The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,199

produced an envelope and gave it to the consul, while another stepped back and aimed a camera.

“We received a request from some people in Santa Ana,” the consul said. “We took the account number they provided us. And with the very kind cooperation and signature of your former patrón, el señor Torres, we secured the money from your account. As you requested.”

“I never requested that. From you.”

“Well, someone contacted me. And you should thank them. And thank me. Pedro here works in the consulate and is also a freelance writer and photographer for Reforma. He’ll do a little article for us. Right, Pedro?”

“Por supuesto, licenciado.”

Araceli peered into the envelope. “This is a check.”

“A cashier’s check. Safer than cash. And, if I may be permitted to say, for an amount that is surprisingly large. It’s so good to see one of our paisanas doing so well for herself. It’s made out to the name on your voting card. And if you lost that one, here’s another I had made for you and sent from the Distrito Federal. And also a passport, which I think you never obtained.”

She examined the new documents, with their seals and hologram squares, and remembered how people suffered a via crucis of lines, forms, waiting rooms, and belligerent officials to get these in Mexico City. Now they gave them to Araceli without her even asking: it was a bureaucrat’s idea of a Christmas present.

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to take a photograph or two to illustrate the story.”

“You want to take a picture of yourself giving me my own money?”

“It will just be a second. And it will help us here at the consulate tremendously.”

Araceli could not say whether the consul was a good man or a bad man. Clearly, he was at the mercy of that clubby Mexico City culture that took bureaucrats, professors, and even painters and poets and transformed them into obsequious babblers. Araceli had escaped from all that, and she thought she should tell the consul to go to hell and leave her alone, because, after all, what had her government done for her? They said they would give me classes in drawing and professors who could teach me to master oils, but it was all a trick, because they don’t give you brushes or a canvas, or a studio, or the time to become what you dream. Instead our government gives us the roads we take in our northward escapes, and the policemen picking at their teeth and sizing us up to see if we can pay a bribe. It gives us the cartoon pictures of Juarez in our textbooks, and the lessons about the agrarian reform and the Constitution of 1917.

Araceli wanted to be angry, but in the end she felt pity, and she turned and posed, foot forward and leg extended, like a beauty contestant, because in the end it was all a joke, and because if the police or the ICE caught her again, she might actually need this bureaucrat’s assistance. Click. Click-click. Click.

“¡Gracias, paisana!”

He offered his business card and she took it, mumbling “Gracias” and slipping away, and thinking that a paper rectangle printed in Mexico City was a poor defense against the ICE. They can grab me at any minute and send me back into tiny, locked cubes, because the eyebrows on the television and the screaming woman on the staircase demand it.

Araceli found Felipe asleep in the cab of his truck, a baseball cap pulled down tight over his eyes, his largeness barely contained by the weather-scarred red skin of his pickup. His mouth gave little wet puffs, but even in this unflattering state, she found him attractive: above all, because she sensed an innocent, incipient devotion in him. He would wait for her an entire day, without eating, if he had to. Finally she woke him up.

“You’re back,” he said, startled.

“Ganamos,” she said.

“You won?”

“I am free. Se acabó todo.”

“¿Estás libre?”

“Yes, except that now I have to run away.” “Right.”

“How much gas do you have in this truck? Because I need to get far away.”

Felipe maneuvered his pickup through the streets of Laguna Niguel with an aggression she had not seen before, squealing through a couple of turns, accelerating with controlled desperation, and after a few minutes they were on the freeway, headed north, his truck settled into a fast cruise. “We need to get out of the city,” Araceli said. Towers covered with razorlike antennas loomed over the highway, and danger seemed to lurk