The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  She stopped in the hallway and moved her hands up into her shirtsleeves. She wriggled slowly until both arms were against her torso, sleeves hanging limp.

  “Who are you looking for?” she said.

  I pushed past her. She couldn’t catch her balance and stumbled.

  “When you’re walking around? Who do you think you’re going to find?”

  The hallway stretched behind and in front of me. I turned around and she’d disappeared. I hurried down the stairs. Marco was out. The fire a weak, suspended string of smoke. I started to make it again, shivering and not looking behind me. When I was a kid, sometimes I would get scared and scare Alexis just by being scared. Then the only way we could fall asleep was to check every room in the apartment, under the beds, press back the clothing in the closets, check behind the shower curtain, until we were certain no one but our abuela was there. We had to move strategically through the apartment so no one could double back and get into a place we had already looked, a place we thought was now empty. It made it worse, though, thinking of all the places someone could be and all the ways the body could bend and shrink. There was no way I could search the whole mill to make sure no one was there.

  I went outside to collect more wood. I crossed the small iron bridge over the dam that directed the river underneath the mill. There were no lights on the street and the outside world was a black curtain, no stars or moon. I don’t know how long I stayed out there, long enough to start shivering. I was so pliable—­anything was enough to make me forget what I was doing. Through the windows I could see Marco walk into the kitchen and La Canaria follow him, as perfectly lit as a play. He’d been outside and was holding a paper—he must have come in though the back door. I could hear them talking through the leaden glass.

  “I think you’re afraid of her,” La Canaria said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Marco said. “Why would I be afraid of her?”

  “You’re afraid she’ll find out what you did.”

  Marco put the paper down on the ancient farm table covered with our trash and cigarette butts. He stared at the glass. I was inches from him, but he couldn’t see me. He lit gold by the kerosene lamp, I covered in night. He moved his hands over his face as if smearing his skin. I could tell his hands were cold from how white they were—he’d had to walk a while to steal the newspaper. The pressure from his hands turned his face red. I wanted to stay like that, just for a minute. To read what his face held when he thought he was turned to a black wall, as if I were entering his sleep and walking there with him. But he stepped away from the window.

  “What do you know about it?” he said.

  I opened the door and they both looked up at me.

  “They’re killing the whistleblowers.” Marco gestured toward the newspaper on the table. “Anyone with information.”

  “This is your news?” La Canaria said. “They’ve been doing that for decades. It’s the party line.”

  “This is different,” Marco said. I couldn’t tell if he was worked up about the news or what Canaria had said. “Remember what they said in Madrid? Before, you accuse an officer of killing a militant, an artist, so what? He’ll never face trial. After the elections, they don’t know what will happen. They might have to pay for their crimes. They’re making sure they’ll never have to.”

  “But what does any of this have to do with you?” La Canaria said. She dug our pouch of tobacco out from under the newspaper and began rolling a cigarette with a page of an old book we’d found upstairs.

  “It has nothing to do with us,” I said quickly.

  “Then stop talking about it. I’m sick of hearing about shit that’s happening a million miles away. Unless you did something that you can fix, shut up.” She finished rolling the cigarette and walked out the door. Cold air entered and shifted the moldy curtains across from the fireplace. They wavered as if they held a melodrama villain who’d just been found out.

  “How much does she know?” Marco said once La Canaria was gone. I cupped my face to the glass and I could see her on the small stone bridge, leaning over the dam. “About what Alexis was doing?”

  I stopped moving, my fingers pressed against the windowpane, my breath clouding the small range of vision I’d created. I held my breath and tried to see through the fog. I couldn’t remember the last time Marco had said Alexis’s name. He stumbled over the sounds, as if both wary to speak them in front of me and unaccustomed to their shape.

  “I mean—I think,” he started again, voice strained, “I mean—they were broken up when he disappeared. He told me he didn’t want her to know about any of it. I don’t think she knows what happened—”

  “Don’t,” I said. Marco had crossed a chasm with only a few letters, but I stood unreachable across many more.

  “Mosca, we have to figure this out. If there’s anything that could link us to the militants Alexis knew.”

  “We’re not even in the same country anymore,” I said. “No one cares.” I moved my hands away from the glass, slowly straightening up, my movements as controlled as if I were drunk and trying to hide it.

  “It’s happened before. Remember that writer they poisoned? He was in Chile.”

  “Yeah, but he was a big deal. He had big secrets,” I said. “Names and photos, lots of them.”

  Marco turned away from me. “The package Alexis had was important, Mosca.”

  I wanted to ask what he knew, why he was afraid, even here. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t talk about that night and the part I’d played in its aftermath.

  “We need to be careful,” Marco said. “We need to figure out what we’re doing next. We can’t just wait here for something to happen.”

  I couldn’t listen to him anymore. La Canaria came back inside. I moved past her, through the door, and the night fell on me. I could just make out someone leaning against the wall of the mill, shoulders hunched against the cold and smoking a cigarette. Though the night was dark, the shadows seemed to start at that cigarette, as if it were their entry port. Through the windows, Marco and La Canaria bent over the farm table, not speaking, just staring, each into their own empty space.

