The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,106
underneath the power wires and sip beer as if she were an ordinary HP girl, even though she knew she would never be an ordinary HP girl again.
Among all these people, young and old, Mexican-born and California-born, the presence at the party of two Orange County boys went largely unnoticed, with Brandon and Keenan slipping easily into the mostly English-speaking orbit of the children, and only a few parents noticing their long bohemian locks, or the ease with which they glided across the backyard in their bare feet and untrimmed toenails. But after just a few minutes no one failed to notice the paisana with Germanic height and bronze freckles, dressed like some explorer in a canvas hat, presenting them all with the mystery of her person. She was too old and not casually stylish enough to be one of Lucía’s friends, but too young and not formal enough to be one of the compadres.
“¿A quién llevas en la camisa?” Araceli asked one of Lucía Luján’s friends, switching to English when he didn’t seem to understand her right away. “On your shirt. Ese hombre. He looks like Jesus, but he is smoking. Y tengo entendido que Jesucristo Nuestro Señor no fumaba. Jesus does not smoke.”
Griselda Pulido, Lucía Luján’s best-friend-forever, heard Araceli’s chilanga accent, and began to pepper her with questions about Mexico City. Griselda had long thought of Mexico’s capital as a kind of Paris, a destination she would visit one day in solemn pilgrimage, a place where a woman with Mexican roots might escape her fraught American existence and find her true self. She wanted to know where the chilangos went out at night, what rock bands they listened to, and at which nightclubs they danced. “What is the Palacio de Bellas Artes like?” Griselda Pulido asked. Switching to Spanglish, she asked, “Tienen las pinturas de Frida allí, or do you have to go to her house in Coyoacán?”
To Araceli, this woman Griselda seemed as intelligent and curious as Lucía, but with a tragic air that was only heightened by the velvet eye shadow she wore, and cross-combed hair that ran down her forehead and crashed upon the eyebrows. “I got into Brown, which is in Rhode Island, and I thought I’d hang out over there on the East Coast with Lucía, but I couldn’t go,” Griselda said, and Araceli looked her straight in the eye to say, I understand completely. Going to school for as long as they wanted was one of those things latinoamericana girls couldn’t do, and hadn’t been able to do for centuries, the same inequity having kept at least one of Araceli’s grandmothers illiterate her entire life. Our feminine emancipation is incomplete: maybe our daughters, if we ever have any, will be free. Araceli tried to answer Griselda’s questions about Mexico’s capital city as best she could, even though she was a bit thrown by the way Griselda weaved English and Spanish together, so freely and without care.
“Lucía and I are going to go there,” Griselda said. “Un día. Tal vez.”
Araceli wanted to suggest some museums Griselda might not have heard of, but before she could the small man with the smoking Jesus asked her if she’d been to Huntington Park before.
“No,” Araceli said. She twisted her mouth into English so Smoking-Jesus Boy would understand her. “But this is a place you can forget easily. So maybe I was here before and I just don’t remember.” Hearing this, the two homeboys among Lucía’s friends stuck their hands deeper in their pockets and squinted approvingly at Araceli through dilated pupils and gave weak and wicked cannabis grins and wondered briefly if this lady had ever been in The Life, over there in Mexico, because she looked like a girl who could handle herself in a fight. A moment later they forgot about her, and looked up at the sickle moon and the first stars of dusk and listened intently to the pulsating bass of the music and how deeply it inhabited infinite space, and then they smelled the fat-laden air coming from the barbecue pit and their stomachs suddenly ached with hollowness, and they decided it was time to get something to eat again.
Araceli was the deepest mystery to all the parents and older relatives present, some of whom were a bit put off when she entered their circle—they were all standing by the tables and their pyramids of pork and side dishes. She was about to plunge her fork into a serving of carnitas