The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  The villa sprawled over the hard red dirt. Several stories with wrought-iron balconies, high windows, and paint peeling off in layers of pink and graying white. A chapel rose in the middle, its bell tower empty. The house sat close to the gate, only a narrow, dusty yard with a worn table and a cork tree between it and the stucco wall. Glasses filled with green slime and seedpods covered the table. Marco opened the door to a huge kitchen, dark and cool. He whistled and a dog came slowly out of the shadows toward him. A sleek bronze hunting dog, not one of the shabby mutts we’d seen on the side of the road following the farmers.

  I could hear sounds throughout the house, but no one seemed to acknowledge our arrival, and I didn’t know where in the house the sounds were coming from. Marco opened the icebox. He pulled out an unmarked wine bottle with pale, almost green liquid, some chorizo, and a hard cheese wrapped in brown paper, then grabbed bread from the low, long table. Then he led us silently through the dark house. The voices seemed to both follow and precede us, the words inaudible. The dog circled lazily, licking Marco’s ankles when he could catch them, unbothered when he didn’t. Marco’s pace wasn’t slow enough to acknowledge that he was making sure we followed him or fast enough to seem like he was hurrying. He touched a few things—a table, a low-slung curtain covering something on the wall—but his fingers didn’t linger. The dog didn’t bark or whine. He was as determined as Marco to keep the silence. We slunk through the long, high halls, easing through the scent of dust and closed rooms.

  As we stepped out of the dark house, the sun hit our eyes, silent and lethal. I thought of the rebels who had hidden in these hills during the war, sucking on their fingers to drink their own sweat. Their bodies were found curled up like children baked in a witch’s oven. Red dirt swirled, tossed up by chickens the dog ignored. The dirt ended abruptly at a tile-lined pool with leaves in the water.

  Grito jumped messily into the pool and howled at the cold water. He stayed in the shallow end because he couldn’t really swim. “Cabrón, what is this place?” he said.

  Marco put the wine down on the side of the pool and dove in, parting the leaves with his body. The water didn’t look very deep, but his form was perfect. He came up for air after making a full lap underwater and opened the bottle of wine. “It’s my home,” he said.

  “The wrong train?” La Canaria said to Marco.

  Grito pushed through the water to us and pulled himself half out of the pool. He pushed his wet hair back from his face. “This was your plan all along?”

  “Now who’s asking about plans?” Marco said, and dove back into the pool.

  I got in slowly but didn’t really notice the water. Marco had never mentioned his family, so I’d assumed they were gone like the rest of ours were, or an ocean away like La Canaria’s. The shame of it: villa, land, pool, the sounds of what were probably servants airing out embroidered linen above us. There was only one party that parents like this could belong to; there was only one side they could be on. I could see it on him in retrospect, in the way he blushed every time he offered to pay for anything or how he always bought something that was a little too nice. Those expensive bottles of brandy. I wondered if he’d kept the wealth a secret from Alexis, too.

  I went deeper into the water, and it was cold, but all I really noticed was the sky—a blue that was closer to red, scorching our retinas, and silent, an echo of the peasants we passed who nodded at Marco though he didn’t nod back. The water seemed to numb all that, to keep me separate. I was just looking at the sky that could kill, not at those people who surely wanted to. The wine tasted sharp—too fresh to be drinking. It made me sink to the bottom of the pool. The water kept me where I wanted to be until it didn’t.

  * * *

  My abuela had been sitting with only her lips moving for six hours when the police came with Alexis’s wallet, watch, and gold medallion—what they’d collected from the pile on the sand by the river. She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve, one of the white hankies that her sister had embroidered for her dowry, the lace edge pulled off and sewn onto new cloth many times. She was careful not to touch the policeman’s hands but brandished the handkerchief in front of her and wrapped what he dropped into it with the same careful folds she used to cover a pastry or a piece of tortilla for our midmorning snack in grammar school.

  “Thank you,” she said to the policemen.

