The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  I search for phones. I write all over the city, but the only words that matter are the ones I know will never get through:

  Mosca, it’s not me you’re following.

  Mosca, I would never lead you here.

  I woke up the next morning on a part of the road where I’d never been, wet, cold, and surrounded by dew. I hitched to Paris on the back of a truck packed with boxes of winter pears and headed toward Jean-Paul’s apartment. The city felt ­orderly, its streets open wide to any invading army, the houses far apart.

  I passed a brightly lit art gallery hung with paintings made from collaged newspapers and comic books, posters that looked like the covers of punk albums. Inside, young women in jumpsuits and David Bowie hairstyles sipped white wine. A group of students walking in front of me tossed a half-full paper envelope of roasted chestnuts onto the sidewalk, and I grabbed it when they turned the corner. The chestnuts were still hot; their wrinkled flesh puckered my mouth.

  I found the apartment. I shouldn’t have worried; it was impossible for my feet not to carry me there. Four perfect walls rose up out of the slick gray cobblestones. The glass of the windows was black against heavy, drawn curtains. Above the door was a carved marble face, scowling lopsidedly, its lips pierced into an o. I turned into the alley and found the fire escape we’d first climbed months ago. Our window had slid shut but wasn’t locked. I shoved it open. No one had been there since we’d left. The air hung heavy with our bodies and our thoughts of those silent, hungry months. Thicker than dust, a weight skirted around every object in the room. It circled my feet, trying to ease up my legs.

  The chestnut and mulberry trees that had partially blocked the view to the Tuileries stretched bare arms. Below them, the plane trees’ branches ended in swollen stumps, hunched around themselves, displaying only black lichen and brown moss. The sidewalks were emptied of the calls of students going out, children running home, old people pecking at sunflower seeds. Somewhere below me, the muffled sounds of a family eating, the measured squeal of silver on antique porcelain. I lay down on the mattress and tried to coax the remnants of the chestnuts from my teeth. When the family spoke, the sound was so filtered through plaster and pipes that the language could have been my own. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but the other city swirled in front of me, refusing to dissipate into blankness. I saw Alexis alone, walking down a street I hadn’t tried yet, down an alley I couldn’t find, someone at his back.

  I find ringing phones. I see the city as sound, the phones a constellation of sound, some dimmer, visible only out of the corners of my eyes. I close my eyes and sound becomes light, a whole city of phones ringing. Voices speaking, or trying to speak, through water. They dug phone lines under the ocean. They are more reliable than stars that shift when you move south. What keeps me from Mosca is very thin. I can almost push through it. The whole city is lit with the sound.

  The sound started in my dreams and I didn’t want it but when it woke me I could hardly move. The old rotary phone was ringing close to my head. It had been collecting dust, untouched, and now it was ringing, almost bouncing in its cradle. I closed my eyes to make the sound stop.

  Eyes half closed and walking, I find the phones, hear the light and heat they give off. Light and heat, enough of it, makes sound. That’s true, that’s not true, that’s true here. I have stopped writing. I wonder what you brought here, Mosca. It won’t be satisfied just following me. I pick up the phone and wait for the sound before the sound. The sound that travels through water and I will catch it.

  Pink dawn light catching breath gray and cold. Making light and air heavy, too much polished stone flecked off by heels, hands, and cat paws. Inside my stomach, I felt another type of light. Underwater, but winning out. Turning into a pressing mass, and it wasn’t soft. It wasn’t dawn. The light from my stomach fused into sound. I knocked the still-ringing phone off the hook and pushed away from it, pushed the mattress across the floor, and felt the warmth from where I had been sleeping condense into a voice I knew coming out of the telephone.

  It was Marco.

  I sat up, suddenly awake, and grabbed the phone.

  “Mosca?” he said. “Are you there?”

  The line was clear, as if his chin and not the plastic receiver were cupped gently between my ear and the wood floor.

  “Marco?” I whispered. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “I didn’t. I just—I’ve been calling and calling. I can’t believe you picked up. Are you safe?” My eyes stayed fixed on the corners of the room. It was full of shadows as it had never been before. Unsought, they frightened me. “Mosca? Are you there?”

  The shadows couldn’t move if I kept my eyes on them.

  “Mosca, I’m in Cádiz.”

  “Why?” I remembered, a thousand years ago, Marco talking about Cádiz and Carnival.

  “I’m in Cádiz. You need to come.”

  “Why?”

  “I bought you a ticket—it’s in the apartment, under the mattress.”

  “Where’d you get the money?”

  He paused. “Mosca, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  CÁDIZ

  February, Carnival

  Marco wouldn’t speak when I got to Cádiz. Not of anything that warranted the trip, the call, the ticket waiting for me. And what I needed to ask, I couldn’t, not yet. He met me at the station in Cádiz, and we walked through the dawn-lit streets. It was cold, but because of Carnival, the streets were never empty. People were sleeping on the sidewalks or carrying each other out of makeshift bars, singing balefully. We talked about Carnival, about the smell that the city carried, or we didn’t talk at all. The smell was different than just trash and ocean, spilled beer and rotting fish; it was a body being dredged up and stronger by the shore. It was a potion, a hypnosis I could feel working within, drawing me toward it.

