The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,149
skin of taco trucks on Thirty-ninth Street, and the fat tortillas the hungry men and women workers raised to their mouths, and the deep-sea purple of the dying daylight over their heads. Those images belonged in her sketchbook, and then later on a canvas as big as she imagined Picasso’s Guernica to be. She imagined a composition with orange and red explosions of fireworks in the background, and in the foreground the rabid teeth of a mob that marched and shouted. And why not the horizontal march of the electric transmission towers, and that corridor of feral grasses and palms, a road to unseen American provinces beyond? An artist needs to be out and about: Araceli understood that now. The study of the visual world while on her feet had informed her life in Mexico City, but in the defeat of her creative ambitions she had gone into a kind of retreat, she had accepted the little room the Torres-Thompsons gave her and the bills in the envelope at the end of each week. She felt like Brandon, who saw fantasy and wonderment in everything new. She wanted to find her gordito, the dancing painter Felipe, and tell him what she had seen.
“I never imagined,” Araceli said after a brief silence, “that I could see things the way a little boy saw them.”
“¿Cómo?”
“Brandon. He’s the older boy. He loves to read. He thought the things he saw in Los Angeles were like the things in his books. He was funny. You see things differently when you open your eyes the way a child does.” There were children in this house too, Octavio and Luz’s kids, hovering nearby and listening for story details they might share with others.
“Well, it’s good to see you calm,” Luz said.
“Sí, me siento calmada,” Araceli said. Octavio looked a little thrown, a little disappointed by her light mood.
“Next time, Señor Covarrubias,” she said, “I am going to make breakfast for you.”
The lights came on and Maureen and the television reporter looked at each other through the layers of makeup that covered their faces, and Maureen had one last moment to think, Ah, this is really show businesses, isn’t it? before listening to the reporter’s first question. It had taken forty minutes to transform her living room into a studio. The point of this interview, as she understood it, was to make a public defense of her own motherhood. But as the crew ran black cables as thick as garden snakes along her tiled floor and raised a half dozen lamp stands to varied heights, her stage fright and anxiety had been replaced, momentarily, with a kind of morbid fascination at this glimpse of the inner workings of television news. The crew shielded their portable four-hundred-watt beams with transparent fabric squares until all shadows disappeared and an eerie, even light settled over her living room. They rearranged photographs on the bookcase and produced fresh-cut roses and a vase, and opened the sliding glass doors to the succulent garden and taped L’s onto the floor where a high folding chair was later placed, so that Maureen could be photographed with the roses, a family portrait, and a mini-landscape of cacti and the ocotillo plant all looming behind her. The producer, a woman of about twenty-five, had punched a message into one of those handheld devices that required much use of the right thumb, and waited a few minutes for a reply, and had looked up from the screen to announce that Maureen alone would be interviewed, with the boys, Samantha, and Scott making silent cameos in the “B” footage to be shot around the house afterward, in a simulation of their daily living, sans Araceli. Of course, Maureen thought, I’m the one they want on camera. Her twelve-second “rant” had been repeated enough in its thirty-six-hour existence for an observer or two on the motherhood blogs to call it “iconic.” Why is it, Maureen wondered, that in any walk of life, from corporate CEO, to U.S. senator, to harried flower vendor and distraught Orange County mother, an angry woman provokes such intense feelings? Why is it considered such a remarkable and noteworthy thing for a mother to raise her voice?
“Maureen Thompson, how are you doing? How is your family?” the reporter asked.
“We’re fine. We had a little scare. For two days and one very long night that seemed like an eternity. I mean, to come home to this house and find it empty, to expect to see our