The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,52

spent on private school for his two sons every month. In fact, thanks to his spendthrift wife, they were going to have to struggle to round up the cash to pay for the boys’ “facilities and activities” fee at the start of the next semester. He squeezed his face in a half wince as he scrolled through the page in search of the interest rate he would pay on said credit card. Twenty-six-point-four percent, compounded! There were formulas taught in finance classes that calculated how quickly the “force of interest” could destroy a family with the slow but powerful engine of exponential calculus. Now he scrambled to grab a memo pad, and scratched out a worst-case scenario.

The result was a five-figure catastrophe: he would be a servant to that borrowed money for the foreseeable future. Its preposterous largeness made him feel bullied and violated, as if his wife had grabbed him by the shirt collar and tossed him into a locked room whose walls were plastered with receipts, bills of sale, service contracts, and warranties, each a mocking reminder of her relentless and happy assault on their disposable income. His three kids were trapped in that room with him too, prisoners to the debt as much as he was. Scott stood up from his chair and grabbed at the air around his temples, and began pacing in his claustrophobic work space, fighting the desire to kick at his chair, or pick up everything on his desk and hurl it against the glass. Finally he flung a pencil at his computer screen with the violent windup of a rioter throwing a rock at a liquor store; the pencil snapped in two but failed to do any damage to the screen itself. “Fuck!” He looked out through the glass and noticed that Jeremy Zaragoza, Mary Dickerson, Charlotte, and all his other employees were staring at him with expressions that combined various degrees of glee, concern, and puzzlement. Yes, here I am in my cage, the boss who lives at the mercy of his wife’s weaknesses and wants. Soon he would be wandering away from his post as corporate laughingstock, to spend a day searching for neighborhoods with affordable homes and half-decent public schools.

When Araceli cooked and cleaned, she daydreamed, and when she daydreamed, her train of thought often ended at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, just off the Periférico Highway in the western part of Mexico City. She had opened her eyes in the morning remembering Felipe, and how he painted dragons, and thought that at the National School of Fine Arts painting dragons would have invited contempt and ridicule. Only a narrow strip of park, with jacaranda trees and walkways where dogs sniffed and pulled at leashes, separated Araceli’s temple of artistic knowledge from the boorish city that surrounded it, buses and microbuses congregating nearby and nudging against one another like cattle in a slaughterhouse pen. At the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes all the first-year students were too somber of disposition to paint or draw anything but abstract representations of their inner demons, or starkly detailed studies of the overcrowded, exhausted city. That was my problem: I was too serious. If she had contented herself with painting dragons and fairies for her nieces and nephews, Araceli concluded, she wouldn’t be the miserable migrant she was now. Those first, few light days of art school she would walk into the main lobby and study the board announcing various exhibitions and gallery openings, watch the students march back and forth in their creative torment across the patios, holding brushes and portfolios, and feel she was standing at the center of the artistic universe—or considerably closer, at least, than she had been at her home in Nezahualcóyotl.

Araceli felt especially attuned to the visual world then, and as she crossed the sooty metropolis her eye was constantly searching for compositions. On the Metro she studied the tangle of wires between the tracks, the contorted faces of passengers squeezing through doors, and the rivers of scampering feet that flowed up and down the wide stairways linking one Metro line to another, and the improvised geometry of the underground passageways that intersected at odd angles. One of her instructors had looked at these first-year sketches and pronounced, “You will make a first-rate cartoonist,” and even Araceli knew that was a slight. Then her classmate Rafaela Bolaño told her she too had been declared a “cartoonist,” and it became their running joke. “We are starting a