The Sleeping World (7 page)

* * *

I traced the slime at the bottom of the pool with my fingers. Marco's and Grito's white legs moved through the cloudy water, interlocked by perspective. My arms pushed the water aside and my legs propelled me forward. I hadn't swum in years, but I remembered quickly. I could stay underwater for a long time.

Four

Out of the heat and the sun where we'd been drinking that fresh wine for hours, the Americans appeared. They were a mirage from one of their dubbed-over movies: blond women in bikinis carry­ing drinks in tall glasses, giggling and moving in a way that was not about getting anywhere faster but because they were aware of being watched. They were trying to activate every cell in their skin. They could feel it working in their movements and in the movements of the eyes behind them. But when they saw us, their movements stopped, all except for the liquid in their glasses, which was moving just as fast as their cells had been; it slung itself forward and fell into the dirt. La Canaria sat up when they stopped, her breasts swinging down and resting to point right at the American women, who stared, caught themselves, and looked away. Marco and Grito, who'd been splashing each other like a couple of twelve-year-old girls, stopped and stared at the American women.

“Who's that?” Grito whispered to Marco.

Marco paused. He knew but didn't want to say, was waiting for the men following the women to round the corner arched by grapevines. We could hear them laughing.

“The Americans,” Marco said.

“I got that much,” Grito said.

“Whoa! I'm sorry!” one of the American men said when he saw La Canaria. “Wait, what?” He was short with a belly and neatly layered hair and tight, bright green swim trunks. He carried a bottle of port.

“Who are they?” one of the women said, the one in the red bikini, backing up slowly to stand beside the man who had just spoken.

“Hey, we're renting this place,” the man started to say to La Canaria. She tilted her head to the side, making her breasts shift, and smiled. “I don't know who you are, but—”

“Jaime,” Marco interrupted him.

“Holy shit,” the man said. “Dude! Marco! I didn't see you there!” He set his bottle of port down behind one of the loose stones and came over to the pool. “I didn't mean to be rude.” He knelt beside the pool and shook Marco's hand. “I just didn't want anyone trespassing, you know.”

“That is fine,” Marco said. “I understand quite well.” His English was strong though formal, and it made his body stiff to use it, his jaw overworking each syllable of the garbled sounds. I hadn't known he could speak English that well. The other men relaxed but stood close to the women, holding their beer cans, all in shorts and burned pink from the sun.

“But what are you doing here?” Jaime asked Marco, slowly letting go of his hand and passing it over his shorts, then through his hair to cover the movement. “I mean, I'm glad to see you, but I thought you weren't—”

“It is true what they say about American manners,” Marco said, his smile tight and straight as a child's drawing.

“Oh, man, I'm sorry,” Jaime said. “You're right, I'm glad to see you. No buts about it.”

“Good!” Marco laughed, though his neck stayed straight. “And I you. Let them try to remove me if they wish.”

Jaime smiled, not knowing whether he should or not. Started to say something, then didn't.

“Are these ladies and gentlemen the other members of your crew?” Marco asked, turning toward the rest of the Americans.

“Yeah, man,” Jaime said, turning behind him. “This is Greg and Howie and their wives, Melanie and Lisa.”

Marco pulled himself out of the pool, shook the men's hands, and kissed each of the women on the cheek, which made them giggle.

“This is Marco's place,” Jaime said to the others. “He's Señor Lara's son.” The men nodded but still looked wary, though Jaime had placed his arm around Marco's shoulders. “I've known Marco forever.”

La Canaria leaned in close to me, and I could feel her wet hair landing on my shoulders, her hot arms brushing mine. “What's going on?” she whispered into my ear. She didn't speak English. I shrugged and swam over to the group. I pulled on Marco's undershirt and it stuck to my wet skin.

Marco introduced us all, and the Americans kept moving their faces in the wrong directions when we kissed hello, grazing our lips with theirs and turning red because they hadn't done it on purpose. They were a group from an American university on an archaeological dig who rented Marco's villa for the summers.

“But who are they?” La Canaria asked me after we were all sitting down by the pool. Jaime had opened the bottle of port—“I hope that's okay?” he asked, and Marco nodded with the smile of a dying abuelo giving a blessing to his favorite grandson. La Canaria kept asking me instead of Marco or Grito, and I realized she didn't want them to know she couldn't understand the conversation.

