The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “Think of this moment we’re living in, this craziness, from the perspective of history. California history,” Goller began. “We grew up in the same kind of places, really. Me in Fullerton, and you in Whittier.” Their homes had been parked on the same plain of scattered orchards and cow patches southeast of Los Angeles, and they had gone to schools that were big rivals back when there were “still enough big German and American kids around to make up a good football team.” California was a paradise of open land and sea breezes, the sliver of Eden between the desert and the sea. This was the California of Scott’s and Ian Goller’s birth, a place of quiet, neat settlements separated by the geometry of melons and cabbages growing in fields, by the repetition of citrus groves, the scent of orange trees blooming. “That beautiful place was our playground. It was a place where anything was possible, where the open spaces matched how we felt about ourselves. How we saw the future.” This paradise was gone, Goller said; the orchards had been plowed over to make room for new neighborhoods, rows of houses that became more ramshackle, more faded from one decade to the next. In the years since he’d been a DA, Ian Goller had been forced to see the decay of his hometown up close. There were too many people here now, a crush of bodies on the sidewalks and too many cars on the highways, people crowded into houses and apartment buildings in Santa Ana, in Anaheim, cities that used to be good places to live. The landmarks of Scott’s youth, the burger stands and the diners, were now covered with the grimy stains of time and something else, an alien presence. There was more trash on the streets than ever. Who threw trash on the streets when Scott and Ian were boys? No one. Everything had been corrupted and despoiled. But most people simply didn’t care. They allowed these multitudes to fill the state. Outsiders, most of them uneducated, people without prospects in their own country. And when those multitudes produced, with a kind of mathematical inevitability, the inmates that filled the jails and prisons, too many Californians averted their eyes and pretended it wasn’t happening. Worse, the defenders of these people twisted everything, and demonized American families like Scott’s for having the good sense to live behind the gates that protected them from the criminal anarchy outside. These people were now cheering the idea that his family would be investigated.

  Scott had been looking at the oak surface of the table, and at times directly into the eyes of Ian Goller as he spoke, and had failed to notice that at some point in Goller’s talk Maureen had entered the room with Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, who was holding a sleeping Samantha. They had been drawn in by the sound of the stranger’s voice, with Maureen at first amused by the incongruity of Goller’s black suit on a hot July day, and by the way he slipped into a geeky trance as he spoke. His motives soon became perfectly clear to Maureen, and in another set of circumstances she would have asked him to leave. I don’t like to hear that meanness, that intolerance, she might have said. But these were not normal times, and she found herself a bit taken in by the emotional pull of his argument. I don’t really understand anything anymore. I am surrounded by mysteries and apparitions: like the presence of this man in black. This man is telling me what to feel as much as he’s telling me what to think. It was not the immigrants she thought of as alien, as much as the L.A. reporters who had parked themselves on her lawn, and who now staked out the front gate to the Estates. They were a disorderly and insistent clan of microphone men and women, of camera-holders and question-shouters, and they reminded her of the City of Los Angeles proper, and her first days in the metropolis. She had come to California expecting something altogether different than what she had first encountered, as a single woman in her twenties in an L.A. neighborhood called Mid-City, an ugly place of wide thoroughfares and gray liquor stores and bunkered apartment buildings with underground garages that were rape traps. She carried Mace in her purse back then, and put a steel lock over the steering wheel of her parked, single-girl Honda Civic with its Show-Me State license plates. Quickly she had found a way to escape southward. That’s why I’m living here, on this hillside overlooking the ocean, instead of in some condo off La Cienega, or in Brentwood. Here I have found a purer version of California.

  “There are people who believe that this change in our hometown is a natural and inevitable thing,” Goller continued. He watched as Maureen stepped forward and picked up the newspaper on the table, and saw the indignation that filled her eyes when she saw the headline. “It’s in their interest to treat this Mexican woman as the victim, and you as her victimizers. And that’s the way everyone will see it, unless you tell them differently.”

  Maureen looked at him with equal measures of skepticism and curiosity. He was a strange, elegant little man; it was not every day you met someone who could make a harsh and angry line of argument sound gentle and reasonable. “I don’t quite get what you’re telling us,” Maureen said. “We’re supposed to start talking about immigration and the undocumented, or the illegals, or whatever, and that’s going to get the media off our backs? Isn’t that just going to get us deeper in a mess?”

  “No. You don’t talk about those things. Definitely not. Your part is very simple. You just tell your story to someone with a sympathetic ear. You tell them your story, and you erase the idea that you’re just this crazy family.” He had them now, Scott especially: he was daydream-listening, processing truths. “There’s a reporter I know. He’s actually the local guy for one of the cable news networks. He’ll guide you through an interview, I believe, without compromising you on anything.”

  Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast watched Maureen take a piece of paper with two phone numbers from Goller and give the faintest nod of assent. No, Maureen, don’t. In a short while, Stephanie would politely round up her husband and children and they would leave, and not return. Maureen was going to link her fate to the kidnapping story circulating among the nativists and rightists on talk radio, when instead she should be telling the story of the broken coffee table. That’s how Stephanie saw things. People would understand a woman’s desire to escape an angry husband. But Maureen had too much pride to do such a thing. Maureen wanted, with the stoic resolve of a British monarch, to protect the family image: she did not want the world to think of her sprawled helpless on her back.

