Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“How do you know that?” I ask.

“We know these guys real well. Each animal has its own dolphinality. Sunshine likes to spy, just like Strawberry, over there, likes to fling wads of seaweed at us to get our attention sometimes. They’re having fun with us.”

“But how do you really know that? It’s not like they can tell you.”

“From our research.”

I watch as he calls a dolphin over to where he stands on a platform at the center of the pen. Luke signals with his hand for the dolphin to open its mouth, and then he shoves a long tube down its throat.

Luke calls over to me on the deck. “I’m doing this ’cause she’s thirsty. They need water just like we do.”

Nesto later tells me that wild dolphins get their hydration from catching live fish, and the frozen food diet captive dolphins get can leave them dehydrated, so the trainers supplement it by shoving a lubricated hose down the dolphins’ throats, dumping ice into their mouths, or feeding them gelatin cubes. He learned that during his days working at the Acuario Nacional in Havana. He said that back there some of the dolphins, the ones they didn’t snatch out of local waters, were from the Black Sea, imported like so much else by los bolos, the Soviets. Just another island absurdity, he told me, Russian dolphins in the Caribbean, and it was only fitting that the aquarium was right across the road from the Soviet embassy plunging like a sword through the heart of Miramar.

When the Russians left, they didn’t take the dolphins with them. But they’d die, of course, because around there, Nesto says, there’s no Reina walking around making sure people don’t throw garbage into the tanks, and sooner or later necropsies revealed plastic bottles in their bellies or too many mackerel jawbones. Some of those animals, people would say, were former military dolphins, trained to drop grenades on submarines and inject enemy divers with poison.

During my first days at the dolphinarium I hear from a guy called Sonny on the maintenance crew that this country once had a similar project going on, and those secret navy dolphins eventually made their way onto the aquarium circuit too.

“Might even be some here,” he says with a raised brow.

I mention it to a couple of trainers who laugh, dismissing it as an urban myth, adding that Sonny’s a full-blooded Seminole, raised not to trust the government, so I shouldn’t listen to any of his theories.

He’s in charge of emptying all the garbage cans and pulling seaweed and fish out of the pens. He points to the little bio the facility has posted by each pen with a picture of each animal and a cute little story about its origins, like that it’s retired from aquariums, or rescued from a mass beaching in South Carolina, and found paradise in these here pens. Lies, he says.

I think it’s strange that Sonny has to spend half the day catching fish that swim through the fence holes from the ocean when dolphins are supposed to eat fish, but he explains they don’t want to tempt them with being able to hunt for their own catch.

When I later ask Mo about it, he tells me to leave matters to the people who really know about this stuff; the vet techs with their diplomas, the trainers with their slick wetsuits and chirpy voices reciting a litany of facts about the species to visitors while the dolphins wait at their feet for a mouthful of dead fish.

“And you, you’re just a newbie, sweetheart.” He takes a piece of my cheek between two knuckles. “You don’t know a dolphin from a dog off the street.”

When my brother was old enough to get real jobs, first as a restaurant dishwasher, then as a stock boy at a grocery store till he got fired for swiping steaks, and then at the car wash where he stayed until he finished high school, he would still hit shops in his free time to see what he could take without paying.

Sometimes he’d aim low, going for drugstore cosmetics, perfumes, sunglasses off the rack, batteries, and condoms, always bringing something extra home for me, like lipsticks or nail polish. Or he’d go into a bookstore with an empty backpack and leave with it full of new novels. Sometimes he would be more ambitious and try his luck in a department store, walking out with shirts and jackets right on his back. He never got caught and often tried to convince me to join him.

He said I had the right kind of face for theft, inconspicuous and forgettable.

“Nobody expects anything from you, Reina. Nobody notices you when you walk into a room. You’re like the air people don’t realize they’re breathing.”

I didn’t like the idea of stealing even if our mother never asked where all the new things that turned up in our house came from, probably because my brother also kept her supplied with gifts.

One day I told Mami what Carlito had said about me, and how it bothered me that I was a girl he was certain nobody gave a second thought to, as inconsequential as a flea.

“Don’t worry, mi’jita,” she told me, caressing my face with her slim hand. “It’s to a woman’s advantage to pass through life desapercibida. Better to be underestimated.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s only in pretending to be cross-eyed that a woman is able to see double.”

Nesto says it was Yemayá who held my brother up to the surface after our father threw him into the ocean so that Cielos Soto could save him, and he’s sure Cielos had already made a pact of his own with Yemayá before casting his line off of the bridge that day, asking her to deliver fish to his bait and hook. Instead, Yemayá made him a hero. And my brother was saved.

But there lies the debt, Nesto warns. Neither Carlito nor anyone in my family ever paid Yemayá back for her blessings, and nobody, especially the orisha, likes an ingrate.

Yemayá only punishes when deeply offended, he says. It’s the reason why, when Carlito’s mind filled with madness and he dropped Isabela’s baby into the ocean, Yemayá did nothing to stop him and instead let the baby fall through her waters down to Olokun’s realm on the ocean floor.

“That’s why you need to make friends with the sea,” he tells me, as we sit together on the beach behind my cottage one sunny morning. “The sea is the origin of all life and the tomb of all death. Before Obatalá claimed the land, oceans covered the earth. So all of life has aquatic origin and we need to honor it.”

“You think we were once fish?”

“Only Olofi knows.”

He runs his hand through the sand at his side, grabs some into his palm, and lets it slip out through his fingers.

“Babies breathe amniotic fluid until birth. It’s a kind of seawater. We grow into our lives on land and lose our connection to the water, but we are of the ocean.”

Nesto takes my hand and leads me into the water stepping sideways like he says we should always do when approaching the sea.

As we walk in deeper, he holds me, lifts me off my feet like my mother used to do, letting me float over his arms, dipping my head backward into the water.

He asks me to hold my breath, to see what kind of lungs I have. Then he teaches me exhalations and ventilation patterns, what he does each time he goes spearfishing or down on Lolo’s line off the float, the way a body can fill itself with oxygen beyond the throat and lungs, down to the diaphragm, through the muscles between the ribs and chest, even into the muscles on top of your lungs and under your shoulder blades, packing and stacking the oxygen through tiny gulps, then how to do purging and cleansing breaths.

We practice in the shallow water where he can stand and I dip my head under the surface, holding my breath, gripping Nesto’s waist for support while he watches over me counting time, tapping my shoulder at intervals so that I’ll lift a finger to signal that I’m okay.