Deeper Than the Ocean

by Mirta Ojito

Genres: Literary Fiction; Sagas; Family Life

Synopsis

A moving multigenerational novel about the enduring power of a mother’s love, the ripple effect of secrets, and the strength of family bonds from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

One hundred years after the shipwreck of the Valbanera, known to history as the “poor man’s Titanic,” Mara Denis gets an assignment to report on the Canary Islands, where her ancestors lived before they moved to Cuba. Unexpectedly, she discovers that the grandmother her mother cherished was listed among the dead of the Valbanera, years before Mara’s mother was even born. This fateful twist changes everything Mara thought she knew about her family and herself, and sends her on a quest to find the truth. If her great grandmother is a ghost, who is she and where did she come from?    

​In spare, beautiful writing, the author transports the reader to the Canary Islands and Cuba in the early part of the twentieth century and New York and Key West in the present. This is an epic tale of a young woman’s passion for her beloved, as well as the redeeming power of family secrets at last uncovered.

This moving, sweeping novel is perfect for fans of Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, and Kristin Hannah.

Release date: November 4, 2025

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 352

Sample

LAST NIGHT I WAS SEARCHING for my daughter again.

The anguish was so palpable I knocked down my nightstand lamp as I thrashed about in bed. In my dreams I was running after her in what seemed like an old house. I rushed room after room but couldn’t find her. As I ran, I could feel the polished wood against my bare feet, the texture of the floral wallpaper against my fingertips—soft, like vinyl—and I furiously rubbed my hands over and over the surface as if my daughter were trapped in that endless field of yellow wildflowers.

When I woke up, I was gripping the blanket so hard my fingers hurt as I stretched out my hand to pick up the phone. It was screeching with that old-fashioned ringtone I assigned to my boss at the newspaper. Glancing at the screen I saw it was 4:02 a.m. A call in the middle of the night is never good news for most people. But for people like me who make a living reporting, it often means a chance at our next story.

“Mara here,” I said, trying to sound alert and professional.

“Mara dear,” said Carl, my editor. His tone told me everything I needed to know.

Somebody, somewhere on my side of the world was indeed receiving very bad news.

“Yes, where is it?”

“Not far from you,” he said, trying to sound upbeat, though for him, almost four thousand miles away in New York, it was already 10 p.m.

I was struggling to keep my eyes open; the Ibuprofen PM I had taken at midnight was finally kicking in. My neck had been bothering me for almost ten years and, lately, the middle of my back had joined the fray. It seemed that, at fifty-five, my body had decided it was time to start falling apart.

“Where?” I repeated, eyeing the two packed bags I kept near the foot of my bed. The small backpack was for short assignments; the larger one could serve me for a week or longer if I was careful.

I jotted down the grim details of the assignment: a boat had been found off the coast of northern Africa with seven dead bodies inside, including a child. For now, Carl wanted only a brief story, but a freelancer in Côte d’Ivoire had told him that dozens of people had taken to the sea in the last few days. “It may be a repeat of 2015. Who knows?”

“You think?” I said, immediately regretting my sarcastic tone. But sweet, polite Carl didn’t seem to notice. Four years ago, a wave of refugees had overwhelmed the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago closer to Africa than to the Iberian Peninsula. Hundreds of people had died at sea. The harrowing photos on the front pages of most newspapers were impossible to forget.

“Keep an eye on it, would you?” Carl urged before hanging up.

I put the phone down and closed my eyes, trying to hold on to the still vivid details of my recurrent nightmare. I was determined to write it down as my therapist had repeatedly asked me to do, but I never did and, invariably, I ended up forgetting the dream. This time, I had the sense I was running, searching for something or someone. My daughter! But I don’t have a daughter. I have a son. Am I subconsciously pining for the baby girl I never had? I didn’t think so but perhaps. Certainly something to discuss with my therapist next time.

