The Sleeping World (4 page)

“
Joder,
I'm freezing,” Grito said. “Let's find somewhere dry to make a fire.”

We found a tiny circle of sand dug into the hill either by sheep or shepherds, and set down our backpacks. Grito and Marco walked back to the pines to try to find some wood to burn. We could see them in the distance, Grito hanging on a thin branch, trying to break it off.

“
Qué idiota,
” La Canaria said.

They came back with sappy branches and a bunch of pinecones. We emptied the bags of wine and soda and used the receipts to start a smoky fire. Then we drank the wine to keep warm. La Canaria howled at the fire. Grito tried to get his hand up her shirt, but she swatted it away. Marco sat kind of close to me. He was still trying to figure out what to do next. I mean, he knew what he wanted to do, he wanted to touch me, he'd wanted to for years, but he couldn't. First Alexis was stopping him, then—then it was still Alexis. How to live with that want and do nothing. Part of me loved watching it run him ragged.

“Leave us alone,” La Canaria said to them. “Mosca and I need some girl time.” She leaned against my shoulder and soon fell asleep.

The few lights of the towns and shepherds' houses on the hills flickered like the piles of gold left on the shores of the river in Casasrojas. Saints' medallions, a spread-open wallet, sometimes a broken watch or a torn chain; the piles were never touched by anyone but the police. The money you could get from the pawnshop wasn't worth it. When the medallions and wallets were found, the person they belonged to could be ­identified and the family would know who had killed them. The secret police all killed the same way. Left the same mark. The body gone but the victim's saint medallion and wallet in the sand. They left the medallions because the people they took weren't human anymore. They didn't have names. They didn't have saints. God no longer knew them or never did.

I remembered standing with Alexis on the broken railway bridge when we were kids. Sticking our feet into the lumps of sand and spiky grass growing through the old railroad ties, daring each other to go farther out on the bridge, our hands red from the rusted rails we'd climbed to get there. We were young when we first saw the piles catch the sun on the sand. Ten of them all in a row. We jumped off the bridge to see what they were, Alexis running before me. A man stepped out of the tall grass and placed his hand on Alexis's shoulder. The man was smiling. I felt guilty—I'd seen the man just before he touched Alexis, and I hadn't said anything. Hadn't stopped him before he reached Alexis. The man was probably just walking home and saw some kids playing where they shouldn't be, but he scared me. He looked perfectly harmless.

“Stay away from here” was all he said. “This isn't for you.”

As soon as the man stepped out of the grass, I realized what the piles were. I knew they weren't for us. It didn't need repeating. He stepped out of the grass, and I remembered when Mamá and Papá dropped us off at our abuela's and didn't come back.
The month of waiting that ended not with our parents walking through Abuela's door but with two policemen politely knocking. They handed Abuela my father's worn leather wallet and my mother's necklace—a gold medallion for St. Julia of Mérida and a small fist carved from
azabache.
My abuela closed her hand around the necklace and wallet. I never saw them again.

I didn't know how long it took Alexis to figure out what the piles meant. Whether he remembered the police coming to the door with our mother's necklace. How long it took him to connect our parents not coming back to the knock on the door, to the others who didn't come back, to the warnings in gold on the sand. I tried to keep him away from the piles, but if I lost him in a game of chase, I would find him there, crouched in the sand. Don't touch them, I'd say, and he wouldn't, he was still too afraid, but he stepped closer, the older he got. They were pulling him in and I couldn't stop it.

* * *

When I woke up a few hours later, the moon was bright above us, and La Canaria had wrapped herself around me so tight I could hardly breathe. Marco lay with his back against me, close enough that I could feel his heat. His jean jacket was pulled over his thick dark curls. Grito was by the fire, crouched near the dead coals and shivering.

“What are you doing, Grito?” I whispered, not wanting to wake La Canaria or Marco.

“I'm trying to get this fire going again.”

“Leave it and go to sleep,” I told him.

“I can't sleep. I'm too cold.” He poked a stick at the coals and blew on them. They started glowing.

“Where'd you get that?” I asked, pointing to a pile of neatly chopped wood by his feet.

“I found it by an empty shepherd's shack over there.”

