Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

Or when Universo would take me to his favorite pool hall outside the city walls in San Fernando and he’d play for pesos until he had enough to buy us ice cream on the way home. By the time we’d make it back to El Centro, it would be dark, the prostitutes already out, old-timers standing in doorways of Getsemaní while the younger crop waited by the port or around the fancy hotels hoping to “coronar,” find a foreigner to take them out of Cartagena, and Universo would joke that his mission was to coronar with me.

Sometimes I wish I’d held on a little longer, but my mother told me from the day I started running around with him in Cartagena that I should never fall in love with a boy like Universo, much less marry him. It would be like going backward, she said, and she always hoped I would at least have enough sense to marry for progress.

I wonder if he’s still with his wife. If they’ve had kids or bought a house.

I wonder if he ever thinks of me or if he tries to guess where I went because I never told him.

What would he say if someone from the old neighborhood in Cartagena were to ask what happened to me?

Esa Reina. No dejó ni la sombra.

She didn’t even leave a shadow.

Sometimes I even think about that dopey shrink, Dr. Joe. He left his job at the prison long before Carlito died, and even though I’d avoided the guy since the night with the dying bird, I asked the friendlier guards by the metal detectors about him, but nobody knew where he’d gone.

He came to mind again just yesterday when I asked Nesto, why, if he’d been such a reluctant father the first time, he’d gone ahead and had another kid. He’d already told me abortions were just about the only things in surplus in Cuba, and condoms — after a shortage in the eighties during which men got used to not wearing them — so plentiful they were often used to substitute as balloons for children to play with, or to make ice packs and sandbags, and during the Special Period, their plastic was even melted down to simulate cheese on pizzas.

He shrugged. “We both wanted another child, even if we couldn’t stand each other. We went to see a Santero who threw the caracoles and he said we would have a girl. Every man wants a daughter.”

I wondered if that was true.

Nesto watched me. I’d hardly mentioned Hector to him, but maybe that’s why he was able to read my thoughts in that moment.

“I’m sure your father loved you.”

It struck me because it was the exact opposite of what Dr. Joe had once told me — that the deep weight of sorrow I’d been born with was the unconscious awareness I had that my own father had never loved me, long before my mother even started telling me so, a trauma almost as severe as birth itself.

“I don’t know about that, Nesto.”

I thought this would be the end of the conversation, but he continued.

“All men love their daughters. It’s a special love. Different than that for a son.”

“Look, you can’t speak for all men any more than I can speak for all women.”

“You could if you wanted to.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“It’s the fear men feel. Sometimes it grows so big inside us, we can’t help but hurt ourselves and the people around us.”

Part of me wanted to laugh at how Nesto was comparing his failings to a part of my history unknown to him.

“You really shouldn’t be so quick to defend a man you never knew.”

“I’m not defending anyone.” He sounded disappointed at my rejection of his wisdom. “Least of all myself.”

I can guess what Dr. Joe would have to say about Nesto. He’d probably tally up his life’s errors, blaming his early promiscuity, just like he did with me, saying it arrested my development and that’s why I was so confused about normal human relations, but he argued that it wasn’t my fault since I inherited the family female burden of early puberty.

Never mind that Nesto says sexual openness was just another tool the Revolution used to get kids to warm up to its doctrine and abandon the traditions of the past, the religion of their elders, and that Escuela al Campo was a free-for-all, where secondary school girls and boys were fair game for the teachers and staff, and students quickly learned sexual favors could earn them not only better grades, but more than the small share of putrid parasite-infested food they got after hours tending crops since their parents could only make the trip out there to visit them on Sundays, walking hours in the heat to bring their children home-cooked meals to keep in their lockers throughout the week though they were usually stolen by bullies or even by the school guards and teachers.

It was a brutal life training. This was the reason Nesto gagged at the smell of strawberries and cringed at the sight of tomatoes. For the months he spent picking them, and the shit he got kicked out of him in the filthy bathroom each night by the dorm thugs. By the next year’s labor term, he came up with a plan to throw himself off the roof of his house so his ankle or arm would break or at least swell enough for a doctor to vouch that he was unfit for working the fields and give him permission to stay home. But the next year, they warned, even with a broken leg, he’d have to go back.

If there is one thing Nesto is grateful for now, he tells me, it’s that the island has depleted its resources so much that there are no crops left to be tended and kids are no longer sent away each year to work out in the campo. No more coffee. No more sugar. The only thing the island has left to export now, he says, is its people.

Dr. Joe would have things to say about Nesto’s infidelities to Yanai, too, which Nesto talks about like it’s just another fact, nothing to brag about or hide. He told me he wasn’t flagrant about it. He says he was no matatán or pinguidulce, just that sometimes he’d get caught up with other women who were between novios or maridos themselves and spend time at their homes; descargas, really — no vows or promises required.

Yanai figured it out, of course, as all women do.

Nesto says there is no room for secrets in Havana, no privacy to be had. Outside, there are the spying eyes of the DRC and surveillance cameras on street posts. Beyond the Granma newspaper propaganda, local chisme and chanchullo occupy the space of news of the rest of the world. Years pass and few things change but the lovers and pairings of the neighborhood folk.

You can’t be modest over there, he tells me. Walls are thin. Windows are always open to let in a breeze. Alleyways echo. Everyone hears everything. Every moan, every pleasure cry. Sometimes the only place a couple can go to be alone is the roof of the building, ripping into each other on a dirty azotea, under the scorching sun or maybe protected by night shadows, but even then, you can be certain somebody, from some window on some building that’s just a little bit higher, is watching.

Nesto says Yemayá was always good to him because he’s a son of Ogún, to whom she was once married. When he was a boy diving off the Malecón, he says it was Yemayá, mother of all life under the sea, who kept him safe and out of Olokun’s realm at the bottom of the ocean. She protected him from the insidious contracorriente that could pull him out to sea, and she kept the rough tide from slamming him against sharp rocks they called dientes de perro. When he was a teenager hunting in the water with only blurry goggles made out of melted boot rubber and beer bottle bottoms, Yemayá brought fish to him so he could catch them with his net or pierce them with his spear. She saved him from drowning more than once, Nesto says, always delivering him to the surface with her gentle power.

Nesto was never fully initiated to make Santo. He never had money to pay for the rites or the white wardrobe he’d have to wear for a year, all of which would have run in the thousands. Back then he’d sometimes stop in at an ilé ocha; go to a bembé or a toque de santo; watch as the musicians pounded the batás, calling to the orishas, before making their petitions and laying down their ofrendas. But he never did kariocha and was nobody’s ahijado, and he didn’t keep a canastillero or soperas for his orishas. In his room, he only kept a pair of candles, a dish full of candies, and a glass of rum he’d change every Monday in front of an image of Elegguá, master of fates.