The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,88
the gutter.
The unwanted closeness caused the muscles of her legs and back to tense. Why are you so spoiled and helpless? Why can’t you have one nosy aunt or uncle or cousin nearby like all the other children on earth? She was going to have to make a decision about them. Was $250 stuffed in an envelope every week enough to justify this march across the city? Looking across the street and to her right, she saw a phone booth. If she just picked up the line and called, then maybe she could get the Foster Care people without summoning the police. And then I would be free. Down the block to Araceli’s left, a group of squat men and women with round faces gathered around a taco truck, in a chatty cluster before the swing shift began at what she guessed was a garment factory. Behind them she could see a loading dock with a large opening to a vast interior space with low ceilings and a bluish glow, engines groaning and puffing metallically. The boys from the Room of a Thousand Wonders did not know that there was a world of dangerous machines and a city of dark alleys all around them. Having been thrown together with these two boys, in the inescapably intimate situation of being their sole caretaker, Araceli suddenly felt the great distance that separated her life from theirs. I am a member of the tribe of chemical cleansers, of brooms, of machetes and shovels, and they are the people of pens and keyboards. We are people whose skin bakes in the sun, while they labor and live in fluorescent shadows, covering their skins with protective creams when they venture outside. Deeper and farther away to the south, beyond the mean city, there were rocky landscapes where men dug tunnels under steel fences, and deserts where children begged for water and asked their fathers if the next ridge was the last one, and cried when the answer was no. Brandon and Keenan did not know of such horrors, but Araceli did, and had survived them, and she wondered how many scars the boys might have after a night or two, or perhaps a week or a month, in Foster Care, which she imagined to be an anteroom to that dark and dangerous world. Maybe she couldn’t and shouldn’t protect them, maybe it was better for them to see and know. Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world. She wondered if she was living at the beginning of a new era, when the pale and protected began to live among the dark and the sorrowful, the angry multitudes of the south.
Behind them a door opened and Araceli and the boys turned around to see the woman from the first bungalow heading down the steps and walking toward them, with three giggling children trailing behind her.
13
Isabel Aguilar peeled back the curtain and spied on the lost strangers through the window of her small living room, which also doubled as the bedroom of her son and the Other Boy who lived with her. The three strangers sat on the curb, two white boys and a mexicana in a foul mood. Encounters with disoriented travelers were not unusual on Thirty-ninth Street, where Isabel’s rented bungalow stood at the edge of a district of hurricane fencing and barbed wire, of HELP WANTED signs in Korean, Spanish, and Cantonese, where cloth was transformed into boutique T-shirts and steel was cut and solvents were mixed. When lost pedestrians reached Isabel’s front step and contemplated the industrial horizon that began on her street, they realized they were in the wrong place and knocked on her door, twisting their faces into question marks: “¿Y la Main, dónde está?” “You know where my homie Ruben lives?” “Have any idea, honey, where I might find the United States Post Office?” Isabel answered the door for all of them, and sometimes opened the outer metal barrier, the better to hear their questions, even though she was a single mother living with her two children and the Other Boy who was not her son. She had been born in a town in the municipality of Sonsonate, El Salvador, a place of rusting railroad tracks where the green mushroom-cloud canopy of a single ceiba tree billowed over the central plaza and where neighbors knocked on your door expecting to be invited in.