Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“I go to see,” he said.

“What can you see at night?” Even with flashlights and boat lights it seemed like something better saved for daylight.

“You don’t see only with your eyes,” he told me, like it was the most obvious thing. “You see with your whole being. One day I’ll take you and you’ll understand.”

I kept quiet because I didn’t want him to know that the idea of being out in the middle of the ocean scared me. It was one thing to wade out to our waists in the waters off the Hammerhead beach under the moonlight where we could still feel the sand under our feet and I could run to shore if I felt some creature rush against my calves, and something else to plunge into the black ocean where, should anything happen, nobody could even hear you scream.

I’m with Nesto when Lolo calls to invite him to his place up in Key Largo for a Nochebuena party. We’re at the supermarket in Marathon buying some food for our own Christmas Eve dinner at my place, and Nesto wanders down the aisle away from me, but Lolo is so loud I can still hear his end of the conversation coming through the phone.

“Ven, asere. What, you’re going to spend the night alone down there?”

“Not alone,” Nesto mumbles, his back fully to me, while I pretend to examine pasta boxes.

I think it’s sweet that he’s chosen my company, even if sometimes it seems like Nesto comes over to spend time with the cottage magazines more than with me. He says I take them for granted. The beautiful paper they are printed on. The fact that I can go to a newsstand and buy a magazine anytime I want when back in Cuba, there are hardly any magazines beyond Revolución y Cultura, or Trabajadores, and Bohemia —if you can get your hands on a copy — and if you want to read one of the international magazines foreigners have left behind and brought into circulation, you’ve got to rent it on the gray market.

Later, I take our plates and wash them off at the sink, and he uses my absence to dip back into the stack. He’s made a pile beside it of the ones he’s already read. Tonight it’s the leopards of Londolozi, South Africa.

“Can you imagine,” he asks, showing me an image of a mother leopard with her cub, “seeing one of these animals in real life?”

“Haven’t you ever been to a zoo?”

“It’s not the same. At the zoo their eyes are full of sadness. It’s unnatural.”

“You think it’s natural for them to be followed around by some guy with a camera?”

“Haven’t you ever wanted to go anywhere, Reina? You, who have the freedom to go anywhere in the world, and you’ve never been anywhere. I’ve only been in this country three years and I’ve already seen more of it than you.”

The phone rings and I know who it is before I answer. My mother. The only person who calls me besides Nesto. She wants to know how I’m spending Nochebuena, if I’ve at least been invited to a party.

“I’m home, Mami. I just had dinner.”

“¿Estás solita?” She sounds worried.

“No.” I glance his way and see he’s hypnotized by another photo spread. This time, the Great Wall of China.

“You’re with a man?”

I mutter affirmatively.

“Does he have a name?”

“Nesto.”

Mami’s in the mood for chisme. She wants to know what he does for a living, if he’s married, and if he’s a real novio or just a peor es nada.

“Ya,” I tell her. “No more questions. He’s just a friend. Someone to pass the time with.”

That last part I know Nesto hears, because he’s closing the magazine, slipping it back onto the stack, and looking right at me.

I realize my words might have sounded harsher than I meant them.

My mother tells me she’s had Jerry’s mother and his son from his first marriage over for dinner. She cooked them a churrasco and pernil. Even la suegra was impressed.

“You never cooked things like that for us.”

“Ay, por favor, Reina. You’re always looking backward. I don’t know how you manage to get anywhere in life without running into walls.”

When we say good-bye, I return to the kitchen area and start cleaning the counter. There’s no dust, no smudges. It’s already clean, but I rub it until the paper towel disintegrates between my fingers.

Nesto turns the television on to a documentary about butterflies, possibly the only nonholiday-themed program on tonight. When I’m finally satisfied with the counter, I see a tiny sugar ant slip out from a crack between the countertop and the wall. Behind it, another ant, then several more. I watch them, the line they form, so certain of their direction. I could kill them with the paper shreds in my hand, but I let them go on their way, even as a dozen more emerge from the seam in the wall.

My mother kept the old house full of poison. In every corner, a mousetrap or a roach motel. The counters lined with a clear gel meant to annihilate a population of ants. The poison was why we could never have a pet, she insisted, even if we argued a cat would do a better job of getting rid of the mice and lizards that found their way into the house. We could bring in one of the strays that hung around our block that she yelled about every time she caught me bringing them our leftovers.

But poison wasn’t the real reason we couldn’t have animals. When Carlito went to trial, to ease the silence of the house, I told her we should get a puppy, something to love, to love us back. But she refused and finally confessed it was because she suspected that with our luck, any animal we took into our home would eventually turn on us just like all the men in our family did. She didn’t want us to become that story, the survivors of an already broken family who were mauled and eaten by their dog. She said in her house we did what she wanted and when I had my own house one day, I could do what I wanted.

So in my cottage, I let the ants live. I admire their instincts. Their intrepid way of staking out the counter until they detect no more movement, and make their way across the surface, down the side of the cabinet, all the way to the top of the garbage can, its lid slightly upturned and reeking of fish bones. They know how to live, these ants. Even with all the poison Mami put out for them, their colonies persisted. Even when she got so frustrated she called professional fumigators, pest killers. The mice died. Even the roaches manifested upturned, on their backs, feet curled into the air. The lizards shriveled into crusts we’d find pressed into the rugs. The spiders dropped off the ceiling, landing on tabletops, turned inward like buttons. But the ants lived.

Carlito told me that in jail, the only free beings are the insects that fly in through the window slats and back out at their own will. Sometimes a lizard would creep in and he’d watch it. He knew some other inmates tortured the life-forms unlucky enough to find themselves in their cells, even smashing the rare unlucky sparrow that made its way in, but Carlito wanted to befriend them, invite them to stay, even make pets out of them. He made a fly trap on a sheet of paper out of some gravy left over from a prison meal just so he’d have treats for the lizards, the crickets, the brilliant roaches, but they never stayed. Once he grew so angry at their abandonment, so jealous of their freedom, he killed a grasshopper by pulling off its legs but he swore he heard it scream so loud the walls of his cell vibrated. He set it on the window ledge and hoped it was strong enough to find its own way out. Then he started watching the ants, the way they dug into the holes in the concrete, and when he grew impatient and started pressing his thumb on them to kill them one by one, he could hear them scream too.

“Everything cries, Reina,” he told me. “There’s not one living thing on this planet that doesn’t scream to survive.”