Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

I let Nesto guide me around the wreck, pointing out the eel tucked into a corner of the deck, the fat grouper passing through, while the other divers go through their own drills.

Marine civilization surrounds us, fish I’ve only seen in aquariums or on television, sharks I’ve only heard about on the news after a splashing surfer or swimmer gets attacked.

It’s easy to get lost in the show, to forget to look at the dive computer, to realize all of this is a kind of experiment of technology and the body. It’s all so beautiful, but the sound of the oxygen in my ears, the taste of plastic in my mouth, the bulky stream of bubbles that follows me at every turn, the clearing of the mask, the weight of the tank on my back, and the steadying of my fins are all exhausting, and somehow, confining.

Despite our enchantment, the awareness of our invasion never dissipates. The animals try to get away from us. I understand now why Nesto prefers to rely on his lungs and not the tanks. He prefers a few minutes on his own breath as just another creature in the ocean rather than a much longer dive burdened by all that gear; he says the noise of our breathing, our bubbles, must echo like a helicopter for all the animals in the ocean.

I can’t wait until we ascend, go back on the boat, unload our tanks, log the dive, then are free to go back in the water with nothing but our wetsuits, to push below the surface with only our breath.

And we do.

The other divers come up in pairs, taking their time to adjust their eyes to open sky and sun once again, but Nesto and I are lost in the water, and I now understand why he brings me out here. The voices on the boat fade behind us and for a few moments it’s only us, floating, drifting, dipping, and kicking under.

My mask in my hand, I open my eyes wide under the water, surprised to discover it doesn’t sting at all.

When I come back up for air, Nesto is waiting, reaching out his hand, telling me it’s time to return to the boat, but I don’t want to go.

I want to stay out here.

Nesto smiles, content to see I’ve been converted.

“The best thing about her is that she’s always there, waiting for you.”

It takes me a moment to realize he’s speaking of the ocean and not of me.

Winter in the tropics betrays. Despite the radiant sun, a sky faintly feathered with clouds, there are days of biting cold when winds from the north bring frost, leaving nature confused, with reports of iguanas falling from trees, lizards frozen to the pavement, turtles and manatees congregating in the warmer waters around sewage plants. Farmers panic over losing their orange and pineapple harvests. We put on our warmest clothes, and at night, since the cottage isn’t meant to hold in heat, we burrow into blankets, pull out spares Mrs. Hartley left in the closet, and use the space heater she lent me from the main house. But the chill leaves us as abruptly as it arrived, and we step out of winter into a taste of summer. The sun holds strong for weeks without rain, warming the waters, and in the morning, instead of feeling our bones stiff with cold, Nesto and I wake to humidity, the pale winter sky returned to its cloudless blue.

Nesto sleeps over most nights now, and I sleep better with him here. But I often wake up to the darkness and when my eyes adjust, I watch him, the heaviness with which he sleeps, the way he always seems to find my body, even in his unconsciousness, and curl around me. I’ve never slept like this with anyone else.

Even when I had entire uninterrupted nights with other men, I never had this sort of closeness. I never had the same face meeting mine across the pillow morning after morning. I never had someone who didn’t tire of me, who didn’t eventually find me uninteresting. Who didn’t decide someone else was more worthy of his time.

I always handed myself over. I let them turn my body into the thing they wanted. My mind left the scene, floating in space where they could never find me.

I told Dr. Joe about this once. He said I was “dissociating,” imagining myself in a happier place. I told him he was wrong. There was no happier place. I was just not there.

Sometimes I wake up and I expect Nesto to tell me today is the last day we’ll share, a switch signaling my time is up. But every morning he’s there, and at the end of the day, when it’s time to go to sleep again, he’s there too.

I think I’m pretty good at living in the present now, when each day is just as good, or better, than the one before. But I still haven’t broken my backward gaze and sometimes, when even my own history becomes boring to me, I take on Nesto’s past. I try to picture him as the man that belongs to a tribe, not the solitary man I know.

I think about the woman with whom he made a family. The closeness they shared. The routines. The love for their children that bonds them even now. I try to picture them in the life they had together. The home they lived in, which had belonged to her parents.

I saw her face once, quickly, in a photo he showed me of a birthday party they’d had for his son when he turned five. She was much younger then, pretty, with long dark hair tied back with a bow, but her face was sad. He was to the side of the frame, looking serious too. Nesto later told me it was a Cuban habit not to smile for photos, a leftover Soviet trait just like the synchronized applause at government speeches. A communist thing.

He never asks about my past. Not in the way of boyfriends or lovers or aventuras.

“Don’t you want to know about me?” I asked him once, curious and half-insulted, but he shook his head and reached for me with his lips, and between kisses told me, “I don’t need to know about other men. For me, you were born the day I met you. Nothing before that counts.”

“What about you? Does that mean you were born that day too?”

He nodded.

“And nothing before that counts?”

He looked thoughtful, then uneasy.

“What do you want me to say, Reina?”

“Nothing. Don’t say anything.”

I was relieved he listened, and I was out of my head and back in my body, feeling him above me, enjoying the pressure of his ribs against mine.

I watch him, shrouded by the night, blueness almost like the one that swallows us when we go out into the ocean. He must feel my eyes on him because without waking, he reaches for me, pulls me to him, and I mold my body to his, kiss him until he kisses me back and I learn the lesson again that I’ve learned every night I’ve spent with him, that I will find in his body, and not in his words, the answers to all my questions.

On a late March morning, Nesto leaves me to go to Cuba. He hasn’t been there in more than a year and wanted to go for the holidays, but didn’t have the money to pay his monthly bills and didn’t want to miss out on any jobs that might come up. Now that he has the full-time gig at the dolphinarium it’s easier, and he bought a ticket home for the weekend. I offer to drive him to the airport but he insists on taking the bus. I take him to the stop, wait with him, and watch as he pulls his backpack, full of gifts and encargos for his family — medicines, vitamins, and shampoos and soaps since they say there’s an island-wide shortage — over his shoulder.

“I’ll see you soon,” he tells me the same way I’ve heard him say to his children so many times over the phone. He kisses me one last time and walks away.

This is a good exercise, I tell myself, to remember life before Nesto. I’ve gotten too used to the way we’ve built each other into our daily routines.

But I miss him. Nights alone, the dark hours before dawn when I sometimes turn and stir him from sleep with my lips.

One morning I go out to the dock on my end of the Hammerhead property with my coffee and see the bearded man from down the canal come out on his boat. He waves to me like he usually does but this time he slows down and gets close enough to my dock to ask me, without having to shout it, if I want go out for a ride with him.