I couldn’t go back to sleep now. The nightmare was receding, but the assignment I had just received loomed large. An assignment is like a marching order to focus hard and fast. I untangled the sheets from my body, and, using the phone, I booked a one-way ticket from Santander, the city where I live in Spain, to Madrid and then to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, flinching a little at the price. I knew the paper would pick up the cost, but I’ve always been frugal, more so now that I’m no longer on the payroll. As a freelancer, you don’t want to spend too much, so that the assignments keep coming. Then I called my friend Nina Blau, a talented Madrid-based Israeli photographer I often worked with. Nina was ready to go. She had received the information from a contact and had already booked a seat on the same flight to Tenerife. “I was about to call you,” she said, sounding more alert than I was. After a quick chat, we arranged to meet at Barajas Airport.

Next, I called my mother, Lila, putting her on speaker. I always refer to her as Mima, which is close enough to her name and a much sweeter variation of Mother. She is seventy-nine years old and, since my father’s death a decade ago, lives alone in Miami in the beautiful home they bought shortly after I left home. I’m her only child, and the one rule she requires of me is to call her every day. If I forget, she calls. At any hour.

In a rush I told her about the new assignment and that I was on my way to the Canary Islands. She was quiet for a moment. The pause was so unusual that I had to ask if she was still on the line as I laid out my clothes on the bed and headed for the bathroom.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve been meaning to ask you for a favor for a while now, but I know you’re busy and I didn’t want to interfere with your work. Now I can finally ask. It shouldn’t be so difficult for you.”

A favor for my mother could be anything from getting her a tube of condensed milk, the kind she was certain you could find only in Spain, to pills to stave off osteoporosis to a cute baby outfit for her friend’s granddaughter—never mind that one could buy perfectly beautiful baby clothes in Miami. For her, quality items came only from Spain. But she wasn’t after anything like that this time.

What she needed from me was simple, she explained. She wanted me to find her maternal grandmother’s birth certificate. The Spanish government had passed a law allowing the children and grandchildren of Spanish citizens to claim citizenship if they had a way to prove the nationality of their ancestors.

My great-grandmother, Catalina Quintana Cabazas, had been born in the city of Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands. She had traveled to Cuba in a ship in the early twentieth century, but the details were fuzzy. Catalina had raised my mother, and, though there were no pictures of her, my mother claimed all she had to do was look in the mirror to see the beloved face of her grandmother: she had inherited Catalina’s curly red hair, unusually tall height for a woman, heavy-lidded brown eyes, and skin so pale that a day at the beach was a torment for her.

“It won’t be easy to get such an old birth certificate,” I said. “I mean, do you even know what year she was born?”

My mother thought for a moment.

“Of course I do,” she said. “She was born April 29th, 1919.”

“Is there anything else you know?” Out of habit I reached for my notebook, ready to jot down details. “Do you have anything of hers?”

“No, of course not. You know that we left it all behind when we left Cuba,” she said. “But I remember her parents’ names. She mentioned them once.”

“Once!” I scoffed.

“Once is enough if it’s important, Mara. She rarely talked about her past.”

“Yes, I guess that’s true,” I said, suddenly feeling the poignancy in her words. But I quickly got back on task. “Well, what are her parents’ names?”

“José Angel Quintana and Inés María Cabazas,” she replied.

“Fine, this’ll have to do. Anything else you remember might help,” I said, both amused and pleased that, three months before turning eighty, my mother had decided to rescue her past. I asked her why now, and she explained that two passports were better than one.

“You never know what can happen,” she added, and hung up, leaving me facing the mirror over the bathroom sink. Only then did I realize I had forgotten to tell my mother about my nightmare. Already, the details were blurry, like the ghostly images that used to emerge from the photographers’ bins in the old darkrooms. But the feeling of dread was still with me as I stepped into a steaming shower.

IT BEGAN WITH A GUST OF WIND, a flurry of leaves spiraling before her eyes, and Inés María immediately felt her throat was scratchy as if grains of sand had lodged in the recesses of her mouth, her nose, her ears, even her eyes. She feared she was choking. Her nostrils constricted, denying her the breath she desperately needed. Inés María turned to her mother, unable to speak, but doña Elena didn’t know what to do. The air around them had turned yellow, then, quickly, orange brown, like clay. The wind battered them from all sides and shook them about as if they were marionettes in a macabre dance. Doña Elena Cueto de Cabazas wrapped an arm around her daughter’s shoulders and pushed her toward the first person she saw at the port of Tenerife, a tall man with an affable face who was bent slightly at the waist against the wind and held on to his hat with both hands. As he grabbed the young woman, his gray felt hat tumbled to the ground and flew off to the sea.

