The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “I know,” she shouted back.

  The music stopped. People around them wiped perspiration from their foreheads and headed for the edge of the patio dance floor. Before Araceli could prepare herself for the inevitable Thank you and goodbye, the music had started again and the curly-headed man was asking, “¿Otra?“ “¡Sí!“

  During the second song he said his name was Felipe and after the third he asked her name. When the music stopped after the fourth song she asked him where he was from, just so he wouldn’t go away. “Sonora,” he said. “A little town called Imuris. It’s near Cananea. ¿Y tú?”

  “El De Efe.”

  When it became clear he did not want to run away, she asked Felipe if he knew anyone else at the party. A few people, he said.

  “I don’t know anyone.”

  “Look, over there,” he said. “It’s the girl who is having the quince-añera.”

  Araceli turned to see a tall young woman with mahogany skin who wore a tight white dress covered in constellations of beads. Nicolasa had the confident look of a young woman enjoying her day of neighborhood celebrity, and was listening to an older man and studying him with smart, dark eyes that occasionally darted away from him to the landscape of the backyard party: the crowd, and the strings of lights, and a large white sign attached to the fence that read feliz 15 nica. Her black hair was parted in the middle and long braids ran down over her shoulders: a girl’s hairstyle and a woman’s face and body. Next to her was a boy with the same complexion but a foot shorter: her brother, apparently. He looked small and vulnerable, and possessed all the tragic aura that his sister lacked: without the black suit he was wearing, he might be one of those boys you see weaving between the cars in Mexico City, raising their palms to catch coins and raindrops from the sky. Now the big, beefy man talking to them raised a bicep to show them a tattoo, a portrait of a cigarette-smoking soldier in a steel helmet, with sgt. ray, r.i.p. written inside a scroll underneath.

  “They’ve been through a lot,” Felipe said.

  “So you know that story?”

  “You mean about their mother dying and being adopted and all that? Yeah. Everybody does. Everybody in the neighborhood, at least.”

  “I’m not from the neighborhood.”

  “Yeah, I know. I think I would have remembered you,” he said, naturally and simply, without any secondary meanings.

  “You see that guy next to them? He got back a few months ago from the war. His name is José. He’s a cousin of the lady who owns this house.”

  “What about you? What’s your story?”

  “I paint houses. And some construction. But mostly I paint houses.”

  “That pays well, qué no?”

  “It’s okay. But I like to paint other things besides walls. ¿Entiendes? The other day I was painting at this family’s house and I heard la señora asking my boss if he knew anyone who could paint a design on a table for her. I stepped in and said I could do it, because I like to draw. She wanted a dragon for her son’s room, so I made her one. A big red dragon. She liked it and the boy did too. That was fun.”

  “You’re an artist!”

  “No, I wouldn’t call myself that. But I like to draw. The dragon turned out okay.”

  “I studied art,” Araceli offered, making a conscious effort not to speak breathlessly: a dancing artist had fallen into her lap, and she wanted to tell him everything, all at once. “I was at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in El De Efe, but only for a year. Then I had to quit.” Araceli thought she should explain why, but stopped herself: among mexicanos of their status, in this place called California, no explanations were necessary when describing dreams that died.

  “I could tell by looking at you that you’re really smart. You look like one of those girls from the show Rebelde. A student. I could tell. That’s why I asked you to dance.”

  At the end of the evening, the two of them having danced for two hours, Felipe said he had to leave because he had to be up early the next morning. Tomorrow is a Sunday, why would you have to be up early? Araceli wanted to ask, but she resisted the temptation. He asked for her phone number, which she wrote on a slip of paper he tucked into the front pocket of his shirt.

  “I work in a house,” she told him. Trabajo en una casa. It meant, Yes, you can call me, but a gringo will answer, and be polite, please, and don’t call me in the middle of the night because my jefes won’t appreciate that. He appeared to understand and smiled as he turned away, and Araceli got one last good look at the backside of his slacks as he left: he was husky when you looked at him from the front, but from the back he was much better proportioned, the width of his shoulders stood out, suggesting a certain musculature. He was a sensitive mexicano trapped, like her, in a too-big body.

