The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar Read Free Book Online Page A

mayor guy, he’s a real piece of work,” the Big Man continued, and he began to pronounce on the swirl of rumors surrounding the personal life of the city leader. Suddenly his son ran through the cluster of his audience: he was a boy of eight with the same curly hair and round belly as his father, and was wearing one of the papier-mâché helmets, along with plastic breast armor and a skirt of cardboard scraps painted to resemble leather. “Hey, it’s the Little Big Man!” someone called out, and the ensuing laughter finally brought the Big Man’s monologue to an end.
    The adults scanned the backyard for their children and saw how their swords and other homemade Roman paraphernalia were starting to fall apart, littering the lawn with scraps of cardboard and paper. They bit into their taquitos and tasted bits of shredded chicken in a red sauce that was boldly spiced with organic
chile de árbol.
Now Araceli was weaving between them with two
sopes
on her tray: they were the last two, she had just realized, and she was going to try to make it back to the kitchen and impertinently devour them. But just as she broke free of the main cluster of guests, she walked into a patch of open grass to discover the Big Man standing alone and suddenly staring straight at her, and then at her tray and the
sopes.
The Big Man raised his boxcar eyebrows jauntily and extended his hands, using one to take the last two
sopes,
and the other to place his empty drink on Araceli’s tray. “Thanks, kid.”
    “¡Cabrón!”
Araceli muttered under her breath, but the Big Man did not hear her because he was circling back to the conversation, which had taken the lamenting, retrospective tone that eventually came to dominate the reunions of the MindWare alumni, once the alcohol started to set in.
    “We should have set up in India,” Tyler Smith was saying. “Everyone is doing that now. Bombay.”
    “Mumbai,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi corrected.
    “Yeah. Or Bangalore. Everyone was telling us to do that.”
    “The stockholders,” Tyler Smith said, repeating a word whose connotations only further darkened their shared mood. “The guy from that hedge fund. What an asshole!”
    “Shahe!” the Big Man’s wife shouted toward the inflated castle. “Shahe Avakian! Take your foot off that boy’s neck now!”
    “Those bouncy houses always bring out the aggressive behavior,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi said.
    “The stockholders! The sacred stockholders!” interjected the Big Man, as his molars crushed what was left of Araceli’s last
sope.
“The first thing we should have done is killed all the stockholders.”
    “Uh, that would have included all of us too.”
    “And the board members too. Where did we find those people?” said the Big Man, who knew perfectly well.
    “They actually expected us to make money,” Scott said.
    “Remember that letter from that stockholder in Tennessee?” the head of research said. “The guy who said he was sticking with us even though he’d lost half of his investment.”
    “And all those stupid suggestions he made,” Scott said. “That we should move our headquarters to Nashville.”
    “Toyota moved there,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi said dryly. “At least the guy was loyal.”
    “I’m sure he sold what he had pretty soon after.”
    “I’m still living under the dictatorship of the stockholders,” Scott said. He was a midlevel executive at a new company, supervising programmers. “The stockholders measure and quantify everything you do. Most of them you never see, but they seem to know everything you do. Like God, I guess. They’ll turn their backs on you if your numbers aren’t right, and then go off running in the direction of another guy who does have the right numbers. Like a herd.”
    This observation caused a pause of agreement and knowing nods. “If you think about it,” Carla Wallace-Zuberi offered, “the whole system is like mob rule.”
    “Woe to the land that’s ruled by a child!” the Big