The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  “I’ve known Nesto, since he was a young boy. His grandmother used to bring him to me because of his nightmares. Now you, mi niña, it’s your turn.”

  I begin by telling her the dreams of the past, of Cartagena until I returned, of my father, my brother, babies going over the bridge, though I don’t tell her the reason for these dreams, how they come from real memories. Then I tell her of my dreams here in Cuba, unlike any I’ve had before. The burning forest that looked so similar to the one I visited yesterday. And the most recent dream: my body in the sand, my figure form filled with blood and water.

  She watches me as I speak though I have the impression she’s not really listening, but reading into me a different way.

  Once I’m done talking she says sternly, without a trace of speculation, “You have been haunted by shame. You have been shackled. You have known violence and you have committed violence unto yourself. You must try to understand why you have placed yourself in a prison. To dream of fire is an indicator of change. You will have to let go of all that came before. You will feel an end to great pain, but only after trials of despair. To dream of sand, water, and blood shows that you feel impermanence, but it’s the opposite; something in you is taking root. Listen to the voice of your instincts. The spirits are guiding you.”

  She pulls back and eyes me with sudden suspicion.

  “You don’t believe in our santos or even the ones you were raised with.”

  I shake my head.

  “But you are a daughter of Yemayá. You must know this. She claimed you long before you were born. You must feel it. You watch the moon. You follow its glow. She is the universal mother. You are in her special favor. Anything you ask of her, she will give you.”

  She calls to Nesto who comes in from the patio and stands at her side.

  “Nesto, take her to see Yemayá. She will bring peace to her dreams.”

  She takes Nesto’s hand, enormous next to hers, and he lowers himself onto one knee at her feet.

  “And you, have patience, my dear boy. The Great One hears you. In time, you will have all that you want.”

  “Gracias, Zoraida.” Nesto leans over and kisses the top of her hand.

  He tries to give her some money but she refuses it, pushing his hand away. He walks to the altar of Santa Barbara and places the bills under the apple.

  “For your santa, then,” he says, and she doesn’t protest.

  Nesto says he wants to show me the view before we leave Zoraida’s place and leads me out to the azotea, all of Havana spread out before us in concrete cubes, homes upon homes, water tanks, electrical chords, antennas, barking dogs, and pigeon coops on nearly every rooftop.

  I feel heat pressing against my chest and become breathless again. I’ve felt nauseated all morning but haven’t said so because I don’t want Nesto to think it’s caused by his mother’s cooking. I could hardly eat my breakfast at the hotel. I feel my stomach cramping, my body both burning and suddenly chilled.

  “It’s so hot,” I tell Nesto, shielding my eyes from the sun as he points to where the Malecón begins and to the fortress of La Cabaña across the harbor.

  Everything becomes dark but I feel his hands on me, hear him say my name. Then he’s above me and I’m not standing on the azotea looking over the city, but lying on the dusty concrete rooftop with Nesto fanning my face with his shirt, which he’s taken off, Zoraida slowly coming toward us through her doorway, one hand on a cane, the other carrying a glass of juice. He helps me prop myself on my elbows, resting my head against his knees, taking the juice from Zoraida, holding the glass to my lips until I taste mango.

  “She’s more overheated than a hot dog!” Zoraida says, and returns a moment later with a wet cloth, handing it to Nesto, who slips it onto my forehead. “What have you done to this poor child? Can’t you see she’s not used to our heat?”

  I sit up but my head feels heavy and I have to lie back down for another moment until Nesto helps me up and toward the door. I thank Zoraida, though I’m almost too dazed to speak.

  “Take her straight to the ocean,” she tells Nesto. “Make sure she covers her whole head with water.”

  When he sees me hesitate to go down the first flight of stairs, cautious with my footing so I won’t lose my balance, Nesto takes my arm, ducks his head into my chest and throws me over his shoulder, carrying me all the way down to the street where the boys wait beside the car for Nesto to pay them their chavitos.

  We head east, outside the city perimeter toward the beaches. I close my eyes as Nesto drives, feel air rush past my face through the open window, the smell of gasoline and exhaust giving way to the aroma of the sea and greenery of the city outskirts.

  I think of the last time I fainted, as a teenager when Universo took me to San Basilio de Palenque because he was obsessed with Benkos Biohó, the cimarron king who founded the refuge for runaway slaves like him high in the hills, surrounded by jungle, the only community in the Americas to resist colonization. We had to hitchhike out of Cartagena and caught a ride with a truck driver on his way to Mompox. He left us at the bottom of the muddy trail and we hiked through thick humidity until we came to the dusty clearing of the village plaza. Universo told me the Palenqueros were known for being reclusive, untrusting of outsiders, and reluctant to come down from their hill.

  An old man came out to meet us by the road, asking what we were doing there.

  “We came to see that,” Universo said, pointing to the statue of Benkos in the center of the plaza, an iron man with arms extended, broken chains hanging from his wrists.

  We walked over to the statue, sweat slick down my back and my legs, sun reflecting on the white dust at our feet.

  I remember telling Universo, “This must be the hottest place on earth,” and then I was on the ground.

