“And how would you know?”
I held his gaze. Whatever Marco had done, whatever his family had done for however many centuries, I wasn’t a part of it.
“Because I’m the same way,” I said.
Cosme smiled. He stepped away and bit his lips. He’d gotten to taste what he wanted to. “Mosquita muerta,” he said and passed. “They’re unstoppable, you know.”
“You don’t know anyone here, do you?” I asked.
“In school, I read that in the Arctic, mosquito swarms can kill these giant deer they have there, the caribou. Drive them completely crazy just with tiny bites.”
“You were going to drop us here, but they’ve done it for you.” I started walking again, trying to retrace our steps.
“Marco’s a pendejo,” Cosme said. “And that other one doesn’t seem any better. Why do you all have such stupid names?”
The streetlamps went out, just like in Casasrojas, and the night flickered into a negative of itself, the sky lit instead of the street. I heard shouting down one of the streets and walked toward it, saw Marco’s frame at the end of an alley. Cosme stood behind me and I turned to him. “What did Marco do to you?” I said. I knew Cosme was going to disappear down one of these alleys soon.
“Nothing. He hasn’t said a word to me for ten years. His father didn’t like the little lord speaking to the peasants.” He lit a cigarette and stared up at the rusting gutters. “But they’ll lose it all now that el Cabronísimo is dead. Now it’s time for the rest of us.”
Grito saw us and waved.
“You think I’m one of you?” I said.
“I can see your whole life, Mosca. Your dingy apartment. The fake roses and jars of pickled meat and photos of el Cabro—”
“My family was Republican.”
“Was. And what happened to them? People like Marco’s family killed them?”
I dug my nails into my palms. “The past doesn’t matter,” I said.
He knew I was lying. “It’s all that matters.” He lit a cigarette. “You can always go back to your family. Real people, not royalty, they will always let you back.”
He turned into an alley and I couldn’t see him anymore. But I knew he was wrong. In the dark, I could see Alexis on the shore of the river, running away from me, running in the sand toward the piles, his legs outgrown his shorts, his messy curls that he wouldn’t let Abuela cut bouncing. From the way he held his shoulders and pumped his arms, I could tell he was smiling. When he turned from the weight of the man’s hand on his shoulder, his mouth still held a bit of that smile, but it was turning to surprise at this man standing over him. Before even looking at the man, Alexis looked at me. Because I should have shouted a warning that something was coming. It came too fast. I saw it and I didn’t do anything.
I rounded the corner without Cosme and didn’t bother to give Marco an explanation. Grito shrugged, but Marco ran down a couple of dank alleys and pulled on doors that had been boarded up for years.
“He’s gone, tío,” Grito said, picking a forearm-long strip of green paint off a rotting door.
Marco turned away from both of us and lunged as if to go after Cosme but instead crashed his forehead into the doorway, landing on the rotting wood and just missing Grito’s own skull. I thought he was done, but he brought his head back and slammed it against the damp wall. Again and again. Around us, the night lurched into the sea.
Once Marco stopped, we found a vendor who was just closing his cart and bargained for three sardine sandwiches. The fish was cold but the bread still fresh. I didn’t know how much money Marco had, but he wasn’t acting like he had a lot of it. He might be protecting it from Grito. I would do the same thing. Not that I feared Grito would steal from me but because I didn’t want to give him the chance. We walked toward the harbor, not speaking, just chewing, and licking the paper wrappers before crumbling them and throwing them in the water. They bobbed against the docked fishing boats.
“We could stay in one of those,” Grito said, pointing to the boats, and I nodded. A night watchman passed by and we sat down on the stone steps by the water, hidden in the shadows and the smell of piss. The outlines of the abandoned steel plants fell in contorted shapes on the water. We waited for the man to walk to the far end of the stone wall.
Our hands greasy from the sandwiches, we ducked below the metal gate and climbed down the slick steps to the dock. Marco pointed silently to the watchman sitting on the other end of the dock, enclosed in cigarette smoke. If we stayed quiet and in the shadow, he wouldn’t see us. Then we could duck into a boat and sleep until sunrise.
