The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

A representative from the travel agency meets Nesto and the other mulas outside the airport, handing him a duffel filled with parcels to be dropped off with its agent in Havana for delivery.

  We stand in the check-in area, halfway through the crowd of passengers waiting to have their luggage weighed at the counter, enormous packages shrouded in plastic, overstuffed suitcases, store-boxed television monitors, and toasters. In front of us, a man pushes along a metal airport cart with a plastic car tire on it, and when Nesto asks what he’s going to do with only one tire, he says he’s already brought the other four over and this one is just the spare.

  I stand with him in the convolution of lines. Airport taxes to be paid, forms to fill out, before they give him a boarding pass.

  “It’s like this every time,” Nesto says. “It’s harder to get out of this country than it is to get in.”

  He once told me about when he arrived at the Matamoros border crossing into the United States. He was told it was a dangerous city, full of trapaleros and paqueteros eager to scam or rob anyone passing through. He called some friends of friends, Cubans who’d settled there and made a living renting rooms to migrants getting ready for the crossing. They warned Nesto it was best to walk over with nothing on him but his Cuban passport because border guards were as bad as bandidos and would confiscate his money, clothes, whatever he had on him. He should leave his things with them, they told him; they’d keep it all safe till he called from the other side with an address, and then would send his stuff over to him. When he made it into Brownsville—no thieves at the gate, no hostile Border Patrol agents—then to Miami, he tried to call the friends in Matamoros to give them his uncle’s address, but the number was wrong and he never heard from them again.

  His arrival in Miami was full of similar deceptions. The amigo who helped him open his first bank account, write a check, and use an ATM machine also stole his pass code and robbed him dry. That blue truck he drives now isn’t the first one he bought in the United States. The first, purchased from an acquaintance, died a day after he brought it home. And during his first year here, when he went out looking for work, he was shocked to hear employers tell him without hesitation, without asking as much as his name, “I don’t hire Cubans,” which is why he decided to start working for himself.

  I see Nesto is embarrassed when he tells me these stories. I can’t picture him so vulnerable. Until I see him at the airport this morning, his eyes nervous and uncertain as they search mine when we stand by the security checkpoint before we part ways to catch our separate flights at different ends of the airport.

  He pulls me into his arms. I close my eyes tight, wishing us back to last night, in the cottage, when we lay close and quiet, neither of us speaking the truth that he will return from this trip married to someone else.

  “I hope everything works out the way you want it to,” I tell him.

  He closes his eyes and nods.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for in Cartagena.”

  There is already an appointment for his marriage at some government office, where the person in charge will ask a bunch of questions, like why, if he and Yanai divorced years ago, they’ve decided to remarry, and they’ll say they fell in love again on one of his visits home, realized they can’t live without one another, and want to make their family whole again. The way he rehearsed it aloud in the cottage, peppering his story with details like that being far away in Los Yunay Estey made him understand he can only ever love her, the mother of his children, even had me convinced. But then Nesto broke character; shook his head; looked down at the floor, moaning as if suddenly ill; then tried the monologue all over again, trying to sound even more authentic.

  “I can’t ask you to wait for me.”

  “I know.”

  He steps out of my embrace. My arms fall off his shoulders before I understand this is the last time I’ll touch him and these will be our last words to each other before we part. He’s turned away from me and become a part of the crowd drifting toward the security X-ray machines. I don’t want him to see me watching him, so I walk away quickly, and if he turns back to look at me one last time, he’ll have found me gone.

  The taxi drops me at my hotel, a former hostel upgraded to a boutique hotel on Calle de la Soledad. I wash my face, change out of my jeans and into a light dress that won’t stick to me with humidity, place myself on the street, and try to see if by memory I can lead myself to my grandmother’s home, back to the first bed I slept in as a newborn, cradled by my mother’s arms, while my brother slept beside us.