  When I came to, Universo and the old man had dragged me into a patch of shade by the church, laying me on some grass. I felt my skull crushing, heard the man shouting in Palenquero until a young boy appeared with a gallon of water that they poured over me.

  “This girl doesn’t belong up here in the hills,” the old man told Universo. “She belongs at sea level. Take her back to the water.”

  Nesto pulls off the highway down a winding road to Bacuranao until we are at an arc of beach, sand fine as flour, water turquoise and transparent.

  “When I see this beauty, I think, How could I have ever left my homeland?” Nesto says. “Then I go back to the city, see the conditions in which the people live, and I think, How could I have stayed as long as I did?”

  The beach is desolate except for a lone horse tied by a long rope in the shade of a coconut palm.

  We walk to the water and Nesto reaches for me to turn my body, reminding me to always approach Yemayá with humility, from the side, never head-on.

  I go into the water as far as my thighs, gathering my dress so it won’t get wet. Nesto doesn’t care, though, and goes in with his jeans on, dunking under the surf, and holds me so that I can dip my head under the water too, feel the cool foam run down my neck and chest.

  We find a coconut palm for ourselves and lie on the sand, salt and water hardening onto our skin, my head cushioned on Nesto’s chest and his in the pillow of his arms.

  I’m tired, I tell him, so tired, and let myself close my eyes for a little while to sleep.

  When we leave the beach, Nesto drives from Bacuranao on the Vía Blanca through the clapboard houses, cuarterías, concrete cube apartments, and colonial buildings of Guanabacoa to neighboring Regla until we come to the tip of the peninsula facing Havana across the bay, at the gates of a white church on the bluff. There is no service happening but the church is busy with people coming in and out, scattered in pews facing the altar where a black Virgin holds in her arms a tiny white baby Jesus.

  Nesto leads me to an altar on the side of the church where believers have placed dozens of blue, wh
ite, and violet flowers, girasoles, candles, and candies, kneeling before the statue of the Virgen de Regla in prayer. One woman carries a baby dressed in blue and white, presenting her child to the statue, whispering the name of Yemayá, then leaning forward to kiss the baby’s cheek.

  Nesto takes a turn kneeling before the altar and I kneel beside him. I don’t know what he’s praying for but I hope his prayers are heard. I hope everything he and Zoraida say is true, that our desires echo through the heavens and that faith will bring them to completion. I close my eyes, feeling the petitions of all those around me.

  “Yemayá, estoy aquí,” a voice says from behind me.

  And beside me, Nesto, “Yemayá awoyó, awoyó Yemayá.”

  Outside the church, a few Santeras sit on the wall lining the harbor road beside improvised altars of dolls surrounded by flowers, seashells, paintings on wood of a tongue with a dagger piercing it, arranged on handkerchiefs and blankets at their sides, calling to passersby, offering clairvoyance and blessings.

  “Oye, muchacho,” one calls to Nesto. “Come let me tell you about your future.”

  Nesto ignores her and I follow him to the water’s edge where passengers of a ferry from across the harbor disembark, and we sit together on a flattened piece of stone.

  “You don’t want to have your fortune told?” I ask him.

  “Not here. Not like this.”

  “When is the last time someone read the shells for you?”

  “Before I left for Mexico.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  He shakes his head. “It wasn’t good.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A few days before I was supposed to leave, somebody left a dead chicken at my mother’s door. Its chest was pinned with a paper with my name written on it. It made me nervous because nobody knew I was planning to defect outside of my family.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I called a friend, a Santero, to take it away. He buried it somewhere so nobody would be tempted to cook it. They say the worst maleficio is the one you eat. But that friend told me to go to see an iyalocha to find out what was going on.”

  “Did you go?”

  “Yes. And the iyalocha told me someone from my past, maybe a jealous or bitter ex-lover, did a trabajo on me. She said this person was in communion with Paleros because the hechizo was so strong it couldn’t be broken no matter how many limpiezas or polvos she mixed for me. She said the purpose of the spell was so that I would never find peace in my life. Not with my family and not even within my heart. She warned me not to leave the country under those conditions. She said I would never find the better life I was seeking. She said the only way to undo this trabajo was to become full Santo, but not just anywhere. She said I had to go to Santa Clara because it’s in a sacred place at the center of the country, the crossroads of aché and benevolent energies. But it would have cost me thousands. Money I didn’t have then, money I don’t have now. And if I did, it would be money better spent on my family and my children.”

  “Do you believe her about the trabajo?”

  “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t.”

  I tell him how the blue-haired bruja in Miami told me that the only way to break the curses I’ve inherited was through some cleansing ritual that involved bathing in honey, milk, oils, and rose petals, surrounded by seven seven-day candles every night for a week. At the end of the week she said I would sleep as if I’d returned to the womb and would be free of all the dark powers plaguing me.

  “She wanted to charge me three thousand dollars. She even said I could pay in installments.”

  “Did you consider it?”

  “No. I was taking care of Carlito in those days. Any extra money I had went only to him.”

  “The iyalocha told me I would always be alone.”

  “The bruja told me that too.”

