The Sleeping World (5 page)

* * *

When Alexis had been gone for three days without calling, my abuela stopped pretending to do anything but wait.

She sat by the television and kept turning it on and off. We had this black-and-white thing she'd won in a church auction that took a long time to turn back on. It would buzz for a few moments and burp white static until the sobbing faces of the telenovela would fade slowly into view. When she thought she'd heard something, she would get up and turn it off, the faces collapsing into a white star that flashed and disappeared. She'd jump up at nothing and then not hear an actual knock on the door. I sat by the television so she wouldn't have to get up. I turned it off when she told me to. It was summer, I hadn't been able to find a job, and I had nothing to do but sit with her and wait. Either that or sit in my room not doing my summer reading and pretending I wasn't doing exactly what she was doing.

Marco kept coming by with a bottle of brandy to see if Alexis was there. I didn't want Marco to know we were worried. I said I didn't know where Alexis was. I didn't say he hadn't called.

One night Marco came by with nothing in his hands and his face wrung out. I hadn't seen or heard from Alexis in six days. I lied to Marco and said Alexis was inside sleeping and maybe Marco should call before coming over to someone's house late at night. Marco wanted to believe me. His body sank in the doorway. He'd been holding it tight and forgotten how much that hurt. But he came the next night and I told him the same thing. That time his body didn't sink; it just stayed how it was.

In the doorway, he tried to look around me. He was scared and that made me scared.

“Do you know what happened?” he said. “What did he tell you?”

“She's in there,” I said.

The credits song for one of Abuela's shows blared behind me. I didn't want to talk about where Alexis could be or what part we'd played in it. If we'd be next to not come home. I knew if my abuela saw Marco, she'd want to ask him about Alexis.

“Do you know if he still has it?” he said.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

I closed the door in his face. I didn't want him in my house again.

Even though I ignored him, Marco kept hanging around me. He'd always be in the background, even if I was with a crowd he hated. He'd follow me home from the bars late at night. He said he wanted to make sure I made it there safe. One night I turned around in the doorway of my abuela's apartment building and waited until he was standing right in front of me. I eased close to him. I could smell his breath on me. I slid my hand under his shirt and he closed his eyes.

“I just want to protect you,” he said.

That was the last thing I wanted. I wanted to be wrecked.
I deserved it after what I did. My hand under Marco's shirt, I opened my penknife. Waited until he felt the blade graze his skin. I didn't press down hard, but it was unmistakable. I hated Marco for every second he'd spent with Alexis. Every laugh and trust they'd shared that I hadn't been a part of. I turned around and opened the door. Left him standing there with his shirt up, searching for blood. I never caught him following me again, but I knew he still did.

* * *

Inside the shepherd's cottage, the rain was all around us. I could tell La Canaria wanted to go out, wanted to get wet and dive in. I could see her skin twitching the way it would before a touch or a cigarette. Suddenly, I needed to distract her and keep her dry as long as possible. But I didn't want to mention looking for food in the shack if there wasn't any to find.

Before anyone else woke up, I'd sat in the grass, numb and looking for the sun. Out on the mountain ridge where the clouds pinked, I could see the world opened by our exams. The safe government jobs, the chance to use my English and collect a modest salary each month until someone married me. This if I were very lucky. Most people I knew, even those with degrees, were unemployed. I'd have to be grateful for anything I got, a woman and with no ties to the state. If I got it—that jewel job tucked deep in a municipal building—the letterhead would no longer bear el Cabronísimo's name, but the ink would smell the same and the work would be the same. I would be couched inside the body of someone making the same movements, filling out the same forms, as they had done for decades in his honor. When I found an old pen underneath the radiator, would I wonder what it had signed away; would I pause before I added my teeth marks to the indentations in the blue plastic,
the marks of someone who didn't have to know how to aim to carry out death sentences?

I watched, waiting for the sun to come up, but there were only dissipating clouds and me, a fast-retreating star pulling back into darkness.

