The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,95
knees, waiting. After two nights she slipped inside the room with the television, leaving Tomás with a peculiar and enduring desire to see her again, though he never did.
Over here, to the right, on the sidewalk underneath the lamppost near the corner of Thirty-ninth and Broadway, a street vendor had come one Saturday evening to sell toys, Transformers, at a price that lured buyers from distant places. As the crowd of milling people around his wares grew, the vendor gave both Héctor and Tomás a Transformer. The next week more peddlers appeared, men and women selling toy cars made of steel, balloons, dolls, and other objects made of plastic or wrapped in plastic, and the crowds grew even further, enticing vendors of churros and hot dogs to come and sell also. These vendors laughed and chanted the names of their wares, and drew other strangers, who came to glue posters on the lampposts, and finally the crowds on the narrow street grew so large that people were blocking the Saturday traffic. Then the police cruisers returned, their lights strobe-flashing rosy light against the factory buildings, the apartments, and the bungalows, and the vendors disappeared. Today the only reminders of that noisy marketplace, Tomás said, were the broken Transformers that he and Héctor still had and the two or three layers of posters glued to the lamppost a few feet from the bungalow, the paper slowly bending and peeling with age. Tomás pointed out the old posters to the visitors and Brandon rose to his feet and briefly examined the lamppost from the front steps of the bungalow, seeing words and pictures half exposed by weathering.
“Los Tu-ca-neys de-el Nor-tay,” he enunciated slowly, taking delight at the phonetically exotic sounds emanating from his lips, foreign words that appeared to derive a meaning from the black leather vests and tiger-print shirts worn by Los Tucanes, a group of troubadours who traveled, apparently, in the tractor-t railer depicted behind them. He imagined them rolling into this neighborhood, which was clearly a crossroads, an outpost, an oasis of some kind. Brandon’s books were filled with accounts of such places, gathering-spots in jungles and deserts, in caves and on mountaintops, market towns where the protagonists rested before important battles and other plot shifts. Some secret force drew people to this place. How else to explain all the comings and goings of travelers, warriors, and traders, and then his own arrival with his brother and Araceli on their long trek from the Laguna Rancho Estates?
Some nights, sitting on these steps, Tomás continued, he would see a man walking down South Broadway and imagined he might be his father, especially if the man advanced with the uneven, slumped-over walk of people whose heads were swimming with what Isabel called estu-pefecantes. Tomás wasn’t especially eager to see his father, and the sight of these drugged and drunk men often caused him to retreat back into the bungalow, lest the old man come and claim him and renew their hotel-hopping adventures. But Tomás quickly realized it was silly to think this, because his father and mother were almost certainly dead: if they were alive they would have come looking for him long ago, because they needed him to help feed them, and to call the ambulance when they lost consciousness, even if they said they didn’t want to be rescued.
“Maybe our parents are dead too,” Brandon said absentmindedly. “Maybe that’s why they left us alone with Araceli.”
“No, they’re not,” Keenan said. “I talked to them.”
Before Keenan could explain further, Araceli was hovering over them, telling them it was time to go to bed. They changed into their pajamas and giggled a bit with Tomás and Héctor in the darkness, until Araceli stretched out on the floor alongside Brandon and Keenan and told them all to be quiet. The weariness of a day spent walking and traveling soon caught up with the boys, and they slipped effortlessly into a sleep that was black and complete, devoid of dreams, fantasies, and illusions.
“Nah, I wouldn’t recommend setting out on those freeways, I really wouldn’t at this particular moment.” The hotel clerk was a smart, cosmopolitan-l ooking young Iranian-American man of about twenty-five, and he offered his advice with a relaxed confidence that made it just a bit harder on Maureen to leave and rush home to her children, so that she could solve the mystery of the unanswered fifty rings of the telephone at her home. She was several hours past checkout time,