The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  The first time Grito and I fucked, we were seventeen. He brought a black-market copy of Sticky Fingers with the songs that had been censored off the Spanish version and put it on the record player in my room. My abuela had saved up to buy the record player so I could listen to English lessons on it. She wanted me to learn English because it would open doors—she must have read that in one of her magazines. She was in the apartment, but she was watching her telenovela, and it only took a minute. Grito was on top of me with his shirt still on, and I reached underneath the collar to feel his sticky skin—a fine layer of pimples beneath downy hair refusing to turn thick and black. He didn’t say anything when he came, softly above me, just put his slightly wet cheek on my chest when it was over. He left me the record and said he’d see me in English.

  That spring, we read bootleg copies of our favorite murdered poet’s books in whispers over the English-language records and wrote the best lines on each other’s limbs to remember them. He wrote Lorca’s words about the curve of a scream in the mountains on the inside of my right thigh, and that was the first time I called him Grito. I didn’t know if he remembered, because we didn’t read that poetry anymore. He told me he lent the book to somebody and that they lost it, but he wouldn’t tell me who.

  * * *

  At dawn we rose from the grass but couldn’t feel the cold. Our bodies were somewhere else. We started moving once we could see, keeping close, the dew between our toes. Grito and Marco walked ahead of La Canaria and me, their white asses glowing slightly in the dawn. The cottage where Grito had found the firewood was only a hill away. He stopped before the shuttered window and plunged his hand into the wet, soft planks. Climbed inside the hole he’d made.

  “There’s a key on the door frame, idiota,” La Canaria said when he opened the door. Blood dripped down his arm, and bits of wood and lichen stuck to his wet skin.

  “There’s nothing in here,” Grito said.

  “Pendejo,” I said.

  When my abuelo was young, he had sheep in La Mancha, and he always kept clothes in his shepherd’s cottage if he came in from the rain and didn’t want to freeze to death. I looked around the cottage and found it—an old army chest made of cardboard.

  “What, have you done this before?” Marco asked, still standing in the doorway like a stupid stray cat who thinks someone’s going to beg it to come in and eat from their hand. Inside the chest were army blankets, a sleeping bag, a pair of worn green trousers, and a torn wool sweater.

  I tossed the clothes on the cot. “Put these on, Grito,” I said. “Go get us some clothes.”

  “How do you know I won’t leave you here?” he asked, grinning.

  La Canaria walked up behind him, wrapped herself around his wet back, her breasts pressed against the grass caked to his skin.

  “You better come back for us, cielo,” she whispered into his ear. “Because if you don’t, I swear by the Virgin and my dead abuela, I’ll find you and chop off your balls. And Mosca will eat your dick. I mean cut up, chew, and swallow.” She pushed him toward me and I handed him the clothes, letting my fingers linger on his.

  “Don’t think we won’t, cielo,” I said.

  Marco was turned away from us, toward the window. He kept touching the bruise around his neck and looking at his fingers, as if the mark were paint that could rub off. The pants I’d handed Grito were too small and bunched up around his crotch. He had to stoop to walk. The sweater’s sleeves were short, too, and they showed where the shutter had torn up his arm.

  We wrapped ourselves in the blankets and walked back to the fire with him. It was only embers. We used the remainders of our boots and the green branches that hadn’t burned to poke through it. Our coins had burned through the cloth and sat glowing on the coals. Marco scorched his hand trying to pick them up. Our clothes were destroyed. I took a piece of what had been La Canaria’s shirt, picked up the coins, and dumped them in the wet grass. The dew sizzled and pulsed around them.

  La Canaria kept off to the side, crouched down, her blanket folded around her. I knew she’d found what she was looking for, what only she and I knew existed. La Canaria always made a big show about not paying for anything. Not just around Grito—with anybody. I had to buy her stuff all the time. But I knew she carried a small cricket box everywhere she went. It was brass with tiny triangles stamped through the metal and had a miniature handle on top like a suitcase. Fit in the palm of her hand. Not much money in it but more than you would have thought she’d have. I stepped over to her. She was looking at Grito and Marco, trying to count the hot coins. She slipped two bills out from under her blanket, and I pretended to have found them in the bottom of my ruined backpack.

