Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“I want to go home,” I told our mother, afraid to look back at the girl with her father, afraid of what I’d seen under the water.

It’s a memory that hasn’t come to me in years. One I’ve never spoken of. But here it is, laid out before me in the delirium of my seasickness, until we are so far out that there is no land and no other boat to be seen in any direction. We are beyond the buoys, the pale shallow waters and sandbars along the coast emptied into to a watery lapis plateau.

Lolo drops anchor and the boat gives into bobbing over the waves that makes me lurch over the side, its engine fumes conjuring another vomit spell.

Nesto kneels beside me.

“I’m sorry, Reina. If I’d known you would get so sick, I never would have asked you to come.”

His words aren’t any consolation. I pull back, lie on the boat floor, hoping it will feel steadier, focusing on the sky above, but it doesn’t help.

“You’ve got to get in the water,” he urges me. “It will make you feel better.”

He pulls his shirt over his head and is down to his shorts, which he steps out of too, and there he is, all of him crammed into a small swimsuit — the kind most guys, except professional swimmers, avoid.

I’ve never seen so much of Nesto. So much of his skin, his limbs, the length of his legs, bare toe to bare thigh. The stretch of his waist, hip folds to armpit. I remember him telling me that in Cuba, it’s common for guys to shave their bodies from the waist up or even all over, because the weather is so hot, sometimes the water supply is cut, and it’s a way to keep from stinking between showers: Nesto, hairless except for some stubble on his chest and that mane, which he pulls back with a thick rubber band. He catches me staring at him and waves his hand at me, as if I am hypnotized, and I look away, prop myself on my knees and over the boat railing again, eyes back on that unreliable horizon, and throw up some more.

When I look back up, Lolo is stripped down to an equally small bathing suit, and I notice a tattoo across his back of what has to be one of Melly’s mermaids. He pulls a bottle of shampoo out of a bag and pours it all over Nesto’s shoulders, and then onto his own chest and they each begin rubbing themselves down. I don’t want to ask what they’re doing. I just watch as Nesto’s dark skin turns slick and shiny, but then it becomes clear they’re just lubricating themselves to make it easier to get into their wetsuits.

When he’s all wrapped in neoprene, Nesto reaches for me.

“Come, Reina.”

I take his hand and he leads me along the railing to the back of the boat, where he helps me sit down beside him, our feet hanging over the edge into the cold water.

He dips the mask he’s been holding in his other hand into the ocean, fills it with water, then puts it up to my face.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and I do.

He says some words in Lucumí, then, so I can understand, says, “Yemayá, take Reina into your arms,” before pouring the water over my head.

I feel it run down my face, cooling my neck, my back, and my chest.

When I open my eyes, Nesto is watching me.

“Get in the water. Swim. It will help you, I promise.”

He starts putting some long fins on his feet while Lolo tosses a large inflatable red tube on a long cord off the back of the boat.

“And when you get in, you do it like this.”

He launches himself sideways off the back of the boat, disappears under the water, then breaks through the surface again, grinning.

“You’ll only feel worse if you stay on board, Reina. Come in. I’m waiting for you.”

Melly lets me use her wetsuit since she’s decided to stay on the boat to work on her tan, and helps me lotion up, then pull the neoprene up over my thighs and around my hips, which is much harder than it looked when I watched Nesto do it. When I have it on properly, she zips me up from behind and I feel the suit push against my ribs up to my neck.

“Breathe,” she tells me. “You’ll get used to it. It’ll feel better in the water.”

She gives me her fins and mask too, and leads me to the ladder at the back of the boat to help me as I put them on.

“Are you scared?”

“Of what?”

“Of this,” she points to the dark water all around us.

“What do you mean?”

“Out here is where the ocean floor drops off. Didn’t you notice how clear and light the water is when we’re closer to land? That’s because it’s not so deep. Then the ocean floor takes a big hit hundreds of feet down and you’re out here, in the blue.”

“Should I be scared?”

“You’ll be fine as long as you don’t panic and start swallowing water.”

Nesto and Lolo are on the line by the buoy calling for me to come in, so Melly helps me push off the ladder into the cold water, sideways, just like Nesto said, and I feel it slip between my skin and suit. I push the fins with my legs, propelling myself along the surface, pulling myself along the line toward the buoy where Nesto waits with Lolo.

“Are you still sick?”

“I’ll be okay.” But as soon as I say it, a wave pushes against me and my stomach goes up with it, then back down, and the sickness returns.

“Put the mask on and go under,” Nesto instructs me, and I do as he says.

Nesto and Lolo have weight belts on and lower another weighted line off the tube and start timing each other, doing ventilation patterns, so they can better hold their breath to dive on air. I don’t have a weight belt, just the mask and snorkel and fins, so I remain on the surface but once I turn my face downward, I gasp at the immensity of the realm below, slivers of sunlight shooting through the blue like lightning.

I don’t see small fish like the ones you see in tropical aquariums or when you snorkel by the reefs or close to the beach, with the stripes and dots. I see nothing, really, just a big slow-moving fish several meters under me, the outlines of a few small jellyfish bouncing along. Otherwise it’s quiet, still, shadows and blueness and emptiness as far as I can see in any direction, which isn’t very far, it turns out, because Lolo later tells me no matter how good the day’s visibility, sunlight only penetrates the first two hundred meters of the ocean and beyond that it’s an eternal midnight.

Even on the most perfect sunny day, the ocean lit up like a chandelier, Nesto says there is an underworld of inverted mountains far beneath the shimmering surface sea, valleys and canyons miles beyond the faintest trace of light.

I feel a tug on my suit and pop my head up to see Nesto tying a rope around my waist.

“You’re drifting. I don’t want to lose you out here.”

Maybe it’s because I feel a little safer knowing I am tied to him and to the tube that I spit the snorkel out and try to dive under, though my wetsuit makes me buoyant and I don’t go very far. But being underwater soothes me. My stomach and my nerves calm. The boat fumes dissipate. My body turns and curls as it wants, weightless, with the ease of an acrobat.

I think of my mother and how, when I was a child, she’d take me into the water with her and I felt time suspended in her embrace. How badly I’ve wanted to return to those moments. We remained under the same roof, but the years pulled us apart, so we could never recover the softness I felt from her under the sun, amid the waves.

Here, in the open ocean, with nobody to hold me at the surface but myself, I become sad for what’s become of my mother and me, the ways life hardened us to one another.

I turn and see Nesto a few meters away, lowering himself headfirst down the line, one hand on the rope, the other pinching his nose. A pair of sea horses comes into my line of vision, then floating close, just in front of my mask. I’ve never seen them swimming free like this. At the dolphinarium, there is a display near the entrance with a few sea horses that usually coil their small tails onto the seaweed at the bottom of the tank. They’re supposed to prefer shallow waters, but here, this pair glides along, tails tied in courtship, and I almost do what Melly warned me against, swallow water, in my effort to call to Nesto, who is back up on the surface, gasping for air.