The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  The result was a five-figure catastrophe: he would be a servant to that borrowed money for the foreseeable future. Its preposterous largeness made him feel bullied and violated, as if his wife had grabbed him by the shirt collar and tossed him into a locked room whose walls were plastered with receipts, bills of sale, service contracts, and warranties, each a mocking reminder of her relentless and happy assault on their disposable income. His three kids were trapped in that room with him too, prisoners to the debt as much as he was. Scott stood up from his chair and grabbed at the air around his temples, and began pacing in his claustrophobic work space, fighting the desire to kick at his chair, or pick up everything on his desk and hurl it against the glass. Finally he flung a pencil at his computer screen with the violent windup of a rioter throwing a rock at a liquor store; the pencil snapped in two but failed to do any damage to the screen itself. “Fuck!” He looked out through the glass and noticed that Jeremy Zaragoza, Mary Dickerson, Charlotte, and all his other employees were staring at him with expressions that combined various degrees of glee, concern, and puzzlement. Yes, here I am in my cage, the boss who lives at the mercy of his wife’s weaknesses and wants. Soon he would be wandering away from his post as corporate laughingstock, to spend a day searching for neighborhoods with affordable homes and half-decent public schools.

  When Araceli cooked and cleaned, she daydreamed, and when she daydreamed, her train of thought often ended at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, just off the Periférico Highway in the western part of Mexico City. She had opened her eyes in the morning remembering Felipe, and how he painted dragons, and thought that at the National School of Fine Arts painting dragons would have invited contempt and ridicule. Only a narrow strip of park, with jacaranda trees and walkways where dogs sniffed and pulled at leashes, separated Araceli’s temple of artistic knowledge from the boorish city that surrounded it, buses and microbuses congregating nearby and nudging against one another like cattle in a slaughterhouse pen. At the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes all the first-year students were too somber of disposition to paint or draw anything but abstract representations of their inner demons, or starkly detailed studies of the overcrowded, exhausted city. That was my problem: I was too serious. If she had contented herself with painting dragons and fairies for her nieces and nephews, Araceli concluded, she wouldn’t be the miserable migrant she was now. Those first, few light days of art school she would walk into the main lobby and study the board announcing various exhibitions and gallery openings, watch the students march back and forth in their creative torment across the patios, holding brushes and portfolios, and feel she was standing at the center of the artistic universe—or considerably closer, at least, than she had been at her home in Nezahualcóyotl.

  Araceli felt especially attuned to the visual world then, and as she crossed the sooty metropolis her eye was constantly searching for compositions. On the Metro she studied the tangle of wires between the tracks, the contorted faces of passengers squeezing through doors, and the rivers of scampering feet that flowed up and down the wide stairways linking one Metro line to another, and the improvised geometry of the underground passageways that intersected at odd angles. One of her instructors had looked at these first-year sketches and pronounced, “You will make a first-rate cartoonist,” and even Araceli knew that was a slight. Then her classmate Rafaela Bolaño told her she too had been declared a “cartoonist,” and it became their running joke. “We are starting a new movement, Rafaela, you and I. We are the Visceral Cartoonists!”