“Some Americans,” I told her, which she probably already knew.

One of the men, Greg or Howie, kept tugging at his wife, Melanie's or Lisa's, bikini straps and jerking his head over at La Canaria and me. The woman finally slapped his hand away and came to sit by me. “Are you from around here?” she asked. I shook my head.

“No? You are from where?” she said, pointing first to me and then to the hills behind us, making a person with her fingers, and walking him across her hand.

“Casasrojas—it's in Castile. We are on holiday after university.”

The woman's fingers kept climbing up her skin to her suit, tightening the knots, touching her bleached and feathered hair. “Do you have a place like this where you live?” she asked finally, curling her wrists in the air to gesture across the sky.

“No,” I said.

“Me, neither.” She seemed to relax. “Greg and I just live in a studio in Cambridge.” I nodded and tried to remember that Greg was her husband, which made her Melanie. “I'm just glad he let me come. I mean, this is really the life, right?” She reached her arms into the sky.

La Canaria laughed at that. Then she walked over to the edge of the pool and dove in, surfacing right next to Jaime and Marco, flinging her hair back like a fucking mermaid. I watched Melanie and Lisa—who was now standing partially between us and her husband—attempt to divide, categorize, and make irrelevant each of La Canaria's movements. Place her skin on a shelf next to theirs and make sure theirs gleamed brighter. I laid my hand on the nape of Melanie's neck, and she flinched but tried to hide it and didn't shrug me off.

“I really like your bathing suit,” I said. It was a bikini made of brightly colored geometric patterns with white fringe on the seams.

“What, this?” she said, not looking at me, still looking at La Canaria, but not really looking at her anymore.

“Yes, this,” I said, touching the fringe around her neck. “You have the best clothes. We get nothing nice here. The styles take years to get here, and then it's only what you've decided to toss out.”

“Oh,” she said. They were older than us, I realized. The men almost or over thirty, the women approaching it.

I dropped my arm from her neck. “You are married to Greg?” The name caught in my mouth, such a stupid combination of sounds.

“Yeah, I am, but I'm getting my Ph.D. in literature.”

“Why?” I asked her.

She blinked several times. “Because I want an education. I'm not just going to rely on Greg all my life.”

“He does not make money?”

“No, it's not that—well, he doesn't make enough now, but we're hoping with this dig—”

“That you'll strike Incan gold?” Lisa said behind us. Both Greg and Howie were in the pool, swimming around La Canaria.

Melanie laughed, her disembodied wrists returning. “It's just a joke. We know the Incans aren't from here.”

“You would have better luck over there,” I said. “The bones are too recent here.”

I was making a joke, but they both looked at me with their mouths open, turning from La Canaria and their husbands for the first time.

“That's just the thing,” Melanie said. She leaned in to me. “They're Classicists, looking for Roman structures, but Greg—Howie, too—they found something recent. Really recent. And terrible.”

“It was a mass burial,” Lisa blurted out, then covered her mouth. She was a little buzzed. “But it wasn't even a burial. They just piled them in there. Fascist bastards.”

“Now, we don't know for sure who it was. And there's loads of red tape. But it's terrible. No marker, nothing. In the middle of this hideous pine forest.”

“Well, what did you expect?” I said, and dove into the pool.

* * *

The air and water and wine and Americans created their own air and language. We stumbled through the few words we shared, flipping more rapidly between them the darker it got. We didn't talk about what they'd found and couldn't talk about, we didn't talk about what we'd left. La Canaria kept getting closer and closer to Greg, making exaggerated gestures with her head at Howie, but the rest of her body a current focused on Greg. For a few hours I had my toe on the floor of the pool, but then the ground drifted away, the tiles sliding so far below me that it didn't matter if they'd melted or ever even existed. Which was what I realized about that new space I'd made in the mountain shack. No one had mentioned the exams since I'd said we were going to miss them. No allusions, no glances, and I believe no one had even thought of them. The perimeters of this space didn't matter. We were in the dare, fully and floating.

The story of the burial kept circulating in whispers until everyone had heard it, but everyone pretended it was still a secret. I wondered how close it was, if there were bones beneath us, pushing up through the cracked tiles in the pool. The discovered grave loomed larger, stretching and spreading like mycelium. We drank more and shouted more and dove into the pool to keep it and all the others away.

