The Sleeping World (8 page)

“I thought you said they lived near the train station,” Grito said to Marco.

“That's what
he
said,” Marco mumbled back. He kept the backpack tight under his arm. In it was the money he'd taken from his parents' house; he'd bought our tickets with it, and who knew how much more he had. Marco wouldn't speak to Cosme directly, but I could tell he felt under Cosme's power, following him through a strange city in the dark. This shift was new, though they'd known each other all their lives. It reversed something that was as familiar to them as the feel of their own
tongue in their mouth. A foreign limb in a too-small cavity: Neither knew what to do with it.

“Are they your family?” I asked Cosme. “The people we're looking for?”

“No. Just friends. Young people. That's why they're hard to find.”

He made a quick turn, and I glanced back to make sure Marco and Grito followed.

“How long have you known Marco?” Cosme asked me.

“A few years. We went to school together.” I didn't know Cosme and I certainly wasn't going to tell him the truth.

“And he never told you about his home? Or his parents?”

“We don't talk about those things.”

“What do you talk about, then?”

Marco and Grito, a ways behind us, stopped, staring down the street to where the city disappeared into the sparkling water. I couldn't tell if they could hear us or not.

“We talk about music, politics.”

“Nothing personal, then. What are you looking for?”

I'd been scanning corners and the hidden curves of water pipes, looking for a familiar arc of spray paint, not even knowing that I was.

“Nothing,” I said. We kept walking up smaller and smaller streets with no view of the water. The buildings closed in on us. The scent of stale pork and grilled sardines.

“That is what is personal,” I said finally. There was no trace of Alexis's tag that I could locate. Why should there be? And what difference would it make? Gijón wasn't on the list, and what did the list mean, anyway?

“Not your family?” Cosme said. “Who do you live with?”

“My abuela.” It was the first time since I'd called her at the station in Casasrojas that I'd thought of her. Not about the way
she moved after Alexis disappeared but about her in the present, as she must have been at that moment. A life can be built entirely around someone, and then a new life is made without her in it. Her saints, her prayers, and her lace, the jars of old oil stacked neatly by the sink. She opened her black lace fan only when she was angry, in one movement, forcing the flowered cloth to bring her new air. She endured the heat otherwise. I had to forget her; remembering her was remembering what I'd done by leaving. The space I had made was not one for remembering, for staying still, jaw slack with want in the solitude of lifelong grief. It was hurtling ahead, no reason, no sight.

I thought of her smell and her weight on the worn linoleum floors. The farther I moved from Casasrojas, the less I could keep what I wanted hidden from rising up. But I could not picture her. I didn't know if she was angry, fanning herself by the closed shutters or kneeling in prayer in front of the shrine with the old marzipan box filled with a lifetime of funeral cards, her rapidly moving lips almost grazing the rosary beads. In Casas­rojas, her reactions formed in front of me into layers of glass, each stained a different color, piling on one another as I climbed the stairs to our apartment, until they were thick enough to be real and I opened the door to her.

But I could not see her then, walking through a new city with a stranger, though I tried. Maybe I had betrayed her so much that I had killed her, this creature who raised her eyebrows and flared her nostrils every time I moved. But I hadn't killed her. She lived. The movement of her palms unknown to me was much worse. I knew what Grito would say if I called her, and I didn't think I could keep it from him. Anyway, what would I tell her? The list of cities swirled in my throat.

“Where are they?” I said. Cosme stopped walking. The street was empty except for two pigeons. A balcony window opened
above us, and an old woman turned the crank that brought in her laundry. “They were behind us.”

“Maybe they ditched you. They ditched the other girl.”

“Maybe you don't know where you're going.” I stopped looking down the blind alleys and faced Cosme. His eyes were just visible in the flickering light from a streetlamp a block away. “Maybe you lost them on purpose.”

Cosme grinned and stepped closer to me. I had my arms behind my back. I reached until I could feel with my fingertips the damp stone of the building surrounding us. A strip of torn poster plastered on the wall grazed my shoulder.

