The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,20

was about to walk out to survey the damage in the living room when she noticed a note in Maureen’s handwriting on the tile counter of the kitchen’s center island: Araceli: We went to The Strand for breakfast. Be back around noon. Sorry about the house. Ah, the warring couple made up this morning. Qué bueno.

In the living room she found a few tossed red fabric capes Maureen had made, along with toys and dolls the guests’ children had looted from the boys’ and Samantha’s rooms and left scattered on the furniture and floors. She gathered plastic board-game pieces in her palm, a foam ball, and a book entitled Airplanes, and proceeded to the boys’ room. Harvesting toys and placing them in the appropriate receptacle was another element of Araceli’s daily routine and it could be said she knew the children’s play and reading habits better than Maureen did. Araceli visited the boys’ room at least three times a day and had given it her own, private nickname: El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas, the Room of a Thousand Wonders, because it was filled with objects designed to amaze and delight, from the colored-glass Art Deco mobile of planets and comets hanging from the ceiling, to the Viking ship made of interlocking Danish blocks and the collection of two or three hundred books of widely varying sizes. When she was in this room alone, Araceli sometimes spent several minutes with the books, especially the series of twelve hardcovers designed to introduce young children to Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Picasso, and other great masters of art. There were other books that produced three-dimensional dragons and castles when opened, or that made cricket sounds, jungle hoots, and whistles. Any child anywhere in the world would kill to have such a room, and to have a mother whose chief preoccupation was to “stimulate” her progeny, though of course these boys didn’t appreciate it. If I had grown up with a mother like la señora Maureen … The mental comparisons between Araceli’s own austere childhood and the abundance that enveloped the Torres-Thompson boys were inevitable when she entered this room—it was the only time in her workday Araceli felt self-pity and resentment at the absences and inequalities that were the core injustice of her existence. It is a big world, divided between rich and poor, just like those humorless lefties at the university said. What would I have become with a mother like Maureen and a room like this?

Next Araceli made all the beds in the house, picked up the pillows and blankets from the couch where el señor Scott appeared to have slept, and folded them up and put them away. She returned to the living room, to run a duster over the furniture, turning its feathers lightly as she touched the tall, distressed-pine bookcases and the vases, as if applying a touch of invisible rouge on everything. She lingered a bit longer, as she usually did, over the family photographs arranged inside one of the bookcases, including a sepia-toned picture of el señor Scott’s father: in the photograph, the elder Torres was a boy only slightly larger than Brandon was now, but scrawnier-looking, his eyes an expression of startled confusion as he leaned against an adobe wall in ill-fitting corduroy jeans. Northern Mexico, Araceli guessed, a dry village where nopals offer the rare green touches to a khaki landscape. Araceli never lost the momentary feeling of paradox that came with finding this relic of a Mexican family history in the home of a wealthy California family. Next to it was a second photograph of the same boy as a teenager, in front of a bungalow in a city that Araceli guessed was Los Angeles in the 1940s or 1950s. A few times the person depicted in these two photographs had come to this house to visit, transformed into a senior citizen with a penchant for irritating remarks. “El abuelo Torres,” Araceli called him, with mordant irony, since the old man never spoke a word of Spanish, despite the faint accent that flavored his English and suggested a tongue that was secretly hoping to pronounce an eñe or an erre or two every time he opened his mouth. He never answered Araceli’s “Buenas tardes” with a “Buenas tardes” of his own. Araceli had the impression that he had been banned from the home, since it had been about two years since she had seen him, and what Mexican grandfather doesn’t want to see