  I held my breath, afraid they’d stick a foot in the door before she closed it. Afraid they weren’t done with us. I knew we could be questioned and the house searched. Maybe I’d be dragged out with them, and a week later the same pair would bring her my medallion. I knew more than enough to justify this.

  But the door closed and the policemen left. My abuela handed me her handkerchief and took off her apron. She placed her finest mantilla on her head and walked to our church to arrange the service. It would be the same Mass as all the other ones when they couldn’t find a body. The same my parents got.

  That week of waiting, I’d left the house only to fuck Grito in the alley behind our apartment, silent, my mouth closed. But when I told him about the police and Alexis’s medallion, he didn’t want to touch me. I was crying and screaming, I needed him to hold me down and fix me to the earth. He just walked away. I didn’t see again him for months.

  * * *

  I traced the slime at the bottom of the pool with my fingers. Marco’s and Grito’s white legs moved through the cloudy water, interlocked by perspective. My arms pushed the water aside and my legs propelled me forward. I hadn’t swum in years, but I remembered quickly. I could stay underwater for a long time.

  Four

  Out of the heat and the sun where we’d been drinking that fresh wine for hours, the Americans appeared. They were a mirage from one of their dubbed-over movies: blond women in bikinis carry­ing drinks in tall glasses, giggling and moving in a way that was not about getting anywhere faster but because they were aware of being watched. They were trying to activate every cell in their skin. They could feel it working in their movements and in the movements of the eyes behind them. But when they saw us, their movements stopped, all except for the liquid in their glasses, which was moving just as fast as their cells had been; it slung itself forward and fell into the dirt. La Canaria sat up when they stopped, her breasts swinging down and resting to point right at the American women, who stared, caught themselves, and looked away. Marco and Grito, who’d been splashing each other like a couple of twelve-year-old girls, stopped and stared at the American women.

  “Who’s that?” Grito whispered to Marco.

  Marco paused. He knew but didn’t want to say, was waiting for the men following the women to round the corner arched by grapevines. We could hear them laughing.

  “The Americans,” Marco said.

  “I got that much,” Grito said.

  “Whoa! I’m sorry!” one of the American men said when he saw La Canaria. “Wait, what?” He was short with a belly and neatly layered hair and tight, bright green swim trunks. He carried a bottle of port.

  “Who are they?” one of the women said, the one in the red bikini, backing up slowly to stand beside the man who had just spoken.

  “Hey, we’re renting this place,” the man started to say to La Canaria. She tilted her head to the side, making her breasts shift, and smiled. “I don’t know who you are, but—”

  “Jaime,” Marco interrupted him.

  “Holy shit,” the man said. “Dude! Marco! I didn’t see you there!” He set his bottle of port down behind one of the loose stones and came over to the pool. “I didn’t mean to be rude.” He knelt beside the pool and shook Marco’s hand. “I just didn’t want anyone trespassing, you know.”

  “That is fine,” Marco said. “I understand quite well.” His English was strong though formal, and it made his body stiff to use it, his jaw overworking each syllable of the garbled sounds. I hadn’t known he could speak English that well. Th
e other men relaxed but stood close to the women, holding their beer cans, all in shorts and burned pink from the sun.

  “But what are you doing here?” Jaime asked Marco, slowly letting go of his hand and passing it over his shorts, then through his hair to cover the movement. “I mean, I’m glad to see you, but I thought you weren’t—”

  “It is true what they say about American manners,” Marco said, his smile tight and straight as a child’s drawing.

  “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Jaime said. “You’re right, I’m glad to see you. No buts about it.”

  “Good!” Marco laughed, though his neck stayed straight. “And I you. Let them try to remove me if they wish.”

  Jaime smiled, not knowing whether he should or not. Started to say something, then didn’t.

  “Are these ladies and gentlemen the other members of your crew?” Marco asked, turning toward the rest of the Americans.

  “Yeah, man,” Jaime said, turning behind him. “This is Greg and Howie and their wives, Melanie and Lisa.”

