The Sleeping World

by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

  I finished my coffee at the counter and tried to read my future in the dregs. It would be nice to know. I wanted to ask her to do this, but she would probably be offended. She already seemed offended. Every part of her body except her face and her hands was covered. It made me feel naked in a way that the shrouded grandmothers never did. My abuela would never speak of the war or before she met my abuelo, but I knew what they did to Republican women when the war ended. There were no photos, just stories passed between women. They stripped them in the squares and made them drink castor oil until shit streamed down their bare thighs, this after the beatings, this after the rapes. A reminder of what those in charge are capable of. Keep your skirt long and your eyes on the ground. There are bad men at night. Keep on the right side; their means of breaking you are very specific.

  I spent my last coins on a couple of the pistachio sweets and watched the white paper wrapping glaze with honey in the woman’s hands. She looked out the window again and I followed her gaze, almost wishing I hadn’t, because I saw someone who looked too familiar to be possible.

  I rushed out the door and into the street. I caught a shadow turning down an alleyway. I ran up and down the whole length of it but saw no one. I kept hearing footsteps. I smelled rust and wet weeds. But the street was empty. Around me only cats and stray shadows. I pulled out Alexis’s medallion from under my shirt. I kept walking, my heart thudding rapidly.

  * * *

  At the factory, people had started to stir. No one was fully awake yet. One of the dogs was back on the steps, but he didn’t want to come in. It was cooler on the shaded stone, and I figured the other dogs had found a better place than the factory to spend the day. La Canaria had her arm stretched over her eyes, and the paler underside of it caught the light. The windows lit the room in elongated rectangles. The only people who had moved were the ones unlucky enough to be caught in that orange space. The dust from the old cloth clogged in the light. Fine powder we shouldn’t breathe.

  It took half the day for everyone to wake up. I didn’t know why I couldn’t just go back to sleep. I didn’t like sitting and waiting in a hot place for anyone. It opened up too many rooms, a hundred books spread out in front of me, and I had to learn them all but each letter was melting, dripping colors. The cities in my throat.

  Paco got up to piss and then smoke on the landing. I came out into the light and asked for a cigarette. He didn’t seem surprised that I was there. I wanted to ask him what they were planning, let that lead to the real question I had, but I didn’t know how to shape the words so that I didn’t sound ignorant. I also didn’t want to give him too much attention.

  No one mentioned the plans all day. Grito was itching, too, I could tell from the way he kept looking at Paco and Borgi, opening his mouth, and then shutting it without speaking. Borgi passed a joint. Something was supposed to happen that day. They’d said so the night before. The orange rectangles of light got smaller and smaller until they disappeared and the sun was overhead, lighting the place through the dirty glass of the skylight. It got so hot that just sitting made us sweat. Paco got up again and disappeared behind his curtain. I could hear him moving in there, the wet sound of a brush dipping in and out of paint.

  La Canaria spread out the clothes from the Americans’ suitcase and we swapped with the punk girls for what we wanted, a striped T-shirt and a pair of black jeans for me, two jean jackets, a woven backpack from Guatemala. La Canaria kept most of the Americans’ stuff because it was nice but got some money for the suitcase. As the day passed, it seemed both more and less likely that anything would happen. Each time I would stop thinking and remember I was waiting, I would be relieved that it hadn’t happened yet and therefore probably wouldn’t. Then I would also be scared, because it just meant that if it was going to happen it would probably happen soon and I hadn’t figured out what to do about it yet. Besides my abuelo’s old hunting rifles, I’d been close to a handgun only once before. I’d been studying in the bar under the philology library and had come up to my abuela’s apartment for siesta. The door was unlocked. All the lights were out, but it was still early in the afternoon. I sat down at the kitchen table; the television buzzed from just being turned off. On the table where Abuela kept her magazines was a gun.

  “Joder, you scared the shit out of me,” Alexis said. He’d just walked into the room and hadn’t known I was there.

