The train station was far more grand than the one in Casasrojas, an expansive metal and glass arcade both delicate and threatening, but the people looked the same. The same men scurrying in their faded black suits and crumpled hats, the same gypsies with dirt worn into the creases in their dark skin, their foreheads bent over the cement, arms outstretched and hands clasped in prayer. The same frantic movements when someone gave them money, tucking a coin into their dresses so their sardine tins always stayed empty. I followed La Canaria, wanting to wash this grime off of me, to see my surroundings for what they really were and not with the tired tinge of what I expected and what I was capable of seeing.
The streets were covered with the smiling photos of all the different candidates, their faces repeated for blocks. Most of the posters were shredded and wilting, but someone could always be paid to plaster more on top of them. Torn pieces crumbled off, adding more trash to the streets. La Canaria kept walking like she knew where she was going, and maybe she did. I never knew when she was boasting or not. She always acted the same way, no matter what spot she was in. The newspapers all had the same photo of the young attorney who’d had his throat slit outside of his apartment in Lavapiés. He’d been trying to prosecute members of the Falange. The centerfolds had a photo of how he’d been found. It looked like he’d tripped falling down the stairs, but blood pooled on the steps below him in a dull gray. All the articles contained the same minutiae about his daily life and the weather the night he was killed, painting a perfect picture and not pointing any fingers.
Marco kept looking at the cafés we passed and I could tell he was hungry. Grito and La Canaria walked ahead of him. I was glad to be somewhere farther south, where it was warmer. In Casasrojas, the sun coaxed each stone warm one by one, and all its efforts were washed away with some rain. It took months to shake the damp and then it was too hot, the city emptied, people piling into cousins’ farms in the country, everyone in search of cool water, a window big enough to catch the breeze. But Madrid was full of people. Maybe the weather didn’t matter much here. The rules of a job or a crowd’s movements probably meant more than the sun. Or maybe it was because there were just so many people that if even half left for the summer, the city would still seem busy to me.
It was around six. All the men were getting off work and stopping in cafés for a caña before they went home. The old people had just left the house and were walking through the city. Groups of old men with canes and summer jackets walked arm in arm in front of their wives, who held on to each other’s hats when delivery trucks sent up gusts of hot air. The young businessmen tried to skirt the edges of these groups, but sometimes the old people would take up the entire width of the sidewalk. The businessmen kept walking behind the old people, their pace the same, just taking smaller steps, moving like those windup plastic ducks with feet that go really fast but don’t go anywhere and that do flips if they’re working right. I thought one man ahead of me in a worn green fedora was about to flip right over the old women who had stopped to look at hosiery in a window and were fighting over whether it was indecent to show a mannequin in her dressing gown. They had their arms linked, and though they had stopped, they hadn’t huddled together by the window because the one farthest away considered even looking too immodest.
Someone brushed into me and I felt something cold and wet reach right under my ribs and grab my spine. It was a young guy—he looked like Alexis. His head wasn’t shaved but he had those same curly lips, the proud way of holding his neck that contrasted strangely with his hunched, defensive shoulders. A few minutes after he passed, I realized I’d stopped looking at the old people and the businessmen. I looked for groups of young people, for young men carrying packages or smoking on balconies. Instead I saw fachas in stiff suits, skin wishing to be encased in military uniform, hands drifting to guns that were perhaps still within easy reach. I thought of how the police hadn’t questioned my abuela or me when they gave us Alexis’s medallion. I’d been relieved, but it seemed strange now, an omission, one that might have to be circled and revisited. We had thought no one was watching us in Casasrojas, but that was because we forgot. Like a child forgetting to breathe, we forgot there were no unsurveyed moments. That was as true in Madrid as in Casasrojas. Nothing was secret.
