Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“You could have gotten yourself killed, Reina.”

If my eyes had been closed at that moment, I’d have believed it was my brother scolding me.

“You can’t just get on a boat with someone you don’t know. It’s dangerous and irresponsible.”

“That’s how I met you .”

“At least we were on land. But I still could have hurt you. And this guy could have strangled you and dumped you in the ocean without any trouble. You would have disappeared and nobody would have ever known.”

I crawl off of him and let him be. But an hour or so later, when he finally decides it’s time to eat rather than sleep, and we sit on the sofa with plates of arroz con pollo on our laps, I try to bring up the matter of the wild dolphins again.

“You think it’s true what Jojo says? They stole them from the waters out here?”

“Why not? In Cuba and probably in most places, when a dolphin dies, they just send people out to catch another.”

“Do you think it’s true the animals are content in their pens because they’re fed and don’t have to worry about predators?”

“That’s a lie they tell so they can keep doing what they do.”

“You don’t think they lose their instincts?”

“No animal does. That’s why they’re called instincts . Everything that is learned can be unlearned.”

“Even if they’ve been captives for years and years?”

“Yes.”

“Even if they were born in captivity and have known no other life?”

I’m thinking of the babies in the pens, born from forceful semen collections and inseminations — the babies that the dolphinarium advertises with a sign outside the entrance reading Come See Our New Additions!

“Yes,” Nesto says with some hesitation. “Even after generations have passed and their ancestors were the last ones to taste freedom.”

He stands up, takes our cleared plates to the sink, and rinses them off.

When he’s through, he goes back to the bed, collapses atop the covers, and shuts his eyes.

A few minutes of silence pass and I assume he’s fallen asleep, but then I hear Nesto’s voice call to me one more time.

“Believe me, Reina. There is not an animal on this earth that if given the choice between freedom or captivity, would not choose to be free.”

Nesto sleeps and I try to sleep next to him, but wake up every hour until I finally pull myself out of bed and walk out the door to the beach. I go barefoot, which I don’t think much about until I’m halfway across the wooden floorboards that lead to the shore, noticing the planks are populated by roaches, worms, and snails out for midnight grazing. Around me, I hear the song of the night creatures, owls, the wrestling in the brush of what are probably raccoons or possums.

I walk until I’m on the beach, sit near the water’s edge, and stare out at the murky sky, the flat sea shining like a razor under fractured moonlight.

I feel a distant disorientation, as if I am no longer myself, living my life, but a stranger, an unknown, living in a world entirely unfamiliar to me, as if I’m watching it in pictures, snapshots from a life that might be torn from me at any moment.

My brother wouldn’t recognize this woman sitting curled into her knees on the beach in the darkest point of night. He would only recognize me as the girl I was when he was alive, in that brown house with the bars on it, on that street where people avoided conversation with us.

I wonder what he would think of me down here, on this island, of the sight of me out on the water, throwing myself into the ocean with only Nesto to protect me should anything go wrong. He would likely warn me not to trust him, say that I have no reason to believe Nesto would do me no harm. He would say you shouldn’t trust anyone but your own family and even then, it’s a risk.

I am mourning my sadness.

I feel it slip away through the tranquillity of these islands, this new life, this ocean, this never-abandoning sun.

I never expected that I would miss the pain of all that came before.

My eyes drift near my feet where crabs stir from half-covered holes in the sand, and a little farther off, the curved silhouettes of hermit crabs drag themselves toward the dunes. The beach is rumbling with life even if nobody is around to see it.

Again, I think of Carlito. The years I tried to serve his sentence with him, and how he let me. Maybe it was wrong of me, but sometimes I hoped that he’d see in my eyes how I’d stopped living for anything and anyone but him, and that he would tell me not to come back.

Another memory comes to me.

When I was a girl of maybe twelve or thirteen, one of our neighbors put the word out that a special saint was coming to her house for a week and all the mothers of the block were invited to bring their daughters to visit her. I didn’t know what this meant but Mami took me over, and the señora had all the girls sit around the tile floor of her living room while she stood beside a huge statue of the Virgin of something or other, dressed in a jeweled cloak with real human hair on her head, and told us that we should pray to this statue to bring us our future husbands, ask that they be good men, and to help keep us pure on the journey of waiting for this blessed man to appear in our lives. I remember looking all around me. The girls, some who were probably as confused as I was, quickly went for it, lowering their heads to pray. The mothers got on board too, even mine, who was as hopeful as ever in those years that she’d marry again. But I knew there was no reason for me to pray for something like purity when I’d already done things the other girls in that room hadn’t. I’d already shown my body to boys, let them touch me. In a year or so, I would be pregnant for the first time. I already suspected there was nobody above looking out for me. I knew there must be a reason people in the neighborhood, and even my own mother at times, called me La Diabla.

As the lady at the front led the group through a round of Hail Marys, one of the girls sitting on the floor near me touched my ear.

“What happened to you?” she said, tracing my mark of the abikú.

“A fishhook caught me,” I lied, because I’d just heard a story about a kid who lost an eye that way.

Before we left the lady’s house that night, she had each of us girls write on a piece of paper our deepest wishes and prayers for the Virgin, which we were supposed to fold into tiny bits and leave in a basket by the statue. I watched the girls and our mothers think carefully before they wrote down the words of their prayers. I pretended to write but the paper I left folded at the Virgin’s feet was blank.

Mami wasn’t satisfied with laying out her wishes to only the traveling Virgin. She went to the top husband-finder of all the saints, San Antonio, and asked her statue of him to bring her someone wonderful. She tried all the tricks: she removed the baby Jesus from the saint’s arms and hid him in a drawer until her prayers were answered and San Antonio delivered a new husband for her. When that didn’t work, she tied the statue upside down to a post on her bed, but when one of her boyfriends was over, he hit his foot against it and when he looked under the bed and saw the statue there like a secuestrado held for ransom, he knew exactly what Mami was up to and didn’t come around again. But she kept praying, and told me the story of a girl, a prima of a prima of a prima back in Colombia, who also prayed to San Antonio for a husband, but one day she got so angry at him for not producing that she threw the statue out of her apartment window and a few moments later a young man came knocking on the door with the saint in his hand, saying, “Excuse me, miss. Did you lose a santo?” And of course, the guy became her husband.