The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  I might be just a housekeeper and a chilanga, Araceli wanted to say, but I know basic English and math and the meaning of commas and decimal points and dollar signs. But instead she gave a long glance at her disbelieving audience, then shook her head with a dismissive chuckle that was instantly recognizable to Lucía for its thick layering of intellectual condescension. With that all the compadres and Lucía drifted away, leaving Araceli amused and finally able to take a first real bite of the carnitas, which were quite juicy. She searched for the boys and spotted them, and then decided she could forget about them again, because here in this big backyard they would be safe.

  Brandon and Keenan were running about the backyard with the children of the extended Luján clan. Having watched the men with the shovels remove their dirt and then the foil-wrapped meat, and a few hot rocks, Brandon had persuaded himself that he was no longer in danger from the fires in the earth, though now there were various firecrackers and flames and explosions going off in the air around him. Salomón’s brother Pedro had brought three large boxes’ worth of assorted handheld pyrotechnics from Tijuana, and the children were playing with them, the most popular being small silver balls that burst into sparks when the children flung them against the patio’s concrete floor.

  “I got you! I got you!” a girl yelled as one of her “fire rocks” exploded at Keenan’s feet, and Keenan replied by throwing one back at her, and laughing as she squealed.

  “Be careful!” Brandon shouted at his brother and anyone else in earshot, though no one listened. A boy was lighting firecrackers and throwing them into the now-empty pig pit and there were no adults stopping him. Gunpowder tickled Brandon’s nose, and bits of paper and cardboard from the firecrackers were littering the patio floor and the lawn, and there were other kids igniting sticks that spit fire and whistled, holding them too close to their eyes, and they wouldn’t stop even when Brandon shouted out “¡Cuidado!“ in Spanish. He looked for Araceli, but she had drifted away into the crowd of people tearing at meat from the buried pig with their teeth, and for the first time since leaving his home on Paseo Linda Bonita, Brandon felt truly alone and afraid. The firecracker explosions pinched his eardrums and the neighborhood dogs were suffering too, filling the air with their wailing and barking on this block and all the others surrounding it, begging the humans to cease fire. It was one thing to play war when all the sounds came from your mouth or your imagination, and quite another to be standing in a cloud of gunpowder. Now he heard a powerful explosion, felt the thumping vibration in his chest, and then the echo of the boom. “An M-80!” a boy shouted, and Brandon wondered why no one in the backyard was ducking for cover when there were bombs exploding out on the street.

  A flash of light on the horizon caught his eye, and he turned to see three fire bursts growing in the shape of dandelions against the dark gray sky, followed by the muffled sound a few seconds later of distant cannons.

  “¡Son los fireworks de la ciudad!” someone shouted, just as more burning dandelions emerged, their light shining on the distant transmission lines and the towers. “The city fireworks show!” someone else said, and now everyone was turning and watching as more bursts followed, some in the shape of flying saucers, in green and crimson and yellow, some drooping like jellyfish, others slithering through the sky like serpents, and finally one forming a large orb that loomed over the towers and the neighborhood like a small planet, causing many oohs and ahhs from the people gathered in the Luján backyard.

  The planet fell from the sky and the explosions stopped, suddenly. For ten, twenty, thirty seconds the adults and children looked up at the blank sky and waited for the next burst of light. They saw only a large cloud of smoke, drifting slowly eastward like a white Rorschach test across the dark sky. From beginning to end the sixty-third annual Huntington Park Fireworks Extravaganza was the shortest in city history, having lasted just four minutes and thirty-five seconds, the city having failed to take note of the nationwide fireworks shortage caused by a warehouse explosion in China’s Guangdong Province some months earlier.

  “That’s it?” someone said in English.

  “¿Se acabó?”

  “What a rip-off!”

  Standing by the table where the carnitas were being carved, City Councilman Salomón Luján stood with a large serving fork, took in the empty horizon, and uttered a useful English exclamation that had been one of the first to drift into his vocabulary:

  “Oh, shit.”

