The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,74

the seat in front of them, leaning forward with the wide eyes of boys taking a ride at the amusement park, and for a moment Araceli was struck by their smallness and fragility, and worried about the bruises and broken bones an accident could bring. These boys never traveled without the protection of seat belts and the crash-tested engineering of American family vehicles. A bus crash could send bodies flying against metal and glass. Araceli had learned this in Mexico City; she knew the dangers firsthand. True, this American bus driver did not bob and weave through traffic like his Mexico City counterparts, who plied their routes with homicidal aggressiveness in rattling and rusty vehicles. Once she had stumbled upon the scene of a bus accident, during her final visit to the art fair in Coyoacán, moments after purchasing a small oil painting rendered on a piece of wood that depicted a suited and masked lucha libre wrestler standing stiffly with his bride. The tableau of stupidity and suffering she encountered that day finally convinced her it was time to leave Mexico. The bus passengers had suffered no visible injuries, though a few were sitting on the edge of the sidewalk theatrically rubbing their necks while a taxi driver remonstrated with them. A few paces away a skinny teenager with chocolate skin and oily hair was gasping for breath as he lay on his back in the gutter, his eyes blazing open to the dirty blue sky as two dozen of his fellow citizens gathered around him, studying him with the distant, emotionless stare chilangos are famous for. Look. A young man is dying right here in front of us. This is something we don’t normally see. It’s all so more real than what’s on television, isn’t it? This isn’t an actor. He is a poor man like us, just trying to make a few more pesos like the ones he is still clutching in his hand. We can’t help him; we can only look and thank the Virgin that it isn’t us down there.

“Is he dying, Mommy?” a child’s voice asked.

“¿Y la pinche ambulancia?” shouted an irritated voice from the back of the cluster.

The young crash victim was a street vendor: a few paces away his bicycle lay bent, while a passerby gathered his scattered load of loofah sponges and stacked them in a small pyramid next to the bicycle. Yes, the boy is dying, but they might need his loofahs in heaven. Araceli was standing at the edge of Coyoacán’s seventeenth-century plaza, in sight of the domed church and the gazebo, next to a line of trees whose trunks were painted white to discourage drivers from crashing into them. She felt bile rising in her throat as the other bystanders pushed their elbows against hers. A red trickle flowed from the young victim’s nostrils, and when he stopped blinking the crowd started to thin, people walking away in a silence as yet unbroken by the wailing of an ambulance. At that moment Araceli fully and finally comprehended the cruelty of her native city, the precariousness of life in the presence of so much unregulated traffic and unfulfilled need, a city where people born farmers and fishermen sprinted before cars faster than any horse or sailing ship. The crash cured her of any lingering procrastinator’s malaise and set in motion her oft-delayed plans to leave for the United States. That night she made a fateful phone call to a friend in downtown Los Angeles, and believed she heard in her friend’s upbeat voice a place where cars, bicycles, and pedestrians each occupied their own byways, sensibly and safely moving through the city.

Scott’s route from the Irvine Hampton Inn to his hillside home took him along the five northbound lanes of Interstate 5, a highway that was considerably thinner and less traveled in Scott’s youth, when it had been known as the Golden State Freeway. The highway was an immense channel of metal and heated air, and at forty miles an hour or seventy-five, its straightness and width exercised a hypnotic power over drivers. As he navigated through the thinly populated fringes of Orange County, at a late-morning post-commute hour with only moderate traffic, Scott found his thoughts about the coming reencounter with Maureen intermingling with the running dots and dashes of the white lines that demarcated the lanes. The lines were a siren speaking in murmurs of rushing air that bade him to follow-me, follow-me, follow-me, to mountain passes,