The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

  How could she say that, I’d screamed at her, when the same people, all those Judases who now called my brother a monster, had once called him “the miracle baby” because God had chosen to save him from the hands of his own murderous father, sending that angel Marielito into the water after him. It was a proper divine intervention, there was no doubt, and the baby, they’d said back then, would grow up to do great things.

  “We were wrong,” she said. “Y fíjate que the Bible is full of bad children born to nice parents. Look at Cain and all of Joseph’s brothers, los desgraciados.”

  “He’s your son, not some cuento. And if you want to talk about the Bible, it also says, ‘Remember those in prison, as though in prison with them.’”

  I learned that much in our Youth Group scripture study, but Mami didn’t want to hear it.

  “How can you turn your back on him? Where’s your compassion?”

  “I didn’t have it for your father after he did what he did, and I don’t have it for your brother after what he has done.”

  I told her I had faith in Carlito even if she didn’t. I would not abandon him but remain with him through his darkest periods, be there waiting for him when he was finally redeemed. I didn’t know how it would happen. But I was hopeful it would.

  I didn’t talk to her for weeks. She didn’t care that I was furious at her, that in speaking of my brother that way, she was also breaking my heart. She didn’t try to soften me up or reason with me. She only stuck to her position that we shouldn’t let ourselves be held hostage by the actions of yet another madman.

  “Ay, Reina. No es fácil,” is all Nesto says, as if we’re still just talking about fish eyes or a slow day at work.

  “You’re not going to ask me why he did it?”

  “Only he could know that.”

  “They were going to execute him.”

  “They execute people in this country?”

  I nod. “All the time.”

  “How do they do it?

  “Injection. Or the electric chair. They give you a choice. But everyone picks injection since one guy they electrocuted caught on fire and flames started coming out of his head. That’s why my brother hanged himself.”

  I’ve always believed it was to avoid his own murder, to deny the state the satisfaction of killing him, an act of rebellion, to at least keep the black-hooded executioner from getting paid his hundred and fifty bucks for putting Carlito to death.

  It never occurred to me until now, hearing myself say so to Nesto, that my brother’s suicide maybe had something to do with his conscience, with guilt, with surrender.

  Nesto watches me. I still can’t meet his eyes. After a few moments, he slips the key back into the ignition and we are on our way, under the last threads of daylight, moving toward Hammerhead.

  I don’t know what I hoped for from this conversation. Maybe I wanted to confess, to testify. Maybe I wanted the chance to share my whole history, even if in fragments, the way Nesto has offered me pieces of his.

  I thought I could shake these shadows when I moved away, skin my old life from this new one as swiftly and bloodlessly as the fisherman at the marina did when gutting our fish for dinner. But if Nesto is to know me at all, he has to know I am my brother’s crime. I am that baby’s murder.

  When Nesto pulls into the path to the Hammerhead estate, careful to park his truck on the side driveway Mrs. Hartley prefers the service vehicles use, I tell him how I visited Carlito at the prison every weekend for the seven years that he was there.

  He doesn’t say anything, but later, after he’s grilled our dinner and we’re sitting on the floor across the coffee table from each other, an unopened bottle of wine between us, the bonito devoured down to the last tiny thin bones the fisherman let break off the spine, Nesto tells me he understands why I was so loyal to my brother.

  “But the thing about loyalty,” he says, “is that it always has a cost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For example, I am here with you in your home eating this nice fish we bought together, but I can’t look at it without thinking of the money we spent on it, knowing this is money that would have fed my family for one week. I can’t eat a meal without thinking of the food I’ve taken out of my children’s mouths. I can’t spend a dollar without calculating the pesos it would put in my mother’s hands. I can’t eat a piece of beef without remembering it’s something my family hasn’t tasted in years, since I was last able to pay a beef broker for a steak he would smuggle from the government slaughterhouses in a briefcase all the way to Havana. Every time my stomach fills, I only remember the emptiness I felt all those years, and I know, if not for the money I’m able to send them from here, they would still be feeling it.

  “That’s one of the reasons I left Miami,” he goes on. “There, people told me I was lucky I made it to the other side and this was my chance to start a new life, borrón y cuenta nueva. I could find a new woman to marry and have a new family. But I can’t start a new life when my life is still back there. I didn’t want to leave. Everybody thinks everybody wants to leave—but who would want to leave their home, their family, everything they love? We leave because we have to. I left because there came a point when I had no choice. They depended on me, and with my arrests, not being able to make my money on the side, I was failing them. So I am here. Not because I was looking for an adventure or because I had dreams of becoming a rich man in this country. I came for them. So they can live better. Only for them.”

  I don’t know what to say so I stay quiet, my eyes on him.

  “I can understand why you were that way when your brother was alive, Reina, living half a life out in the world, free, and half a life locked in that prison with him. This is what family does. What love does. It chains us together.”