Late at night, Marco appeared from behind the cork trees
on a horse, its mane coiled in tiny knots on its neck like a row of marzipan. The horse reared up against the moon and Marco laughed. We were sitting in the dust by the pool, hair wet. Marco galloped the horse in a tight circle around us. Jaime cheered. For a second, Marco paused and leaned into the animal's neck. The yellowing bruise around his own neck was just another in a series of shadows, like the grave, something that happened before and was not real. The horse's damp hide shone from the moon and Marco's mouth grazed those sweating marzipans and the horse walked backward. Short, hesitant steps, then he jumped sideways, landing a meter to the right. The space between the two places where he'd stood ceased to exist, like a splice of badly censored film. The Americans hollered and La Canaria fell back in the dust, her hair spread out around her, neck open to the stars. I could feel Marco looking at me, feel him smile in a way I'd never seen him smile before. I fell back on the grass by La Canaria. The sky swung up around me and circled in.

Five

After the Mass for Alexis—flowers and no body—I went to the old railway bridge where we'd first seen the piles. He'd kept going there long after I could try to stop him. Walking back from the university along the river, I would see the shadow of his head tuck behind the rails. When he washed his hands in Abuela's kitchen, the rust from the bridge's railing floated in the sink.

On the bridge, with his medallion the police had brought in my hand, I knew if he was anywhere, he was there. I stepped out to the edge where the rails broke off and searched, hoping to find a waterlogged stack of his hand-rolled cigarette butts. The tufts of grass were empty. On the riverbank below the bridge, red poppies waved against the gray water and gray sky. I stood up and went as far as I could, took off my shoes and socks for better balance, and wrapped my bare feet around the wood where the bridge disappeared into air. At the very edge, perched on a broken plank as if he'd written it right as he was diving in, was his tag.
A L X S
. I unwrapped the handkerchief and threw Alexis's wallet in the river. I put the ID in my pocket. Then I took off my medallion. My mother had given it to me for my first communion. I could remember only her hands opening
and the medallion inside, nothing else. I threw it in the river, deep in the middle, where it would sink or wash away but not ashore. Looking at the water, at the poppies, I put on Alexis's medallion. San Judas Tadeo, the keeper of helpless prayers.

Grito, La Canaria, Marco, they all knew about the Mass, but only Marco came, and he stayed in the back of the church, tucked away from my abuela's sight. None of them has spoken Alexis's name since.

* * *

Someone was shouting, but I heard it through water. The sharp grass was slick under my skin. The scent of goats and rotting grapes. I'd fallen asleep outside Marco's villa, in the grass, but I was wearing clothes, expensive ones. I remembered stumbling through the villa with Marco, laughing, and how he smelled like the horse when he buttoned up my new shirt, linen with tiny abalone buttons. But it was morning, and a woman had hold of my hair and was pulling me through the grass.

“
Puta, puta, puta,
” the woman mumbled. She dragged me across the courtyard to the front of the villa. “My house is full of
putas.
”

I pulled myself out of groggy half-sleep and grabbed her wrist and bit it. My tongue tasted her gold bracelets. She was shorter than me. When she slapped me, I saw Marco in her face for a moment. A face he'd always tried to hide, blooming without shame on hers.

I pushed her to the ground and ran out the open gates of the villa. Marco and Grito were crouched in the doorway of the hut just outside the villa's walls. Marco held a bright red little-kid backpack clutched to his chest. A clump of green oaks hid them from the courtyard.

“Cosme, please,” Marco whispered through the wooden
door. “You have to let us in. They're crazy—I swear they're going to kill me this time.”

Behind the door of the hut, I could hear soft breathing and the scratch of callused hands on unpolished wood, but no one spoke.

“Please, Cosme. I know you hate me, but you hate them even more.”

“Marco!” screamed the woman who had dragged me. Through the green oak branches, I could see her standing with her legs wide and swinging a heavy piece of wood. A man joined her. His bald head glistened with sweat.

“Marco, you
maricón
!” the man screamed.

“
Joder,
Marco,” I whispered. “Are those your parents?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Marco said.

“What's the matter with them?” Grito said.

Marco turned away from the door to study the two figures delicately lit by the rising sun. They were dressed in fine country suits, their bodies small and compact, like an atom before it splits.

