Zorra stood in the center of the signs and threw off her trench coat. “¡Oyé!” she shouted. “Listen up! Everyone here knows someone who didn’t come home. Who one day just didn’t show up for work.” She was dressed like a flamenco dancer, with a black flared skirt, long black satin gloves, and big gold hoops, red carnations in her hair. In the artificial lights from the plaza, she appeared both young and old at the same time. “We don’t even know how many dead there are! How many they marched out into the desert and never brought back!” She moved through the crowd, bringing her long fingers to turned-down chins, carving out a stage as people pulled away from her. “The police give us the medallions, but we never see the bodies—every one of you walking here! But you all saw his body—Oscar Luis Romero—throat slit on his front steps because he wanted to know where they are buried and who put them in the dirt. He wanted to know who killed—”
Borgi stepped behind Zorra and shoved her to the ground. I gasped. Paco caught her right before she hit the stones and tossed her in the air. She spread her arms and landed in Borgi’s arms, and then they both rolled to the ground. It was some sort of dance. They were fighting, but it was beautiful, too. Zorra kept trying to drag herself out of Borgi’s reach, but then he would pin her down again. The people walking in the plaza stopped to watch. Some men tried to get between Borgi and Zorra because they thought it was real. Paco raced in front of them like a startled antelope, his neck arched back and arms out. Zorra got away from Borgi and twirled around and around, leaping into the air, her legs almost completely horizontal when she jumped, turning herself from a wounded doll two guys were throwing into a piece of sailing architecture. Borgi collided with her in the air and they rolled onto the ground. He started stage-punching her, his fist landing in smart slaps onto his splayed palm. Then he drew her up on her knees by her hair and pulled back her head. Though I knew it wasn’t real, I believed it. Her neck stretched back like a curve of water. A man rushed toward them and Paco had to hold on to his overcoat. Borgi drew his arm up to Zorra’s neck like he was about to slit her throat.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and smelled rust from the bridge in Casasrojas, empty aerosol spray cans, hand-rolled cigarettes. “Watch,” someone whispered in my ear. I turned around, but there was no one next to me. When I looked back at the dancers, Zorra was collapsed on the ground, Borgi standing over her. Still holding the man back, Paco motioned frantically at the punks sitting nearby. One stood up and threw a bucket of red paint on Zorra and Borgi.
The punks who’d been watching stood up and cheered. Paco tried to explain to the man what they were doing. The man thought he’d been tricked and kept checking his pockets. Finally he shrugged Paco off and walked away. The punks passed around a hat to the crowd who had gathered to watch. Most people turned away once they saw it and kept heading in the direction they’d been going. Grito was shaking all the punks’ hands and hugging them, his ponytail bobbing up and down. A few moving lines of people separated me from them. I walked over, going against the current, searching the crowd around me. I could still smell the bright rust that sticks in your throat, the decaying weeds and algae clumped around the bridge, the harsh burn of drying paint. Still hear that voice in my ear. La Canaria followed me. She hadn’t said anything during the performance.
Grito wouldn’t stop talking to the punks about the show. I’d never seen him so into something. La Canaria sneaked her hand under his crooked arm and around his waist. He turned to us, beaming. “Could you see from over there?” he asked. “Why didn’t you come closer?”
“Yeah, we could see,” she said. Grito was waiting for La Canaria to say something more, but she didn’t.
“It was just amazing,” Grito said to Borgi, who was trying to wash the paint off with turpentine from an old shampoo bottle. The paint clung to his hair, molding it into strips of red clay.
“Thanks, macho,” Borgi said. “Glad you enjoyed it.”
Paco stood talking to Zorra; their cheeks were flushed. They were in the center of a group of other punks. She stretched her leg out high and straight in front of her and laughed.
“Where’s Marco?” Grito asked. “Where’s that pendejo?”
“I don’t know if he saw it,” La Canaria said.
“What did you think, gachí?” Borgi asked me.
“Look,” I said. “It’s Marco.” He was walking toward us, carrying a brown paper bag. The corners were shiny with grease.