  “What is that?” I said. Of course I knew what it was, but I didn’t know what it was doing there.

  He picked up the gun and pointed it at the television. He pulled the trigger. I flinched. It was empty. “I’m just keeping it for someone,” he said, looking at me and smiling. “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.”

  He sat down next to me, which he hadn’t done in a while. As a kid, he was never on the same eating schedule as me and Abuela, squirming at dinner, gorging on biscuits and candies before bed. Years later, his stomach always hurt, and it kept him up at night. He was thin unless he was in a drinking period. Then the extra weight coiled heavily around his neck. I’d notice it suddenly, as if I hadn’t seen him in months. But he’d wake up and start running in the mornings, do push-ups in front of Abuela’s telenovelas, and he’d be thin again. Neither ever lasted.

  “Turn on the television,” he said, teasing me. “I want to watch the game.” He knew I hated when he bossed me around.

  “You never watch anything,” I said. “You don’t even know who’s playing.”

  “Just turn it on.” He was playing with the gun, scooting it around the Formica table, moving it between the neat piles of magazines and porcelain figures and the baby Jesus like he was trying to get it out of a maze.

  “Why are you keeping a gun for someone?” I asked.

  “A friend asked me to.” He was trying to maneuver the gun through two porcelain angels. His black hair was buzzed short, a style Abuela didn’t like. She said it made him look like one of the prisoners from the war. Alexis said at least that way it was more honest.

  “Why would you do that?” I said. “I wouldn’t do that.” I didn’t look at Alexis when I said this, just pointed at the gun. But I tried to keep my voice even, tried to use as few words as possible.

  He never asked me for anything, not since almost a year before, when he’d broken his arm jumping over the fence by the train tracks. The bone had cut through strips of skin. The doctors shot him with morphine before he left the hospital, but he wanted me to go get him brandy and I wouldn’t. I was studying and didn’t want to leave the house. I was worried, too, that the two drugs together would be dangerous. He laughed at me, said he could handle it, had handled worse, but I wouldn’t leave. I was trying to protect him, but he stopped laughing and got so angry that I wouldn’t do this one thing. How amazed I’d been at the weight of his hand on my cheek. I couldn’t stop the tears that came to my eyes, couldn’t keep them from thickening my tongue. Not pain but surprise that the casing around my body had been broken and how easily. I remembered that moment then, and I knew he did, too.

  “I have the same reason to care,” I said when he stayed quiet. “About what you’re doing. Who you’re fighting.”

  “What do you know about what I’m doing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. It was true, really.

  “Good.”

  When he was young, our abuela would cut his hair short in the back, letting the top grow long and curly like a Botticelli cherub’s. In the days after she cut his hair, I used to love running my hand along the back of his head. Even though his hair was just as short in the back now, I never would have dreamed of reaching my hand to his head.

  “But you’re right,” he said. “And if I asked, you’d help me.” He smiled like it was a joke.

  I nodded. I hoped I would.

  He stopped playing with the gun, thrummed his fingers on his knees. “Do you think you’ll stay here, Mosca?” The television buzzed in and out. He got up to try to fix
the antenna.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In this comemierda country? Or will you leave?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it depends on how well I do on my exams.”

  Alexis laughed. He’d dropped out of university and teased me for studying all the time. When he was really young and we first came to live with Abuela, he was always in my room. He’d even get dressed there, sprint naked through the apartment to grab something he forgot, and run back to my room even if I wasn’t there. Or the door would be locked and he’d be inside under the bed, playing with his toy soldiers. Even though he had a room of his own, he slept in either my or Abuela’s bed, sometimes leaving mine in the middle of the night to move to hers. I never knew what made him switch, what woke him and made him sure he wasn’t safe where he was. It drove me crazy, but it stopped right when it should have. I don’t know if Abuela told him or he heard it at school in that silent language just being learned. All of a sudden he couldn’t even look at me in a swimsuit.

