Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

After I came to know Nesto, I learned Saint Anthony was another face of Elegguá, whom Nesto regularly asked for assistance; the wise one, the trickster who, as a boy, was the only orisha able to cure Olódumare when he was ill, and for that reason, the Great One made him the controller of destinies, the one whose blessing must be sought at the opening of every prayer to any other orisha.

“You have to give yourself permission to believe,” Nesto once told me. “The orishas are forces of light, and you don’t have to look far to find them. The sun, nourishing us with its warmth, is Olorun. Mars and Mercury are Ogún and Elegguá, guardians over their warrior sons. The moon is the queen Yemayá, keeping vigil over her children on earth. They’re watching over us even when we don’t think they are.”

I smiled, because my mother would often, in her way, with her own santos and prayers, say the same thing.

When the sand becomes too chilly for my feet, I walk back to the cottage. I left the porch light on and moths gather in the glow, and I see what I haven’t noticed by day, that star spiders have been at work on a few webs under the lip of the cottage roof. I’m near the door when I look down and see what at first glance looks to be an especially huge cockroach at the threshold, but when I bend in closer, I see it’s a scorpion.

Mami raised Carlito and me with her own childhood habit of checking our shoes for scorpions before we put them on since scorpions like to hide in small, dark places. But I’ve never seen one in Miami. Even when Carlito and his boy gang said they were going out hunting for scorpions, they never found any.

This scorpion is dark brown or black, with large hook hands and an upward-coiling tail. I’ve heard they can jump. Mami was bitten by one as a girl and said it almost killed her, and other times just said she wished it had killed her.

I stare at this scorpion for a few minutes.

It doesn’t budge.

I don’t know how else to get past it or at least nudge it on its way so I call for Nesto.

He finally turns up in the doorway, rubbing his eyes as they adjust to the porch light.

“Don’t come any closer,” I warn, pointing to the scorpion between us.

“What the hell are you doing out here?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He goes back into the cottage and returns with a broom, a glass, a magazine; leans over; in one swift movement, uses the broom to scoot the scorpion into the glass, covering the opening with the magazine; and walks far from the path, liberating the scorpion in the land extending behind the cottage into the rough edges of what used to be the plantation.

I’m still on the walkway when he comes back, and he pushes past me, tugging my elbow, mumbling, “Reina, por Dios, I really wish that when I close my eyes or I’m not around, you would just be where I think you are.”

When we’re back in bed he lies flat, staring at the ceiling, the fan above making slow, nearly airless rotations.

“Reina. I have to tell you something.”

I expect him to say that the scorpion is a bad omen, because that’s what I was thinking until I reminded myself I don’t believe in omens, ever since my father decided that my very birth was the worst omen of all since some say that when abikús come back to life, the deal they make with the spirits, in order to remain among the living, is to send another person back to the death world in their place.

“Something happened when I was in Cuba.”

He turns his head to me. I’m almost afraid to look at him.

“You were with someone.”

“No.”

I would be more relieved if I didn’t sense something just as bad behind it.

“I decided something while I was there. We decided something.”

“ We? ”

“My family and me.”

“Decided what?”

“I have to get married.”

I try my best not to react but my eyes must give me away.

“Let me explain. You know the problems I’m having bringing my children over here. All the delays. There’s a way around it. A much faster way. Through the Family Reunification Program. But we have to be a complete family. If I remarry their mother, I won’t have to wait for the children one by one. And they won’t have to leave their mother. She has relatives in Miami they can live with. I’ll be able to see them when I want. I can move there to be closer to them. Everything will be better. It’s the easiest thing. We won’t have to wait as long. It’s the waiting, Reina. It’s killing me.”

“You’ll be a family again.” I want to sound like this is a great thing.

“I’ll be able to be a real father again. Not a long-distance one. But it won’t be a real marriage. It’s just to get them all out of there.”

He’s told me many times before how people are casually married in Cuba to ease the way for any kind of paperwork, from visas to car exchanges to housing permutas, and just as easily divorced, while people who live as married couples are often not married at all. Yanai herself went on to marry a German, hoping he’d take her and the children to Europe, but she hadn’t managed to pass the required language test, so her visa never got approved and the German divorced her to marry a Dominican girl. But even if marriages can be transactional, this doesn’t seem like one of those cases to me.

“She doesn’t want to be with me any more than I want to be with her. It’s for the children. That’s it. Once they’re all over here and she gets the political asylum, we agreed we’ll divorce right away.”

I don’t know if I should be joyful that he’s finally come up with a way to accomplish reuniting with his kids, or disappointed because one way or another he’ll be married to someone else.

My silence must convey this, because he touches my arm and repeats, “It won’t be a real marriage. But it is a real family. That’s why I have to do this.”

“So when is it going to happen, this wedding of yours?”

“Don’t call it a wedding. It’s not going to be at El Palacio de los Matrimonios or with a party or anything. It’s just an appointment at a government office. We sign papers and that’s it, we’re married. I don’t know when it will be.”

“Soon?”

“I hope so. The sooner we do it, the sooner I can bring Sandro and Camila over here.”

Nesto has told me he’s most worried about Sandro because he reminds him so much of himself, once a great student in his aula, who the teachers now report doesn’t seem to care about anything and if he keeps it up he’ll end up in an Escuela de Conducta. He’s becoming restless, intranquilo, disillusioned like Nesto was at that age, even if they’ve raised him to be a good pionero too, just as Nesto says all parents do — the typical doble-moral, patriots in public, dissidents in their hearts — so the State won’t give them a hard time. But the Revolution is old, Nesto told me, it means nothing to the young, and now Sandro sees the great Nada that awaits him if he stays on the island. Nesto fears his son falling in with las malas compañias in Buenavista, or worse, going from a reform school to El Combinadito, the jail for minors. Or maybe even ending up like one of Nesto’s best friends from childhood, a guy named Lenin who started selling Jamaican marijuana that came in through Oriente to foreigners in order to provide for his family, and was quickly turned in by the CDR, both his legs broken by police and sentenced by the court to fifteen years in prison.

“I know I can’t ask you to wait for me, for all this to pass,” he tells me. “You have your own life to think about.”

We are both quiet.

“I will miss you, Reina, but I will understand it.”

I don’t know what else to say because I know if I were in his place I would do the same, just like I would have done anything to be under the same roof as my brother for one more day before I lost him forever.