  The streets are even more colorful now than years ago when Carlito and I came with our mother to see Abuela through her final days. A basket of fuchsia, turquoise, and banana yellow, with dark wood balconies dripping with bougainvillea, stone streets pounded by horse-drawn carriages like the one Carlito and I once saw turn over right in the Plaza de los Coches. One second the horse shuffled along mechanically, and the next, it collapsed, flat on its side, the carriage buckled over. Shopkeepers and street vendors rushed over to help the passengers to their feet. The horse was dead. Its ribs and pelvis protruded and tourists asked when was the last time the driver fed the horse, talking about animal abuse and fair labor. Others just blamed the heat.

  I was quiet the rest of the day and Carlito laughed at me for being so sentimental, said nobody was going to miss a ratty old horse that was probably diseased anyway. I was surprised he could be so callous. He’d always been nice to animals, not like some of the weirder kids from the neighborhood who used to kill squirrels to give them shoebox funerals in their backyards. Carlito even saved a rodent or two from certain death at those kids’ hands, but that day he was strutting new teenage macho heartlessness.

  “How would you like it if somebody said that about you after you’re gone? Ese pendejo comemierda. We’re better off without him.’”

  Carlito laughed arrogantly. “Everybody knows I was saved from the water by angels. Nobody would dare say something like that about me.”

  When my mother was a girl, the whole neighborhood knew when a norteamericano set foot in El Centro. Now, there are so many tourists beyond the moneyed folks who stay at the fancy hotels, a daily extranjero flood of cruise ship passengers doubling the population between the city walls. Street vendors toss around English and Italian phrases to get their attention, and even the kids rapping verses to tourists sucking on fruity drinks at the café tables in the Plaza Santo Domingo conclude their performances with “Come on, amigo, a dollar for my song.”

  I find my way through the pedestrian crowds to Abuela’s building, which I remember as whitewashed, rain-stained gray where its fachada merged with the pavement, now painted the color of guava, fresh tejas on the roof, its balconies newly honey-stained. A sign beside the door that once led to the stairwell spiraling to the apartments above reads, Inquire Within About Sales and Rentals.

  Above the street, the window where Abuela used to sit at her sewing machine table is open. I can ask the building’s new management if I can see the home that belonged to my family. See how it’s changed, maybe take some pictures to show my mother. I’ll tell Carlito about it too. I still report to him. I don’t believe in much, but I believe he hears me, still see his face across from me at the prison listening to me as I’d describe the feeling of being drenched by a sudden rainstorm, the warm sizzle of sun on my skin, the sweet and tart smell of the orange and pineapple groves I’d pass on the drive down to see him.

  I want to see if I feel the same as I did when I saw the house in Miami ripped out of its soil.

  But I hesitate. I’m not ready to step within those walls, identify myself to the new owners, say the words this was once my home.

  I used to blame my mother for having taken us away. I imagined that if we’d never left, the darkness wouldn’t have found us, and even if my brother had grown up to be a killer just the same, at the very least, because there is no capital p
unishment in Colombia, Carlito wouldn’t have been sentenced to death, and probably not even to cadena perpetua, which is not even a life sentence like the name implies, but a maximum of sixty years. But Mami told me I was wrong, even if in Colombia it seemed like a person could get away with more for less. She said there’s another kind of justice down here and sooner or later, the streets would have made him pay for his crime.

  I step away from my grandmother’s building down to the tree-lined plaza at the corner, still glistening from fresh afternoon rain. The Parque Fernández de Madrid has been cleaned up, but the same old guys stand in the shade at its fringes selling candies and frituras out of carts, arguing about fútbol teams, a solitary vago fishing for scraps in garbage cans. When my grandmother’s hand joints stiffened and she became too old to care for the beauty of other women’s nails and hair, she sold mamoncillos and ciruelas de campo from baskets to passersby. In this park, I used to spend hours with my brother and the neighborhood children because anywhere was better than the stiff heat of Abuela’s apartment, which always smelled of her tobacco and the incense she used to camouflage it. Here, I met Universo and came with him often when we were older, listening to him talk about his plans for his life, how jealous he was that I was lucky enough to grow up far from Cartagena and how one day, even though his mother forbade it, he’d leave too.

