The Sleeping World (11 page)

“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 still. 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.

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.