The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  Araceli said she wasn’t sure if she’d ever go back to school, but that she wasn’t going to be doing “esto” much longer, gesturing rather coldly in the direction of Brandon and Keenan on the trampoline. She had a little money saved up, and the “aventura” with the boys would be her last.

  Lucía understood everything Araceli said, although her own castellano came out slowly and with the simple vocabulary of a much younger person—she had studied French in high school and never been formally educated in Spanish—and she often fell back to English.

  “Go with what your heart tells you,” Lucía said, and then repeated the phrase in Spanish, “Haz lo que te diga tu corazón.” She gave a sidelong glance to her friends, who had drifted into semi-sleep again, their heads resting on the table. “I’m studying history and American literature. I don’t know why. Just because I like stories, I guess. My dad’s got a good story. Maybe I’ll write it someday.”

  Scott had stayed up late into the night on the beach, watching the march of the constellations along the ecliptic, his dark-adjusted eyes making out the oval smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. He had watched the flight of low-flying birds along the purple-blue twilight waters, the black featureless forms of two hel icopt ers headed southward to Mexico, and the silent, slow drift of lighted ships, and then he had fallen asleep sometime deep into the night, his head resting near the top of the sloping sand that rose from the water. He had been awakened after dawn by the simultaneous assault of the first rays of morning sun on his face and the first wave splashing the balls of his feet. He stretched out, then took a long, slow walk along the beach, listening to screaming seagulls. When he reached a tide pool he’d once visited with the boys, he held back tears at the not entirely rational thought that he might never enjoy such a life-affirming paternal moment again, until finally his rumbling stomach cured him of such melodrama and he decided to begin the long climb back to his house. He would launch a search for his wife and children, who had likely left for Missouri to spend a week, or perhaps a month or two in recreation and exile from their abusive paterfamilias, and perhaps he would go there to plead his case.

  He was surprised to spot, halfway through his quarter-mile trek through the meadow, the familiar high silhouette of his wife’s car. For a moment he felt a sense of relief and reprieve—they had not left him after all—and then once again a sense of foreboding when he realized he would have to add an explanation for this night out on the beach to his apology for the fiasco in the living room and his absence over the past four days. She’ll think I’ve gone totally nuts. He got closer to the car and imagined his unhappy sons inside, and the daughter who would wrap her arms around him no matter what. When he reached the car, smiling despite himself, the electric-driven window lowered theatrically, revealing Maureen’s sunglasses, which she quickly lowered to study him and his surroundings with unshaded eyes.

  “Where are the boys?” she asked quickly.

  “What?”

  Maureen had seen Scott appear on the horizon, and she too felt her apprehensions lifting, a motherly reunion just moments away. She too imagined an embrace, or several, dropping to her knees as one did when children were smaller. But no, Scott was alone.

  “Where are the boys?” she insisted.

  “You don’t have them?”

  “I have Samantha! I left with Samantha and left you with Brandon and Keenan.”

  “No, you didn’t. I wasn’t home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t have any of the kids. I left. I thought they were all with you.”

  “I left on Friday with Samantha.”

  “You didn’t take the boys?”

  “Obviously not!”

  “Where are they?”

  By dusk the Lujáns’ ample backyard was filled with a hundred people chewing pork whose succulent juices pooled at the bottoms of paper plates, and triggered memories of summer barbecues in provincial Mexican cities with gazebos and stone churches. Araceli noted that they were significantly better dressed than the summer partygoers at the Torres-Thompson residence. They were all immigrants linked to Mr. Luján by blood, marriage, and business ties, and several were compadres of Mr. Luján and his wife. Not having lost the sense of formality attached to family gatherings in their native country, the men were dressed in freshly ironed shirts tucked into jeans and polished snake-skin boots, and the women wore big jewelry and ran wet combs through their sons’ hair, and teased and pulled their daughters’ hair into buns, braids, ponytails, and little black fountains held in place with barrettes that bore butterflies and flowers. The men showed off new brass belt buckles with Mexican flags and the names of towns in Jalisco and Durango, and the women moved about in newly purchased jeans or stiff dresses whose wide linen cones resembled the style worn in U.S. movies during the Eisenhower era.

  Alongside this older, largely Mexican-born and Spanish-speaking group, there was a younger circle of partygoers, speakers of English and Spanglish, teenagers and sedate twentysomethings who equated good taste with understated flair and the ironic embrace of fashions past. They wore porkpie hats and baseball caps, jeans with narrow legs, canvas tennis shoes and mauve T-shirts of high-quality cotton, and campy links of faux-gold chains. A couple were dressed in baseball jerseys as wide as capes, and the shorts and knee-high white socks that a goofy midwestern suburban dad might wear, their cottoned feet stuffed into guarache sandals, a style Lucía liked to call “retro summer gangster casual.” They were all people of understated ambitions too, most having graduated to new jobs at hardware stores and composition-writing classes at community colleges, or to long drives across the metropolis to the waiting lists and crowded parking lots of underfunded state universities.