He started throwing the wood into the fire. It was getting bigger. He looked unfamiliar, a weird elf backlit by the moon, his ponytail bouncing in the wind. He wouldn't turn toward me, and I could see only the outline of his face, but I knew what emotions it held.

“We're not going back in time for our exams, are we?” I said.

“
Joder,
Mosca. Did you think we were gonna make it back in time?”

“No.”

He was surprised at that and laughed. “Me, neither,” he said. “You'll have to tell your abuela you'll be late.” He'd seen me then or knew that I had to tell her what I was up to. He refused to call his abuela. Like mine, she was his only family member left, but all that weight focused on him wasn't enough to make him tell her where he was going. He wanted to be like a scream, alone and jutting out, ungraspable. That's why his nickname stuck.

Alexis would always call. Whether he was gone a night or three or a whole week, the phone in the hall would rattle—the only time it ever did. He wouldn't tell me over the phone what he was doing. He'd return, worn and jittering, his hands swollen, a new grin smacked over the face he'd had when he left. And he'd say just enough that I could piece together the rest. He'd met a group of militants who were resisting the general's regime. He was gaining their trust. Small jobs, nothing dangerous, Mosquita. Just finding a few names, he said, a few locations. I scanned the papers, trying to link his clues to the codes hidden in the articles, but they never said anything. All I had were the few words he gave me, and he muttered them so carelessly, I wanted to hit him. Because whatever he was doing, it wasn't nothing, and it wasn't safe. People never came
back home for less. He hinted that he'd crossed the border into France—hitchhiked through the mountains without a visa—and bragged that he'd seen the famous woman with a painted half-smile. He wasn't impressed. Not half as mysterious as you. Not a dying firefly to my girl.

Grito turned to me. His face was lit up in pieces by the flames. “Why'd you come along, anyway?” he said. “You can't stand Marco.”

I pressed my hands into the scorched grass around the fire. Whether Alexis had ever gotten to Paris, I didn't know, but I'd added his words to the ballast sentences that sustained me. He left. He came back. He can leave. I can leave. I listed the cities he said he'd been—Madrid, Granada, San Sebastián, Barcelona, Paris, even. Their order was confused, but their names made a map of lights in my mind. A constellation leading not back but far. Each a whole world I'd never been, swallowing him up and spewing him back, crustaceans in his pocket and seaweed in his hair, on the shores of our prison town. I considered the cities he talked about not destinations but destructions. A chosen wreckage. Different only in that way from the one handed us.

The sound of sap popping woke La Canaria. Her makeup was smudged all over her face. She'd left a black pool of it on my shoulder. “
Coño,
Grito,” she whispered groggily. “That's a really good fire.”

She nudged Marco, who shot up in the air as if he'd been bitten. Grito didn't say anything; he just kept throwing logs on the blaze. I stood and did the same. The embers flew at our faces each time we threw more wood in. When we'd used all the wood Grito had carried, we stumbled in the dark to the shack and brought more over.

The heat batted our faces, drying our mouths, pulling our skin tight across our noses. I don't know who did it first. If it was
Grito who refused to say a word, La Canaria who kept running around the fire and threatening to jump in, or if it was me. We had climbed the cars together in Casasrojas. No one knew who had broken the first store window or who had tilted his head in such a way to give permission. Grito had hit the police officer with the crowbar, but who had made his lips bleed, who had broken his ribs. That wasn't the point. There were no government cars or police officers to wreck on the hillside in the dark. There were only our books and our clothes and our bodies. Our books first into the fire, a few pages, a corner of the binding to start. Our shirts next. Grito's glowing for a second like a moth before it burst like a moth. The flames high from the burning paper. My backpack and then La ­Canaria's. Marco stripped off his jacket and shirt, threw them in. La Canaria guzzled the last of the wine and tossed in the empty soda bottles and wine boxes. The wax and nylon made the fire shoot neon. We coughed at the smoke but kept breathing it in, hard and deep. We didn't speak. Our words were clear. I dare you. I dare you to retreat and attack in one moment. To make that one movement. Our jeans and our combat boots. Threw them in and stood with our toes digging into the cold sand. Staring ahead, watching the fire spark red and green and purple into the sky. I dare you to wreck it all. I dare you. La Canaria wrapped her arm around my stomach, and I could feel her sticky flesh press against mine. Marco edged in next to us. This time I relaxed into him. I waited until Grito stepped close to me. I took his hand. Felt that pocket of damp air between our palms shape and disappear.

