The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,79
of scorched-earth warfare, including the slaughter of entire villages and their children with blades forged from various metals, real and fanciful, and the antagonists who filled their speeches with fascistic rationalizations about “the weak,” “the strong,” and “the pure.” It was all meant to be an allegory about the cruelty and demagoguery of the modern age, and its imagery drew heavily from the outrages of the twentieth century, so much so, and so realistically, that the sharp-eyed Brandon had long ago concluded that the story was not entirely the product of a writer’s imagination. Long before this train journey Brandon had begun to warm to the idea that the Fire-Swallower saga was, in fact, a thinly veiled, detailed account of a real but primitive corner of the actual world. Entire cities emptied of good people, civilians tortured, their homes and their books set to the torch. How could such injustice exist, how could humanity live with it? He knew he should speak of what he read to his mother, who obviously had no idea about the taboos being broken in the works of literature he carried about the house: “You’re such a good little reader,” was all she said. It was stunning to be confronted with such adult naïveté, though it was undeniably cool to possess knowledge forbidden to eleven-year-olds who were not as precocious readers as he. Still, the stories told in the saga caused him to lose sleep some nights, until he finally convinced himself that what he was reading was indeed fantasy. And now this, a wounded man, an actual victim of the Fire-Swallowers’ wrath, driven to seek shelter by the concrete river with his fellow Vardurians.
“Those flame-swallowing bastards!” Brandon cried out, in imitation of the hero of the saga, the noble Prince Goo-han.
“¿Qué dices?” Araceli said. “¿Bastardos?” Suddenly the eleven-year-old was saying swear words. He’s only been out of the house and into the world a few hours and already he’s being corrupted.
“It’s the Fire-Swallowers,” Brandon said in a tone of patient explanation, having realized quickly that Araceli had never read those books: they were in English, after all. “The Fire-Swallowers made these people refugees. They destroyed their towns and houses. They fled and they’ve come to live here by the river. I read about it in Revenge of the Riverwalkers. The Fire-Swallowers burned down their village, Vardur, because they wouldn’t swear loyalty to the evil king. So they had to seek shelter on the riverbanks, but I never thought …”
“Estás loco,” Araceli said. “You read too much.”
No one had ever told Brandon such a thing: in the Torres-Thompson home reading was a sacred act; it was the one activity the children were allowed without time limits or parental supervision. Books were powerful and good, they told truths, and Brandon decided he should ignore his temporary caretaker’s remarks and study the Vardurian camp and see what secrets it might reveal. Brandon’s memory stretched back only a few years beyond the time they moved into the Laguna Rancho Estates, and his idea of what homes looked like was deeply influenced by the repetitive conformity of his neighborhood, with its association-approved paint schemes and standard-sized driveways. Below him, now, was a place where every shelter was entirely different from its neighbor, many with tiny yards fenced in with loops of electrical wire and plastic bags tied together to form a kind of rope. Before the train made one final turn and headed into the station he spotted one last Vardurian: a woman with a fountain of silvery hair who was sweeping out her shelter with a broom.
Maureen stood over the portable crib in her hotel room and studied her daughter as she took an afternoon nap. Samantha slept on her back, clutching the yellow blanket that accompanied her day and night, her closed eyes peaceful hemispheres, with her rusty eyelashes as delicate equators. With her eyes closed Samantha’s oval face was nearly identical to her oldest brother when he was the same age, the boy’s sleeping face recorded in a photograph framed in mahogany in their living room gallery: Maureen’s separation from Brandon for more than seventy-two hours only heightened the sense that she was looking down at her son and not her daughter, and she began to feel the deepening absence of her boys from her life. When you see your children sleeping you understand the full glory and beauty of being a mother; you stand tall and awake before their silent need, before their purity and