We passed the huge museums and rows of carts selling used books. On balconies, pudgy women in tailored suits and heavy gold jewelry, wives of the old guard, knitted under parasols. Their feet bulged out of tight leather sandals, arched into high heels even when sitting. Women in pleated pantsuits with matching bright plastic jewelry stood in doorways, smoking and waiting for it to be time to close up shop. We turned down smaller streets that the dipping sun couldn’t reach. Last Easter’s palm fronds had been woven into the window grates. Children’s fingers or the long nails of women about to go out picked at the fronds. The streets were already dark and damp even though it wasn’t yet night. It didn’t take long for the buildings around us to start crumbling. Empty lots appeared, with kids and old people picking through the rubble like tongues surfacing through missing teeth. La Canaria walked up to a group of young people sitting on the steps of a grimy café, drinking liters of beer.
“Buy us a couple,” she said to one of guys. He was skinny and short with dirty pants cut off mid-calf and a dark shirt, the sleeves rolled up like James Dean’s. His hair looked like the scruffy hind legs of a circus bear. His face was shaved and his nose turned up like a boy’s.
“Why should I?” he said, taking a drink of his beer and looking La Canaria up and down.
“Because we’re cute.” La Canaria grabbed my arm and wrapped her hands around my waist. Grito and Marco stood back, not speaking. The guy smiled and went inside the store. A group of gypsies had made camp in one of the abandoned buildings across the street and were roasting potatoes in a trash can. A family was asleep in an old Renault 4, the children’s faces smudged against the glass hatchback.
“His cousin works here—he gets a bunch of stuff for free,” said a tall guy with a Mohawk. A dog sat with his head on the punk’s legs, lapping up the cold sweat from the beer bottle.
“Well, I don’t do anything for free,” La Canaria said. She sat down on the side opposite the dog. The dog pulled his tongue away from the beer bottle and sniffed La Canaria’s knees. She ignored him. The guy came out of the café with two beers. He handed one to me and one to La Canaria.
“You punki?” La Canaria asked.
They laughed. “Yeah, we are,” said the one with the Mohawk.
She introduced us. They said their names but didn’t stand up, just waved lazily. There were about five of them, two guys and three girls in leather jackets and miniskirts. Paco brought us the drinks and Borgi, with the Mohawk, had the dog. Marco kept twitching toward them to offer his hand, but they stayed still.
“What, are these your brothers?” Paco said to me, jutting out his beer at Marco and Grito. Marco looked at me quickly and then away. I ignored him.
“No, they’re not our brothers,” I said.
“Vale, vale,” Paco said, stretching out his long fingers to scratch behind the dog’s ears. “Where are you from?”
“Casasrojas,” I said.
“We came for the protests, but I guess we’re late,” Grito said, speaking for the first time.
“Joder, I thought everyone in Casasrojas was a facha,” Borgi said. The girls sitting behind him laughed. When he spoke, his Mohawk flopped around in front of his eyes. He was taller than the others, taller than anyone I had seen before, though he was sitting down. He was as skinny as the rest of us, but his limbs seemed to contain a barely reined current. Paco was stockier; the veins in his forearms pulsed when he gripped his bottle.
“We had huge protests for the Communists,” Marco said. “Almost all of the students were involved. A bunch of teachers just passed their students without even looking at the final exams.”
“I hope they did t
hat for us,” La Canaria said.
“I guess that would have been the only way you could’ve passed,” Grito said. It made him angry when she talked to any other guy except Marco.
“We’re not in school anymore,” I said. “I don’t know why we have to talk about it so much.”
“We haven’t mentioned it for days,” Marco said. “Not since—”
“Then we shouldn’t now.” I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been in school. Everything that I could remember doing had happened while I was getting ready for an exam or after I’d been studying in the print shop beneath the philology library or leaving it. That I’d never do that again was not quite touchable.
“Did you drop out?” Paco asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Cool. Us, too.”
I drank from my beer bottle.
“We’re artists,” he continued when I didn’t speak. “Public artists.”
