The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,55

the civilized one and they are the savages. They have taken the living room I have worked so hard to give the sparkle of a museum and they have transformed it into a wrestling ring. Lucha libre. If I hadn’t come in they would be grabbing the chairs from the dining room and throwing them at each other. Stepping gingerly around the ruins of the table she had cleaned that morning, and too many other mornings to count, with blue ammonia spray, Araceli reached out and took the hand of her jefa and helped her to her feet.

BOOK TWO

Fourth of July

“You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into these houses … and just see how your people live.”

—Richard Wright, Native Son

10

Waaaaaaaaaa!

The alarm startled Araceli awake at the lazy hour of 7:30 a.m., the summer sun already blasting through the curtains. On most mornings she would have been long awake, but the memory of the powerful matriarch of the mansion momentarily helpless on the floor had kept her from sleeping well. During the summer the Torres-Thompson household got a later start to the day and Araceli could often spend some time in the morning with the hosts of the Univision morning show as she got dressed, half listening to their interviews with diet experts, the celebrity gossip, the reports on the latest drug murders in Guerrero and Nuevo Laredo, the videos of the dead being pulled from overturned buses, and the like. Now she had witnessed a kind of news event in this home, too close and too raw to be entertainment. The crash and scream had invaded her dreams, causing her to sleep right up to the deadline announced by her digital clock. By now, el señor Scott would have made himself some toast and be out the door—on this morning, perhaps more than any other, he would have wanted to avoid contact with his servant. Araceli took her time getting dressed and put on her white filipina, dreading the stony mood that awaited as soon as she entered the main home; a day of silences from Maureen, followed by the tense sharing of the domestic space in the evening when Scott returned from work. When a man tosses his wife to the ground, there can be no easy forgiveness.

With some trepidation Araceli opened the door to the kitchen, and then the door from the kitchen to the living room. No one, nothing, all quiet, as orderly as she had left it the night before, when she swept up the glass and steel ruins of the coffee table and collected them in two boxes she placed next to the plastic trash barrels outside. Only the conspicuously empty space in the living room hinted at what had happened the night before. Perhaps she should examine the floor for any traces of glass, lest the baby Samantha pick one up and place it in her mouth. Leaning down, Araceli examined the ocher surface of the Saltillo tile floors and found two slivers, each smaller than a child’s fingernail. She held them in her palm to examine them, meditating not so much on the shards as on the unexpected violence that had produced them. This house will not return to normal so quickly. Suddenly Araceli the artist, the Araceli who didn’t care, longed for the ordinary. She was the strange one, the mexicana they couldn’t comprehend, but it would fall to her to bring the Torres-Thompson household back to a calm center by restoring the broken routines: the comfort of served breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, the tonic of a sparkling kitchen and smartly made beds at the end of the day. She tossed the shards into the trash and started breakfast, following the rotation la señora had established on a refrigerator calendar. Friday: Cream of Wheat.

Brandon wandered into the kitchen first, at 8:36, followed by his brother a few minutes later. They sat at the kitchen table, eating silently, their spoons hitting the bottom of their bowls with a comforting clank-clank, Brandon reading a thick book with a dragon on the cover as he ate. Araceli wondered how much they knew about their parents’ altercation the night before. Probably they heard everything, she thought, and this was almost true: they had retreated to the television room and the comfort of cartoon warfare just as the shouting had reached a peak, but before their father had shoved their mother backward into the coffee table. Brandon had guided his softly weeping younger brother away