The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,152
turn it off completely.
Octavio Covarrubias turned to Araceli and put his hand on her shoulder. “Ese hombre te quiere encarcelar.” On the TV, the man who wanted to send Araceli back to jail peered into the camera without speaking for a few seconds, then gave a dismissive nod, followed by a playful bobbing of his head that, Araceli guessed, was meant to convey incredulity. His hair, she noted, was the color and thickness of a weak mountain stream during a summer drought, and his lips were arranged in a crawling half smile with the geometry of a roller coaster. Ese hombre, all by himself, Octavio added, might have the power to lock her up again. Millions watched him. “No lo entiendo.”
Octavio drifted away, leaving Araceli with a plate of leftover barbecued beef she had brought in from the backyard, alone before the television. She had seen this commentator flicker past during the nighttime page-turning of channels on her television, but she had never stopped to watch him. Now she saw that his eyebrows and mouth, in close-up, were a theater all to themselves. He played to the camera with his eyebrows, which moved like elaborate stage machinery above the radiant blue crystals of his eyes. His eyebrows rose, fell, twisted, and contorted themselves in ways that appeared to defy the limits of human facial musculature. The camera pulled back as he brought his body into the show by leaning back in his chair, and he puffed his cheeks quickly with a suppressed laugh, and finally shook his head, and gave a forty-five-degree turn to face another camera.
It was frightening to think that the brain behind that face could somehow shape her fate, and Araceli quickly reached over and turned off the television, the image of the man shrinking to a point and going dark with an electric pop. What other eyebrows, mouths, and brains were out there, conspiring to put her behind bars again, and what did they see in her, that they would want to punish her so? The thought made her want to put on running shoes, to see if she could outsprint the men in uniform this time. But no, she was tired of running. No voy a correr. She would wait and prepare herself. For starters, she would get another tortilla and make herself a taco out of the beef on this plate, because when a man is as good a cook as Octavio Covarrubias, you really shouldn’t let his food go to waste.
20
A pretty and tiny Latina woman of about twenty-five arrived at the Covarrubias residence first, with a long, thin notebook in her hand. She had swept-back eyes with chestnut irises and strands of thin coal-black hair; a significantly older and taller man of rugged features who smelled of cigarettes accompanied her. They were an odd, English-speaking couple in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, and a decidedly bad omen for a Mexican woman who expected to be arrested at any moment. Araceli might have taken the man for a retired cowboy, but for the camera in his hand and the nylon bag on his shoulder. These people have probably not come to arrest me, Araceli thought, and after they introduced themselves as journalists, she stepped outside onto the porch, and then onto the lawn, to see if there was a police cruiser lurking nearby. After a few moments of conversation on the grass it became clear that these two periodistas had not expected to find Araceli alone. “There’s no cops here,” the photographer said in a half question and half observation, after glancing inside the living room.
“¿Cómo que cops? ¿Entonces sí me vienen a arrestar?”
“Uh, I think that I, that we …” the reporter began, and she gave a guilty, girlish smile that was inappropriate to the moment. “Disculparme, por favor, no sabía,” the reporter began in Spanish, but stopped, because that language was obviously not her first, and was barely her second. She handed Araceli a business card, a stiff little rectangle with glossy letters that rose from the paper, inviting one’s fingers to linger over them, claiming the title Staff Writer for its owner, a Cynthia Villarreal.
“Well, this is awkward,” the photographer said, and he reached inside the pants of his jeans and grabbed a cigarette and put it in his mouth but did not light it. “The captain will not be pleased to see us, I think.”