The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  The door to the basement opened slowly, but it wasn’t Grito, it was Marco. He didn’t see me. The facha from inside followed him out and put an arm around Marco’s shoulders, pretending to be friendly, but the gesture was closer to a headlock.

  “Why are you pretending you don’t know me?” the facha said. “You’ve known my family for years. You think you’re too good for me?”

  “Get the fuck off me, maricón,” Marco said. He reached behind the facha but was too slow. The guy grabbed his gun from the back of his fancy wool-blend pants and hit Marco across the face with it. Marco fell back and slid over the cobblestones. The facha kicked him in the gut.

  “You don’t remember me?” the facha said. He knew how to hold the gun, though his pose had a self-conscious quality. Maybe he’d only practiced playing the gangster in front of the mirror. Not that it mattered to me. I tried not to breathe. I didn’t want anything to move, scared that someone would open the door and make the facha jump, scared that he would see me only a few meters away.

  Marco leaned forward and started to rise. The facha was crisp and clean—he looked so different from us. But he was our age, from Casasrojas, just a completely different version of it, a different version of what he wanted it to be. The facha kicked Marco again. Suddenly, Alexis stepped out of the darkness on the other side of the door. He punched the facha’s hand holding the gun, and his fingers splayed apart.

  I didn’t see it happening even as it happened, I had to remember it to see it for the first time. Alexis bent his knees and bucked himself sideways against the facha, who skidded in the air and landed at my feet. The gun was over by Marco, still on his knees, watching Alexis, fixed not by pain but awe. Alexis picked up the facha by his greased-back hair and dragged him over to the guardrail. He smashed his face against a post and smashed it again. Blood and spit arched away from him, shone in the light from a streetlamp half a block away. Alexis made to slam him again into the metal. Instead he let him drop to the cobblestones. He picked up the gun and shoved it into the facha’s face.

  “One more for our arsenal, little piggy,” Alexis said. He walked over to Marco and gave him a hand, pulling him to his feet.

  “I don’t know what he was talking about,” Marco said. “He was crazy or something—thought I was someone else.”

  “Don’t worry about it, che,” Alexis said. “I trust you.”

  Marco grinned as if someone hadn’t just smeared his face on the cobblestones. I knew Alexis had seen me—he must have been waiting outside for the pig to come out. He’d just stood there while I stood there. I understood it. He could be by me without having to say anything, without having that silence mean whatever he was afraid it might.

  “You keep it,” Alexis said, handing the gun to Marco. “It’s your hit.”

  They walked away, shoulders tipped back toward the flickering streetlamps. I waited for Grito, the only sounds the buried music and the thin rasps of the facha on the ground.

  * * *

  Zorra cornered me in the hallway. Asked for a light and then grabbed my wrist.

  “You have beautiful bones,” she said, and held my arm above my head so it cast a shadow over her face. “Like a dancer’s. Why did you leave Casasrojas, anyway?”

  It was dark and I could see only the harshest outlines of her features. She smelled of geranium oil and gasoline. “To join the protests here,” I said. “What do you care?”

  She placed my hand on her hip like we were dancing. “I’m saying if you’re trying to find a place to lay low, maybe this isn’t the spot.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. I didn’t move toward her or away.

  “There’s been this guy—a facha trying to pretend he’s not—hanging around outside. He’s looking for some students from Casasrojas.”

  The instant she spoke, I could see this man, gave him the same face as the man by the river, layered over the shifting features of the police who had brought Alexis’s medallion.

  “He says they attacked a policeman. Maybe it’s not you, but I don’t think specifics matter that much to them.”

  “What did you say to him?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t say anything. But why stick around and push it? We have our own shit.”

  “I think you’re exempt from anything that happens here,” I said. I removed her hand from my waist. “Don’t worry, we won’t stay long.”

  I knew I should tell Grito or La Canaria what Zorra had said, but I didn’t want to leave yet. I was waiting. Not for Paco and Borgi’s plan but for an unsettling to occur in me. The punks seemed like Alexis’s crowd, the kind of crowd we wanted to be, but I wanted to be sure. Maybe they had some information, something that would answer a bit of what had been left so raw it had to be ignored.

  I hadn’t spoken Alexis’s name since he’d disappeared. I’d say my brother, or with my abuela, simply him, because there was no question where all our words and thoughts were focused. His name put too fine a point on things, an arrow at the mangled bits of me. I wanted to make sure I had a reason to say it.

  I found Borgi leaning up against a window, drifting deep into a cloud of his own mixture, and I thought then was the moment to ask, when he couldn’t tell the difference between me and his dreams.

  “I think you may know someone we know,” I whispered.

  “We know a lot of people.”

  “He came down here a lot,” I said.

  “Doing what?”

  I hesitated—again I wished for the right words but remembered they were the enemy, too. “What you’re doing.”

  “What we’re doing.”

