The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,83
the feeling of standing in the still and ugly oxygen of a real city. “We walk. That way,” Araceli said, pointing south down a long thoroughfare that ran perpendicular to the street the bus had left them on, the four lanes running straight toward a line of distant palm trees that grew shorter until they were toothpicks swallowed up by the haze.
“This doesn’t look like the place my grandfather lives,” Brandon said.
“Is it close?” Keenan asked.
“Sí. Just a few blocks.”
They stood alone, housekeeper and young charges, on a block where only the bus bench and shelter interrupted the empty sweep of the sidewalk. So strange, Araceli observed, a block without people, just as on Paseo Linda Bonita, but this time in the middle of an aging city with buildings from the previous century. All the storefronts were shuttered and locks as big as oranges dangled from their steel doors, while swarthy men struck poses for the passing motorists from rooftop billboards, their fingers enviously wrapped around light-skinned women and bottles of beer and hard liquor. For a moment Araceli thought that Brandon might be right, that el viejo Torres could not live near here. Then again, you never knew in Los Angeles what you might find around the next corner. You could be in the quiet, sunny, and gritty desolation of a block like this at one moment, and find yourself on a tree-l ined, shady, and glimmering block of apartments the next. Mexico City was like that too.
Once again, the wheels of the boys’ suitcases clack-clacked on the sidewalk as they marched southward. “This doesn’t look like where he lives,” Brandon repeated, annoying Araceli. “In fact, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the place.”
“It’s just a few blocks,” she insisted. In a few minutes she would be free of the care of these two boys and the pressure would be lifted from her temples. Their grandfather would emerge from his door, she would tell him the story of the table and the empty house, and he would make them an early dinner and she would be free of them. They advanced southward, witnessed only by the passing motorists, who were all accelerating on this stretch of relatively open roadway, going too fast to take much note of the caravan of pedestrians headed southward in single file, a boy with rock-star-long hair leading the way, his brow wrinkled skeptically, a smaller child behind him, and a big-boned Mexican woman bringing up the rear and studying the street signs. These were the final minutes before the clock struck five, and the drivers were eager to cover as much ground as possible before the skyline to the north began to empty of clerks, analysts, corporate vice presidents, cafeteria workers, public relations specialists, sales wizards, and assorted other salaried slaves. On this midsummer day, most of these automobiles proceeded with windows sealed and artificial alpine breezes blowing inside, but the air-conditioning was not working inside the Toyota Cressida of Judge Robert Adalian, a jurist at the nearby concrete bunker known as Los Angeles Municipal Traffic Court—Central District. Judge Adalian was driving with the windows open when Araceli, Brandon, and Keenan passed before him at the crosswalk on Thirty-seventh Street and South Broadway, thanks to the rare red light on his drive northward along Broadway, his daily detour of choice to avoid the Harbor Freeway. These pedestrians pushed the button to cross and broke the sequence of the lights, the judge thought as he took in the odd spectacle of a woman who was clearly Mexican with two boys who were clearly not. It’s not their skin tone that gives the boys away, it’s their hair and the way they’re walking and studying everything around them like tourists. Those boys don’t belong here. Through his open window he caught a snippet of their talk.
“I think we’re lost,” the taller boy said.
“No seas ridículo, no estamos lost,” the Mexican woman answered, irritated, and the judge chuckled, because he’d grown up in Hollywood with some Guatemalans and Salvadorans, and the Mexican woman’s brief use of Spanglish transported him to that time and place, twenty years ago, when Spanish could still be heard in his old neighborhood, before that final exodus from the old Soviet Union had filled up the neighborhood with so many refugees from the old country (including his future wife) that the city had put up signs around it announcing LITTLE ARMENIA. The light turned green and the judge quickly filed away the Mexican woman