“What’s happening?” Marco stared at Borgi’s red paint. Borgi turned away from him and walked over to the others. “Here,” Marco said, and handed us each a ham and cheese sandwich, still not looking at me.
“How cute,” La Canaria said. “I like rich Marco.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Marco said quickly. He looked over at the punks.
“You’re worried they’re gonna hold you hostage for ransom money, maricón?” Grito said. His lips were lined in grease from the sandwich. A string of hot cheese hung out of his mouth.
“Why are they covered in paint?” Marco asked.
“They did this art thing,” I said. “Some kind of protest.”
“Glad I missed it.”
Grito swallowed the rest of the sandwich and pulled La Canaria over to the group with him.
“You don’t like them,” I said to Marco.
“I don’t have to. I just don’t want them fucking with us.”
* * *
We followed the punks toward a bar a few blocks away from the plaza. A woman sang on the street corner, one of the old flamenco songs my abuela used to listen to. Zorra danced down the street, circling the singer and spinning away. Her clothes were refined in comparison to the singer’s, Zorra’s clearly a costume. La Canaria reached out and stole the flower in the singer’s hair, but the woman didn’t pause. When the rose wouldn’t stay behind her ear, she traced it over the graffiti that sprouted haphazardly between buildings, smearing the petals on brick and cement.
I almost passed it. But I noticed La Canaria’s hand hesitate for a second and then leap over a patch of wall. There—half hidden by a poster for Princesa madeleines—was Alexis’s tag. I pulled up the paper ad to make sure, but I knew the second I saw the long hook of the x. I pressed my hand against the cement until it warmed. La Canaria tore my hand away.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. She’d seen the tag same as me.
Grito was up ahead, talking to the punks. I could tell La Canaria was trying to figure out how to feel about them or, more, how to act. Grito seemed really into it and she didn’t know if that threatened her or not. Maybe she also didn’t know how much she cared.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. I thought of her and Alexis fighting in the plaza and dancing alone in the parks at dawn. No matter how many times they broke up, they always got back together.
“Down here,” Borgi called out, and disappeared below street level. La Canaria followed him and ran her fingers along the crumbling clay and glass mosaics that lined the descent into the bar. Pink-and-purple-tinted shards of mirror glittered back at us, reflecting sweaty corners of our skin. She’d dropped the shredded rose under Alexis’s tag.
The bar was underground, full of cramped booths, the stuffing sticking out of the plastic seats. The whole place was lit with only a few red bulbs. It was hard to see what color anything really was. Like we were in one of those cheap horror movies that the censor boards love—the kind that always ends with the main girl dying, not because her vampire boyfriend sucked her dry but because she tried to abort their baby and now she’s bleeding to death in an alley. The vampire boyfriend has converted and repented for his sins—the big one being that he’d fucked the dying puta.
We squeezed into a booth with the punks. They ordered pitchers of beer with the few coins they’d collected in the hat. Someone shook a salt cellar over the pitcher to settle the foam.
“Watch this,” Grito said.
He already had a glass of beer half filled with foam. He ran his index finger around his nose and across his forehead and then dipped it in the glass. The foam collapsed slowly under his finger. Everyone laughed. La Canaria laughed really loudly and high-pitched to show how stupid she thought it was. She reached for her own beer.
“I prefer salt to his dirty face,” she whispered to me, but loudly enough that Grito could hear.
The punks continued talking. Grito’s joke had been a quick interruption; they turned in toward one another.
“It’s more dangerous now,” Paco said.
“Yeah,” Zorra cut in. “After the elections, there’s a chance there’ll be trials—the fachas will actually have to pay for what they did. And if that happens, they want to make sure anyone who could point a finger is already dead.”
“But we have to know it’s a good source first,” Borgi said. “That we can trust them.”
“And then what?” Paco said. “None of us even knows how to use one.”
“I do,” Borgi said. “My father was in the Civil Guard. He was always giving me these fucking lessons. Trying to make me into a man.” He flicked his wrist and the punks laughed.