I swallowed my beer and nodded as if I understood. Then I handed the beer to Marco. He was still standing over us, expecting someone to ask him to sit. I don’t know why I handed him the beer. It was making me laugh, him leaning, up on his toes. But I wanted to make it clear just what I was accepting from these punks and what I wasn’t. La Canaria looked at me and handed her beer to Grito. She grabbed it back when he took two sips in a row. I took mine back too.
“Coño,” she said, “public artists, what does that mean?”
I peeled off the label of my beer bottle. The beer wasn’t quite cold enough for it to come off in one easy strip.
“We make public art,” Borgi said. “In the street—wouldn’t you say, Zorra?” He reached back to tickle one of the girls’ legs. I handed my beer to Marco again and tried to iron out the torn label on my thigh.
“They’re just a bunch of hicks,” Zorra said, brushing him off. She stretched her long legs out around Borgi and flexed her feet, moving through ballet positions. Then she tightened each of the three ponytails that stuck out in a row on top of her head. “They don’t know what we’re talking about.” The girl next to her nodded and took a slow drag, leaving a ring of bright purple lipstick on her cigarette. Their clothes were nice, the leather jackets new, the zippers shining. They smoked American cigarettes—Winston Slims—blowing the smoke high above them. They were slumming it, but there was no dirt under their nails.
“If you’re artists, let me see your art,” La Canaria said.
“It’s transient,” Paco said.
“You mean you haven’t done any?” La Canaria said.
“We’re having a show tonight,” Zorra said. “In the Plaza Mayor.”
“That sounds cool,” La Canaria said, “but we have to keep moving because we don’t have anywhere to stay.” She was perfect in these moments. I held my breath, trying to show I didn’t care what they said next.
“You can stay with us,” Borgi said. “We squat in a big place, an old factory. There’s room.”
“Well, then,” La Canaria said. “Let’s go see some art.”
* * *
Paco got more beer and we followed them a few blocks to an old textile factory. We walked up three flights of stairs through a dingy boardinghouse. The kind without lightbulbs in the hallways, where you know they’re not licensed and everyone is constantly terrified of getting evicted. The punks lived on the top floor. The door was off its hinges. Behind it, several dogs whined, pushing their snouts against the frame.
I couldn’t tell how many people were living there. It smelled of piss and wet dogs and what gathers on your scalp when it has been weeks since you had a shower. A couple of punks were sleeping on the floor right by the door. Their mutts circled them, panting, but the punks didn’t move. It was mostly guys. The girls we’d met glided in and out of the rooms, not touching any surface for long. The drugs they had were too expensive for us.
By the door, the almost-floor-to-ceiling windows were wide open but barely caught the breeze coming off the rooftops. The farther we moved into the building, the hotter and stiller it got. There weren’t any doors, just half-standing walls and old blankets hung up between different spots where people were sleeping. Paco’s stuff was in the middle, right under a dingy skylight that had been collecting the sun full-force all day. Just sitting there made me sweat.
Paco put on Santana’s Amigos and set the record to “Europa.” Marco groaned and Grito smacked him in the chest. There was no electricity in the warehouse, but they’d rigged a network of extension cords snaking out the windows and over to the next apartment building. Across the room was a hot plate on a milk crate. The cord was that soft woven plastic from right after the war. The wires were visible and frayed.
“It’s still so good, gachó,” Paco said, and passed a joint to Grito. “Listen to that.” The guitar did sound like smoke, a dangerous smoke that wanted to pull you in and lose you there.
Paco had just a sleeping bag and an old army roll. His spot was sectioned off from the rest of the room with an old blanket. Piles of broken wood—doors, pieces of tabletops, and old signs—were propped against the walls around us, next to buckets of house paint and horsehair brushes.
Paco moved closer to me and laid his hand flat on my stomach. La Canaria had floated into another corner I couldn’t see, probably going after Borgi.
“Is it cool, gachó?” Paco asked Marco.
“Don’t ask him what’s cool to do to me,” I said, pressing down on his hand.