Grito chose a long boat with a high, solid railing. Even if we couldn’t get into the cabin, we could sleep on the deck, curled up by the railing, and no one would see. The lights from the city dove and died in the water. They didn’t reach the dock. We were in black air surrounded by light, and nothing could touch us.
The boat barely rocked when we climbed into it. All the boats on the dock were low with large decks. A few other men joined the watchman and huddled around one another, making one form, their cigarette smoke rising and blurring the lights behind them.
“They can’t hear us,” Grito said.
“They can if you keep talking,” Marco said.
The cabin was locked and none of us wanted to risk breaking a window. The deck was damp. We huddled together against a pile of fishing ropes. No one said La Canaria’s name, but we were all wondering if we’d left her to a worse or better fate. No one had said her name since we last saw her. The same as after Alexis disappeared. Abuela and I didn’t speak about him, but his name hung over us, a flashbulb that would burst suddenly and fill the air with the smoke of his absence, leaving me immobile in the shattered light. Abuela with her rosaries, her knees pitted from kneeling, sucked all the oxygen from the apartment and the tears from my body. There was no room in her grief for mine. No room for a single breath that was my own.
“Do you think she went to Madrid?” Marco said. “That’s where we said we were going.”
Grito shrugged. “I never know where she’s going.”
We didn’t know how to feel about La Canaria. At least I didn’t know how I felt, and I thought Marco didn’t, either. I wasn’t sure how much Grito could feel. Not just for La Canaria but for anything. In Casasrojas, he never winced at the gypsy children begging or the old men who’d fought in the war and now sat on the park benches, their sleeves hanging empty at the joints. He didn’t wince at the smell coming off of them—sulfur and bitter almond—the smell I imagined leaked from the white scars where their arms and legs ended. He’d left me as soon as I wasn’t something easy to be around. During the protests, he’d screamed and thrown empty bottles against the cathedral walls, but I hadn’t seen him break in any other way for a long time.
I knew that Marco wanted to say that leaving La Canaria, that not searching for her, that not speaking about her, was disloyal, but Grito would have smacked him on the back of the head like a misbehaving acolyte. Whose side are you on? Grito would ask. Want to go back to your mansion and your peasants?
Loyalty was one of el Cabronísimo’s words. Loyalty to the Church, loyalty to the Fatherland. Friendship was, too. Friendship was watching your neighbors; it was turning on them for the chance at a higher number in the ration line. We didn’t have words to speak about our lives, about how we moved into and around one another. They had been stolen; they were never ours to begin with. We were animals, wordless and scratching.
Alexis’s protection was that he was able to keep some of those words. He guarded them deep within or wrestled them, bloody and almost broken, from the very lips of those he hated most. As a kid, he held my or Abuela’s hand everywhere he went. We slept in the same bed most nights, curled together like foxes in a den, safe under thick layers of oak roots and red dirt. Years later, I remembered what he had been. Because the toughness he slipped on,
I knew it was an act, a film over each of his movements. I saw the same in La Canaria. Masking something, though with her I never quite grasped what. Which was perhaps why she and Alexis had made so much sense together—even when they fought, it was like watching a drunk punch himself.
Marco’s and Grito’s breaths landed heavy on my skin, heavier than the damp air coming off the harbor. I could never stand to feel anyone else’s breath when I slept except for Alexis’s. Marco’s and Grito’s bodies, anxious not to touch each other, were stiff even in sleep. From where I sat, their shoulders, dashed in fragments of light by the moon, created a separate skyline, like the pictures of American cities I’d seen in magazines, paper puppets against the night, casting their own light, containing their own spheres. I couldn’t sleep. Too many names hung above me, each letter a flickering bulb that refused to finally die.