La Canaria, Grito, Marco, and I all listened closely. Grito smiled and nodded along with them; maybe he did know what they were talking about—he’d walked right next to them on the way to the bar. La Canaria had this grin on that she got right before everything started to fall apart in a way she liked.
“What are you discussing?” She leaned into the group, fake-absentmindedly piling her hair on top of her head, doing her best impression of a Soviet spy. What movie we were in kept shifting.
None of the punks answered her. They all stopped talking as if they had forgotten we were there and wouldn’t have been talking about this if they’d remembered. But we were right next to them the whole time.
“It’s nothing,” Borgi said. “Just more art stuff.”
“Cabrón,” Grito said. “No, it isn’t.”
Marco leaned away from us and looked around the room slowly.
“You can trust us, tío,” Grito said. “We know which side we’re on.”
“What about Señor Sandwich over there?” Borgi pointed his glass at Marco. Marco rubbed his eyes and covered his mouth with a half-formed fist, resting his head on it. He met Borgi’s gaze but didn’t speak.
“He’s with us, tío,” Grito said. “He’s been protesting with us all spring.”
“This isn’t protests we’re talking about,” Borgi said. “This is serious. This is military defense.” La Canaria raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips conspiratorially.
We’d heard the rumors about the old guard in the capital. That they hadn’t surrendered their guns. That they weren’t as interested as the king in a peaceful transition to democracy. But none of us knew how much to believe. The news in Casasrojas was completely controlled by the old fachas. Any event, we read filtered through that lens. When el Cabronísimo was alive, “tension” meant secret arrests. “Skirmish” meant executions, piles of medallions rimmed with dried blood in tiny plazas. But the code was always changing, and we were never quite sure that we’d cracked it accurately in the first place. After his death, there was even less clarity about what the words meant. All we knew was what we had known then, that they may keep information from us but that didn’t mean they didn’t know how to communicate. That didn’t mean they couldn’t find you wherever you were, whenever they wanted.
“We have a right to defend our party,” Paco said. “We want this country moving forward, not backward.”
“Yeah, of course,” Grito said. “Us, too. We’re in. All of us.”
La Canaria looked at me and rolled her eyes. She didn’t believe a word the punks said, but as long as it was an act, it was her kind of script.
* * *
We stumbled back to the factory and sat as close as we could to the open windows to catch the night air moving slowly over the buildings. Borgi and Paco seemed to be leading things, but they spoke in a sort of shorthand that was hard to decipher. There would be long pauses after one of them spoke. They, too, seemed unclear about what was happening. One of their friends who was a part of the Communist Party had received death threats. They didn’t know what to do about it—who to ask for help. The old guard and the new police force were made up of the same people.
“We want to be armed for later, too,” Paco said.
“Why?” Grito asked.
Zorra leaned into me. “They just want another war. In a war, they know where they stand.”
“We’re saying we need to be prepared,” Paco said. “The pigs are prepared—”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked Zorra.
“The men, mujer. They’re fucking terrified we’ll start actually expecting all the change they’ve been talking about.”
“That’s off track,” Paco said. “We need to think about what happens if the pigs try to rig the elections. We need a way to fight back. The people are on our side, we just need a way to fight.”
“You’re about to drop your balls over anything actually changing,” Zorra said. “Not being a fascist is easy—cleaning the shit stains out of your own underwear is a little harder.”
“Not me,” Borgi said. “Let the change come, please.”
La Canaria nodded along with Paco and Borgi, but of course no one knew her well enough to know how much she was joking. If she was at all. At least no one who knew her was paying attention. Grito hadn’t spoken to her all night—pissed at her for flirting with Borgi. The floor of the building was coated with fabric dust from when it had been a mill. Threads and tiny motes of different colors of cotton and wool packed tight between the floorboards. I kept picking at them, pulling out several centimeter-long stretches of compacted cloth, smashed by heat and age into something new, a composite of a thousand forgotten dresses. Marco had bought Zorra’s pills and was stretched on the floor, sloping his arms up and over his body.
