The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,80
vulnerability. She looked up at where she was, in a hotel room of slightly overdone southwestern décor, with a Navajo rug nailed to the wall opposite the bed and an authentic, desert-baked ram’s skull hanging on the door, and could hear the startled voice of her conscience screaming out, What have I done? My son! My sons! She picked up the phone and called home.
At that moment, Maureen’s boys were walking dutifully behind their Mexican caretaker, taking their first steps off the train at Union Station. They walked along one of several parallel platforms between locomotive behemoths, one of which was ringing a bell as it rolled away, roughly at the pace of a walking man, into open tracks toward the city beyond. Brandon and Keenan saw porters wearing stiff caps, and seniors defeated by the stacks of luggage on steel carts, and heard a speaker pronounce, “Last call for the Sunset Limited … all aboard!” and thought that at last they’d arrived at a real train station. The boys wanted to linger out on the open-air platform, in the meaningful presence of all that rolling stock and those travelers, but Araceli was telling them to follow her, with an impatient “Órale, por aquí,” and they descended down a long, sloping ramp, going underground.
They entered a long and wide hallway with low ceilings that reminded Keenan of airports he had visited. Araceli had passed through here during her first days in Los Angeles, and the sight of the crowds of people with huge duffel bags and boxes tucked under their arms reminded her of that other, more innocent Araceli. Sola. With a hard-shell suitcase the smuggler had mocked for its patent impracticality, dazzled by the city’s alien and sleek feel, suffering a kind of weird agoraphobia because she was in a vast plain of unknown things. The reencounter with her recent past only made Araceli more uncomfortable, more anxious to reach her destination. She looked left and then right and decided to go right, beginning to walk very quickly, navigating smartly between the crosscurrents of passengers, like a chilanga again, almost losing Brandon and Keenan because she was in such a hurry.
“Hey, Araceli, wait up,” Brandon shouted, and Araceli turned back and gave him a mildly exasperated look identical to the one she showed him two or three times a day in his own living room, bedroom, and kitchen.
Walking side by side now, they passed an electronic sign announcing destinations and departure times, LAS VEGAS BUS, TEXAS EAGLE, SURFLINER NORTH, and then suddenly entered a room where the low ceilings disappeared and the space above them opened up, causing Brandon and Keenan to crane their necks skyward. They marveled at the vaulted ceiling, which was covered with tiles of vaguely Mediterranean or Arabic styling, exuding both warmth and largeness. Chandeliers resembling baroque spacecraft hung from the rafters and both boys silently mouthed the word Whoa as they walked underneath them. There were rows of high-backed, upholstered benches where boys in baseball uniforms and weary, sunburned Dutch and Italian travelers sat with clusters of nylon backpacks at their feet. A crew that was in the second day of a music-video shoot was packing up in the unused and locked wing of the station where tickets had once been sold, where the oak-paneled ticket windows served as permanent and oft-used sets.
“I’ve seen this place in the movies,” Keenan said. “I thought it was pretend.”
They passed through an arch high enough for the tallest troll or giant to fit through, and then walked out the main door of the station, where they were confronted by the summer sunlight, and cars and pedestrians all moving purposefully northward and southward on streets and walkways. Behind this shifting tableau stood the imposing backdrop of the downtown Los Angeles skyline, the glass skyscrapers of the Financial District, and the stubby stone tower of City Hall, which had a ziggurat pyramid on top, so that it resembled a Mesopotamian rocket ready for launch.
“No, por aquí no es,” Araceli said, and she circled back into the waiting room again, the boys scrambling behind her.
She walked up to the information booth and the tall, lean, sclerotic man standing there, the name tag on his jacket announcing him to be GUS DIMITRI, VOLUNTEER.
“We are looking for the buses,” Araceli said.
Gus Dimitri was a spry octogenarian and a native of South Los Angeles, old enough to remember when that black and brown ghetto of today was a whites-only haven for Greeks, Jews,