  Both groups of guests, young and old, looked at Mr. Luján and his daughter, Lucía, with varying degrees of respect and envy, because in their own way father and daughter were the most successful people they knew. The compadres entered Mr. Luján’s home and found its knight-errant furnishings tasteful and elegant, and they saw in Lucía and the famous university attached to her name a shiny specialness that made them sick to their stomachs with worry about their own progeny and how studious and dedicated those children might or might not be. Among her friends too, Lucía was the subject of awe, esteem, and suspicion, because she had gone farther away from Huntington Park than anyone else they knew, and because she had come back from this distant and wealthy place to stand underneath the power wires and sip beer as if she were an ordinary HP girl, even though she knew she would never be an ordinary HP girl again.

  Among all these people, young and old, Mexican-born and California-born, the presence at the party of two Orange County boys went largely unnoticed, with Brandon and Keenan slipping easily into the mostly English-speaking orbit of the children, and only a few parents noticing their long bohemian locks, or the ease with which they glided across the backyard in their bare feet and untrimmed toenails. But after just a few minutes no one failed to notice the paisana with Germanic height and bronze freckles, dressed like some explorer in a canvas hat, presenting them all with the mystery of her person. She was too old and not casually stylish enough to be one of Lucía’s friends, but too young and not formal enough to be one of the compadres.

  “¿A quién llevas en la camisa?” Araceli asked one of Lucía Luján’s friends, switching to English when he didn’t seem to understand her right away. “On your shirt. Ese hombre. He looks like Jesus, but he is smoking. Y tengo entendido que Jesucristo Nuestro Señor no fumaba. Jesus does not smoke.”

  Griselda Pulido, Lucía Luján’s best-friend-forever, heard Araceli’s chilanga accent, and began to pepper her with questions about Mexico City. Griselda had long thought of Mexico’s capital as a kind of Paris, a destination she would visit one day in solemn pilgrimage, a place where a woman with Mexican roots might escape her fraught American existence and find her true self. She wanted to know where the chilangos went out at night, what rock bands they listened to, and
at which nightclubs they danced. “What is the Palacio de Bellas Artes like?” Griselda Pulido asked. Switching to Spanglish, she asked, “Tienen las pinturas de Frida allí, or do you have to go to her house in Coyoacán?”

  To Araceli, this woman Griselda seemed as intelligent and curious as Lucía, but with a tragic air that was only heightened by the velvet eye shadow she wore, and cross-combed hair that ran down her forehead and crashed upon the eyebrows. “I got into Brown, which is in Rhode Island, and I thought I’d hang out over there on the East Coast with Lucía, but I couldn’t go,” Griselda said, and Araceli looked her straight in the eye to say, I understand completely. Going to school for as long as they wanted was one of those things latinoamericana girls couldn’t do, and hadn’t been able to do for centuries, the same inequity having kept at least one of Araceli’s grandmothers illiterate her entire life. Our feminine emancipation is incomplete: maybe our daughters, if we ever have any, will be free. Araceli tried to answer Griselda’s questions about Mexico’s capital city as best she could, even though she was a bit thrown by the way Griselda weaved English and Spanish together, so freely and without care.

  “Lucía and I are going to go there,” Griselda said. “Un día. Tal vez.”

  Araceli wanted to suggest some museums Griselda might not have heard of, but before she could the small man with the smoking Jesus asked her if she’d been to Huntington Park before.

  “No,” Araceli said. She twisted her mouth into English so Smoking-Jesus Boy would understand her. “But this is a place you can forget easily. So maybe I was here before and I just don’t remember.” Hearing this, the two homeboys among Lucía’s friends stuck their hands deeper in their pockets and squinted approvingly at Araceli through dilated pupils and gave weak and wicked cannabis grins and wondered briefly if this lady had ever been in The Life, over there in Mexico, because she looked like a girl who could handle herself in a fight. A moment later they forgot about her, and looked up at the sickle moon and the first stars of dusk and listened intently to the pulsating bass of the music and how deeply it inhabited infinite space, and then they smelled the fat-laden air coming from the barbecue pit and their stomachs suddenly ached with hollowness, and they decided it was time to get something to eat again.

