Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“How absurd,” he tells me, “that on an island, it’s illegal to fish without a license. Even the creatures swimming in Cuban waters belong to the State.”

Later, as a young soldier doing his military service, stationed to guard the home of a high official, Nesto witnessed the banquets enjoyed by those in high government ranks, while the people outside El Laguito’s walls starved — food was so scarce that cats and dogs disappeared off the streets and pigeon coops kept on building roofs were, depleted; the terrified yet resigned faces of the young guajira girls brought from their villages to the estate’s metal gates for officials’ entertainment, and the parents who sometimes showed up looking for their daughters, crying to Nesto for mercy until a more senior guard came to scare them off with threats of jail or worse.

Why, he often asked his mother, hadn’t she or her husband left, taken the family away from the island when they had the chance?

Because with the Revolution, they’d had more to gain than to lose, she’d reasoned; because it wasn’t right that on their island there could exist such obscene wealth alongside such crushing poverty. And because, under Batista, with nobody safe from being hunted by his police, life was so much worse.

But why then, Nesto insisted, when the failures of the Revolution became clear, hadn’t they tried to leave later, even on one of the boatlifts? So what if they’d be called gusanos and vendepatrias, shunned by neighbors, even having rocks thrown at them? He insisted to his mother those were things they’d forget in their new life.

“Ay, mi amor,” she’d said. “It’s hard to leave, and even harder to break up a family. May you never know how hard.”

He’d been a gifted athlete, and good enough in school that he was tapped to join the young communists of the UJC, which at eighteen would have secured him a carnet del partido and he’d have been a full-fledged Party member, but Nesto refused to join, disappointing his family and making neighbors suspicious.

After his military service, he could have gone to university to be a lawyer like both his older sisters, or even to be an engineer. He’d passed the entrance exams. But ten miles on a bicycle each day since the camello buses didn’t come out to Buenavista, and so many years of study just to give his life to serving the State, defending laws he didn’t believe in, and earning next to nothing for it? Even his sisters, with all their education, earned just over twenty dollars a month. Nesto wanted no part of it. He’d completed his military service as a young father and newly married, and had a future other than his own to think about now. He was raised to believe a man should serve his country before anything— ¡patria o muerte! — but knew he wouldn’t pass that obedience on.

Everyone had one job the government saw; but another, the job that truly fed and provided, was the job the government didn’t see. He opted to be an obrero and went to a trade school to learn to repair things so at least he could earn some money, that which he’d declare, and that from side jobs which he’d hide, so his family could live better, supplement the food rations of the Libreta de Abastecemiento, perpetually scaled back, the government grocery depleted of just about everything but beans, diluted coffee, stale bread, and maggot-filled bags of rice. Anything else cost extra, and in fula — dollars — not the pesos the locals earned, and was sold in the diplomercados and shopping malls meant for diplomats and foreigners.

They were poor, like everyone else, but he didn’t want his kids’ bodies to show it with skinny, enclenque legs and rickets, so he did all he could, resolviendo, inventando, to make money for better food, for milk beyond what they were rationed only to age seven.

“But there are eyes all over the island,” Nesto says. And eventually the neighborhood snitches of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution turned him in for fixing cars — Russian Ladas or discontinued Korean imports left behind by foreigners, when only cars manufactured before 1959 could be bought and sold — to sell for a personal profit.

After the Cederistas reported him, police arrived at Nesto’s door to arrest him.

“So you went to jail?” I ask him.

We’re at the Crescent Key marina watching the fishermen come in with the day’s catch. Nesto wants to buy a couple of fillets to char on the grill behind my cottage, which he helped me clean out and get working again. He says once he has enough cash, he’s going to buy himself a real spear gun, the fancy mechanical kind, and start catching fish himself again. For now, the fish from the marina market will do.

“Yes. Three times. For three days each. But that’s nothing on the island. Anybody can be arrested for anything. They make honest work a crime. Everyone becomes a criminal because everything is illegal.”

“You weren’t scared?”

“Not really. Not until the last time when they said if I got arrested again, they wouldn’t let me go. Then I knew they were serious.”

“What was it like in there?”

He looks at me with a hint of impatience in his eyes.

“¿En el tanque? They put me in a big cell with all kinds of people. Some were real delincuentes, thieves, pandilleros, jineteros. Some were guys like me who got turned in for nonsense: a guy who sold mangos from his garden, a tailor who made somebody a suit for his wedding, a baker who sold someone a birthday cake, a guy who bought a microwave.”

“They can arrest you for buying a microwave?”

“They watch how much each person spends. Everything is assigned to a name and nobody is allowed to buy more than his share. It’s called Illicit Enrichment .”

“Where do they put the murderers?”

He laughs. “Somewhere else. With the rapists, subversives, and spies.”

I can tell he thinks me naive because of my questions, that maybe he’s shocking or even thrilling me with the intrigue of his time in jail, but really, I’m trying to decide if I should tell him about Carlito.

The fishermen lay out their fish and Nesto leans over a table picking out a bonito for them to fillet for us. I turn away when the fisherman pulls out the blade to cut off its head and start the skinning and pulling of bones.

The fisherman with the knife asks if we want to keep the head.

I say no just as Nesto says, “Of course. The head is the best part. The eyes are what give you wisdom.”

When we have our wrapped fillets in hand and are headed back to his truck, I tell Nesto, “My brother was in prison.”

“What did he do?”

I wait until we’re in the truck, his key in the ignition, to answer.

It gives me time to rehearse my words in my mind. But there really is only one way to say it.

“He killed a baby.”

Nesto pulls the key out and turns to me, but I look away, out the window toward the marina.

“A baby?”

“It was his girlfriend’s daughter. He threw her off a bridge into the ocean.”

Somehow, I believe it doesn’t sound as bad as if he’d stabbed Shayna or shot or even strangled or poisoned her, maybe because Carlito’s public defender put that notion in my mind. We were hoping he’d be charged with voluntary manslaughter, but the prosecutor went straight for murder in the first degree with malice and intent to kill. Carlito pleaded not guilty and his attorney tried to prove to the jury it had been a lapse of sanity, not some premeditated thing, that he hadn’t driven over to Isabela’s that day knowing he would soon end her daughter’s life. The jury didn’t buy it though. I’m not even sure I did.

I watch the image burn across Nesto’s face in revulsion.

I always expect people to ask why Carlito did it. But they never do. Once, I mentioned to my mother how I was always prepared to come to my brother’s defense, to say that it had been a momentary psychosis and it wasn’t the real Carlito who committed that terrible crime. But the opportunity never came up. Mami told me that’s because most people believed the only explanation for Carlito taking the life of an innocent child was that he was evil; whether he was born or bred that way didn’t matter. And even she was starting to accept that this might be the truth.