The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  He tried to shrug her off of him. “You want a sandwich?”

  “I’m too starving to walk,” she said. “You better carry me.”

  Grito stumbled off the platform with La Canaria on his back. Marco followed them.

  “You look like a circus act,” I said. “A clown following a fucking elephant on a beach ball that’s about to pop!” They didn’t turn around. Once Grito was out of sight, I walked to the phone booth and called my abuela.

  “I’m gonna stay at my girlfriend’s tonight.” I spoke with the receiver close to my mouth, despite the film that had formed on it. “Yeah, Susanna—she lives next to the library.” I hung up and heard the last of my coins clunk into the phone. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “Hush,” whispered one of the grandmothers. She could have been my abuela. I swear, the second they turn sixty, every widow in Castile-León goes through this ceremony where they get dropped into a vat of olives and wrapped in serrano ham, and by the time they’re pulled out, they all look the same. “Don’t talk like that,” she told me.

  “Vale, Señora. I’m sorry.”

  She offered me a hard anise candy. The other widows stepped closer to me. “Where are you going, chica?” one of them asked.

  “To Madrid,” I said, making up a lie. “To join the protests.”

  “What protests?” the little widow asked.

  “For the Communist Party,” I told her, wondering how many rosaries she’d had her head under and for how long.

  “Why would you want to do that?” one of them said. “Those protests are a disgrace.”

  “The general gave the king very clear directions about how to lead our country once God took him,” the widow said, crossing herself. “This election goes against the will of God.”

  Grito, La Canaria, and Marco came back then, La Canaria still on Grito’s back, Marco following them. La Canaria was holding on to Grito with one arm and biting into a huge tortilla sandwich. Bits of greasy potato and egg stuck to her chin. “What are you talking about to these viejas, Mosca?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s get on the train.” I didn’t want Grito to try to fight these pigeon-ladies. Didn’t want to watch them slam their heavy purses into his skull while La Canaria cheered him on. I’d seen it before.

  “Here, take this,” Grito said, handing me a bulging plastic bag full of wine boxes and Coca-Cola bottles. “You owe me.”

  “No, I got her covered,” Marco said, and tried to put his arm around my shoulder. I bent down to tie my laces, and he stumbled instead. La Canaria, still on Grito’s back, laughed.

  * * *

  The train edged out of Casasrojas. The sun hit the university buildings, turning the gold stones pink. For years I’d known exactly where I would paint my initials on those walls when I graduated. How I would write the extra symbol for honors on the top right corner. The students used to write their names in bull’s blood. Now they used red paint. We crawled out of the city. I could still see the spot high above the street. The spot I showed my brother when we were so small, we could barely see it, and he laughed.

  Leaving the city, I thought I’d see Alexis. It had been two years, but I still thought I’d see him in Casasrojas, his black hair cresting above the mass of wool hats the old men wore out walking after siesta. He’d started writing his name in spray paint on the city walls—first making fun of the students and then as something else. He wrote in black spray paint, making curved and delicate letters, spelling out ALEXIS, and later just A L X S, sometimes a meter long, sometimes smaller than an outstretched hand. I looked for the signatures throughout Casasrojas. Most of them had been painted over or bleached out, but he said he’d tagged every place he’d been. I’d go on walks before dawn in the tunnels that the new streets passed over. The fluorescents would flicker, a power outage or a surge. I’d think, he must be here, he must have scared the pigeons flying toward me, but the lights jerked back on and it was only me who scared them, the echo of my footsteps. Or someone else walking in the dark before dawn.

  The train was mostly empty. The cars smelled of smoke and ham sandwiches, the windows yellow and smudged with kids’ handprints. We opened the boxes of wine, chugged some, poured in the Coke, and swirled it around.

  Even in our abuela’s apartment on Calle Grillo, I’d turn my back to the front door and know he was coming in. I could feel him, not his breath but his whole body, his whole life, pressed down on the back of my neck. Soft as the place in a baby’s skull before it’s formed, heavy as that, too. And I would wait, wanting to hear his keys in the door even after my abuela changed the lock. I’d wait for his steps, the pattern I’d know anywhere, because if he made it to the door, he might be too weak or frightened to knock. It had to be me who let him in. I was the reason he wasn’t coming back.

