“This is it,” Nesto says. “This is Buenavista.”
We’re not far from the famous Tropicana, where Yutong buses drop hundreds of tourists each evening for a show, or even from the neighborhood where El Comandante is said to live beyond gates in a no-fly zone. But Buenavista is one of the forgotten pockets of the city, Nesto tells me; some sections didn’t even have electricity until a year or two ago.
People wave to him as he rolls the car slowly down the broken road, until he pulls over, parks, and points to a house with metal bars over the front door and windows that reminds me of the house I grew up in.
“This is my home.”
Nesto opens the front door for me and we stand in the entryway as he calls to his mother until she comes down a dark hall toward us. She looks much older than my own mother, more like the sweet abuelitas of kids I knew from our neighborhood in Miami, grandmothers who lit up when their grandchildren came around, so different from my grandmother, who, in spite of her affection for me, often snarled that it was too bad I had the misfortune of being born my mother’s daughter.
Nesto greets his mother with a kiss, then pulls back to introduce me to her.
“This is Reina, Mamá.”
“Reina,” she pulls me to her chest with an embrace, then holds me by my shoulders to get a better look at me as if I’m a long-lost relative and not a total stranger. It’s a warmth I’m not used to. “Welcome, welcome. Estás en tu casa.”
I see Nesto’s smoky eyes in his mother’s. She’s dark as melao de caña like he is, though her face is dotted with freckles. She ushers me into a sitting area with a door open to the patio while Nesto goes out to the car to bring in the food we bought for dinner. I look out to the patio and see the prized trees Nesto has told me about, which fed his family through their toughest times. Beneath the mango tree, the long-haired white cat sleeps: Blancanieves, who Nesto told me he rescued from a dumpster years ago, before someone else could trap her to use or sell for brujería.
This is the house Nesto was brought to as a newborn, the long-awaited son; the space in which he’d grown up as a fatherless boy, through hungry years when he had to find a way to help feed his family, the home of the young man who left when recruited for the military; the house he returned to after marrying and divorcing the mother of his children, the house he’d remained in until he gathered the courage to leave that final time, crossing the ocean to the other shore where he eventually met me.
I see pieces of his former life everywhere, relics of stories he’s told me back in our new life together in Florida. Opposite the sofa where I sit is the fish tank Nesto built into the wall as a teenager from glass panels of abandoned windowpanes and concrete he mixed himself, full of tropical fish swimming over pieces of coral and painted rocks; the shelves Nesto told me he built from a disassembled table to hold his mother’s ceramic figurines and a few pieces of bone china, the only things she had of value, inherited from her mother; other things Nesto made for her when there was no money to buy gifts: a box made of seashells gathered in Isla de la Juventud, a rose carved out of the wood of a fallen chaca tree with his mother’s name, Rosa María, inscribed at the base.
On the wall above the chair where his mother sits facing me, three pictures hang: a royal portrait of the king and queen of Spain beside one of a young Fidel in a military cap; on his other side, a depiction of the island’s patron saint, la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the other face of the orisha Ochún.
I notice on the table next to her armchair a framed photograph of Nesto with his children standing by a small roller coaster, the same photo he has taped to a wall in his room at the motel on Crescent Key, which now feels so far away along with the cottage and the life we share on those small distant islands.
Nesto arrives at my side, sits beside me on the sofa, tells his mother all the places we went to get the food for tonight’s dinner.
“Can you believe it?” his mother says to me. “The things we have to do in order to put a decent meal together in this country?”
I nod, though I’m uncertain of what to say because Nesto has always told me that despite her disappointments, having given her life and her faith to a revolution that gave so little in return, she still feels a conflicted loyalty to it.
Nesto tells his mother we are going to go to Yanai’s house to collect the children and bring them back here while she prepares dinner. By the time we return, he says, the others—his stepfather, sisters, nieces, and aunts—should be back too.
We walk along the broken road. Every now and then we’re interrupted by people calling to Nesto, saying they’re glad to see him back in Buenavista, and he pauses to wave back, telling them yes, it’s good to be home.
“Nesto,” I begin when we’re a few blocks along. “What have you told your children about me?”
“That you’re important to me.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”
“When my brother and I were kids, we hated when our mother brought somebody new to the house. She’d send us to the kitchen to get the guy a beer and we’d spit in it before we brought it back to him. Then we’d watch him drink it and try not to laugh.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I guess we were afraid of someone taking her away from us.”
“Didn’t you want a father?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you want her to find happiness with someone?”
“I didn’t understand why she couldn’t be happy with just my brother and me.”
“What do you want me to tell my kids about you then?”
“Tell them I’m nobody special.”
“I’m not going to lie to them, Reina.” He points to a house a few feet away with a wide stone terrace behind a high metal fence. “That’s the house.”
A body rushes Nesto from behind and he reaches around him, laughing, knowing his son’s weight and touch on him, pulling Sandro into his arms. He’s as tall as his father and already growing out of his chamaco body with new muscles. He’s in his blue school uniform, carrying a nylon book bag I remember Nesto buying for him around Christmas. They hug and wrestle for a moment until Nesto breaks up the laughter and motions to me.
