The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,107

when she noticed she had inadvertently brought the conversation between the compadres to a sudden halt. “Buenas tardes,” she said, eliciting a round of not-especially-friendly “Buenas tardes” in return. These mothers and fathers were put off too by Araceli’s failure to pay much attention to the boys she was apparently assigned to look after, even when the older of the two approached and said with a stricken plea, “I think someone should tell all these kids to stop playing with firecrackers because it’s so dangerous.”

“¿Qué quieres que haga?” Araceli asked rhetorically, because there was nothing she could do, and the boy snuck away, leaving all those who observed the exchange to wonder what exactly was going on here with this child-unfriendly woman and those American boys.

“It’s true what el niño says,” one of the moms said in Spanish. “Those things are too dangerous. Someone is going to get burned.”

“They see more dangerous things at school, believe me,” said another mom dismissively, and with this all the mothers and fathers in the circle nodded. “The other day, I go to pick up my son and the entire school is surrounded by police cars and police officers, and there is what they call a ‘lockdown.’ My son is in the sixth grade, believe it or not, and one of the kids is running down the hallway with a knife. I think he stabbed a teacher in the leg with it.”

“Qué barbaridad.”

“The things that go on in those schools.”

“My son is in sixth grade too, and he doesn’t know his times tables past three,” one of the fathers said. “ ‘What’s six times eight?’ I ask him, and he looks at me all confused. So I tell him, ‘What are they teaching you there?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know.’ In my pueblo, they taught us that in the second year.”

“What are we supposed to do?” one of the mothers said.

“You’re supposed to go to the teacher and complain,” Lucía Luján interjected in English, having just entered the circle on the hunt for her own plate of food. “You’re supposed to get in the face of that teacher and say, ‘What’s up with the times tables?’ “

“¿Podemos hacer eso?”

“Of course you can. That’s how this country works. Get a classroom full of white kids, and that’s what their parents do all the time. They treat every teacher like a worker.”

“Tiene razón,” Araceli said. “La señora Maureen, mi jefa, siempre está peleando con los maestros.”

“But if we go, they don’t take us seriously,” one of the mothers said, speaking directly to Lucía. “You go to the office and they tell us, ‘What are you doing here? Go away. We’re busy.’ “

They all paused, middle-aged and young, Mexican-born and U.S.-born, and considered the betrayal of the schools, and the steel mesh that covered every window, the security cameras in the hallways, the posted warnings aimed at student and adult alike, and a few of them very self-consciously allowed their eyes to drift over to those young girls and boys who were their blood and their responsibility, running and bouncing in the backyard, each child gleaming and full of promise, and each poor and stripped of it. Boy and girl screams filled the silence that followed, which was heavy with hurt and powerlessness and a certain unfocused sense of workingman’s defiance that found no words in which it could be expressed.

Araceli broke the wordlessness suddenly, to say that the kids she cared for seemed to be getting an excellent education.

“Where are they from?”

“Los Laguna Rancho Estates. Por la playa. En los cerros.”

“The public schools are good down there, I bet,” Lucía Luján said.

“No van a la escuela pública,” Araceli said. “Private school. Todo pagado. Y muy caro. Very expensive. I see the bills.”

“How much?” Lucía Luján asked quickly.

Araceli spoke the figure in slow and deliberate Spanish, allowing its mathematical obscenity, its thousands and thousands, to hover over the assembled hardworking, cash-strapped, taxpaying adults and scholarship-funded college students like a blinding glow of fake sunshine. There were one or two gasps, though Lucía Luján’s eyebrows rose with only moderate surprise—the tuition for those two boys, together, was a bit more than her tuition at Princeton, before all the financial aid kicked in.

“Imposible,” one of the parents said.

“Estás loca,” said another.

“No sea chismosa. Por favor.”

It was preposterous, and suddenly everyone in the circle except Lucía was angry at Araceli for revealing a figure that, were they to accept it as truth, would temporarily strip them of some of