At some point the city lights went out. Or I dreamed they did. I watched the water dance, ushering in new musical movements, streaks of diesel shimmering in taffeta over the surface. In my pocket, I found the bullet La Canaria had given me at the shepherd’s shack in the mountains. I couldn’t remember how I’d kept it. Maybe Marco had found it in my widow’s clothes and had been about to throw it out but I’d grabbed it from his hand, drunk and reaching, and put it in the pockets of the polyester trousers I woke up in, dragged across the dirt by his mother. The bullet fit right in my palm and I ran my fingers over the writing—the name of the gun and where it was made. The same gun my abuelo used for hunting. Alexis went with him several times until he refused to go again. He was twelve. They had been hunting pheasants. The birds hung from their shoulders. Alexis handed my abuelo the gun and his old wool hat.
“He doesn’t like killing,” my abuelo said. But he didn’t mean that Alexis was weak. He meant Alexis understood something we didn’t.
La Canaria’s bullet warmed in my hand, the only warm and dry thing around me. I pulled at a frayed bit of rope by my feet until I’d loosened a thin strand. When I was young I used to read books aloud to Alexis about these kids whose lives were really terrible but they found this amazing new world where they were kings and queens. The thing about this world was that you could access it through ordinary things—a closet, a park bench, whatever. We always hoped we’d find that right thing that could get us in. Of course, our parents would be there, but we never said that. We were always looking for a way, even after we stopped believing in it. After so much searching, I’d gotten into somewhere, but it wasn’t that place. And the things that had been solid before no longer were. No object or act held definition. I floated between the wants realized in sleep and the loss found in waking, unable to distinguish between them.
I wrapped the frayed rope around the bullet and put it over my head. It hung on my sternum beside Alexis’s medallion. Gijón was somewhere I had never been, but it was somewhere Alexis had never been, either. Madrid, Madrid was the first city. I felt the name, the shape the syllables had made in his mouth, pulling me. I looked up and met Marco’s eyes. I could barely look at him. Marco had lied. But far worse was what I’d already known: he kept Alexis alive in front of me—nothing more cruel or more gracious. I didn’t want to want him because of who he’d been close to, what he’d meant to Alexis. I didn’t want to be that cruel. But I was. I’d do worse. And I wanted to hurt him for the same reason and because he was stupid enough not to see what I was. I knew what he felt about me and I wanted to punish him for it, for being the one person who could really see I was bloody rocks to break on and chains and gulls at his eyes and he was still following my every move. I would have told him if I could, what I wanted him to bear, but I couldn’t meet his gaze long enough.
The water and the lights continued their flirt, a slow torture for no one else to see. If Marco heard the cities I whispered when the moon set, he didn’t say.
* * *
“I’ve got money, but it is going to have to last us,” Marco said when it was just light enough to see beyond one another’s faces to the edge of the boat. “It’s not endless.”
“No, Marco, it’s just your family’s land and peasants that are endless,” Grito said.
“Do we have to do what you say, Marco?” I said. “Or you’ll sic your father on us?”
“It’s not very much money; it’ll just get us to where we’re going.”
“Which is where?” I asked.
“I don’t know, maybe we could go south, to Cádiz. We could stay there, get jobs, I don’t know,” Marco said without looking at me.
“Why do you want to go there?” I asked. It was the first time I’d ever heard him mention Cádiz. Grito talked about it sometimes because the rumor was that now that el Cabronísimo was dead, the ban on Carnival would be lifted, or people would just have it anyway. Cádiz was famous for having the best Carnival before the war.
“Carnival isn’t for almost another year,” Grito said.
“We’re going to Madrid, like we said we would,” I said.
“No,” Marco said. “We should go to Cádiz. We should start there.”
“Marco Francisco,” Grito said, laughing and using Marco’s middle name for the first time. “They even gave you the general’s name. Somebody to live up to?”
“Mosca, listen to me—”
“Got more land in Cádiz?” Grito continued. “An uncle you can sell us out to?”
“Shut up, Grito,” I said. “Madrid is where we said we’d go. It’s where we told La Canaria we’d go. It’s where I’m going.”