  “Nothing fancy.” I handed the bills to Grito. “No fucking around.”

  He bobbed down the mountain, the old clothes swirling around him. Marco kicked around the embers but couldn’t find anything else. He ran back to the cottage to get warm.

  * * *

  Marco had been Alexis’s closest friend. When they started hanging out, it made me feel better. Marco was kind of a geek, like me—he acted tough but no one believed it. I liked Alexis hanging out with him instead of the runaways who slept on the street, or people like Felipe, whose names I could hardly remember, they disappeared so often.

  My abuela had managed to keep her apartment through the years, a lucky chance here and there, the money from the sale of my abuelo’s farm placed in the right hands. Alexis would bring Marco over, and they’d sit in the kitchen and drink. Everyone else I knew lived in boardinghouses and shared a kitchen with five other families—you didn’t exactly invite anyone over. That was what the parks were for, the tiny cafés where you didn’t have to buy anything, the tracks of cement and stone in between buildings always covered by furtive knees, hands flicking cigarettes and cupping a mouth to say the same hidden thing. I didn’t know where Marco lived, but he always brought a nice bottle of brandy, and then they’d split the bottle. My abuela would hum loudly the whole time because she didn’t allow liquor in her house. But she’d stopped trying to say no to Alexis. My abuelo had been the only person who could do that. Perhaps my father would have been able to, but he never had the chance.

  Marco was the only friend Alexis brought home, though he had many. For a while, Marco was in the kitchen every night, and I ignored him then like I did the table’s chipped legs, different from how I ignored him after Alexis disappeared.

  The night he first appeared in our kitchen, I’d just come home from trying to study for my university entrance exams in the bar under the philology library. I sat close by the door to the hidden print shop because I liked the sound of the machines, the whir of paper, the idea of the same secret stories and photos printed over and over, carpeting the room. It was the distraction necessary to exist in a world where my words were not my own. It worked for a time, anyway. I’d spent most of the afternoon crouched on one of the bar’s leather seats. I tipped back against the damp wall, trying not to spill my caña, trying not to be noticed, eavesdropping on a group of young professors beside me.

  “He’s going to die,” one of the men said, looking over his shoulder, then making the gesture of combing a perfect part in his hair with the exactitude of slitting someone’s throat. When he was alive, no one used el Cabronísimo’s name out loud. The gesture to signal who it was you were talking about changed regularly and could be disguised easily as a tic or normal movement. “He has to sometime.”

  I couldn’t hear what his companions said in response because all I could hear were those reverberating words. The general had been alive all my life, all my parents’ brief lives. The only person who knew of a time before him was my abuela. She wouldn’t mention it or the war that had brought him to power, just as she wouldn’t speak the devil’s name.

  I drank my flat caña and chewed my greasy tortilla. After lightning there is the sky, black as before but jittering. There was me, sli
ghtly drunk, tired, not having memorized any of the English vocabulary I’d brought but with the knowledge inside me that the general could die. Someone, a professor, had said it out loud. I smoked all the way home and then bought marzipan from the nuns on the corner of Calle Grillo and La Libertad to hide the scent from my abuela.

  Alexis’s voice came out of the kitchen when I turned the lock to our apartment. He was in a good mood, laughing, and I could hear my abuela humming because of it. She always moved softly across our floors, attuned to Alexis, each of her gray hairs a taut wire listening.

