Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“Didn’t you tell her you’d help her?”

“She knows I can only help so much. She’d have to get a job.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Here she can go to her job at the women’s clinic and earn the equivalent of twelve dollars a month, but she would spend more than that on the buses or almendrones she’d have to take to get there. So she is able to not work and earn the same, which is to say, nothing.”

He points across the dark water and night horizon.

“There, everyone has to work and hard . Nothing is free. You get a small amount of help through the Adjustment Act but beyond that, you are on your own. She’s scared. She says she doesn’t want to drown out there. She prefers to drown at home even if our children drown with her. I tell her, ‘Yanai, there is nothing for them here,’ and she just says, ‘Look at you. What have you accomplished there in La Yuma? You’re a nobody over there just like you were over here.’ I don’t have anything to answer to that because she’s right. I am a nobody. But I only want for my children to be what they want to be, say what they want to say, have what they want to have. It’s a small ambition for anyone else, but for me it’s everything.”

I know there are no words that I can offer to comfort him, so I slip my hand over his as it rests on the smooth stone wall and we sit together a while longer in silence as the Malecón of the night begins to take form: pale Europeans walking by, arms draped around much younger local girls provocatively dressed; foreign women marked by sunburns and tan lines, elbows linked with dark, muscled young men. Farther down the road and a little deeper into the night, Nesto tells me, the real body commerce begins.

We start the long walk up Paseo del Prado to my hotel, passing prostitutes in arched walkways, the shadows of joined bodies in dim alleyways between crumbled buildings, behind graffitied barricades under signs indicating reparaciones, though Nesto says it takes an eternity for anything to get repaired, and often a building simply collapses, taking the lives inside with it.

The hotel bar is full of foreigners and a few locals among them. Once in the room, Nesto flops onto the bed as if it’s already his and I lie beside him, kissing him. He won’t stay the night. He wants to see his kids in the morning to walk with them to school. We enjoy each other for the part of the night we do have together.

“I have to admit, I didn’t think you would come.”

“I told you I would.”

“I thought you would change your mind, or you would lose your way somehow. I didn’t think there would ever be a day when I’d see you in Havana, with me.”

That night, my first on Nesto’s island, I dream of walking at dusk through a thick green forest where trees burn down to their roots, each one spiraled by smoke and fire. In my dream, I don’t run or panic, but remain still, heat on my face, watching the forest burn until all that is left is seared earth.

Two days in Havana. Nesto says he can take me where the tour groups go — to see the lovely painted and restored plazas of Old Havana where musicians perform “Chan Chan” and “Guantanamera” on street corners, where tourists drink daiquiris at government-run cafés and buy communist memorabilia from government-licensed vendors running shops out of their living rooms. The Havana of illusions, he calls it, packaged for foreign consumption.

“I’d rather see your Havana.”

“You will. Tonight I’ll take you to dinner at my mother’s house.”

“What do they know about me?”

“That you’re important to me. And that I invited you here.”

“Okay,” I say. “But what can I bring? I don’t want to show up empty-handed.”

“You won’t. You and I are the ones bringing the food.”

Today Nesto has borrowed another car from a friend, a boxy brown Russian Lada with windows that don’t roll up or down, and a backseat that slides off its rails hitting the car’s unpadded and oxidized metal shell. We are on our way to the tree-lined streets of Vedado, on what Nesto says is the daily mission of every citizen on the island, to put food on the table that night.

We start at an agropecuario, a market built on a lot amid mansions in varying states of disrepair and decay, abandoned by the rich who once inhabited them. The better-maintained ones are government offices or foreign firms, but most have been split from single-family homes into tenements holding up to twenty families. Nesto buys a plastic bag from a lady selling them on the curb and inside the market, and we make our way down rows of produce piled onto crates and tables. Nesto picks onions, yuca, malanga.

“Are there potatoes?” Nesto asks a vendor.

“No, amigo. Maybe next month or the month after.”

“How about lemons?”

“No lemons in the markets since November. Only for tourists.”

At the back of the market, Nesto buys several pounds of rice and beans.

“I thought you got that stuff free,” I say.

“The State gives just five pounds of rice and beans per month, and it comes full of pebbles and worms. Even the coffee they give us is cut with peas.”

We pass the butcher stand where a man with blood on his apron swats flies gathering around thin slabs of beef hanging on hooks and fillets resting on his splintered wooden counter, Todo Por la Revolución painted in red across the front.

Outside the market, as we walk back to where he parked the Lada, a man approaches Nesto with a stack of egg crates on his shoulder. Nesto negotiates for four dozen eggs and the man helps him arrange the cartons on the floor of the Lada so they won’t crack.

“Do you really need that many?” I ask.

“With the Libreta, a person is only allowed five eggs a month, but right now there are no eggs in any dispensary or market in all of Playa or Marianao. So we have to get them here while they have them. Next week or next month, there might not be any.”

Just as the egg vendor walks off with the money Nesto paid him, another man arrives at Nesto’s side whispering that he has in his possession potatoes, which only tourist restaurants have had access to in months.

“Bueno, amigo,” Nesto says. “Show me what you’ve got.”

The man disappears around a corner, reappears a few minutes later with a paper sack in his arms, and presents it to Nesto, who pushes down the flaps to get a glimpse of what look to be real potatoes, fat as fists.

“Give me a dozen,” Nesto says, and the man is thrilled to be paid in CUCs.

“Black market potatoes,” I say, once we are in the car and on our way again.

“Black market everything .”

We hit three supermarkets where you can buy food, clothes, furniture, and appliances at inflated prices in the tourist currency, but are unable to find milk for Nesto’s children beyond condensed or the powdered kind. Finally, at a diplomercado out in Miramar where the expats and diplomats shop, we find real boxed milk and Nesto buys an entire case along with a few other luxuries — cheese, salami, pasta sauce, cookies, and crackers — food he says will hold up after he’s gone and won’t spoil easily in the tropical heat. We wait in line to pay among foreign-looking shoppers, their carts full of bottled water, wine, and packaged meats.

“You do this every time you come here?”

He nods. “This is what I save up for. I try to leave my mother’s and children’s refrigerators as stocked as I can. They go through it quickly though. When you live with rationing you panic because what remains uneaten today might not be where you left it tomorrow.”

Nesto takes me into the hills where a forest folds around the Río Almendares, the river that slices through Havana and pours out to the ocean through the end of the Malecón. Here in the bosque, spreading into a grassy field curtained by trees feathered in Spanish moss, air lush and clean, as if we’ve traveled very hard to get here, away from the noise of the city and smell of diesel and petrol, Nesto tells me people come to meet with the orishas, for a limpieza or a despojo, bathing for purification in the waters of Ochún, laying down offerings of fruit and flowers on the riverbank, gathering stones, beating drums, singing alabanzas for the orisha’s continued blessings.