  Besides the tourists, the foreign men with preening local girls, the slouching backpackers, are the ordinary faces of tired people whose names I may have once known, who may have known me when I was still considered una hija del barrio even though my parents had taken me to the other side of the ­Caribbean, because back then people still believed, for a long time after you left, that you might still come home.

  An old man sits with a paper bag in his hands, tossing crumbs to the crows and pigeons and sparrows at his feet. There’s a commotion among birds between the benches. A furious chirping grows louder near me, a pair of sparrows split from the hungry swarm, pecking each other with their beaks, wrestling against each other, rolling on the ground, their claws joined, until one rises above the other, jabbing at the other bird’s beak and back. I stomp by them so they’ll separate, but they go back at each other with more fury. I shoo them with my hands, but they meet in the air and pull each other down into the dust, and it’s clear these birds are fighting to the death.

  “Déjelos, mi niña,” the old man with the crumbs calls to me. “You’ll never stop one animal from trying to kill another. Nature is wiser than we are.”

  I leave the birds to their massacre, the old man and the park behind me. I walk until I pass the cafetería on the corner of Calle de la Universidad where Mami would sometimes escape to, usually a few days into our visit every summer, after a standoff with our grandmother. Mami would always threaten to pack up and leave, though she never did. I’d sit with her, chewing on a pan de bono as she sipped aguardiente, saying she never belonged here and it was a mistake to keep coming back.

  Though we came to spend time with Abuela, Mami often had dates with men she knew from her girlhood who were already tired of their wives, or she’d go for a drink at a hotel bar and find a tourist or businessman to take her out that night. She never brought men home, but on nights she stayed out, Abuela would sit by the window and watch over the street to see if she was coming. If she stayed out all night, Abuela would lock the door, refusing to let Mami in the next morning, making Carlito and me swear to do the same because Abuela said we had to be unified in our punishment.

  Mami would plead to us through the door. Carlito always caved in first, slowly undoing the lock. But her shame was complete and she’d move around our shared space careful as a mouse, going into the bathroom for a long shower until one of the neighbors screamed that the building water tank had run out.

  “Don’t ever become like your mother,” Abuela warned me regularly, whether Mami was out of sight or right in front of her.

  My mother would look at me with hurt eyes, but would never argue or defend herself.

  Years later, when it was me who disappeared with boys, mostly Universo, sometimes not coming home until sunrise while Mami slept because she didn’t get as many dates anymore, Abuela would taunt her daughter, tell Mami it was obvious she was jealous of me because she couldn’t attract quality men, just the barrio bums.

  “What would a decent man want with a trash dump like you?” she’d hiss. “Only pigs like garbage.”

  Abuela had a way of silencing us. Carlito and I watched as she humiliated our mother, never sticking up for her, never mentioning that it didn’t matter how flawed she was, she was our mamita and we loved her.

  Once back at our house in Miami, our mother would make me hand over the dresses Abuela spent all summer sewing for me with the best fabrics she could find at the shops on Badillo, taking scissors to them, ripping the seams, slicing the dresses into long rags she’d put on the end of a wooden pole and use to wash the floors.

  If my grandmother could know me as I am now, she’d say I missed my golden window in life. She’d say I threw it all away to look after my brother, the years I should have been busy making my way in the world. She’d say I squandered my feminine currency by hanging around a prison for so long.

  She advised me when I was still a teenager, instead of going back for another year of school, to stay with her in San Diego and marry Universo so I could get marriage and children out of the way. Abuela had faith Universo was a good boy raised by good women, and wouldn’t grow up to be the typical sinvergüenza husband who disappears Friday through Sunday. Even so, at the time, I couldn’t imagine a worse fate.