“And if I did, what would I do now?” he whispered.

I could smell the inside of his mouth and the sweat from the collar of his jacket. “Nothing,” I said.

He stepped in closer. “Why's that?”

“You're not who you're acting like you are.”

“And how would you know?”

I held his gaze. Whatever Marco had done, whatever his family had done for however many centuries, I wasn't a part of it.

“Because I'm the same way,” I said.

Cosme smiled. He stepped away and bit his lips. He'd gotten to taste what he wanted to. “
Mosquita muerta
,” he said and passed. “They're unstoppable, you know.”

“You don't know anyone here, do you?” I asked.

“In school, I read that in the Arctic, mosquito swarms can kill these giant deer they have there, the caribou. Drive them completely crazy just with tiny bites.”

“You were going to drop us here, but they've done it for you.” I started walking again, trying to retrace our steps.

“Marco's a
pendejo
,” Cosme said. “And that other one doesn't seem any better. Why do you all have such stupid names?”

The streetlamps went out, just like in Casasrojas, and the night flickered into a negative of itself, the sky lit instead of the street. I heard shouting down one of the streets and walked toward it, saw Marco's frame at the end of an alley. Cosme stood behind me and I turned to him. “What did Marco do to you?” I said. I knew Cosme was going to disappear down one of these alleys soon.

“Nothing. He hasn't said a word to me for ten years. His father didn't like the little lord speaking to the peasants.” He lit a cigarette and stared up at the rusting gutters. “But they'll lose it all now that el Cabronísimo is dead. Now it's time for the rest of us.”

Grito saw us and waved.

“You think I'm one of you?” I said.

“I can see your whole life, Mosca. Your dingy apartment. The fake roses and jars of pickled meat and photos of el Cabro—”

“My family was Republican.”

“Was. And what happened to them? People like Marco's family killed them?”

I dug my nails into my palms. “The past doesn't matter,” I said.

He knew I was lying. “It's all that matters.” He lit a cigarette. “You can always go back to your family. Real people, not royalty, they will always let you back.”

He turned into an alley and I couldn't see him anymore. But I knew he was wrong. In the dark, I could see Alexis on the shore of the river, running away from me, running in the sand toward the piles, his legs outgrown his shorts, his messy curls that he wouldn't let Abuela cut bouncing. From the way he held his shoulders and pumped his arms, I could tell he was smiling. When he turned from the weight of the man's hand on his shoulder, his mouth still held a bit of that smile, but it was
turning to surprise at this man standing over him. Before even looking at the man, Alexis looked at me. Because I should have shouted a warning that something was coming. It came too fast. I saw it and I didn't do anything.

I rounded the corner without Cosme and didn't bother to give Marco an explanation. Grito shrugged, but Marco ran down a couple of dank alleys and pulled on doors that had been boarded up for years.

“He's gone,
tío,
” Grito said, picking a forearm-long strip of green paint off a rotting door.

Marco turned away from both of us and lunged as if to go after Cosme but instead crashed his forehead into the doorway, landing on the rotting wood and just missing Grito's own skull. I thought he was done, but he brought his head back and slammed it against the damp wall. Again and again. Around us, the night lurched into the sea.

Once Marco stopped, we found a vendor who was just closing his cart and bargained for three sardine sandwiches. The fish was cold but the bread still fresh. I didn't know how much money Marco had, but he wasn't acting like he had a lot of it. He might be protecting it from Grito. I would do the same thing. Not that I feared Grito would steal from me but because I didn't want to give him the chance. We walked toward the harbor, not speaking, just chewing, and licking the paper wrappers before crumbling them and throwing them in the water. They bobbed against the docked fishing boats.

“We could stay in one of those,” Grito said, pointing to the boats, and I nodded. A night watchman passed by and we sat down on the stone steps by the water, hidden in the shadows and the smell of piss. The outlines of the abandoned steel plants fell in contorted shapes on the water. We waited for the man to walk to the far end of the stone wall.

