The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  I watched, waiting for the sun to come up, but there were only dissipating clouds and me, a fast-retreating star pulling back into darkness.

  Marco leaned over a pile of kindling in the fireplace. “If Grito comes back soon,” he said, “we’ll probably be able to catch a train and be back in time for our exams.”

  “We won’t be back in time,” I said, even though I’d been thinking the same thing. We’d all been trying to gauge the time by the height of the sun or guess the frequency of trains back from where we were.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. I was exhausted. But instead of darkness behind my eyelids, I saw a constellation. A dim handful of city names flickering slowly into focus. The cities Alexis would call from. Solid as bricks stacking, they formed in the back of my throat. Madrid, Granada, San Sebastián, Barcelona, Paris. I tried to swallow, but there they stayed.

  “We’re not going back,” I said.

  “You weren’t going to take the exams, were you?” Marco said.

  I shook my head. I’d known all along I couldn’t sit through them. I just couldn’t admit it until that moment. I had my reasons for not taking those final exams, and I didn’t need to explain them to Marco. He knew better than anyone.

  We wouldn’t mention it again. Even when Grito returned, he would be able to sense what I’d done with those words. We’d all been thinking them—maybe not Marco, he was always watching me too carefully to notice anything else—but we hadn’t said them out loud.

  The cathedral in Casasrojas: its open halls, stained glass windows smudged with dirt and light, pigeons passing through streaks of sun. The view of the cathedral’s facade and the new students trying to find the good-luck frog hidden among the skulls carved into the yellow stone. The passageways behind the walls that led to the unimportant towers, the ones without gargoyles and panoramic views of the city. Grito and I used to spend hours there, in between the walls, bent over each other, the scent of incense filtering through the cracked oak doors. We climbed curved stone staircases that led to narrow doors and opened to keyholes of gray sky. The stairs were covered in dust, layers of forgotten years, walls wet from sweet-smelling mold. The cathedral shifted the first time we opened one of those forgotten doors. It didn’t look the same afterward.

  “Vale.” La Canaria nodded.

  There had never been any power in what I said, what I prayed at night—even as a kid, I could feel the weakness—but with those words, I lucked out. It was luck, nothing of mine. The final whirring in a lock I didn’t know I had, and I’d opened up to a new raw space. A field made of strange, wet mud, low clouds on the horizon. The words pushed the door wide and dared us to step through. We did without even knowing it. The new space was real and nothing else. That was where we stood.

  La Canaria started looking through the old shack. There were the cot with the army trunk under it and a table made of wooden wine boxes covered in a torn oilcloth. She took off the cloth and started going through the boxes.

  “You’re not going to steal anything else, are you?” I said.

  She didn’t answer, but she turned away from me, her hands searching. She kept opening boxes. When she turned back, she held a handful of bullets and the raw wool they’d been packed in. She dropped the bullets one by one from her hand onto the floor, letting them fall like water. They bounced in the dust and rolled across the floor until they hit the walls or a crack in the floorboards too large to pass over. Closing her finger over the last bullet, she walked across the room and reached for my hand. Pressed the bullet into my palm. “Just for you,” she said.

  She met my eyes and I didn’t look away. It was Alexis who’d first brought her to El Chico, before the newspapers went up on the windows, and I could see them walking together, his arm wrapped around her. We’d seen her around, smoking under the juniper trees on campus and at bars. Alexis was crazy about her, and she seemed to care about him, too, though she didn’t stop flirting with anyone who talked to her. They’d fight and break up, get back together again, fight again. When they were together, they ignored everyone else, and we would just stand and watch them, hypnotized by the way they’d hypnotized each other. Hoping to catch a little bit of the light bouncing off them.

  The rumor was that she was the daughter of a plantation owner on the Canary Islands out of wedlock. Or she’d been kicked out of school there and sent here. Despite what we called her, some people said she was dominicana or from Cuba. The scent of a bribe somewhere, money, a secret, and she played that part up, probably even started it. No one had ever been to her place.

