The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,170
is all I ask.”
El abuelo Torres disappeared into the kitchen and then into the backyard and the guesthouse. Scott found him thirty minutes later, with his head in the refrigerator.
“Dad? What’s going on?”
“I’m looking for a decent cheese to make these kids a quesadilla. That’s something I know they’ll eat for dinner.”
Scott walked away, feeling he had entered a nightmare in which he sleepwalked through scenes from his childhood, the past returning with an eerie and familiar sense of doomed domesticity.
“My father is cooking dinner?” Scott asked Maureen in the living room.
“And living with us.”
“In this house?”
“In the guesthouse, yes.”
“Why?”
“Not my idea.”
“Can we make him leave?”
“I suppose we could,” Maureen said. She took in the smell of melting cheese wafting in from the kitchen. “But can we afford to?”
After serving his grandsons and granddaughter a dinner of quesadillas and sliced apples, with the boys grinning at him and calling out, “Can we have another one, Grandpa?” the elder Torres returned to the silver range. He prepared baked potatoes and chicken thighs spiced with tarragon, the kind of simple but hearty meal you might get at a diner, and slid it across the kitchen table to his son and daughter-in-law.
“Enjoy,” he said flatly.
“Thank you,” Maureen answered weakly.
When they were finished he left the dishes in the sink for Maureen and went out in the backyard and grabbed one of the footballs and yelled out to Brandon, “Go long.” After a few tosses Keenan joined them and they played catch for thirty minutes, until the elder Torres began to cough and he plopped down on the grass and said, “Let’s sit down and take a rest and look at this pretty desert we’ve got growing here.”
Grandfather and grandsons admired the stiff petals of the prickly pear cactus, the spiny yuccas, and held very still when they saw a crow perch itself on top of the ocotillo. It turned its head side to side to examine the humans below with each of its eyes.
“Damn, that’s pretty,” the elder Torres said. “It’s been a long time since I seen the desert like this. Grew up in the desert, you know.”
Brandon sensed his grandfather was drawn to the cactus in some profoundly adult and emotional way, and he half heard and half imagined a cowboy twang in his speech. Perhaps he was a south-of-the-border cowboy like the venal gunslinger with a Mexican accent in that spaghetti western Brandon watched with his father once, until the cowboys started cussing and his father told him he had to leave.
“Is this what Mexico looks like?” Brandon asked.
“Wouldn’t know. I’m from Yuma, in Arizona.” The elder Torres looked at his grandchildren, saw their expression of innocent confusion, and allowed his natural defensiveness to slip away. “My father was from Chihuahua. I was born there, but it’s been a long time. I suppose it probably still looks like this.”
“Are we Mexican?”
“Just a quarter. By me, I guess.”
“Only a quarter?” Keenan said. He thought about the math lessons at the end of second grade, and did not understand how a human being could be divided into fractions. One-quarter, two-thirds, three-eighths. Were his bones and muscles split into Mexican parts and American parts? Could his greenish-brown pupils have a quarter Mexican pie slice, two American pie slices, and an Irish pie slice, and if he looked in the mirror with a magnifying glass, could he see the slices and tell them apart?
“Yeah,” their grandfather said. “Just a quarter.”
“Is less Mexican better than more?”
“Don’t know. Some people think it is. These days, though, I ain’t so sure.”
At 8:45 p.m. the elder Torres retired to the guesthouse, and by 9:15, when Maureen entered the kitchen to make herself some tea, she could hear him snoring, a faint animal rumbling of stubborn helplessness squeezing through the two walls that separated them.
The next morning he awoke at 6:00 a.m., entered the kitchen, and made his son a ham, tomato, and cheese omelet for breakfast. When Scott had finished eating, his father gave him an order.
“Do me a favor and scrub out a couple of toilets before you leave for the day.”
“What?”
“Listen. Your wife is allergic to the toilet bowls, and I’m gonna have a lot on my plate today.”
“But I’m going to work. I’ll be late.”
“I thought you were the boss there.”
Twenty minutes later the elder Torres found his son on his hands and knees in one of the home’s four bathrooms, attacking the porcelain with a scrubber.