The Sleeping World (2 page)

“What the hell are you doing?” A man in a suit broke through the crowd. He grabbed Grito's shoulder and tossed him off the car. The man was twice Grito's size, his hair cleanly clipped and his fingers thick from having been broken many times. He pinned Grito to the cement.

“Get off him,” I shouted, and kicked the man in the back. He barely noticed.

“Get out of here, you fucking
facha
!” someone behind me shouted. We tugged and kicked at the man until he turned around to face us. Grito grabbed the crowbar that had fallen out of his hands and swung, cuffing the man's shoulder. He fell backward onto the pavement. We kicked him until he was still.

We could have kept going, but we didn't. A kind of pulse stopped us, a lack of inertia when our boots hit flesh that didn't resist. The man slowly pushed himself up onto his knees, one arm hanging limp. His face was bloody and his breathing whistled through broken ribs.

“
Idiotas
,” Samo said beside me, “he's a police officer.”

“You think I give a fuck?” Grito shouted through his bandana, still breathing heavily.

The man lifted his broken face to us and grinned, his teeth dripping red.

Grito dropped the crowbar. We turned and ran.

Two

My abuela didn't notice any change, or if she did, she herself did not change. She left the house only for Mass and to buy groceries. Her daily trips to the fruit seller, the bakery, the butcher used to last her all morning, but the old vendors had been replaced by their sons or nephews, and she had no one to talk to. They hurried her along, she said, like a log through a mill. She must have been happy in some way when the general died, but I think part of her didn't believe he could. She believed that he would rise from the dead or that it was a trick to draw out the seditious elements and slaughter them. The general had taken too much from her to be truly gone.

She set out my breakfast, a row of Maria cookies, even though it was almost midday by the time I stumbled into the kitchen. I turned on the burner to reheat the coffee. She snatched the moka pot out of my hands. “Don't touch that,” she said. “That's disgusting.” Her nails accidentally grazed the underside of my wrist, but they were too soft to make a mark.

She poured out the old coffee and started a new pot. It was just me and her left living in the apartment.

Last night's events surfaced hesitantly. It wasn't hard to push them back into the murky water. I wanted them to tunnel down
the shower drain with the sweat and booze leaking out of me, but that was too much to ask. Everything was carried. After I toweled off and dressed, I found my abuela watching a television musical in the kitchen. Her posture was perfect despite her age, and she watched every commercial and news report as if it had the same importance. The song was a cover of a
ye-ye
hit that had been on the radio years ago. A woman singing about how content her heart was, the trumpets and violins rising to meet her upbeat soprano notes. The singer and her backups danced around a gas station in white go-go boots and bright yellow uniforms that showed their midriffs and upper thighs. An old officer with stacks of medals on his chest sat watching them and smiled. It was an old show, dated and safe.

“Can you believe this trash?” my abuela said. “Hardly any clothes at all.”

She looked up at me from where she sat at the very edge of her gold-and-gray-brocade armchair, long fingers perched on the hand-knitted doilies that covered the almost half-century of wear. I was wearing a crumpled men's black button-down, the sleeves chopped short and layers of flea-market silver chains tucked under the collar like a tie, and the combat boots La Canaria and I found after months of digging in the trash. I hadn't let my abuela touch my jeans in weeks, and they were stiff with stains.

“Good,” she said, and turned back to the television. “You stay serious.” She'd supported my going to university, though when I'd started, her butcher said that only women who weren't going to be mothers went to university and women who weren't going to be mothers were going to be whores.

A glittering new kitchen appeared on the television screen, occupied by a housewife, one of those golden Spanish pillars, obedient and always pregnant, waxing her floors with orgasmic joy.

“Pathetic,” my abuela said. She rapped out a counter-beat to the jingle on the armchair. Above the television was an altar with photos of my parents and saints. In a closed compartment under the altar, in a cupboard that blended with the wall, was my abuela's collection of novels, poetry, and history books from before the war. I never saw her open the compartment, but whenever I checked on it, each book was carefully dusted. The whole apartment was an altar to the dead, the disappeared, the lost, the gone. Nestled next to the faded photos of my parents was a new addition—a picture of me and my brother as kids.

“What's that doing there?” I said.

She didn't answer me.

I turned off the television, but my abuela didn't shift her eyes. She kept them pinned to the screen, as if scrutinizing the black glass and flecks of static for their weak moral fiber.