Three

I'd known Grito the longest. He lived in the same apartment building as Alexis, my abuela, and me on Calle Grillo. I'd see him through the elevator gates when we were kids, holding on to his mother's skirt, coming back from the market. I'd press the close button so they couldn't get in and watch him disappear between the floors, only his brown hair and white hand on his mother's black skirt visible. Alexis would laugh, even though he wasn't ever mean to kids because they were skinny and still hanging on to their mothers. He was just following me. And I was mad that Grito still had a mother, though she died soon after, giving birth to what would have been his sister.

The first time Grito and I fucked, we were seventeen. He brought a black-market copy of
Sticky Fingers
with the songs that had been censored off the Spanish version and put it on the record player in my room. My abuela had saved up to buy the record player so I could listen to English lessons on it. She wanted me to learn English because it would open doors—she must have read that in one of her magazines. She was in the apartment, but she was watching her telenovela, and it only took a minute. Grito was on top of me with his shirt still on, and I reached underneath the collar to feel his sticky skin—a fine layer of pimples beneath
downy hair refusing to turn thick and black. He didn't say anything when he came, softly above me, just put his slightly wet cheek on my chest when it was over. He left me the record and said he'd see me in English.

That spring, we read bootleg copies of our favorite murdered poet's books in whispers over the English-language records and wrote the best lines on each other's limbs to remember them. He wrote Lorca's words about the curve of a scream in the mountains on the inside of my right thigh, and that was the first time I called him Grito. I didn't know if he remembered, because we didn't read that poetry anymore. He told me he lent the book to somebody and that they lost it, but he wouldn't tell me who.

* * *

At dawn we rose from the grass but couldn't feel the cold. Our bodies were somewhere else. We started moving once we could see, keeping close, the dew between our toes. Grito and Marco walked ahead of La Canaria and me, their white asses glowing slightly in the dawn. The cottage where Grito had found the firewood was only a hill away. He stopped before the shuttered window and plunged his hand into the wet, soft planks. Climbed inside the hole he'd made.

“There's a key on the door frame,
idiota,
” La Canaria said when he opened the door. Blood dripped down his arm, and bits of wood and lichen stuck to his wet skin.

“There's nothing in here,” Grito said.

“
Pendejo,
” I said.

When my abuelo was young, he had sheep in La Mancha, and he always kept clothes in his shepherd's cottage if he came in from the rain and didn't want to freeze to death. I looked around the cottage and found it—an old army chest made of cardboard.

“What, have you done this before?” Marco asked, still standing in the doorway like a stupid stray cat who thinks someone's going to beg it to come in and eat from their hand. Inside the chest were army blankets, a sleeping bag, a pair of worn green trousers, and a torn wool sweater.

I tossed the clothes on the cot. “Put these on, Grito,” I said. “Go get us some clothes.”

“How do you know I won't leave you here?” he asked, grinning.

La Canaria walked up behind him, wrapped herself around his wet back, her breasts pressed against the grass caked to his skin.

“You better come back for us,
cielo,
” she whispered into his ear. “Because if you don't, I swear by the Virgin and my dead abuela, I'll find you and chop off your balls. And Mosca will eat your dick. I mean cut up, chew, and swallow.” She pushed him toward me and I handed him the clothes, letting my fingers linger on his.

“Don't think we won't,
cielo,
” I said.

Marco was turned away from us, toward the window. He kept touching the bruise around his neck and looking at his fingers, as if the mark were paint that could rub off. The pants I'd handed Grito were too small and bunched up around his crotch. He had to stoop to walk. The sweater's sleeves were short, too, and they showed where the shutter had torn up his arm.

We wrapped ourselves in the blankets and walked back to the fire with him. It was only embers. We used the remainders of our boots and the green branches that hadn't burned to poke through it. Our coins had burned through the cloth and sat glowing on the coals. Marco scorched his hand trying to pick them up. Our clothes were destroyed. I took a piece of what had been La Canaria's shirt, picked up the coins, and dumped them in the wet grass. The dew sizzled and pulsed around them.