  For a moment, Stephanie felt more connected to the Mexican woman who had worked in this house, the hardworking oddball and perfectionist who had been Maureen’s shadow since Stephanie had first come for a playdate. The sad thing is that Araceli and Maureen are really so much alike.

  Goller shook everyone’s hand and left. Stephanie followed her husband to the window, where he studied Goller walking down the path and to his car.

  “He’s got a surfboard on top of his car,” Peter Goldman said, laughing at the incongruity as Stephanie looked at his parked BMW and saw it was true. “Look, he’s starting to take off his jacket. He’s like Batman or something.”

  About a mile down the coast, there was a surf break called Cotton’s that was one of the best-kept secrets on the coast this summer. A little slice of Orange County goodness, known only to the locals, a place where, after a terrain-shifting winter storm, long walls of water now moved left over sand and rocks, large and steady at middle tide. Ian Goller thought that he might, with a little luck, have it to himself late on a quiet weekday afternoon like this one.

  19

  In his small kitchen-dining room in Santa Ana, Octavio Covarrubias made Araceli a breakfast of eggs with chorizo, fresh-squeezed juice from oranges plucked from the tree in the backyard, and a side dish of fried nopals, from the petals of an enormous cactus plant that grew in a vacant lot down the street. With every serving he raised the eyebrow that was hovering between his Jupiter eye and his moles Io and Europa, and asked if she wanted more coffee. Araceli grinned widely at the sight of this unshaven family patriarch of about fifty-five, a semiretired truck driver dressed in faded green work pants, holding a pan and making breakfast for her when, to her knowledge, he never even made breakfast for himself. “Ay, Octavio,” his wife, Luz, said,
after she noted the irony too, “a mí nunca me haces breakfast. Qué bonito sería if you brought me breakfast in bed one morning.” Since Araceli’s arrival at his home last night, Octavio Covarrubias had a sudden and strange need to dote over her, a woman whose presence on earth had only faintly registered in his consciousness before.

  Octavio Covarrubias was impressed that an ordinary mexicana could be put through an arrest and a symbolic flogging by the machinery of the English-language media, survive with her mexicana dignity más o menos intact, and then enter his living room, of all places. He was an avid reader and a faithful consumer of cable television news in two languages, and almost always this made him nothing more than a passive witness to the way his people were crushed, time and again, in American courtrooms, on desert smuggling trails, and in Arizona detention centers. He read and pontificated so much on these issues to his neighbors on Maple Street that they called him licenciado behind his back, because his outrage and verbosity reminded them of a certain kind of annoying politico-bureaucrat back home.

  When Araceli was on her last mouthful of eggs, Octavio Covarrubias began to speak. “Proceso has a correspondent here in Los Angeles,” he said. “Maybe we should call him, because Proceso will want to write something about you, I’m sure.” Octavio Covarrubias was a Proceso subscriber, receiving the Mexican investigative magazine by mail from Tijuana every week. Before Araceli could respond, he began describing a report by this same Proceso correspondent about a facility for the detention of immigrant children in San Diego County, and a Televisa report on the same story, and then later more reports on CNN en Español, and finally on CNN in English. Octavio’s news appetite was such that he could explain to his wife and neighbors why the U.S. Army was to blame for the flooding of the Mississippi and the conspiracies behind the assassination of the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and the links between drug cartels and former President Salinas de Gotari. Having been forced to drop out of his final year of high school in Durango, his dream of a degree in political science unrealized, he studied the news instead, in the belief that he might understand the seemingly unpredictable events of the world, which were obviously orchestrated to keep his people poor, ignorant, and enslaved.

  Araceli ignored the passing question about the Proceso reporter, and helped Octavio and his wife clean up. Her hosts obviously wanted her to fill in the silence with an insider’s account of her arrest and the news they had seen on TV. But she couldn’t think of where to begin.

  “So, it looks like they treated you okay?” Luz Covarrubias said, as Araceli dried a plate with a cloth and handed it to her to put away. “No te veo traumada. Te veo tranquila.”

