Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

But I hesitate. I’m not ready to step within those walls, identify myself to the new owners, say the words this was once my home.

I used to blame my mother for having taken us away. I imagined that if we’d never left, the darkness wouldn’t have found us, and even if my brother had grown up to be a killer just the same, at the very least, because there is no capital punishment in Colombia, Carlito wouldn’t have been sentenced to death, and probably not even to cadena perpetua, which is not even a life sentence like the name implies, but a maximum of sixty years. But Mami told me I was wrong, even if in Colombia it seemed like a person could get away with more for less. She said there’s another kind of justice down here and sooner or later, the streets would have made him pay for his crime.

I step away from my grandmother’s building down to the tree-lined plaza at the corner, still glistening from fresh afternoon rain. The Parque Fernández de Madrid has been cleaned up, but the same old guys stand in the shade at its fringes selling candies and frituras out of carts, arguing about fútbol teams, a solitary vago fishing for scraps in garbage cans. When my grandmother’s hand joints stiffened and she became too old to care for the beauty of other women’s nails and hair, she sold mamoncillos and ciruelas de campo from baskets to passersby. In this park, I used to spend hours with my brother and the neighborhood children because anywhere was better than the stiff heat of Abuela’s apartment, which always smelled of her tobacco and the incense she used to camouflage it. Here, I met Universo and came with him often when we were older, listening to him talk about his plans for his life, how jealous he was that I was lucky enough to grow up far from Cartagena and how one day, even though his mother forbade it, he’d leave too.

Besides the tourists, the foreign men with preening local girls, the slouching backpackers, are the ordinary faces of tired people whose names I may have once known, who may have known me when I was still considered una hija del barrio even though my parents had taken me to the other side of the Caribbean, because back then people still believed, for a long time after you left, that you might still come home.

An old man sits with a paper bag in his hands, tossing crumbs to the crows and pigeons and sparrows at his feet. There’s a commotion among birds between the benches. A furious chirping grows louder near me, a pair of sparrows split from the hungry swarm, pecking each other with their beaks, wrestling against each other, rolling on the ground, their claws joined, until one rises above the other, jabbing at the other bird’s beak and back. I stomp by them so they’ll separate, but they go back at each other with more fury. I shoo them with my hands, but they meet in the air and pull each other down into the dust, and it’s clear these birds are fighting to the death.

“Déjelos, mi niña,” the old man with the crumbs calls to me. “You’ll never stop one animal from trying to kill another. Nature is wiser than we are.”

I leave the birds to their massacre, the old man and the park behind me. I walk until I pass the cafetería on the corner of Calle de la Universidad where Mami would sometimes escape to, usually a few days into our visit every summer, after a standoff with our grandmother. Mami would always threaten to pack up and leave, though she never did. I’d sit with her, chewing on a pan de bono as she sipped aguardiente, saying she never belonged here and it was a mistake to keep coming back.

Though we came to spend time with Abuela, Mami often had dates with men she knew from her girlhood who were already tired of their wives, or she’d go for a drink at a hotel bar and find a tourist or businessman to take her out that night. She never brought men home, but on nights she stayed out, Abuela would sit by the window and watch over the street to see if she was coming. If she stayed out all night, Abuela would lock the door, refusing to let Mami in the next morning, making Carlito and me swear to do the same because Abuela said we had to be unified in our punishment.

Mami would plead to us through the door. Carlito always caved in first, slowly undoing the lock. But her shame was complete and she’d move around our shared space careful as a mouse, going into the bathroom for a long shower until one of the neighbors screamed that the building water tank had run out.

“Don’t ever become like your mother,” Abuela warned me regularly, whether Mami was out of sight or right in front of her.

My mother would look at me with hurt eyes, but would never argue or defend herself.

Years later, when it was me who disappeared with boys, mostly Universo, sometimes not coming home until sunrise while Mami slept because she didn’t get as many dates anymore, Abuela would taunt her daughter, tell Mami it was obvious she was jealous of me because she couldn’t attract quality men, just the barrio bums.

“What would a decent man want with a trash dump like you?” she’d hiss. “Only pigs like garbage.”

Abuela had a way of silencing us. Carlito and I watched as she humiliated our mother, never sticking up for her, never mentioning that it didn’t matter how flawed she was, she was our mamita and we loved her.

Once back at our house in Miami, our mother would make me hand over the dresses Abuela spent all summer sewing for me with the best fabrics she could find at the shops on Badillo, taking scissors to them, ripping the seams, slicing the dresses into long rags she’d put on the end of a wooden pole and use to wash the floors.

If my grandmother could know me as I am now, she’d say I missed my golden window in life. She’d say I threw it all away to look after my brother, the years I should have been busy making my way in the world. She’d say I squandered my feminine currency by hanging around a prison for so long.

She advised me when I was still a teenager, instead of going back for another year of school, to stay with her in San Diego and marry Universo so I could get marriage and children out of the way. Abuela had faith Universo was a good boy raised by good women, and wouldn’t grow up to be the typical sinvergüenza husband who disappears Friday through Sunday. Even so, at the time, I couldn’t imagine a worse fate.

It’s a wonder Universo never got me pregnant since I was never more careless than with him. He might have loved me. He never said it, but it’s possible. But he was a boy a bit like my brother, wild with loyalty to his mami. Universo’s vieja never let me beyond the front rooms of their house on Calle del Cuartel. I pass by it now and see it’s been converted into a hotel too, the front sala where the tías once crocheted and gossiped made into a lobby, the wall that once held a cabinet of their finest china now studded with room key slots behind a bulky reception desk. But every now and then, when his mother and all her sisters were out visiting parientes in San Pedro, he’d sneak me inside and we’d do it all over the house.

“That malparida Castillo girl,” la vieja would tell Universo, her sisters, and anybody from the neighborhood who would listen, “she’s more dangerous than a bullet to the ear.”

To keep her son busy and away from me, Universo’s mother would send him on endless errands. She didn’t trust the modern supermarkets popping up all over the city, selling packaged meats and imported shined-up fruit. She preferred to send Universo outside the city walls to Bazurto. Sometimes I went with him. We’d make our way through the maze of vendors, pinch our noses through the odors, until we arrived at the shaded section where they kept the live animals. Universo would pick out a chicken, watch as the vendor broke its neck, dunking it in a pot of boiling water to loosen the flesh, making it easier to pull out the feathers. I’d hide my shock so I wouldn’t have to hear from Universo how sheltered I was by my North American life, and how what goes on in those big gringo meat factories was far worse than this. Behind us, rows of cows and pigs hung on hooks for people to pick out their cuts — not a single part going to waste, down to the eyes, tails, and hooves. I’d stay with him until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then wander out through the fish stalls to the road, crossing the traffic of trucks and horse carts to the polluted lagoon, and watch the scavenging seabirds until Universo came to find me.