Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“Good enough, I guess.”

“You must be descended from sailors. . or mercenaries.”

“All I know is that mother says I come from a long line of bastards on both sides.”

“We all do.”

He leans over and dips his palms into the tide, pulls them out, and runs his wet fingers over his face and hair, water dripping off his shoulders like feather plumes.

He walks back over to me and bends over, touching one hand to my cheek so I can feel how cold the water is on his skin.

“You know why I came down here, Reina?” He steps back toward the water.

“To get away,” I say, figuring Crescent Key is the kind of place people just turn up, coughed up from some other broken life.

“No. I came to get closer.”

“To what?”

“To there.” He points to the black horizon. There is no moon tonight. “Home.”

There’s the sudden rumble of thunder above us. Nesto looks to the sky and raises a hand, then brings it back down to cover his heart.

“Bendición, Changó.”

He turns to me with a wide smile.

“That thunder means he hears me.”

When Carlito was first taken into custody, to punish myself for being the one who pushed him into his madness, I didn’t let myself sleep. I closed the door to my room so my mother would think I’d gone to bed, but I’d sit in a chair in the center so that I couldn’t even tilt my head back to lean against a wall. Sometimes I dozed off. So I became stricter with myself, tying a string around my neck connected to the ceiling fan, taut, so if I slumped over into sleep, the tug on my neck would wake me up. But sometimes nothing could stop me, and I’d fall into a walking sleep during a break between clients at work. My boss took me aside and asked if I was on drugs. I realized this might jeopardize my source of income, so I decided to find another way to punish myself: I stopped eating.

I was satisfied by my silent hunger strike for a while. The pangs pass, the mind settles into a soft fuzz that buffers you from the world around you. My flesh shrank, my features sharpened, but these are things people compliment in women, so nobody noticed I’d only wanted to imprison myself in solidarity with my brother.

I felt Carlito’s hunger in the county jail where he was held without bail until his trial because the judge considered him a flight risk, and then when he was moved down south to the prison. I felt his disgust every time he looked at a plate of prison food, some of which Dr. Joe once told me came from bags and barrels marked NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.

I felt the inescapable noise of intercoms and alarms and howls and whispers permeating the prison walls and bars that kept him from ever getting real sleep, the hard boot steps of the guards checking his cell every fifteen minutes, the fluorescent overhead lights that never went completely out.

I stopped bathing as much to keep up with the three ten-minute showers my brother was permitted per week.

Even as I eventually let myself sleep, I kept the lights on in my bedroom to remind myself of my brother’s suffering and often only let myself rest on the floor because my brother slept on a thin plastic-coated pad set on a concrete slab with only a prickly blanket for cover.

I had a fear of forgetting, as if I ever could.

I saw my mother, with her patchwork amnesia about our father, the way she tossed out memories of Carlito too, and I thought, someone has to remember , for the sake of our family, if only to tell someone else one day what was, what could have been, and what never will be again.

And there were the dreams.

I think I was born having nightmares. My mother tells me I refused to sleep as a baby, fighting off fatigue by crying until my body gave out, and even then, my sleep was always short-lived and I’d awake in screams, a look of terror on my face.

The nightmares have stayed with me all my life, but I’m not afraid of them anymore, like an old film on repeat, scenes from our family’s darkest moments: a baby dropping from a bridge, my brother’s face when he received his death sentence, the sounds of our mother’s wails filling our house.

Sometimes I dream of my father. Though in the dreams he’s not my father but a man who looks like him and is calling my name from far away.

I dream of the old house; me, a child, sitting on the dirt patch my mother called a garden even though it refused to give her any flowers, digging into the soil with a plastic shovel, pulling out worms and lining them up as if I were reuniting them. Sometimes I would dare myself to eat dirt. Mami warned us that children who ate dirt grew up to be crazy, but I did it anyway, stuffing a handful into my mouth, telling myself she would never know.

I dream of Cartagena. Of playing in the grimy streets with my brother, of him leading me by the hand up the hidden steps to the roof of Abuela’s building where the whole city stretched out in front of us and we could see as far as La Matuna and Getsemaní. Or when he’d take me down to the third floor to spy on Doña Gabriela, who had regular male visitors. From the stairwell we could hear them grunting, pounding against the furniture, and we’d laugh and imitate them, watch the men as they came out of the apartment and wobbled down the stairs rubbing sweat from their foreheads with a kerchief, and then we’d give them dirty looks when we saw them at Mass at Santo Toribio on Sunday mornings, sitting among the church pews with their wives and children, and receiving Communion.

I dream of my grandmother. How she used to sew blouses for me with embroidered flowers on puffy sleeves while my mother watched, and when the blouses were finished and she gave them to me to wear, she would tell me she loved me better than anyone else in the world while my mother looked on, shaking her head.

For years, when we were small, Mami would talk about going back to Cartagena to live, as if this North American life were just some interlude and we ended up here by accident. But when we’d ask, “When, Mami? When are we moving back?” she would never give an answer. When Abuela died, instead of keeping her apartment in the family like Carlito and I begged her to do, Mami sold it and said now there was no need for us to ever return.

I didn’t miss Cartagena anymore in my waking life, but in my sleep I still longed for it, and sometimes wandering those city walls in my dreams was the only peace I got.

In the old house in Miami, I’d wake with the feeling of a hand on my chest, my eyes open to the murky blue half-light of my bedroom. Everything quiet, though still feeling noise all around me, through my ears, behind my eyes, under my skin.

In the cottage, I fall asleep slowly, counting the sounds of the night animals — crickets, frogs, squealing raccoons, a cat in heat somewhere beyond the coco plum trees.

But mine is still a loneliness that shakes me from my sleep.

I can forget my solitude all day, through my working hours, through errands, the evening housecleaning ritual I’ve made up for the cottage.

Yet night remains a tomb, when I’m most vulnerable, lying down for rest without distraction.

Only this body and that darkness, the whispers of the never-ending noche:

You belong to no one. No one belongs to you.

Nesto says he never knew silence until he came to this country, that there is no quiet to be found in Havana. In his barrio of Buenavista in the high folds of the Playa district, he lived in a concrete house that tunneled from the street down a long corridor with a patio and garden running alongside it, home to a mango and an avocado tree. It was a good house, he says, in a not-so-good neighborhood, a reparto people would never go to if they didn’t have to. The house had belonged to his mother’s father, who owned a grocery store until it was seized by the Revolution. But he and his family had been eager to support what was then believed to be a democratic turning of the tide, certain it would be an improvement from life under Batista, when streets in every neighborhood echoed with screams from the dictator’s secret torture chambers, bodies of the executed left lying on sidewalks for days as warnings against dissent.