The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,53
new movement, Rafaela, you and I. We are the Visceral Cartoonists!”
In the end Araceli was done in not by the snobby teachers, but by the long journey across the city from home to school and back again, east to west to east, and by the lists of required materials submitted at the beginning of each term. At the art supply store the clerk gave a satirical grin as he laid the required oils on the counter before her, each an import from England: quinacridone red, raw umber, terra rosa, titanium white, 150 pesos a tube. And then the brushes whose supple bristles suggested the hides of large mammals migrating across the Mongolian steppes; the collection of flesh-toned pastels from Germany, the entire human spectrum in a pine box; and finally the textbook tomes with prices as flashy and exorbitant as their glossy pages of illustrations. “They come from Spain, so it’s all in euros, which is really bad for us Indians here in Mexico,” the clerk said. Beyond the cost of these accoutrements, there was the simple question of having enough money to buy a torta for lunch, and the exhaustion that overcame her after the final, hour-long journey home on the Metro and on the bus as it inched forward the last three miles along the main drag of Nezahualcóyotl with its littered sidewalks, the multitudes of factory workers fighting the gridlock on Ignacio Zaragoza Boulevard, pushing against the domestics and the peddlers of pirated CDs. She would rise up before dawn to finish assignments she’d been too tired to complete the night before. “Araceli, why are you killing yourself like this?” her mother said one morning, her words heavy with a sense of futility and absurdity. “¿Para qué?“ The decision to go to art school was, for her mother, a superfluous act of filial betrayal, because daughters, unlike shiftless boys, were expected to place family first. A wayward daughter counted as much as six wayward sons on the scale of neighborhood shame. When Araceli gave up art school after a year and started working, handing over half of her earnings to pay for her baby brother’s future college education, her parents stopped assaulting her with their prolonged silences.
Probably Felipe had an artist’s soul and had also been forced to surrender his ambitions. “You look smart, that’s why I asked you to dance,” he’d said. Felipe, she sensed, had long ago made the accommodation Araceli still struggled to live with; he could make art without feeling the sense of injustice that ate away at Araceli whenever she thought about her mother and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.
In the late afternoon, when Araceli was finishing cooking dinner and was getting ready to set the table, she noticed that she had absentmindedly arranged Maureen’s silver forks, knives, and spoons into patterns on the kitchen counter while polishing them earlier in the day: an asterisk, a series of overlapping triangles, an arrow. Araceli imagined, for a moment, a sculpture that would make an ironic statement about the fine curlicue designs on their handles: she imagined taking a blowtorch and welding forks, knives, and spoons into tangled sculptures of machetes and plows. That would be fun, but expensive. She was rubbing a spot on the last spoon that had somehow escaped her cleaning when she heard the front door slam, hard enough to provoke a faint rattle of the dishes in the cupboard. What was that? One of the boys again?
After a minute or so Araceli began to hear raised voices, el señor and la señora yelling at each other. The usual back-and-forth barking and pleading, their voices pushing through the closed door as an irritating and genderless vibration. She considered the basil remedy again, but then thought better of it: their fighting was part of a natural rhythm, a kind of release; they would fight and a day or two later Araceli would see Scott rubbing his wife’s back, or Maureen clasping his hand as they watched their children play in the backyard. After observing the Torres-Thompsons for several years she could begin to see their arguments as a kind of marriage fertilizer: they were ugly, one recoiled before their nasty smell, but they appeared to be necessary. She listened as the shouting continued, rising in volume so that she could begin to make out clear phrases: “Because you have to be more responsible!” “Don’t humiliate me,” and finally a laughing shout of “Pepe? Pepe?” Well, Araceli’s curiosity was piqued now,