  “Do you think it’s true we’re both doomed to solitude?”

  “If I believed that, I wouldn’t be here with you.”

  I often think, if only Carlito had lived another three months, he and Nesto could have met each other.

  But then, if Carlito had lived, and everything in our lives hadn’t gone so wrong, neither Nesto nor I would have ever found our way down to those lonely islands, into each other’s lives.

  I feel tethered to Nesto in a way I’ve never felt with anybody else.

  Like family but not family because we weren’t tossed to the tides of life together but instead found each other, adrift.

  “I need something to change,” Nesto says, eyes on the Havana skyline across the water, pale and blurry in the afternoon haze. “When I was young and I got so frustrated I punched walls, cursed everything about this country, locked myself in my room for days without speaking to a soul, my grandmother would tell me, ‘Cálmate, mi’jo. Not even sadness is a permanent condition.’ She thought she would be alive to see the end of the regime, but of course, she was wrong. Those men are immortal.”

  “Nobody can live forever.”

  “The thing is, they can all die and it still won’t matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because where there is a dead king, there is already a crowned prince.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re not looking at the relics of a revolution anymore, we’re looking at the beginning of a dynasty.”

  It’s a half-moon night, a breeze from the trade winds ruffles against our skins. On my last night in Havana Nesto and I sit together on the same stretch of the Malecón that he took me to on my first night. He’s quiet beside me, until we part so that he can go back to Buenavista, see his children for dinner again, and for one last time before returning to Florida, try to reason with Yanai, convince her to change her mind so they can carry out their plan to marry again and get her and their children out of here.

  Later, I dream of my brother in prison.

  I confuse stories he told me when he was still alive about how the guards would often abuse inmates, especially the mentally ill ones. He’d learn about these accounts when he crossed ways with them in the infirmary or hospital, bruises on their faces, gashes on their heads. He’d hear about it from other inmates on the prison “radio,” echoes down the death row corridor between security checks, how guards withheld toilet paper and meals while writing in their reports that those prisoners refused them, taunting the most vulnerable ones until they banged their heads against the walls, tied them to their beds or cuffed them to their toilets for days, then punished them for soiling themselves by sending them to the hole.

  These were guys, Carlito said, who you couldn’t imagine being fit for trial, men who could barely speak full sentences, who cried in anguish at the faces of demons they saw within the shadowed corners of their cells, burrowed in the crevices of the walls; men who ended up in prison when they should have been in a psychiatric hospital somewhere. The prisoners could do nothing but endure the mistreatment because the guards would only deny their actions, lying and covering for each other with their own kind of brotherhood loyalties.

  I told all this to Dr. Joe once, everything Carlito had described, and was surprised when Dr. Joe didn’t even argue or try to convince me it was an exaggeration.

  “And you just let this go on?” I’d said.

  “I’m only one man, Reina. Prison is too big a system.”

  “Then you’re complicit. And you’re as bad as the rest of them.”

  In my dream, it’s Carlito who is being tormented, starved so that his body looks as dry and shriveled as the bark of a tree.

  He cries, screaming for our mother, for me, to come save him, while a faceless guard laughs, mocking him. He covers Carlito’s head with the sheet of his bed so that my brother can barely breathe and, in my sleep, I feel myself suffocating, slapping at my own face to tear the cloth off my mouth. I see the guard grab C
arlito by the neck, thrust his face in the toilet, leave it there until water fills his nostrils and Carlito is certain he is drowning.

  He can’t cry anymore. No sound comes from his throat, but I feel him scream from within, calling for Mami, calling for me.

  In the morning, Nesto meets me at the hotel, his eyes ringed with fatigue, and I know he hasn’t slept. He will take me to the airport though he won’t leave on his flight to Miami until tonight.

  “She said she’ll think about it,” he tells me, once we are in the car, yet another borrowed Lada, on our way to the airport. “I asked her how much more time she needs. It’s been years already. By the time she’s done thinking, the kids will be grown and have their own children to struggle to feed or Sandro will have already thrown himself to the sharks to bring himself over. I know she has a new boyfriend. My sister told me he works in the kitchen of a paladar. But Yanai says she’s not staying for him. She says this is her country and it breaks her heart to think of leaving it. She blames me. She says I should never have left. She says, ‘If you love your children as much as you say, why don’t you come back?’”

  “Do you ever think about doing that? Of moving back instead of trying to bring them over?”

  “Every day. Even my mother tells me maybe Yanai is right, and the children are better off here. They won’t know the pain of leaving their country. They know only the pain of being left behind. She says to let it be, to let time take care of everything. But just look around this island. Anyone can see time is our enemy. We are already four generations deep into this mierdero of a revolution. I was born into it. I didn’t have a choice. But am I supposed to surrender my children and all my descendants too?”

  We slow at an intersection and Nesto turns to face me.

  “This island causes blindness. I know because I was blind for a long time too. But I can’t let things just be. I have to keep trying.”

  At the airport, we say good-bye though it’s only for a matter of hours because we will meet tonight back at the Miami airport, after my detour through Colombia and his short flight from Havana, and take the bus together back to the cottage in the Keys.