The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,34

project using three fist-sized blocks of sculptor’s clay. Keenan was kneading a lump, and the baby Samantha had ocher-colored fingers after sticking them in a bowl of clayish water, while Brandon was on the couch reading a book. Maureen looked up at Araceli with a smile of parental pride—We are doing something educational, my children and I—and if Araceli had a slightly more cynical bent she might have concluded the scene had been arranged for her benefit. Yes, Mexican woman, you are leaving us to fend for ourselves, but as you can see we Americans can manage okay.

“Adiós, I am leaving now,” Araceli said, tapping at the small travel bag hanging over her shoulder.

Maureen looked up from the table and said, “Okay. See you Monday,” and then added a gentle reminder. “Morning. See you Monday morning.”

“Sí, señora.”

With that Araceli was through the door and free from work, relishing those first few, very light and liberating steps down to the sidewalk, a happy reencounter with the person she once was, the woman who lived in a true city, with crowds, art, subways, and beggars. The twenty-minute walk to the bus stop took her downhill along the curving streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates, past one block where, for reasons Araceli never understood, all the houses were exactly alike, each a copy of a tile-roofed home from a white Andalusian village, each with the aesthetically misguided and culturally inappropriate addition of garages with tiny arched windows in their tin skins. The garages were as Spanish-phony as the made-up names on the street signs, which still brought a smile to Araceli’s lips. Mostly variations on the words “vía” and “paseo,” the street names had lots of pretty vowels that, when put together, meant absolutely nothing. Paseo Vista Anda. Via Lindo Vita. Her jefes lived on Paseo Linda Bonita, which was not only grammatically incorrect, Araceli noted, but also a redundancy.

Paseo Linda Bonita and all the other paseos and vías in the Laguna Rancho Estates bent and twisted in arbitrary ways, as if the designers had intended to frustrate impatient motorists, unpunctual deliverymen, novice mail carriers. When Araceli first came to work here she too had been disoriented by the anti-linear geography of the place, more than once finding herself turning into an unfamiliar dead end, having to retrace her steps back out of the maze. Now she reached the front gate, a stone portal with a guard shack and two big black iron gates with the letters l, r, and E superimposed in polished steel. A man of chocolate skin and cornrow braids was posted there, and he gave a distracted half wave back as she walked past, headed to the bus stop marked by a fiberglass sign, orange county transportation authority. Only the maids and construction workers used this bus stop, so there was no sidewalk, just the dust and pebbles of the shoulder and a post driven into the undeveloped meadow that ran down to the beach. Araceli turned her back to the road and gate and faced the rolling expanse of yellow grass that mamboed in the breeze, the remnant of the “rancho” the Laguna Rancho Estates were named for, the millennial silence interrupted only infrequently by the sound of a vehicle moving behind her with a low purr. Looking past the meadows at the blue ocean beyond, she saw a large vessel many miles offshore, a black box drifting northward across the horizon, like a flat cutout in an arcade game. It was routine to spot ships as she waited at the bus stop, and seeing another evoked a fleeting sense of hopelessness: their slow, industrial drift seemed free of any romantic purpose, and their presence somehow tamed the Pacific and robbed it of openness and adventure.

Araceli waited. She had spent her formative years in Mexico City lines standing before elevator doors and cash registers, in buses stranded before stoplights, and in constipated thoroughfares, but it seemed illogical to find herself waiting in this open, empty stretch of California. Making a Mexican woman stand under this bus sign for thirty minutes was a final subtraction from all that was supposed to be relaxing, leisurely, and languorous about these neighborhoods by the sea. When her time became her own again, when she was a woman with a party outfit stuffed into a travel bag, Araceli reverted to the city dweller she was by birth; she was in more of a hurry, restless. Ya, vámonos, ándale, let’s get moving. ¡Ya! In