  Nesto knows plenty of people in Crescent Key and the neighboring islands. He’s been here for three years already and everywhere he goes, someone gives him at least a nod or a wave. Sometimes he gets pulled over for a handshake and some banter, and his English is pretty good—accent-heavy but fluid—since one of the benefits he received upon arriving in the United States as part of the Cuban Adjustment Act was free English courses at the local community college. Even Mrs. Hartley smiled big when she saw him pull into the driveway the first time, then turned her grin on me when she realized he was there to see me. Since I moved in, we hardly ever cross paths. I slip my rent checks under her front door on the first of each month, and the only regular evidence of her is the land crabs crushed by her car on her end of the driveway.

  Nesto also has a few friends from Cuba that we sometimes run into who turned up in the Keys for the same reasons he did, that gravitational pull back to native waters. Guys from his Malecón days with whom he swam and fished, including Lolo, who grew up around the corner from him in Buenavista and whose father, a former navy diver, taught scuba diving out in Playa Baracoa and let Nesto take his course under a fake tourist name since it was illegal for Cubans to dive if not for military purposes.

  Lolo defected from Cuba by way of the Dominican Republic ten years ago; bald-headed and square-chested, he now runs his own dive shop in Key Largo. At least once a weekend, and sometimes during the week, when work is slow, Nesto will go out with Lolo on his boat, not even to fish but to throw himself into the ocean, hold his breath, and go as deep as he can, something he couldn’t do back home without watching his back for police. Sometimes they go after sunset and I asked him once why he bothers swimming in darkness.

  “I go to see,” he said.

  “What can you see at night?” Even with flashlights and boat lights it seemed like something better saved for daylight.

  “You don’t see only with your eyes,” he told me, like it was the most obvious thing. “You see with your whole being. One day I’ll take you and you’ll understand.”

  I kept quiet because I didn’t want him to kno
w that the idea of being out in the middle of the ocean scared me. It was one thing to wade out to our waists in the waters off the Hammerhead beach under the moonlight where we could still feel the sand under our feet and I could run to shore if I felt some creature rush against my calves, and something else to plunge into the black ocean where, should anything happen, nobody could even hear you scream.

  I’m with Nesto when Lolo calls to invite him to his place up in Key Largo for a Nochebuena party. We’re at the supermarket in Marathon buying some food for our own Christmas Eve dinner at my place, and Nesto wanders down the aisle away from me, but Lolo is so loud I can still hear his end of the conversation coming through the phone.

  “Ven, asere. What, you’re going to spend the night alone down there?”

  “Not alone,” Nesto mumbles, his back fully to me, while I pretend to examine pasta boxes.

  I think it’s sweet that he’s chosen my company, even if sometimes it seems like Nesto comes over to spend time with the cottage magazines more than with me. He says I take them for granted. The beautiful paper they are printed on. The fact that I can go to a newsstand and buy a magazine anytime I want when back in Cuba, there are hardly any magazines beyond Revolución y Cultura, or Trabajadores, and Bohemia—if you can get your hands on a copy—and if you want to read one of the international magazines foreigners have left behind and brought into circulation, you’ve got to rent it on the gray market.

  Later, I take our plates and wash them off at the sink, and he uses my absence to dip back into the stack. He’s made a pile beside it of the ones he’s already read. Tonight it’s the leopards of Londolozi, South Africa.

  “Can you imagine,” he asks, showing me an image of a mother leopard with her cub, “seeing one of these animals in real life?”

  “Haven’t you ever been to a zoo?”

  “It’s not the same. At the zoo their eyes are full of sadness. It’s unnatural.”

  “You think it’s natural for them to be followed around by some guy with a camera?”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to go anywhere, Reina? You, who have the freedom to go anywhere in the world, and you’ve never been anywhere. I’ve only been in this country three years and I’ve already seen more of it than you.”

  The phone rings and I know who it is before I answer. My mother. The only person who calls me besides Nesto. She wants to know how I’m spending Nochebuena, if I’ve at least been invited to a party.

  “I’m home, Mami. I just had dinner.”

  “¿Estás solita?” She sounds worried.

  “No.” I glance his way and see he’s hypnotized by another photo spread. This time, the Great Wall of China.

  “You’re with a man?”

  I mutter affirmatively.

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Nesto.”

  Mami’s in the mood for chisme. She wants to know what he does for a living, if he’s married, and if he’s a real novio or just a peor es nada.

  “Ya,” I tell her. “No more questions. He’s just a friend. Someone to pass the time with.”

  That last part I know Nesto hears, because he’s closing the magazine, slipping it back onto the stack, and looking right at me.

  I realize my words might have sounded harsher than I meant them.

  My mother tells me she’s had Jerry’s mother and his son from his first marriage over for dinner. She cooked them a churrasco and pernil. Even la suegra was impressed.

  “You never cooked things like that for us.”

  “Ay, por favor, Reina. You’re always looking backward. I don’t know how you manage to get anywhere in life without running into walls.”

  When we say good-bye, I return to the kitchen area and start cleaning the counter. There’s no dust, no smudges. It’s already clean, but I rub it until the paper towel disintegrates between my fingers.

