The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,50
smile to her employee. “¿Te gusta?“
Araceli placed a large jug of agua de limón on the squat folding tray next to Maureen and used the glass stirring rod to make the cloud of lemon pulp inside swirl, and then finally looked up at the garden.
Well, there was certainly something exotic about this patch of desert her jefa had purchased. Standing this close to it, Araceli got the sense of being transported to a place of mystery and timelessness even as the boys screamed from the pool a few yards away, and as Maureen sat in her folding chair, sunscreen glistening from her bare legs, a floppy canvas hat protecting her against the sun. But no, Araceli couldn’t say she liked it. There was a certain minimalism to this new garden with its red volcanic rocks and expanses of scarlet and mustard-colored sand filling the space between the plants—Araceli’s aesthetic, however, had always leaned toward the ornate and complex. She remembered her startling first impression of the tropical garden on the day she interviewed for this job at the Torres-Thompson household: she had emerged from the house on a hot day like this one to encounter a jungle of defiant wetness fighting back against daylight. Later she had studied the garden for hundreds of hours while working in the kitchen, laundry, and master bedroom, and from the window of her casita in the back. She liked the way the leaves of the elephant plant caught the slightest breeze, the way the calla lilies changed their shape from early morning to noon, and the movement of the false stream. This new desert garden was a static construction, while the tropical garden was a work of performance art, with Pepe as its star, stepping inside its verdant stage to send streams of water that cascaded over the tops of the plants, catching the sun’s rays and making rainbows.
“Well, what do you think?” Maureen insisted. “You don’t like it. I can sense you don’t like it.”
What could Araceli say? She really didn’t possess the words in English to communicate what the tropical garden and this new desert garden made her feel. How did you say in English that something was too still, that you preferred plants that you could feel breathing around you?
“Me gustaba más como era antes,” she said in Spanish, and then in English, “I like it before … But this is very pretty too, señora. Very pretty, muy bonito. Very different.” Empty words, Araceli thought, but they seemed to be what Maureen wanted to hear.
“Yes, it is very bonito, isn’t it?” Maureen said with satisfaction. “And muy diferente too.”
That morning at the headquarters of Elysian Systems, Scott invited his staff out to lunch to celebrate shipping the final version of the CATSS “accountability” program to the government. The corporate guys on the fourth floor had suggested he do these sorts of things, because even a bunch of loner programmers expected the occasional perk. “You take them to a nice place, you blow off half a day of work, and you pick up the tab,” said the executive, as Scott tried not to frown at the paperweight on the executive’s teak desk awarded for “outstanding leadership” by a lumber trade group in the Pacific Northwest. “Then you expense it. You go back to the office and everyone works just a little harder the next few days.”
They gathered in the nearest chain restaurant that served decent mojitos and margaritas and plodded through two hours talking about sports, video games, celebrities, and other banalities. His programmers were five men and two women, the oldest about five years younger than him. They had bounced around various software companies in search of the place that offered the most pay with the least work expected and they all considered the drudgery of programming at Elysian Systems to be a necessary compromise with their free-spirited, late-hacker ethos. That’s why I hired them: because I saw a little bit of myself in each of them. I wanted to surround myself with me. You could get them going if you talked about open sourcing, and the fences big companies were putting around their code. “There’s all kinds of languages out there, but they’re not accessible,” said Jeremy Zaragoza, who was a thin twenty-eight-year-old of indeterminate ethnicity. “So your average kid in suburbia can’t just open a machine and start playing with the code.” Scott had grown tired of these conversations—he’d been listening to them, in one form or another, for