Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

I remember the look he gave me every time he found me after I’d slipped off into a crowd. Relief, happiness, a kind of peace. I felt it too.

Sometimes Universo took me with him on the back of his motorcycle all the way to San Juan Nepomuceno, through hillside roads scattered with guerrilla checkpoints, past marshy ciénegas bleeding into green and blue mountains. When we arrived, we’d sit at the bottom of the church steps for hours, waiting to see if Universo could spot his father, who he heard lived there now with his second family, but we never saw him.

On the way back into Cartagena’s city walls, we’d stop at the feet of La Popa, the white monastery on the mountain that hovers over the city like a cloud, where Universo’s mother, who we all called La Cassiani, told her son the Karib and Calamarí Indians worshipped Buziraco, the devil in the form of a golden goat, until the friar who wanted to build the monastery and shrine to la Virgen de la Candelaria showed up, confronting the devil and his worshippers, throwing the golden goat off the side of the mountain. The devil retaliated with hurricanes and storms until the church was completed, and then relented, moving deeper into the continent. It’s for that reason, Universo’s mother told him, that Cartagena has always remained protected, and the rest of Colombia so troubled, already half a century under the thumb of its latest civil war.

Our grandmother told Carlito and me a different story: After Buziraco was thrown off the mountain, the devil of La Popa had lingered in the shadows of the hills, so quiet people didn’t notice he was there. But when our father took us away from Cartagena, the devil followed our family across the Caribbean, waiting to see how he could make us fall. She’d meant it to scare us into being good children but Carlito and I only laughed at her story, though it turned out to be the same warning I’d receive from the blue-haired bruja so many years later.

I climb the muralla steps up to the wall where I used to sit with Universo, where I can still hear my brother’s voice echoing against the stone corridor calling for me to come home, watching the sun fall like an orb into the dark ocean.

Carlito wanted to bring Isabela to Cartagena. He planned to marry her and the day he went to the bridge with her baby, he was already close to having all the money he’d need to buy her a nice engagement ring. He’d been saving for a year, and before that, even longer, for a down payment on a home. Isabela said she would take his last name, but told Carlito she wouldn’t give him a baby until after the wedding. On their honeymoon, he’d take Isabela to Cartagena, where Carlito predicted, his eyes shining with hope, they’d conceive their first child.

“But Cartagena is ours ,” I’d insist.

I hated when he talked about a future with Isabela, but hated even more that he’d peddle our past to her.

“Don’t be jealous, Reina. One day you’ll love someone as much as I love Isabela and you’ll want to share everything with that person too.”

Years later, I’d try to understand how Carlito had once wanted to give Isabela so much, yet had still managed to take everything away from her. But Dr. Joe told me the prison was filled with guys like Carlito, who’d committed terrible crimes against the person they professed to love the most.

“It’s a mixed-up, messy sort of love,” Dr. Joe said.

I remember wondering if there was any other kind.

I don’t go to my grandmother’s grave. But for three days, I walk the narrow passages from Santo Toribio to what was her home. I lean along the wall of the building across the street, watching to see if anyone goes in or comes out of the doorway. Her window is open and I stare at it for a long while to see if I can will the image of my grandmother’s figure into the frame, how she’d perch there to check on my brother and me playing in the park. I look down the block, see a pack of young boys walking together, and, as they press past me on the narrow sidewalk, I check their faces, aching in that way I’ve lived with for so long, trying to see my brother as he used to be, exploding with youthful curiosity, wrestling with the best and worst parts of himself.

If not today, I may never have the chance to see my grandmother’s place again.

I ring the bell beside the door and an intercom voice answers.

“I’m interested in a property,” I say.

The door buzzes open and I let myself in.

The ground-floor apartment, which used to belong to a guy everyone called “El Viejo Madrigal,” a retired army captain who liked to sit around in his old uniform drinking whiskey, is now an office and a slim woman, speaking Spanish with a French accent, welcomes me in. I planned to lie, tell her I’m looking to rent an apartment, but I try honesty instead, tell her the apartment on the fourth floor had been in my family for generations.

She doesn’t seem to believe me, or maybe she thinks I’ve come here to make a claim on the place, so I drop the name of the guy Mami sold it to, a lawyer from Medellín whose name I remember because she had a fling with him before transferring the deed.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I say. “I won’t be back again. I would be grateful if you would let me see it for just a minute. Then I’ll go.”

She looks around the office, maybe looking for an excuse to say no, but it’s otherwise empty beyond the two of us, not even a phone ringing.

She sighs, a little embarrassed, and stands up.

“Follow me. Just a few minutes though. I’ve got to mind the office and I can’t leave you up there alone.”

The stairwell and landings have been painted and retiled; our footsteps are the only sounds in a building that used to vibrate with voices. But the aroma of locked-in dusty moisture on the third and fourth floors is still the same — a smell my mother hated and said was full of spores that would one day kill us.

My grandmother’s door is no longer blue but tangerine, and the woman tells me the apartment has been recently vacated and is available should I want to live there again.

Without furniture it should appear larger, but the apartment feels so small. I can’t believe we lived here, the four of us.

The walls are a fresh white, the splintered wooden floors sanded down and varnished. The agent waits in the hall as I walk through the rooms, stand in the places that used to hold beds, where I slept and where my grandmother died.

I don’t know what to feel. I long for some sort of sensation that will bring all my lost pieces together, but I only feel the inertia of the space, the light breeze coming in through the window I’ve been watching for days from the street.

“Carlito,” I whisper his name, but I am overwhelmed with solitude.

There is nobody here but me.

Here on the equator, darkness falls evenly for twelve long hours of night. I don’t take myself to restaurants or to the champeta or salsa clubs the front desk guy recommends to the other hotel guests. I buy a bakery sandwich and a soda, and settle into my room, the sounds of the horse carriages and music of the Plaza Simón Bolívar reverberating against the terra-cotta tiles and stone walls the color of burned bone.

The TV news talks about a homeless man set on fire near the university in Bogotá, about the peace negotiations between the guerrilla forces and the government being carried out on neutral ground in Havana.

I think of Nesto.

By now he would have gone to the appointment from which he would have left a newly married man. I wonder if they kissed or took photos. I wonder if the children looked on with renewed hope at the sight of their parents together again.

My mother, despite all her boyfriends, never managed to make a new father of anyone for Carlito and me. She longed for a handsome and rich gentleman to show up and marry our whole family, give us a new last name. I think she still dreams of it.