The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,40
husky when you looked at him from the front, but from the back he was much better proportioned, the width of his shoulders stood out, suggesting a certain musculature. He was a sensitive mexicano trapped, like her, in a too-big body.
On Sunday afternoon, some thirty-six hours after the departure of her only domestic help, Maureen found herself sitting on the floor of her walk-in closet, listening to the steady static that came from the baby monitor, and to the distant sounds of heads being smashed, flesh being pierced, and stone walls crashing to the ground. Allowing the boys the pleasures of movie-made warfare was the only way she was going to get a little time to herself, to sort through her box of family pictures and to arrange the photographs of Samantha’s first birthday in the album she had purchased months ago. Maureen did this to calm herself, and as an affirmation of the nurturing progress of her family. She took a picture of Scott holding Samantha at the party and placed it next to another that showed the baby sitting before her cake, with Brandon and Keenan on either side, helping her blow out a wick that burned atop a wax number one. The blending of features in the faces of their children was plain to see: there was Ireland in the specks of emerald in Keenan’s eyes, Maine in her daughter’s prominent jaw, and Mexico in the way Brandon’s long nose stretched. Her children blended the features of many branches of the human tree. In their faces she saw the hands of an eccentric creator, an artist who surprises his audience with the unexpected.
On the other end of the Paseo Linda Bonita home, Scott was gripping a console control with two hands, playing a football simulation of cutting-edge visual complexity. He had purchased the newest release two days earlier, thinking that he could justify the cost as a professional, tax-deductible expense, because he had designed a game or two in his day and might again. But the unadorned truth was that a bestselling game like this was beyond his talents, which had been honed in the days of “real programming.” You had to manage and inspire large groups of people to bring a game like this to market: artists, teams of technicians conducting motion studies, and brain trusts of football mavens to work out the strategy book. This game was a big Hollywood production: the credits were buried deep in the disk for true geeks like Scott to find, and ran on for several pages, as if for a David Lean epic.
A man needed to play, to feel the exhilaration and escape of sports, even if he was sitting down while doing it, so Scott returned to the task at hand: leading his team of animated San Francisco players to victory over a Pittsburgh team. The glossy realism of the animation more than made up for the lack of exertion, and as he completed a third-and-long backed up against his own goal line, Scott thought that a virtual triumph was the most ephemeral source of adrenaline out there, but it did make it easier to do the dishes afterward. Maureen expected Scott to leave the kitchen spotless, to attack the stacks of bowls and oily pans in the sink, wipe the counters, and sweep the floor. It was an absurd rule of Maureen’s that the house had to look “presentable” when Araceli walked in the door on Monday morning. Unfortunately, the disarray built rather quickly in Araceli’s absence, with dishes filling the sink and loose laundry invading the hallways and bedrooms, while children’s shoes walked midstride on the living room floor and plastic warriors massed for battle on the dining room table, surrounded by a toast-crumb snowfall.
Maureen had decided to aggressively ignore this growing disorder, and was still in the closet, retreating deeper into family nostalgia, remembering the gentle, funny, and neglected but handsome man her husband was. Back then, she had thought of his surname, Torres, as a signpost announcing her arrival at a remote, exotic village.
After all these years what had seemed like silent strength had been revealed to be a deeply rooted stoicism, a disconnectedness from people. The promise of a Latin journey seemed closer to fruition after their marriage, when her new mother-i n-l aw had graciously presented her with an album of Torres family pictures, including some bleak photographs of her father-in-law as a boy, and others of him as a cocky young