  After a harried exchange of shouted questions and answers during their five-minute drive up the hill to Paseo Linda Bonita, Maureen and Scott realized that Brandon and Keenan had been alone with Araceli since Friday morning, and that neither had talked to the boys since calling home on Friday evening. The length of their absence stretched out to unseemly numbers: four days, more than ninety-six hours of blank and unknown chapters in their sons’ lives, ninety-six hours in which they had abdicated their parental responsibilities. When they are small, you are vigilant at the playground, you never allow your eye to stray from them for more than a few seconds, Maureen thought. And if you lose sight of them, for twenty seconds, for a minute, you are transported suddenly into an abyss of guilt and panic, and you scan the surroundings against the idea that your loss will endure forever, until you spot them and your heart returns to that calm place where parents most seek to live. Maureen drove past the guard shack without bothering to acknowledge the pregnant woman on duty, and violated the 25 MPH speed limit signs, flying over speed bumps and making several squealing turns up the sinuous streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates. She pulled into the garage and ran into the house, leaving Samantha still strapped in the car with her father.

  Although Maureen had been in the house thirty minutes earlier, and recognized the improbability that her sons might have returned in that short time, she called out their names again: “Brandon! Keenan! Mommy and Daddy are home! Brandon! Keenan!” This maternal reflex became more of a plea and lament with each repetition, until Scott said, “They’re not here,” which caused Maureen to turn and snap at him, “I can see that!”

  Scott began looking for a note from Araceli, and for clues about her departure and destination. There was nothing in the kitchen, the place where one might have expected her to leave a message. In the living room he was distracted by the great open space where the shattered coffee table had once been, and thus failed to notice that one of the picture frames on the bookshelves was empty. He moved back to the kitchen, where he informed Maureen of the undeniable conclusion that their children had not been home for a while. “If you look closely you can tell the bathrooms haven’t been used for at least twenty-four hours, if not longer,” he said. “And no one used the kitchen until you got here and made that meal for Samantha. Right?” Before Maureen could answer, Scott headed toward the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard and the guesthouse, and stepped across the open space to Araceli’s door again, and tried turning the handle.

  “Do we have a key for this door?”

  For the next ten minutes, Maureen and Scott searched their home for a spare guesthouse key, until they found a plastic sandwich bag filled with keys in a drawer in the laundry room. They rushed back to Araceli’s room: neither had set foot in this locked corner of their property for the four years Araceli been their employee, respecting the Mexican woman’s privacy and trusting her to keep it clean. They opened the door and entered a space of unexpected clutter and mystery. Their eyes were drawn immediately upward, to an object hanging from the ceiling of the small living room. It hovered over a small drafting table and many drawings taped to the walls, along with pictures cut from magazines, a floating sculpture that drifted very slowly in the faint, hot breeze that seeped through the room’s lone, partially opened window.

  Maureen stepped back to the doorway so that she could focus on the object in its entirety. It was a bird of prey, assembled from one hundred or more blue, white, red, orange, and yellow disposable forks, knives, and spoons that Maureen had purch
ased for the last few birthday parties. The utensils had been fused together into a bird about three feet long, its clawed feet made from broken fork prongs, while many serrated knives were layered together to form the teeth, and two layers or more of utensils formed the body and wings, the smooth plastic covered, haphazardly, with ripped-up strips of discarded clothing and dishrags, the various textures creating an especially meaty-looking representation of flesh and feather. The sculpture had the crude quality of an object formed by a series of haphazard and violent collisions, and in a letter to one of her friends Araceli had called it El Fénix de la Basura, the Garbage Phoenix. Araceli liked it both for its disturbing, otherworldly quality and as a commentary on her situation in the United States: she dusted it once a month, but had recently considered taking it down, because in the one-woman artistic circle that followed her work, the Garbage Phoenix was becoming passé. Maureen studied this creation and then examined the drawings on the walls. There was a eight-by-eleven-inch self-portrait in which Araceli had enlarged the size of her own nostrils, and rendered the rest of her face in a Picasso-inspired abstract geometry, but without the master’s sense of balance and composition. There were several pencil and charcoal sketches of shoes and sandals ascending and descending the steps in the Tacubaya Metro station, their rotting laces and heels melting into concrete steps covered with swampy moss and dripping water. And there was a collage of hands, assembled from magazines that were stacked on the floor: My magazines, the ones I threw in the recycling bin. Maureen studied the hanging sculpture and the drawings, and felt she was looking into the mind of a woman upon whom various psyche-smashing torments had been inflicted. Is this the same woman who has lived in my house for four years and fed my children and cleaned my clothes? No. This is a stranger. She sulks while she cooks for us, and then she sits here in her free time and creates monstrosities with the broken fragments and discarded objects of our home. The grim aesthetic of the utensil bird, the cavernous nostrils, and the melting shoes suggested, to Maureen, self-hatred and a suppressed desire toward destruction. Understood in the light of her art, Araceli’s surly everyday nature took on new meanings, and this sudden, unexpected insight was all the more unsettling in the light of Scott’s announcement that “I looked and there’s nothing here, no note, no clue.” Araceli had taken the two boys someplace without giving word of where she might be.

