Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

As he pulls me out of the crowd, Nesto looks different to me. Something in his eyes. Or the way the sun here has turned his skin a deeper amber than our sun back in Florida. I can’t place it, but before I say anything about it, Nesto turns to me and touches my face.

“You look different to me, Reina. Something happened to you in Cartagena.”

“The only thing that happened is that nothing happened.”

“Maybe that’s what you needed.”

Nesto rented a car from a neighbor, a discontinued miniature Korean Daewoo Tico left behind by Soviets in the nineties. He drives among other cars, Fords, Chryslers, and Pontiacs, most from the middle of last century, down a long road lined with billboards of socialist slogans: ¡Más Socialismo! and ¡La RevolucIÓn Sigue Adelante! splattered under images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara — Nesto’s namesake — or Camilo Cienfuegos, and sometimes of the three men together.

Entering the city through Avenida Salvador Allende, I see peeling building facades, sun-bleached the color of ash, broken balconies, boarded windows, crumbling columns — some structures already imploded with only posts of their original foundation remaining, no fresh paint to offset the decay. Nesto tells me this is what happens when there is no money for repair and you take everything away, leaving a city to defend itself against time, storms, and the salt of the sea.

He turns onto narrower city streets in the direction of the hotel I’ve arranged. He’s invited me to stay with his family in Buenavista but I insist I don’t want to impose myself on his clan, show up as proof of his life on the other side of the Straits when he’s come to be with them, not play tour guide to me. Any time he has left over, we can spend together, but I don’t want to be a burden.

“But you’ll at least come over and meet them.”

To that, I agree.

Nesto parks the car and comes along so I can check in at the hotel and unload my bags.

Once in the hotel room, small with wooden-paneled walls and colonial furniture, Nesto says, “You know, it wasn’t so long ago that I wouldn’t have been able to walk into this hotel with you, or even walk on the street with you without getting stopped by police.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re foreign.”

“How would they know?”

“They know . They have a file on every person that enters the country. You just got here and I’m sure they’ve already got a file started on you.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Remember where you are, Reina. The archipelago has ears.”

We leave the hotel, where Nesto eyes the employees, sure everyone is a chivato, an informer, and walk down to the Malecón, finding spots on the seawall under the last golden bits of daylight, the city at our backs.

Below our feet, young boys splash in the balnearios where Nesto says he learned to swim, shallow pools carved out of coral and stone buffering the seawall from the whipping waves of the open sea. There are no visible boats, there is nothing to indicate that anything exists beyond this island or that the sea ever ends.

Nesto says the Malecón is a city unto itself. Around us, Cuban families and tourists stroll; vendors offer peanuts in paper cones, and raspados of red and blue sugared ice; clusters of teenagers pass glass bottles around, sipping rum or matarata, moonshine. There are pairs of embracing lovers, the sounds of laughter, conversation, the music of guitars and tambores and voices singing songs to which everyone seems to know the words.

I’ve been waiting for him to explain. I don’t want to probe, but I can’t hold back the question I’ve been carrying with me from Cartagena.

“Are you going to tell me what happened with the marriage plans?”

“It’s like you said. Nothing happened and everything happened.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s Yanai. She doesn’t want to go.”

“I thought the plan was her idea too.”

“It was. But she changed her mind.”

“I don’t understand. All this time I thought she was trying to leave. The marriage to the German. The plan to marry you again.”

Nesto takes a deep breath, eyes fixed on the ocean.

“It’s not that simple, Reina. I had chances to leave this island before I finally took the step. In the nineties there was the Maleconazo right along this wall down by the port. There were boat hijackings and people protested so much the government said anyone who wanted to leave could leave and they wouldn’t put you in jail for trying like they usually do. I was nineteen or so. Sandro wasn’t yet born. I was young enough that I could have started a life somewhere else. It was the time to leave. But I was too scared. The boats were getting intercepted on the water by the Americans and the people on them sent to camps in Guantánamo or Panama. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk leaving just to end up in an army prison. I finally understood what my mother always told me. It’s hard to leave, to be the one to rip apart your family. So hard. No matter how much you hate where you are, no matter how much you curse your government or desire something better, leaving your home, your country, is like tearing off your own flesh.”

“You never told me that.”

“It would take a lifetime for me to tell you everything there is to tell.”

He sighs.

“There were other chances after that too. You know marriage is a negocio here. People come from other countries offering to marry a person. At that time, it was five or six thousand dollars for a European or Mexican. Two or three thousand for a Peruvian or Costa Rican. Men, women, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes they disappear with the deposit, but sometimes it’s a legitimate transaction. I never considered it but I know plenty of people who left that way. After the Maleconazo, life became even more difficult. With the Special Period, we were all the thinnest we had ever been in our lives. I was at Santa María del Mar with a friend. People would go there hoping a tourist on the beach would buy you lunch. I was just there to swim, to forget about things for a while. But a woman swam over to me in the water. She said she’d been watching me. She was from Barcelona. She liked me, it was obvious. She was a pretty good-looking temba, at least forty-five. I wasn’t interested but she kept talking. She told me she worked with a theater company and could send a letter of invitation for me so I could get a visa to travel to Spain. She said she had a big apartment and I could stay with her. She didn’t want money. She said she didn’t want anything except to help me because she saw how miserable things were for us here. She would pay for everything until I got settled. She would give me a job at her theater or help me find work doing something else. I didn’t believe her but she later sent the letter and the money for the plane ticket and I was lucky and got the tarjeta blanca and permission from the Spanish embassy to travel. Even Yanai wanted me to go so I could send for her and Sandro later and we could have a new life together in Spain. But people kept telling us horrible stories about Cubans who went to Europe and ended up sleeping on the streets, in bus stations, how people abroad hated them and mistreated them and wouldn’t give them jobs so they had no choice but to become criminals or prostitutes. They said the cold weather would kill us and we’d beg to come back home to Cuba but by then, maybe the government wouldn’t let us in. They terrorized us. We didn’t sleep thinking about it.”

“So what happened?”

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave. In the end, I was too scared. Things were so bad on the island in those days, but I still believed it couldn’t get worse. By the time I realized how wrong I was, it was too late. Yanai had opportunities to leave too. She had a cousin in Chile who said he could bring us both there. He had a restaurant and said he would put us to work. But Yanai was afraid to go so far away, almost to the end of the earth, so she told him no. And then, after we divorced, she married the German. She said he was a good man and all he wanted was companionship and that he promised he would send the kids to a good school and they would live in a beautiful house in the countryside. Sometimes I think she didn’t study enough for those language tests on purpose. But when she said she’d marry me again herself so I could bring her and the children over together, I believed she was serious. Now I see she never wanted to leave and she’s only being honest about it now. She says she’d rather live in her family’s house, keep up with the daily lucha because she already knows how to survive here. She’s afraid of the world out there, even in a place as close as Florida. I understand because I was afraid for so many years too. Everyone here is.”