Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

Nesto leads me to an altar on the side of the church where believers have placed dozens of blue, white, and violet flowers, girasoles, candles, and candies, kneeling before the statue of the Virgen de Regla in prayer. One woman carries a baby dressed in blue and white, presenting her child to the statue, whispering the name of Yemayá, then leaning forward to kiss the baby’s cheek.

Nesto takes a turn kneeling before the altar and I kneel beside him. I don’t know what he’s praying for but I hope his prayers are heard. I hope everything he and Zoraida say is true, that our desires echo through the heavens and that faith will bring them to completion. I close my eyes, feeling the petitions of all those around me.

“Yemayá, estoy aquí,” a voice says from behind me.

And beside me, Nesto, “Yemayá awoyó, awoyó Yemayá.”

Outside the church, a few Santeras sit on the wall lining the harbor road beside improvised altars of dolls surrounded by flowers, seashells, paintings on wood of a tongue with a dagger piercing it, arranged on handkerchiefs and blankets at their sides, calling to passersby, offering clairvoyance and blessings.

“Oye, muchacho,” one calls to Nesto. “Come let me tell you about your future.”

Nesto ignores her and I follow him to the water’s edge where passengers of a ferry from across the harbor disembark, and we sit together on a flattened piece of stone.

“You don’t want to have your fortune told?” I ask him.

“Not here. Not like this.”

“When is the last time someone read the shells for you?”

“Before I left for Mexico.”

“What did they tell you?”

He shakes his head. “It wasn’t good.”

“Tell me.”

“A few days before I was supposed to leave, somebody left a dead chicken at my mother’s door. Its chest was pinned with a paper with my name written on it. It made me nervous because nobody knew I was planning to defect outside of my family.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I called a friend, a Santero, to take it away. He buried it somewhere so nobody would be tempted to cook it. They say the worst maleficio is the one you eat. But that friend told me to go to see an iyalocha to find out what was going on.”

“Did you go?”

“Yes. And the iyalocha told me someone from my past, maybe a jealous or bitter ex-lover, did a trabajo on me. She said this person was in communion with Paleros because the hechizo was so strong it couldn’t be broken no matter how many limpiezas or polvos she mixed for me. She said the purpose of the spell was so that I would never find peace in my life. Not with my family and not even within my heart. She warned me not to leave the country under those conditions. She said I would never find the better life I was seeking. She said the only way to undo this trabajo was to become full Santo, but not just anywhere. She said I had to go to Santa Clara because it’s in a sacred place at the center of the country, the crossroads of aché and benevolent energies. But it would have cost me thousands. Money I didn’t have then, money I don’t have now. And if I did, it would be money better spent on my family and my children.”

“Do you believe her about the trabajo?”

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t.”

I tell him how the blue-haired bruja in Miami told me that the only way to break the curses I’ve inherited was through some cleansing ritual that involved bathing in honey, milk, oils, and rose petals, surrounded by seven seven-day candles every night for a week. At the end of the week she said I would sleep as if I’d returned to the womb and would be free of all the dark powers plaguing me.

“She wanted to charge me three thousand dollars. She even said I could pay in installments.”

“Did you consider it?”

“No. I was taking care of Carlito in those days. Any extra money I had went only to him.”

“The iyalocha told me I would always be alone.”

“The bruja told me that too.”

“Do you think it’s true we’re both doomed to solitude?”

“If I believed that, I wouldn’t be here with you.”

I often think, if only Carlito had lived another three months, he and Nesto could have met each other.

But then, if Carlito had lived, and everything in our lives hadn’t gone so wrong, neither Nesto nor I would have ever found our way down to those lonely islands, into each other’s lives.

I feel tethered to Nesto in a way I’ve never felt with anybody else.

Like family but not family because we weren’t tossed to the tides of life together but instead found each other, adrift.

“I need something to change,” Nesto says, eyes on the Havana skyline across the water, pale and blurry in the afternoon haze. “When I was young and I got so frustrated I punched walls, cursed everything about this country, locked myself in my room for days without speaking to a soul, my grandmother would tell me, ‘Cálmate, mi’jo. Not even sadness is a permanent condition.’ She thought she would be alive to see the end of the regime, but of course, she was wrong. Those men are immortal.”

“Nobody can live forever.”

“The thing is, they can all die and it still won’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because where there is a dead king, there is already a crowned prince.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not looking at the relics of a revolution anymore, we’re looking at the beginning of a dynasty.”

It’s a half-moon night, a breeze from the trade winds ruffles against our skins. On my last night in Havana Nesto and I sit together on the same stretch of the Malecón that he took me to on my first night. He’s quiet beside me, until we part so that he can go back to Buenavista, see his children for dinner again, and for one last time before returning to Florida, try to reason with Yanai, convince her to change her mind so they can carry out their plan to marry again and get her and their children out of here.

Later, I dream of my brother in prison.

I confuse stories he told me when he was still alive about how the guards would often abuse inmates, especially the mentally ill ones. He’d learn about these accounts when he crossed ways with them in the infirmary or hospital, bruises on their faces, gashes on their heads. He’d hear about it from other inmates on the prison “radio,” echoes down the death row corridor between security checks, how guards withheld toilet paper and meals while writing in their reports that those prisoners refused them, taunting the most vulnerable ones until they banged their heads against the walls, tied them to their beds or cuffed them to their toilets for days, then punished them for soiling themselves by sending them to the hole.

These were guys, Carlito said, who you couldn’t imagine being fit for trial, men who could barely speak full sentences, who cried in anguish at the faces of demons they saw within the shadowed corners of their cells, burrowed in the crevices of the walls; men who ended up in prison when they should have been in a psychiatric hospital somewhere. The prisoners could do nothing but endure the mistreatment because the guards would only deny their actions, lying and covering for each other with their own kind of brotherhood loyalties.

I told all this to Dr. Joe once, everything Carlito had described, and was surprised when Dr. Joe didn’t even argue or try to convince me it was an exaggeration.

“And you just let this go on?” I’d said.

“I’m only one man, Reina. Prison is too big a system.”

“Then you’re complicit. And you’re as bad as the rest of them.”

In my dream, it’s Carlito who is being tormented, starved so that his body looks as dry and shriveled as the bark of a tree.

He cries, screaming for our mother, for me, to come save him, while a faceless guard laughs, mocking him. He covers Carlito’s head with the sheet of his bed so that my brother can barely breathe and, in my sleep, I feel myself suffocating, slapping at my own face to tear the cloth off my mouth. I see the guard grab Carlito by the neck, thrust his face in the toilet, leave it there until water fills his nostrils and Carlito is certain he is drowning.