The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  Ian Goller had closed the trunk of his car and was contemplating the best route to the sea when his phone chattered again with the announcement of another text message.

  Araceli did not notice the assistant district attorney as she left the courtroom and entered a hallway filled with people in sagging, end-of-the-summer day clothes. She walked a step behind Ruthy Bacalan, who was talking into a cell phone, and then into a long corridor where a man and a woman were walking toward them, backs and heels first—after a moment, Araceli saw they were two photographers aiming lenses at a subject, walking backward as the subject walked toward them, as if walking backward were the most natural thing in the world.

  The smart-stepping photographers tangoed in reverse past Araceli and Ruthy and suddenly the two women were alone with the subject, a sapphire-eyed man with a light, sun-kissed complexion and a wheat-field of hair that looked as if it had been born on van Gogh’s palette on one of the painter’s sunnier mornings. He was an A-list movie star, internationally recognized and swooned over, and he was in the courthouse to testify at and savor the trial of an annoying paparazzo. The sight of the A-list star caused both Ruthy Bacalan and Araceli to stop in the center of the hallway to admire him. Suddenly he spotted Araceli and stopped his advance down the hallway.

  “Hey, I know you,” he said to Araceli. He reached out, shook her hand, and said, “I’ve been following your case.”

  “¿De veras?”

  “I have.” He smiled, spectacularly, and then added, “And I just want to say, good luck to you, señorita,” in a voice that seemed a conscious imitation of Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant or some other star of a bygone age, and in a moment he was bygone too, headed down the hallway to Department 186B to witness the sentencing of a man who would hound the beautiful people of Laguna Beach, Brentwood, and Bel Air no longer.

  “Wow,” Ruthy said, with a hand at her chest.

  “Sí, wow,” Araceli agreed.

  He left them in a trance as they followed the hallway to the door and the concrete plaza outside and its long-shadowed brightness. None of the distracted newspeople standing in the center of the plaza had noticed that Araceli was walking among them. Five of them were gathered in a semicircle, talking to one another and contemplating the black slabs they held in their raised palms, as Hamlet had the skull of his poor friend Yorick, summoning news of a tragedy with their thumbs. A girl’s body was being pulled out of a suitcase in the lake, her stepmother had been arrested, and Ian Goller was speeding toward the scene. The newspeople were all wondering where they would be deployed next, because it was an all-hands-on-deck moment, but Araceli did not know this and assumed that they had simply grown bored with her, and she gave herself a moment to think about how fickle they were, how short their attention spans. None of them had been present to see Ruthy in her white nautical outfit destroy the prosecution in Department 181.

  Araceli parted company with Ruthy and made her way to the parking lot, where Felipe was waiting for her. He’d been there for four hours, waiting, sitting in the cab of his truck with a pad of paper and a pencil, drawing, and he tossed the pad into the back of the cab as soon as she approached. They drove back to Santa Ana, and she told him about how Ruthy had taken apart the prosecution, and when they reached the Covarrubias home he walked her to the front door and said goodbye in a very chaste way, as if he were holding back other, deeper things he wanted to express but was too afraid to say. There was something that was supposed to happen next between them, and Araceli wondered if he would allow that thing to be.

  “¿Mañana? At the same hour?” he asked.

  “Yes. But only if you want to.”

  “I do. I really do. I don’t have any work now—things are slowing down. But even if I did have to work, I would be here, porque es importante.”

  “Hasta mañana entonces.”

  “Hasta mañana.”

  This is a formal, too-polite parting, filled with unspoken yearnings, like in the villages back home, Araceli thought, and she reached out for his hand. Their fingers lingered together long enough for her to inhale and exhale once, very slowly, and in that moment Araceli felt infinitely more electricity pass through her skin than when the A-list movie star had touched the same hand.

  26

  On the morning of Araceli’s second day in court the large crowds of protesters had disappeared from the front steps of the courthouse. In their place there was Janet Bryson, alone, scanning the street and the parking lot for the friends she had made yesterday, at first perplexed by their absence and then, finally, disappointed by their lack of resolve. “They said they would be here,” she said to herself aloud, and when the defendant in The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez appeared at the bottom of the steps with another Mexican, Janet Bryson barely noticed, because she was so upset with the unpunctuality and flakiness of her fellow Californians. What are they doing that’s so important that they can’t be here? What’s on their televisions that’s so captivating; what excuses about traffic will they concoct? Araceli walked up the steps with Felipe and didn’t see Janet Bryson. The shouting woman of the day before had dissolved into the background for Araceli, because at the bottom of the stairs Felipe had reached over to take her hand.