  “I wouldn’t stay here,” he said.

  “I guess I’d want to go to France,” I said. “To Paris.”

  “Paris, yeah,” he said. “Me, too. We can meet up at that Sacré-Coeur—where you intellectuals love to go.”

  “When?” I said, playing along.

  He shrugged. “When we haven’t seen each other in a while.” He smiled that curly smile that made even me blush. No matter what he was saying, he could get anyone to smile when he wanted to. He sat down again and started pushing the gun around.

  “Paris,” he said. “That’s where I’d go. That’s where I’ll see you.”

  The gun squeaked against the tabletop.

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “What if you get caught?”

  “They can’t touch me, they have nothing on me.”

  “They don’t need anything.”

  “He’s about to fall, Mosca. We’re winning. We’re taking him down.”

  I didn’t want to say that even if he was right, and I knew he wasn’t, a cornered animal is the most dangerous kind.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  He brought the gun to his temple. I froze. He pulled the trigger.

  “It’s empty,” he said again, smiling. But he meant it as a warning.

  * * *

  It was dark and we’d been inside all day by the time Grito opened his mouth and finally decided to speak.

  “Isn’t it going to happen today?” he said. He didn’t look at anyone when he said it. Borgi and Paco were both nearby but didn’t turn toward him. “You know, with the transfer.”

  Borgi got up and went to the room with the hot plate in it. He came back with a bottle of wine. Grito didn’t like it when people ignored him. He was getting angry. “Well?” he asked again.

  “Oh yeah, macho,” Borgi said. He took a swig of wine and passed it to me, then lay down on the floor. “Probably not today, soon though. Pass it on, Mosca.”

  Grito nodded and went to get more wine. La Canaria crawled toward me on all fours, away from Zorra and another girl gossiping about the latest Kaka de Luxe show they’d seen and what had happened backstage, flicking their syringes and holding down the other’s veins. Zorra took a close-up photo of the other girl shooting up.

  “Now you can tell they’re good anarchists,” La Canaria said loudly, slurring her words and jerking her head back toward the girls. “They fuck everything that moves. Good little anarchists.” She bounced her head to the words and tickled Borgi’s chest with her ponytail.

  Grito came back into the room. “What are you doing?” he said.

  She ignored him. “Only fascists don’t put out,” she said. Borgi snorted with laughter, but kept his arms stretched out on the floor. Grito pushed La Canaria but that only made her lean closer into Borgi. “‘María la O,’” she sang loudly, “‘¡todo se acabó!’”

  Once everyone forgot that we hadn’t done anything all day, the punks started to talk about their plan again, to collect arms, it seemed, but they spoke in vague terms and never added new information or details. Perhaps Paco and Borgi didn’t trust us yet. Perhaps they themselves were wading in the dark. Grito got really excited and La Canaria acted like she cared.

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Borgi kept saying.

  Everything that was going to happen was always going to happen tomorrow.

  I sat in a dark corner, trying to stay cool. Marco walked over to me and sat down. I didn’t move, waiting. He leaned in and kissed my shoulder, like a question.

  I pushed him away. “You don’t get to touch me,” I said.

  He stayed sitting, looking out at the rest of the room. “But some asshole you never met, that’s fine?”

  “I don’t give a shit about him,” I said.

  “Do you give a shit about me?”

  “I don’t owe you anything, Marco.”

  He stood up, surprised. “That’s not what I think,” he said.

  “Then what do you think? Huh?”

  “I think—” He paused, tilted his head back to the ceiling. He was more than a little drunk. “I think—I hated him as soon as I found out who he was. I wanted to kill him.”

  “How could you not tell us?”

  “I didn’t want you to hate me. I didn’t want Alexis—”

  “Shut up,” I said. We didn’t talk about this and he knew it. We didn’t talk about who knew what and the consequences of that knowledge. We didn’t speak his name. Not to each other.

