The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  “I don’t know,” La Canaria said. “That place looked like it wanted to start on fire.”

  “It’s you that started it!” one of the men yelled from behind the bureau.

  “It’s you that ratted us out to your facha friends!” Grito shouted.

  “Ask your girlfriend who the facha is!” Paco shouted.

  “She’s not my girlfriend!”

  Marco had been standing apart from us, his red backpack slung over his shoulder, talking to a group of tenants and passersby. He walked quickly over to the doorway. He tried to pull at the bureau, but one of the drawers was caught in the doorway. He pinched his fingers in it.

  “¡Joder!” he shouted, and pulled his hand away from the door, shaking it in pain. “It’s not moving. You’ll have to push it back if you want to get out.”

  The windows on the first floor were barred with iron lattices. The people inside either had to get out the front door or jump out the second-floor windows. Grito looked warily up at the windows. The show suddenly wasn’t as much fun as it had been a moment before.

  “Help us push it back, then, cabrón!” another man behind the bureau shouted.

  Marco pushed at the dark wood, his hands balled up in the center of his chest to keep them from getting pinched. He looked like a rag doll someone had pulled the arms off of and thrown against a wall. The bureau creaked and sighed but didn’t move.

  “How did you even get it in there?” Marco shouted, now pressing with his hands and nudging the legs with his feet.

  “It was my great-grandmother’s,” an old woman behind them shouted. “She had it assembled in her boudoir.”

  Marco couldn’t help laughing. He hadn’t asked anyone else to help him, and no one was offering. I knew the thing wasn’t going to move no matter how many of us helped. “Hand her out to me,” he shouted. “Then climb over.”

  The old woman’s black orthopedic shoes appeared first, the sun glinting off her leg braces.

  “This is shameful!” she shouted. The men lifted her higher and pushed her over the bureau. “Ugly, lazy, absolutely shameful!” she paused to yell, perched on top of the bureau, crouched between its ornate posts and the low entryway ceiling. Marco jostled the bureau and she cried out, crossing herself repeatedly. “It’s me and the bureau or neither me nor the bureau!”

  The men behind her tilted the bureau up. The old woman began to slide off. “Shameful!” she shouted, falling. Marco was looking down the street at a fast-approaching fire truck. He reached out to try to catch the old woman but missed, and she slapped his arm for seeing her slip and garter belt. The men climbed over after her.

  “What a hero!” Grito shouted behind him.

  Marco turned away from him. The punks stared at the fire truck down the street. It had to stop at the corner because the road was too narrow for it to pass through. Firemen were jumping out of the truck and trying to hook up their hose to the water main. They were mostly volunteers in this part of the city, but the police would follow them.

  Borgi held a big canvas army bag and kept looking at it, then at the firemen. I walked up to them. The bag was full of guns, the long ones the old guard used to carry when they stood on every street corner, slung nonchalantly across their backs like an extra limb. I felt fingers wrap across my arm, but I didn’t really understand that it was my arm or that a living limb could bend. Marco pulled me close to him.

  “Paco said a policeman was looking for us—” I started.

  “I know. I saw him. We have to get out of here now,” Marco whispered.

  “Did he see you?” I whispered. “The policeman?”

  “No, I was on the roof.”

  I nodded twice, my chin jutting against his sternum, feeling something gurgling within me and the light outside fading. Soon I would be a body, running or not.

  “They have another place where we can stay,” Grito said.

  “Come on, follow us,” Borgi hissed. He was just as nervous about the crowd from the boardinghouse eyeing us all, listening to the old woman shouting and waving her arms.

  “We’re not going anywhere with you,” Marco said.

  “What do you mean, tío?” Grito asked. “You chickening out?”

  “We’re leaving,” Marco said. He hadn’t let go of my arm. I didn’t know where La Canaria was.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Grito said. “Doesn’t this mean anything to you?” He pushed himself close to Marco. I was pressed between them both, Marco’s fingers tight around my arm. I couldn’t remember how to move, that I could shake him off or try to, that I had in the past. I didn’t feel arms were made for that.

