The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar

homes they worked and lived in, while simultaneously keeping an eye on their charges, who were swarming over the play structure and filling the air around it with the squeals their parents called “outside voices.” Carmelita sat on the mat a few feet from Araceli and allowed the boy in her care to stand in his leather shoes and overalls, walk toward her, and then fall into her embrace. Modesta, a freckled and green-eyed
mexicana,
raised a finger at a girl climbing the roof of the structure’s plastic cube, and the girl immediately clambered down to safety. They were all parents themselves (and María Isabel a grandparent), and their motherly self-assurance fell over and calmed the children around them like a rain of warm milk. Once they’d finished greeting Araceli, their conversation drifted, as it often did, to the practical problems of child-rearing.
    “This is a good place to practice walking. If he falls, he can’t hurt himself.”
    “If you don’t let them fall, they don’t learn to walk.”
    “I remember when Kylie was that age.
Es una edad de peligros:
they fall as much as they talk. She still has that scar on her forehead, underneath her hair.”
    “I finally got Jackson to eat the squash, after I tried that recipe with the food machine.
Un milagro.
But it didn’t work with his sister.”
    “Each one is different. God makes them that way.”
    Araceli watched and listened, saw the children on the play structure casting glances at their paid caregivers, and the caregivers looking back as if to say,
You are okay, I am here.
They knew that each child was his or her own shifting landscape because the estrogen that ran through their veins, and their own histories as mothers, allowed them to see these things: Araceli sensed that North American employers and Latin American relatives alike revered them for this power.
They all seem to possess it—and to know that I do not.
    After a while their attention returned to Araceli, the quiet, awkward woman in their midst, and the small mystery and break in the park routine she represented. What, they now asked directly, had happened to Guadalupe?
    “I guess they didn’t have enough money to pay her what she wanted,” Araceli told them. “Or to keep her.”
    “Or she didn’t want to stay,” María Isabel said knowingly.
    “No sé.”
    “Yes, I remember her saying something about the money,” María Isabel said. “First they asked her to work for less. Then her
patrón
said they were going to need just one person to cook and clean and take care of the kids too. To do everything. Guadalupe said she thought it was too much work for one person. And that she wouldn’t do it, even if they asked her … So I guess they hired you.”
    Araceli said nothing.
    “Do you know where she went?” Carmelita asked.
    “No.”
    Suddenly the newcomer looked perplexed and agitated. Araceli could see now that all the scenery at Paseo Linda Bonita had been shifting around her, even before Guadalupe left: calculations were being made, consultations undertaken. Araceli worked harder than Guadalupe, she was infinitely more reliable, but she didn’t chat with her bosses, or make friendly with them, and so they had revealed their crisis to Guadalupe, the flighty and talkative one. But they hadn’t even bothered asking Araceli what she thought, and had instead simply foisted more work upon her. Araceli saw her standing in the world with a new and startling clarity. She lived with English-speaking strangers, high on a hill alone with the huge windows and the smell of solvents, and lacked the will to escape what she had become. She quietly accepted the Torres-Thompsons’ money and the room they gave her, and they felt free to make her do anything they asked, expecting her to adapt to their habits and idiosyncrasies, holding babies, supervising boys at the park, and probably more things that she could not yet imagine.
    “Sometimes, you just have to pack your things and go to the next