The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  To ease my introduction to the open ocean, on the way to the marina to meet Lolo and his Boston Whaler, Nesto tells me one of his favorite patakís:

  “In the beginning, the earth was made of only rocks and fire. So Olódumare in the form of Olofi, the all-powerful, turned the smoke of the flames into clouds, and from the clouds came down water, which put out the fires, and a new world was born. In the holes between the once burning rocks, oceans formed. What remained above the water was known as land. Olofi gave the oceans to Olokun and the land to Obatalá with a small pile of dirt that a chicken scratched out with its feet to form the continents. But Obatalá was jealous of Olokun’s vast domain, so he chained her to the ocean floor where she remains with a great serpent that only peeks out its head with the new moon. Olokun is vengeful, though, and still tries to steal parts of Obatalá’s land for herself, by shaking the sea floor, sending up tidal waves and tsunamis from the deep.

  “When it was created, the ocean was massive and empty of life. At this time, Yemayá lived in the heavens with Olofi, complaining that her womb ached. It’s Yemayá who gave birth to the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, and to the rivers, the lakes, and to the orishas, becoming mother to all life on earth. To show his love for her, Olofi made Yemayá queen of the oceans and gave her the rainbow to wear as a crown, which appears only when Yemayá shows herself to the world in the form of rain.”

  We are only a few miles offshore when my stomach starts to quiver.

  I feel the vibration of the engine under us, watch the marina shrink, the darkening of the crystalline waters bordering the islands, from my place on a padded bench on the back of the boat with Melly, Lolo’s wife, while Nesto has joined Lolo by the wheel.

  Melly has already peeled off her shorts and is down to her string bikini, posing on the edge of the boat like one of those rubber truck flap girls. She’s twenty-two and Lolo’s third wife, though they have this running joke that he only married her because she’s Canadian and wanted to get her U.S. papers. She calls herself a wildlife artist, but I saw her work when Nesto and I went to meet them at Lolo’s dive shop earlier this morning, and her paintings aren’t what you’d call natural—they show dolphins and stingrays paired with big-breasted mermaids touching the animals in lusty ways. Nesto and I had to keep from spitting our laughter when we saw them all over the dive shop walls next to posters for wetsuit brands.

  I’m thinking about Melly’s paintings when I throw up the first time, all my breakfast into the white waves spiking against the side of the boat. Nesto has his back to me so he doesn’t notice until Melly makes a fuss, running to my side, rubbing my shoulders. I push her away and keep on vomiting, which would be embarrassing if I were to stop and think about it, but I can only focus on the churning of my stomach and the burning of my throat as stuff keeps coming up and up.

  I hear them all behind me, Lolo saying we’re hardly two miles out and I’m already tossing up hasta el último tetero. Then Nesto is beside me, telling me to concentrate on the horizon, but when I try to it looks lopsided to me and the only thing that helps is closing my eyes and forgetting where I am if for just a second.

  “Do you want us to turn back?” I can tell by Nesto’s tone that he wants me to say no, so that’s what I give him, while steadying myself on the railing, and he goes back to Lolo and tells him I’ll be fine.

  But I am not fine. I feel a confusion of my senses. On my back, the sun is warm and delicious; the sea salt is calming and aromatic; and the splash of the boat cutting through waves, sprinkling cool drops on my face, is a relief from the convulsions I feel from the neck down, my intestines twisting, exorcising themselves even when there is nothing left to push up. I want to forget where I am. Forget I’m on a boat heading to nowhere in the ocean, with Nesto, who, at this moment, seems more of a stranger to me than the night I met him, and his friends, who I sense mocking me as they trade glances.

  And then I am not there anymore.