  Still holding Samantha, who had reached up to try to touch the mobile, Maureen returned to the kitchen and wondered what they should do next.

  Forty minutes after the fiasco of the fireworks, Brandon and Keenan stood on the front porch of the Luján home on Rugby Avenue, having been drawn there, along with much of the Luján family and their guests, by the shouting and chanting coming from the street. With Araceli at their side, the Torres-Thompson boys cast a disoriented squint at a crowd of about one hundred people, all of Latin American descent, gathered in the middle of the roadway, under the flickering light of a streetlamp. Some carried beer bottles in foam sleeves, and others held folded lawn chairs, but all shared the disheveled, sunburned, and offended look of Fourth of July recreation interrupted and unfulfilled. They had come from the park, and they had come from their lawns, confused by the empty sky, the missing explosions, and the very ordinary, very unpleasant sounds of car alarms and car stereos and crying children left in the truncated show’s wake. The vacuum caused by the sudden lack of explosive noise was filled by their own voices telling them to be angry, telling them to remember where they lived. It was a holiday insult added to all the usual, daily HP insults—the dirty tap water, the aggressive parking cops, and the annual surprise of supplemental property-tax fees. “Those fucking council incompetents! Again!” “¡Pinche ciudad de la chingada!” And when a certain, very metiche woman at the park suggested Luján was to blame, they began to head off in a group to his home, gathering more people on the way.

  Councilman Luján appeared on the porch, hanging both thumbs on his belt, and even the children in the crowd seemed enraged, their high-pitched voices adding a feminine squeal to the crowd’s collective chant.

  “¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres!”

  “Out with the three?” Brandon asked no one in particular. “What’s that about?”

  “They mean my dad and Councilwoman María and Councilman Vicente,” said Lucía, who was standing behind him. Sensing the boy was smart enough to understand, she quickly explained the political dispute that pitted her father and two allies against a corrupt mayor. “So whenever anything goes wrong, the mayor blames my dad. And his Special Friend, that lady in the back over there, she gets her rabble from el movimiento to come out and harass us because we want to reform things.” With that, Lucía stepped to the front of the porch and down the steps to the concrete path that ran through the front lawn, and leaned forward into a screaming shout: “Go home, losers!”

  “¡Rateros!“ someone in the crowd shouted back, starting a new chant with the Mexican Spanish idiom meaning “bandit” or “crook.” “¡Ra-te-ros! ¡Ra-te-ros!”

  “You stole the money for the fireworks!”

  “Get out here and defend yourself like a man, Salomón. We see how you spent the money for the fireworks on your own party. ¡Ratero! “

  Having heard Lucía’s explanations, Araceli scanned the back of the crowd and spotted the mayor’s Special Friend, a woman with a black head of hair-sprayed raccoon quills, her temples sporting identical white wings. She was light-skinned and small inside her wide summer paisley dress, and she held at her side a cell phone, which Araceli understood to be the instrument by which the Special Friend rounded up crowds and exerted her will. The Special Friend spotted Mr. Luján on the porch and gave him a long, self-satisfied stare, like a half-deranged chess master sizing up the effect of a game-changing move on her opponent. Finally she raised her eyebrows quickly, as if to summon a reply from her rival—but Mr. Luján seemed unfazed. “No hay que hacerles caso,” he said to his daughter and anyone else who would listen. Mr. Luján said this with calm conviction, a deepness of thought that hinted at reserves of belief and self-awareness. Now the Special Friend was back on the phone, summoning additional troops. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Mr. Luján were locked in a familiar struggle, the same one played out in village councils and big-city demonstrations in their native country, at inquests and in courtrooms, between those who understood that wielding power meant being a paternalistic shepherd to the stupid flock and those who dreamed of an Empire of Reason and a literate citizenry. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Councilman Luján were standing on opposite sides of Mexican history, even as they stood in the United States.

