The Sleeping World Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œWhat’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.
    â€œWhat’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.
    â€œStudy 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 copyingthe 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. Wordsshaped 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