  But I saw a bleakness, too. When she wasn’t cursing at the bartender for a weak drink or slinging herself into a sweaty crowd, her face in repose looked like it had been recently smacked clean. I thought there must be some good reason she’d left. Her skin drew her to us, that pause where she couldn’t quite be placed. She could have just been from the south, but in some lights her skin looked darker. It made us lean in closer. Anything different was to be coveted, anything that showed the lie of the pure world the fachas preached. Even if that thing was not a thing at all. Either way, if she was here on the condition of not fucking up, she wasn’t holding up her end of the deal.

  “We didn’t ask Grito for any cigarettes,” Marco said.

  “You better start thinking on your feet,” La Canaria said, turning away from me. “Or else we’ll drop you like a fist of burnt corn.”

  “Whatever that means.” Marco looked over at me, but I didn’t share his sneer. I curled my fingers around the bullet.

  La Canaria finished going through the boxes, mostly raw wool used to pack objects long since removed. She pulled out a few rusted tools and a small jar of rice. There was only about a handful left, and I saw her finger the grains slowly, then put the jar back underneath the wool.

  “Marco,” I said. “Start the fire again.” Just to give him something to do and me something to watch. La Canaria sat down by me. We waited for Grito to come back with our clothes and a way out.

  My abuela used to say that no matter how small a house was, its walls would swell to fit those in it. I would lie in bed and imagine her apartment expanding with each new intake and exhale. The shack on the mountain felt aware of us. It sucked in air, but its walls never lifted. The walls drew out our breath and contained it, growing thicker, the air more stale. La Canaria lay on the cot, asleep or staring an escape through the roof. The blanket had fallen down her chest, leaving one breast open to the shack’s low ceiling.

  I knew Marco was looking at me, but I could still feel him all over me from the night before, and his eyes were vinegar on stripped-off skin. I was being kind to him, though he didn’t know it, by not looking at him, not slugging him, letting the light from where his skin had been on mine vibrate and reappear. Just allowing that was very kind.

  When Grito finally got back, soaking wet from the rain and with a plastic bag under his arm, we’d been silent for hours. The sun shone weakly but high in the sky. The clothes must have been an old woman’s; they smelled quiet, furious, and of fried bacalao. La Canaria and I put on two identical floor-length black polyester skirts. Mine sagged around me, and hers was so tight she couldn’t button it at the waist. Then more sweaters, moth-eaten and stale with sweat at the neck, a pair of too-long trousers for Marco, and a few cheap white undershirts.

  “It’s just until we get back to Casasrojas, then—” Grito stopped.

  I was right. He’d read my words in the shack’s thin air, read them because they were all that was left to read, our faces blank, our bodies limp to the scrape of someone else’s clothes.

  There was still time to go back. We could have made ­excuses—bandits, the strikes, a sudden rash of penitence. Days later we could have returned, heads down, lashing our backs with the remnants of our schoolbags, and taken the exams ­individually. Maybe Felipe was mistaken, maybe it had all passed over us and we wouldn’t be caugh
t. Of course we were afraid, terrified, of the police, of getting caught. But that wasn’t why we didn’t go back.

  “Casasrojas?” I said. “What have we got there?”

  The fire was a dare, and though it had seemed like the summit at the time, it was only a few dusty crags on the shore of what the real dare would become. It had not started when we put on the bandanas. We thought it had ended when we threw our clothes in the fire. But the breaking glass, the policeman, the burning backpacks were all symptoms. We had broken the things around us that we hated and then broken our own things. Finding the ground scorched for miles, we turned to what was left.

  The real dare was not to go back, to keep messing up, to step deeper and deeper into the murk. We skidded our eyes over one another’s faces, looking out for the weakling. Who’s gonna be the one to turn tail? Not me, we each silently, separately vowed. Me, I’m going for the bottom.

  La Canaria spoke from the corner. “I don’t have any reason to go back. Do you, Grito?”