Sometimes when Alexis was little, he’d get these plans in his head, and my abuela and I would be so happy to go along with them. Once he convinced himself that he was a baby fox and couldn’t leave his den until winter was over. My abuela and I spent all Sunday afternoon stretching out blankets and lining up chairs so that he could move from under his bed to the kitchen. We sat under the table to eat, my abuela moving her old knees uncomfortably every few minutes, watching carefully that no scraps fell on the floor. He was giddy to be down there with us, and though he refused to speak—because he was a fox—he kept nuzzling us with his snout and making this sweet growling sound. My abuela had probably never eaten on the floor in her life, or sat on it in decades, but she smiled at his tender growl and even ate a few bites with her hands. She liked things to be very clean, very clear. She was like the facade on the cathedral: thousands of tiny, perfect relief sculptures spread out so far you had to arch your back to see. But each in the exact right place, never moving. Each figure symbolized something directly, a perfect ratio of image to meaning. Alexis could make these relief sculptures shift, make where and when we ate change, make a flower mean something different, make everything mean many things at once. I liked Abuela best this way, all of her attention turned toward keeping Alexis smiling. Even when Alexis got older, she acted like that. Even when she wasn’t trying to keep him smiling but just trying to make sure he didn’t break through his own seams.
“It’s gonna happen tomorrow,” Borgi said. The sun was beginning to rise, but the few streetlights on the block were still on. They were the only light in the room. “Tomorrow we’ll pick the stuff up.” Everyone around him nodded, trying to look focused and determined through their different hazes. The punks kept talking, but I finally fell asleep, their indefinite words passing through my dreams.
* * *
I woke up to the sun hot on my face, already sweating, the air in the factory completely s
till. La Canaria was draped over Grito. Marco had curled up in a corner near the far window. None of the others were awake, though it was late in the day. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I just wanted coffee. I still had a few of La Canaria’s coins. I stepped slowly over the stretched-out bodies to get to the door and into the street. The dogs were whining to be let out. I let them go and they disappeared into the alleys ahead of me. It was the first time I had been alone in a long time.
“Joder,” I said out loud. There was no one to hear me. The streets were quiet—it was a Sunday, I realized, and all the shops were closed.
It was strange to walk alone and not be flanked by Grito or La Canaria or Marco. I kept thinking one of them would appear and make some comment about how stupid I was, walking through a city I didn’t know, looking for a café on a Sunday. I didn’t trust my movements without one of them around to contain me. Without La Canaria or Grito or even Marco there to keep me closed in on myself, my arms might just detach and float away.
White canopies stretched across the rooftops to keep the streets shaded. Only the intersections were unprotected from the sun, but there were no cars, so I didn’t have to wait at any of them. The air felt cool because it was early, but that was a warning of how hot it was going to get. The cement and stones releasing their last calm breath before absorbing the sun. I passed the red outline of a body splayed awkwardly on the sidewalk. Zorra had said that it was for a student killed when the riot police’s tear-gas canister exploded in his face. The outline was painted over every day, but someone sneaked back at night and repainted it. I finally found a tiny Moroccan place that was open. I’d heard about places like this appearing now that the borders were open. Immigrants started up shops again, right where their ancestors had lived centuries before, neon lights flickering under ornate columns with Arabic script.
The shop sold newspapers, pinkie-sized sweet rolls stuffed with pistachio and honey, and coffee with cardamom. It was smaller than my abuela’s kitchen, with room for only one person and no place to sit. The coffee was thick with oils, and grit floated near the bottom. The woman behind the counter had on a pale lilac veil. She didn’t look up from her magazine, just accepted my coins in her outstretched palm and deposited them underneath the counter. I wanted to stay by her because even though she wouldn’t look at me, sometimes she would look out the window through a section that wasn’t covered by posters of football players and ice cream ads. She glanced up as if the window looked out over something unimaginable.
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