  Felipe had wrapped his fingers around Araceli’s suddenly, instinctively, because he was swept up by the emotion of leading his new friend into a courthouse, which he thought of as a place where people went to disappear and never come back. They could take Araceli away and send her to one of those prisons in the desert, in faraway valleys where people trekked to visit incarcerated fathers and brothers on pathetic road trips where an ice cream for the kids at Burger King on the way back was supposed to make it all better. Felipe had suffered such trips to see his older brother—who was still in that prison, thirteen years later—and when he reached over to take Araceli’s hand, it was to comfort himself as much as her. He knew she was someone special and brilliant whose freedom and future were under threat. They walked up the stairs with palms joined for twenty-four steps and thirty-eight paces to the door with the metal detector, until he let go and allowed her to enter the court building alone, and said, “Te espero en el parking lot, just like yesterday.”

  Inside the paneled courthouse, the proceedings resumed with Ruthy Bacalan rising to her feet and announcing, “We call Salomón Luján, Your Honor.” The Huntington Park city councilman entered the courtroom, in black denim jeans and a thick leather belt whose bronze buckle bore the initials SL. His nod to the formality of the courtroom was a freshly ironed plaid shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, and boots polished so that they resembled the skin of the oak table on Paseo Linda Bonita. Once on the stand he recounted the phone call that brought Araceli Ramirez to his home, and the arrival of the defendant and her two charges at her front door. “She told me she was looking for their grandfather,” he said in moderately accented English, “because the mother and father had abandoned her in the house, alone, with two gringuitos,” he said.

  “With two what?” the judge interrupted.

  “Sorry. I mean with two little American children.”

  “And did these children you saw,” Ruthy asked quickly, “did they seem to be well taken care of?”

  “Yes. They look a little tired. But this lady, Araceli, she was in charge. Their hair was long, but she made them comb it. She was taking care of them, yes.” After asking Luján to recount how Brandon, Keenan, and Araceli had all slept in his daughter’s room—“She’s the one going to Princeton, correct?”—and having Luján confirm that he was a member of the Huntington Park City Council, Ruthy moved to the moment at which Araceli fled his home, alone.

  “Did she tell you why she was leaving?”

  “Yes. Because of the immigration.”

  “She was afraid because she felt she might be detained for her immigration status?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when she left, did she leave the children in your care?”

  “Yes. She could see, on the television
, that their mother and father were back home. So she didn’t need to take care of them anymore.”

  “And you had them until the police arrived?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing further, Your Honor.”

  Arnold Chang said he didn’t have any questions for the councilman—the prosecutor seemed as eager as Araceli to be out of the courtroom.

  “The defense rests, Your Honor,” Ruthy said.

  “Any affirmative defense or motions?” the judge asked.

  “Motion to dismiss based on insufficiency of the evidence,” Ruthy said. “I would like to be heard, Your Honor.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Araceli watched and listened as Ruthy rose to her feet again and launched into a spirited monologue directed at the judge and, with the occasional sidelong glance, at the prosecutor. “It strikes us as a misuse of prosecutorial power to file charges against the only adult in the household who acted responsibly,” Ruthy said. She sometimes held her belly in her palm as she spoke, and she leaned on the lectern once or twice as she described Araceli’s attempts to find a safe place for the children first with their grandfather, and then in a “traditional home with a respectable family” in Huntington Park. “Clearly,” she concluded, “these are the actions of an adult who’s taken the responsibility of caring for two children seriously.” When she finished she plopped back down into her chair, and all the men in the courtroom seemed relieved that she did, because it seemed she might go into labor if she kept on talking.

  “And the People?” the judge asked.

  Now Arnold Chang stood up and began using the same legalisms Ruthy had pronounced, but with a dismissive tone, as if firing tennis balls back across the net. “The facts in evidence establish the vulnerability that is at the essence of the endangerment statute,” he said, and Araceli wrinkled her brow at him because despite his at times abstract and difficult English, the meaning of what he was saying was clear in his flustered, strained brow, and the way he stretched out his arm in Araceli’s direction to make a point. “The vulnerability need not be an actual physical threat, but may also include a looming emotional threat over the psyche of the victims. The People argue that the disturbing nature of the journey undertaken by the defendant with the two minor children, into an area of persistent physical dangers, all thanks to the poor decisions of the defendant, falls within the definitions of the statute.”

  After the prosecutor had stopped and returned to his seat, the judge leaned back into the cushions of his swivel chair and said, “Well, then.” Araceli understood that it was now his turn to decide the next stop on her journey through these buildings and their rooms of concrete and wood paneling. He rubbed his bald head vigorously with both hands, in what felt like some odd judicial ritual, then looked at a clock on the wall. He allowed the second hand to advance in its circular motion and kept on looking as it reached the six at the bottom and swung back and began climbing again toward the twelve, leading Araceli to wonder if he was peering into the clock’s face and studying it for a message only he could discern. Finally, he turned to the lawyers.

  “I’m going to grant your motion, Ms. Bacalan.”

  This short statement was followed by a long silence whose contours Araceli did not fully appreciate, because she did not know what “motion” meant, precisely, in this context. Motion. Moción. Something is moving. The judge will allow something to move. Me? Do I move? But to where? The prosecutor sat up straight, as if preparing to launch into new arguments, while Ruthy leaned back in her chair and gave her pen a jaunty twirl between her fingers.

