The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  “But Cartagena is ours,” I’d insist.

  I hated when he talked about a future with Isabela, but hated even more that he’d peddle our past to her.

  “Don’t be jealous, Reina. One day you’ll love someone as much as I love Isabela and you’ll want to share everything with that person too.”

  Years later, I’d try to understand how Carlito had once wanted to give Isabela so much, yet had still managed to take everything away from her. But Dr. Joe told me the prison was filled with guys like Carlito, who’d committed terrible crimes against the person they professed to love the most.

  “It’s a mixed-up, messy sort of love,” Dr. Joe said.

  I remember wondering if there was any other kind.

  I don’t go to my grandmother’s grave. But for three days, I walk the narrow passages from Santo Toribio to what was her home. I lean along the wall of the building across the street, watching to see if anyone goes in or comes out of the doorway. Her window is open and I stare at it for a long while to see if I can will the image of my grandmother’s figure into the frame, how she’d perch there to check on my brother and me playing in the park. I look down the block, see a pack of young boys walking together, and, as they press past me on the narrow sidewalk, I check their faces, aching in that way I’ve lived with for so long, trying to see my brother as he used to be, exploding with youthful curiosity, wrestling with the best and worst parts of himself.

  If not today, I may never have the chance to see my grandmother’s place again.

  I ring the bell beside the door and an intercom voice answers.

  “I’m interested in a property,” I say.

  The door buzzes open and I let myself in.

  The ground-floor apartment, which used to belong to a guy everyone called “El Viejo Madrigal,” a retired army captain who liked to sit around in his old uniform drinking whiskey, is now an office and a slim woman, speaking Spanish with a French accent, welcomes me in. I planned to lie, tell her I’m looking to rent an apartment, but I try honesty instead, tell her the apartment on the fourth floor had been in my family for generations.

  She doesn’t seem to believe me, or maybe she thinks I’ve come here to make a claim on the place, so I drop the name of the guy Mami sold it to, a lawyer from Medellín whose name I remember because she had a fling with him before transferring the deed.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I say. “I won’t be back again. I would be grateful if you would let me see it for just a minute. Then I’ll go.”

  She looks around the office, maybe looking for an excuse to say no, but it’s otherwise empty beyond the two of us, not even a phone ringing.

  She sighs, a little embarrassed, and stands up.

  “Follow me. Just a few minutes though. I’ve got to mind the office and I can’t leave you up there alone.”

  The stairwell and landings have been painted and retiled; our footsteps are the only sounds in a building that used to ­vibrate with voices. But the aroma of locked-in dusty moisture on the third and fourth floors is still the same—a smell my mother hated and said was full of spores that would one day kill us.

  My grandmother’s door is no longer blue but tangerine, and the woman tells me the apartment has been recently vacated and is available should I want to live there again.

  Without furniture it should appear larger, but the apartment feels so small. I can’t believe we lived here, the four of us.

  The walls are a fresh white, the splintered wooden floors sanded down and varnished. The agent waits in the hall as I walk through the rooms, stand in the places that used to hold beds, where I slept and where my grandmother died.

  I don’t know what to feel. I long for some sort of sensation that will bring all my lost pieces together, but I only feel the inertia of the space, the light breeze coming in through the window I’ve been watching for days from the street.

  “Carlito,” I whisper his name, but I am overwhelmed with solitude.

  There is nobody here but me.

  Here on the equator, darkness falls evenly for twelve long hours of night. I don’t take myself to restaurants or to the champeta or salsa clubs the front desk guy recommends to the other hotel guests. I buy a bakery sandwich and a soda, and settle into my room, the sounds of the horse carriages and music of the Plaza Simón Bolívar reverberating against the terra-cotta tiles and stone walls the color of burned bone.

  The TV news talks about a homeless man set on fire near the university in Bogotá, about the peace negotiations between the guerrilla forces and the government being carried out on neutral ground in Havana.

  I think of Nesto.

  By now he would have gone to the appointment from which he would have left a newly married man. I wonder if they kissed or took photos. I wonder if the children looked on with renewed hope at the sight of their parents together again.

  My mother, despite all her boyfriends, never managed to make a new father of anyone for Carlito and me. She longed for a handsome and rich gentleman to show up and marry our whole family, give us a new last name. I think she still dreams of it.

  I wonder what Yanai thinks of their reunion. I wonder if she’ll be willing to let him go in the end and if he will be willing to walk away.

  Nesto gave me the number of his mother’s place the last time he went home because his American cell phone would be blocked from working on this island. He said to call if I needed him. He said to take that any way I wanted.

  I consider it for a while before I dial.

  He told me he never would have left his family if he hadn’t had to. He would trade everything to be with his kids again.

  Would you trade me? I thought, selfishly, though I knew better, because not so long ago, I would have traded anything and anybody in my life, even my own mother, to have Carlito walking free beside me.

  It takes a few tries, sorting out the tangle of numbers and country codes on the hotel room phone.

  The buzzy ringing, the voice of an older woman answering.

