Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

For submitting to the cause and keeping in line with the new property redistribution policy, the family was able to remain in their house in Buenavista if they gave up their beach cottage in Guanabo, and it became Nesto’s mother’s, where she lived through three marriages, three children, and now, three grandchildren. Nesto says it was a malleable enough house, like everything else in Cuba. Walls could be added to make more rooms, the long house extending, growing wider, like bacteria: a second floor added above, a separate entrance created to make room for the widowed aunts, the children and cousins displaced by divorce and broken affairs. Just like that, a simple family house becomes a commune, full of voices, footsteps, doors opening and closing, and outside, a row of houses enduring the same overcrowding, a simple street becoming its own restless city.

He says life in Havana was a series of house swaps, permutas, since buying or selling property was still illegal, and he’d only left his mother’s home in Buenavista to move a few streets away, to live in the house that belonged to the family of his new wife, who he married at nineteen.

“You’re married?”

I’m surprised he hasn’t mentioned it until now, though maybe I shouldn’t be.

We’re sitting on the deck outside the Lobster Bay Inn, picking over our last bits of stone crab from the permanent all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. It’s an obnoxious spread made even tackier by holiday lights, miniature snowmen adorning the display, employees in Santa hats; artificial reminders that it’s holidays season in the tropics.

“I was married. It ended a long time ago.”

Before I can ask anything further, he turns the question on me.

“Have you ever been married?”

“No way.” I don’t know why I’m embarrassed by the question.

“Nobody ever wanted to marry you?”

He’s teasing me and I know it. I turn away from his grin to a table of tubby tourists with plates piled high with crab legs and seafood slaw.

“No,” I say, coolly. “Nobody ever wanted to marry me.”

He pinches my arm the way Carlito used to do to get my attention.

“I’m sure somebody wanted to marry you. You just didn’t know it.”

Later, I follow him back to his place, where we sit on the patio outside his door, on a pair of shaky plastic chairs planted half in the sand facing the ocean. It’s getting chilly so he lends me a sweatshirt so I won’t have to go back to my car for mine. He’s been anxious because there’s hardly been any work for him this week — few calls for anything to be fixed. And this is the high season, just before the holidays. If it’s this quiet now, he worries about what will happen when the snowbirds go back up north. He lives simply and frugally enough that I wouldn’t have thought it an issue until he tells me about the clan of people he supports back home, waiting for their monthly remittances.

I say something about hearing that everything — food and necessities — is provided for over there, but his expression dims and he says that’s a myth, what’s provided by the government is only enough to keep hearts beating, not to keep people from hunger or from suffering through sickness.

“That’s not a life.” His voice falls so low I can barely hear it over the tide. “It’s not a life at all.”

When it’s dark, he shows me his room, a block carved out of a row of identical efficiency apartments, with a low ceiling, gray as a puddle. His bed, a futon covered with a blanket and a coverless pillow, an old armchair pushed into a corner beside a stack of worn books. A guitar rests upright in a corner and I notice a small stack of photos atop the sole wooden dresser.

The bareness between the painted-over concrete walls reminds me of how I’ve always imagined my brother lived during his years away from us. But Nesto has a pair of windows. Carlito told me all he had was a three-inch-wide slat carved out of the thick wall angled toward one of the gun towers. He could only see out of it if he stood on the toilet and crooked his neck so far to the left he thought it might snap.

I sink into Nesto’s armchair while he pours me a glass of coconut water made by the same old guy who prepared the guarapo de caña, then fumbles through his only cabinet to see what else he can offer me to eat even though I insist I’m not hungry.

“I’m guessing she was pregnant,” I say.

“Who was pregnant?”

“Your wife.” The word wife feels strange on my lips. “I mean, the girl you married.”

I try to sound half-bored by the topic already, not like it’s something I haven’t stopped thinking about since he mentioned it at the restaurant.

He nods. “She was.”

“You’re a father.”

“I am.”

“To how many?”

“Two. A boy and a girl.”

“Both with her?”

He laughs. “Yes, both with her.”

I watch him shake a bag of plantain chips onto a plate. He brings it over to me and finds a place on the floor at my feet, his legs crossed.

I can’t picture him holding a child.

Nesto is thirty-five. Seven years older than I am now. As night seems to swallow the ocean outside his window, I wonder what he was like at nineteen, the age he became a father. I listen as he tells me about the girl who was his high school love, whom he’d first met at fifteen during one of his required stints at Escuela al Campo when the whole school was transplanted to the Pinar del Río province for forty-five days of tending government crops — potatoes, coffee, strawberries, tomatoes — farming for the State in exchange for their “free” education.

“Yanai was so pretty even the teachers were trying to be with her. I was a skinny, shy thing. And she was much whiter than I was. Not as white as an egg, more like flan or bread crust. But still much lighter than me and people always reminded her of this—‘¿Qué tú quieres con ese tinto?’—I didn’t think she would ever want to be with me. But she did.”

By eighteen, he’d grown into an athlete, went to do his military service, and was assigned to guarding the gate of a general’s home in El Laguito, where mansions once inhabited by Havana’s wealthiest families were now the homes of pinchos, high-ranking military officials. It was during a visit home, in his second year of service, that Yanai became pregnant. Their mothers agreed they should marry and he and Yanai agreed, for the sake of the baby — a son they’d call Sandro after a Brazilian musician Nesto once saw perform — and because they loved each other enough, and because there was no reason not to.

They tried for ten years to sustain their marriage, through occasional separations, and had their daughter, Camila, until he eventually left Yanai’s house for good and went back to live with his mother and family in Buenavista.

I thought of my own life and the times I’d been pregnant, and the men, most of them boys at the time, who made those never-born babies with me.

When I was eighteen, Carlito took me to the clinic. He thought it was my first time but it was really my third. Until the very last minute before they called me in he tried to convince me to keep the baby. He said we could raise it together, that as a family, we’d been through harder things.

“A baby will brighten things, Reina. Maybe it’s your destiny.”

“Fuck destiny,” I said, and he warned me not to tempt bad fortune by talking that way.

Till he got locked up, Carlito was a churchgoing guy. First, with Mami, even when I refused to go with them, then with Isabela and her daughter. They’d sit side by side in one of the front pews. The perfect little family.

“Don’t you ever want to be a mom?” Carlito asked me that day.

“Not by some huevón who won’t even talk to me now.”