The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  “Can you believe this trash?” my abuela said. “Hardly any clothes at all.”

  She looked up at me from where she sat at the very edge of her gold-and-gray-brocade armchair, long fingers perched on the hand-knitted doilies that covered the almost half-century of wear. I was wearing a crumpled men’s black button-down, the sleeves chopped short and layers of flea-market silver chains tucked under the collar like a tie, and the combat boots La Canaria and I found after months of digging in the trash. I hadn’t let my abuela touch my jeans in weeks, and they were stiff with stains.

  “Good,” she said, and turned back to the television. “You stay serious.” She’d supported my going to university, though when I’d started, her butcher said that only women who weren’t going to be mothers went to university and women who weren’t going to be mothers were going to be whores.

  A glittering new kitchen appeared on the television screen, occupied by a housewife, one of those golden Spanish pillars, obedient and always pregnant, waxing her floors with orgasmic joy.

  “Pathetic,” my abuela said. She rapped out a counter-beat to the jingle on the armchair. Above the television was an altar with photos of my parents and saints. In a closed compartment under the altar, in a cupboard that blended with the wall, was my abuela’s collection of novels, poetry, and history books from before the war. I never saw her open the compartment, but whenever I checked on it, each book was carefully dusted. The whole apartment was an altar to the dead, the disappeared, the lost, the gone. Nestled next to the faded photos of my parents was a new addition—a picture of me and my brother as kids.

  “What’s that doing there?” I said.

  She didn’t answer me.

  I turned off the television, but my abuela didn’t shift her eyes. She kept them pinned to the screen, as if scrutinizing the black glass and flecks of static for their weak moral fiber.

  “What’s that picture doing up there?”

  Her lips were moving in prayer. The slow, precise shapes I knew so well, a track worn painfully over her false teeth. I kissed the top of her head where she’d gathered her soft white hair into a bun. She did her hair herself, kept it perfectly in place without lacquer. It smelled of baby powder and chamomile, a preserved scent, closed but clean.

  “Study hard, mija,” I heard her call as I left the apartment.

  * * *

  The university library was one of the oldest in Europe. It was empty except for a few nerds who still cared. My last chance to make up for a semester of not studying, but I just wandered the stacks, like I had before I was a student. I would walk through the library, trace with my fingers the worn stone seats of the ancient students, all men, all my size or smaller. See the ­medieval monks hunched over their books, the scribes copying the holy word, their industry fueled by devotion to the Savior, their devotion unshaken by doubt. Don’t look too closely at what the scribes are actually studying—algebra from the Arabic, theology from the Talmud—ink out this act of translating. See them instead writing a new language made by a lisping king, its structures as narrow as the mind that sculpted it. There must have been pages that weren’t burned, words not blotted out of recognition. I had searched for them. My murdered poets drew from deep wells, even if they were presently hidden from me. They spoke the same words as the monks, as the conquista­dores, as our dictator general, but coaxed a language anew from the charred bones they’d been tossed. I had taken comfort that we had been lying for millennia, erasing whole races of writers, executing texts with aplomb. It wasn’t new. And someone had always been pressing hidden words from quill to parchment backed by stone. Whispering them into someone’s ear. Even if the parchment was burned and the hand chopped off and thrown into the same fire, the stone remained. Only there were the words legible.

  Years ago, I’d decided to stay in the old library, chose philology over English for my major, because I thought there, among these old books, something must have slipped by. Some words that, despite their sedition, were too historically important to erase or too clever for the censors to detect. A couple of writers had done it right after the war. Their books were complicated, dense. The fachas never saw the crossbow pointed at their throats. You make a child hungry by denying her food. You turn hunger to anger when you rip pages from her schoolbooks. But I didn’t find what I was looking for. In the bar underneath the philology library, the students didn’t quote from the old books with their crumbling bindings. Instead, they growled and twitched in their seats, casting about for new words. Words shaped like handmade bombs and Molotov cocktails. Words that weren’t words at all. Because there was nothing we could say that didn’t have Indian, Moor, Republican blood dripping off it. Our tongue the tongue of murderers. The general didn’t come from nowhere.

  The bar underneath the library was empty. A few display plates sat next to the ham, but there was no bartender to swipe away the flies from the tortilla, and a hard skin had developed on the membrillo. The door that led to the print shop was locked and a heavy wooden bench pushed in front of it. Maybe everyone was in the plaza.

  I smoked a cigarette under the tower and waited, but the plaza was empty, too. The huge black hands of the clock twitching slowly. Sometimes it looked like the clock was going backward, if you caught it right when the hour changed. The hands hovered for a moment, unable to decide whether to progress or regress. A man in a rumpled jacket, his hat pulled over his eyes, leaned against a stone pillar on the opposite side of the plaza. He was staring right at me. I stomped out my cigarette and hustled over to El Chico. There Grito and La Canaria were, sitting at the middle table, slugging big bottles of beer. They cheered when I walked in.

  “Mosca! You found us!” La Canaria yelled. “We were hiding from you!”

  “Hijos de putas,” I mumbled, and went up to the bar without kissing them hello. “I was standing at the clock for an hour. Why weren’t you there?”