  “I’m not going back,” Grito said, smiling snidely. “I meant Madrid. Aren’t we gonna join the protests?”

  Now that he understood where we were, he wanted to be the one to do the daring. All utterances were fair game. Anything we’d said before or threatened to do, we had to make good. There had been no decision and yet there it was, lodged deep. In the fire we’d seen the others’ hidden faces and realized they were all the same. That was no comfort. We were unrecognizable in the span of a morning. We didn’t trust ourselves.

  “Madrid’s where all the action is,” La Canaria said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Madrid. Or wherever.” I traced the cities lodged in my throat. Madrid, as good a place to start as any.

  * * *

  The woman at the station said that the direct train to Madrid wouldn’t come through the town at the base of the mountain for another week. We’d have to take a bunch of regionals to get there. Marco spoke to the teller and figured out a route that avoided most of the strikes. La Canaria handed him a few bills and said it was the last she had. We found four seats with a table between them and sat down. Grito and Marco tried to sleep, but the seats didn’t go back. An old lady kept poking their legs with her umbrella whenever their feet slipped into the aisle. Outside the window the mountains rolled into swirls of hue. Tiny villages, stucco houses with dirt floors, shantytowns made of surprisingly bright plastics and tin. The whole country melting into a plaything of the train and time, showing it for what it really was: blurs of carbon.

  “What are we gonna do there?” Marco asked hesitantly.

  “Where?” Grito said.

  “In Madrid, where are we gonna stay, how are we—”

  “You want a timetable?”

  “We’ll start in Madrid,” La Canaria said.

  “I’m just saying, how are we—”

  “Hey, Mosca.” Grito leaned over Marco to me. “Where’d you pick up this pendejo with the suit and tie?”

  I tucked my tongue in my mouth and silenced the voice begging we plan for food before we got too hungry to spit, demanding we seek out a place to sleep that wouldn’t leave us dew-drenched in the morning. The cities swarmed in my throat. Madrid, Granada, San Sebastián, Barcelona, Paris.

  “I didn’t invite him,” I said.

  “It’s not facha to want to know what’s happening next,” Marco said.

  “Isn’t it?” Grito drummed his fingers on the sticky table between us. After a pause he spoke again. “But that’s not what’s facha about you, Marco.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Grito looked over at me and then quickly away. He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper, as if I couldn’t hear. “Yeah, Marco. I know what you are. Who you are.”

  “Will you two shut up?” La Canaria said. “I’m trying to sleep.” She got up and moved to the back of the car.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Marco said.

  “Everyone knows, tío. Want a chance to prove them wrong?”

  I stood up and followed La Canaria. She leaned her head against the yellow glass and closed her eyes. There was a certain comfort in her, and I edged as close as I could without touching.

  “All I know is I’m not going back to that fucking island,” La Canaria whispered, her eyes still closed. “Nobody is dragging me back there.”

  We were silent for a while. I tried to sleep, but Marco sat down next to me and he sat too close. I could tell he wanted to talk, to figure out what I was thinking, but I kept my eyes closed tight and let the towns pass by.

  * * *

  “Time to switch trains,” Marco said, shaking us awake. The train started to slow, and the blurs of color solidified into red dirt and brown grasses.

  “No, it isn’t,” Grito shouted from the other end of the car.

  “Let’s move before we miss our stop.” Marco pulled at my arm. I shrugged him off but stood up. I hadn’t paid attention to the route we needed to take.

  “Come on,” Marco said, and we followed him off the train. Another train was pulling into the station. “This is ours, come on, we’re gonna miss it!”

  “Vale, vale,” La Canaria said, rubbing her eyes. “We’re coming.”

  We got on the next train and Marco found us a seat. “Now you can all go back to sleep,” he said. He sat down next to me and I turned to the window, watched the green mountains swirl to soft terraces of yellow dirt.