Marco leaned over a pile of kindling in the fireplace. “If Grito comes back soon,” he said, “we'll probably be able to catch a train and be back in time for our exams.”

“We won't be back in time,” I said, even though I'd been thinking the same thing. We'd all been trying to gauge the time by the height of the sun or guess the frequency of trains back from where we were.

I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. I was exhausted. But instead of darkness behind my eyelids, I saw a constellation. A dim handful of city names flickering slowly into focus. The cities Alexis would call from. Solid as bricks stacking, they formed in the back of my throat. Madrid, Granada, San Sebastián, Barcelona, Paris. I tried to swallow, but there they stayed.

“We're not going back,” I said.

“You weren't going to take the exams, were you?” Marco said.

I shook my head. I'd known all along I couldn't sit through them. I just couldn't admit it until that moment. I had my reasons for not taking those final exams, and I didn't need to explain them to Marco. He knew better than anyone.

We wouldn't mention it again. Even when Grito returned, he would be able to sense what I'd done with those words. We'd all been thinking them—maybe not Marco, he was always watching me too carefully to notice anything else—but we hadn't said them out loud.

The cathedral in Casasrojas: its open halls, stained glass windows smudged with dirt and light, pigeons passing through
streaks of sun. The view of the cathedral's facade and the new students trying to find the good-luck frog hidden among the skulls carved into the yellow stone. The passageways behind the walls that led to the unimportant towers, the ones without gargoyles and panoramic views of the city. Grito and I used to spend hours there, in between the walls, bent over each other, the scent of incense filtering through the cracked oak doors. We climbed curved stone staircases that led to narrow doors and opened to keyholes of gray sky. The stairs were covered in dust, layers of forgotten years, walls wet from sweet-smelling mold. The cathedral shifted the first time we opened one of those forgotten doors. It didn't look the same afterward.

“
Vale.
” La Canaria nodded.

There had never been any power in what I said, what I prayed at night—even as a kid, I could feel the weakness—but with those words, I lucked out. It was luck, nothing of mine. The final whirring in a lock I didn't know I had, and I'd opened up to a new raw space. A field made of strange, wet mud, low clouds on the horizon. The words pushed the door wide and dared us to step through. We did without even knowing it. The new space was real and nothing else. That was where we stood.

La Canaria started looking through the old shack. There were the cot with the army trunk under it and a table made of wooden wine boxes covered in a torn oilcloth. She took off the cloth and started going through the boxes.

“You're not going to steal anything else, are you?” I said.

She didn't answer, but she turned away from me, her hands searching. She kept opening boxes. When she turned back, she held a handful of bullets and the raw wool they'd been packed in. She dropped the bullets one by one from her hand onto the floor, letting them fall like water. They bounced in the dust and rolled across the floor until they hit the walls or a crack in
the floorboards too large to pass over. Closing her finger over the last bullet, she walked across the room and reached for my hand. Pressed the bullet into my palm. “Just for you,” she said.

She met my eyes and I didn't look away. It was Alexis who'd first brought her to El Chico, before the newspapers went up on the windows, and I could see them walking together, his arm wrapped around her. We'd seen her around, smoking under the juniper trees on campus and at bars. Alexis was crazy about her, and she seemed to care about him, too, though she didn't stop flirting with anyone who talked to her. They'd fight and break up, get back together again, fight again. When they were together, they ignored everyone else, and we would just stand and watch them, hypnotized by the way they'd hypnotized each other. Hoping to catch a little bit of the light bouncing off them.

The rumor was that she was the daughter of a plantation owner on the Canary Islands out of wedlock. Or she'd been kicked out of school there and sent here. Despite what we called her, some people said she was
dominicana
or from Cuba. The scent of a bribe somewhere, money, a secret, and she played that part up, probably even started it. No one had ever been to her place.