“What's that picture doing up there?”

Her lips were moving in prayer. The slow, precise shapes I knew so well, a track worn painfully over her false teeth. I kissed the top of her head where she'd gathered her soft white hair into a bun. She did her hair herself, kept it perfectly in place without lacquer. It smelled of baby powder and chamomile, a preserved scent, closed but clean.

“Study hard,
mija,
” I heard her call as I left the apartment.

* * *

The university library was one of the oldest in Europe. It was empty except for a few nerds who still cared. My last chance to make up for a semester of not studying, but I just wandered the stacks, like I had before I was a student. I would walk through the library, trace with my fingers the worn stone seats of the ancient students, all men, all my size or smaller. See the ­medieval monks hunched over their books, the scribes copying
the holy word, their industry fueled by devotion to the Savior, their devotion unshaken by doubt. Don't look too closely at what the scribes are actually studying—algebra from the Arabic, theology from the Talmud—ink out this act of translating. See them instead writing a new language made by a lisping king, its structures as narrow as the mind that sculpted it. There must have been pages that weren't burned, words not blotted out of recognition. I had searched for them. My murdered poets drew from deep wells, even if they were presently hidden from me. They spoke the same words as the monks, as the conquista­dores, as our dictator general, but coaxed a language anew from the charred bones they'd been tossed. I had taken comfort that we had been lying for millennia, erasing whole races of writers, executing texts with aplomb. It wasn't new. And someone had always been pressing hidden words from quill to parchment backed by stone. Whispering them into someone's ear. Even if the parchment was burned and the hand chopped off and thrown into the same fire, the stone remained. Only there were the words legible.

Years ago, I'd decided to stay in the old library, chose philology over English for my major, because I thought there, among these old books, something must have slipped by. Some words that, despite their sedition, were too historically important to erase or too clever for the censors to detect. A couple of writers had done it right after the war. Their books were complicated, dense. The
fachas
never saw the crossbow pointed at their throats. You make a child hungry by denying her food. You turn hunger to anger when you rip pages from her schoolbooks. But I didn't find what I was looking for. In the bar underneath the philology library, the students didn't quote from the old books with their crumbling bindings. Instead, they growled and twitched in their seats, casting about for new words. Words
shaped like handmade bombs and Molotov cocktails. Words that weren't words at all. Because there was nothing we could say that didn't have Indian, Moor, Republican blood dripping off it. Our tongue the tongue of murderers. The general didn't come from nowhere.

The bar underneath the library was empty. A few display plates sat next to the ham, but there was no bartender to swipe away the flies from the tortilla, and a hard skin had developed on the
membrillo.
The door that led to the print shop was locked and a heavy wooden bench pushed in front of it. Maybe everyone was in the plaza.

I smoked a cigarette under the tower and waited, but the plaza was empty, too. The huge black hands of the clock twitching slowly. Sometimes it looked like the clock was going backward, if you caught it right when the hour changed. The hands hovered for a moment, unable to decide whether to progress or regress. A man in a rumpled jacket, his hat pulled over his eyes, leaned against a stone pillar on the opposite side of the plaza. He was staring right at me. I stomped out my cigarette and hustled over to El Chico. There Grito and La Canaria were, sitting at the middle table, slugging big bottles of beer. They cheered when I walked in.

“Mosca! You found us!” La Canaria yelled. “We were hiding from you!”

“
Hijos de putas,
” I mumbled, and went up to the bar without kissing them hello. “I was standing at the clock for an hour. Why weren't you there?”

They looked at each other and then up at me. We didn't mention last night.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Grito said, sliding up beside me. He was wearing his white T-shirt with the anarchy “A” drawn on it, the pits yellow from sweat. His arms were shaking a little
and covered in bruises, either from fucking La Canaria or from last night. I didn't care.

“It's the least you can do,” I said. Grito ordered us two pitchers to share because somehow La Canaria had finished both of their bottles in the time it took him to walk up to the bar. Under the table I saw his bag, full of books again. Maybe he'd had the chance to study earlier.

“I need to piss,” La Canaria said before I could sit down. She grabbed my arm, blowing kisses to Grito when we squeezed by him. The bar was full of punks and their dogs. Greasy paper napkins and layers of sticky sawdust covered the floor. Newspaper blotted out the windows. La Canaria kicked the dogs we passed but moved by too fast for anyone to notice that she was the one who'd done it. The dogs strained at their rope and chain-link leashes, blaming their owners, blaming the other dogs.

