The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,90
Isabel to the kitchen, which occupied the transitional space between the room where the children were watching television and a third room in the back where there were two more beds and a dresser covered with cold creams, rouges, eyeliner, and perfume bottles and makeup containers that filled the air with a bouquet of ethanol and coconut oil. From this spot, Araceli could keep an eye on the children, and also watch as Isabel drew water from the tap and filled a pot to boil the hot dogs. La señora Maureen would be scandalized: she insisted that all cooking in her home be done with bottled water.
“And the kids?” Isabel asked Araceli in a conspiratorial Spanish half whisper. “What’s going on with them?”
“They belong to the family I work for,” Araceli said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Their parents disappeared on me. And I came looking for their grandfather. I thought he lived here.”
“Maybe he lived here once. But I’ve been here two years and haven’t seen any other viejos other than Mr. Washington.” Isabel opened a cabinet and removed a small, flat package from a space where boxes, loaves of bread, cans, and plastic bags were packed in as tight as passengers on a Mexico City subway, then threw the package into a microwave, and the room was soon filled with the sound of corn popping. Araceli looked over and saw that Brandon was talking to the children who lived here, their heads leaning forward, Isabel’s boy nodding, his eyes narrowed in an expression of serious contemplation. She wondered in which language they were conversing.
When the movie ended, Brandon and the Other Boy renewed their discussion of the plot and characters, talking in a bilingual mix of English and Spanish that leaned heavily toward the former. “I think the bruja blanca has to come back in the next movie,” the Other Boy, Tomás, was saying. “There’s lots of movies where people come back from the dead.”
“Who are they going to do battle with if not the witch?” Héctor offered, and then he and Tomás looked at Brandon, because in the twenty minutes they had been watching the movie together Brandon had, with a few comments and observations, already established himself as an authority on the subject.
Brandon moved his head back and forth in a gesture that meant Yes and no. The movie was based on another series of books Brandon had read and finished, over the course of Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations and many school nights in between during his fourth-grade year. More than a year had passed since he had completed the seventh volume in the series, but he remembered all the books in great detail. “The witch is really dead and she’s not coming back. But she’s in another book that comes before this one.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Brandon began a patient, detailed recitation of the long, winding series of adventures of the characters portrayed in the movie, an epic narrative that involved an apple core, the tree that blossomed from it, a piece of furniture built from the tree, and various magicians, professors, and animals with visionary powers, all unfolding in the City of London and other places in the real world, and in a magical, parallel realm. Brandon had also read about the historical war that took place in the background of the seven-volume fantasy saga, in a big picture book called Eyewitness: World War II, and he wove a few events from that conflict into the story that he told Tomás and Héctor, who were shocked to hear that German planes had bombed British cities and transformed entire neighborhoods into flaming rubble. “How could they do that to the kids down there?” Tomás asked, and Brandon replied, “Don’t know. That’s just the way war is, I guess.”
“It happened to my grandpa in the war, in Chalatenango,” Héctor interjected, causing the other boys to stop and look at him and await more details, though he had none. Héctor was a shy boy and not a natural storyteller, and El Salvador was a place that might as well have been a place from a fantasy novel, because he had never been there and he knew the country only from the stories his father told him during his twice-monthly visits.
Returning to the fantasy saga depicted in the movie, Brandon told them how, over the course of seven books, it had become clear that the magical and the real inhabited the same physical space—“not like in the movie, where they have to go