  Marco pulled himself out of the pool, shook the men’s hands, and kissed each of the women on the cheek, which made them giggle.

  “This is Marco’s place,” Jaime said to the others. “He’s Señor Lara’s son.” The men nodded but still looked wary, though Jaime had placed his arm around Marco’s shoulders. “I’ve known Marco forever.”

  La Canaria leaned in close to me, and I could feel her wet hair landing on my shoulders, her hot arms brushing mine. “What’s going on?” she whispered into my ear. She didn’t speak English. I shrugged and swam over to the group. I pulled on Marco’s undershirt and it stuck to my wet skin.

  Marco introduced us all, and the Americans kept moving their faces in the wrong directions when we kissed hello, grazing our lips with theirs and turning red because they hadn’t done it on purpose. They were a group from an American university on an archaeological dig who rented Marco’s villa for the summers.

  “But who are they?” La Canaria asked me after we were all sitting down by the pool. Jaime had opened the bottle of port—“I hope that’s okay?” he asked, and Marco nodded with the smile of a dying abuelo giving a blessing to his favorite grandson. La Canaria kept asking me instead of Marco or Grito, and I realized she didn’t want them to know she couldn’t understand the conversation.

  “Some Americans,” I told her, which she probably already knew.

  One of the men, Greg or Howie, kept tugging at his wife, Melanie’s or Lisa’s, bikini straps and jerking his head over at La Canaria and me. The woman finally slapped his hand away and came to sit by me. “Are you from around here?” she asked. I shook my head.

  “No? You are from where?” she said, pointing first to me and then to the hills behind us, making a person with her fingers, and walking him across her hand.

  “Casasrojas—it’s in Castile. We are on holiday after university.”

  The woman’s fingers kept climbing up her skin to her suit, tightening the knots, touching her bleached and feathered hair. “Do you have a place like this where you live?” she asked finally, curling her wrists in the air to gesture across the sky.

  “No,” I said.

  “Me, neither.” She seemed to relax. “Greg and I just live in a studio in Cambridge.” I nodded and tried to remember that Greg was her husband, which made her Melanie. “I’m just glad he let me come. I mean, this is really the life, right?” She reached her arms into the sky.

  La Canaria laughed at that. Then she walked over to the edge of the pool and dove in, surfacing right next to Jaime and Marco, flinging her hair back like a fucking mermaid. I watched Melanie and Lisa—who was now standing partially between us and her husband—attempt to divide, categorize, and make irrelevant each of La Canaria’s movements. Place her skin on a shelf next to theirs and make sure theirs gleamed brighter. I laid my hand on the nape of Melanie’s neck, and she flinched but tried to hide it and didn’t shrug me off.

  “I really like your bathing suit,” I said. It was a bikini made of brightly colored geometric patterns with white fringe on the seams.

  “What, this?” she said, not looking at me, still looking at La Canaria, but not really looking at her anymore.

  “Yes, this,” I said, touching the fringe around her neck. “You have the best clothes. We get nothing nice here. The styles take years to get here, and then it’s only what you’ve decided to toss out.”

  “Oh,” she said. They were older than us, I realized. The men almost or over thirty, the women approaching it.

  I dropped my arm from her neck. “You are married to Greg?” The name caught in my mouth, such a stupid combination of sounds.

  “Yeah, I am, but I’m getting my Ph.D. in literature.”

  “Why?” I asked her.

  She blinked several times. “Because I want an education. I’m not just going to rely on Greg all my life.”

  “He does not make money?”

  “No, it’s not that—well, he doesn’t make enough now, but we’re hoping with this dig—”

  “That you’ll strike Incan gold?” Lisa said behind us. Both Greg and Howie were in the pool, swimming around La Canaria.

  Melanie laughed, her disembodied wrists returning. “It’s just a joke. We know the Incans aren’t from here.”

  “You would have better luck over there,” I said. “The bones are too recent here.”