Before she passed out in the arms of the man who would become her husband, Inés María saw the world turn red.

This is how Inés María Cabazas and José Angel Quintana would later recount the beginning of their courtship to their children.

“I had no choice. Your grandmother flung your mother into my arms. What was I to do?” José Angel used to say with a glint in his eyes.

By the time Inés María came to, sheltered under the awning of a shuttered café near the port, José Angel had already decided he couldn’t let her go. At the time, she was eighteen and he was twenty-four, an imperceptible age difference because Inés María, with her sad dark eyes, slightly curved back—a foolish attempt to hide her full height—and long hair so pale blond that it looked white from a distance, seemed at least as old as José Angel, a strongly built redheaded native Canarian with blue eyes, a long straight nose, and a dimpled chin.

His ancestors were Guanches, men and women who had migrated from the north of Africa and found refuge in the caves of Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, which had sprouted from volcanic activity at the bottom of the sea millions of years ago, as if they were ancient trees, their canopies full but their roots shaky. At least once a century they would erupt, altering the topography of the islands and rattling the hardy men and women who trusted the land and God to keep them alive.

To live on those islands, one needed to be finely attuned to the most minuscule vibrations of the ground, alert to winds that seem to come out of nowhere, and attentive to the form and crest of waves, the rustle of tree leaves, and the flight patterns of native birds. Any rumble could signal an active volcano. A sudden squall could make the difference between life or death. A flock of birds suddenly flying away could indicate a disastrous storm was approaching. Sometimes, swarms of locusts from Africa would rain down on the islands like hail, with the power to devour millions of acres of cropland in a matter of hours.

José Angel was such a man: strong and watchful, yet optimistic; deeply devout, yet confident in his own prowess. He thought that his fate was in his hands, and his hands were never idle. When troubled, he looked up to the heavens, searching for God, but he also looked eastward, toward Africa, which was a mere two hundred miles away. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew all his strength, all that he was, came from his ancestors—men brave enough to tame the rocky soil of these islands and fight a succession of invaders until they lost their independence to Spain in the late 1400s. This is why the descendants of Guanches like José Angel spoke Spanish, like almost everyone else on the islands, but with a lilt that Inés María, who was from the north of Spain, found enchanting.

She had traveled to the Canary Islands aboard the Coruña, a ship that once a month carried passengers and merchandise from ports in peninsular Spain and its islands to Puerto Rico and Cuba. But before the ship arrived at the port of Tenerife, its last Spanish stop, Inés María’s father, don Carlos Cabazas, suffered a fatal heart attack one evening at dinnertime. The two women held on to the body for a day, but ultimately doña Elena was forced to tell the captain she had no money to properly bury her husband of twenty years. All their savings had been used to book passage to Cuba on that gleaming new ship. There, on the Caribbean island said to be the prettiest human eyes had ever seen, they had planned to forge a new life.

After the captain ordered them to prepare the body for burial at sea, doña Elena lovingly washed her husband’s face and hands and removed his shoes, but she did not change his clothes. Don Carlos would be buried wearing his best outfit, the dark gray woolen three-piece suit he’d had made for the journey, the one he had worn for dinner every night since they left home. During the short ceremony the captain himself cast the sheet-enshrouded body of don Carlos off the ship. Heavy rocks attached to his legs with thick ropes made the bundle quickly disappear as Inés María and her mother embraced, horrified that the captain had refused to wait until they reached land to give the body a proper Christian burial.

“May God forgive you,” doña Elena hissed at the captain, keeping her eyes on the waves that had swallowed up her husband’s body but speaking forcefully enough for all gathered to hear. “Because I never will.”

It was the last time she spoke to any man other than her future son-in-law or a priest during confession. Mother and daughter then retreated to their small second-class cabin and did not resurface until they felt the ship approaching port.