  I walked toward the shadows, but when I crossed to the bridge, there was no one. On the stones was the end of a hand-rolled cigarette, fragile and still damp from landing by the water, still glowing faintly.

  Back inside the mill, I wrapped the end in a scrap of newspaper from my pocket and placed it in La Canaria’s cricket box. She’d left it in the middle of the tiny room in Paris after all her money from her last job was spent. The box fit in my palm. There was a compactness to it that I liked. So practically made for something so silly. The cigarette end proof of what, I wasn’t sure.

  “Where did you go today?” Marco came up behind me.

  I turned and La Canaria was there, too, as if he wanted a witness.

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want La Canaria to hear. Maybe if it were just him, I would have said it or said something else in a way that he would know what I meant. Maybe he already knew. He knew he couldn’t follow me on my walks—I would have fought him. And I think he knew that I was very tenderly affixed to him. He had to look at me askance if he wanted to keep me in sight. His grip was so loose as to be almost nonexistent.

  La Canaria looked up. She was interested. It was strange to see that expression on her face. She suddenly had awareness of us that she hadn’t in so long. She usually looked less like she was listening to us speak and more like she was watching fireflies in a dark room.

  “I just walk around,” I said, and tried to get past them. They hadn’t moved, but they’d created a wall with their questions.

  “What are you looking for?” Marco asked. It was the first time he’d confronted me about what I did all day.

  “Who,” La Canaria said, as if to correct him.

  “There’s no one I could be looking for,” I said
.

  I’d said the words aloud in Madrid and almost believed them. But when I said them again and knew they were lies, they frightened me all the same. I didn’t know how much power words had in the place I’d entered, but speaking them proved that they could be possible—that there could be no one I could find.

  Just then there was a knock on the door, and I felt that prickle of damp breath at my neck that I would feel standing in Abuela’s apartment and waiting for Alexis to come back. When I would open the door to nothing, the emptiness was as sharp as a hangover landing. This time I didn’t turn.

  La Canaria walked slowly to the door. Marco stepped toward me once she passed, about to speak, but he held the words in his mouth. La Canaria opened the door.

  “Good evening, darling.”

  My body had lied again. Though he was French, the man spoke almost perfect Castilian. His accent was old-fashioned, as if he’d learned from the first lisping king and was here to show us how it was done. He stepped inside and saw me and Marco for the first time. “Oh my, will you introduce me to your friends?”

  La Canaria was silent but grinning. Looking at her, I was looking at someone I’d never met. Her smile dripping like ­caramelized sugar off flan. Her whole face saturated.

  “This is Jean-Paul,” she said. “Can you believe he came while we were here? How lucky!”

  “A pleasure,” Jean-Paul said to me, and kissed my cheek. He held out his hand to Marco.

  “It’s Jean-Paul!” La Canaria said, trying to jog our memories about this amazing event that was going to happen today because it was a fucking holiday and why couldn’t we remember. “He’s here!”

  “Jean-Paul,” Marco said, and took the hand that had been hanging there a second. “That’s just great. Really great to finally meet you.”

  “I’ve got some things in my car,” Jean-Paul said. “Groceries. Though I didn’t know we’d have guests, you naughty thing.” He reached out and tugged on La Canaria’s nose. “This is quite a surprise!”

  La Canaria giggled. A sound I’d never heard out of her, not in all her characters and parts.

  “Mind helping me?” he asked Marco.

  “Of course.” Marco followed him out the door, glancing at me for a second—terrified because he didn’t know what he was supposed to say, what role to play.

  Inside the mill, our wimpy fire issued a thin veil of smoke and green scent. The lights from the low candles threw our reflections back at us. I knew I had only a few moments to speak and understand before the reflection warped and Jean-Paul appeared before us again. But the only word I could form was the one I knew I couldn’t speak. Grito’s name bubbled up, large enough to choke on. La Canaria’s face in the glass turned from a grinning pastry to an old chalkboard passed over many times with the same dusty eraser. The board doesn’t get clean; the chalk smears into a uniform layer until rain comes and every hint of what was written is gone. She met my eyes in the reflection and opened the door.

  I understood then that the certain words we had never been able to say would now never be said. Whether we should have kept looking for him—whether he could still be alive—had we been weak and cowardly or just stupid and afraid. As with Alexis, the extent of our betrayal would go unsurveyed. I didn’t blame La Canaria for her ability to turn from these questions, a move made of velvet and without ripples, I just wished I had the ability in my spine to bend as fast and far as she did.

  * * *

  “What fun to be with such Bohemians,” Jean-Paul said, opening another bottle of red wine. He’d brought roasted chicken, mayonnaise, mustard, olives, bread, and cheese. We nodded at him, chewing slowly, trying not to act like this was the first warm, real meal we’d had in months. “One of my maids said she thought she’d seen a woman climbing in and out of my apartment fire escape—it wasn’t until a nosy country neighbor called me in Paris that I even began to dream it would be you!” He looked a bit like a facha, clean-shaven and starched, but one who thought himself to have an artistic temperament—his hair a little long, a weave of pink thread in his vest. “But why are you here?” he continued. “Why not be back in your country, where the action is?”