  I was making a joke, but they both looked at me with their mouths open, turning from La Canaria and their husbands for the first time.

  “That’s just the thing,” Melanie said. She leaned in to me. “They’re Classicists, looking for Roman structures, but Greg—Howie, too—they found something recent. Really recent. And terrible.”

  “It was a mass burial,” Lisa blurted out, then covered her mouth. She was a little buzzed. “But it wasn’t even a burial. They just piled them in there. Fascist bastards.”

  “Now, we don’t know for sure who it was. And there’s loads of red tape. But it’s terrible. No marker, nothing. In the middle of this hideous pine forest.”

  “Well, what did you expect?” I said, and dove into the pool.

  * * *

  The air and water and wine and Americans created their own air and language. We stumbled through the few words we shared, flipping more rapidly between them the darker it got. We didn’t talk about what they’d found and couldn’t talk about, we didn’t talk about what we’d left. La Canaria kept getting closer and closer to Greg, making exaggerated gestures with her head at Howie, but the rest of her body a current focused on Greg. For a few hours I had my toe on the floor of the pool, but then the ground drifted away, the tiles sliding so far below me that it didn’t matter if they’d melted or ever even existed. Which was what I realized about that new space I’d made in the mountain shack. No one had mentioned the exams since I’d said we were going to miss them. No allusions, no glances, and I believe no one had even thought of them. The perimeters of this space didn’t matter. We were in the dare, fully and floating.

  The story of the burial kept circulating in whispers until everyone had heard it, but everyone pretended it was still a secret. I wondered how close it was, if there were bones beneath us, pushing up through the cracked tiles in the pool. The discovered grave loomed larger, stretching and spreading like mycelium. We drank more and shouted more and dove into the pool to keep it and all the others away.

  Late at night, Marco appeared from behind the cork trees on a horse, its mane coiled in tiny knots on its neck like a row of marzipan. The horse reared up against the moon and Marco laughed. We were sitting in the dust by the pool, hair wet. Marco galloped the horse in a tight circle around us. Jaime cheered. For a second, Marco paused and leaned into the animal’s neck. The yellowing bruise around his own neck was just another in a series of shadows, like the grave, something that happened before and was not real. The horse’s damp hid
e shone from the moon and Marco’s mouth grazed those sweating marzipans and the horse walked backward. Short, hesitant steps, then he jumped sideways, landing a meter to the right. The space between the two places where he’d stood ceased to exist, like a splice of badly censored film. The Americans hollered and La Canaria fell back in the dust, her hair spread out around her, neck open to the stars. I could feel Marco looking at me, feel him smile in a way I’d never seen him smile before. I fell back on the grass by La Canaria. The sky swung up around me and circled in.

  Five

  After the Mass for Alexis—flowers and no body—I went to the old railway bridge where we’d first seen the piles. He’d kept going there long after I could try to stop him. Walking back from the university along the river, I would see the shadow of his head tuck behind the rails. When he washed his hands in Abuela’s kitchen, the rust from the bridge’s railing floated in the sink.

  On the bridge, with his medallion the police had brought in my hand, I knew if he was anywhere, he was there. I stepped out to the edge where the rails broke off and searched, hoping to find a waterlogged stack of his hand-rolled cigarette butts. The tufts of grass were empty. On the riverbank below the bridge, red poppies waved against the gray water and gray sky. I stood up and went as far as I could, took off my shoes and socks for better balance, and wrapped my bare feet around the wood where the bridge disappeared into air. At the very edge, perched on a broken plank as if he’d written it right as he was diving in, was his tag. A L X S. I unwrapped the handkerchief and threw Alexis’s wallet in the river. I put the ID in my pocket. Then I took off my medallion. My mother had given it to me for my first communion. I could remember only her hands opening and the medallion inside, nothing else. I threw it in the river, deep in the middle, where it would sink or wash away but not ashore. Looking at the water, at the poppies, I put on Alexis’s medallion. San Judas Tadeo, the keeper of helpless prayers.