  “We have to get out of here,” Marco said. “The police are looking for you. They’re looking for Mosca.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  Marco was silent.

  Grito leaned in close to him. “What are you afraid of? No one’s going to arrest the Butcher’s son.”

  “These people are idiotas,” Marco hissed. “They’re not going to do anything. The only thing that will happen is that they will get themselves killed.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Grito said, stepping back and holding his arms out wide.

  “Where’s La Canaria?” Marco asked.

  I couldn’t speak, and my eyes hadn’t left Borgi’s bag.

  “What do I care?” Grito said. Marco started walking away, pulling me with him. Grito stood still, staring at us. “You’re nothing but a pig at heart.”

  I could feel Marco tense, but he didn’t turn around. In front of me, La Canaria stepped out of a shadow made by laundry hanging out to dry. She started moving in the direction Marco was heading, not looking back at the firemen or the burning building or Grito. Marco pulled me around. I couldn’t see Grito anymore. But I knew the second he slipped from my view that he was going to follow us. It was easier to. He probably looked back—saw the neighbors shouting, the punks twitching with the weight of their new weapons, Paco pointing at us. Grito would drop the punks and whatever they were going to do and come with us. Because it was easiest. But he’d drop us, too, if that became easier.

  Eight

  Outside the train station Marco squeaked his finger across the greasy glass that covered the map. Along the border were the strips of wasteland that had held thousands of war refugees. The map like a gravestone, some clean way to show the dead.

  “I think we should go to Paris,” I said. I looked down when I said it. I hadn’t meant to let the sounds out.

  “Why?” Grito said.

  “I want to see the museums.”

  La Canaria rolled her eyes.

  To say why I wanted to go would make it sound like what it was: desperate. All the other cities had disappeared—there was only one left. Borgi’s word wasn’t much, but it was more than I’d had before, and it was all I had. I couldn’t look at Marco because I was scared that as soon as I did, he would know why I wanted to go to Paris. But maybe he wanted to go there, too. We would go for the same reasons and help each other; we didn’t need to say why.

  “I think we should head south to Cádiz,” Marco said. “We can hide out there.”

  “You and Cádiz,” Grito said.

  “No way,” La Canaria said. “They found us in Madrid. I want out of this facha country.”

  “We’re not voting,” Marco said.

  Grito moved his finger across the map, undoing our steps, pulling our clothes from the bonfire, tracing rings around Casasrojas.

  “I’m going to Paris,” I said. Marco hadn’t seen Alexis’s tag and he hadn’t talked to Borgi. “I’m going whether you come or not.”

  Marco’s face was still, his gaze fixed beyond us. He nodded, deciding something, though it took me a long time to figure out just what it was. “I’m staying with Mosca.”

  “I don’t need your protection,” I said. He said
nothing to that, but his eyes were the firmest I’d ever seen them. There was no pleasure in his words, only certainty.

  “I know a place in Paris we could stay,” La Canaria said before Marco could answer me. “In France, once you’re in a spot that no one else is in, they can’t kick you out.” I didn’t care about the details of what she was saying, so long as it would get us where I wanted to go. And I was glad to have the attention pointed away from me. “This guy has a huge apartment, lots of rooms all shuttered off that he doesn’t even use.”

  “So you don’t have a place for us to stay,” Marco said.

  “No, I do,” she said.

  “But we’d have to sneak in,” Grito said. His hand spread across the map, blotting out the whole country.

  “Well, I wouldn’t, and I could probably get Mosca in, too—”

  “Into what?” Marco said.

  “Once we’d been there a couple of days, I’d sneak you in. He’s a total brat. Always traveling—actually, his place in the country would be the best, but we’d have no way to make money.”