  They looked at each other and then up at me. We didn’t mention last night.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” Grito said, sliding up beside me. He was wearing his white T-shirt with the anarchy “A” drawn on it, the pits yellow from sweat. His arms were shaking a little and covered in bruises, either from fucking La Canaria or from last night. I didn’t care.

  “It’s the least you can do,” I said. Grito ordered us two pitchers to share because somehow La Canaria had finished both of their bottles in the time it took him to walk up to the bar. Under the table I saw his bag, full of books again. Maybe he’d had the chance to study earlier.

  “I need to piss,” La Canaria said before I could sit down. She grabbed my arm, blowing kisses to Grito when we squeezed by him. The bar was full of punks and their dogs. Greasy paper napkins and layers of sticky sawdust covered the floor. Newspaper blotted out the windows. La Canaria kicked the dogs we passed but moved by too fast for anyone to notice that she was the one who’d done it. The dogs strained at their rope and chain-link leashes, blaming their owners, blaming the other dogs.

  In the bathroom, La Canaria jumped up on the sink, her back to the mirror. “You do me and I’ll do you.” She handed me a stick of black eyeliner. I leaned in close to her face and layered more makeup beneath her lashes and in thick lines on her eyelids. She turned to the mirror to see how I’d done and smudged the black with her thumb. It looked like she’d gone to bed without washing her face. “Nice. Your turn.” La Canaria wrapped her legs around my torso, bringing me in close to her body. I could feel the zipper of her jeans pressed against my own.

  “I don’t want any,” I told her.

  “You never have enough on.”

  I could smell Grito on her, his acrid communion-wine cologne, his hash cigarettes, the powdery baby scent of the detergent his abuela used to clean his sheets. I could feel how those sheets used to press down on me. The sound of the novice Carmelites chanting in the abbey across the street. The sense of suffocating when the air under the she
ets grew hot from our breath.

  “That’s enough,” I said to La Canaria, trying to squirm away from her. She had me locked between her legs. She wrapped a thick arm around my neck and twisted my ear so I wouldn’t move.

  “I’m trying to make you look good, Mosquita.”

  A roll of skin escaped from underneath her black tank top. I could see ridges of flesh between her pits and her push-up bra, soft spaces prickled with three-day-old black hairs. Grito teased her about being chubby, but we all knew he loved it. Her skin was darker than the rest of ours. Not dark enough to articulate what it meant but dark enough to notice.

  Somebody pounded on the bathroom door.

  “Oh, Mosca, chica!” La Canaria cried out. “Right there, that’s how I like it!”

  I pinched her right where I guessed her nipple was, and though I got mostly bra, she was surprised enough to let me go. Grito was hanging outside when I opened the door, smirking. I pushed by him and he went into the bathroom. He scraped the trash can across the floor to keep the door shut.

  There were only a couple of people I knew in the bar that I could talk to. I mean, I knew everybody, but I didn’t want to talk to everybody. Stupid Marco was there, his neck still bruised from his attempted suicide by shoelace, and he was laughing because some girl was sitting on his lap, kissing the purple splotches. I grabbed one of the pitchers Grito had bought and sat down by them. The girl poured herself a drink from it, as did everybody else at the table.

  “See this?” Marco asked, fingering his neck. I didn’t know what made him decide to stop hiding the bruises and show them off, except maybe he’d run out of turtlenecks.

  “Everybody sees it, Marco,” I said. “And everybody wishes you’d done it with your abuelita’s pantyhose, like you were planning, so it worked.” I heard his scores weren’t even that bad.

  “You’re just jealous, Mosca,” the girl on his lap said. Some girl who hung around him sometimes, I could never remember her name, but I was sick of Marco grinning at me because of her. I threw my drink in her face. She got up, her white shirt soaked through. Instead of hitting me herself, she pushed Marco in front of her.

  “I’m not going to fight Mosca,” Marco said, putting me in a headlock. “I love her too fucking much.” He started messing up my hair, and his forearm grazed my breast.

  “Don’t touch me!” I said.

  His hands flew up in the air. “I’m sorry, Mosca. I really didn’t mean to.”

  “If this bar weren’t so full of wimps, I’d be happy,” I said.

  The girl walked over to the bathroom to clean up. She opened the door and faked a scream when she saw La Canaria and Grito in there.

  “I heard if La Canaria fails, she’s getting sent back to the Islands,” Samo, who didn’t really care that he’d been fired, said from a couple tables over.

  “Mosca would love that, wouldn’t you?” Marco sat back down and folded his arms tightly around his torso. “Have Grito all to yourself again?”

  “They can get married and spend their honeymoon picking sugarcane for all I care,” I said. I turned to Marco. “Buy me another beer.”

  He jumped up, which made me feel good. That girl was still standing by the bathroom door, shivering from the drink I’d thrown on her.

  When La Canaria and Grito got back, they stank of salt and plastic. Everyone howled at them and slapped Grito on the shoulder. La Canaria shouted and slammed her head up and down in the air to the music. She pretended she’d tripped over a dog and stuffed her tits in Marco’s face. Marco high-fived Grito once La Canaria stood up and let him breathe again.