The cities were an itch in the back of my throat. Cádiz was not on the list. Madrid first, then the rest. I couldn’t get rid of the thought. I didn’t need to talk about it. Why I heard them, why I listened to them, why I wanted so badly to go to them and trace their walls with my fingertips. The want unformed but there, letting me know it wasn’t leaving.
“All right,” Marco said. “Madrid to start.”
“Excellent choice,” Grito said. “Maybe you’ll become the first Lara to slaughter pigs exclusively.”
I touched the bullet around my neck, wondered if that or a thin blade to the throat was better. I had a bullet, but the farther we moved away from Casasrojas, and especially there on the water, the half-light remaking every form, the less I could believe that it was Alexis who had gotten the blade. The less I could see him how I’d imagined him—on his knees, throat pulled back—the more something else twisted in me. It no longer seemed as certain. Other passages felt possible.
In the summer we used to take trips to Abuelo’s old farm. That’s where our parents’ clothes, our mother’s childhood toys were kept. I knew Abuela’s apartment would freeze until we got back and then be set in motion when she turned the key in the lock. The more I thought about it, the more real that thought felt. I never saw Alexis’s body. Without a body, nothing is certain.
MADRID
Six
Her feet before the rest of her, in the Atocha train station, La Canaria’s dirty toes curled around the edge of the marble steps, easing into the depression at the center, making home. Then her voice, yelling at the pigeons gathered around her, cupping a handful of bread to keep them close. “¡Hijos de putas!” she shouted, just loud enough for it to echo a bit. “Suck it, ¡maricones!” I knew this act, the crazy one she made when she didn’t want anyone near her, when she wanted to feel safe sleeping somewhere strange. “¡Cabrones! ¡Pendejos! ¡Co-o-o-ño!”
Looking right at us, yelling at the pigeons, the whole train station, and us. We walked straight toward her, Marco and me first, Grito following, staring at the polished marble floor. She threw a shoe at Marco but missed by a lot. It wasn’t hers. “¡Hijos de putas!” La Canaria waved the other shoe above her head, moving it with the rhythm of her words.
“Where did you go?” Marco said when we were close enough.
“I tried to run away to America, you comemierdas,” she said, still waving the shoe abo
ve her head. “But they kicked me off the boat!” She was laughing and I couldn’t tell how angry she was. I knew that was how she wanted it. “I grabbed this as a goodbye present.”
Marco tossed the shoe back to her and she clapped it in her hands before it hit her in the face. She kicked her legs in the air, pretending she was a can-can dancer. She stood up and revealed an expensive-looking suitcase. “The bitch overpacked. Want a bikini, Mosca?”
She tossed it in the air and I caught the bikini—a skimpy gilded thing. With that I let her slip back in, her breath on the back of my neck. The kind of weight you have to turn around for, because what person would stand so close unless she wanted something. And you always turn, not knowing how much you’re willing to give or how much you’ll be asked to.
“What were you going to do?” I said.
“I got plans, tía,” she said. “I was heading to Paris—I know someone there. But that can wait.” She tossed Marco the suitcase she’d stolen. “It took us so long to get here, let’s see this fucking city.”
She was wearing a pair of black tights with her sandaled toes peeking through the seams and a green silk shirt that barely covered her ass. Marco wanted to say something but didn’t. I knew he didn’t want to stay in Madrid but wanted to keep moving, to Cádiz, for whatever reason. “Fine,” I said.
Marco walked over to a boy selling newspapers. The demonstrations seemed to have died down for the time being. Instead the headline was the murder of Oscar Luis Romero, a young attorney.
“Well, at least it’s better than it was before,” Marco said.
“You would think that, Don Lara,” La Canaria said. She was walking ahead of us.
“I mean at least the newspapers are covering it,” he said. Marco and Grito hurried to catch up, the stolen suitcase banging against Grito’s leg.
I’d never been to Madrid, and I’d always thought it would be different from Casasrojas. It was where the demonstrations had started, where all the artists lived, it was supposed to be modern. In Madrid, everything we always talked about had happened, was happening. It was supposed to be much more alive than Casasrojas, a place that couldn’t collect dust or suspend you in oil your whole life.
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