In the bathroom, La Canaria jumped up on the sink, her back to the mirror. “You do me and I'll do you.” She handed me a stick of black eyeliner. I leaned in close to her face and layered more makeup beneath her lashes and in thick lines on her eyelids. She turned to the mirror to see how I'd done and smudged the black with her thumb. It looked like she'd gone to bed without washing her face. “Nice. Your turn.” La Canaria wrapped her legs around my torso, bringing me in close to her body. I could feel the zipper of her jeans pressed against my own.

“I don't want any,” I told her.

“You never have enough on.”

I could smell Grito on her, his acrid communion-wine cologne, his hash cigarettes, the powdery baby scent of the detergent his abuela used to clean his sheets. I could feel how those sheets used to press down on me. The sound of the novice Carmelites chanting in the abbey across the street. The sense
of suffocating when the air under the sheets grew hot from our breath.

“That's enough,” I said to La Canaria, trying to squirm away from her. She had me locked between her legs. She wrapped a thick arm around my neck and twisted my ear so I wouldn't move.

“I'm trying to make you look good, Mosquita.”

A roll of skin escaped from underneath her black tank top. I could see ridges of flesh between her pits and her push-up bra, soft spaces prickled with three-day-old black hairs. Grito teased her about being chubby, but we all knew he loved it. Her skin was darker than the rest of ours. Not dark enough to articulate what it meant but dark enough to notice.

Somebody pounded on the bathroom door.

“Oh, Mosca,
chica
!” La Canaria cried out. “Right there, that's how I like it!”

I pinched her right where I guessed her nipple was, and though I got mostly bra, she was surprised enough to let me go. Grito was hanging outside when I opened the door, smirking. I pushed by him and he went into the bathroom. He scraped the trash can across the floor to keep the door shut.

There were only a couple of people I knew in the bar that I could talk to. I mean, I knew everybody, but I didn't want to talk to everybody. Stupid Marco was there, his neck still bruised from his attempted suicide by shoelace, and he was laughing because some girl was sitting on his lap, kissing the purple splotches. I grabbed one of the pitchers Grito had bought and sat down by them. The girl poured herself a drink from it, as did everybody else at the table.

“See this?” Marco asked, fingering his neck. I didn't know what made him decide to stop hiding the bruises and show them off, except maybe he'd run out of turtlenecks.

“Everybody sees it, Marco,” I said. “And everybody wishes you'd done it with your abuelita's pantyhose, like you were planning, so it worked.” I heard his scores weren't even that bad.

“You're just jealous, Mosca,” the girl on his lap said. Some girl who hung around him sometimes, I could never remember her name, but I was sick of Marco grinning at me because of her. I threw my drink in her face. She got up, her white shirt soaked through. Instead of hitting me herself, she pushed Marco in front of her.

“I'm not going to fight Mosca,” Marco said, putting me in a headlock. “I love her too fucking much.” He started messing up my hair, and his forearm grazed my breast.

“Don't touch me!” I said.

His hands flew up in the air. “I'm sorry, Mosca. I really didn't mean to.”

“If this bar weren't so full of wimps, I'd be happy,” I said.

The girl walked over to the bathroom to clean up. She opened the door and faked a scream when she saw La Canaria and Grito in there.

“I heard if La Canaria fails, she's getting sent back to the Islands,” Samo, who didn't really care that he'd been fired, said from a couple tables over.

“Mosca would love that, wouldn't you?” Marco sat back down and folded his arms tightly around his torso. “Have Grito all to yourself again?”

“They can get married and spend their honeymoon picking sugarcane for all I care,” I said. I turned to Marco. “Buy me another beer.”

He jumped up, which made me feel good. That girl was still standing by the bathroom door, shivering from the drink I'd thrown on her.

When La Canaria and Grito got back, they stank of salt and
plastic. Everyone howled at them and slapped Grito on the shoulder. La Canaria shouted and slammed her head up and down in the air to the music. She pretended she'd tripped over a dog and stuffed her tits in Marco's face. Marco high-fived Grito once La Canaria stood up and let him breathe again.

At Samo's table they were talking about the Madrid protests.

“Those fuckers don't stop,” Samo said. “And I don't mean just marching or breaking shit, like here. I mean they are planning for armed resistance.”