  “This is Reina. Nesto’s friend,” I say, feeling foolish.

  She responds as if I’m just a neighbor calling from around the corner, “Oh, yes. Hold on, hold on.”

  I hear her footsteps, as if she’s walking with the phone, other voices in the background, and I try to pick out who they are from how he described his family members to me—could that girl’s voice belong to his cousin, or his niece? The man, maybe his stepfather, or an uncle? But then I hear only Nesto, telling me to wait one more moment, he’s going somewhere quiet. The other voices fade, and he says he’s taken the phone to his bedroom at the back of the house, which, no matter how many years he’s been away, has remained his room, as he left it, the same way we maintained Carlito’s room for him until Mami occupied it with her saints and crucifixes.

  “I hoped you’d call. How did you find your city?”

  “Not really mine anymore. How are things over there?”

  “You know. The same.”

  We are both quiet.

  “It’s not the same though. You’re married now.”

  For a moment, I think the line has gone dead. I hear nothing, not even his breath, until the line comes alive again with his voice.

  “No. It didn’t happen.”

  “Why not?”

  I imagine another case of postponed appointments, bureaucratic delays.

  “Let’s just say that plans have changed. But I can’t talk about it on the phone. ¿Me explico?”

  I know he means that over there you never know who is listening in on a call.

  “I’m sorry. I know how much you were hoping this would work out.”

  “It might still. It might not.”

  I don’t know how to respond so I just listen.

  “I wish you could see how things are here. I wish you could experience life as a Cuban. No, I take it
back,” he laughs. “Nobody deserves that.”

  He stops himself and I hear him take a deep breath.

  “I wish you could come, though. See my house. Meet my family. You would see that everything I’ve told you is true.”

  “I’ve always believed you.”

  “You can hear about it from me all day long, you can read about it in your magazines, watch it on TV Martí, but you won’t understand until you see it for yourself.”

  He pauses.

  “You could come here. You have the two passports. You could postpone your ticket and fly into and out of Havana from Colombia. You’d face no issues when you get back to the States.”

  “I’m supposed to go back home tomorrow.” But the word home feels odd leaving my lips and even stranger sitting heavy on the airwaves between us.

  “Reina, I’m inviting you. Come see my island. I would be so happy if you came.”

  Nesto has never asked me for anything. And until now, I’ve never felt there was anything I could give him.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  “Don’t think about it. Just come.”

  I tell myself, it’s not a big deal, simply going to visit a friend for a few days, but of course it’s more than that; it’s to carve out another space in whatever little time we may have left together, to meet him at his origin, the way I returned to Colombia to meet myself in mine.

  Now, to go to him in Havana seems like the only choice, continuing on the same path that brought me back to Cartagena:

  The only way to hold on.

  The only way to let go.

  Afew nights before we left for our separate journeys, Nesto and I went out to the beach and saw, on the path illuminated by the moon, the long tracks left by a turtle that came ashore to lay her eggs. We followed the lines until we found her nest far from the tide in a knoll at the foot of the dunes. Nesto marked the area with coconuts and seashells. There were times he and his family were forced to survive on turtle meat and now that he was no longer hungry, he said, he’d show his gratitude by looking after this turtle’s babies in her absence.

  In Florida I dream of Cartagena, but here, I dream I am lost among night waters trying to swim back to the cottage, to Nesto, gasping, my limbs fatigued. But then I feel myself buoyed from underneath by a giant loggerhead turtle who carries me on her back. I hold tight to her shell as she breaks through the current, and though I feel safe in her care, in my dream the moonless night is unending, and we never reach the shore.

  There are no direct flights from Cartagena de Indias to Havana. Less than a thousand miles separate the cities but, instead of heading north across the Caribbean, I’m on a plane heading south, over the rippling cordillera of the Andes into the city built on the savanna, Bogotá.

  I remember making the same stopover with my mother and brother. Mami always seemed nervous and said it was because she didn’t like being so far inland, the singsong accent of la costa with its swallowed syllables, the sweet air fresh with salt and sun, so unlike the guttural voices of the capital and the thin air high on the plateau, the atmospheric pressure change we felt upon touching ground that made our heartbeats jumpy—the same fluttering I feel in my chest now—and which, if we’d ever stayed longer than our layovers, would cause headaches and dizziness until the body and blood adjusted to the altitude and the soroche passed.

  The man sitting in the seat next to me, a guy in a wrinkled suit who so far hasn’t spoken a word, gathers his things to get off after we land.

  When he sees I haven’t budged from my seat by the window he turns to me.

  “This isn’t your stop too?”

  “I’m staying on until Havana.”

  “¿Y qué se te perdió por allá?”

  “I didn’t lose anything over there,” I say, smiling, because it’s true, I haven’t lost Nesto yet, “but you never know what I might find.”