  Entering the kitchen, I saw Marco first. Like all the kitchens in the apartments I’d been in, ours was small, made for one woman to move in and maybe sit down for a second to take her espresso while the rice finished. But Alexis and I had always stayed in the kitchen. We needed to feel that sticky air filled with oil fried, poured into a jar that once held asparagus, and fried again. Being in that kitchen always felt like we were in that jar. Our words and movements the burnt flecks of potatoes and skirt steak that passed through the sieve, suspended, immobile, but contained in a way that felt safe. The kitchen was where we had last seen Mamá. She kissed us and handed us a box of crackers and said she’d be back soon. At least, I wanted to believe I remembered the last thing she said and not just standing waiting for her.

  Alexis’s back was to me, as I would never put my back to his. He was a year and a half younger than me but in the past few months he’d put on weight. He always used to thump me on the shoulder when he came in, but it had started to hurt. Or he’d shoot a rubber band at the back of my neck when I was reading, and I’d scream, Abuela rushing in because she thought one of us had been burned. He didn’t do it to hurt me, just to say he was there, that he knew I was there. It was the only way he could. Once I grew breasts, he could barely kiss my cheek. Even though I knew what his actions meant, they still scared me. He wasn’t always in control. To study, I sat at the far side of the kitchen table, where I could see him coming in. After he disappeared, I would sit there because if I didn’t, I might confuse my heartbeat with his steps down the hall and his breath with my own.

  Marco looked up at me.

  “Buenas,” I said to Alexis, and leaned down to kiss him, ignoring his flinch when our cheeks touched. He grabbed my long braid, slung over my shoulder like a kid’s, and twisted it around his hand so I couldn’t stand up.

  “I told you not to start smoking,” Alexis said.

  I stayed still until he let go of my braid. Even a year ago I would have bitten his hand, but I knew where that would get me.

  “I’ve been studying,” I said, and went to cut some bread and cheese on the counter.

  “My sister’s a geek,” he said to Marco. “And it better stay that way. Don’t hang out in that shithole under the library.”

  It was impossible to lie to him. Marco still hadn’t spoken. He knew he couldn’t. Alexis was skinnier than most of his friends, but they all listened to him. He could destroy you in one sentence, and Marco wasn’t really cool enough to be hanging around him anyway. Every neutral word Alexis said to Marco was a gift.

  “Do you know Marco?” Alexis said.

  “Hey.” I bent over and kissed Marco’s cheek.

  “Hey,” he said quietly, not looking at me.

  “He has a crush on you,” Alexis said.

  “Carajo,” Marco whispered.

  “Yeah, he thinks you’re really cute. Can’t stop talking about you.” Alexis ripped off a tiny piece of his bread and flicked it at Marco. “But I told him you’re dating that comemierda Grito.”

  “What’s wrong with Grito?” I said.

  “Besides that he’s dating my sister?” He flicked a bread crumb at me. “Anyway, Marco knows I’ll kill him if he touches you.”

  Alexis was smiling, teasing Marco, but he also meant it completely.

  “You’re such a pendejo,” I told Alexis, and walked out of the kitchen.

  Down the hall, I could hear them goading each other. Then popping a wine bottle, then laughing. My abuela turned up the volume of the TV, pretending she could hear nothing through our cardboard walls.

  * * *

  Through the crack Grito had made in the shutters, I could see the rainclouds easing over the mountains. I walked behind La Canaria where she stood watching the clouds crest slow and shy over the rocks. The sun wasn’t fully up yet, and we were shivering in the army blankets.

  La Canaria turned to me and touched my hair. “We should have sent Grito for a comb, at least,” she said.

  “Or a mirror,” Marco said from the other side of the room. A big brass key hung on a shoelace around his neck, the bits polished where they rubbed against his skin.

  “Shut up,” La Canaria whispered.

  I faced out at the splintered wood and air turning to water. Marco looked the worst; at least he looked worse than I felt. I’d been needing less and less sleep, eating less, enjoying the feel of my bones brittle beneath my skin. La Canaria ran only on food. The closest I’d seen her to tired was being slightly quiet. But Marco slept like a British tourist. Eight hours and it had to be regular. His face cast off a certain light that made me cold, want coffee. Made waiting seem long and the room small. I didn’t like waiting. It was impossible not to compare it to other times.

