, a trauma almost as severe as birth itself.

  “I don’t know about that, Nesto.”

  I thought this would be the end of the conversation, but he continued.

  “All men love their daughters. It’s a special love. Different than that for a son.”

  “Look, you can’t speak for all men any more than I can speak for all women.”

  “You could if you wanted to.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “It’s the fear men feel. Sometimes it grows so big inside us, we can’t help but hurt ourselves and the people around us.”

  Part of me wanted to laugh at how Nesto was comparing his failings to a part of my history unknown to him.

  “You really shouldn’t be so quick to defend a man you never knew.”

  “I’m not defending anyone.” He sounded disappointed at my rejection of his wisdom. “Least of all myself.”

  I can guess what Dr. Joe would have to say about Nesto. He’d probably tally up his life’s errors, blaming his early promiscuity, just like he did with me, saying it arrested my development and that’s why I was so confused about normal human relations, but he argued that it wasn’t my fault since I inherited the family female burden of early puberty.

  Never mind that Nesto says sexual openness was just another tool the Revolution used to get kids to warm up to its doctrine and abandon the traditions of the past, the religion of their elders, and that Escuela al Campo was a free-for-all, where secondary school girls and boys were fair game for the teachers and staff, and students quickly learned sexual favors could earn them not only better grades, but more than the small share of putrid parasite-infested food they got after hours tending crops since their parents could only make the trip out there to visit them on Sundays, walking hours in the heat to bring their children home-cooked meals to keep in their lockers throughout the week though they were usually stolen by bullies or even by the school guards and teachers.

  It was a brutal life training. This was the reason Nesto gagged at the smell of strawberries and cringed at the sight of tomatoes. For the months he spent picking them, and the shit he got kicked out of him in the filthy bathroom each night by the dorm thugs. By the next year’s labor term, he came up with a plan to throw himself off the roof of his house so his ankle or arm would break or at least swell enough for a doctor to vouch that he was unfit for working the fields and give him permission to stay home. But the next year, they warned, even with a broken leg, he’d have to go back.

  If there is one thing Nesto is grateful for now, he tells me, it’s that the island has depleted its resources so much that there are no crops left to be tended and kids are no longer sent away each year to work out in the campo. No more coffee. No more sugar. The only thing the island has left to export now, he says, is its people.

  Dr. Joe would have things to say about Nesto’s infidelities to Yanai, too, which Nesto talks about like it’s just another fact, nothing to brag about or hide. He told me he wasn’t flagrant about it. He says he was no matatán or pinguidulce, just that sometimes he’d get caught up with other women who were between novios or maridos themselves and spend time at their homes; descargas, really—no vows or promises required.

  Yanai figured it out, of course, as all women do.

  Nesto says there is no room for secrets in Havana, no privacy to be had. Outside, there are the spying eyes of the DRC and surveillance cameras on street posts. Beyond the Granma newspaper propaganda, local chisme and chanchullo occupy the space of news of the rest of the world. Years pass and few things change but the lovers and pairings of the neighborhood folk.

  You can’t be modest over there, he tells me. Walls are thin. Windows are always open to let in a breeze. Alleyways echo. Every­one hears everything. Every moan, every pleasure cry. Sometimes the only place a couple can go to be alone is the roof of the building, ripping into each other on a dirty azotea, under the scorching sun or maybe protected by night shadows, but even then, you can be certain somebody, from some window on some building that’s just a little bit higher, is watching.

  Nesto says Yemayá was always good to him because he’s a son of Ogún, to whom she was once married. When he was a boy diving off the Malecón, he says it was Yemayá, mother of all life under the sea, who kept him safe and out of Olokun’s realm at the bottom of the ocean. She protected him from the insidious contracorriente that could pull him out to sea, and she kept the rough tide from slamming him against sharp rocks they called dientes de perro. When he was a teenager hunting in the water with only blurry goggles made out of melted boot rubber and beer bottle bottoms, Yemayá brought fish to him so he could catch them with his net or pierce them with his spear. She saved him from drowning more than once, Nesto says, always delivering him to the surface with her gentle power.