  I’d stand there until my abuela called out, “What are you doing, mija?”

  “Nothing,” I’d say. But she knew what I was doing. I was never sure what I could hide from her. That I knew I couldn’t.

  * * *

  The train jerked to a stop several meters from the platform outside a speck-dust town two hours from Casasrojas. After a few minutes when the doors didn’t open and we didn’t keep moving, Grito walked to the front to ask about what had happened.

  “The tracks are blocked. It’s the strikes, I guess,” he said when he got back. He opened another box of wine. “They say we could be here all night.”

  “Coño.” La Canaria grabbed the box from Grito’s hand. “I’m not staying here all night.” She slugged the wine and Coke and pulled me out of my seat. “Come on, Mosca, let’s find something to do.” Marco and Grito pried the doors open and we jumped out onto the tracks.

  The town was one of those dumps with one bread shop, one café, and one ugly church butting up against scraggly foothills. No countryside hostel. The streets were full of widows again. La Canaria ran at them cawing, but they refused to scatter; instead, they shook their crooked fingers at her. The café owner saw our clothes and wouldn’t even let us sit down, let alone sleep above his shop. The town ended at the foot of a steep hill, and we climbed it, La Canaria and Grito swaying arm in arm. Marco walked in front of me, carrying the wine and smoking. We turned off on a shepherd’s trail and kept climbing, the scent of pine heavy in the air. Pollen glowed in the twilight.

  We climbed higher, and the ground got soggier until the pines finally stopped and there was only grass. Wild daffodils covered the hills, their spiky yellow buds reaching up to us. The earth was soaked with snowmelt that trickled down in hundreds of slender streams. Sheep shit was everywhere, but the air smelled of grass and sun and water. La Canaria bent down to drink from one of the streams.

  “Are you crazy?” I said, kicking a dried lump of manure at her. She just laughed and crouched down, lapping up the water.

  “So we’ll camp up here and catch the earliest train back in the morning?” Marco said. “Is that the plan?”

  “You and your fucking plans,” Grito said. He pounced on La Canaria and wrestled her to the wet grass.

  “Why do you need to go back in the morning?” La Canaria teased. “Got something important scheduled?” She rolled on top of Grito. Marco had set himself up for their taunting.

  “Mosca told those old ladies we’re going to Madrid,” Grito said. “Is that the plan, Mosca?”

  “Nobody said anything to me about Madrid,” Marco said. “I still have one more exam to take, and I need to pass it to graduate.”

  “Don’t listen to that pendejo,” I said, and started climbing again.

  “Where are you going?” Marco called after me. “There’s nothing up there.”

  I didn’t answer him. I wanted to see how far he’d follow me.

  * * *

  The air changed quickly as soon as the sun went down. The scent of hot pine lingered, but with no moisture in the air, it sudde
nly turned cold. We noticed it slowly, our skin adjusting until it couldn’t and we were shivering.

  “Joder, I’m freezing,” Grito said. “Let’s find somewhere dry to make a fire.”

  We found a tiny circle of sand dug into the hill either by sheep or shepherds, and set down our backpacks. Grito and Marco walked back to the pines to try to find some wood to burn. We could see them in the distance, Grito hanging on a thin branch, trying to break it off.

  “Qué idiota,” La Canaria said.

  They came back with sappy branches and a bunch of pinecones. We emptied the bags of wine and soda and used the receipts to start a smoky fire. Then we drank the wine to keep warm. La Canaria howled at the fire. Grito tried to get his hand up her shirt, but she swatted it away. Marco sat kind of close to me. He was still trying to figure out what to do next. I mean, he knew what he wanted to do, he wanted to touch me, he’d wanted to for years, but he couldn’t. First Alexis was stopping him, then—then it was still Alexis. How to live with that want and do nothing. Part of me loved watching it run him ragged.

  “Leave us alone,” La Canaria said to them. “Mosca and I need some girl time.” She leaned against my shoulder and soon fell asleep.