Inés María and doña Elena arrived in Tenerife, heartbroken, ashamed, and penniless. The sea had not delivered them to the new world as they had hoped; instead, it had robbed them of the man central to their lives. But the sandstorm blowing in from the Sahara Desert as they debarked, a weather phenomenon known in the Canary Islands as la calima, would end up saving them and sealing their fate.

José Angel Quintana was not a wealthy man, though he had inherited a farm on one of the islands of the archipelago, La Palma, a speck of land shaped like a heart with a beating dormant volcano in its center, and treacherous mountains protecting it from the sea. His grandparents had lived and raised their families on that land, but his parents had moved to Santa Cruz de Tenerife after their wedding and had never wanted to return to the more isolated and rural La Palma permanently. For them, it would have been a step backward.

José Angel, on the other hand, saw a life in La Palma as both a rightful return to his roots and a leap forward. In fact, when la calima deposited Inés María in his arms he had been on his way to arrange travel to La Palma. Three days later, when the sky once again returned to its usual flawless blue, José Angel went to the port to book passage to La Palma, but this time he bought two additional tickets. “You are coming with me,” he told Inés María, pressing his mouth to the curled fingers of her left hand. It never occurred to him to ask her if she agreed. He took her quiet demeanor for acquiescence.

Inés María and José Angel married on March 11 of 1888, exactly twelve days after they met. Ordinarily, doña Elena would have opposed such a rush to the altar, but these were not ordinary times. Without her husband, she felt that José Angel Quintana was, for the moment, the only person she could trust, though she wasn’t sure why. In his face, she saw kindness, and his very name seemed to confirm his goodness and her faith. Doña Elena was a devout woman, and she was certain God himself had put an angel on their path. One evening, when she detected doubt in her daughter’s eyes, doña Elena took Inés María’s hands in hers and asked, “Who else but someone with the name of Angel could have saved us from penury and a sky so red it looked as if heaven itself was raining down blood?”

To that, Inés María, who was reticent to share her thoughts and moved through life in her mother’s shadow, had no concrete response, only the vague feeling that her mother, though exaggerating, was probably right.

The wedding was held at a small church in Tenerife, near the guesthouse where Inés María and her mother had found refuge on the day of their arrival. José Angel had offered to pay for their accommodations, but doña Elena was proud and prudent, selling her wedding ring instead to pay for the accommodations. For her wedding, Inés María wore a simple light blue dress with a high neckline and three-quarter sleeves, which she had planned to wear upon their arrival in Cuba, and the black mantilla her mother had packed for the trip. They had no money for flowers, but José Angel took care of that, thrusting a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers in Inés María’s hands the moment she reached him at the altar, accompanied only by her mother.

Because both were illiterate, Inés María and José Angel signed their wedding certificate with crosses, as if God was guiding their hands, if not their lives. When she said, “I do,” the priest had to ask her to speak up. She was so mortified, she looked to her mother, and doña Elena said the words on her behalf. The priest, content with a response he could hear, did not even notice that Inés María’s lips had not formed the words. Until the day she died of a fright, alone in her bedroom, but much loved by her family, José Angel would tease doña Elena that she was the one married to him, not her daughter.

When, newly married and with doña Elena in tow, they arrived at the plot of land José Angel had inherited, Inés María felt she had made the wrong choice and that perhaps that was why she had lost her voice on her wedding day. She was supposed to be in Cuba, the dreamy land of possibilities, not in this barren, desolate part of the world. In the area of northern Spain where she grew up, a peaceful valley near the old port city of Santander, apples grew unbidden from the fertile green earth, blessed by almost continuous rain. So did beans, tomatoes, onions, lettuces, leeks, kiwis, pears, cabbages, cauliflower, and chard. Here, in La Palma, the land was hard and uneven, and the sun brutal. She couldn’t imagine this soil would ever yield anything.

But José Angel had a plan.

“I have no intention of selling onions or bananas,” he said after a pause, as the two made their way back to the house. “My ambition is grander.”

He told her he wanted to plant mulberry trees. The leaves of those trees—dark green and wide as fans—were the only food consumed by silkworms, tiny spinners of the finest threads that, woven together by the expert hands of La Palma’s women, would be turned into garments to clothe the clergy and the wealthy all over Europe.

