Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

One of the boys, Universo Cassiani, scrawny, shirtless, and juggling a rubber ball, laughed at Carlito, happy to have a chance at revenge for the times my brother had mocked his name in front of the other kids, and howled that Carlito was a cochino mentiroso and our father was no millionaire. He was kind enough not to elaborate that day, but several summers later, when I was fifteen or sixteen and found myself making out with the now eighteen-year-old Universo, tall with stringy muscles, in the night shadows of the muralla overlooking the sea amid shuffling drunks and beggars, he confessed his mother had told him the story of our father as a warning of the madness that afflicts men when they leave for Gringolandia.

“It’s better down here,” his mami warned him. “Here, women know their place. Up there, they become wild and their men go crazy trying to contain them.”

He knew Hector had tried to kill my brother. He even had an explanation for it.

“Boys are the ones who carry a family name. Girls get married and fade away from a family tree. Your father probably did it to avoid the shame of your descendants.”

His words hurt. But serves me right because back then I still had the habit of scavenging for memories even if they were false ones.

Sometimes I’d look at old photos and invent stories for them. Sometimes I heard relatos of things that really happened, like the way Hector proposed to our mother, which wasn’t really a proposal at all but a deal: “Let me marry you and I will help you get away from your mother.” Then I’d invent a cover-up; tell myself that he met her when she was out buying food for dinner. Not the truth my mother once confessed to me, that he’d forced himself on her in an alley one night when she came home from a long day of painting nails for society ladies in Manga. But they didn’t call it rape back then, and because las malas lenguas had already anointed my mother with a reputation as a loose girl, people wouldn’t have been surprised he took liberties with her even though she tried to fight him off. So instead of being known as her attacker, because she was afraid she might already be pregnant and because he said he could take her away from this life, he became her boyfriend and then her husband.

Universo Cassiani was probably the first and only boy who ever came close to being a boyfriend to me. He would hold my hand as we walked along the streets of El Centro, kiss me in the archways of the muralla once used to hold cannons shooting against invaders, tell me my lips were sweet like granadillas, and that I was different from the other girls of the neighborhood who were prudish and protected by their papis.

I was with Universo just before the final hours of my grandmother’s life. Mami sent my brother out looking for me, to bring me home because she knew her mother’s last breath was coming. Carlito ran down the seawall shouting for me until I heard his voice echo against the stone. I pulled back from Universo, who was biting at my neck, but he persisted so I let him continue until Carlito appeared next to us in the alcove where we’d been hiding. Carlito pulled Universo off me, informing me that Abuela had announced she was waiting for me to be at her side before transitioning, which may or may not have been true. I went with my brother and left Universo by the sea.

My mother, brother, and I held hands across my grandmother’s body. She wasn’t even that old but she was a shrunken stump of a viejita with cropped white hair, a fleshy nose, and a tropic-charred complexion. Her palm was cool in mine and I tugged at her papery skin, counted the dark spots, compared it with my own, and thought nature is a real beast, the way it robs a body of its dignity.

She was ready to quit this life. Until a few days prior, she could still walk around okay, even without the help of the neighbor who’d taken on the role of her nurse. She survived alone with the money her daughter sent from Miami and ate well even if her body didn’t show it. She always smoked hand-rolled tobacco, and that evening kept her cigar on a porcelain plate on her nightstand. She’d been praying all her life for a good death, como buena colombiana, and knew tonight was the night. When I showed up in her doorway, she tilted her head my way and nodded slightly as if to say, Now we can get on with things .

It took a while, but was still faster than I expected. Her breaths became longer, then shorter. Her eyes drifted to the farthest point in the room, a corner between two windowless walls.

“Open the door,” she said, and Mami looked to Carlito and me and to the bedroom door, which was already open.

“It’s open, Mamá. The window is open too. Are you hot? Should we bring in the fan?”

“No,” Abuela shook her head with more force than we’d seen in a while from her. “Open the door. I want the door open.”

Carlito stood up and closed the bedroom door and opened it again, narrating to Abuela as he did so, “It’s open, Abuela. As open as it can be.”

“Open the door!” Abuela cried, but her voice was growing faint so it came out like a whisper.

Her breath quickened, her eyes widened. She looked at each of us, closed her lids, and left us in the room without her.

We did things the traditional way. That’s how I learned how to mourn the dead. We prayed over our grandmother all night like she was a saint and not the cold and rancorous woman our mother secretly hated for not defending her against the father and stepfather who’d put their hands on her; the woman she’d wanted to escape so badly she married our father; the woman she’d hoped would, in her final days, tell her daughter she was sorry, admit to having failed her in some small way, though that didn’t happen.

We cried over her; spoke of her; as if she’d been a holy woman; waited for the priest to come administer blessings; gave her a somber funeral Mass in the Santo Toribio church, attended by all her neighbors; and buried her in the Santa Lucía cemetery, facing the ocean.

Universo lives in Miami now. The funny thing about immigration is that people from your old neighborhood often end up right around the corner from you in your new one.

We ran into each other at El Palacio de los Jugos and made eyes at each other through some small talk.

“So you finally got the courage to leave your mami behind,” I teased.

“No, they increased the taxes in San Diego so much we had to move. She went to live with her sister in Santa Marta, so I came here.”

It was just as Abuela feared — the return of the rich to edge out the poor. Local folk who’d lived there for generations, unable to pay the higher taxes, forced to sell their homes and move.

Universo followed me home on his motorcycle for a welcome-to-Miami bang on my couch. He told me he’d heard about Carlito’s crime through the inter-American gossip wires as soon as it happened. We saw each other for a while. Not in a meaningful way but in one that was easy because, even though years had passed between us without contact, he already knew the things I never tell anyone. He knew why my house was always empty and why I didn’t have friends to go to parties with in pretty-girl clusters, wearing new dresses, shiny with makeup and iron-curled hair.

But he was no longer the Universo who looked at me like I was a special creature. The one who’d write me long letters in between summers saying he missed me, begging me to come back to Cartagena over the December fiestas, promising one day he’d defy his mother and move to the other side of the Caribbean and we could be together every day.

He was casual about me now, more like the boys I’d grown up with around the neighborhood, Carlito’s friends, who came looking for me when they had nothing else to do. It was okay, though. I never asked to be taken anywhere so it was always a nice surprise when Universo suggested we go out to eat instead of me cooking up some rice and warming over whatever leftovers I had in the fridge. He had another girlfriend, a rich rola, which I thought was funny considering Universo always claimed he wasn’t colombiano but cartagenero, as if it were its own nation, because, he said, what does Cartagena have in common with Bogotá other than being manipulated and ignored by its government? Here, equally displaced on neutral ground in Miami, they were novios. Sometimes he’d talk about a new movie and say we should go see it together that weekend, but we never did. I knew stuff like that was reserved for the official novia. And Universo knew my weekends were reserved for Carlito.