“Sandro, this is Reina. My friend from La Yunay. She’s eating with us tonight.”
Sandro says hello and kisses me on the cheek. In his face, I see their bloodline, his grandmother’s eyes, his father’s grin, canela-skinned, a blend of his parents on the spectrum of mestizaje.
“Go get your sister,” Nesto tells him, and Sandro disappears through the gate, leaving us on the sidewalk outside the house.
“You used to live here,” I say, taking in the facade, trying to picture Nesto living within its walls with his wife and family.
“Yes, for many years. You see that terrace? I built it myself. It was a narrow wooden thing before. I brought each one of those stones and laid them with my own hands. I built the columns for the roof canopy, and I built that front door after a cyclone blew out the old one. And this fence?” He fingers the metal wiring. “I put it up too.”
“You’re good with fences.” I slide my hands over the rusty links, remembering how we freed the dolphin together, on a night that already feels so long ago. “Putting them up, taking them down.”
I look back up to the house and notice a slim figure in the front window watching us. She leans on the edge of the window frame, arms limp at her sides, dark hair pulled tight off her pale face.
Nesto notices her too and gives a small wave.
“That’s Yanai. She knows about you too.”
She raises her palm slightly, gives a faint wave, then leaves the window and our sight.
Their daughter is smaller than I expected, even from older pictures. She runs to Nesto when she steps out of the house and sees him waiting for her outside the g
ate, swings her legs when he pulls her off the ground into the air. She’s changed out of her school uniform into a dress that Nesto sent her from Florida and shows it off proudly, twirling at his feet. Her hair is braided, similar to the way my mother used to braid mine every morning before school, gently dividing my hair with the comb, in a way that I loved, even if later other girls would pull on those braids. I can’t help thinking of my mother now and what she would say if she knew where I was, with Nesto at the foot of his ex-wife’s door. She would remind me there is no stupider woman than one who takes up with a man between lives.
“Look, Cami,” Nesto says to his daughter. “This is my friend Reina.”
She stands behind him, covering her face with a flap of her father’s shirt.
“Hi, Camila,” I tell her. “You’re even prettier than your papi told me.”
“Say thank you.” Nesto nudges her, and she mumbles, clutching her father’s waist.
We walk back to Nesto’s mother’s house. Camila drops her father’s hand to walk ahead with her brother, his arm protectively draped over her shoulders. She leans into him and he tilts his head toward hers as if they’re sharing secrets.
I remember how Carlito and I used to walk together the same way, how I felt when I was by his side that nobody in the world could hurt me.
I would give anything to feel that way again.
Nesto says there’s no way the rest of his family will miss dinner tonight, not because a guest is coming but because they’ve all heard he was bringing home steak from the broker. As we wait for his mother to prepare the food we brought home into a meal for twelve, the others begin to arrive: his stepfather, Juan Mario, who was out having his bifocals repaired, a small husk of a man with a hollowed face, trails of pigmentless patches up his arms and across his neck including one on his shin he swears is the exact shape of Cuba; then Nesto’s two older sisters, Bruna and Galina, women with thick bodies and tired faces who bear little resemblance to him, probably because they have different fathers; Bruna’s daughter, Clarilu, nineteen, with her boyfriend, Yordan, and her baby daughter, Lili, in her arms; and Galina’s daughter, Cassandra, twenty-two and wearing an engagement ring Nesto tells me was given to her by a British guy she hasn’t heard from in a year.
We’re crammed into the living room, spilling onto the patio, Nesto’s sisters and Yordan leaning on the walls because there are not enough chairs to go around. Nesto tells them I used to paint nails and Cassandra rushes off and returns with a bottle of polish—a gift from Nesto—and asks if I’ll paint hers for her.
“Of course,” I say, and when I’m through, Clarilu and then Nesto’s sisters each ask for a turn. Nesto pushes his daughter forward.
“What about you, Cami? Do you want Reina to paint your nails?”
She clenches her fists and hides her hands behind her back, shaking her head. Nesto smiles at her and then at me. He looks happy, though it’s a kind of happiness different from the one he shares with me: joy with confianza, among the people who know him best. The room is small and hot, the metal fan in the corner barely moving the air, but I envy this family’s closeness and think of how vacant my childhood home felt in comparison.
Nesto’s mother has taken the steaks we brought, sliced them down, and added them into a stew with rice, potatoes, and fried eggs. She arranges the food on a table near the kitchen and we eat with plates on our laps, Nesto and me on a corner of the sofa with his children on his other side. Nesto’s sisters ask me about life in Miami, if it’s as beautiful as they see on the telenovelas they catch from their neighbor’s illegal satellite dish. Nesto’s stepfather, after hearing I arrived from Colombia, asks if it’s true that all of Venezuela’s shortages are to be blamed on their neighbor because that’s what the Cuban news reports.
“I can’t say for sure,” I tell him, “but I really don’t think so.”