  “No me imaginaba,” Araceli said suddenly. Octavio and his wife thought she meant she never imagined she’d be pulled into the depths of the machinery of hate, that she never imagined being tackled and having the humiliation broadcast on the airwaves, that she never imagined a million televisions would defame her as a criminal. But no. She meant she never believed she could be pulled so quickly and definitively from her stasis, from her comfortable but boring existence, from the cycles of meals and laundry, into the full mad circus of a life lived without a schedule or rhythm. For this reason, her face brightened with a strange, bemused expression as she said “No me imaginaba …” a second time. The break had begun with the arrival of that first rabble of barbarian gardeners, the men who took the machetes to Pepe’s tropical forest. Those men had ripped her from her roots too and tossed her from a shady jungle into the full California sunlight. Liberated now from jail and from the worry of the fate of Brandon and Keenan, she could appreciate the journey away from Paseo Linda Bonita and into Los Angeles for its carnivalesque qualities. The decaying art of the railroad tracks, the startling dream-sense that came from being in a jail one moment, and then in the silent, spooky glory of the nighttime streets of Aliso Viejo the next. Out here, in the world away from the paradise of the Laguna Rancho Estates, there was the silver skin of taco trucks on Thirty-ninth Street, and the fat tortillas the hungry men and women workers raised to their mouths, and the deep-sea purple of the dying daylight over their heads. Those images belonged in her sketchbook, and then later on a canvas as big as she imagined Picasso’s Guernica to be. She imagined a composition with orange and red explosions of fireworks in the background, and in the foreground the rabid teeth of a mob that marched and shouted. And why not the horizontal march of the electric transmission towers, and that corridor of feral grasses and palms, a road to unseen American provinces beyond? An artist needs to be out and about: Araceli understood that now. The study of the visual world while on her feet had informed her life in Mexico City, but in the defeat of her creative ambitions she had gone into a kind of retreat, she had accepted the little room the Torres-Thompsons gave her and the bills in the envelope at the end of each week. She felt like Brandon, who saw fantasy and wonderment in everything new. She wanted to find her gordito, the dancing painter Felipe, and tell him what she had seen.

  “I never imagined,” Araceli said after a brief silence, “that I could see things the way a little boy saw them.”

  “¿Cómo?”

  “Brandon. He’s the older boy. He loves to read. He thought the things he saw in Los Angeles were like the things in his books. He was funny. You see things differently when you open your eyes the way a child does.” There were children in this house too, Octavio and Luz’s kids, hovering nearby and listening for story details they might share with others.

  “Well, it’s good to see you calm,” Luz said.

  “Sí, me siento calmada,” Araceli said. Octavio looked a little thrown, a little disappointed by her light mood.

  “Next time, Señor Covarrubias,” she said, “I am going to make breakfast for you.”

  The lights came on and Maureen and the television reporter looked at each other through the layers of makeup that covered their faces, and Maureen had one last moment to think, Ah, this is really show businesses, isn’t it? before listening to the reporter’s first question. It had taken forty minutes to transform her living room into a studio. The point of this interview, as she understood it, was to make a public defense of her own motherhood. But as the crew ran black cables as thick as garden snakes along her tiled floor and raised a half dozen lamp stands to varied heights, her stage fright and anxiety had been replaced, momentarily, with a kind of morbid fascination at this glimpse of the inner workings of television news. The crew shielded their portable four-hundred-watt beams with transparent fabric squares until all shadows disappeared and an eerie, even light settled over her living room. They rearranged photographs on the bookcase and produced fresh-cut roses and a vase, and opened the sliding glass doors to the succulent garden and taped L’s onto the floor where a high folding chair was later placed, so that Maureen could be photographed with the roses, a family portrait, and a mini-landscape of cacti and the ocotillo plant all looming behind her. The producer, a woman of about twenty-five, had punched a message into one of those handheld devices that required much use of the right thumb, and waited a few minutes for a reply, and had looked up from the screen to announce that Maureen alone would be interviewed, with the boys, Samantha, and Scott making silent cameos in the “B” footage to be shot around the house afterward, in a simulation of their daily living, sans Araceli. Of course, Maureen thought, I’m the one they want on camera. Her twelve-second “rant” had been repeated enough in its thirty-six-hour existence for an observer or two on the motherhood blogs to call it “iconic.” Why is it, Maureen wondered, that in any walk of life, from corporate CEO, to U.S. senator, to harried flower vendor and distraught Orange County mother, an angry woman provokes such intense feelings? Why is it considered such a remarkable and noteworthy thing for a mother to raise her voice?

  “Maureen Thompson, how are you doing? How is your family?” the reporter asked.

  “We’re fine. We had a little scare. For two days and one very long night that seemed like an eternity. I mean, t
o come home to this house and find it empty, to expect to see our boys here, and then, well, to find them missing.” She was aware that her voice had begun to tremble, that she sounded tenuous and frail, and as soon as she became aware of this, she realized that this was not necessarily a bad thing. “And then to find out they were all the way on the other side of the city.”

  “And they’re okay?”

  “Yes, yes. They’ve got a story to tell, a wild story, but it appears nothing happened to them.”

  “A wild story?”

  “Yes. It seems our employee, Araceli, took them on a train ride. For what purpose, God knows. They were among the homeless at some point, or so it seems.”

  “The homeless?”

  “Yes. Which is very disturbing, of course.”

  “But they’re okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell us a little about yourself.”

  “My husband, he’s a programmer. I teach art at my sons’ school. I’m an art teacher there. Well, a volunteer art teacher, I should say, because they don’t pay me anything, but I do get to be close to the boys and their school.” Her voice had lost its quaver suddenly. “And we’ve lived in this beautiful house for five years now.”

  “Now, explain to us exactly how it was that you found your children missing,” the newsman said, and then looked her directly in the eye and added in a markedly more friendly voice, as if he were an actor speaking an aside to the groundlings, “And please, feel relaxed. We can do this more than once if we need to.”