  On Sunday afternoon, some thirty-six hours after the departure of her only domestic help, Maureen found herself sitting on the floor of her walk-in closet, listening to the steady static that came from the baby monitor, and to the distant sounds of heads being smashed, flesh being pierced, and stone walls crashing to the ground. Allowing the boys the pleasures of movie-made warfare was the only way she was going to get a little time to herself, to sort through her box of family pictures and to arrange the photographs of Samantha’s first birthday in the album she had purchased months ago. Maureen did this to calm herself, and as an affirmation of the nurturing progress of her family. She took a picture of Scott holding Samantha at the party and placed it next to another that showed the baby sitting before her cake, with Brandon and Keenan on either side, helping her blow out a wick that burned atop a wax number one. The blending of features in the faces of their children was plain to see: there was Ireland in the specks of emerald in Keenan’s eyes, Maine in her daughter’s prominent jaw, and Mexico in the way Brandon’s long nose stretched. Her children blended the features of many branches of the human tree. In their faces she saw the hands of an eccentric creator, an artist who surprises his audience with the unexpected.

  On the other end of the Paseo Linda Bonita home, Scott was gripping a console control with two hands, playing a football simulation of cutting-edge visual complexity. He had purchased the newest release two days earlier, thinking that he could justify the cost as a professional, tax-deductible expense, because he had designed a game or two in his day and might again. But the unadorned truth was that a bestselling game like this was beyond his talents, which had been honed in the days of “real programming.” You had to manage and inspire large groups of people to bring a game like this to market: artists, teams of technicians conducting motion studies, and brain trusts of football mavens to work out the strategy book. This game was a big Hollywood production: the credits were buried deep in the disk for true geeks like Scott to find, and ran on for several pages, as if for a David Lean epic.

  A man needed to play, to feel the exhilaration and escape of sports, even if he was sitting down while doing it, so Scott returned to the task at hand: leading his team of animated San Francisco players to victory over a Pittsburgh team. The glossy realism of the animation more than made up for the lack of exertion, and as he completed a third-and-long backed up against his own goal line, Scott thought that a virtual triumph was the most ephemeral source of adrenaline out there, but it did make it easier to do the dishes afterward. Maureen expected Scott to leave the kitchen spotless, to attack the stacks of bowls and oily pans in the sink, wipe the counters, and sweep the floor. It was an absurd rule of Maureen’s that the house had to look “presentable” when Araceli walked in the door on Monday morning. Unfortunately, the disarray built rather quickly in Araceli’s absence, with dishes filling the sink and loose laundry invading the hallways and bedrooms, while children’s shoes walked midstride on the living room floor and plastic warriors massed for battle on the dining room table, surrounded by a toast-crumb snowfall.

  Maureen had decided to aggressively ignore this growing disorder, and was still in the closet, retreating deeper into family nostalgia, remembering the gentle,
funny, and neglected but handsome man her husband was. Back then, she had thought of his surname, Torres, as a signpost announcing her arrival at a remote, exotic village.

  After all these years what had seemed like silent strength had been revealed to be a deeply rooted stoicism, a disconnectedness from people. The promise of a Latin journey seemed closer to fruition after their marriage, when her new mother-i n-l aw had graciously presented her with an album of Torres family pictures, including some bleak photographs of her father-in-law as a boy, and others of him as a cocky young man. She had framed a couple of these sturdy old images and placed them in the living room for guests to see, but they were artifacts in a historical vacuum, since in her few conversations with the old man he refused to talk much about his life in the black-and-white, Spanish-speaking past. “We had a raw deal when we were kids, but we never complained about it. And I sure as hell ain’t going to complain about it now.” The old man had dedicated his life to the erasure of the language and rituals he associated with short hoes and lettuce fields, with the transience of old Ford trucks and night arrivals at labor camps and menacing urban ghettos. The old man confused amnesia with reinvention, and thus the only trace of Mexican in her husband was that very faint brownish red she saw when he allowed himself to stand under the sun for an hour, and perhaps his Julius Caesar nose, which may or may not be Indian. Everything else about Scott was as pale and severe as the Maine winters her late mother-in-law used to talk about, though Maureen never would have dared to say such a thing out loud, to anyone, because as an American “white” woman it wasn’t her place to make such judgments.