La Canaria kept off to the side, crouched down, her blanket folded around her. I knew she'd found what she was looking for, what only she and I knew existed. La Canaria always made a big show about not paying for anything. Not just around Grito—with anybody. I had to buy her stuff all the time. But I knew she carried a small cricket box everywhere she went. It was brass with tiny triangles stamped through the metal and had a miniature handle on top like a suitcase. Fit in the palm of her hand. Not much money in it but more than you would have thought she'd have. I stepped over to her. She was looking at Grito and Marco, trying to count the hot coins. She slipped two bills out from under her blanket, and I pretended to have found them in the bottom of my ruined backpack.

“Nothing fancy.” I handed the bills to Grito. “No fucking around.”

He bobbed down the mountain, the old clothes swirling around him. Marco kicked around the embers but couldn't find anything else. He ran back to the cottage to get warm.

* * *

Marco had been Alexis's closest friend. When they started hanging out, it made me feel better. Marco was kind of a geek, like me—he acted tough but no one believed it. I liked Alexis hanging out with him instead of the runaways who slept on the street, or people like Felipe, whose names I could hardly remember, they disappeared so often.

My abuela had managed to keep her apartment through the years, a lucky chance here and there, the money from the sale of my abuelo's farm placed in the right hands. Alexis would bring Marco over, and they'd sit in the kitchen and drink. Everyone else I knew lived in boardinghouses and shared a kitchen with five other families—you didn't exactly invite anyone over. That
was what the parks were for, the tiny cafés where you didn't have to buy anything, the tracks of cement and stone in between buildings always covered by furtive knees, hands flicking cigarettes and cupping a mouth to say the same hidden thing. I didn't know where Marco lived, but he always brought a nice bottle of brandy, and then they'd split the bottle. My abuela would hum loudly the whole time because she didn't allow liquor in her house. But she'd stopped trying to say no to Alexis. My abuelo had been the only person who could do that. Perhaps my father would have been able to, but he never had the chance.

Marco was the only friend Alexis brought home, though he had many. For a while, Marco was in the kitchen every night, and I ignored him then like I did the table's chipped legs, different from how I ignored him after Alexis disappeared.

The night he first appeared in our kitchen, I'd just come home from trying to study for my university entrance exams in the bar under the philology library. I sat close by the door to the hidden print shop because I liked the sound of the machines, the whir of paper, the idea of the same secret stories and photos printed over and over, carpeting the room. It was the distraction necessary to exist in a world where my words were not my own. It worked for a time, anyway. I'd spent most of the afternoon crouched on one of the bar's leather seats. I tipped back against the damp wall, trying not to spill my
caña,
trying not to be noticed, eavesdropping on a group of young professors beside me.

“He's going to die,” one of the men said, looking over his shoulder, then making the gesture of combing a perfect part in his hair with the exactitude of slitting someone's throat. When he was alive, no one used el Cabronísimo's name out loud. The gesture to signal who it was you were talking about changed regularly and could be disguised easily as a tic or normal movement. “He has to sometime.”

I couldn't hear what his companions said in response because all I could hear were those reverberating words. The general had been alive all my life, all my parents' brief lives. The only person who knew of a time before him was my abuela. She wouldn't mention it or the war that had brought him to power, just as she wouldn't speak the devil's name.

I drank my flat
caña
and chewed my greasy tortilla. After lightning there is the sky, black as before but jittering. There was me, slightly drunk, tired, not having memorized any of the English vocabulary I'd brought but with the knowledge inside me that the general could die. Someone, a professor, had said it out loud. I smoked all the way home and then bought marzipan from the nuns on the corner of Calle Grillo and La Libertad to hide the scent from my abuela.

Alexis's voice came out of the kitchen when I turned the lock to our apartment. He was in a good mood, laughing, and I could hear my abuela humming because of it. She always moved softly across our floors, attuned to Alexis, each of her gray hairs a taut wire listening.

