The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  With Araceli’s help they would make it to the day of the party without any major embarrassments. It was to be both a birthday party and the annual, informal reunion of the old crew from MindWare, the company her husband-to-be had cofounded a decade earlier in the living room of Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian, a garrulous charmer and pitchman from Glendale. Maureen had joined them eighteen months later as their first-ever “director of human resources,” which in those undisciplined and freethinking early days made her a kind of company den mother. MindWare had since been sold to people who did not wear canvas tennis shoes to work, and the twenty or so pioneers who were its core had been dispersed to the winds of entrepreneurial folly and corporate servitude. Scott came out of his shell when “the Duo of Destiny and Their Devoted Disciples” were reunited and drank too much sangria, which was another reason why Maureen went to the trouble of making each party a small exercise in perfection.

  Maureen stepped back inside and found Samantha resting her cheek against Araceli’s shoulder in the living room, looking out the big picture window in a somnolent daze while beads of sweat dripped from Araceli’s forehead. She’s been holding the baby this entire time. “Thank you, Araceli,” Maureen said as she relieved her maid of Samantha’s weight.

  Maureen was carrying Samantha to the playroom when a flash of green on the floor caught her eye: her husband had left a trail of cut grass on the Saltillo tiles in the living room. She followed the blades to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and his “gaming” room, and touched them with the tips of her toe-loop leather sandals. Before she could call out to Araceli, the Mexican woman had arrived with broom and dustpan, quickly corralling the stray blades into a palm-sized pile. When it came to the upkeep of the house, Maureen’s and Araceli’s minds were one. Keeping Araceli and letting Guadalupe go was the better outcome of the we’re-going-broke saga Scott had foisted upon them, though she was not entirely convinced they were indeed flirting with bankruptcy. Guadalupe and Pepe were ill-timed and too-sudden losses. But as she watched Araceli sweep up the grass from the floor, Maureen felt less alone before the enormous responsibility of home and family, and somehow stronger. You pay to have someone in your home, and if it works out, they become an extension of your eyes and your muscles, and sometimes your brain. This protected feeling stayed with her as she watched Samantha try to take a step in the playroom and listened to the distant and soothing growl of the vacuum cleaner: Araceli was busy erasing the last traces of Scott’s footsteps from the carpeted hallways.

  Scott entered his sons’ bedroom and found his progeny with heads bowed and eyes fixed on tiny screens. Their fingers made muted clicks and summoned zaps and zips and tinny accordion music from the devices in their hands. He considered them for a moment, two boys transported by semiconductors into a series of challenges designed by programmers in a Kyoto high-rise. Keenan, his younger boy, with his black madman wig of uncombed and pillow-pressed hair, was opening his hazel eyes wide with manic intensity; Brandon, his older son, with the long russet rock-star hair, sat slumped with a bored half frown, as if he were waiting for someone to rescue him from his proto-addiction, which was precisely what Scott had come here to do. Maureen had told him to get them out of the house and “run them a bit,” because without Guadalupe to get them outdoors and away from their insidious, pixilated gadgets, the first week of summer had failed to add much color to their skin. “Why don’t you play football with them?” Maureen had said, and of course Scott resented being told this, because like every other good parent he lived for his children. When he grabbed a book from their library to read or when he watched them swimming in the backyard pool, the money spent on this hilltop palace felt less like money lost. That was the idea behind the home in the first place, to give their boys, and now Samantha too, a place to run and splash, with a big yard and rooms filled with books and toys of undeniably educational value, such as the seldom-used Young Explorers telescope, or the softball-sized planetarium that projected constellations onto the walls and the ceilings.

  “Why is your game barking?” Scott asked his older son.

  “I’m taking Max for a walk,” Brandon said.

  After a few perplexed seconds, Scott remembered that his oldest son was raising virtual puppies. He walked, shampooed, and trained his dogs, and the animated animals grew on the screen during the course of an hour or two, soiling the rug and doing other dog things. We don’t own a real dog, because my wife can’t stand the mess.

  “Okay, guys, that’s enough of that. Games off … please.”

  Brandon quickly folded shut his game, but Keenan kept clicking. “Let me just save this one,” he said.

  “Go ahead and save it, then.” Scott was a programmer and a bit of a gamer himself: he understood that his son was holding a toy that told a story, and that he could lose his place by the flipping of the off switch. Scott walked over to see precisely which gaming world his son had entered and saw the familiar figure of a plumber in overalls. “Ah, Mr. Miyamoto,” Scott said out loud. The alter ego of the game’s Japanese creator jumped from one floating platform to the next, fell to the ground, was electrocuted and then miraculously resurrected, and eventually entered passageways that led to virtual representations of forests and mountain lakes. In this palm-sized version, the game retained an old, arcade simplicity, and to Scott the programmer, the mathematics and algorithms that produced its two-dimensional graphics were palpable and nostalgia-enducing: the movement along the x- and y-axes, the logical sequences written in C++ code: insert, rotate, position.

  “You’re doing pretty well,” he told his son. “But I really think you should get off now.”

  “Okay,” Keenan said, and kept on playing.