  Addressing the prosecutor, the judge said, “You’re not even anywhere near a preponderance of evidence.”

  “I respectfully disagree, Your Honor.”

  “Well, you can make a trip to the Court of Appeals if you like, counselor. If you feel it’s worth it. This court has rendered its decision.”

  “Your Honor, before you adjourn,” Arnold Chang interjected, “there’s also the matter of the defendant’s immigration status.”

  “Excuse me?” the judge snapped. He leaned forward and glared at the prosecutor.

  “Objection,” Ruthy said, almost spitting the word out as she rose quickly to her feet.

  The judge motioned for her to sit down, then leaned back in his tall padded chair and brought his hands together before his face as if in prayer. “Counselor, there’s a couple of things,” he began. “First, I’ve got a pretty full docket here. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of an hour, or even fifteen minutes discussing facts not related to the charges before this court. And second, and most germane, is that big bronze seal that’s floating over and behind my head. See that?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “It’s got the San Francisco Bay and a lady with a spear, and it says ‘State of California.’ Is there an immigration law in the California code that you’d like me to enforce, counselor?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “Case dismissed,” the judge said. “Ms. Ramirez, you’re free to go.” He pounded the gavel, which sounded with an odd clack-clack, and rose to his feet and retired to his chambers, carrying an empty coffee cup he intended to fill before returning to the bench for the next case.

  They walked up a wide staircase of weathered granite into the open house, a family of five, Maureen holding Samantha’s hand as the little girl raised her legs high to navigate each step, Brandon and Keenan and their father following after. Maureen stopped in her climb to look longingly at the Prairie style, Frank Lloyd Wright—inspired windows, each an eye-pleasing geometry of nine glass rectangles separated by thin strips of wood. The windows were authentically old and American, as were the pillars of river stones that held up the rafters of the front porch, and the polished floors in the living room whose brown mirror greeted the Torres-Thompson family as they walked through the front door.

  “This is nice,” Scott said.

  Of all the Craftsman homes they had seen in South Pasadena, this was the purest gem. It wasn’t as big as some of the others, but it was the best preserved, and it seduced Maureen with the triangles of its eaves, the sturdiness of its exposed rafters, the long beams that loomed over the living room and jutted out over the porch outside. It was a squat story and a half, perched halfway up a gentle rise above the concrete wash of the Arroyo Seco.

  The boys ran through the living room to the stairs and climbed up to the two rooms of a second story that was tucked underneath the sloping ceilings of a pitched roof. The floors creaked and moaned with each of their steps. “It’s like an eagle’s nest up here,” Brandon said, and he lay on his stomach and looked out a window frame that was only six inches off the floor. He scanned the neighborhood, the billowing canopies of the sycamores and oaks, the spotted green fruit of a black walnut tree, and the shadows and shafts of light that cut through leaves and branches to dapple the sidewalk below, and he remembered the tiny talking forest creatures of a novel he’d read a long time ago.

  Down in the living room, Maureen paced the echoing floors and thought about how she liked the simplicity and directness of the Craftsman design, with its embrace of early twentieth century American values of openness and restraint. Sunlight and breezes raced through its spaces, which seemed familiar and somehow midwestern. This house embodied the new person she wanted to become, and she felt it was a good sign that at this property, unlike all the others, the Realtor had not done a double-take when he saw the notorious Orange County family from the television news walk up to the door.

  “It’s from 1919,” Scott said, reading the brochure as he climbed the stairs behind them. “The plumbing is probably not great.”

  “Who cares about the plumbing?” Maureen said. We’re looking for a new beginning, she thought, and some old pipes aren’t going to stop us.

  She returned to the porch and admired the street, with its wide oaks and denuded jacarandas, each standing in a pool of purple flowers. It was a version of an America that was, a Main Street USA, a Music
Man. She thought, Only the streetcars are missing. This is the kind of street where the boys can ride their bikes. There were no walls separating this neighborhood from the rest of the city, and yet there were no bars on the windows either, no suggestion that the residents lived in fear. This is as it should be. Yes, the air was still and dirty here; she would miss the sea breezes living inland. She was losing the California home of her dreams—she had been chased away from it, really, but perhaps it was for the best. I paid for my ocean view with that horrendous isolation, up on that hill, in that gated and insular place.

  “It’s just nineteen hundred square feet,” Scott said. “Can we squeeze in?”

  “That’s the point,” Maureen said. “To make do with less.”

  Scott examined the asking price, a nose more than seven figures, and more than he had paid for the house on Paseo Linda Bonita five years earlier. Now I might be paying more for less house and no ocean view. It made sense only for the supposedly excellent local public schools, and for having a home small enough to take care of without a Mexican living with them.

  “What if we offer a little less than that?” Scott said to the Realtor, a man with slippery hair and ruddy skin who was just reaching the top of the stairs.