Entering the kitchen, I saw Marco first. Like all the kitchens in the apartments I'd been in, ours was small, made for one woman to move in and maybe sit down for a second to take her espresso while the rice finished. But Alexis and I had always stayed in the kitchen. We needed to feel that sticky air filled with oil fried, poured into a jar that once held asparagus, and fried again. Being in that kitchen always felt like we were in that jar. Our words and movements the burnt flecks of potatoes and skirt steak that passed through the sieve, suspended, immobile, but contained in a way that felt safe. The kitchen was where we had last seen Mamá. She kissed us and handed us a box of crackers and said she'd be back soon. At least, I wanted to believe I remembered the last thing she said and not just standing waiting for her.

Alexis's back was to me, as I would never put my back to his. He was a year and a half younger than me but in the past few months he'd put on weight. He always used to thump me on the shoulder when he came in, but it had started to hurt. Or he'd shoot a rubber band at the back of my neck when I was reading, and I'd scream, Abuela rushing in because she thought one of us had been burned. He didn't do it to hurt me, just to say he was there, that he knew I was there. It was the only way he could. Once I grew breasts, he could barely kiss my cheek. Even though I knew what his actions meant, they still scared me. He wasn't always in control. To study, I sat at the far side of the kitchen table, where I could see him coming in. After he disappeared, I would sit there because if I didn't, I might confuse my heartbeat with his steps down the hall and his breath with my own.

Marco looked up at me.

“
Buenas,
” I said to Alexis, and leaned down to kiss him, ignoring his flinch when our cheeks touched. He grabbed my long braid, slung over my shoulder like a kid's, and twisted it around his hand so I couldn't stand up.

“I told you not to start smoking,” Alexis said.

I stayed still until he let go of my braid. Even a year ago I would have bitten his hand, but I knew where that would get me.

“I've been studying,” I said, and went to cut some bread and cheese on the counter.

“My sister's a geek,” he said to Marco. “And it better stay that way. Don't hang out in that shithole under the library.”

It was impossible to lie to him. Marco still hadn't spoken. He knew he couldn't. Alexis was skinnier than most of his friends, but they all listened to him. He could destroy you in one sentence, and Marco wasn't really cool enough to be hanging
around him anyway. Every neutral word Alexis said to Marco was a gift.

“Do you know Marco?” Alexis said.

“Hey.” I bent over and kissed Marco's cheek.

“Hey,” he said quietly, not looking at me.

“He has a crush on you,” Alexis said.

“
Carajo,
” Marco whispered.

“Yeah, he thinks you're really cute. Can't stop talking about you.” Alexis ripped off a tiny piece of his bread and flicked it at Marco. “But I told him you're dating that
comemierda
Grito.”

“What's wrong with Grito?” I said.

“Besides that he's dating my sister?” He flicked a bread crumb at me. “Anyway, Marco knows I'll kill him if he touches you.”

Alexis was smiling, teasing Marco, but he also meant it completely.

“You're such a
pendejo,
” I told Alexis, and walked out of the kitchen.

Down the hall, I could hear them goading each other. Then popping a wine bottle, then laughing. My abuela turned up the volume of the TV, pretending she could hear nothing through our cardboard walls.

* * *

Through the crack Grito had made in the shutters, I could see the rainclouds easing over the mountains. I walked behind La Canaria where she stood watching the clouds crest slow and shy over the rocks. The sun wasn't fully up yet, and we were shivering in the army blankets.

La Canaria turned to me and touched my hair. “We should have sent Grito for a comb, at least,” she said.

“Or a mirror,” Marco said from the other side of the room.
A big brass key hung on a shoelace around his neck, the bits polished where they rubbed against his skin.

“Shut up,” La Canaria whispered.

I faced out at the splintered wood and air turning to water. Marco looked the worst; at least he looked worse than I felt. I'd been needing less and less sleep, eating less, enjoying the feel of my bones brittle beneath my skin. La Canaria ran only on food. The closest I'd seen her to tired was being slightly quiet. But Marco slept like a British tourist. Eight hours and it had to be regular. His face cast off a certain light that made me cold, want coffee. Made waiting seem long and the room small. I didn't like waiting. It was impossible not to compare it to other times.