Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

This is the house Nesto was brought to as a newborn, the long-awaited son; the space in which he’d grown up as a fatherless boy, through hungry years when he had to find a way to help feed his family, the home of the young man who left when recruited for the military; the house he returned to after marrying and divorcing the mother of his children, the house he’d remained in until he gathered the courage to leave that final time, crossing the ocean to the other shore where he eventually met me.

I see pieces of his former life everywhere, relics of stories he’s told me back in our new life together in Florida. Opposite the sofa where I sit is the fish tank Nesto built into the wall as a teenager from glass panels of abandoned windowpanes and concrete he mixed himself, full of tropical fish swimming over pieces of coral and painted rocks; the shelves Nesto told me he built from a disassembled table to hold his mother’s ceramic figurines and a few pieces of bone china, the only things she had of value, inherited from her mother; other things Nesto made for her when there was no money to buy gifts: a box made of seashells gathered in Isla de la Juventud, a rose carved out of the wood of a fallen chaca tree with his mother’s name, Rosa María, inscribed at the base.

On the wall above the chair where his mother sits facing me, three pictures hang: a royal portrait of the king and queen of Spain beside one of a young Fidel in a military cap; on his other side, a depiction of the island’s patron saint, la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the other face of the orisha Ochún.

I notice on the table next to her armchair a framed photograph of Nesto with his children standing by a small roller coaster, the same photo he has taped to a wall in his room at the motel on Crescent Key, which now feels so far away along with the cottage and the life we share on those small distant islands.

Nesto arrives at my side, sits beside me on the sofa, tells his mother all the places we went to get the food for tonight’s dinner.

“Can you believe it?” his mother says to me. “The things we have to do in order to put a decent meal together in this country?”

I nod, though I’m uncertain of what to say because Nesto has always told me that despite her disappointments, having given her life and her faith to a revolution that gave so little in return, she still feels a conflicted loyalty to it.

Nesto tells his mother we are going to go to Yanai’s house to collect the children and bring them back here while she prepares dinner. By the time we return, he says, the others — his stepfather, sisters, nieces, and aunts — should be back too.

We walk along the broken road. Every now and then we’re interrupted by people calling to Nesto, saying they’re glad to see him back in Buenavista, and he pauses to wave back, telling them yes, it’s good to be home.

“Nesto,” I begin when we’re a few blocks along. “What have you told your children about me?”

“That you’re important to me.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

“When my brother and I were kids, we hated when our mother brought somebody new to the house. She’d send us to the kitchen to get the guy a beer and we’d spit in it before we brought it back to him. Then we’d watch him drink it and try not to laugh.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I guess we were afraid of someone taking her away from us.”

“Didn’t you want a father?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you want her to find happiness with someone?”

“I didn’t understand why she couldn’t be happy with just my brother and me.”

“What do you want me to tell my kids about you then?”

“Tell them I’m nobody special.”

“I’m not going to lie to them, Reina.” He points to a house a few feet away with a wide stone terrace behind a high metal fence. “That’s the house.”

A body rushes Nesto from behind and he reaches around him, laughing, knowing his son’s weight and touch on him, pulling Sandro into his arms. He’s as tall as his father and already growing out of his chamaco body with new muscles. He’s in his blue school uniform, carrying a nylon book bag I remember Nesto buying for him around Christmas. They hug and wrestle for a moment until Nesto breaks up the laughter and motions to me.

“Sandro, this is Reina. My friend from La Yunay. She’s eating with us tonight.”

Sandro says hello and kisses me on the cheek. In his face, I see their bloodline, his grandmother’s eyes, his father’s grin, canela-skinned, a blend of his parents on the spectrum of mestizaje.

“Go get your sister,” Nesto tells him, and Sandro disappears through the gate, leaving us on the sidewalk outside the house.

“You used to live here,” I say, taking in the facade, trying to picture Nesto living within its walls with his wife and family.

“Yes, for many years. You see that terrace? I built it myself. It was a narrow wooden thing before. I brought each one of those stones and laid them with my own hands. I built the columns for the roof canopy, and I built that front door after a cyclone blew out the old one. And this fence?” He fingers the metal wiring. “I put it up too.”

“You’re good with fences.” I slide my hands over the rusty links, remembering how we freed the dolphin together, on a night that already feels so long ago. “Putting them up, taking them down.”

I look back up to the house and notice a slim figure in the front window watching us. She leans on the edge of the window frame, arms limp at her sides, dark hair pulled tight off her pale face.

Nesto notices her too and gives a small wave.

“That’s Yanai. She knows about you too.”

She raises her palm slightly, gives a faint wave, then leaves the window and our sight.

Their daughter is smaller than I expected, even from older pictures. She runs to Nesto when she steps out of the house and sees him waiting for her outside the gate, swings her legs when he pulls her off the ground into the air. She’s changed out of her school uniform into a dress that Nesto sent her from Florida and shows it off proudly, twirling at his feet. Her hair is braided, similar to the way my mother used to braid mine every morning before school, gently dividing my hair with the comb, in a way that I loved, even if later other girls would pull on those braids. I can’t help thinking of my mother now and what she would say if she knew where I was, with Nesto at the foot of his ex-wife’s door. She would remind me there is no stupider woman than one who takes up with a man between lives.

“Look, Cami,” Nesto says to his daughter. “This is my friend Reina.”

She stands behind him, covering her face with a flap of her father’s shirt.

“Hi, Camila,” I tell her. “You’re even prettier than your papi told me.”

“Say thank you.” Nesto nudges her, and she mumbles, clutching her father’s waist.

We walk back to Nesto’s mother’s house. Camila drops her father’s hand to walk ahead with her brother, his arm protectively draped over her shoulders. She leans into him and he tilts his head toward hers as if they’re sharing secrets.

I remember how Carlito and I used to walk together the same way, how I felt when I was by his side that nobody in the world could hurt me.

I would give anything to feel that way again.

Nesto says there’s no way the rest of his family will miss dinner tonight, not because a guest is coming but because they’ve all heard he was bringing home steak from the broker. As we wait for his mother to prepare the food we brought home into a meal for twelve, the others begin to arrive: his stepfather, Juan Mario, who was out having his bifocals repaired, a small husk of a man with a hollowed face, trails of pigmentless patches up his arms and across his neck including one on his shin he swears is the exact shape of Cuba; then Nesto’s two older sisters, Bruna and Galina, women with thick bodies and tired faces who bear little resemblance to him, probably because they have different fathers; Bruna’s daughter, Clarilu, nineteen, with her boyfriend, Yordan, and her baby daughter, Lili, in her arms; and Galina’s daughter, Cassandra, twenty-two and wearing an engagement ring Nesto tells me was given to her by a British guy she hasn’t heard from in a year.