The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,36
family and the owner of this house. She found him in a torso-swallowing blue lounge chair: he was reading, in a rather conspicuous display of his lefty bona fides, the Sunday edition of the Mexico City daily newspaper La Jornada, which he received by mail every week, devouring its star-studded lineup of radical Mexican literary and political commentators. Covarrubias was a semiretired carpenter and one of the thousands of proletarian, Spanish-speaking autodidact intellectuals scattered across the Southern California metropolis, and he had two large moles above his left eye that he called Io and Europa, after the moons of Jupiter. His wife and adolescent progeny, meanwhile, were sitting semierect on a couch as they absorbed the pings, sizzles, and cheers of a television broadcasting a Mexico City–based variety show hosted by a garrulous man whose vulgar shtick annoyed thoughtful people on both sides of the border. The living room décor further echoed the contrasts between high and low culture, with the velvet painting of tongue-wagging dogs on one wall looking across the space at the bowed, dignified heads of the mother and child in a Siqueiros woodcut on the other. Even on the bookshelf, the gravitas of Elena Poniatowska and José Emilio Pacheco were pushing up against the pulp crime of Los secretos del cartel del Golfo and The True Story of Los Zetas, announcing to Araceli her arrival at the home of a workingman grappling for ideas, arguments, and facts to understand his world.
Octavio lowered his newspaper to say “Hola, Araceli, ¿qué tal?”
Araceli returned the greeting and asked if Marisela was in.
“She’s waiting for you.”
Araceli zigzagged around the children in the living room and made her way to the last bedroom in the back, where she found Marisela lying on her back on a bed, pushing buttons on her cell phone.
“No one ever calls me,” Marisela said without looking at Araceli. She was a short and roundish young woman who always wore jeans that were a size too small. Araceli liked Marisela because she was blunt and often unaware of the fact that she was offending people, and because she was a chilanga, a Mexico City native. They had met in a Santa Ana thrift store, two Latinas sorting through the same rack of men’s vests, and weeks later it was Marisela who introduced Araceli to the friend who knew a gringa in Laguna Rancho who in turn knew another gringa, named Maureen Thompson, who was looking for a new maid.
“The only call I got today was from el viejo,” Marisela said, turning on her side to look at her friend now. “He didn’t even ask how I was doing before telling me he needed money.”
“Is your brother still sick?”
“No, he got better. Now they need one hundred dollars because there’s a hole in the roof.”
Once it had been taboo to complain about their families and the demands they made. A Mexican daughter in exile was supposed to place individual ambitions aside and make ample cash transfers in the name of younger siblings and nephews. So their money flowed southward, every month without fail, even as the months and years passed and the voices on the other end of the telephone became older and more distant. Their U.S. wages fertilized a tree of family narratives that had grown many new and gnarly branches that no longer involved them directly. Now Araceli and Marisela complained openly and without guilt, because it had become painfully clear that their families didn’t understand the complications of life in the supposedly affluent United States of America, and because their relatives were using their telephones as probes to discover how deep the well of dollars went, as if they sensed, correctly, that the faraway daughters in exile were squirreling away money for their own selfish use.
“I’m going to send them fifty instead of one hundred,” Marisela said.
“They need to learn to take care of their own problems,” Araceli said, the phrase having become a refrain in their conversations.
“Exactly. I’m going to keep that extra fifty dollars to buy another hat like this one I’m going to wear tonight. I got it at that new place on Main Street. Let me show you.”
Marisela went to the closet and emerged with a cowboy hat made of black jute straw, its brim bent up saucily on two sides, like a bird about to thrust its wings downward. “Qué bonito,” Araceli said through half-gritted teeth, because they had an unspoken agreement not to speak ill of each other’s party