The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,18

It’s all tumbling around me, but do I even care?

Later in the afternoon, long after the Big Man had sobered up and left with his embarrassed wife, Maureen said goodbye to the last guests filing out the front door: Tyler Smith and his wife and sons. Mrs. Tyler Smith stopped on her progress toward their car, startled by the spectacle of the flaming ball of the sun as it raced toward the ocean horizon, the purple wisps in the stratosphere, and the blood-orange pastel glistening in the water. “What an amazing view,” the wife of the erstwhile head of research said, trying to convey sympathy and solidarity. “This is an amazing house, Maureen. You’re so lucky to live here.” Maureen gave a distracted thank you: she was still thinking about the Big Man and la petite rain forest and how the weeds and wilting flowers had ruined everything. After two weeks of driving herself to the point of exhaustion in pursuit of a liberating confab with their friends, the Big Man’s booming voice had drawn the eyes of all of their friends to the telling flaw in their home. Damn him. Damn that fat jester, and damn Scott for letting Pepe the gardener go.

4

Night had fallen and the kitchen window had become a mirror once again, leaving Araceli to catch glimpses of herself as she listened to the dishwasher, to its timed sprays and its rhythmic swishes, and the click-clack of cycles beginning and ending. One more load and she would retire for the evening, out the kitchen’s back door, past the trash cans, into the guesthouse. The last three glass bowls, two pots, and assorted serving spoons and spatulas were soaking in the sink, where steaming water and detergent worked to dissolve the final vegetable, olive oil, and fruit-fiber memories of the party concluded hours earlier. If this were her own home, and not the home of la señora Maureen, Araceli would simply take a sponge and scrubber to these dishes and be done in ten minutes, but la señora insisted on running everything through the searing, sterilizing water of the dishwasher. Still, Araceli could have ignored her jefa this evening, because la señora Maureen was fighting with el señor Scott and thus too busy to wander over to the kitchen and check on Araceli. The argument had been going on intermittently for three hours, with long and toxic silences in between, having started just moments after Maureen’s final goodbye, and it had filled several rooms with recriminations and miscellaneous shouting, with descriptions of the flaws in the tropical garden, passing on, through an odd and not entirely logical chain, to events deep in the couple’s shared past. Araceli wondered how it was that her jefa, clearly simmering with outrage after the departure of the last guest, had been placed so quickly on the defensive. “You said the same thing in Barcelona!” Maureen yelled from the living room. Araceli had missed what it was Scott had said that reminded Maureen of Barcelona, a city that came up in their conversation from time to time, most often in sensuous and nostalgic tones that suggested, to Araceli, the romantic postcard images of embracing middle-aged couples in certain magazine and television advertisements common to both English- and Spanish-language media. Araceli would like to visit Barcelona and the Gaudí towers, and if she had a passport with the stamps and stickers that would allow her to come and go from the United States, she would take the several thousand dollars she had saved and buy an Iberia ticket and be out the door with not more than a week’s notice.

“Jesus, I was twenty-five!” Scott insisted from another room, his voice muffled because he was deeper in the house. Araceli could only hear Scott intermittently, when the dishwasher paused, or when he wandered into the living room to parry one of Maureen’s assertions with a weepy, prepubescent voice one moment, and a husky old-man’s rant the next. “You’re so totally pathetic!” he said, following up with uniquely raw English vulgarity, which Maureen shouted back at him with a “you too” added for punctuation’s sake. Araceli guessed that if she were to leave the kitchen and burst into the living room and step in the acoustic line of fire, they would stop. She had done this before, entering to the scene of Maureen’s reddish eyes and Scott’s straining temples, one party or the other halting in midsentence at the sight of their underpaid Mexican employee.