But I saw a bleakness, too. When she wasn't cursing at the bartender for a weak drink or slinging herself into a sweaty crowd, her face in repose looked like it had been recently smacked clean. I thought there must be some good reason she'd left. Her skin drew her to us, that pause where she couldn't quite be placed. She could have just been from the south, but in some lights her skin looked darker. It made us lean in closer. Anything different was to be coveted, anything that showed the lie of the pure world the
fachas
preached. Even if that thing was not a thing at all. Either way, if she was here on the condition of not fucking up, she wasn't holding up her end of the deal.

“We didn't ask Grito for any cigarettes,” Marco said.

“You better start thinking on your feet,” La Canaria said, turning away from me. “Or else we'll drop you like a fist of burnt corn.”

“Whatever that means.” Marco looked over at me, but I didn't share his sneer. I curled my fingers around the bullet.

La Canaria finished going through the boxes, mostly raw wool used to pack objects long since removed. She pulled out a few rusted tools and a small jar of rice. There was only about a handful left, and I saw her finger the grains slowly, then put the jar back underneath the wool.

“Marco,” I said. “Start the fire again.” Just to give him something to do and me something to watch. La Canaria sat down by me. We waited for Grito to come back with our clothes and a way out.

My abuela used to say that no matter how small a house was, its walls would swell to fit those in it. I would lie in bed and imagine her apartment expanding with each new intake and exhale. The shack on the mountain felt aware of us. It sucked in air, but its walls never lifted. The walls drew out our breath and contained it, growing thicker, the air more stale. La Canaria lay on the cot, asleep or staring an escape through the roof. The blanket had fallen down her chest, leaving one breast open to the shack's low ceiling.

I knew Marco was looking at me, but I could still feel him all over me from the night before, and his eyes were vinegar on stripped-off skin. I was being kind to him, though he didn't know it, by not looking at him, not slugging him, letting the light from where his skin had been on mine vibrate and reappear. Just allowing that was very kind.

When Grito finally got back, soaking wet from the rain and with a plastic bag under his arm, we'd been silent for hours.
The sun shone weakly but high in the sky. The clothes must have been an old woman's; they smelled quiet, furious, and of fried
bacalao.
La Canaria and I put on two identical floor-length black polyester skirts. Mine sagged around me, and hers was so tight she couldn't button it at the waist. Then more sweaters, moth-eaten and stale with sweat at the neck, a pair of too-long trousers for Marco, and a few cheap white undershirts.

“It's just until we get back to Casasrojas, then—” Grito stopped.

I was right. He'd read my words in the shack's thin air, read them because they were all that was left to read, our faces blank, our bodies limp to the scrape of someone else's clothes.

There was still time to go back. We could have made ­excuses—bandits, the strikes, a sudden rash of penitence. Days later we could have returned, heads down, lashing our backs with the remnants of our schoolbags, and taken the exams ­individually. Maybe Felipe was mistaken, maybe it had all passed over us and we wouldn't be caught. Of course we were afraid, terrified, of the police, of getting caught. But that wasn't why we didn't go back.

“Casasrojas?” I said. “What have we got there?”

The fire was a dare, and though it had seemed like the summit at the time, it was only a few dusty crags on the shore of what the real dare would become. It had not started when we put on the bandanas. We thought it had ended when we threw our clothes in the fire. But the breaking glass, the policeman, the burning backpacks were all symptoms. We had broken the things around us that we hated and then broken our own things. Finding the ground scorched for miles, we turned to what was left.

The real dare was not to go back, to keep messing up, to step deeper and deeper into the murk. We skidded our eyes over one another's faces, looking out for the weakling. Who's gonna be
the one to turn tail? Not me, we each silently, separately vowed. Me, I'm going for the bottom.

La Canaria spoke from the corner. “I don't have any reason to go back. Do you, Grito?”

“I'm not going back,” Grito said, smiling snidely. “I meant Madrid. Aren't we gonna join the protests?”

Now that he understood where we were, he wanted to be the one to do the daring. All utterances were fair game. Anything we'd said before or threatened to do, we had to make good. There had been no decision and yet there it was, lodged deep. In the fire we'd seen the others' hidden faces and realized they were all the same. That was no comfort. We were unrecognizable in the span of a morning. We didn't trust ourselves.