  In the end Araceli was done in not by the snobby teachers, but by the long journey across the city from home to school and back again, east to west to east, and by the lists of required materials submitted at the beginning of each term. At the art supply store the clerk gave a satirical grin as he laid the required oils on the counter before her, each an import from England: quinacridone red, raw umber, terra rosa, titanium white, 150 pesos a tube. And then the brushes whose supple bristles suggested the hides of large mammals migrating across the Mongolian steppes; the collection of flesh-toned pastels from Germany, the entire human spectrum in a pine box; and finally the textbook tomes with prices as flashy and exorbitant as their glossy pages of illustrations. “They come from Spain, so it’s all in euros, which is really bad for us Indians here in Mexico,” the clerk said. Beyond the cost of these accoutrements, there was the simple question of having enough money to buy a torta for lunch, and the exhaustion that overcame her after the final, hour-long journey home on the Metro and on the bus as it inched forward the last three miles along the main drag of Nezahualcóyotl with its littered sidewalks, the multitudes of factory workers fighting the gridlock on Ignacio Zaragoza Boulevard, pushing against the domestics and the peddlers of pirated CDs. She would rise up before dawn to finish assignments she’d been too tired to complete the night before. “Araceli, why are you killing yourself like this?” her mother said one morning, her words heavy with a sense of futility and absurdity. “¿Para qué?“ The decision to go to art school was, for her mother, a superfluous act of filial betrayal, because daughters, unlike shiftless boys, were expected to place family first. A wayward daughter counted as much as six wayward sons on the scale of neighborhood shame. When Araceli gave up art school after a year and started working, handing over half of her earnings to pay for her baby brother’s future college education, her parents stopped assaulting her with their prolonged silences.

  Probably Felipe had an artist’s soul and had also been forced to surrender his ambitions. “You look smart, that’s why I asked you to dance,” he’d said. Felipe, she sensed, had long ago made the accommodation Araceli still struggled to live with; he could make art without feeling the sense of injustice that ate away at Araceli whenever she thought about her mother and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.

  In the late afternoon, when Araceli was finishing cooking dinner and was getting ready to set the table, she noticed that she had absentmindedly arranged Maureen’s silver forks, knives, and spoons into patterns on the kitchen counter while polishing them earlier in the day: an asterisk, a series of overlapping triangles, an arrow. Araceli imagined, for a moment, a sculpture that would make an ironic statement about the fine curlicue designs on their handles: she imagined taking a blowtorch and welding forks, knives, and spoons into tangled sculptures of machetes and plows. That would be fun, but expensive. She was rubbing a spot on the last spoon that had somehow escaped her cleaning when she heard the front door slam, hard enough to provoke a faint rattle of the dishes in the cupboard. What was that? One of the boys again?

  After a minute or so Araceli began to hear raised voices, el señor and la señora yelling at each other. The usual back-and-forth barking and pleading, their voices pushing through the closed door as an irritating and genderless vibration. She considered the basil remedy again, but then thought better of it: their fighting was part of a natural rhythm, a kind of release; they would fight and a day or two later Araceli would see Scott rubbing his wife’s back, or Maureen clasping his hand as they watched their children play in the backyard. After observing the Torres-Thompsons for several years she could begin to see their arguments as a kind of marriage fertilizer: they were ugly, one recoiled before their nasty smell, but they appeared to be necessary. She listened as the shouting continued, rising in volume so that she could begin to make out clear phrases: “Because you have to be more responsible!” “Don’t humiliate me,” and finally a laughing shout of “Pepe? Pepe?” Well, Araceli’s curiosity was piqued now, she had to see what was going on, so she opened the door to the living room but pushed it too hard, bringing forth a moment of unintended theatricality in which the yelling instantly stopped and both Scott and Maureen turned to face her, their foreheads and cheeks burning with an identical angry hue. No, Araceli hadn’t intended to do that; she wanted to hear more clearly what they were saying, not to stop the fight altogether. One glance at her jefe and jefa told her that this argument was significantly more serious th
an any that had come before, that the words passed between them were dangerously close to finding a physical expression in the exercise of limbs and muscles. Scott was standing in the center of the living room with his arms tensed at his sides, and as he turned to look at Araceli she saw a man with an expression she barely recognized: here was a man who felt his power slipping from him, who strained to open his eyes wide to take in the room and the woman before him, as if he had never really seen her before this moment. A few feet away, Maureen sat on the couch, before the coffee table and its plane of blown glass, legs crossed and arms folded, in that tenuous state of mind that exists between being amused and being afraid. Araceli sensed she was trying very hard to convince herself that her husband’s yelling was nothing more dangerous than the grumbling of an eight-year-old.