  At Samo’s table they were talking about the Madrid protests.

  “Those fuckers don’t stop,” Samo said. “And I don’t mean just marching or breaking shit, like here. I mean they are planning for armed resistance.”

  “Then they have very short memories,” Marco said.

  “Those fachas who killed the Communist lawyers in Madrid in January?” Samo said. “They didn’t even think they’d get arrested.”

  “And they still didn’t get the people who were really behind it,” Grito said. “Yeah, Madrid, that’s where the real action is.”

  The door swung open, and a group of punks with their faces covered by black bandanas rushed in. They pushed a table against the door of the bar. The dogs barked at them and their sweaty, shaky fear.

  “¿Qué coño?” the bartender yelled. “What’s going on?” The punks pulled off their bandanas as if we didn’t already recognize them. They’d been the ones tearing up shirts and handing out hooch last night. Felipe was with them, still in his worn brown jacket, though his hair was dripping with sweat.

  “It’s cool,” one of them said. “We’re just going to chill here.” Felipe sat down at the bar and counted his coins to see how many beers he could cover. Then he walked over to our table. I ignored him, but he leaned over us and spoke in a whisper. “Mosca, you should get out of here.”

  “Why?” Grito said.

  It wasn’t that we had forgotten last night, it just hadn’t mattered. There was no firm ground. There was no past or future. You could dream up a night like that and ride the reputation for months. Or you could dream and not wake up.

  “That pig from last night? They’re looking for you,” Felipe said.

  “There was a huge crowd,” Marco said, “and we had bandanas on.”

  “You weren’t even there,” I said.

  “I was,” he said. “I was there.”

  “Look, I don’t know why,” Felipe said, “but the word is they’re looking for you three.” He pointed at Grito, La Canaria, and me.

  “Coño, coño,” Grito mumbled. “How do they know who we are?”

  “No one saw any of us,” I said.

  “I just wanted to tell you, Mosca,” Felipe said.

  The dogs started whining, their barks mixing with the police’s German shepherds outside. Felipe had a handgun tucked in back of his black jeans. We glanced up at the photo of the general with a noose drawn around his neck. Underneath it someone had written our favorite epithet: el Cabronísimo. The hash in our pockets felt heavy. The police pounded at the door. The dogs inside went wild.

  “I’m outta here,” La Canaria said. We rushed out the back door, spilling our beers. Marco dropped some pesetas on the table for the bartender. “Such a gentleman,” she called after him.

  The streets were full of students partying, and the punks lost themselves in the crowds, dragging their dogs with them. We pushed a path away from the bar, and the barking faded.

  “How do you know that guy?” Grito asked me over the crowds.

  “Who?” I said.

  “The punk with the gun.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Yeah, you do. He wasn’t gonna tell us except he knew you. Wasn’t he friends with your brother—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said.

  “Do you think he’s right?” Grito said.

  A couple of fachas pushed between us, spilling beer on my jeans and combat boots.

  “You want to fight, Commie?” One of them threw a drunken punch at Grito, which he dodged.

  “I want out of this Nazi city,” Grito said. He held La Canaria tight around the waist. He looked skinny up against her, like a little girl with a long greasy ponytail.

  “No one saw you,” I repeated, but I was scared, too.

  “Let’s get out of town for the night,” Grito shouted. “Find a little countryside hostel.” He raised his eyebrows at La Canaria. Real subtle, that tío.

  “Good idea,” La Canaria said, tugging on his ear.

  “We’ll just hide out for the night,” Grito said. “We’ll be back in time for our exams.”

  La Canaria pushed Marco over to me. “Here, Mosca, you can bring this along for company.”

  Marco’s face cr
isped in that pathetic way it did every time I looked at him.

  “He’s not the one they’re looking for,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s the one who ratted us out,” Grito said.

  “Fuck you,” Marco said. “I was there, same as you. But maybe Felipe’s right. We’ll get out of town, just for a night.”

  It had been years since I’d left Casasrojas, even just for an afternoon. I had to be near for Alexis, just in case, but there was a pulling away, too. I needed only the softest words to wake it. The night before, I’d felt something—something dragging me awake—felt near to him somehow. I wanted that again. I thought of the calls he would make from phone booths, my abuela forced to accept the charge so she could hear his voice crackling back to us from wherever he’d disappeared to for the night. And the cities he’d describe to me when he returned—Madrid, Granada, San Sebastián, Barcelona—perfect for having held him.

  “I’m coming,” I said. “But I’m not coming with Marco.”

  “We’ll be back before you know who you’re coming with,” La Canaria said. She tugged Grito behind her, deeper into the crowd.

  * * *

  The train station was full of grandmothers dressed in black who scattered like pigeons when we came onto the platform. The next train out of town was in fifteen minutes. Grito crumbled some hash into his cigarette while we waited. Since we didn’t pay any attention to them, the grandmothers regrouped, edging closer to us and cooing about bad habits.

  La Canaria jumped up on Grito’s shoulders. “I’m hungry, cariño,” she said, and slunk her tongue into his ear. “Get me something to eat.” She nibbled on his neck, her teeth moving up and down like fingers doing piano scales.