  I am still under the winter sun, still surrounded by water, but now I am a child again, maybe five or six, swimming at the public pool Mami sometimes took us to during the free family-swim hours since Carlito didn’t hate pools as much as he hated the ocean. One afternoon, Carlito and I made friends with another kid, a girl there with her father. She had inflatable tubes, floating toys, all for her, but she shared them with us. I was drawn to this father-and-daughter twosome, mystified by the gentleness with which the father handled his daughter and how she hung on to him, her arm around his neck. When Carlito got out of the pool to sit by our mother on the lounge chairs, I stayed in the water with the girl and her father. She would invite me over to her house one day to play with her dozens of Barbie dolls, she said. I didn’t have any.

  Her father picked her up and tossed her across the water and she landed with a big splash. He must have seen the envy on my face because he told me to swim over and lifted me up to do the same. I never felt such big hands on me. I never knew a person could be so strong. I didn’t remember ever being carried off the ground by anyone. He tossed me up and away and I crashed into the water. When I came up for air, I looked over at my brother to see if he’d seen me soaring but he hadn’t.

  Then the father was carrying his daughter and pulling her toward the deep end, where I wasn’t allowed. “Do you want to come?” he asked, and I looked back at my mother, lying on a plastic lounge chair, reading a magazine, and back to the man, nodding. He picked me up in his other arm and we glided, all three of us, two little girls in a father’s embrace, to the deeper water, and I felt the thrill of knowing the floor was too far below for me to touch. I felt safe in this father’s arms. He led us over to the wall and we perched there, the three of us, each girl straddling one of the father’s knees. The daughter was talking about the new dress her father had bought her that morning—long and lavender with a ruffled bottom. It sounded like the most beautiful dress in the world. I could not imagine what it would be like to have a father buy me nice things and I watched her and her father and the way they loved each other. I felt something poke my leg and when I looked down, through the gloss of the pool water, I saw the father’s penis had grown and popped out of his bathing suit. I knew what a penis was because I had a brother and during our early years, we took our baths together. I said to the father, “You should fix your bathing suit,” and he looked down and said, “Yes, I should,” and put himself away. But it happened again and when I told the father this time, he said, “Why don’t you fix it for me?” I looked at the girl, who didn’t react, and then at my mother, still buried in her magazine pages, and my brother drying off with a towel on the chair beside her. I called to my mother, but she only looked up and when I said nothing else, she turned back to her magazine. I tried my brother. I called his name. He looked at me, and again I said nothing, but he stood up and came to me. He knew something was wrong. The man squirmed beneath me, and I reached my hand out to my brother and let him pull me out of the water. I said nothing and my brother saw nothing, but still looked at the man with suspicion. We went back to our mother, who still hadn’t noticed a thing.

  “I want to go home,” I told our mother, afraid to look back at the girl with her father, afraid of what I’d seen under the water.

  It’s a memory that hasn’t come to me in years. One I’ve never spoken of. But here it is, laid out before me in the delirium of my seasickness, until we are so far out that there is no land and no other boat to be seen in any direction. We are beyond the buoys, the pale shallow waters and sandbars along the coast emptied into to a watery lapis plateau.

  Lolo drops anchor and the boat gives into bobbing over the waves that makes me lurch over the side, its engine fumes conjuring another vomit spell.

  Nesto kneels beside me.

  “I’m sorry, Reina. If I’d known you would get so sick, I never would have asked you to come.”

  His words aren’t any consolation. I pull back, lie on the boat floor, hoping
it will feel steadier, focusing on the sky above, but it doesn’t help.

  “You’ve got to get in the water,” he urges me. “It will make you feel better.”

  He pulls his shirt over his head and is down to his shorts, which he steps out of too, and there he is, all of him crammed into a small swimsuit—the kind most guys, except professional swimmers, avoid.

  I’ve never seen so much of Nesto. So much of his skin, his limbs, the length of his legs, bare toe to bare thigh. The stretch of his waist, hip folds to armpit. I remember him telling me that in Cuba, it’s common for guys to shave their bodies from the waist up or even all over, because the weather is so hot, sometimes the water supply is cut, and it’s a way to keep from stinking between showers: Nesto, hairless except for some stubble on his chest and that mane, which he pulls back with a thick rubber band. He catches me staring at him and waves his hand at me, as if I am hypnotized, and I look away, prop myself on my knees and over the boat railing again, eyes back on that unreliable horizon, and throw up some more.

