The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,42
any other moment she would have been angered by his failure to pay full attention to her.
“So I’ll just charge it, then,” she said.
He did not answer, but instead leaned his body forward in his chair. On the screen the animated representation of a football quarterback threw a very long pass, and through a mesmerizing miracle of technology the game’s eye followed the ball through the air and into the hands of an animated receiver, though Maureen had already turned away and was in the hallway when that very masculine corner of her home filled with a semiconductor-produced simulation of a multitude, a sizzle of voices and cheers celebrating a touchdown.
8
The kitchen window offered only a partial view of the sidewalk at the bottom of the sloping lawn, and when the work crew rolled up to the cul-de-sac at Paseo Linda Bonita, Araceli saw only the top half of their truck. Three men of Mesoamerican heritage stood in the back, peering over a side panel of rough-cut plywood with the startled look of Aztecs about to enter a town filled with conquistadores. They looked around at their alien, affluent surroundings for a few moments, and began talking to a person invisible to Araceli, and she could lip-read them saying “¿aquí?“ and “¿bajamos?“ The answer to both questions was yes, apparently, and soon they were jumping off their perch to the street below. Two more men who had been sitting on the floor of the truck rose to their feet, one of whom was holding a long machete, which he proceeded to strike once against the truck’s plywood panels, as if to test the blade. Both the eager-to-work peasant expressions of the workers and what Araceli could see of the truck itself seemed like anachronisms, and Araceli half expected them to admit they were lost and turn around and drive away. The presence of these roustabouts in their used clothing inspired in Araceli a familiar and comforting burst of sarcastic thoughts: I’m sorry, but there is no farm here. There are no cabbages to pick, as you can see! Put your machetes away: we have no bananas to harvest! To her surprise, another man, an older Mexican-American type dressed in a freshly ironed plaid shirt, came walking up the path.
Araceli was headed for the door, preparing the polite words by which she would inform this man that he and his poorly fed day laborers had obviously come to the wrong place, when she saw her jefa reach the door first and open it.
“You’re late,” Maureen said abruptly.
“I’m really, really sorry, lady, but my usual guys didn’t show up. So I had to pick up some new guys.” The raffish “guys,” five in all, were now standing near the bottom of the walkway behind their foreman, hands in their pockets and silent.
“Day laborers?” Maureen asked in a tone that suggested concern.
“Yeah, but these guys are cool. I’ve hired them all before.”
“As long as you finish in time. You need to be done by eleven. You know that, right?”
“We’ll be outta here by ten-thirty, I promise. I got another job at eleven anyway over at Newport. I brought a couple more guys than usual to get done in time. Trust me.”
What is going on? Araceli wondered as she watched Maureen show the contractor the gate where his crew could enter the backyard without tramping through Araceli’s freshly cleaned living room. These men have come to do some serious labor, Araceli concluded, something involving plants and soil, and of course I am the last to know, because my patrona doesn’t feel the slightest need to inform me. Araceli felt mildly insulted, an emotion that had become familiar in the days since she had discovered that she was now the do-everything doméstica, her workload doubled without a corresponding raise.
She walked across the living room to the glass doors that opened to the backyard and watched as the contractor and Maureen gathered before the withering tropical garden. Half the calla lilies were tan and irrevocably dead, the banana tree would never again produce the tiny fruit that it used to give each spring, and the ferns were as dry as Egyptian parchment. The river boulders inside the little stream had lost their rich black texture and turned a brittle, pale gray because the small pump that fed the stream stopped working days ago, which Araceli could now see in retrospect was a final, unmistakable sign of what was about to happen.