  I tried to describe Alexis to Borgi. Not too tall, thin, black trench coat. I tried to use words that didn’t sound tender, that didn’t compare him to birds or animals lost in the dark. “He had dark eyebrows, a shaved head, a mole beneath his right eye.” It had been a detail he hated. He thought it was womanly, which was why the girls loved it.

  “Lexi?” Borgi said.

  “Alexis,” I said without meaning to. The letters sank down to the floor. They were heavy and I wanted to hide them, but they swirled around my feet, tenebrous and dense.

  “Yeah, Lexi. I liked him. I haven’t seen him in a while. He was going to Paris the last time I saw him.”

  “When? When did you see him?”

  “Not that long ago. Why? He jilt you?”

  “He said Paris? How long ago?”

  Borgi sat straight up, alert to something beyond the factory walls, but if it was there, it was hovering three stories in the air. He turned to me, eyes wide and focused, though not on anyone in the room. “Not long at all,” he said, and leaned back against the window.

  “And it was Paris? You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, he was going there. He was in trouble, so he was going to Paris.”

  “How long?” I said, my voice weak. “How long ago?”

  But I couldn’t get him to say anything coherent after that.

  From across the factory, I could just hear Zorra talking about the music scene in London and New York. Those were too distant for me to imagine. They were past the edge of space. The other cities in the back of my throat—Granada, San Sebastián, ­Barcelona—faded and dissipated. They didn’t matter anymore. They were replaced by one, swelling to burst. Paris, where Alexis had told me he’d go. Paris, where he’d told Borgi—not too long ago—he was heading. He might be there, and if he was, I might find him. Paris, Paris, eclipsing all other maps.

  Seven

  “I said, don’t touch my girl.” Grito shoved Borgi. It was afternoon the next day. Grito was much smaller than Borgi, but he was drunk and high and, like a Chihuahua, didn’t seem to notice his size.

  “I didn’t touch your girl.” Borgi stood up straight, smiling, his shoulders relaxed.

  “Why are you so hung up on ownership?” Paco sai
d from the corner. “Even Señor Sandwich over here has let go of that.” Marco rolled closer to the window, pretending he hadn’t heard. “Monogamy is for fascists.”

  “Yeah, share and share alike, sexy,” Borgi said, and tousled Grito’s hair.

  “That works great for you all,” Zorra said, walking into the room with a bottle of wine and her camera. “What about us?”

  “It works great for you, too, if you relax a little,” Paco said.

  “Cabrón, shut up.” Grito moved toward Paco.

  “Let’s get out of here.” La Canaria pulled me up off the floor. “This is boring.”

  We left the factory and walked west toward the outskirts, passing a market selling fruit, olives, and sandals.

  “Don’t even bother,” the vendor said when he saw La Canaria finger a pair of espadrilles with blue ribbon.

  “It’s not really my style,” she sneered at him. Our feet were filthy, the delicate suede sandals stolen from Marco’s mom disintegrating after too many nights in the rain and mud.

  We walked past bags of garbage lining the street. An old boardinghouse was getting cleared out. Women picked through the bags, avoiding the worst-smelling ones.

  “He’s not even interested,” La Canaria said.

  “Who?”

  “Borgi.”

  “Not everyone likes you,” I said.

  “No, I mean he’s not interested in girls.”

  I stopped walking.

  “You are such a prude, Mosca. I wish the guys would all just fuck each other. Leave us alone.” I realized she was sober—the first I’d seen her in a while. “We don’t want it as much as they do.”

  I nodded, though sometimes I felt like I wanted it enough to kill. What I’d done with Paco or on the mountain wasn’t it. Sometimes I felt like I’d chop off my hand if I could kiss someone the way I wanted to. But that was when I felt anything at all.

  It started raining, so we stopped outside an old building with a sign on the door that said MUSEUM. FREE TUESDAYS.

  “It’s Tuesday, right?” La Canaria said.

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s go in, then.”

  It wasn’t that big, just a single story of an old house. We thought we’d see some art, but the whole place was only toys—antiques from a hundred years ago or collected by anthropologists in Latin America. The old man behind the desk smiled when we walked in, and I gave La Canaria a look that I would kill her if she made fun of the place. She gave me a look like she didn’t understand why I was looking at her. Instead she flirted with the old man, which was probably the nicest thing I’d ever seen her do. While she talked to him, I wandered around. The place was empty of other people, the rain streaking the windows. There were hardly even signs by the toys; a few had a stock paper card that said the year they were made or where they were from. There were pre-Columbian figures, miniature tin cars from Germany with chickens and rabbits in them, and weird life-size porcelain dolls with hair that looked real. Some of the toys had been made by hand, each probably the only one a kid had. In the center of one of the rooms was a tower, and hanging from it were marionettes of all the characters in Carnival. They were old and had the same costumes that I’d seen in books from before the war. The harlequins and witches were dressed in faded oranges and greens. In the center hung a skeleton, the death figure, its bony grin stretched wide. They moved slowly, lit from above by a small window near the top of the tower.

  La Canaria made a strange sound. She’d stopped talking to the man and was on the other side of the room from me. I walked to where she was bent over, looking at something in a case on the wall.