Through it all, I watch Nesto’s children. They eat quietly, his daughter’s head resting on her father’s thick arm. I remember being her age and trying to claim ownership of my mother every time she brought a new man home to meet us. I would cling to her, wedge myself onto her lap until she pushed me away or told Carlito to take me out to play. I remember the men I saw as intruders, invaders of our territory. Carlito was never as threatened or bothered, with an innate awareness that each man was just passing through.
There is dessert of flan and by the time each of Nesto’s family members has been served, there is none left. They give me the biggest piece and I see Nesto’s daughter eye me with envy. I offer to share with her but she shakes her head, hiding again behind her father, tugging his shoulder down to her level.
I hear her whisper into his ear, “Papi, will we ever see her again?”
“Yes, mi amor. She’s a very good friend of ours.”
“Will she come back with you when you come back?”
He tries to distract her, offering her what’s left of his own slice of flan, but she’s undeterred and now asks her father when his next visit will be, and makes him promise to return before her next birthday because her mother has promised to throw her a big party.
After dinner, Nesto walks his children home and I stay behind, offering to help his mother and sisters clean the plates, put away what little food is left, but they don’t let me and leave me to wait for Nesto in the living room as his stepfather watches a news program describing Venezuela as the role model for the future of the Americas.
When Nesto returns, he tells me to follow him down a narrow hall past the kitchen and a row of small bedrooms, to a cave-like room at the back of the house, the bulk of the floor taken up by a mattress and a small stereo system on a metal stand; the only window covered by a thin sheet to block out light.
On the wall, a solitary print of Fidel hangs upside down.
“This is your room?”
“What’s left of it. I sold almost everything I had before I went to Mexico.”
We stand quietly as I look around. In the distance, the sound of somebody striking together a pair of palitos, like the opening pulses of a guaguancó. I hesitate to touch Nesto in his house, afraid he doesn’t belong to me here, and maybe not at all anymore.
I wonder how it would have felt if I’d ever had the chance to stand with him within the walls of what had been my room in the old house in Miami, or in the first room I ever lived in, the one I just left behind in Cartagena. I think I would never have felt more naked.
I touch his hand, as if that is all that’s permitted. He takes hold of my fingers and leads me down to the mattress and we rest facing each other as I try to picture the years and nights he spent on this very bed, more than thirty summers, winters, and springs, waiting, waiting, waiting, and how I slept on a similar bed on the floor across the ocean, and though I didn’t always know for what, I was waiting too.
In my dream, I lie on a crest of beach where sand meets water, my body pressing deep, carving its form into the earth; when I stand and look down, I see my silhouette has hardened despite the current rushing over it, filling the space where my body rested until the water recedes and my form in the sand fills with blood; water washes over it again, and with each wave, an exchange of blood and tide.
I tell Nesto about my dreams when he calls me at the hotel in the morning, how they’ve changed since I arrived in Cuba.
“I’m going to take you somewhere so you can make sense of them,” he tells me.
“No brujas, please.”
“She’s no bruja. She’s the best reader of dreams in Havana.”
The morning sun is hot, the air heavy with moisture. Nesto picks me up in a 1952 Chevrolet, borrowed from a cousin. He drives through Centro Habana, down cracked roads, stray dogs scampering to avoid being kicked or chased off; men hunched over popped-open car hoods trying to diagnose the day’s malfunction; buckets and baskets full of fruit or food being pulled from the street up to balconies full of laundry lin
es; old men sitting around improvised tables and overturned crates playing dominó; ladies young and old, some with babies in their arms, lingering in windows and doorways mirando y dejando, watching the world go by.
We come to the enclave of Cayo Hueso, webbed with wires and antennas, where Nesto parks on the corner of a tight street, asking a group of shirtless boys kicking a ball around to watch the car so it’s not stripped of any parts while we’re gone.
He calls up to a building, “Zoraida! Zoraida!” his voice filling the small avenue.
A woman pokes her head out of a third-floor window, turns her face upward to yell the same name too. Finally, on the sixth floor, another head emerges from some curtains. A man calls down to Nesto to catch, and tosses a key down to the street for him. Nesto opens the building door to a foyer wall painted over with a portrait of a dreamy-faced young Che, and we start the long walk up several flights of broken stairs, sweat gathering in the crevices of my collarbone and dripping down my spine. I stop and lean on the banister to catch my breath while Nesto flies past me, teasing that I have no stamina, until we both arrive at the top floor, which opens into a small cinder block single-room apartment on the building’s roof.
Zoraida sits in a wooden chair at the center beside an altar to Santa Barbara—Changó—with her long sword watching over a glass of white wine and a red apple. Zoraida is a small woman, her head wrapped in a ruby scarf, wearing a long white dress that reaches the floor. The door behind her opens to a concrete garden. Nesto greets her, bowing to her slightly, and introduces me; and Zoraida, who Nesto says is at least one hundred years old though nobody knows for sure but she looks about seventy, waves me over to her, takes my hand in hers, rubs it gently with her thumbs, and says, “So you are the one having trouble with your dreams.”
She turns to Nesto. “You leave us alone. Go outside. Wait in the shade until I call you.”
Nesto obeys and I see him settle onto a metal chair out on the azotea while Zoraida tells me to sit on the stool close to her.
The Veins of the Ocean Page 28
