The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,71

a parallel world, and within a few minutes he was asleep again, as was his brother.

Araceli listened to their boy-sized puffs become rhythmic, the quiet song of children at rest. This is the third night I am spending alone with these boys. I should be the one crying out in my sleep. I should be the one screaming for my mother. ¡Mamá, ayúdame!

Unable to fall back asleep, she decided to get up and make herself tea. She took her steaming cup of manzanilla to the silent living room, lit one of the lavender-scented candles there, and sat on the couch. Maureen never brought a match to these candles—why buy something and never use it? Araceli sipped her tea and watched the yellow flame flicker and cast long shadows throughout the room, the soft, dancing light falling upon the pictures in the Torres-Thompson gallery, coloring the faces with nostalgia and loss. Here are people related by blood, but distant from one another. Pobrecitos. The photograph of the younger version of el abuelo Torres was the one most closely related to her own experience: the urban setting was familiar, along with the mestizo smile. Had he run across the desert to reach the United States as Araceli had? Araceli had a photograph like this of her mother in Mexico City, a snapshot taken by one of those men with the big Polaroids in the Zócalo, when her mother was a young woman recently arrived from provincial Hidalgo. My mother still felt like a tourist in Mexico City then, and so does the young man in this picture—he is a young man in the first days of his Los Angeles adventure. In this picture too there was a just-arrived feeling, the brow raised in something between astonishment and self-assurance. Now something behind the young man caught her eye. Three numbers could be seen floating above his slicked-back hair, attached to a wall behind him: 232. A street address. She remembered how her mother carefully wrote dates and other information on the back of family photographs. On a hunch, she picked up the frame, turned it around, and moved the tabs that held the photograph in place and pulled it out. She found words and numbers written on the back in the elegant, masculine script of another era, the florid penmanship of a teenager educated according to the standardized rules of Mexican public education, the looping letters teachers of the Secretaría de Educación Pública had tried to force upon Araceli too, until she rebelled.

West 39th Street, L.A., Julio 1954.

On Monday morning, Araceli approached the preparation of the oatmeal with a sense of finality. After breakfast was cooked and served she would be free, because el señor Scott was sure to be at his office, the desk altar where he never missed a weekday prayer. When they finished eating, the boys went directly to the game room and within a minute or so the sound effects of steel striking steel were wafting toward the kitchen, where Araceli stood before the refrigerator, a tremor of anticipation in her hands as she picked up the telephone and began to punch in the number.

“You’ve reached Scott Torres, vice president of programming at Elysian Systems. I’m currently on the phone or away from my desk. Please leave a message or press zero to talk to the operator.”

Startled to hear another recorded voice, she pressed zero. After a single ring, an actual human voice answered, a woman.

“Elysian Systems.”

“Con Scott Torres, please. Mr. Scott Torres.”

“I’m sorry, he called in sick today.” “¿Qué?”

“Excuse me?”

“He called sick?”

“Yes,” the operator said, speaking slower now, because the person on the other end of this call was obviously English-challenged. “He called in sick.”

“¿Cómo que sick?”

Now the operator was amused by the incongruity of a woman with a thick accent and poor telephone skills calling a cutting-edge, if somewhat small, software company, and asking for a midrange executive in the same tone of voice these people probably used to order their spicy food.

“Sick, yes. Ill. Unwell. Would you like me to transfer you to his voice mail so you can leave him a message?”

“A message? Yes. Please.”

Araceli thought quickly about what she should say while Scott’s message unfurled again over the phone, her pulse racing anew.

“Señor Scott. Estoy sola con los niños. I am alone with the boys.” She stopped and seconds passed as she thought how she should elaborate on that central fact. “¡Sola! Por tres días ya. Se nos está acabando la comida. The food