“I didn't think they'd come back so soon. I'm not really supposed to be here,” he whispered. “The last time I saw her, I told her to take her
facha
money and shove it up her ass.”

“You said that to your mother?” Grito said.

“You see that thing she's waving around?” Marco whispered to me. “That's what she smashed my head on. Can you believe my mother dragged me all the way down the stairs to the altar before I woke up? San Sebastián's head woke me. A fucking tête-à-tête.”

“You get back here, Marco Francisco!” The woman waved the outstretched torso of San Sebastián through the air.

Behind us, the door of the hut swung open. Grito and Marco slammed down face-first onto the packed dirt floor.

“Thank you, Cosme, thank you,” Marco whispered.

We crawled in the door, not daring to rise up in case that woman saw us. She was small, but I was scared because Marco was.

“Cosme, they're crazy,” he said. “You saved my life.”

The room was dark and I couldn't see anyone. The shutters were open only slightly to the purple dawn. I smelled old
bacalao
and drying rice. In the corners were rough bunks, but the lumps in them lay still. I couldn't tell if they were blankets or someone listening.

“Who are these
comemierda
s
?” The voice floated out of a corner. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see a young man—the same one who'd been drinking in the yard when we pulled up the night before—leaning against the wooden shutters. He struck a match and lit a cigarette. Grito breathed in deep and fast behind me. My head pounded. I couldn't remember seeing La Canaria after watching Marco on the horse.

“Who?” Marco said. He was standing up, though he was still crouched, his head tucked protectively under his shoulders.

“Them.” The young man pointed at me and Grito with the lit cigarette.

Marco looked back at us, confused. “They're my . . . you know—”

“They're not from here.”

“No,” Marco said.

“I'm your only friend around here, eh, Maria?”

“Yeah, Cosme,” Marco said. “For a long way.”

Cosme eased the shutter closed with his shoulder and turned on a kerosene lamp.

“My parents are already out working.” He nodded at the empty cots on the far side of the wall. “The babies won't say anything unless I tell them to.”

Four heads raised out of the cots, dark hair matted against flushed cheeks.

“I knew they weren't sleeping,” I whispered to Grito.

“Shut up,” Marco said.

“What'd she say?” Cosme said. “She your girl?”

“Yeah, ah, no. Yeah, yeah, she is,” Marco said, and he put his arm around me.

“Who is he?” I asked Marco.

“I can hear you,” Cosme said.

“All right,” I said, and removed Marco's arm from my shoulder.

Cosme was younger than us but his face was burned old by the sun, and his hands were too large for his body. He looked like the boys who would come help my abuelo when he could no longer tie the ropes around the sheep gates or carry the stacks of hay from the stable.

“May I?” I leaned into Cosme and he handed me his cigarette. I held his gaze and blew out the smoke, struggling not to cough. I didn't know what was in the cigarette besides tobacco, but the smoke was a porcupine needle racing to my heart. He smiled slightly when he saw that I wasn't going to flinch. “Are you going to help us out of here?” I asked.

Cosme turned to Marco. “Where's the other girl? The one with the tits?”

Grito looked at me but didn't say anything.

“Maybe she left with the Americans,” Cosme said.

“Where'd they go?” Marco said.

“They headed out when Her Majesty came in screaming. Took all the cars.”

“Where?”

“They always go to the city when the dons get here. Stay out of Her Majesty's way.”

“She's our friend,” Marco said.

“I bet she is.”

Marco had never used that word before. None of us had. It
was too corny, too soft. It wasn't our own, like he was reading from a card our grandmothers would send, covered in lace and flowers and the clasped hands of Christ praying.
Condolences for a beloved friend.
But Marco using the word made me wonder. We'd all entered something that night in front of the fire, but had we entered the same place or all crossed through our own separate doors that slammed shut behind us? I didn't know whether our words meant the same thing to one another anymore.

“I'm going to Gijón,” Cosme said. “I know some people there we can stay with. You'd like them.”

“What does that mean?” Marco said.

“They have drugs. They're not a bunch of pigs.”

“We're trying to get to Madrid,” I said. “Gijón is in the opposite direction.”

“Don't want to be late for the hotel check-in, Mosca?” Grito sneered.

“Catch the train to Madrid there, then,” Cosme said. “It'll be easier to find a cheap one in a city.”

Gijón. I traced the name in my mouth. Alexis hadn't called from there. It was not on the list of cities.

