The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,72
is gone almost. No sé qué hacer. La señora Maureen se fue. I don’t know where she is …”
A loud tone sounded on the receiver and the call went dead.
Scott Torres was not at his desk because he was recovering Monday morning in a hotel room, alone, having fled Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment after two nights, his marital fidelity more or less unblemished. Thanks to the hotel minibar, he was hung over and had awakened at 8:45 in a bright, sun-drenched room with open curtains, stumbling over to the phone to report in sick to the office switchboard some ten minutes later, having forgotten, in his unsettled state, that he’d given the entire programming department, including himself, the day off for a four-day weekend. He showered, dressed, and paid the hotel bill in cash. It was time to go home and face Maureen.
After hanging up the phone, Araceli lingered by it for several minutes, because it seemed within the realm of possibility that Scott could receive her message immediately and call her back. She had already decided that she would not spend another night sleeping on the floor of El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas. Before the day was out either she would have reached one of her patrones with the message of her plight, or she would head out for the Los Angeles address of the Torres family patriarch, the clapboard building depicted in the glossy photograph. During her first few weeks in California, Araceli had lived at a similar address, a 107 East Twenty-third Street, and she believed that if the address corresponded to the logical system one expected from an American city, a 232 West Thirty-ninth Street must not be far away. It was not within Araceli’s experience, or that of most people who had been born and raised into adulthood in Mexico, that families picked up and moved themselves and abandoned their old properties every few years, in the same way one might discard a dress that had been worn once or twice too often. Property in Mexico stood as a constant. Once in possession of a deed, and sometimes without a deed at all, a family would plant itself on a patch of topsoil and allow themselves to become as rooted as noble old oak trees, their branches of children and grandchildren a canopy blossoming over the land. Either old man Torres himself or someone related to him would certainly be living at this West Thirty-ninth Street address, just as one could find twenty to thirty people connected by blood, marriage, and poor judgment to Araceli at Monte Líbano 210 in Nezahualcóyotl and the adjoining houses.
This escape plan liberated Araceli’s mind of the mocking ticks of the clock, of her dependence on absent bosses. She had taken control of the situation.
At 10:45 a.m. she entered the gaming room and found the two boys sitting on the couch amid the ambient noise of a cheering crowd. There was a football game taking place on the flat screen in front of them, only the players were frozen in their positions, several stopped in midstride, an image that seemed unnatural precisely because the players looked so lifelike. The virtual football teams were waiting for one or both of the boys to set them in motion with controllers that had been tossed on the rug and forgotten. Having grown bored, finally, with the pleasures of computer-generated fantasy, the boys were both reading, Brandon immersed in a Bible-sized tome, Keenan with a book of brightly colored cartoons depicting the adventures of a journalist mouse, the text rendered in a crazy pasticcio of changing fonts.
“When are Mom and Dad coming home?” Brandon asked.
“Get ready,” Araceli announced, ignoring the question. “After lunch, we go to your grandfather’s house.”
“To Grandpa John’s?” Brandon asked.
“Yes.”
“Excellent!” Keenan said. They had not seen their paternal grandfather in two years, a time at the very limit of young Keenan’s pool of memories, though the old man had left a lasting impression on both of them because he was a bit of a libertine, a dispenser of large quantities of hard candy who didn’t care if a movie was rated PG-13, and who often handed over meaningful sums of cash that raised the eyebrows of their parents. The boys associated him, most strongly, with visits to a soda fountain in his neighborhood, a place where a certain dish of chocolate in excess was served. They remembered their grandfather sitting in a booth across from them, wringing his hands in delight