  “How long have you been thinking about this, chica?” Grito asked, leaning close to her, playing a nervous rhythm on her shoulder, easing himself back into the space around her body as if he’d never left. But I could see how many escape routes he kept open.

  “I knew for a long time that I’d fail my exams, and there’s no way I’m going back to that sugarcane pit. No one’s gonna find me in France.”

  “How did you meet this guy?” I asked.

  “On the island. He was vacationing with his parents. We met on the beach.”

  Marco and Grito shared this stupid look. They were trying to guess what that meant, like it was a secret to figure out. I wasn’t too curious about what La Canaria had done that she felt she could stay at this guy’s house. What I wanted to know was what he’d done that she felt good bringing in squatters. That’s what would matter to us. But that wasn’t why I was going, and I didn’t plan on spending time at the house or with this guy. I couldn’t say what I wanted, just that it was moving me forward. The reason was climbing up my tongue, getting ready to form.

  * * *

  La Canaria and I stood by the road with our thumbs out.

  “Why can’t we take a train, Marco?” La Canaria had asked.

  “The money has to last us,” he’d said. We didn’t mention the policeman in Madrid again, but I knew that was partly why he’d insisted we hitchhike. He wanted to move fast and stay out of places where we might be seen.

  If a car that seemed safe stopped, Marco and Grito would climb out of the green oaks that lined the highways, trying to look like they hadn’t been hiding. If the car sped away, fine, we’d wait for the next one. If not, we’d climb in, heading north and east, through Castile, La Mancha, and Aragon. We slept half-nights, or during the day in the back of worn-down vans. We listened to the drivers’ old radios playing French love songs and shitty disco and news of the ETA kidnappings. The price of oil and the number of unemployed rising.

  In Catalonia, the Castilian signs had been spray-painted over with their old Catalan names. We got stuck in a traffic jam from a protest. We asked the driver what it was about, but he refused to answer. He stuck his head out the window and listened to a young guy in a jean jacket who was shouting about separating from the rest of the country and creating an autonomous nation. The driver nodded earnestly, and spoke to the young man in Catalan, gesturing back at us with a jerk of his head. After that he wouldn’t speak in Castilian. The young people outside the car windows looked like us—ragged clothes and grubby faces peeking through black and red bandanas—but they spoke a language we could barely understand. The radio played new songs by protest singers, bare, rough guitars being plucked under lyrics spoken rather than sung, all in Catalan or Basque. These languages had been banned for decades and sounded much older than our own.

  It took a couple of days to get to the border of France. Then another day over the Pyrenees Mountains that had been the first border. Closer to a week in all. We crossed at dawn on a small road, sitting in the back of a truck filled with metal canisters of milk. I’d never left the country before. I’d thought about it so many times when I was a kid—I’d imagined the sky expanding, my lungs lifting with it, my whole body growing so large and light. But I felt just as small and crouched as before, a rodent scurrying from one tunnel to the next.

  On the northern side, the mountains were filled with Dutch tourists, their pale skin burned pink, with small bags fastened in front of their crotches and cameras covering their faces. The mountains did look like paintings. On them stood clean sheep and white dogs as big as bears. The wind spread their fur, making them look even larger.

  “I wish I had a camera,” Marco said.

  Blond cows were visible at the edge of a crag, bending their heavy heads, collared in red embroidered leather and bells, down into the grass. Light and shadow played to make the animals and mountains flat, as if they could be touched from where we stood. The man with the milk canisters dropped us off in a town that was a ski resort in the winter and had mostly closed for the season. Locals led small groups of tourists around the town, into the tiny church, up to a spring whose water was supposed to keep marriages together. Grito laughed.