“Can’t others do the same?” asked Inés María, sensibly, bending down to poke at the parched land with the tips of her fingers. When she looked up, she saw José Angel from a different angle. As he spoke about his dreams, he seemed somewhat taller and more handsome to her. Her heart began to expand, and love planted its roots in an organ that, until then, had merely pumped blood. Now, a warmth originating there began to spread until it reached every recess of her body. Inés María blushed. Gently, José Angel took her hands and helped her to her feet. Standing upright, they were the same height.

“No,” José Angel explained kindly. “Not everyone has access to those trees, but our land is blessed with the kind of soil, elevation, and light these delicate trees need to thrive.”

José Angel knew this because his grandfather had passed along the information as if it were a family secret. The old man himself had never planted the much-coveted trees because he had feared failure, but he knew his grandson feared only God. And God, José Angel was certain, had always been on his side, especially since the day Inés María had fallen into his arms.

“The trick to keeping mulberry trees alive and thriving is to plant them in the right spot,” he told his bride. “Too much sun and their leaves burn and drop to the ground, dry and brittle. Too little and they wilt in the shade.”

As a response, Inés María pressed her fingers into his, and José Angel was startled by the strength he felt from this warm hand that only two weeks before he hadn’t known existed.

From then on, all their hopes were centered on the mulberry trees. They weren’t pursuing wealth, just hoping that the trees would provide them a decent living and peace of mind.

After they rebuilt his grandparents’ house with José Angel’s meager savings and money borrowed from an uncle, all they had left was the furniture they could salvage from the grandparents’ old house: a metal framed bed with a straw mattress, which they kept for themselves, and an old bed with a coiled-spring mattress, for doña Elena. They also had a solid wood kitchen table whose surface bore the scratches of a lifetime of chopping vegetables and cleaving meat, four wobbly chairs that José Angel hammered into shape, three black cast-iron cooking pots, ten reales, and the fifteen mulberry seeds they had purchased to plant. Within a month, ten of the fifteen seeds had sprouted. Seven eventually grew to maturity. In time, from the bark of those trees, José Angel took softwood cuttings and planted others.

Mulberry trees, José Angel knew, had become inextricably linked to silkworms. Though he was no scientist, he was convinced that the leaves released a substance that altered the chemistry of the worms and made them dependent on those trees for their survival. The same substance, perhaps, deterred other insects from feeding on the leaves; therefore, no pests or other animals ever attacked the Quintanas’ trees. What José Angel feared were the acts of God: the wind, especially when the saplings were small, or a sudden fire, a constant worry in this part of the world where a tossed cigar or errant lightning could ignite and destroy an entire forest in hours.

From sunup to sundown, José Angel worked on his farm, tending to his vegetables but, especially, to his trees as if they were his children. And, in some ways, they were. For what are children if not the essence of optimism? Children, like his trees, would forever extend his life into a future he couldn’t yet fathom, but deeply believed would be exceptional.

While the mulberry trees grew and multiplied, Inés María withered, as her body rejected the lives that she so coveted. She would get pregnant, and the couple would pray for a boy, a strong boy to help them with their growing mulberry tree business. But, every time, the babies squeezed out of her body too soon, often during the night, soaking the bedsheets with the blood that had nourished them in her womb for weeks, sometimes months. In desperation and shame, Inés María turned to her mother, whose hands alone were healing but who also had a talent for making tinctures and teas for all her daughter’s ailments since childhood.

“Mother, mother!” she yelled the first time she miscarried, standing in the kitchen, a wooden spoon in one hand and the handle of a bubbling pot in another. She was petrified. The second time it happened, she called out to her mother as she lay alone in the bed, her hands wadding the sheets between her legs in a futile attempt to force the clots of blood back into her uterus. By the third time, while she was resting under the sun, her back against a tree, Inés María didn’t call for anyone. She waited for the clots to trickle out of her body, and, when the pain allowed her to get up again, she went to her bedroom and cleaned herself. Then she knelt under the wooden cross on the wall opposite the marital bed and asked God for a miracle.