Paco leaned in and kissed me. I tasted chemicals, bright and burning as the sun on water. Marco was staring straight at me. I took off my shirt. Marco got up and passed through the curtain without saying a word. Out the skylight you could see the splayed forks of pigeon feet moving around on the glass.
* * *
Once it was dark there were more people bumping through the building. Grito came and sat by us, but I couldn’t see Marco.
“How many people live here?” Grito said.
“I don’t know,” Paco said. “It’s a free space. If someone needs to stay here, they can.”
Borgi pushed open the curtain and stuck his head in. “Everyone’s getting ready,” he said to Paco. “Let’s go.”
“Hold on. I need my chocolate,” Paco said. He unrolled another cigarette and crumbled more hash into it. I put my shirt back on. We smoked and then stood up. Borgi had kept his head in the same spot the whole time. His Mohawk was stiffer now and smelled of raw eggs. He nodded his chin to the sound of an accordion player on the street, but his hair didn’t move. Then he grabbed a bunch of the pieces of wood around us and handed some to Paco. Grito offered to help, but Paco acted like he didn’t hear. He took a bucket of paint, too.
More young people were waiting outside, smoking and pulling on bottles of San Miguel. Zorra stood in the center of the group in a large men’s trench coat. Once they saw Paco and Borgi, they all started moving in the same direction, toward the city center. Everyone was getting off work, moving in one current from their offices and storefronts downtown back into the apartments where they lived. We pushed against aging businessmen and young women in pressed polyester skirts and matching jackets. Some of the men cursed us and others looked like they knew—that we were coming up now, that they were the ones to get shoved in the dirt. Marco caught up to us, but instead of reattaching himself to my elbow, he walked next to Grito. He wouldn’t look at me.
We walked past a bar playing that stupid disco song, “Fly Robin Fly.” It only had six words in it, which these coked-up German blondes repeated over and over. Those six words had played a million times on the radio since last year. The place was empty because it was early, but a group of women stood outside the door, dressed in matching metallic pants and halter tops and platform sandals with clear plastic heels, their lips fluorescent pinks and oranges. They were practicing their dance moves and mouthing the words. Grito started walking toward them, shouting the lyric
s over the instrumental break and gyrating his hips. They tossed their cigarettes at him.
“Fuck disco!” Grito shouted once we were past them.
“Fuck punk!” they shouted back.
The plaza was full of people going out for tapas and to catch the air, cool now that the sun had gone down. La Canaria absentmindedly traced graffiti letters that spelled out REVOLUCIÓN SOCIAL on a brick wall, the a an anarchy sign and the r a trademark. I caught Marco staring at the graffiti. Maybe he was looking for something specific, too.
Tiny pools of water from the afternoon street cleaning reflected the gold and pink lights of the bars and municipal buildings. The streets in the city center were immaculate, scrubbed raw for the soon-to-descend packs of English and Swedish tourists. In each window of the tapas places was a big empty table, but the waiters ushering people inside made them stand at the bar. This so the tourists would think there was an empty table and then get stuck at a bar with the rest of the fools. All the boards outside the restaurants offered the same menu as in Casasrojas—potatoes and red peppers, tortilla, octopus with garlic—but the food the servers scurried past us with was far more elaborate than anything I’d ever seen. The punks didn’t seem to notice the restaurants or the lines of tourists and Madrileños alike waiting to get in.
Borgi and Paco walked right to the center of the plaza and put down their pieces of wood and buckets of paint. It was so full, no one noticed them at first. I could hardly see them in the crowd because I hadn’t been following them that closely. La Canaria was standing outside one of the restaurants. We were starving. Paco turned over the boards, which had cartoon sketches of political prisoners on them. One had the hammer and sickle in red behind black bars. It was pretty typical stuff. The same that I’d seen on posters and banners at the rallies in Casasrojas. La Canaria took her eyes off the platters of food for a second and glanced at Paco and Borgi. She rolled her eyes.
The Sleeping World Page 9