  The few lights of the towns and shepherds’ houses on the hills flickered like the piles of gold left on the shores of the river in Casasrojas. Saints’ medallions, a spread-open wallet, sometimes a broken watch or a torn chain; the piles were never touched by anyone but the police. The money you could get from the pawnshop wasn’t worth it. When the medallions and wallets were found, the person they belonged to could be ­identified and the family would know who had killed them. The secret police all killed the same way. Left the same mark. The body gone but the victim’s saint medallion and wallet in the sand. They left the medallions because the people they took weren’t human anymore. They didn’t have names. They didn’t have saints. God no longer knew them or never did.

  I remembered standing with Alexis on the broken railway bridge when we were kids. Sticking our feet into the lumps of sand and spiky grass growing through the old railroad ties, daring each other to go farther out on the bridge, our hands red from the rusted rails we’d climbed to get there. We were young when we first saw the piles catch the sun on the sand. Ten of them all in a row. We jumped off the bridge to see what they were, Alexis running before me. A man stepped out of the tall grass and placed his hand on Alexis’s shoulder. The man was smiling. I felt guilty—I’d seen the man just before he touched Alexis, and I hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t stopped him before he reached Alexis. The man was probably just walking home and saw some kids playing where they shouldn’t be, but he scared me. He looked perfectly harmless.

  “Stay away from here” was all he said. “This isn’t for you.”

  As soon as the man stepped out of the grass, I realized what the piles were. I knew they weren’t for us. It didn’t need repeating. He stepped out of the grass, and I remembered when Mamá and Papá dropped us off at our abuela’s and didn’t come back. The month of waiting that ended not with our parents walking through Abuela’s door but with two policemen politely knocking. They handed Abuela my father’s worn leather wallet and my mother’s necklace—a gold medallion for St. Julia of Mérida and a small fist carved from azabache. My abuela closed her hand around the necklace and wallet. I never saw them again.

  I didn’t know how long it took Alexis to figure out what the piles meant. Whether he remembered the police coming to the door with our mother’s necklace. How long it took him to connect our parents not coming back to the knock on the door, to the others who didn’t come back, to the warnings in gold on the sand. I tried to keep him away from the piles, but if I lost him in a game of chase, I would find him there, crouched in the sand. Don’t touch them, I’d say, and he wouldn’t, he was still too afraid, but he stepped closer, the older he got. They were pulling him in and I couldn’t stop it.

  * * *

  When I woke up a few hours later, the moon was bright above us, and La Canaria had wrapped herself around me so tight I could hardly breathe. Marco lay with his back against me, close enough that I could feel his heat. His jean jacket was pulled over his thick dark curls. Grito was by the fire, crouched near the dead coals and shivering.

  “What are you doing, Grito?” I whispered, not wanting to wake La Canaria or Marco.

  “I’m trying to get this fire going again.”

  “Leave it and go to sleep,” I told him.

  “I can’t sleep. I’m too cold.” He poked a stick at the coals and blew on them. They started glowing.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked, pointing to a pile of neatly chopped wood by his feet.

  “I found it by an empty shepherd’s shack over there.”

  He started throwing the wood into the fire. It was getting bigger. He looked unfamiliar, a weird elf backlit by the moon, his ponytail bouncing in the wind. He wouldn’t turn toward me, and I could see only the outline of his face, but I knew what emotions it held.

  “We’re not going back in time for our exams, are we?” I said.

  “Joder, Mosca. Did you think we were gonna make it back in time?”

  “No.”

  He was surprised at that and laughed. “Me, neither,” he said. “You’ll have to tell your abuela you’ll be late.” He’d seen me then or knew that I had to tell her what I was up to. He refused to call his abuela. Like mine, she was his only family member left, but all that weight focused on him wasn’t enough to make him tell her where he was going. He wanted to be like a scream, alone and jutting out, ungraspable. That’s why his nickname stuck.