  Marco had enough money to rent a room in a boardinghouse with a shared bathroom down the hall and two twin beds. He had enough to buy us sandwiches and refill a bottle of wine. I didn’t know if it was from his parents or if he had kept a bit to himself those months in Paris. I didn’t ask how long we had. I didn’t ask what he wanted to tell me.

  The sun was just rising when we got to the boardinghouse, but instead of going back to bed, Marco took me to the very top of the building. The door to the roof was closed with a tiny rusted padlock, like the kind on girls’ diaries that you can open with your fingernail. I was tempted to take the lock off, hook it onto my neck with the medallion and the bullet, but Marco slipped it in his pocket. No one else came up those stairs. The rest of the lodgers were old, widowers and rag sellers, barely making it to their second- and third-floor apartments. You could see the whole city there, unraveling itself.

  The sunlight eased itself over the white stucco buildings, and I turned my face from it. I spent all day up there, though I hadn’t slept since getting on the train. The weather had turned suddenly warmer, and it was hot on the white roof in the middle of the reflected light. The white stucco buildings surrounding us were almost brighter than the sun. To the west, the sea obscured itself, each wave catching the light and blocking what was to be found there. I wondered how many people were looking at the sea at that moment, if it added up, if their eyes weighed anything, created an opening, at least.

  “We could have saved him,” Marco said, looking out over the rippling body of red tile roofs. He was shirtless and his skin was slightly cool when I accidentally brushed against it. The sun was directly above us, ruining any shade. It must have been siesta, people sleeping for the longest time the city would allow. “We could have at least looked for his body.”

  “Who are you talking about?” I said, though I didn’t want to hear any names. Two hawks circled in the sky, backlit into black silhouettes of whatever colors they might have been. Each hunting for the same kill in the same place, neither acknowledging the other.


  “You’re right.”

  He got up and returned in a few minutes with beers. We didn’t search for shade. He handed me a beer, and we let the sun seep into our skulls, dizzying us beyond words, beyond names, beyond rivers and whatever was or was not found on their shores.

  * * *

  The chirigotas started in the morning, as soon as everyone had enough espresso to forget they hadn’t slept the night before. Men in brightly colored wigs rode through the city, stopping whenever there was a crowd to sing to. They were out of tune, still drinking, not having stopped. The daylight was a tonic that made the night not have happened. The sun turned the buildings pink, then purple until they disappeared and all that was left was what was under them, an ocean of unmarked graves. I felt I could see them.

  That night Marco and I walked through the Carnival crowds. There were no punks on the street or disappearing into underground bars. Marco said that even before Carnival, all he saw were people getting ready for the big party or kids walking to school with their grandparents. We could feel the presence of the old guard, men in starched shirts climbing into American cars with tinted glass windows. They weren’t retreating. A bear climbing into its winter cave isn’t retreating. Along the beach, the iron supports for huge new high-rises were being raised, luxury apartments for the new generation of executives, luxury hotels for the new tourists. In the papers were more photos of dead students. The articles blamed it on sectarian violence, labor feuds, or the newly organized anarchists, but the deaths were all the same, a line so thin and neat across their throats, it seemed easy to put back together.

  Even walking beside Marco, the shadows found me. At first I didn’t recognize them. They blended with the living and didn’t look so strange. But the shadows made the Carnival costumes real. The dancing young women dressed as pregnant nuns became scared and skinny things with nothing but gruel and another body needing all they could give. The singing priests covered up the garters they were displaying so proudly a moment before, took off their wigs, and disappeared into the crowd, quiet and ashamed. It was not the shadow’s shape that was important; it was what it could do and where it proved I was. The spoiled scent—I recognized it, each time both familiar and like nothing I’d ever encountered, each time terrifying.

  I forgot Marco beside me. Before, I had to search for the shadows, but in Carnival they showed themselves freely. I wondered that no one else could see them. I wondered that no one else shivered to be wading at the edge of where the dead live. I couldn’t see Alexis, but the dead were all around me. I was getting closer to him.

  Mosca wakes up screaming and sweating, and she should, because the room is full of much more than just me and Marco. He gets up from his bed and tries to calm her, but he’s sweating, too, and she pushes him away. She can feel me press up against her window. She sees the living and the dead in the Carnival crowd. She can’t tell them apart. She’s waded far enough that there are more dead than living. Marco can feel me, too, and he puts his arm around her when he does. I want to kill him for touching her. He knows I come at night and he waits up for me and he talks to me but he’s already started whispering when I come into the room. I know he can’t tell when I’m there or not. Just that I come. All he can say is that he’s sorry and he’ll keep Mosca safe. The first, I don’t care about. The second, I know he can’t.