  Araceli raised her eyebrows and prepared to turn away, but then something happened that had never happened before: they resumed their argument, without caring that Araceli was still in the room. Scott raised his finger and declared, “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare say another fucking thing.” I didn’t think he could do that. He screams while I watch. Maureen rose to her feet and began to walk toward Scott, causing Araceli to immediately turn around and close the door with the same speed and sense of repulsion that one uses to change the television channel upon encountering a gory, tasteless scene from a horror movie.

  Inside the kitchen Araceli removed her apron: she would leave the dinner ready, in covered bowls on the marble counter, and then leave the kitchen and seek shelter in her room for the time being. When men raised their voices in imitation of carnivorous mammals, smart women made for the exits; that’s how it was in her home, in many other homes, in too many homes to count in the stacked cubes of the Nezahualcóyotl neighborhood where women conspired during the day to undo the tangles men made with their words at night. Sometimes you just have to run away. You have to close the window, close the door, and seal off your ears from the sounds people make when the dogs inside them decide to come out and snarl. Araceli made a conscious effort not to listen to the back-and-forth coming from behind the pine door, not to hear what words were being said as she finished putting clear plastic wrap over the bowls filled with pasta and fish sticks.

  Araceli was reaching for the back door when she heard a half-grunted “Be quiet!” followed by an unmistakably female scream and a high-pitched crash that sounded like fifty porcelain plates striking the floor and shattering all at once. Instinctively she ran back across the kitchen, pushed open the swinging door, and found Maureen on the floor, half sitting and half prone upon the ruins of the coffee table, raising her arms in an attempt to steady herself without getting cut on the pool of shattered glass around her. She looked to Araceli like a woman who had been dropped from an airplane, or who had fallen from a cloud, landing on a spot of the earth she did not recognize, and who was surprised to see she had survived. Scott stood above her, raising his hands to his temples as he looked down at his wife.

  “Oh, my God, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it,” he said, and he reached out to help her.

  “Get away from me!” Maureen shouted, and he instantly stepped back. “Araceli, help me. Please.”

  The Mexican woman froze. What have they done to each other, these people? Araceli felt the need to restore order and understood that the violence in this room might spin into something unspeakable were it not for her presence. Today I am the civilized one and they are the savages. They have taken the living room I have worked so hard to give the sparkle of a museum and they have transformed it into a wrestling ring. Lucha libre. If I hadn’t come in they would be grabbing the chairs from the dining room and throwing them at each other. Stepping gingerly around the ruins of the table she had cleaned that morning, and too many other mornings to count, with blue ammonia spray, Araceli reached out and took the hand of her jefa and helped her to her feet.

  BOOK TWO

  Fourth of July

  “You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into these houses … and just see how your people live.”

  —Richard Wright, Native Son

  10

  Waaaaaaaaaa!

  The alarm startled Araceli awake at the lazy hour of 7:30 a.m., the summer sun already blasting through the curtains. On most mornings she would have been long awake, but the memory of the powerful matriarch of the mansion momentarily helpless on the floor had kept her from sleeping well. During the summer the Torres-Thompson household got a later start to the day and Araceli could often spend some time in the morning with the hosts of the Univision morning show as she got dressed, half listening to their interviews with diet experts, the celebrity gossip, the reports on the latest drug murders in Guerrero and Nuevo Laredo, the videos of the dead being pulled from overturned buses, and the like. Now she had witnessed a kind of news event in this home, too close and too raw to be entertainment. The crash and scream had invaded her dreams, causing her to sleep right up to the deadline announced by her digital clock. By now, el señor Scott would have made himself some toast and be out the door—on this morning, perhaps more than any other, he would have wanted to avoid contact with his servant. Araceli took her time getting dressed and put on her white filipina, dreading the stony mood that awaited as soon as she entered the main home; a day of silences from Maureen, followed by the tense sharing of the domestic space in the evening when Scott returned from work. When a man tosses his wife to the ground, there can be no easy forgiveness.