  A man in the crowd wearing a backward baseball cap and an incipient beard stepped forward to stand on the edge of the lawn and send a glob of spit toward Lucía, causing Councilman Luján to remonstrate with the spitter and then to pull back his daughter to the safety of the porch.

  Keenan, who had never seen an adult use his saliva as a weapon, grabbed Brandon’s hand for security. “What is this?” he asked his brother.

  “I think it’s a lynch mob,” Brandon said with the amused detachment of an anthropologist describing some primitive rite. He took a weird comfort in the idea that he had stumbled upon another case where life clearly and obviously imitated literature. He had believed lynch mobs were creations of novelists and filmmakers, but here was one before him, with real people showing their canine teeth and twisting their faces into other expressions that suggested incipient revenge. “I’ve read about them in books. In this lynch mob, no one is carrying torches. But I guess torches are not, like, required for it to be a lynch mob.”

  “What are they going to do?” Keenan asked. “Are they going to hurt us?”

  “Well, I don’t see them carryi ng any rocks, so I guess they can’t stone us. I predict they’ll start throwing those bottles and cans. Unless the police get here first. In a situation like this, it helps if the police show up. They call that ‘restoring or
der.’ “

  A minute later two police cruisers slowly wheeled up to the block, each painted white with slanted steel-blue letters proclaiming POLICE, and progressively smaller letters declaring HUNTINGTON PARK, and the department’s wordy motto: DEDICATED TO SERVICE THROUGH EXCELLENCE IN PERFORMANCE. Police Chief Mike Mueller emerged from one of the vehicles, standing tall and thick and midwestern in navy wool, and strode into the space between the contending parties, raising his hands like an announcer in a boxing ring. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to remind all of you, once again, that we have a whole new city ordinance related to so-called political gatherings on residential streets.”

  He kept his arms raised and turned his beef-fed torso 360 degrees, his preferred method for ending these “Mexican standoffs.” “Okay, all right, everyone go home now.” The crowd in the street obeyed, as did the members of the Luján family on the porch, until Lucía stood alone on the front steps and started a chant directed at the retreating lynch mob.

  “¡Re-for-ma! ¡Re-for-ma! ¡Re-for-ma!”

  Brandon soon joined the chant too, his voice squeaking as he tried to match Lucía’s. “Ray-for-mah! Ray-for-mah!”

  Keenan stood on tiptoe and joined them too, trying to mimic the Spanish sounds, as his brother was. When the last of the lynch mob was gone and the chanting had stopped, Keenan turned to his big brother and asked, “Who’s Ray Forma?”

  “No sé,” the boy answered.

  Maureen and Scott stood in the kitchen looking at each other, studying the main work area of their servant, the unwashed plastic tumbler and bowl in the sink the only objects out of place: the leopard skin of the marble countertops gleamed, spotless, even the windows suggested they might squeak if you put a cloth to them. The perfect kitchen and the disturbing art were both the work of the same Mexican woman, and Maureen felt blind and ignorant in the face of this newly revealed proof of human complexity: I took her for granted, allowed her to seep into the white noise around me. It was not immediately obvious what Maureen and Scott should do next, and they wandered about the house, hoping that the ring of the phone or chime of the front door would liberate them from waiting for something to happen. For the moment, it seemed likely, or at least probable, that their two sons and their employee might appear at the door at any moment. It was Maureen and Scott’s experience as parents that all crises eventually ended and their home returned to its placid normality. Fevers dropped, cuts were stitched up, X-rays were taken, and doctors pronounced the children resilient and fated to healthy lives, and when it was all over the home’s routine comforts—the hum of television sets, the salty smell of cheese and prepared meats cooking in the kitchen—confirmed their faith that good parenting values and vigilance would protect them.