  When I look back up, Lolo is stripped down to an equally small bathing suit, and I notice a tattoo across his back of what has to be one of Melly’s mermaids. He pulls a bottle of shampoo out of a bag and pours it all over Nesto’s shoulders, and then onto his own chest and they each begin rubbing themselves down. I don’t want to ask what they’re doing. I just watch as Nesto’s dark skin turns slick and shiny, but then it becomes clear they’re just lubricating themselves to make it easier to get into their wetsuits.

  When he’s all wrapped in neoprene, Nesto reaches for me.

  “Come, Reina.”

  I take his hand and he leads me along the railing to the back of the boat, where he helps me sit down beside him, our feet hanging over the edge into the cold water.

  He dips the mask he’s been holding in his other hand into the ocean, fills it with water, then puts it up to my face.

  “Close your eyes,” he says, and I do.

  He says some words in Lucumí, then, so I can understand, says, “Yemayá, take Reina into your arms,” before pouring the water over my head.

  I feel it run down my face, cooling my neck, my back, and my chest.

  When I open my eyes, Nesto is watching me.

  “Get in the water. Swim. It will help you, I promise.”

  He starts putting some long fins on his feet while Lolo tosses a large inflatable red tube on a long cord off the back of the boat.

  “And when you get in, you do it like this.”

  He launches himself sideways off the back of the boat, disappears under the water, then breaks through the surface again, grinning.

  “You’ll only feel worse if you stay on board, Reina. Come in. I’m waiting for you.”

  Melly lets me use her wetsuit since she’s decided to stay on the boat to work on her tan, and helps me lotion up, then pull the neoprene up over my thighs and around my hips, which is much harder than it looked when I watched Nesto do it. When I have it on properly, she zips me up from behind and I feel the suit push against my ribs up to my neck.

  “Breathe,” she tells me. “You’ll get used to it. It’ll feel better in the water.”

  She gives me her fins and mask too, and leads me to the ladder at the back of the boat to help me as I put them on.

  “Are you scared?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of this,” she points to the dark water all around us.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Out here is where the ocean floor drops off. Didn’t you notice how clear and light the water is when we’re closer to land? That’s because it’s not so deep. Then the ocean floor takes a big hit hundreds of feet down and you’re out here, in the blue.”

  “Should I be scared?”

  “You’ll be fine as long as you don’t panic and start swallowing water.”

  Nesto and Lolo are on the line by the buoy calling for me to come in, so Melly helps me push off the ladder into the cold water, sideways, just like Nesto said, and I feel it slip between my skin and suit. I push the fins with my legs, propelling myself along the surface, pulling myself along the line toward the buoy where Nesto waits with Lolo.

  “Are you still sick?”

  “I’ll be okay.” But as soon as I say it, a wave pushes against me and my stomach goes up with it, then back down, and the sickness returns.

  “Put the mask on and go under,” Nesto instructs me, and I do as he says.

  Nesto and Lolo have weight belts on and lower another weighted line off the tube and start timing each other, doing ventilation patterns, so they can better hold their breath to dive on air. I don’t have a weight belt, just the mask and snorkel and fins, so I remain on the surface but once I turn my face downward, I gasp at the immensity of the realm below, slivers of sunlight shooting through the blue like lightning.

  I don’t see small fish like the ones you see in tropical aquariums or when you snorkel by the reefs or close to the beach, with the stripes and dots. I see nothing, really, just a big slow-moving fish several meters under me, the outlines of a few small jellyfish bouncing along. Otherwise it’s quiet, still, shadows and blueness and emptiness as far as I can see in any direction, which isn’t very far, it turns out, because Lolo later tells me no matter how good the day’s visibility, sunlight only penetrates the first two hundred meters of the ocean and beyond that it’s an eternal midnight.