  It’s a wonder Universo never got me pregnant since I was never more careless than with him. He might have loved me. He never said it, but it’s possible. But he was a boy a bit like my brother, wild with loyalty to his mami. Universo’s vieja never let me beyond the front rooms of their house on Calle del Cuartel. I pass by it now and see it’s been converted into a hotel too, the front sala where the tías once crocheted and gossiped made into a lobby, the wall that once held a cabinet of their finest china now studded with room key slots behind a bulky reception desk. But every now and then, when his mother and all her sisters were out visiting parientes in San Pedro, he’d sneak me inside and we’d do it all over the house.

  “That malparida Castillo girl,” la vieja would tell Universo, her sisters, and anybody from the neighborhood who would listen, “she’s more dangerous than a bullet to the ear.”

  To keep her son busy and away from me, Universo’s mother would send him on endless errands. She didn’t trust the modern supermarkets popping up all over the city, selling packaged meats and imported shined-up fruit. She preferred to send Universo outside the city walls to Bazurto. Sometimes I went with him. We’d make our way through the maze of vendors, pinch our noses through the odors, until we arrived at the shaded section where they kept the live animals. Universo would pick out a chicken, watch as the vendor broke its neck, dunking it in a pot of boiling water to loosen the flesh, making it easier to pull out the feathers. I’d hide my shock so I wouldn’t have to hear from Universo how sheltered I was by my North American life, and how what goes on in those big gringo meat factories was far worse than this. Behind us, rows of cows and pigs hung on hooks for people to pick out their cuts—not a single part going to waste, down to the eyes, tails, and hooves. I’d stay with him until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then wander out through the fish stalls to the road, crossing the traffic of trucks and horse carts to the polluted lagoon, and watch the scavenging seabirds until Universo came to find me.

  I remember the look he gave me every time he found me after I’d slipped off into a crowd. Relief, happiness, a kind of peace. I felt it too.

  Sometimes Universo took me with him on the back of his motorcycle all the way to San Juan Nepomuceno, through hillside roads scattered with guerrilla checkpoints, past marshy ciénegas bleeding into green and blue mountains. When w
e arrived, we’d sit at the bottom of the church steps for hours, waiting to see if Universo could spot his father, who he heard lived there now with his second family, but we never saw him.

  On the way back into Cartagena’s city walls, we’d stop at the feet of La Popa, the white monastery on the mountain that hovers over the city like a cloud, where Universo’s mother, who we all called La Cassiani, told her son the Karib and Calamarí Indians worshipped Buziraco, the devil in the form of a golden goat, until the friar who wanted to build the monastery and shrine to la Virgen de la Candelaria showed up, confronting the devil and his worshippers, throwing the golden goat off the side of the mountain. The devil retaliated with hurricanes and storms until the church was completed, and then relented, moving deeper into the continent. It’s for that reason, Universo’s mother told him, that Cartagena has always remained protected, and the rest of Colombia so troubled, already half a century under the thumb of its latest civil war.

  Our grandmother told Carlito and me a different story: After Buziraco was thrown off the mountain, the devil of La Popa had lingered in the shadows of the hills, so quiet people didn’t notice he was there. But when our father took us away from Cartagena, the devil followed our family across the Caribbean, waiting to see how he could make us fall. She’d meant it to scare us into being good children but Carlito and I only laughed at her story, though it turned out to be the same warning I’d receive from the blue-haired bruja so many years later.

  I climb the muralla steps up to the wall where I used to sit with Universo, where I can still hear my brother’s voice echoing against the stone corridor calling for me to come home, watching the sun fall like an orb into the dark ocean.

  Carlito wanted to bring Isabela to Cartagena. He planned to marry her and the day he went to the bridge with her baby, he was already close to having all the money he’d need to buy her a nice engagement ring. He’d been saving for a year, and before that, even longer, for a down payment on a home. Isabela said she would take his last name, but told Carlito she wouldn’t give him a baby until after the wedding. On their honeymoon, he’d take Isabela to Cartagena, where Carlito predicted, his eyes shining with hope, they’d conceive their first child.