  Alexis would always call. Whether he was gone a night or three or a whole week, the phone in the hall would rattle—the only time it ever did. He wouldn’t tell me over the phone what he was doing. He’d return, worn and jittering, his hands swollen, a new grin smacked over the face he’d had when he left. And he’d say just enough that I could piece together the rest. He’d met a group of militants who were resisting the general’s regime. He was gaining their trust. Small jobs, nothing dangerous, Mosquita. Just finding a few names, he said, a few locations. I scanned the papers, trying to link his clues to the codes hidden in the articles, but they never said anything. All I had were the few words he gave me, and he muttered them so carelessly, I wanted to hit him. Because whatever he was doing, it wasn’t nothing, and it wasn’t safe. People never came back home for less. He hinted that he’d crossed the border into France—hitchhiked through the mountains without a visa—and bragged that he’d seen the famous woman with a painted half-smile. He wasn’t impressed. Not half as mysterious as you. Not a dying firefly to my girl.

  Grito turned to me. His face was lit up in pieces by the flames. “Why’d you come along, anyway?” he said. “You can’t stand Marco.”

  I pressed my hands into the scorched grass around the fire. Whether Alexis had ever gotten to Paris, I didn’t know, but I’d added his words to the ballast sentences that sustained me. He left. He came back. He can leave. I can leave. I listed the cities he said he’d been—Madrid, Granada, San Sebastián, Barcelona, Paris, even. Their order was confused, but their names made a map of lights in my mind. A constellation leading not back but far. Each a whole world I’d never been, swallowing him up and spewing him back, crustaceans in his pocket and seaweed in his hair, on the shores of our prison town. I considered the cities he talked about not destinations but destructions. A chosen wreckage. Different only in that way from the one handed us.

  The sound of sap popping woke La Canaria. Her makeup was smudged all over her face. She’d left a black pool of it on my shoulder. “Coño, Grito,” she whispered groggily. “That’s a really good fire.”

  She nudged Marco, who shot up in the air as if he’d been bitten. Grito didn’t say anything; he just kept throwing logs on the blaze. I stood and did the same. The embers flew at our faces each time we threw more wood in. Wh
en we’d used all the wood Grito had carried, we stumbled in the dark to the shack and brought more over.

  The heat batted our faces, drying our mouths, pulling our skin tight across our noses. I don’t know who did it first. If it was Grito who refused to say a word, La Canaria who kept running around the fire and threatening to jump in, or if it was me. We had climbed the cars together in Casasrojas. No one knew who had broken the first store window or who had tilted his head in such a way to give permission. Grito had hit the police officer with the crowbar, but who had made his lips bleed, who had broken his ribs. That wasn’t the point. There were no government cars or police officers to wreck on the hillside in the dark. There were only our books and our clothes and our bodies. Our books first into the fire, a few pages, a corner of the binding to start. Our shirts next. Grito’s glowing for a second like a moth before it burst like a moth. The flames high from the burning paper. My backpack and then La ­Canaria’s. Marco stripped off his jacket and shirt, threw them in. La Canaria guzzled the last of the wine and tossed in the empty soda bottles and wine boxes. The wax and nylon made the fire shoot neon. We coughed at the smoke but kept breathing it in, hard and deep. We didn’t speak. Our words were clear. I dare you. I dare you to retreat and attack in one moment. To make that one movement. Our jeans and our combat boots. Threw them in and stood with our toes digging into the cold sand. Staring ahead, watching the fire spark red and green and purple into the sky. I dare you to wreck it all. I dare you. La Canaria wrapped her arm around my stomach, and I could feel her sticky flesh press against mine. Marco edged in next to us. This time I relaxed into him. I waited until Grito stepped close to me. I took his hand. Felt that pocket of damp air between our palms shape and disappear.

  Three

  I’d known Grito the longest. He lived in the same apartment building as Alexis, my abuela, and me on Calle Grillo. I’d see him through the elevator gates when we were kids, holding on to his mother’s skirt, coming back from the market. I’d press the close button so they couldn’t get in and watch him disappear between the floors, only his brown hair and white hand on his mother’s black skirt visible. Alexis would laugh, even though he wasn’t ever mean to kids because they were skinny and still hanging on to their mothers. He was just following me. And I was mad that Grito still had a mother, though she died soon after, giving birth to what would have been his sister.