  Even on the most perfect sunny day, the ocean lit up like a chandelier, Nesto says there is an underworld of inverted mountains far beneath the shimmering surface sea, valleys and canyons miles beyond the faintest trace of light.

  I feel a tug on my suit and pop my head up to see Nesto tying a rope around my waist.

  “You’re drifting. I don’t want to lose you out here.”

  Maybe it’s because I feel a little safer knowing I am tied to him and to the tube that I spit the snorkel out and try to dive under, though my wetsuit makes me buoyant and I don’t go very far. But being underwater soothes me. My stomach and my nerves calm. The boat fumes dissipate. My body turns and curls as it wants, weightless, with the ease of an acrobat.

  I think of my mother and how, when I was a child, she’d take me into the water with her and I felt time suspended in her embrace. How badly I’ve wanted to return to those moments. We remained under the same roof, but the years pulled us apart, so we could never recover the softness I felt from her under the sun, amid the waves.

  Here, in the open ocean, with nobody to hold me at the surface but myself, I become sad for what’s become of my mother and me, the ways life hardened us to one another.

  I turn and see Nesto a few meters away, lowering himself headfirst down the line, one hand on the rope, the other pinching his nose. A pair of sea horses comes into my line of vision, then floating close, just in front of my mask. I’ve never seen them swimming free like this. At the dolphinarium, there is a display near the entrance with a few sea horses that usually coil their small tails onto the seaweed at the bottom of the tank. They’re supposed to prefer shallow waters, but here, this pair glides along, tails tied in courtship, and I almost do what Melly warned me against, swallow water, in my effort to call to Nesto, who is back up on the surface, gasping for air.

  He gathers his breath and swims over to me, looking concerned, while Lolo waits on the line rig behind him. I take his hand and guide him to where the seahorses seemed to dance under a strobe of sunlight a moment ago. We go under together and the seahorses are still there, twirling beneath the current. We watch them for a few seconds. When we come up for air, Nesto looks pleased.

  “Seahorses are a sign,” he tells me.

  “Of what?”

  “You don’t believe in signs, remember?”

  “Tell me, Nesto.”

  “It’s Yemayá. She’s welcoming you. She’s giving you a place out here.”

  On the way b
ack to shore, Lolo stops the boat by the Key Largo hump where the continental shelf rises into a little mountain that pushes the smaller fish to the surface and larger fish come after them. That’s what he tells me when I ask if I can get off the boat again and go for another swim. I’m not sick anymore. Ever since I got in the water out in the blue, I feel calm, and the feeling remained even when I climbed back in the boat and it started up again, skipping and splitting waves.

  Out by the hump, there are a lot more boats, most outrigged with multiple fishing poles, hoping for bites from bonefish, tarpon, or snook. As Lolo sets up a couple of poles off the back of the boat, I know we’ll be here a while. But he says I can’t go for a swim because along with barracuda, there are plenty of sharks out in the hump and once in a while even a wandering great white makes an appearance. I settle onto a bench with Melly. She’s been nice and helped me out of her wetsuit just like she’d helped me into it. She ran the freshwater hose all over me to wash off the salt and shampoo residue, and brushed out my hair.

  “I’ve never seen Nesto with a girl before,” she tells me when the guys are out of earshot and deep into some story about the old days spearfishing in El Salado. “Whenever he comes around, he’s always alone. I tried to set him up with friends of mine a few times, but he’s always said no. How long have you known him?”

  “About two months.”

  “I knew Lolo three months when I married him. And that was three years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “I came to his shop looking for a job. He said, ‘I can’t give you no job if you don’t have no papers.’ I said, ‘Well, how am I supposed to get papers if I don’t have a job?’ so he said, ‘You can marry me.’ And he leaned right over the counter and pulled my face to his and kissed me right there with customers all around. That’s how he got me to go out with him. I didn’t think I’d marry him, but I like a guy who goes after what he wants.”