Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

I wonder what Yanai thinks of their reunion. I wonder if she’ll be willing to let him go in the end and if he will be willing to walk away.

Nesto gave me the number of his mother’s place the last time he went home because his American cell phone would be blocked from working on this island. He said to call if I needed him. He said to take that any way I wanted.

I consider it for a while before I dial.

He told me he never would have left his family if he hadn’t had to. He would trade everything to be with his kids again.

Would you trade me? I thought, selfishly, though I knew better, because not so long ago, I would have traded anything and anybody in my life, even my own mother, to have Carlito walking free beside me.

It takes a few tries, sorting out the tangle of numbers and country codes on the hotel room phone.

The buzzy ringing, the voice of an older woman answering.

“This is Reina. Nesto’s friend,” I say, feeling foolish.

She responds as if I’m just a neighbor calling from around the corner, “Oh, yes. Hold on, hold on.”

I hear her footsteps, as if she’s walking with the phone, other voices in the background, and I try to pick out who they are from how he described his family members to me — could that girl’s voice belong to his cousin, or his niece? The man, maybe his stepfather, or an uncle? But then I hear only Nesto, telling me to wait one more moment, he’s going somewhere quiet. The other voices fade, and he says he’s taken the phone to his bedroom at the back of the house, which, no matter how many years he’s been away, has remained his room, as he left it, the same way we maintained Carlito’s room for him until Mami occupied it with her saints and crucifixes.

“I hoped you’d call. How did you find your city?”

“Not really mine anymore. How are things over there?”

“You know. The same.”

We are both quiet.

“It’s not the same though. You’re married now.”

For a moment, I think the line has gone dead. I hear nothing, not even his breath, until the line comes alive again with his voice.

“No. It didn’t happen.”

“Why not?”

I imagine another case of postponed appointments, bureaucratic delays.

“Let’s just say that plans have changed. But I can’t talk about it on the phone. ¿Me explico?”

I know he means that over there you never know who is listening in on a call.

“I’m sorry. I know how much you were hoping this would work out.”

“It might still. It might not.”

I don’t know how to respond so I just listen.

“I wish you could see how things are here. I wish you could experience life as a Cuban. No, I take it back,” he laughs. “Nobody deserves that.”

He stops himself and I hear him take a deep breath.

“I wish you could come, though. See my house. Meet my family. You would see that everything I’ve told you is true.”

“I’ve always believed you.”

“You can hear about it from me all day long, you can read about it in your magazines, watch it on TV Martí , but you won’t understand until you see it for yourself.”

He pauses.

“You could come here. You have the two passports. You could postpone your ticket and fly into and out of Havana from Colombia. You’d face no issues when you get back to the States.”

“I’m supposed to go back home tomorrow.” But the word home feels odd leaving my lips and even stranger sitting heavy on the airwaves between us.

“Reina, I’m inviting you. Come see my island. I would be so happy if you came.”

Nesto has never asked me for anything. And until now, I’ve never felt there was anything I could give him.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

“Don’t think about it. Just come.”

I tell myself, it’s not a big deal, simply going to visit a friend for a few days, but of course it’s more than that; it’s to carve out another space in whatever little time we may have left together, to meet him at his origin, the way I returned to Colombia to meet myself in mine.

Now, to go to him in Havana seems like the only choice, continuing on the same path that brought me back to Cartagena:

The only way to hold on.

The only way to let go.

Afew nights before we left for our separate journeys, Nesto and I went out to the beach and saw, on the path illuminated by the moon, the long tracks left by a turtle that came ashore to lay her eggs. We followed the lines until we found her nest far from the tide in a knoll at the foot of the dunes. Nesto marked the area with coconuts and seashells. There were times he and his family were forced to survive on turtle meat and now that he was no longer hungry, he said, he’d show his gratitude by looking after this turtle’s babies in her absence.

In Florida I dream of Cartagena, but here, I dream I am lost among night waters trying to swim back to the cottage, to Nesto, gasping, my limbs fatigued. But then I feel myself buoyed from underneath by a giant loggerhead turtle who carries me on her back. I hold tight to her shell as she breaks through the current, and though I feel safe in her care, in my dream the moonless night is unending, and we never reach the shore.

There are no direct flights from Cartagena de Indias to Havana. Less than a thousand miles separate the cities but, instead of heading north across the Caribbean, I’m on a plane heading south, over the rippling cordillera of the Andes into the city built on the savanna, Bogotá.

I remember making the same stopover with my mother and brother. Mami always seemed nervous and said it was because she didn’t like being so far inland, the singsong accent of la costa with its swallowed syllables, the sweet air fresh with salt and sun, so unlike the guttural voices of the capital and the thin air high on the plateau, the atmospheric pressure change we felt upon touching ground that made our heartbeats jumpy — the same fluttering I feel in my chest now — and which, if we’d ever stayed longer than our layovers, would cause headaches and dizziness until the body and blood adjusted to the altitude and the soroche passed.

The man sitting in the seat next to me, a guy in a wrinkled suit who so far hasn’t spoken a word, gathers his things to get off after we land.

When he sees I haven’t budged from my seat by the window he turns to me.

“This isn’t your stop too?”

“I’m staying on until Havana.”

“¿Y qué se te perdió por allá?”

“I didn’t lose anything over there,” I say, smiling, because it’s true, I haven’t lost Nesto yet, “but you never know what I might find.”

A short while after the first man leaves, another old man arrives in his place. He settles into his seat, pulls a worn prayer book from his bag, and sets it on his lap, gently caressing a small photograph between his fingers. It’s an image of the same young boy with a staff I saw on Nesto’s dashboard the first night I climbed into his truck under that full moon. The one I recognized that first night as El Santo Niño de Atocha, rescuer of victims of circumstance, safe keeper of travelers, but whom Nesto claimed as Elegguá, opener of paths, so living beings can accomplish their destiny.

I exit the José Martí airport terminal and make my way to the corridor designated for arrivals through a crowd of waiting families and friends. At first, it’s as if everyone has his eyes, his broad smile. But then I see a hand reaching above all the others. He pushes through the wall of shoulders and elbows toward me, his long hair pulled off his face, temples and collarbones shining with sweat, pulling me close to him.

“I can’t believe it,” he says between embraces. “You’re really here.”