  We hitched through southern France, not the ocean resorts but inland, the terrain not much different from the scrubby hills surrounding Casasrojas, more desert than countryside. Then the soil turned from hard-packed red sand to black dirt. Instead of green oak shrubs, spread out and stunted in search of nonexistent water, lindens, chestnuts, and pines loomed tall over the road. A driver let us off in a small town circled by mountains. On the flat roofs, black-and-white sheepdogs paced and kids threw stones up at them to catch in their mouths. We walked to the train station and Marco pointed at where we’d ended up, the Cevennes, a different set of mountains, in central France. We’d never heard of them, and there were few roads going into them, no cities. On the map they rose green and unmarked out of the red hills.

  “Paris is a straight shot to the north,” Marco said.

  “Who gives a fuck about Paris?” Grito said. “Let’s just get out of this hick town.”

  Marco flagged down a van, and the driver said he’d get us going in the right direction. He wasn’t much older than we were, but he dressed like an old man, and his face had deep lines cut into it by the sun. In overly formal Castilian, he told us that people had moved here to drop out of society and get back to nature. La Canaria rolled her eyes, but Grito leaned forward.

  “It’s so much work,” the man said. The highway was wide but flanked by mountains and held few cars. “The farms have been vacant for decades. It’s wild here. In the winter, you’re trapped up on these roads. Snowstorms can come even in the summer and block you in. Then when the snow melts, it washes out the roads. But you can grow what you want, eat it, barter the rest, try to eliminate the cash flow. The farmers need helpers, if you’re looking for work.”

  “What the fuck?” Marco said, ignoring the driver. He was digging in his red backpack frantically. “Where the fuck is it? Where’s the rest of it?”

  Grito lowered in the front seat and muffled a snicker.

  “Give it back,” Marco said. He threw down his bag and grabbed Grito’s shirt. “Give it back!”

  “I can’t, tío.” Grito laughed. “It went up in flames!”

  “What the fuck are you two talking about?” La Canaria said.

  “Let go of me,” Grito said. “It really was an accident. I just took some money and put it where I was sleeping, for safekeeping!” He laughed again.

  “You stole from me?” Marco said.

  “I just thought you needed to share a little more. Each according to his abilities, each according—”

  “You stole from me! That money was supposed to last us!” Marco slammed his fist into Grito’s seat.

  �
�Watch out!” the driver said. “I’ll leave you right here.”

  Grito turned around to face Marco. “Guess you’re just like us now,” he said.

  Marco dropped his hands and his jaw wilted.

  “We’ll work,” Grito said to the driver. “If there’s work, we can do it.”

  The driver nodded and in a few minutes took a turn off the highway. We drove between jagged cliffs that would settle suddenly into small plateaus covered in crab apple and chestnut trees. The lindens were just budding out, pushing frail neon-­green blossoms into the light.

  “That was fucking stupid, Grito,” La Canaria said.

  “It’s Marco’s fault we’re in this shit anyway,” Grito said.

  I looked to Marco, who avoided my eyes. I couldn’t insist on going to Paris right away without letting on why, and without money there wasn’t much I could insist on. We climbed higher into the mountains, turning on increasingly narrow roads. Finally Marco spoke. “We’ll make some money and then we can go to Paris.”

  “What kind of work?” La Canaria said. “I’m not doing anything unless I get paid.”

  “I don’t need four workers,” the driver said warily, looking back at Marco in the rearview mirror. “Just two.”

  “We’ll stay together,” Marco said.

  “You’re like orphans in the war,” the driver said. “My grandmother would tell me about them. Packs roaming the hills and spilling off trains, looking for work but never getting any because they wouldn’t be split up. The big packs were the scrawniest because no one could take them all in at once.”

  Outside the window, timid new ferns uncurled and began to swell, breaking on the mountain rocks. The pine needles and fallen leaves hid the depths of each valley, as if to say falling here would not be so far.

  “I know a family who needs help,” the man said. “Their workers left them for a better deal on the other side of the valley.” He took his hand off the steering wheel. Where his finger pointed looked close enough to touch, but to walk there must take several days, to descend and to climb again. “They have a large plot, they could use you all.”