  Her journey through the albums having failed to transport her away from the messy and complicated present, Maureen put her family memories back in their shoe boxes and decided to start cleaning the house. As she picked up dirty pajamas and towels, she marveled, not for the first time, at how much work Araceli did. This home, even when you thought of it in the most abstract sense, as a place of security, order, and happiness, depended on the Mexican woman as much as it did on Maureen. Allowing Araceli to leave for two days was, Maureen realized, a way of claiming it as her own.

  She was in the kitchen, holding Samantha and heating up a bottle of milk, when her oldest son entered the kitchen to ask for something to eat.

  “How about a sandwich? Turkey and cheese?”

  “Okay.”

  “Is the movie over? Did you turn off the TV?”

  “Yes,” Brandon said. “And yes.”

  She looked at the dishes in the sink, remembered to scan the backyard for toys, and thought about what she would make for dinner and what she could get the boys to do this afternoon: perhaps a game of Scrabble Junior. It takes concentration to do all these things at once. Already today she had played Risk with her boys and had set them to work with aprons and paintbrushes and butcher paper. Later she would wade into her boxes of colored scrap paper and fabric strips and assemble another art project. There was an element of performance to being a good mom, but no one gave you executive bonuses for getting through the day, for keeping three kids fed, entertained, and stimulated without doing the easy thing and leaving them in front of the television. It took stamina and a certain optimistic and demanding outlook.

  Maureen had the baby on her hip and was walking to the bedroom to retrieve her children and call them to an early dinner when she caught a glimpse of her husband, sitting on that boomerang-shaped chair before the mirage of a high-definition television monitor, a series of color images quick-flashing in response to the movement of his fingers. Again? What is the fascination? I am carrying the baby and he is playing. She took in his frantic fingers, and the intense look of excited concentration she could see in profile, and decided the moment presented an opportunity.

  “Honey, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, giving a quarter turn in her direction without taking his eyes off the screen. “Sorry, I’m in my two-minute offense here.”

  “Okaaaay. Well, I came up with a plan for the garden. Something that will save us some money in the long run. But it’s gonna require a big expense to get started.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m going to have them put in some desert plants.”

  “Cool.”

  “I’ll go ahead and do that, then.”

  “What?”

  “The desert garden.”

  “But how much is it going to cost?” he said, giving a half turn in her direction while the screen behind him replayed the last running play.

  “Not too much. Honest.”

  “Really,” he said, and then the pull of the game caused him to turn fully to the screen.

  “Honest, I promise,” she said to the back of his head.

  “Cool,” he said, and Maureen thought that at any other moment she would have been angered by his failure to pay full attention to her.

  “So I’ll just charge it, then,” she said.

  He did not answer, but instead leaned his body forward in his chair. On the screen the animated representation of a football quarterback threw a very long pass, and through a mesmerizing miracle of technology the game’s eye followed the ball through the air and into the hands of an animated receiver, though Maureen had already turned away and was in the hallway when that very masculine corner of her home filled with a semiconductor-produced simulation of a multitude, a sizzle of voices and cheers celebrating a touchdown.

  8

  The kitchen window offered only a partial view of the sidewalk at the bottom of the sloping lawn, and when the work crew rolled up to the cul-de-sac at Paseo Linda Bonita, Araceli saw only the top half of their truck. Three men of Mesoamerican heritage stood in the back, peering over a side panel of rough-cut plywood with the startled look of Aztecs about to enter a town filled with conquistadores. They looked around at their alien, affluent surroundings for a few moments, and began talking to a person invisible to Araceli, and she could lip-read them saying “¿aquí?“ and “¿bajamos?“ The answer to both questions was yes, apparently, and soon they were jumping off their perch to the street below. Two more men who had been sitting on the floor of the truck rose to their feet, one of whom was holding a long machete, which he proceeded to strike once against the truck’s plywood panels, as if to test the blade. Both the eager-to-work peasant expressions of the workers and what Araceli could see of the truck itself seemed like anachronisms, and Araceli half expected them to admit they were lost and turn around and drive away. The presence of these roustabouts in their used clothing inspired in Araceli a familiar and comforting burst of sarcastic thoughts: I’m sorry, but there is no farm here. There are no cabbages to pick, as you can see! Put your machetes away: we have no bananas to harvest! To her surprise, another man, an older Mexican-American type dressed in a freshly ironed plaid shirt, came walking up the path.