  A short while after the first man leaves, another old man arrives in his place. He settles into his seat, pulls a worn prayer book from his bag, and sets it on his lap, gently caressing a small photograph between his fingers. It’s an image of the same young boy with a staff I saw on Nesto’s dashboard the first night I climbed into his truck under that full moon. The one I recognized that first night as El Santo Niño de Atocha, rescuer of victims of circumstance, safe keeper of travelers, but whom Nesto claimed as Elegguá, opener of paths, so living beings can accomplish their destiny.

  SIX

  I exit the José Martí airport terminal and make my way to the corridor designated for arrivals through a crowd of waiting families and friends. At first, it’s as if everyone has his eyes, his broad smile. But then I see a hand reaching above all the others. He pushes through the wall of shoulders and elbows toward me, his long hair pulled off his face, temples and collarbones shining with sweat, pulling me close to him.

  “I can’t believe it,” he says between embraces. “You’re really here.”

  As he pulls me out of the crowd, Nesto looks different to me. Something in his eyes. Or the way the sun here has turned his skin a deeper amber than our sun back in Florida. I can’t place it, but before I say anything about it, Nesto turns to me and touches my face.

  “You look different to me, Reina. Something happened to you in Cartagena.”

  “The only thing that happened is that nothing happened.”

  “Maybe that’s what you needed.”

  Nesto rented a car from a neighbor, a discontinued miniature Korean Daewoo Tico left behind by Soviets in the nineties. He drives among other cars, Fords, Chryslers, and Pontiacs, most from the middle of last century, down a long road lined with billboards of socialist slogans: ¡Más Socialismo! and ¡La RevolucIÓn Sigue Adelante! splattered under images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara—Nesto’s namesake—or Camilo Cienfuegos, and sometimes of the three men together.

  Entering the city through Avenida Salvador Allende, I see peeling building facades, sun-bleached the color of ash, broken balconies, boarded windows, crumbling columns—some structures already imploded with only posts of their original foundation remaining, no fresh paint to offset the decay. Nesto tells me this is what happens when there is no money for repair and you take everything away, leaving a city to defend itself against time, storms, and the salt of the sea.

  He turns onto narrower city streets in the direction of the hotel I’ve arranged. He’s invited me to stay with his family in Buenavista but I insist I don’t want to impose myself on his clan, show up as proof of his life on the other side of the Straits when he’s come to be with them, not play tour guide to me. Any time he has left over, we can spend together, but I don’t want to be a burden.

  “But you’ll at least come over and meet them.”

  To that, I agree.

  Nesto parks the car and comes along so I can check in at the hotel and unload my bags.

  Once in the hotel room, small with wooden-paneled walls and colonial furniture, Nesto says, “You know, it wasn’t so long ago that I wouldn’t have been able to walk into this hotel with you, or even walk on the street with you without getting stopped by police.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re foreign.”

  “How would they know?”

  “They know. They have a file on every person that enters the country. You just got here and I’m sure they’ve already got a file started on you.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Remember where you are, Reina. The archipelago has ears.”

  We leave the hotel, where Nesto eyes the employees, sure everyone is a chivato, an informer, and walk down to the Malecón, finding spots on the seawall under the last golden bits of daylight, the city at our backs.

  Below our feet, young boys splash in the balnearios where Nesto says he learned to swim, shallow pools carved out of coral and stone buffering the seawall from the whipping waves
of the open sea. There are no visible boats, there is nothing to indicate that anything exists beyond this island or that the sea ever ends.

  Nesto says the Malecón is a city unto itself. Around us, Cuban families and tourists stroll; vendors offer peanuts in paper cones, and raspados of red and blue sugared ice; clusters of teenagers pass glass bottles around, sipping rum or matarata, moonshine. There are pairs of embracing lovers, the sounds of laughter, conversation, the music of guitars and tambores and voices singing songs to which everyone seems to know the words.

  I’ve been waiting for him to explain. I don’t want to probe, but I can’t hold back the question I’ve been carrying with me from Cartagena.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened with the marriage plans?”

  “It’s like you said. Nothing happened and everything happened.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s Yanai. She doesn’t want to go.”

  “I thought the plan was her idea too.”

  “It was. But she changed her mind.”

  “I don’t understand. All this time I thought she was trying to leave. The marriage to the German. The plan to marry you again.”

  Nesto takes a deep breath, eyes fixed on the ocean.

  “It’s not that simple, Reina. I had chances to leave this island before I finally took the step. In the nineties there was the Maleconazo right along this wall down by the port. There were boat hijackings and people protested so much the government said anyone who wanted to leave could leave and they wouldn’t put you in jail for trying like they usually do. I was nineteen or so. Sandro wasn’t yet born. I was young enough that I could have started a life somewhere else. It was the time to leave. But I was too scared. The boats were getting intercepted on the water by the Americans and the people on them sent to camps in Guantánamo or Panama. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk leaving just to end up in an army prison. I finally understood what my mother always told me. It’s hard to leave, to be the one to rip apart your family. So hard. No matter how much you hate where you are, no matter how much you curse your government or desire something better, leaving your home, your country, is like tearing off your own flesh.”