  Nesto turns the television on to a documentary about butterflies, possibly the only nonholiday-themed program on tonight. When I’m finally satisfied with the counter, I see a tiny sugar ant slip out from a crack between the countertop and the wall. Behind it, another ant, then several more. I watch them, the line they form, so certain of their direction. I could kill them with the paper shreds in my hand, but I let them go on their way, even as a dozen more emerge from the seam in the wall.

  My mother kept the old house full of poison. In every corner, a mousetrap or a roach motel. The counters lined with a clear gel meant to annihilate a population of ants. The poison was why we could never have a pet, she insisted, even if we argued a cat would do a better job of getting rid of the mice and lizards that found their way into the house. We could bring in one of the strays that hung around our block that she yelled about every time she caught me bringing them our leftovers.

  But poison wasn’t the real reason we couldn’t have animals. When Carlito went to trial, to ease the silence of the house, I told her we should get a puppy, something to love, to love us back. But she refused and finally confessed it was because she suspected that with our luck, any animal we took into our home would eventually turn on us just like all the men in our family did. She didn’t want us to become that story, the survivors of an already broken family who were mauled and eaten by their dog. She said in her house we did what she wanted and when I had my own house one day, I could do what I wanted.

  So in my cottage, I let the ants live. I admire their instincts. Their intrepid way of staking out the counter until they detect no more movement, and make their way across the surface, down the side of the cabinet, all the way to the top of the garbage can, its lid slightly upturned and reeking of fish bones. They know how to live, these ants. Even with all the poison Mami put out for them, their colonies persisted. Even when she got so frustrated she called professional fumigators, pest killers. The mice died. Even the roaches manifested upturned, on their backs, feet curled into the air. The lizards shriveled into crusts we’d find pressed into the rugs. The spiders dropped off the ceiling, landing on tabletops, turned inward like buttons. But the ants lived.

  Carlito told me that in jail, the only free beings are the insects that fly in through the window slats and back out at their own will. Sometimes a lizard would creep in and he’d watch it. He knew some other inmates tortured the life-forms unlucky enough to find themselves in their cells, even smashing the rare unlucky sparrow that made its way in, but Carlito wanted to befriend them, invite them to stay, even make pets out of them. He made a fly trap on a sheet of paper out of some gravy left over from a prison meal just so he’d have treats for the lizards, the crickets, the brilliant roaches, but they never stayed. Once he grew so angry at their abandonment, so jealous of their freedom, he killed a grasshopper by pulling off its legs but he swore he heard it scream so loud the walls of his cell vibrated. He set it on the window ledge and hoped it was strong enough to find its own way out. Then he started watching the ants, the way they dug into the holes in the concrete, and when he grew impatient and started pressing his thumb on them to kill them one by one, he could hear them scream too.

  “Everything cries, Reina,” he told me. “There’s not one living thing on this planet that doesn’t scream to survive.”

  I turn back to Nesto, but he’s fallen asleep on the sofa, his head dipped into his shoulder. I’ve never seen him sleep. Never seen him with his eyes closed longer than a blink.

  I’ve thought about him spending the night. Sometimes when he touches me, brushes up against me for no reason other than I’m in the way, I think about what it would be like to have his hands on me because he put them there, because he wanted to touch me. I’ve watched his lips move when he tells me one of his stories, wondered what it was like for his ex-wife, Yanai, who got to kiss him for so many years, or for the other girl he lived with for a time in the barbacoa loft of a solar, a tenement by the Parque Trillo in Cayo Hueso where there was often no electricity for days and the entir
e building shared a phone line and a bathroom with water pulled from a tank.

  Nesto learned to ignore the smells. “A person can get used to anything,” he said. “That’s our island’s biggest problem.”

  But he went back to Yanai after a few months and the girl from Cayo Hueso eventually found an old Italian man to marry and is now living somewhere in Rome.

  Maybe it’s because I haven’t been kissed in so long, the longest I’ve gone since I was a girl and boys started reaching for me. But Nesto doesn’t. Sometimes I wonder if with a little effort I can sway his interest, change the way he looks at me. Those are skills I’ve had as long as I can remember, but with him I hold back.

  His lips part, air slips out of them. His long lashes press against his cheek and his hair fans out on the cushion behind him.

  So this is what he looks like when he’s alone in his little room by the beach, when he takes off his clothes at night and rests his body on that flimsy futon. When he dreams of his family. His life. His island. This is his face wearing the freedom of sleep.

  I’ve never invited him to stay, not explicitly, but I hoped he could sense my wanting him to be my companion in the night, to maybe make the hours pass a little faster, easier, with fewer throbs of loneliness.

  In the old days, I never had to ask men to stay with me. They’d usually leave before the night was over, but I never had to work to get them to want me. Seduction was intuitive for me. Even when I was the one who wanted it more, I could make them think it was all their idea.

  But with Nesto, I’m different.