  He stepped back, arms out. “Please, Mosca. I’m sorry.”

  I pushed against the wall to stand up and walked away from him, into the dark.

  * * *

  Before el Cabronísimo died, before the police handed my abuela Alexis’s medallion, I was at an illegal party in a warehouse on the edge of Casasrojas. We were all stuffed in the basement, haggling for beer and thrashing around to these guys doing a horrible job covering Led Zeppelin. Their own songs were even worse, but it mattered only that they were loud. The place was so full of people that even if you weren’t too far gone, you could pretend you didn’t know what was happening. Nothing really was happening.

  I’d come out with Grito but didn’t know where he was. He always left me in a crowd, reaching out to strands of ­people he didn’t know, more interested in a face that wouldn’t last the night. I didn’t care—when I was near someone who knew me, it was harder to pretend I wasn’t anywhere, harder to just feel the slick skin of the crowd pressed against mine and close my eyes and scream and have that scream disappear into unknown bodies. The only lights were on the band, and that helped, too. Someone handed me a hash cigarette and I sucked it in and passed it on. It was stupid—these places were always getting shut down, but there were too many of us there that night. We couldn’t be stopped.

  Someone pushed into me and I pushed back just as hard. A face leaped into mine: it was Alexis. He stuck out his tongue. He was making fun of the band and me and everyone there, but he was doing it, too. I laughed and kept dancing, really just moving my arms and legs fast and yelling. I didn’t want to hang out with him, and he didn’t want to stay by me, but we were each glad the other was there.

  Some tió shoved me again and I was about to push back, but he grabbed my chin with one hand and threw me back into the crowd. Marco shuddered up behind him. He hadn’t seen the guy hit me, he was angry at him about something else.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Marco shouted. The guy was way taller than Marco, with milky facha skin that came from never having to do much. It looked even paler in the light from the stage. His hair was short and parted neatly on one side. He even wore a polyester shirt, brown with a big pointy collar.

  The facha stepped up to Marco, smiling. “Listen, I don’t want to fight you—we’re on the same side.”

  “The fuck we are.” Marco raised his arm to punch
him, but just then one of Alexis’s friends appeared out of the crowd and put his hand on Marco’s shoulder. He whispered into Marco’s ear, and Marco’s face collapsed as if someone had cut his puppet strings. The facha turned away from both of them and moved through the crowd. He didn’t belong there. He knew it and didn’t care. Pigs never do. They think they own everything around them, and they might.

  Across the crowd, leaning close to the speakers, Alexis and La Canaria were dancing next to each other. It took me a moment to realize why they looked strange; they were the only people in the crowd really dancing. Their bodies pressed against each other like old-fashioned flamenco dancers, hips slung low and legs wired to the backs of the other’s kneecaps. They’d found a slow beat beneath the noise, so close to the speakers that a whole separate terrain rolled out before them and they were alone beneath a starry sky, lit by a desert bonfire. Seeing them, I hoped they’d get back together. Making sure La Canaria didn’t spin out kept Alexis in this orbit. I’d take that even with the beer bottles they’d fling at each other across the plaza, the people they’d fuck to make sure the other was watching. But somewhere in the middle of a keyless dirge, La Canaria pulled away from Alexis, stuck her finger in his face. He curled over her in mock ­supplication—only I knew how real it was—making baby faces, cooing at her until she shoved him and melted back into the bodies flailing to the ruin of sound. It took her only another song to find someone else.

  I found Grito and told him I was leaving. He said he’d meet me when he finished his beer. I stood outside waiting, smoking a cigarette. The street was silent and dark. In the distance cars sped over the highway. The silver guardrail across the street was the last visible thing before the ground dropped off into darkness. It was a good spot. The sound of the music throbbed faintly, like that heart buried under a mattress. No one could hear the party going on under the stone, and in this part of town, no one would care if they did. I stayed in the shadow of the warehouse. I couldn’t see much, and I hoped no one could see me.