The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,94

doorway and his bed, which was under the window that faced out onto the street. Many a night he had crawled out from under the covers and peeked out the window to investigate the source of a noise, relaying whispered descriptions to Héctor, who was usually too frightened to get out from under his covers and look for himself: “It’s the police. They’ve got a guy, I haven’t seen him before. He’s sitting on the curb. They’re pulling back his hands.” “It’s just some drunk guy.” “She’s crying and she’s hitting him on the chest and now he’s hugging her again …”

In Tomás’s mind the window and the doorway were like a television of constantly switching channels, with new actors and dramas arriving to perform on the Thirty-ninth Street set before departing for new lives in other neighborhoods offstage. Having himself survived a transient existence, this did not strike Tomás as an abnormal state of affairs. He watched people pull up to the neighborhood in Chevy Novas brimming with boxes and towels pressed against the curving glass of rear windows, or jumping off the backs of pickup trucks, or on foot carrying their belongings in big duffel bags they dragged forward on the sidewalk like stubborn farm animals. They came chatting and laughing in large family groups, or quiet and alone with flight bags tucked under their arms, squinting up at the street names on the sign poles to make sure they hadn’t taken a wrong turn. Tomás secretly took in their stories with his eyes, and now he tried his best to relate what he had seen, to show his new friends that he could tell tales too, even though he had never read a book. Thirty-ninth Street was a book-story, Tomás now realized, although one with characters more varied and fleeting than those in Brandon’s readings.

Many of the events in the neighborhood book-story took place underneath the four streetlamps visible from the front porch, Tomás said. They were nocturnal machines that came to life with a snap and a buzz an hour after sundown, and their yellow glow had the curious property of subtracting the color from the street, so that the events of the night played out like a black-and-white movie. For many months the neighborhood story was dominated by events that took place at the far edge of what could be seen from Tomás’s window, at the corner of Calvino Street, underneath a streetlamp recently repaired by a crew of city workers with a truck that had a stretching bucket that lifted a man into the air. A group of young men used to gather underneath the lamppost on Calvino Street, not for its light (which they repeatedly broke with rocks) but for the markings they had painted on the post’s metal skin, a tangle of letters and swirls that made the post resemble a stiff, tattooed arm. The young men gathered for conferences, listening with their hands in their pockets as the members of their group took turns making speeches, and then they would wrestle one another and shadowbox, and sometimes they would pick one boy and pummel him while they counted to thirteen. The lamppost was no longer covered with graffiti, and the cluster of young men no longer gathered there because they had gone off to battle in another neighborhood, Tomás had heard, and afterward their spot under the lamppost was occupied for several weeks by police cruisers staffed by bored officers with leaden eyelids.

With the young men gone, other people spilled out onto the streets, Tomás said. On some nights the male workers from the factories played soccer using the no-longer-tattooed lamppost to mark the goal, and their shouts, whistles, and laughter echoed against the buildings. There was a teenage girl who sat in a doorway of the apartment directly behind the lamppost, and for several months a teenage boy had come to court her. They talked for an hour or two each night at the open door, the girl’s awkward silhouette framed by a kaleidoscope television light flickering through the doorway. Once the girl came down and sat on the steps next to the boy, pulling down her skirt and adjusting the straps on her blouse, her leg touching the boy’s, until the bulky shadow of the girl’s mother appeared in the doorway. Tomás said he watched the couple talk for eight nights until the boy stopped coming, leaving the girl on the front steps with her elbows resting on her