  Marco finished chewing first. La Canaria and I looked at him to speak.

  “We were where the action was,” Marco said. “And it almost got us killed.”

  Jean-Paul’s eyes widened on cue, and he took a slow sip of wine.

  “We were staying with these artists in an old factory in Madrid,” Marco said, staring into his glass of wine. “They were doing protests, political art, that sort of thing. There was also an arms deal with a group of militants. We’d collected the guns and were going to give them to our contact, but the fachas broke us up. I was the lookout, but they were already there, they knew we were coming. The problem was”—he flitted his eyes up at me—“Mosca had this package. And we couldn’t let the police get ahold of it.”

  Marco told his story without pause or fumbling, as if he’d rehearsed it several times. As if such substitutions were easy and possible.

  Jean-Paul nodded slowly as if he, too, of course, had crossed paths with people like that and he, too, knew how to act when you were in real trouble.

  “What was it—this package?” he asked.

  “We figured the less we knew . . .”

  “I understand. But you couldn’t just drop it?”

  “All we knew was that it was important.” Marco leaned back in his chair and spread his arms. “No one we were with would help us. Those artists, they acted like they were part of the movement, but when we asked for help, they wouldn’t.”

  “They were pinkies,” La Canaria said. “Only half-red. In it for the look.” She blushed as if she’d been rude and cared. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

  “If you’re not willing to risk your neck, then you don’t really care,” Marco said to Jean-Paul, who smiled a comradely smile.

  La Canaria raised her glass to them. She’d joined in Marco’s lie flawlessly.

  “What did you do?” Jean-Paul asked. He pushed his dish away and leaned closer to La Canaria.

  “Someone set fire to an old factory we were staying in. We just left, left the package, and started heading north, out of there. La Canaria had told us so much about you, I thought we could stay here for a while.”

  Jean-Paul’s arm around La Canaria stiffened into a hook. “It was your idea?”

  Marco knew he’d misspoken. It was better if Jean-Paul thought La Canaria had brought us here.

  “No, it was mine,” La Canaria said. “I knew we could trust you.”

  “You should have told me you were here.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. And I couldn’t risk anyone else finding out, cariño.” She leaned in close to him and stroked his cheek, cheery and demure.

  “Was there anyone else with you?” Jean-Paul directed this at Marco, though we all knew whom it was for. Marco kept silent. La Canaria should be the one to say it, whatever she was going to say.

  “No,” she said. “No one else was with us.” Inside the lie Marco had told, Grito’s body—already white with water decay—faded and was never there.

  “I would have rather known,” Jean-Paul said to La Canaria. “Then I could have helped.”

  “You are helping.”

  “I hadn’t gotten a letter from you in so long.”

  Marco rose to clear the dishes and I went to join him.

  “Sit with us, Mosca,” Jean-Paul said. “I think Marco is man enough to handle a few plates.”

  “Jean-Paul’s a forward thinker,” La Canaria said, snuggling into his shoulder.

  “About some things.” He ran his fingers through her hair and slowly down the length of her spine. He whispered in her ear and she giggled. The second time I’d ever heard her do that.

  “Are you worried you’ll be followed?” Jean-Paul whispered
into La Canaria’s ear but loudly enough for all of us.

  “We’re kind of low on the rung,” Marco said.

  “Even a small fish can muddy the water,” Jean-Paul said. “In the papers, it’s the tiniest bit of evidence that links a name to a deed, even tangentially. I’ve been following your country’s situation. It’s cost lives before.”

  Marco was about to speak but didn’t; instead he leaned ­toward the sink, his hand tightening around the fine china, definitely not looking at me.

  “All this talk of danger is making me tired.” Jean-Paul rose from the table, and so did La Canaria. They walked up the stairs but turned at the landing. “Mosca, why don’t you come upstairs with us?”

  Marco stepped away from the sink and put his hand on my shoulder. I knew there were two options. I could walk out the door with Marco and never come back to the mill. Or I could walk upstairs with La Canaria and Jean-Paul. But I wasn’t thinking of that; I was thinking of the story he’d told Jean-Paul.

  “Is it true?” I whispered to Marco.

  “Come on, Mosca, I just made something up so he’d lay off of us. I didn’t mean it.”

  “But is it true that you were the lookout?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was.”

  It wasn’t for failing at the job I was supposed to do. Marco had never spoken to me about that night. I’d never asked. I realized then that he’d had the possibility to play the scene over in his mind, to edit and erase his actions, layer script on script, and I had only a blank blood-black sky. I couldn’t ask about that night because then I’d have to admit the full extent of my betrayal, the part even Marco didn’t know. That I’d refused the package Alexis carried. I’d rather Marco thought I knew nothing than have him know my most damning shred.

  I looked at Marco and saw a ghost. A ghost and someone who could have told me more. Who could have been alive to me in a way that he refused.

  Marco wasn’t lying. He’d just mixed two stories together. He’d slipped me in as a fiction and let me live there but left me paralyzed in this stretch of life. For Alexis, he’d substituted me. I couldn’t forgive him that.