  Nesto was never fully initiated to make Santo. He never had money to pay for the rites or the white wardrobe he’d have to wear for a year, all of which would have run in the thousands. Back then he’d sometimes stop in at an ilé ocha; go to a bembé or a toque de santo; watch as the musicians pounded the batás, calling to the orishas, before making their petitions and laying down their ofrendas. But he never did kariocha and was nobody’s ahijado, and he didn’t keep a canastillero or soperas for his orishas. In his ro
om, he only kept a pair of candles, a dish full of candies, and a glass of rum he’d change every Monday in front of an image of Elegguá, master of fates.

  On the last night of the year, Nesto pops open a bottle of rum inside the cottage, spilling a few drops behind my front door for Elegguá, who he says lives behind hinges, and more drops in every corner of the cottage, in remembrance of the ancestors.

  I follow him out to the beach behind my cottage and sit on the sand as he steps to the water’s edge, looking to the sky, palms up, asking for the blessing of the Great One, recognizing the dead who accompany him, known and unknown, the camaché, and looks down at his feet, asking Elegguá, who controls the flow of aché, to guard his health and for his specific request, the same thing he always asks for: to bring his family across the Straits to be with him and to intercede on his behalf to Obatalá, creator of mankind, and his wife Yemayá, mother of the ocean that separates him from his children.

  Then Nesto reaches down to the white cloth at his feet where he’s spread out pieces of watermelon, berries, and coffee beans, picks them up, carries them to the water’s edge, and places them in the ocean. Rather than push the offering up to the sand, the tide takes it out with the current.

  When he returns to my side on the beach, we take turns sipping from the bottle and he tells me that since he received his green card almost two years ago, he’s started the paperwork to bring his kids over to be with him. But after waiting a year for their appointment to get their tarjeta blanca exit permit to leave the country, they’ve been denied and told to make another appointment, which they did, for the first available opening, three years from now. Even paying secret fees and bribes has only managed to bump the appointment up from three years to two.

  Nesto gulps the rum. I’ve never seen him drink like this. He complains every other Caribbean rum tastes like candied piss compared to Havana Club, but that doesn’t stop him from swallowing more and closing his eyes, and, as if he’s forgotten I’m beside him, he whispers to the sky, “I don’t know how much longer I can live like this.”

  It’s not yet midnight but we can already hear firecrackers in the distance. The Broken Coconut put out word that they’re launching fireworks from a barge offshore. I thought maybe Nesto would want to go see the display, but he said he just wants to be with the ocean tonight, and with me, if I don’t mind.

  He hands me the bottle and I take a few sips. I hold the rum in my mouth for a few seconds before letting it slide down, stinging my throat.

  “What about you, Reina? Isn’t there anything you want to ask for?”

  “Ask who?”

  He touches the sand and kisses his fingers before saying, “Olódumare.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “God. The supreme one. Owner of the day and night.”

  “I know you believe in that stuff, Nesto. But I don’t.”

  “You don’t need to believe to ask.”

  “Then I would be a hypocrite.”

  “No, you would be honest.”

  “I’ve learned asking for things doesn’t work. You have to just accept what’s given to you. Make the best of it.”

  “You don’t believe in praying for things?”

  I shake my head.

  “You know, there was a time when all the birds of the world had feathers but no wings. They lived on the ground and leopards would come and eat them. The surviving birds prayed to Elegguá, asking him to find a way to protect them from the leopards. So Elegguá spread the birds’ feathers and gave them wings with which to fly away from all the creatures that wanted to eat them.”

  “I don’t need wings.”

  “I am sure there are other things you need. The only way to get what we want from life is to ask for it.”

  I smile but I can see it isn’t enough for him; he wants me to say I’m willing to believe one can petition the sky and the sea and be heard.

  Instead I say, “I believe there is what happens and what doesn’t happen. Hoping or praying won’t change that.”

  “If that were true, I wouldn’t be here. I’d still be stuck on that island.”

  “Nesto, if there were such a thing as answered prayers, I’m the one who wouldn’t be here.”

  “There are worse places you could be.”

  “If my prayers had been heard back when I used to say them, life wouldn’t have taken the turns it did. I wouldn’t have had to come here. I’d be somewhere else living some other life.”