  * * *

  When Alexis had been gone for three days without calling, my abuela stopped pretending to do anything but wait.

  She sat by the television and kept turning it on and off. We had this black-and-white thing she’d won in a church auction that took a long time to turn back on. It would buzz for a few moments and burp white static until the sobbing faces of the telenovela would fade slowly into view. When she thought she’d heard something, she would get up and turn it off, the faces collapsing into a white star that flashed and disappeared. She’d jump up at nothing and then not hear an actual knock on the door. I sat by the television so she wouldn’t have to get up. I turned it off when she told me to. It was summer, I hadn’t been able to find a job, and I had nothing to do but sit with her and wait. Either that or sit in my room not doing my summer reading and pretending I wasn’t doing exactly what she was doing.

  Marco kept coming by with a bottle of brandy to see if Alexis was there. I didn’t want Marco to know we were worried. I said I didn’t know where Alexis was. I didn’t say he hadn’t called.

  One night Marco came by with nothing in his hands and his face wrung out. I hadn’t seen or heard from Alexis in six days. I lied to Marco and said Alexis was inside sleeping and maybe Marco should call before coming over to someone’s house late at night. Marco wanted to believe me. His body sank in the doorway. He’d been holding it tight and forgotten how much that hurt. But he came the next night and I told him the same thing. That time his body didn’t sink; it just stayed how it was.

  In the doorway, he tried to look around me. He was scared and that made me scared.

  “Do you know what happened?” he said. “What did he tell you?”

  “She’s in there,” I said.

  The credits song for one of Abuela’s shows blared behind me. I didn’t want to talk about where Alexis could be or what part we’d played in it. If we’d be next to not come home. I knew if my abuela saw Marco, she’d want to ask him about Alexis.

  “Do you know if he still has it?” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I closed the door in his face. I didn’t want him in my house again.

  Even though I ignored him, Marco kept hanging around me. He’d always be in the background, even if I was with a crowd he hated. He’d follow me home from the bars late at night. He said he wanted to make sure I made it there safe. One night I turned around in the doorway of my abuela’s apartment building and waited until he was standing right in front of me. I eased close to him. I could smell his breath on me. I slid my hand under h
is shirt and he closed his eyes.

  “I just want to protect you,” he said.

  That was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to be wrecked. I deserved it after what I did. My hand under Marco’s shirt, I opened my penknife. Waited until he felt the blade graze his skin. I didn’t press down hard, but it was unmistakable. I hated Marco for every second he’d spent with Alexis. Every laugh and trust they’d shared that I hadn’t been a part of. I turned around and opened the door. Left him standing there with his shirt up, searching for blood. I never caught him following me again, but I knew he still did.

  * * *

  Inside the shepherd’s cottage, the rain was all around us. I could tell La Canaria wanted to go out, wanted to get wet and dive in. I could see her skin twitching the way it would before a touch or a cigarette. Suddenly, I needed to distract her and keep her dry as long as possible. But I didn’t want to mention looking for food in the shack if there wasn’t any to find.

  Before anyone else woke up, I’d sat in the grass, numb and looking for the sun. Out on the mountain ridge where the clouds pinked, I could see the world opened by our exams. The safe government jobs, the chance to use my English and collect a modest salary each month until someone married me. This if I were very lucky. Most people I knew, even those with degrees, were unemployed. I’d have to be grateful for anything I got, a woman and with no ties to the state. If I got it—that jewel job tucked deep in a municipal building—the letterhead would no longer bear el Cabronísimo’s name, but the ink would smell the same and the work would be the same. I would be couched inside the body of someone making the same movements, filling out the same forms, as they had done for decades in his honor. When I found an old pen underneath the radiator, would I wonder what it had signed away; would I pause before I added my teeth marks to the indentations in the blue plastic, the marks of someone who didn’t have to know how to aim to carry out death sentences?