The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,67

loud tones, ascending in frequency, followed by the message “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in use …”

¡Caramba!

Next on this list was Goldman-Arbegasts, the family that was the Torres-Thompsons’ best friends, although they had missed, for some reason, the most recent birthday party. Yes, these Goldman-Arbegasts were responsible people, the mother was a somewhat taller and more even-tempered version of Maureen, another matriarch of schedules and smartly dressed children.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Goldman-Arbegast residence,” said a woman’s voice. “We’re not here right now because we’re in Italy.”

“No, we’re in Greece!” said a boy’s voice.

“No, we’re in Paris!” interrupted the voice of a man.

“No, we’re in London!” said a second boy’s voice.

And then in chorus all four voices said, “We’re in Europe! On our dream vacation!”

Araceli put the phone back in its wall cradle and looked at the remaining two numbers on the list: they were both for the doctors who had treated Maureen during her pregnancy and delivery, and thus useless for the crisis Araceli now faced.

Who could she call now? No one immediately came to mind. She did not know the neighbors, not their names or anything about their relative trustworthiness, and it would be dangerous, she sensed, to share the secret of their isolation with strangers. She had no phone numbers for any uncles or aunts that might exist in the Torres-Thompson universe: Scott was an only child and Maureen had a sister that Araceli had never met. As the hours passed and Scott and Maureen did not return, the strangeness of her predicament only grew. Araceli sensed, for the first time, a larger malaise, the consequences of one or more hidden family traumas at work, as in the convoluted narratives of a telenovela. The woman whose hair filled the brush, whose voice kept the boys bright-eyed, eager, and well behaved, could not and should not have abandoned them. Araceli expected to hear the long-gaited slapping of Maureen’s sandals on the Saltillo tiles at any moment, but until then there was no place she could walk to where Brandon and Keenan might be welcomed as relatives or friends. Nor was the phone ringing with calls from the outside world, with compadres and acquaintances calling in to chat: in fact, the phone didn’t ring very often at all. It seemed impossible to Araceli that a family and a home could become something akin to an island surrounded by vast stretches of salt water, and that its young inhabitants and their innocent housekeeper might become castaways. The peninsulas that linked this island to a continent of annoying relatives and nosy neighbors had been quickly and definitively washed away. Araceli realized now that the daily solitude she felt in this home, the oppression of the droning appliances and the peopleless views from the picture window, was not hers alone. This American family whose home she inhabited had come to this hill above the ocean to live apart from the world. They are runaways, like me. It was an obvious truth, but one Araceli had never fully pondered before. Among Mexicans the peculiar coldness of the norteamericanos was legendary because it came to infect the many paisanos who lived among them. One heard how individualism and the cult of work swallowed up the hours of the American day, their sunsets and their springtimes, causing their family gatherings, their friendships, and their old people to disappear. But it was quite another thing to be thrust directly into an American family’s lonely drama, to find your mexicana self a player in their game of secrets and silences, their separation from one another by long stretches of freeway, by time zones and airline hubs and long-distance phone rates. And what about the absent family patriarchs? Not once had she heard Maureen speak of her father, there were no pictures of the man anywhere. Was he dead too, like Scott’s mother? And if so, why was he not mourned with photographs? Or was he simply banished from the home like the boys’ Mexican grandfather? It seemed to Araceli that el viejo Torres should have his number on the refrigerator. Why wasn’t it there?

Maureen’s room at the High Desert Radiance Spa was a two-room suite in which both rooms opened to a strand of Joshua trees, their twisted limbs arranged on a gently sloping hillside in the poses of a modern dance troupe. Just after sunrise, she stepped outside and sat in a plastic chair on the small cement patio, while