  I mean that I would be with my brother, but Nesto takes it differently.

  “You would be living somewhere with a wonderful husband and many children.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t want things the way other people do. I just take what I have, what’s already in front of me.”

  “It’s good to want things, Reina. We have to want things or we’ll die.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What makes you get out of the bed every morning?”

  “The fact that being awake is better than being asleep.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I dream too much.”

  “Your dreams are messages. They are telling you to pay attention to the world around you.”

  “Nesto. You have all the answers.”

  “Just look out there at the sea. We can’t see below the surface but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a whole world under the current.”

  “If we go for a swim we’ll see it.”

  “No, we’ll see just a small piece of it. And you don’t have to see all of it, so immense it’s beyond our comprehension. You just have to know it’s there. It’s the same with everything else. If you take a chance believing, you’ll see what can happen.”

  I consider telling him I once had faith. I was, for a brief time, a young girl who prayed and believed in the unseen, perhaps as much as he does, but it all fell away from me.

  Instead, I shove him gently.

  “You live in your world. I’ll live in mine.”

  He stands up quickly and stretches his hand out to me to pull me to my feet as well.

  “What is it?”

  “Come on,” he says “We have to bring in this new year with happiness, not with such gloomy talk. It’s bad luck.”

  “What are we going to do?” I’m standing in front of him now, still holding his hand, which he holds up, putting his other hand on my waist.

  “We’re going to dance.”

  He starts swaying gently, guiding me with his hands and steps, following the slow rhythm of the tide washing up the shore just inches away, and he adds his voice to it, humming the tune to “Lágrimas negras,” which he once told me was his mother’s favorite bolero. With each step he leads me a bit closer to the surf, until the cold foam covers our toes and then reaches above our ankles. He’s close enough for me to feel his warm breath pass my cheek, but his body is far, his long arms between us. I step in closer, without thinking much about it, but he steps back, and I try it again, and again he steps back.

  “It’s not so bad where you ended up, Reina, is it?”

  “No. It’s not.”

  I lean my face forward to kiss him, but he pulls back before my lips reach his, though he never stops dancing.

  “What are you doing?” I say, because he says nothing.

  “I’m dancing with you.”

  “You don’t want to kiss me.”

  “I do.”

  “But you won’t.”

  He drops my hands and steps away, leaving me alone with my feet in the water.

  He turns his back to me to face the moon behind us.

  “Lolo invited me out on his boat tomorrow. Do you want to come?”

  I walk up on the beach and sit on a mound of sand a few feet from him.

/>   “Okay.”

  “I’ll sleep here tonight, if you don’t mind.”

  “No problem.”

  He walks up to the cottage but I remain behind on the beach, digging my feet into the sand.

  When I go back inside a while later, Nesto is already stretched out on my sofa, asleep or at least pretending to be.

  I don’t fall sleep for a while though. I sit on my bed with the nightstand light on beside me and think back to the end of last year, when I still lived in the Miami house, and Carlito was still alive and waiting for my next visit. I brought him chocolates that morning but the guard took them away at the security check because someone got caught a month or two before smuggling pills inside a similar box. When I got to the visiting room to see Carlito, I only had a corny Christmas card to give him. I’d bought it at a drugstore and planned to write a nice note inside but no words came to me, so below the printed message, I’d only signed my name.

  When he opened the card, Carlito traced his fingers over the letters.

  “Did you know I was the one who picked your name? Mami wanted to call you María Reina de la Paz after Abuela’s favorite Virgin, but I convinced her to just call you Reina. I said you were my Reina. My little queen.”

  “Carlito, how is that possible? You were only three.”

  “Ask Mami. She’ll tell you.”

  And for once, when I asked my mother about one of Carlito’s stories of our childhood she nodded, turning her face from me to the ground.

  “Sí, Reina. Your brother named you. That much is true.”

  Nesto can’t believe I’ve never been on a boat. I grew up close to the Atlantic, not on an island where you need a permit to take a boat offshore like he and Lolo did. But I’ve never even been on one of those Everglades airboats that blow through the swamps on gator tours. I’ve never even been on a canoe.