Our hands greasy from the sandwiches, we ducked below the metal gate and climbed down the slick steps to the dock. Marco pointed silently to the watchman sitting on the other end of the dock, enclosed in cigarette smoke. If we stayed quiet and in the shadow, he wouldn't see us. Then we could duck into a boat and sleep until sunrise.

Grito chose a long boat with a high, solid railing. Even if we couldn't get into the cabin, we could sleep on the deck, curled up by the railing, and no one would see. The lights from the city dove and died in the water. They didn't reach the dock. We were in black air surrounded by light, and nothing could touch us.

The boat barely rocked when we climbed into it. All the boats on the dock were low with large decks. A few other men joined the watchman and huddled around one another, making one form, their cigarette smoke rising and blurring the lights behind them.

“They can't hear us,” Grito said.

“They can if you keep talking,” Marco said.

The cabin was locked and none of us wanted to risk breaking a window. The deck was damp. We huddled together against a pile of fishing ropes. No one said La Canaria's name, but we were all wondering if we'd left her to a worse or better fate. No one had said her name since we last saw her. The same as after Alexis disappeared. Abuela and I didn't speak about him, but his name hung over us, a flashbulb that would burst suddenly and fill the air with the smoke of his absence, leaving me immobile in the shattered light. Abuela with her rosaries, her knees pitted from kneeling, sucked all the oxygen from the apartment and the tears from my body. There was no room in her grief for mine. No room for a single breath that was my own.

“Do you think she went to Madrid?” Marco said. “That's where we said we were going.”

Grito shrugged. “I never know where she's going.”

We didn't know how to feel about La Canaria. At least I didn't know how I felt, and I thought Marco didn't, either. I wasn't sure how much Grito could feel. Not just for La Canaria but for anything. In Casasrojas, he never winced at the gypsy children begging or the old men who'd fought in the war and now sat on the park benches, their sleeves hanging empty at the joints. He didn't wince at the smell coming off of them—sulfur and bitter almond—the smell I imagined leaked from the white scars where their arms and legs ended. He'd left me as soon as I wasn't something easy to be around. During the protests, he'd screamed and thrown empty bottles against the cathedral walls, but I hadn't seen him break in any other way for a long time.

I knew that Marco wanted to say that leaving La Canaria, that not searching for her, that not speaking about her, was disloyal, but Grito would have smacked him on the back of the head like a misbehaving acolyte.
Whose side are you on?
Grito would ask.
Want to go back to your mansion and your peasants?

Loyalty was one of el Cabronísimo's words. Loyalty to the Church, loyalty to the Fatherland. Friendship was, too. Friendship was watching your neighbors; it was turning on them for the chance at a higher number in the ration line. We didn't have words to speak about our lives, about how we moved into and around one another. They had been stolen; they were never ours to begin with. We were animals, wordless and scratching.

Alexis's protection was that he was able to keep some of those words. He guarded them deep within or wrestled them, bloody and almost broken, from the very lips of those he hated most. As a kid, he held my or Abuela's hand everywhere he went. We slept in the same bed most nights, curled together
like foxes in a den, safe under thick layers of oak roots and red dirt. Years later, I remembered what he had been. Because the toughness he slipped on, I knew it was an act, a film over each of his movements. I saw the same in La Canaria. Masking something, though with her I never quite grasped what. Which was perhaps why she and Alexis had made so much sense together—even when they fought, it was like watching a drunk punch himself.

Marco's and Grito's breaths landed heavy on my skin, heavier than the damp air coming off the harbor. I could never stand to feel anyone else's breath when I slept except for Alexis's. ­Marco's and Grito's bodies, anxious not to touch each other, were stiff even in sleep. From where I sat, their shoulders, dashed in fragments of light by the moon, created a separate skyline, like the pictures of American cities I'd seen in magazines, paper puppets against the night, casting their own light, containing their own spheres. I couldn't sleep. Too many names hung above me, each letter a flickering bulb that refused to finally die.