  Araceli was the deepest mystery to all the parents and older relatives present, some of whom were a bit put off when she entered their circle—they were all standing by the tables and their pyramids of pork and side dishes. She was about to plunge her fork into a serving of carnitas when she noticed she had inadvertently brought the conversation between the compadres to a sudden halt. “Buenas tardes,” she said, eliciting a round of not-especially-friendly “Buenas tardes” in return. These mothers and fathers were put off too by Araceli’s failure to pay much attention to the boys she was apparently assigned to look after, even when the older of the two approached and said with a stricken plea, “I think someone should tell all these kids to stop playing with firecrackers because it’s so dangerous.”

  “¿Qué quieres que haga?” Araceli asked rhetorically, because there was nothing she could do, and the boy snuck away, leaving all those who observed the exchange to wonder what exactly was going on here with this child-unfriendly woman and those American boys.

  “It’s true what el niño says,” one of the moms said in Spanish. “Those things are too dangerous. Someone is going to get burned.”

  “They see more dangerous things at school, believe me,” said another mom dismissively, and with this all the mothers and fathers in the circle nodded. “The other day, I go to pick up my son and the entire school is surrounded by police cars and police officers, and there is what they call a ‘lockdown.’ My son is in the sixth grade, believe it or not, and one of the kids is running down the hallway with a knife. I think he stabbed a teacher in the leg with it.”

  “Qué barbaridad.”

  “The things that go on in those schools.”

  “My son is in sixth grade too, and he doesn’t know his times tables past three,” one of the fathers said. “ ‘What’s six times eight?’ I ask him, and he looks at me all confused. So I tell him, ‘What are they teaching you there?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know.’ In my pueblo, they taught us that in the second year.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” one of the mothers said.

  “You’re supposed to go to the teacher and complain,” Lucía Luján interjected in English, having just entered the circle on the hunt for her own plate of food. “You’re supposed to get in the face of that teacher and say, ‘What’s up with the times tables?’ “

  “¿Podemos hacer eso?”

  “Of course you can. That’s how this country works. Get a classroom full of white kids, and that’s what their parents do all the time. They treat every teacher like a worker.”

  “Tiene razón,” Araceli said. “La señora Maureen, mi jefa, siempre está peleando con los maestros.”

  “But if we go, they don’t take us seriously,” one of the mothers said, speaking directly to Lucía. “You go to the office and they tell us, ‘What are you doing here? Go away. We’re busy.’ “

  They all paused, middle-aged and young, Mexican-born and U.S.-born, and considered the betrayal of the schools, and the steel mesh that covered every window, the security cameras in the hallways, the posted warnings aimed at student and adult alike, and a few of them very self-consciously allowed their eyes to drift over to those young girls and boys who were their blood and their responsibility, running and bouncing in the backyard, each child gleaming and full of promise, and each poor and stripped of it. Boy and girl screams filled the silence that followed, which was heavy with hurt and powerlessness and a certain unfocused sense of workingman’s defiance that found no words in which it could be expressed.

  Araceli broke the wordlessness suddenly, to say that the kids she cared for seemed to be getting an excellent education.

  “Where are they from?”

  “Los Laguna Rancho Estates. Por la playa. En los cerros.”

  “The public schools are good down there, I bet,” Lucía Luján said.

  “No van a la escuela pública,” Araceli said. “Private school. Todo pagado. Y muy caro. Very expensive. I see the bills.”

  “How much?” Lucía Luján asked quickly.

  Araceli spoke the figure in slow and deliberate Spanish, allowing its mathematical obscenity, its thousands and thousands, to hover over the assembled hardworking, cash-strapped, taxpaying adults and scholarship-funded college students like a blinding glow of fake sunshine. There were one or two gasps, though Lucía Luján’s eyebrows rose with only moderate surprise—the tuition for those two boys, together, was a bit more than her tuition at Princeton, before all the financial aid kicked in.

  “Imposible,” one of the parents said.

  “Estás loca,” said another.

  “No sea chismosa. Por favor.”

  It was preposterous, and suddenly everyone in the circle except Lucía was angry at Araceli for revealing a figure that, were they to accept it as truth, would temporarily strip them of some of their own moderately elevated sense of accomplishment, by revealing just how small their achievements were relative to true American success and affluence. The compadres with kids in parochial school imagined they were paying top dollar, but in fact it was a small fraction of the sum Araceli had just divulged, even though those gringo boys didn’t look so much different than theirs, not especially special, and certainly not that rich.

  “Es lo que cuesta,” Araceli insisted. She explained that she knew this startling fact not because she’d made any effort to find out, but rather because her employers were exceedingly casual with their paperwork and left letters and bills lying around. And with a dollar figure that big screaming from the kitchen countertop, even a normally circumspect housekeeper like Araceli had to take a look.

  “You’re pretty sure about that number?” Lucía asked.

  “Claro que sí,” Araceli said.

  “No,” one
of the compadres insisted. “Estás confundida.”