  “Mosca, look at me, look here.” Marco shook me awake. It was almost dawn and I could still feel my dream around me. The shadows shaping into figures pressing against the glass, trying to crawl down my throat. Marco’s fingers pressed into my arm, accidentally separating the thin ropes of muscle. The dreams pressed back. I knew he didn’t sleep well, either, and not just because of me.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked him, staring at the wall of our rented room, trying to fix anything solid in my sight. Dirty clothes and paper from old sandwiches covered the bureau, the only piece of furniture in the room except the bed. The wallpaper had given up on most of the wall, revealing strips of newspaper from before the war. This part of the city was old, the buildings left to decompose on their own. I hadn’t asked Marco before: Why this city? Why had he come here, where he knew no one, a city so far from our own, jutting out into the sea, as far as you could get while staying on land?

  “Why did you come back?” I said, an easy question but getting closer to what I needed to ask. “Why here? Why Cádiz?”

  He didn’t speak. I should know the answer, his look told me. I shouldn’t dare to ask it out loud.

  “I thought you knew,” he said. “Isn’t that why you came?”

  “I came because you were here.”

  “You left La Canaria.”

  Someone shouted beneath our window and the shadows faded.

  “I told you, she left me. I woke up one morning and she wasn’t there.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “I can’t sleep. I’m going out.”

  The crowds were larger than before, growing as we approached the final night of Carnival. People had arrived from all over the country. But all I could see were children. Not students in swarms, massing on the street and calling out, spraying cava and beer, but skinny kids in the shadowy alcoves near mosques and synagogues converted to churches centuries ago. They moved slowly in pairs or alone. They were dressed in long shirts, black hair shorn close, the dark skin of their skulls covered by round hats. The smell strengthened. It was coming off the people at the edges of the crowds—the wandering children, the men dressed as monks who were too solemn to be a part of the revelers. The shadows walking among the living. They weren’t just shadows anymore. They had form and heft. I was closer to the city I walked through in my half-sleep, on the outskirts, where the dead and the living mixed. The city’s shape was coming to me. I felt I was remembering it.

  An old woman was standing in front of the boardinghouse when I got back. I recognized her from the hallway outside our room, passing on the way to the toilet, or when she disappeared behind her door. She was a widow born into mourning, covered at birth in her dark lace mantilla, her skin stained blue by decades of cheap black dye. But she looked different in the doorway. It was almost dawn, and she was lit by the fading stars. The streetlights were off. Under real light she looked less solid. She might have been a creation of the boardinghouse—the mansion she’d probably grown up in and seen the rooms rented out one by one until she lived in a partitioned hovel with papery walls. She had stepped out of the shadows when I approached, but when she knew that I’d seen her, she receded back into them.

  “This is an old city,” she said when I was almost past her.

  “I know, Señora.”

  “You came here for Carnival?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you did not,” she said. “You came for the water.”

  “For the beach,” I said.

  “It’s too cold for the beach.”

  I don’t know why I didn’t move past her. That salty scent clung to her and coated my mouth when I breathed in. Her tiny figure blocked the door.

  The Carnival crowds were thinning a bit with the daylight, and people passed us, using the alley as a shortcut to their apartments. A group of men in crusaders’ costumes of cheap polyester, the silver crosses on the front of their shirts already peeling off, dragged one another down the alley. They paused behind me, but the old woman ignored them, as if she couldn’t hear their vomit splattering on the cobblestones.

  “It’s an old city,” she said again.

  “Yes, Señora.” The men stood up and kept walking. I turned back to her, drawn in by her voice.

  “This is the country’s greatest harbor. All the rivers flow into it and out to the sea.” When she spoke, spit formed in the corners of her mouth and stretched between her lips like blades of grass. “In the water are the wrecks of ships that tried to take the city long ago.”

  Past the door, in the hallway
behind her, I heard the hollow clatter of a wheeled grocery basket. The baskets sounded every morning outside our door, the rubber wheels sticking on the worn tile, like there was an army gathering to hoard up all the chorizo and dried garbanzo beans in the world. I moved aside to let the woman and her basket through, but she stopped the cart in front of me and whispered to the woman in the doorway. She stepped closer and drifted into her shoulder, her dark coat merging with the older woman’s shawl. They were distinct figures despite the shadows, but they blended at the shoulders. This new woman, I hadn’t seen before, but I could tell she was only slightly younger than the other. Her face had the same transparent quality that seemed solid only in the shadow from the doorway. The light rose and strengthened behind me, but the doorway was cool.

  “This little girl, she doesn’t know,” the first woman said to the newcomer. They spoke quickly and mostly to themselves.

  “No, the young people, they don’t.”

  “Beneath the water is all the gold of the great ones of the city.”

  “Oh yes, they dropped it there when they could not stop their city from being taken—”

  “Then they climbed in after it.”

  “There is more buried in the harbor than in the whole city.”

  “These young people, they think this is the place to be.” The old woman arched her arm up and out grandly, though her wrist could barely reach her forehead. “This is not it.”

  “But the other city is all around,” the other woman broke in. “This girl knows that much, at least.” She held up her hand as if pressing gently against a gauzy curtain or the cheek of someone she loved.

  “Yes,” the old woman said. “But there is a difference. Beneath the water, the dead can speak.”

  I heard the soft pad of bare feet on stone in the hallway behind the door, and my shoulders twitched involuntarily.