Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

How could she say that, I’d screamed at her, when the same people, all those Judases who now called my brother a monster, had once called him “the miracle baby” because God had chosen to save him from the hands of his own murderous father, sending that angel Marielito into the water after him. It was a proper divine intervention, there was no doubt, and the baby, they’d said back then, would grow up to do great things.

“We were wrong,” she said. “Y fíjate que the Bible is full of bad children born to nice parents. Look at Cain and all of Joseph’s brothers, los desgraciados.”

“He’s your son, not some cuento. And if you want to talk about the Bible, it also says, ‘Remember those in prison, as though in prison with them.’”

I learned that much in our Youth Group scripture study, but Mami didn’t want to hear it.

“How can you turn your back on him? Where’s your compassion?”

“I didn’t have it for your father after he did what he did, and I don’t have it for your brother after what he has done.”

I told her I had faith in Carlito even if she didn’t. I would not abandon him but remain with him through his darkest periods, be there waiting for him when he was finally redeemed. I didn’t know how it would happen. But I was hopeful it would.

I didn’t talk to her for weeks. She didn’t care that I was furious at her, that in speaking of my brother that way, she was also breaking my heart. She didn’t try to soften me up or reason with me. She only stuck to her position that we shouldn’t let ourselves be held hostage by the actions of yet another madman.

“Ay, Reina. No es fácil,” is all Nesto says, as if we’re still just talking about fish eyes or a slow day at work.

“You’re not going to ask me why he did it?”

“Only he could know that.”

“They were going to execute him.”

“They execute people in this country?”

I nod. “All the time.”

“How do they do it?

“Injection. Or the electric chair. They give you a choice. But everyone picks injection since one guy they electrocuted caught on fire and flames started coming out of his head. That’s why my brother hanged himself.”

I’ve always believed it was to avoid his own murder, to deny the state the satisfaction of killing him, an act of rebellion, to at least keep the black-hooded executioner from getting paid his hundred and fifty bucks for putting Carlito to death.

It never occurred to me until now, hearing myself say so to Nesto, that my brother’s suicide maybe had something to do with his conscience, with guilt, with surrender.

Nesto watches me. I still can’t meet his eyes. After a few moments, he slips the key back into the ignition and we are on our way, under the last threads of daylight, moving toward Hammerhead.

I don’t know what I hoped for from this conversation. Maybe I wanted to confess, to testify. Maybe I wanted the chance to share my whole history, even if in fragments, the way Nesto has offered me pieces of his.

I thought I could shake these shadows when I moved away, skin my old life from this new one as swiftly and bloodlessly as the fisherman at the marina did when gutting our fish for dinner. But if Nesto is to know me at all, he has to know I am my brother’s crime. I am that baby’s murder.

When Nesto pulls into the path to the Hammerhead estate, careful to park his truck on the side driveway Mrs. Hartley prefers the service vehicles use, I tell him how I visited Carlito at the prison every weekend for the seven years that he was there.

He doesn’t say anything, but later, after he’s grilled our dinner and we’re sitting on the floor across the coffee table from each other, an unopened bottle of wine between us, the bonito devoured down to the last tiny thin bones the fisherman let break off the spine, Nesto tells me he understands why I was so loyal to my brother.

“But the thing about loyalty,” he says, “is that it always has a cost.”

“What do you mean?”

“For example, I am here with you in your home eating this nice fish we bought together, but I can’t look at it without thinking of the money we spent on it, knowing this is money that would have fed my family for one week. I can’t eat a meal without thinking of the food I’ve taken out of my children’s mouths. I can’t spend a dollar without calculating the pesos it would put in my mother’s hands. I can’t eat a piece of beef without remembering it’s something my family hasn’t tasted in years, since I was last able to pay a beef broker for a steak he would smuggle from the government slaughterhouses in a briefcase all the way to Havana. Every time my stomach fills, I only remember the emptiness I felt all those years, and I know, if not for the money I’m able to send them from here, they would still be feeling it.

“That’s one of the reasons I left Miami,” he goes on. “There, people told me I was lucky I made it to the other side and this was my chance to start a new life, borrón y cuenta nueva. I could find a new woman to marry and have a new family. But I can’t start a new life when my life is still back there. I didn’t want to leave. Everybody thinks everybody wants to leave — but who would want to leave their home, their family, everything they love? We leave because we have to. I left because there came a point when I had no choice. They depended on me, and with my arrests, not being able to make my money on the side, I was failing them. So I am here. Not because I was looking for an adventure or because I had dreams of becoming a rich man in this country. I came for them. So they can live better. Only for them.”

I don’t know what to say so I stay quiet, my eyes on him.

“I can understand why you were that way when your brother was alive, Reina, living half a life out in the world, free, and half a life locked in that prison with him. This is what family does. What love does. It chains us together.”

Nesto knows plenty of people in Crescent Key and the neighboring islands. He’s been here for three years already and everywhere he goes, someone gives him at least a nod or a wave. Sometimes he gets pulled over for a handshake and some banter, and his English is pretty good — accent-heavy but fluid — since one of the benefits he received upon arriving in the United States as part of the Cuban Adjustment Act was free English courses at the local community college. Even Mrs. Hartley smiled big when she saw him pull into the driveway the first time, then turned her grin on me when she realized he was there to see me. Since I moved in, we hardly ever cross paths. I slip my rent checks under her front door on the first of each month, and the only regular evidence of her is the land crabs crushed by her car on her end of the driveway.

Nesto also has a few friends from Cuba that we sometimes run into who turned up in the Keys for the same reasons he did, that gravitational pull back to native waters. Guys from his Malecón days with whom he swam and fished, including Lolo, who grew up around the corner from him in Buenavista and whose father, a former navy diver, taught scuba diving out in Playa Baracoa and let Nesto take his course under a fake tourist name since it was illegal for Cubans to dive if not for military purposes.

Lolo defected from Cuba by way of the Dominican Republic ten years ago; bald-headed and square-chested, he now runs his own dive shop in Key Largo. At least once a weekend, and sometimes during the week, when work is slow, Nesto will go out with Lolo on his boat, not even to fish but to throw himself into the ocean, hold his breath, and go as deep as he can, something he couldn’t do back home without watching his back for police. Sometimes they go after sunset and I asked him once why he bothers swimming in darkness.