Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

We stand in the check-in area, halfway through the crowd of passengers waiting to have their luggage weighed at the counter, enormous packages shrouded in plastic, overstuffed suitcases, store-boxed television monitors, and toasters. In front of us, a man pushes along a metal airport cart with a plastic car tire on it, and when Nesto asks what he’s going to do with only one tire, he says he’s already brought the other four over and this one is just the spare.

I stand with him in the convolution of lines. Airport taxes to be paid, forms to fill out, before they give him a boarding pass.

“It’s like this every time,” Nesto says. “It’s harder to get out of this country than it is to get in.”

He once told me about when he arrived at the Matamoros border crossing into the United States. He was told it was a dangerous city, full of trapaleros and paqueteros eager to scam or rob anyone passing through. He called some friends of friends, Cubans who’d settled there and made a living renting rooms to migrants getting ready for the crossing. They warned Nesto it was best to walk over with nothing on him but his Cuban passport because border guards were as bad as bandidos and would confiscate his money, clothes, whatever he had on him. He should leave his things with them, they told him; they’d keep it all safe till he called from the other side with an address, and then would send his stuff over to him. When he made it into Brownsville — no thieves at the gate, no hostile Border Patrol agents — then to Miami, he tried to call the friends in Matamoros to give them his uncle’s address, but the number was wrong and he never heard from them again.

His arrival in Miami was full of similar deceptions. The amigo who helped him open his first bank account, write a check, and use an ATM machine also stole his pass code and robbed him dry. That blue truck he drives now isn’t the first one he bought in the United States. The first, purchased from an acquaintance, died a day after he brought it home. And during his first year here, when he went out looking for work, he was shocked to hear employers tell him without hesitation, without asking as much as his name, “I don’t hire Cubans,” which is why he decided to start working for himself.

I see Nesto is embarrassed when he tells me these stories. I can’t picture him so vulnerable. Until I see him at the airport this morning, his eyes nervous and uncertain as they search mine when we stand by the security checkpoint before we part ways to catch our separate flights at different ends of the airport.

He pulls me into his arms. I close my eyes tight, wishing us back to last night, in the cottage, when we lay close and quiet, neither of us speaking the truth that he will return from this trip married to someone else.

“I hope everything works out the way you want it to,” I tell him.

He closes his eyes and nods.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for in Cartagena.”

There is already an appointment for his marriage at some government office, where the person in charge will ask a bunch of questions, like why, if he and Yanai divorced years ago, they’ve decided to remarry, and they’ll say they fell in love again on one of his visits home, realized they can’t live without one another, and want to make their family whole again. The way he rehearsed it aloud in the cottage, peppering his story with details like that being far away in Los Yunay Estey made him understand he can only ever love her, the mother of his children, even had me convinced. But then Nesto broke character; shook his head; looked down at the floor, moaning as if suddenly ill; then tried the monologue all over again, trying to sound even more authentic.

“I can’t ask you to wait for me.”

“I know.”

He steps out of my embrace. My arms fall off his shoulders before I understand this is the last time I’ll touch him and these will be our last words to each other before we part. He’s turned away from me and become a part of the crowd drifting toward the security X-ray machines. I don’t want him to see me watching him, so I walk away quickly, and if he turns back to look at me one last time, he’ll have found me gone.

The taxi drops me at my hotel, a former hostel upgraded to a boutique hotel on Calle de la Soledad. I wash my face, change out of my jeans and into a light dress that won’t stick to me with humidity, place myself on the street, and try to see if by memory I can lead myself to my grandmother’s home, back to the first bed I slept in as a newborn, cradled by my mother’s arms, while my brother slept beside us.

The streets are even more colorful now than years ago when Carlito and I came with our mother to see Abuela through her final days. A basket of fuchsia, turquoise, and banana yellow, with dark wood balconies dripping with bougainvillea, stone streets pounded by horse-drawn carriages like the one Carlito and I once saw turn over right in the Plaza de los Coches. One second the horse shuffled along mechanically, and the next, it collapsed, flat on its side, the carriage buckled over. Shopkeepers and street vendors rushed over to help the passengers to their feet. The horse was dead. Its ribs and pelvis protruded and tourists asked when was the last time the driver fed the horse, talking about animal abuse and fair labor. Others just blamed the heat.

I was quiet the rest of the day and Carlito laughed at me for being so sentimental, said nobody was going to miss a ratty old horse that was probably diseased anyway. I was surprised he could be so callous. He’d always been nice to animals, not like some of the weirder kids from the neighborhood who used to kill squirrels to give them shoebox funerals in their backyards. Carlito even saved a rodent or two from certain death at those kids’ hands, but that day he was strutting new teenage macho heartlessness.

“How would you like it if somebody said that about you after you’re gone? Ese pendejo comemierda. We’re better off without him.’”

Carlito laughed arrogantly. “Everybody knows I was saved from the water by angels. Nobody would dare say something like that about me.”

When my mother was a girl, the whole neighborhood knew when a norteamericano set foot in El Centro. Now, there are so many tourists beyond the moneyed folks who stay at the fancy hotels, a daily extranjero flood of cruise ship passengers doubling the population between the city walls. Street vendors toss around English and Italian phrases to get their attention, and even the kids rapping verses to tourists sucking on fruity drinks at the café tables in the Plaza Santo Domingo conclude their performances with “Come on, amigo, a dollar for my song.”

I find my way through the pedestrian crowds to Abuela’s building, which I remember as whitewashed, rain-stained gray where its fachada merged with the pavement, now painted the color of guava, fresh tejas on the roof, its balconies newly honey-stained. A sign beside the door that once led to the stairwell spiraling to the apartments above reads, Inquire Within About Sales and Rentals.

Above the street, the window where Abuela used to sit at her sewing machine table is open. I can ask the building’s new management if I can see the home that belonged to my family. See how it’s changed, maybe take some pictures to show my mother. I’ll tell Carlito about it too. I still report to him. I don’t believe in much, but I believe he hears me, still see his face across from me at the prison listening to me as I’d describe the feeling of being drenched by a sudden rainstorm, the warm sizzle of sun on my skin, the sweet and tart smell of the orange and pineapple groves I’d pass on the drive down to see him.

I want to see if I feel the same as I did when I saw the house in Miami ripped out of its soil.