Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

It makes me think of my grandmother and the way she would have me stand on the wooden stepping block in her apartment so she could measure me for dresses she’d make me, how she’d examine me, warn me against sitting in the sun so I wouldn’t darken my already trigueña skin; she’d pick at my hair, “coarse as a rat’s, black as azabache,” she’d say, just like my mother’s and a remnant of our Karib roots, complaining, in the way of her generation, that such evidence of our family’s past would take generations for the bloodline to clear.

“Nobody cares about my rat hair in the United States,” I’d tell Abuela.

She’d shake her head at me. “You think they don’t care, Reinita. But believe me, they do.”

My grandmother was poor. We have only ever been poor, any way you look back at those who came before us. But Abuela was ashamed of that fact and often tried to pass herself off as de mejor familia because she somehow shared a last name with one of the most distinguished families of Cartagena. But Mami says people borrow and steal last names all the time, “as easy as a Santero stealing a Mass,” and a fancy last name doesn’t mean anything anymore; the only thing that proves where you really come from is your blood.

That first morning, Nesto was waiting for me with a plastic cup in hand. He gave it to me. I saw it was filled with thick orange liquid.

“I brought this for you. It’s guarapo de caña. Try it.”

I’d had sugarcane juice before and didn’t like it, but I accepted it, because Nesto was smiling, all his chunky teeth on display, and told me about the old guy in the trailer park where he lived, who takes the bus up to the Mexican market in the Redlands every weekend just so he can buy real caña to make guarapo for himself and for his Caribbean friends, to ease the homesickness, la añoranza.

I had some time before I had to be at the spa and Nesto was still waiting for his first repair call of the day, so we stopped by Conchita’s. Conchita is a dominicana who sells coffee, pastries, and sandwiches from a little shop she built out of her front porch complete with a few tables in the adjacent yard. She’s married to a Coast Guard guy who’s never around and you can often catch her having full conversations with the chickens and stray cats that hang out on her property. I bought Nesto a cafecito of gratitude for delivering me home the night before, then back to my car today.

That morning, I noticed the pale seams of scars around his fingers, thick as cigars. In our initial weeks as friends he would tell me his body was all marked up with clues of his youth, pointing out the map of history all over his body. His leathery feet, rough from years of playing basketball on the concrete cancha because there was only one pair of sneakers passed around among all the boys of his barrio and he never had the patience to wait his turn, his toes scarred from cuts and infections. His knuckles chafed, palms callused, from fixing, fixing— inventando , he calls it — using wires from a bicycle tire to repair the ignition on a 1952 Chevrolet, breaking down rocks to turn into fresh cement to repair a collapsed wall, or stealing bricks from an abandoned factory in Marianao to turn one room into two, two rooms into three, to accommodate his home’s growing population; fine purplish lines and keloid tracks marking where a mismanaged blade or a jumped fence pierced his skin.

“Look at you,” he said to me when he grew more comfortable around me, telling me the stories of some of his marks, taking my wrist between his fingers and holding up my arm as if inspecting me. “It’s like you’ve been living in a glass case all your life. No marks, no scars whatsoever. How is that possible?”

“Oh, I have plenty,” I said, amused because nobody’s ever thought me perfect in any way.

Even though Carlito once told me our father used to hit us bad — even me, and I was just a tiny baby — I don’t have any memory of it, and no evidence on the flesh to make me wonder.

From the day I hitchhiked, when I jumped out of the perv’s car, I’ve only got a tender, shadowy patch that shrank to the size of a quarter on my knee where the pavement dug into my bone. Other than that, it’s kind of funny how immaculate I am.

I pushed my hair back to show Nesto where my father sliced my ear to break the curse he was convinced I carried.

“What is that from?”

“My father marked me. They said I was an abikú.”

“Is that so?” He looked surprised though he didn’t ask me to explain.

I nodded.

“That can’t be your only scar.”

“I have more.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re the kind you can’t see.”

When Carlito was still among the living, I’d drive back up from my weekend visiting him down at the Glades and find my mother waiting for me at home on Sunday night with some warmed-over dinner, usually just back herself from a weekend with her boyfriend. It was the only day of the week she cooked. She wasn’t a talented chef. Her meals were always the same: sancocho that would last us for days, or some kind of fried fish or pork with arroz con coco, and maybe some empanadas or carimañolas she picked up at a bakery on the way home.

We’d sit together at the kitchen table, and she’d tell me about the nice restaurants Jerry took her to up in Orlando, show me things he bought her, brag about the promises he made to buy her a new car, a new wardrobe, to take her to Rome so she could finally see Saint Peter’s Square. She never asked about Carlito. We’d made an agreement years before that I wouldn’t talk to her about him, even to relay the messages he’d ask me to send her, his pleading questions about how a mother could forget her son, deny him, turn her back on him — he said it was as unnatural as murder. She’d just stare at me when I walked through the door and tell me I looked tired, stroke my hair, and set my plate on the table before me.

Sometimes the visits were particularly tough, like when Carlito would tell me about days he spent in “the hole,” a solitary confinement even worse than the one he was already used to, in an empty, unlit, windowless cell with nothing but his hands to talk to. He got sent there for fighting with a guard who taunted him as he pushed the food cart down the death row hall every morning around five, saying, “Enjoy the taste of my piss in your grits, Castillo,” as he slid Carlito’s breakfast through the door slot, purposely breaking the plastic spork that came with it. The same guard who complimented the thickness of my lips when I came to visit, saying he’d like to see what I could do with them, and who once left a note for me at the Glades Motel front desk saying that he’d like to take me out sometime.

I can guess what sort of things he said to provoke my brother into trying to attack him with his bare hands while being led to the shower room in handcuffs. The thought of my brother crouched on the dirty floor of a prison dungeon made me ill for days but I never told Mami about these things because it’s not what she wanted.

I never understood how she could cast Carlito away, forgetting he was the baby she’d coddled and kissed, fed from her breast, and whom she always favored above me.

I wished she could be more like Isabela, almost pathological in her grace, sending Carlito a birthday card every year saying she knew that beyond his hardened heart, he was still the boy she once loved and believed she’d marry, and she forgave him for killing her daughter.

My mother was a woman who was capable of performing happiness no matter what. There were times when I knew she felt sorrow, her body withering away from anxiety, but she put on her painted smiling face and no stranger could guess what she carried within. Only I knew. But she never permitted the kind of closeness that would allow us to commiserate, to help each other, to give each other strength. We were each on our own.