  The night before, I’d managed to get between La Canaria and Grito. I’d pushed myself onto Grito and held him still beneath me. Each of our faces was just visible, lit by something other than the fire, other than the black sky. We looked like ghosts, burnt-wood white, the shape of the dots in your eyes after staring at a lamp too long. Marco had his eyes closed, touching La Canaria. Hers were open and looking right at me. I couldn’t read her expression and that made my legs relax and give enough so Grito could push me off of him and pin La Canaria’s face to the wet grass and come on her back, her skin brighter in the places his semen landed.

  * * *

  Grito shoved Marco into me and woke me up. His skin on mine was like an alarm. Fine that he wouldn’t leave my side. Sitting down next to me whenever he could. But I didn’t want him touching me.

  “What’s your problem, maricón?” Grito said, pointing to a list of stops above us. “You made us get on the wrong train.”

  “Joder,” Marco said. “I’m sorry. I guess I misread the signs.”

  “No me jodas. You’re the one who talked to the lady who said where to go.”

  “What happened?” La Canaria appeared above us with a can of orange soda in her hand. “Want some?” She handed me the can. “I made this kid in the dining car buy it for me. He’s really cute, even though he’s just a baby. I might have to wait for him.” She flicked out her tongue at Grito.

  “This idiota got us on the wrong train,” Grito said, shoving Marco again.

  “Shut up,” Marco said. “I’ll figure it out.” He stood up and looked at the list of stops. “Let’s get off here.” He pointed to the next stop.

  “Why?” I said. He usually had a good sense of direction. I didn’t understand how he had gotten turned around.

  “We can get back on in the morning. I’ve got a place we can stay around here.” He said it flatly and wouldn’t say anything else about it. We got off when the train stopped outside a town surrounded by olive groves. Across a dirt road loomed a billboard with the far-right candidate staring stoically into the distance. His face was painted over by graffiti that read simply, LEÓN SIN CASTILLA.

  “We’re in the fucking province of León?” Grito said.

  We’d been going north all day instead of southeast, toward Madrid, and we’d been too exhausted to notice.

  “Wait here,” Marco said. He left us standing in the middle of the tiny station and came back in a couple of minutes. “The ba
nk’s closed,” he said when he walked back to us.

  “What do you need a bank for?” Grito asked. “How are we gonna buy the next ticket?”

  Marco walked up to one of the old Renaults that served as taxis outside the station. He held the door open for us. The driver pulled his hat down at Marco, who climbed into the front seat. The three of us crammed in back. The driver didn’t ask where we were going, he didn’t even look at us, bulky in our long skirts and sweaters in the dry sun. He just drove down the dirt road lined with collapsing stucco houses. The town—dusty with flaking stone, skinny cats swaying sagging stomachs and swollen tits, dying vines hanging from balconies to graze the cars—didn’t notice our arrival, didn’t bend or breathe at all. We drove into the terraced hills of olives and grapes. We stayed silent, staring at the red ground between the olive rows, the leaves so dark they almost turned red, too, before our eyes. We passed old people walking along the road. The women in black, bent over, carrying huge bundles of wood or wheat on their shoulders. They stared at Marco, sucking him up with their eyes. They kept their faces as blank as the dirt.

  The driver turned off on a gravel lane and stopped outside an iron gate lodged in a high stucco wall that curved around a large villa. A small hut leaned against the outside of the stucco wall, sharing one of its walls with the barrier. A tío who looked just our age sat outside the hut, drinking from an unlabeled green wine bottle. When he saw the car stop, he slowly stood up, placing his bottle in the dirt, stepped inside the hut, and closed the door. Something crashed inside and a speckled hen flapped out the window and down into the dirt yard. Marco reached into his pocket, but the driver shook his head—good thing, because I knew Marco had nothing left. The driver might have been upset that Marco didn’t insist on tipping him at least, but his expression remained the same, shaded by a brown shepherd’s cap, dry as the leaves on the olive trees and impassive as the sun. We got out and Marco opened the iron gate with the key around his neck I’d seen that morning.