The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,113

later when Scott found, in Araceli’s bedroom, a stack of postcards addressed to her and also the bank book for the savings account Scott had set up for her four years ago. The savings book revealed the last name Ramirez too, but the address was their own. “We have a full name, but that’s it. What else do we know?” Maureen had no idea what Araceli’s parents’ names might be. How many people lived in Mexico City? Ten million? Twenty? And how many Ramirezes might there be in such a metropolis? Such a common last name offered these Mexican people a kind of anonymity. They’re all Ramirez, or Garcia, or Sanchez.

“Where does she go on the weekend?” Maureen asked Scott.

“I think she said to Santa Ana. I’m pretty sure I heard her say that once.”

Scott decided he would go through the old phone bills and check for any unfamiliar numbers. He returned from the office with a stack of paper, began scanning, and soon realized he would find nothing. “I think I’ve seen her use a card or something when she calls Mexico,” he said. “And Santa Ana is a local call.” The toll-free access numbers for the long-distance services left no trace on the bill, which was precisely what Araceli had intended—she didn’t want to owe the Torres-Thompsons any money for the phone bill, and felt the details of her Mexican life were hers alone to possess: they were not for others to see, or study, or to be amused by. Araceli was “very private,” as Maureen put it to her friends, and until this moment Maureen didn’t mind, because she equated Araceli’s reserve with an efficient and serious approach to her job. For a year before Araceli joined them the Torres-Thompsons had a Guatemalan housekeeper, Lourdes, who kept a continual lament about the daughter she had left behind in a place called Totonicapán, often weeping as she did so. After one tearful soliloquy set off by the sight of children her daughter’s age celebrating Brandon’s seventh birthday in the Torres-Thompson backyard, Maureen had decided to let Lourdes go. Madame Weirdness, the childless woman from Mexico City, came to take her place. I have allowed this person to live in my home for four years without once having a substantial conversation about where she is from, about her brothers and sisters, or about how she got here. I have allowed this foreign mystery to float from one room of my home to the next, leaning into the vacuum cleaner, flexing forearms as she mops with that look that often goes far away. I have allowed this state of affairs to persist, and may have placed my sons in danger, in exchange for her chicken mole, for the light and tart seasoning of her black beans, and for the passion we share for the sanitizing power of chlorine.

Maureen’s ignorance about Araceli’s life beyond Paseo Linda Bonita meant she had no information on which to base even an educated guess about where the Mexican woman might have taken Brandon and Keenan. “Where did she go? What is she doing with them?” If Scott was right and they hadn’t been in this house in two days, at least, then the situation became even more inexplicable: Why would a woman who had shown so little interest in her sons suddenly take an overnight excursion with them? As the light shining through the windows lost its white sheen and aged into a faint yellow, and the shadows in the succulent garden turned longer, and the memory and guilt over her own absence from the home grew fainter, Maureen’s thoughts took on a darker and increasingly suspicious hue, leading her to declare, just a few minutes before sunset:

“I think we’re going to have to call the police.”

15

Not long after the lynch mob dispersed, Keenan put his thumb in his mouth and wandered to the backyard and slumped down in a lawn chair. Araceli found him there, and realized her charges needed to go to bed. She approached Lucía, who offered her bedroom, saying, “I’m going to be out late.” The boys could sleep on her bed, and Araceli in a sleeping bag on the floor, she said, and soon Brandon and Keenan were dozing off underneath a poster of Frederick Douglass, a photograph of a teenage Spanish matador clipped from a magazine, and the orange and silver tassel from Lucía’s high school graduation cap. Araceli dozed off quickly too, studying the image of the bullfighter