There was not much doña Elena could do for her daughter. She had not yet become acquainted with the ways of the Canary Islands. Her prayers from the north, whispered over her daughter’s rounded belly, were lost in the air, like smoke rising over their heads, never settling on the object of their shared obsession: a healthy womb for Inés María to nurture her babies until they came to term.

The last two babies Inés María lost—a set of twins—were in her body for so long that when they left her, she raised herself on the bed, putting all her weight on her elbows and closely examined the lifeless bodies between her legs. Though tiny, they were already fully formed boys. Their nails were transparent and their ears softer than silk. One had a pink birthmark on the lid of his right eye. Inés María made the sign of the cross with one hand and with the other she covered the baby’s entire body. The other baby seemed like a beautiful angel in repose. If he had stayed in her body only a little bit longer, he would have survived, she was certain of that. She had seen women who delivered prematurely wrap their babies in banana leaves and keep them close to their bosom for months, feeding them as if they were birds in a nest until God and all the saints decided to bestow a soul on them and allow the babies to thrive. But Inés María had no such luck. When her mother helped her burn the useless afterbirth, she threw in the pile the banana leaves she had gathered once she had felt the first stab of pain. Then, she bound her breasts with a long strip of cloth until they stopped leaking.

She hated to say that she had lost her children. She had not; she knew exactly where they were. Inés María had insisted on burying them herself. She wrapped their tiny bodies in white silk and delicately placed a piece of cotton over each eyelid, forever sealing eyes that had never witnessed the glorious light that bathed their corner of the world. Eyes that would never see how pain had ravaged their mother’s face: her cheeks now hollow, and her full mouth thinned out and haggard.

After each miscarriage, Inés María hoisted the shovel over her shoulder and walked to the shadiest spot on their land, under a magnolia tree, surrounded by the fiery orange and red blossoms of the pico de paloma flowers that grew wildly on the island. Every time the shovel hit the hard ground, she felt her entire body convulse as if, once again, her babies were leaving the safety of her womb.

In the first three years of their marriage, five crosses poked up from the ground to remind her daily of her failure and her sadness. When she ventured outside their home, which wasn’t often, she could feel the eyes of the townsfolk on her. She knew the whispers traveling from mouth to mouth about her barren womb or her impotent husband. In the river, where she joined other women weekly to wash her husband’s soiled work clothes and their white sheets against the rough edges of river rocks, the women ceased talking or singing when she approached. She sensed they feared her fate was contagious, as if her mere presence would also leave them childless and dry, unable to keep a home or a husband. For what was the purpose of the union between a man and a woman if not to fill their hands and their hearts with the sweet plump bodies of babies?

One night, after a hearty meal of white bean stew and goat meat grilled with peppers, onions, and olives, Inés María waited for her mother to leave the table and then implored her husband to bring the river to her.

“I’m choking with anger and despair,” she said bluntly, looking directly at his eyes. “I don’t want to see them anymore.”

“What are you saying?” José Angel thought he knew but he needed to hear her say it.

“The women,” she said, almost spitting out the words. “I don’t want to see all those women and their children.”

José Angel bowed his head, as if ashamed, but he obliged. The next day, before dawn, he built a pedestal with discarded wood under the myrtle tree and placed a concave river stone on top. On laundry days, he would bring pails of water from the well and pour them in the stone, which he had smoothed out with his farm tools to protect his wife’s still delicate hands.

Absconded in her house with her mother and loving husband, Inés María tended to her grief as if it were a garden. She paid close attention to it and fed it memories, expectations, and truncated hopes. As she went through her daily chores—caring for the animals, weeding the vegetable patch, helping her mother cook meals and clean the house, washing clothes and pressing them with a flat iron heated by coals—she grew sadder and more pensive. It was clear to her that God was punishing her. For what, she wasn’t sure, for she considered herself a virtuous woman and a devout Catholic, already faithful to La Virgen de la Candelaria, the patron saint of the islands, and to La Virgen de las Nieves, the virgin venerated in La Palma. It became clear to her that, despite her frequent prayers to the Blessed Mother, she would never bear another child. The thought pierced her soul for in their solitude and misfortune, Inés María had . . .