  With some trepidation Araceli opened the door to the kitchen, and then the door from the kitchen to the living room. No one, nothing, all quiet, as orderly as she had left it the night before, when she swept up the glass and steel ruins of the coffee table and collected them in two boxes she placed next to the plastic trash barrels outside. Only the conspicuously empty space in the living room hinted at what had happened the night before. Perhaps she should examine the floor for any traces of glass, lest the baby Samantha pick one up and place it in her mouth. Leaning down, Araceli examined the ocher surface of the Saltillo tile floors and found two slivers, each smaller than a child’s fingernail. She held them in her palm to examine them, meditating not so much on the shards as on the unexpected violence that had produced them. This house will not return to normal so quickly. Suddenly Araceli the artist, the Araceli who didn’t care, longed for the ordinary. She was the strange one, the mexicana they couldn’t comprehend, but it would fall to her to bring the Torres-Thompson household back to a calm center by restoring the broken routines: the comfort of served breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, the tonic of a sparkling kitchen and smartly made beds at the end of the day. She tossed the shards into the trash and started breakfast, following the rotation la señora had established on a refrigerator calendar. Friday: Cream of Wheat.

  Brandon wandered into the kitchen first, at 8:36, followed by his brother a few minutes later. They sat at the kitchen table, eating silently, their spoons hitting the bottom of their bowls with a comforting clank-clank, Brandon reading a thick book with a dragon on the cover as he ate. Araceli wondered how much they knew about their parents’ altercation the night before. Probably they heard everything, she thought, and this was almost true: they had retreated to the television room and the comfort of cartoon warfare just as the shouting had reached a peak, but before their father had shoved their mother backward into the coffee table. Brandon had guided his softly weeping younger brother away with a “Hey, Keenan, let’s go watch a movie,” and the crash and their mother’s short scream had been lost behind a closed door of sound-swallowing Mexican pine, and in the swirling orchestral theme music that accompanied a boy on his animated martial-arts adventures through a world inhabited by dueling tribes of warriors. When Maureen had shown up sometime later to tell them to get ready for bed, they had assumed everything was normal because they were too young to pick up the muted exhaustion in her voice, too unknowing of the cruelties that adults could inflict upon one another to recognize the meaning in the puffy droop in their mother�
��s eyes.

  Maureen awoke atop a cushion of comforters on the floor of the nursery, next to her daughter’s crib. With its lavender walls, Samantha’s incipient doll collection, and the stuffed purple pony in the corner, the nursery was a safe room, its femininity a shield against the masculine harshness outside. He didn’t follow her there; he didn’t hit her or yell at her with her baby girl by her side. Having failed to injure Maureen with his words, Scott had infected the household with fear and unpredictability and the silencing power of his muscle. He unleashed a monster, to ravage her body and violate unspoken codes, to inflict the injuries his words could not. At first the argument about Maureen’s spending on the desert garden had played out as the mirror image of the argument about Scott’s neglect of la petite rain forest. In this case it was Scott who was the aggrieved party, having been humiliated before his employees, but somehow Maureen had wrested the upper hand, shifting the discussion to Scott’s failings as husband and parent, and their roots in his emotional distance. She had taken the argument back to South Whittier, to that sad little two-story home of thin drywall and crabgrass lawns, with the box rooms that had mirrors along the walls to create the illusion of space. It had been her misfortune to visit this property as their courtship reached its climax, to see the Torres family home in all its faded, lower-middle-class glory, and last night she had allowed herself to blurt out certain truths he refused to see, long-held but never-spoken observations that focused on that brittle woman whose admonitions were the font of her husband’s ambition and also much of his self-doubt. It occurred to Maureen now, in the morning, that bringing her late mother-in-law to the conversation was not a good idea: the rage she provoked by doing so was entirely predictable, but not what happened next. He had taken two purposeful and irrational steps toward her, and attacked her with the muscles of his forearms and hands, sending her sprawling backward across the room and into the table. There was the moment of stunned helplessness as she lost her balance and the table collapsed and shattered underneath her, followed, seconds later, by a moment of clarity, the sudden understanding of a long-suppressed fear.