“What do we need you for?” Grito said.

“I have a truck that'll get us to the station,” Cosme said. “No one will come out here to pick you up now that they're here. I don't think you can all fit on Marco's horse.”

“We'll go to Gijón,” Grito said flatly. “Sounds like a good time.”

* * *

Cosme took a back road toward town, gravel the whole way, sometimes slipping into the brush and almost bouncing down a hill. Even early in the morning, the dust rose through the open windows.

“You've got quite a family, Marco,” I said.

“You don't have any idea who he is, do you?” Cosme said to me, one hand on the large wheel of his rusty truck. I was packed between him and Marco in the front seat. His hand grazed my thigh each time he shifted gears.

“They know who I am,” Marco said.

We were silent, looking out over the scrubby trees in the purple light. Grito sat in the open back. He fidgeted, tapping his fingers against the broken back window.

“Stop it,” Cosme said.

Grito pounded his fists against his thighs. We bumped over a low row of scrub. Finally he spoke. “Are you really that dumb, Mosca? Why don't you tell her, Marco? Since she can't figure it out herself.”

Marco kept looking straight ahead. “What do you want, Grito?”

“The house, the money, the fucking peasant at your beck and call—” Cosme swerved the truck to throw Grito on his back, but he wouldn't stop. “You really can't figure it out, Mosca?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

“He's not talking about anything,” Marco said.

“Oh, yes, I am. I'm talking about Marco's famous father. Even us lowlifes have heard of him. Don Lara—the Butcher.”

Marco flinched.

“Is that true?” I said.

Cosme grinned. “You stupid fucks.”

“I knew it,” Grito said. “I knew it the whole time!”

Marco was silent, staring out the window at the dust the truck kicked up.

“Jesus Christ,” Grito said slowly. “
You're
the fucking snitch.”

Marco turned back to face him for the first time. “Shut the fuck up. I don't talk to the police.”

“You're the reason the police were after us—out of that whole crowd, they were only looking for us.”

“I didn't tell them anything!”

“You didn't have to. They've probably been following you for years. Making sure the precious Butcher's son doesn't get too roughed up while he plays revolutionary.”

Marco's face was white and he was shaking. He couldn't speak. He couldn't deny it.

When we got to town, Cosme pulled his truck underneath a mulberry tree and yanked up the parking brake. “What did you come back for, anyway?” he said.

Marco jumped out of the truck, clutching the red backpack tight under his arm. “I had to get something of mine.”

* * *

The train slowed once we left León Province and entered As­turias. Whenever we stopped in a town, swarms of striking workers pressed against the windows. In Oviedo, the crowd wouldn't step off the rail, and instead of stopping, the conductor drove through them. They hurled rocks and glass bottles. A man's shirt caught on the car. He was stuck for a moment and we all watched, but the cotton tore and he tumbled away from the rails. The remains of his shirt rippled over the glass, a red flag, as the train picked up speed.

“Should we be on this?” Marco said.

“Believe me,” Cosme said, “you don't want to get off here.”

Marco had kept the secret from all of us, especially Alexis. Alexis might have forgiven the wealth, the peasants, but not certain family tendencies. An aptitude for torture, a relish. Alexis believed too much in blood to forgive Marco for what his father was known for and what he would therefore consider his true inheritance. The Butcher's son, that he could not for
give. So Marco had lied. The Butcher was famous but the name Lara was common enough to not connect Marco to him. In the same way that you'd never confuse two homonyms, never even consider them alike unless they were placed together on a dry blank page.

* * *

It was dark by the time we arrived in Gijón. The train eased into the station, a mess of wires and cement on the edge of the city. The scent of the sea hit us, but no water was visible. The sky hovered low and clouded, air dense with fog. We walked through the narrow streets. Our feet slipped on cobblestones slick with centuries, and picked up clumps of dried rice—the remnants of someone's wedding in the empty trash-strewn streets. A
feria
had just passed. Pink and green streamers hung between the buildings, carrying secrets to those roofs still too sturdy in their foundations to hunch toward one another. Julio Iglesias leaked out of a high apartment window, competing with a recording of Lolita singing a lonesome flamenco on the opposite side of the street. Both sounds floated high above us. Grito kicked a paper devil mask over the cobblestones until it became too waterlogged and melted apart in a puddle.