Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

We’re crammed into the living room, spilling onto the patio, Nesto’s sisters and Yordan leaning on the walls because there are not enough chairs to go around. Nesto tells them I used to paint nails and Cassandra rushes off and returns with a bottle of polish — a gift from Nesto — and asks if I’ll paint hers for her.

“Of course,” I say, and when I’m through, Clarilu and then Nesto’s sisters each ask for a turn. Nesto pushes his daughter forward.

“What about you, Cami? Do you want Reina to paint your nails?”

She clenches her fists and hides her hands behind her back, shaking her head. Nesto smiles at her and then at me. He looks happy, though it’s a kind of happiness different from the one he shares with me: joy with confianza, among the people who know him best. The room is small and hot, the metal fan in the corner barely moving the air, but I envy this family’s closeness and think of how vacant my childhood home felt in comparison.

Nesto’s mother has taken the steaks we brought, sliced them down, and added them into a stew with rice, potatoes, and fried eggs. She arranges the food on a table near the kitchen and we eat with plates on our laps, Nesto and me on a corner of the sofa with his children on his other side. Nesto’s sisters ask me about life in Miami, if it’s as beautiful as they see on the telenovelas they catch from their neighbor’s illegal satellite dish. Nesto’s stepfather, after hearing I arrived from Colombia, asks if it’s true that all of Venezuela’s shortages are to be blamed on their neighbor because that’s what the Cuban news reports.

“I can’t say for sure,” I tell him, “but I really don’t think so.”

Through it all, I watch Nesto’s children. They eat quietly, his daughter’s head resting on her father’s thick arm. I remember being her age and trying to claim ownership of my mother every time she brought a new man home to meet us. I would cling to her, wedge myself onto her lap until she pushed me away or told Carlito to take me out to play. I remember the men I saw as intruders, invaders of our territory. Carlito was never as threatened or bothered, with an innate awareness that each man was just passing through.

There is dessert of flan and by the time each of Nesto’s family members has been served, there is none left. They give me the biggest piece and I see Nesto’s daughter eye me with envy. I offer to share with her but she shakes her head, hiding again behind her father, tugging his shoulder down to her level.

I hear her whisper into his ear, “Papi, will we ever see her again?”

“Yes, mi amor. She’s a very good friend of ours.”

“Will she come back with you when you come back?”

He tries to distract her, offering her what’s left of his own slice of flan, but she’s undeterred and now asks her father when his next visit will be, and makes him promise to return before her next birthday because her mother has promised to throw her a big party.

After dinner, Nesto walks his children home and I stay behind, offering to help his mother and sisters clean the plates, put away what little food is left, but they don’t let me and leave me to wait for Nesto in the living room as his stepfather watches a news program describing Venezuela as the role model for the future of the Americas.

When Nesto returns, he tells me to follow him down a narrow hall past the kitchen and a row of small bedrooms, to a cave-like room at the back of the house, the bulk of the floor taken up by a mattress and a small stereo system on a metal stand; the only window covered by a thin sheet to block out light.

On the wall, a solitary print of Fidel hangs upside down.

“This is your room?”

“What’s left of it. I sold almost everything I had before I went to Mexico.”

We stand quietly as I look around. In the distance, the sound of somebody striking together a pair of palitos, like the opening pulses of a guaguancó. I hesitate to touch Nesto in his house, afraid he doesn’t belong to me here, and maybe not at all anymore.

I wonder how it would have felt if I’d ever had the chance to stand with him within the walls of what had been my room in the old house in Miami, or in the first room I ever lived in, the one I just left behind in Cartagena. I think I would never have felt more naked.

I touch his hand, as if that is all that’s permitted. He takes hold of my fingers and leads me down to the mattress and we rest facing each other as I try to picture the years and nights he spent on this very bed, more than thirty summers, winters, and springs, waiting, waiting, waiting, and how I slept on a similar bed on the floor across the ocean, and though I didn’t always know for what, I was waiting too.

In my dream, I lie on a crest of beach where sand meets water, my body pressing deep, carving its form into the earth; when I stand and look down, I see my silhouette has hardened despite the current rushing over it, filling the space where my body rested until the water recedes and my form in the sand fills with blood; water washes over it again, and with each wave, an exchange of blood and tide.

I tell Nesto about my dreams when he calls me at the hotel in the morning, how they’ve changed since I arrived in Cuba.

“I’m going to take you somewhere so you can make sense of them,” he tells me.

“No brujas, please.”

“She’s no bruja. She’s the best reader of dreams in Havana.”

The morning sun is hot, the air heavy with moisture. Nesto picks me up in a 1952 Chevrolet, borrowed from a cousin. He drives through Centro Habana, down cracked roads, stray dogs scampering to avoid being kicked or chased off; men hunched over popped-open car hoods trying to diagnose the day’s malfunction; buckets and baskets full of fruit or food being pulled from the street up to balconies full of laundry lines; old men sitting around improvised tables and overturned crates playing dominó; ladies young and old, some with babies in their arms, lingering in windows and doorways mirando y dejando, watching the world go by.

We come to the enclave of Cayo Hueso, webbed with wires and antennas, where Nesto parks on the corner of a tight street, asking a group of shirtless boys kicking a ball around to watch the car so it’s not stripped of any parts while we’re gone.

He calls up to a building, “Zoraida! Zoraida!” his voice filling the small avenue.

A woman pokes her head out of a third-floor window, turns her face upward to yell the same name too. Finally, on the sixth floor, another head emerges from some curtains. A man calls down to Nesto to catch, and tosses a key down to the street for him. Nesto opens the building door to a foyer wall painted over with a portrait of a dreamy-faced young Che, and we start the long walk up several flights of broken stairs, sweat gathering in the crevices of my collarbone and dripping down my spine. I stop and lean on the banister to catch my breath while Nesto flies past me, teasing that I have no stamina, until we both arrive at the top floor, which opens into a small cinder block single-room apartment on the building’s roof.

Zoraida sits in a wooden chair at the center beside an altar to Santa Barbara — Changó—with her long sword watching over a glass of white wine and a red apple. Zoraida is a small woman, her head wrapped in a ruby scarf, wearing a long white dress that reaches the floor. The door behind her opens to a concrete garden. Nesto greets her, bowing to her slightly, and introduces me; and Zoraida, who Nesto says is at least one hundred years old though nobody knows for sure but she looks about seventy, waves me over to her, takes my hand in hers, rubs it gently with her thumbs, and says, “So you are the one having trouble with your dreams.”

She turns to Nesto. “You leave us alone. Go outside. Wait in the shade until I call you.”