  Araceli was headed for the door, preparing the polite words by which she would inform this man that he and his poorly fed day laborers had obviously come to the wrong place, when she saw her jefa reach the door first and open it.

  “You’re late,” Maureen said abruptly.

  “I’m really, really sorry, lady, but my usual guys didn’t show up. So I had to pick up some new guys.” The raffish “guys,” five in all, were now standing near the bottom of the walkway behind their foreman, hands in their pockets and silent.

  “Day laborers?” Maureen asked in a tone that suggested concern.

  “Yeah, but these guys are cool. I’ve hired them all before.”

  “As long as you finish in time. You need to be done by eleven. You know that, right?”

  “We’ll be outta here by ten-thirty, I promise. I got another job at eleven anyway over at Newport. I brought a couple more guys than usual to get done in time. Trust me.”

  What is going on? Araceli wondered as she watched Maureen show the contractor the gate where his crew could enter the backyard without tramping through Araceli’s freshly cleaned living room. These men have come to
do some serious labor, Araceli concluded, something involving plants and soil, and of course I am the last to know, because my patrona doesn’t feel the slightest need to inform me. Araceli felt mildly insulted, an emotion that had become familiar in the days since she had discovered that she was now the do-everything doméstica, her workload doubled without a corresponding raise.

  She walked across the living room to the glass doors that opened to the backyard and watched as the contractor and Maureen gathered before the withering tropical garden. Half the calla lilies were tan and irrevocably dead, the banana tree would never again produce the tiny fruit that it used to give each spring, and the ferns were as dry as Egyptian parchment. The river boulders inside the little stream had lost their rich black texture and turned a brittle, pale gray because the small pump that fed the stream stopped working days ago, which Araceli could now see in retrospect was a final, unmistakable sign of what was about to happen.

  Having finished their conference, the workers and their boss made for the side gate and their truck, while Maureen contemplated la petite rain forest for the last time. A few minutes later the contractor was back with his laborers, each of whom was holding a machete and studying the boss as he consulted with Maureen. He gave the workers a set of instructions with wide sweeps of his hands and pointing fingers. Not one of these workers, Araceli guessed, had been in this country for longer than a year. The one with the droopy mustache and the sweatshirt that said loudon county high wrestling team was likely a grandfather. The stringy young guy next to him was wearing a Banamex giveaway T-shirt and appeared to be the newest one in this country. The grandfather looked intently at the boss, suggesting he was anxious to prove himself, and they all seemed to have a need to get a good day’s work out of their systems, having just won the lottery and wrestling match back at the hiring site.

  The boss was addressing the workers, and through the window Araceli could make out his bad, shouted Spanish. “¡Comienzan con estos! ¡Con puro machete!” At the sound of the first machete whacks Araceli felt the briefest pang of nostalgia. Adiós to Pepe’s garden, to the green leaves and flowers that carry the memory of his hands. The hacking machetes reverberated loud enough to be heard even when Araceli retreated to the kitchen and turned on the water in the sink. She heard them too in the laundry room, the messy, sickening sound of blades cutting into fleshly stalks. A whack, whack, whack filled the house, punctuated by the long, rising whistles of the men calling back and forth to one another. “¿Qué hago con esto?” “¿Todo?“ “¡Está bien duro el bambú!” Each time she wandered past the sliding glass doors of the living room, she turned to catch glimpses of the day laborers raising their machetes and slashing, stalks and branches falling to the ground starkly and suddenly, as if murdered. These roustabouts were machete experts and each of their blows sent a living thing flying into the air: they worked in a line, advancing into la petite rain forest like men assigned to clear a cane field.