  “Look,” she said, pointing, her finger bent against the glass.

  “At what?” The case looked the same as the others. Packed full of different dolls, hand games, tiny planes.

  “It looks just like mine,” she said.

  I bent down to her level and followed her finger to a tiny doll between two British bears. It had brown skin, a white headdress, tiny hoop earrings, and an old-fashioned dress of bright patterns. The placard said it was from Cuba, mid-­century.

  “It’s just like her, like my dolly,” she whispered. Our breath fogged the glass. I didn’t know what to say. “But she couldn’t really be here.”

  “No,” I said.

  “My sisters all had ones like it, too,” she said.

  “Your sisters?” I said. She’d never spoken about her life before Casasrojas.

  “Their dolls all matched them, except mine. I was the only one with light skin. They buried them with their dolls.” La Canaria pulled away from the glass. She traced the doll’s outline with her thumb. “You know I really miss him, don’t you?” I knew she was talking about Alexis. “I’d still do anything I could to get him back.” She wiped our breath off the display case with her hand. “And I’d hurt anyone who hurt him.”

  She turned from me and walked out of the museum. The old man stepped out from behind his desk. I twirled my finger around my temple to say that she was crazy, but I didn’t mean it.

  I remembered one morning in Casasrojas, I was walking back from the bakery and saw La Canaria sprawled out on a park bench. I didn’t really believe it was her until I got right up to the bench. It was one of the first warm days of spring and right before Alexis disappeared. The sun had reddened her face so that it looked swollen, about to burst like a pimple with too much pressure on it. She woke up when I stood over her, blocking the light.

  “Have you been here all night?” I said.

  “No, just a couple of hours. I was with Alexis—”

  “You’re back together?”

  “For about two seconds we were, but he was being so stupid, I ditched him and went to El Llano.” She sat up and crossed her legs underneath her. El Llano was what we called a corner on the edge of a run-down park frequented by drug dealers. I’d never been there alone. It was a meat market—you went there only if you wanted to fuck somebody and didn’t care who.

  She ripped off the heel of my bread and stuck it in her mouth, chewing slowly, shaping the crumb into a ball with her tongue. Then she turned around on the bench and puked up the bite of bread and a lot of red wine. Some of the vomit hit my sleeve. She didn’t apologize. That’s what women in Casasrojas did. They apologized and they bent their heads and prayed and then they smacked the next small body they could catch and pin down long enough. La Canaria just smacked, no bending, no praying, then licked our upturned faces with her scratchy tongue. I waited beside her until she stopped puking and then she got up and left. She acted the same as always, but she looked back at me before she left the park.

  “How is he?” she said.

  “Alexis?”

  “Yeah. He seemed worried.”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “You know him.”

  But she just shook her head. Her face was impossible to read.

  * * *

  I caught up with her on the street outside the museum. “Your sisters?” I said. “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She stopped in front of a candy stand and pointed to a purple Chupa Chups. “Buy me one, will you?”

  We headed back toward the factory and passed the same woman we’d heard the first night, singing “Chant du Levant.” She looked older in the daylight. Her body was as small as a child’s, skin yellow and puckered, with dark circles underneath her eyes.

  “Why do you let us call you La Canaria?”

  “Because I don’t care. Why would I care whether a fake name fits?” Her mouth was bright purple from the candy. “Do you think Grito will stay with them?” she said. He hadn’t been clinging to her in Madrid, not ignoring her, exactly, just acting like Casasrojas didn’t exist or that we were the visitors, not him.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  * * *

  When we got back to
the factory, everyone was outside. Smoke billowed out of the top-floor windows. Grito, Borgi, Paco, and Zorra stood in a close circle, whispering. The boardinghouse tenants were dragging everything they could down the narrow staircases and throwing clothes out their windows. Handkerchiefs and slips caught in the air, mixing with scraps of burning paper drifting slowly down.

  “Hey, you pendejos,” Paco shouted at us. He broke away from the group and ran at me but stopped too close and backed up. I could feel the pulse of him running at me, trying to still and unable to. “There’s someone looking for you.”

  “Who?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “Some old guy, clean-cut, smiling all over, he looks like an undercover policeman.”

  “I don’t know anyone here,” I said.

  “Borgi said you were asking about Lexi,” Paco said. “Whose side are you on?”

  I moved away from both him and La Canaria.

  “Do you see what’s happening?” Grito said when we came over to him. It was the first time he’d spoken to me directly in days. “The fire—it’s sabotage.” He was looking in every direction at once, his face red and eyes strained.

  “What do you mean, it’s sabotage?” La Canaria said to him.

  “The old guard, the fachas—they started this! It’s arson!” Grito said, practically screaming. Two men were trying to push a bureau through the front door onto the street. An old woman shouted behind them to hurry.

  “Hey, you maricones, help us with this!” one of the men holding the bureau shouted.

  Grito waved his hand to ignore them. “There’s no way that’s coming through the door,” he said. “Everyone’s gonna burn up if you don’t move it.”