The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar

Author:Héctor Tobar
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781444726756
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

“¡Buenos días!” Councilman Luján said, causing his daughter, Lucía, to startle and sit up straight, and her three friends to emit wake-up groans and coughs.

“This is Araceli,” he said to Lucía. “She’s a friend of your cousin Marisela. And she’s visiting us for Fourth of July with the two boys she takes care of. ¿Cómo se llaman?”

“Brandon.”

“Keenan.”

“Look, they just finished with the trampoline,” Councilman Luján said. “Vayan a jugar. Go play.”

The boys ran off, while Araceli joined the four young adults. Lucía Luján was nineteen, and Araceli recognized her immediately as the girl in the cap and gown in the living room, even though the thick braids into which she had woven her hair for summer had the curious effect of making her look younger than in the photograph. Her friends wore jewels and studs in the crooks of their noses, and loops inside their earlobes, and presented Araceli with the realization that she was losing touch with urban fashions. Probably they were already wearing these things in Mexico City, or would soon be, Araceli thought. “Hola, ¿qué tal?” Lucía said, after rubbing the sleepiness out of her eyes. “I think my cousin told me about you once.”

Lucía was wearing the same clothes she had put on the night before, but even in this wrinkled and weary state, she presented a picture of hip and fashionable mexicana femininity. She wore a vintage pin-tucked blouse of caramel silk, its shimmering skin playing an odd lightgame with the copper tone of her skin and the half dozen friendship bracelets on her wrist. That blouse looked one hundred years old to Araceli and brand-new at the same time. Lucía was two weeks back from Princeton and still suffering from the cruel cultural whiplash caused by her return to Huntington Park: she had lived nine months among assorted geniuses and trust-fund children from across the United States, none of whom understood the contradictions of being a young expatriate from her own, wire-crossed corner of mexicano California. A week before finals she had split up with a young man who hailed from a moneyed Long Island suburb, in part because he had talked about coming to Huntington Park this summer, and the thought of him entering her home in his Tommy Hilfiger summer-wear was too much to bear. She imagined him reciting to her friends those Lorca poems he had memorized—¡verde que te quiero verde!—and thought, No, that won’t go over well in HP. She was still trying to figure out where she stood after a nine-month waking dream of calcified eastern tradition and unadorned American ambition. I am not the same Lucía. She was trying to figure out too how to tell her father that she had already dropped the premed classes in favor of Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, and James Baldwin. Lucía the Ivy Leaguer did not smile or laugh as easily as before, and sometimes she laughed harder and louder and with a kind of cynical meanness her friends did not recognize.

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