  Scott looked up and surveyed the books and the toys in the real space around them, the oversized volumes stacked unevenly in pine bookcases purchased in New Mexico, the plastic buckets filled with blocks and miniature cars. Here too he felt the mania of overspending, although in this room much of the excess was of his own doing. How many times had he entered a toy emporium or bookstore with modest intentions, only to leave with a German-designed junior electronics set, or a children’s encyclopedia, or an “innovative” and overpriced block game for Samantha meant to kindle her future recognition of letters and numbers? But for the gradual diminishing of their cash on hand, and the upwardly floating interest rates of credit cards and mortgages, he might now be conspiring to take them to their local high-end toy store, the Wizard’s Closet, where he had purchased toys that satisfied unfulfilled childhood desires, such as the set of miniature and historically accurate Civil War soldiers that at this moment were besieging two dinosaurs in the space underneath the bunk beds. The bookshelves were stacked with multiplication flash cards, a geography quiz set, a do-it-yourself rock polisher, and a box of classical architecture blocks. Scott’s parents had sacrificed to make his life better than theirs; they had saved and done without luxuries: but Scott spent lavishly to ensure the same result for his own children. He remembered the childhood lesson of his father’s hands, with their curling scars three decades old, earned in farm and factory work, hands the father urged the son to inspect more than once, to consider and commune with the suffering that was buried in Scott’s prehistory, unspoken and forgotten before the clean and sweat-free promise of the present and future.

  “Dad, Keenan hasn’t quit his game yet,” said Brandon, who had gone back up to his bunk to pick up the book he was reading the night before.

  “Keenan, turn off the game, please,” Scott said, in a faraway voice his boys might have found disturbing if they were a few years older and more attuned to adult emotions like reflection and remorse. He had felt this way, also, the night Samantha entered the world, during those three hours he spent overwhelmed by the fear that he and his wife might be tempting fate by having their third child when they were pushing forty. His God, part penny-pinching Protestant and part vengeful Catholic, would wreak a holy retribution against him and his wife for wanting too
much and trying for the girl that would give their family a “perfect” balance. But Samantha had entered the world easier than her brothers, after a frantic but short labor, and was a healthy and alert child. No, the reckoning came from the most likely and obvious place: the private spreadsheet disaster of his bad investments. I thought I was being prudent. Everyone told me, “Don’t let your money get left behind, don’t let it sit—that’s stupid. Get in the game.” The absurdity that a six-figure investment in a financial instrument called a “security” could shrink so quickly and definitively into pocket change still did not compute. He worried about the two geniuses in this room, if he was about to set them on a tumultuous journey that would begin with the sale of this home and a move to less spacious quarters. Scott considered the precocious reader sitting on the top bunk, and his younger brother, who appeared to have a preternatural gift for logical challenges, judging by his swift advancement through the levels of this game, and wondered if he might soon be forced to subtract something essential from their lives.

  3

  The first guests arrived and rang the doorbell ten minutes early, a terribly rude North American habit, in Araceli’s opinion. Rolling her eyes in exasperation, she left a stack of sopes waiting to be garnished with Oaxaca cheese in the kitchen and walked toward the finger that had set off the electric chimes, but stopped when two midget centurions with papier-mâché swords ran past her. Brandon and Keenan raced to the door, holding their helmets atop their heads as they ran, and Araceli listened, unamused, as they stumbled over the lines Maureen had told them to recite: “Friends, Romans, countries …” Keenan began, and then faltered, until Brandon finished with, “Give us your ears!”

  “How cute,” the early guests called out. “Little Romans!”

  When the second and third guests arrived at precisely the appointed hour, the boys were off playing with the children of the first guests, while Maureen and Scott were busy in the back, which left Araceli to open the door for the invitados.

  “We’re here for Keenan’s party?” An American woman with vaguely Asian features and a child and husband in tow tried to look past Araceli into the interior of the house, her expression suggesting she expected to see wondrous and magical things there.

  “Sí, adelante.” What Araceli really wanted to say was, Why do you people insist on treating an informal social gathering as if it were the launching of a rocket ship? Why do you arrive with a clock ticking in your head? How am I supposed to finish these sopes la señora Maureen wants if you keep ringing the doorbell? In Mexico it was understood that when you invited people to a party at one o’clock, that meant the host would be almost ready at one, and therefore the guests should arrive at their leisure at least an hour later. Here they do things differently. The punctual guests walked past her, oohing and aahing at the decorations in the living room, at the Roman-lettered cardboard signs declaring happy birthday keenan and viii on either side of the Chesterfield sofa, and the Doric Styrofoam columns topped with plastic replica helmets. Araceli recognized this couple, and the other guests that followed, from parties past. They were people she saw frequently back in the days when she first started with the Torres-Thompsons, when el señor Scott had his own company. They arrived dressed in the assertively casual attire Southern Californians wore at their weekend parties: in cotton shorts and leather sandals, in jeans faded to the whitish blue of the Orange County sky in summer, and in T-shirts that had gone through the washer a few times too often. Her jefa wanted everything “just right,” and now these early arrivers in their unironed natural fabrics were preventing Araceli from finishing her appointed task. The way some of these people dressed was the flip side of their punctuality: they were like children who cling to a favorite blanket or shirt, they valued comfort over presentation, they were unaware or unconcerned about the spectacle they inflicted upon the eyes of the overworked mexicana who must greet them. How disappointing to work so hard preparing a home for an elegant event, only to have such unkempt guests.

  “Hello, I brought some cookies for the party,” the next early arriver said. “Can I leave them with you?”

  The woman with the chocolate chip cookies was Carla Wallace-Zuberi, chief publicist of the defunct MindWare Digital Solutions. She was a roundish white woman of Eastern European stock with box-shaped sunglasses and a matriarchal air, and she lingered near the doorway as her husband advanced into the Torres-Thompson home with their daughter, Carla’s gaze settling on Araceli as the Mexican woman took a few impertinent moments to assess the cookies. Carla Wallace-Zuberi prided herself on having an eye for strong personalities and here was one that clearly could fill a room, and not just because she was a tad larger than most other Mexican servants. Araceli wore her hair pulled tightly and gathered in two fist-sized nubs just over her ears, an absurd style that suggested a disoriented German peasant. The only thing this Mexican woman accomplishes by pulling her hair back is to establish a look of severity: maybe that’s the point. A small spray of hair, just a few bangs, jutted forth from Araceli’s forehead like the curled plume of a quail, a halfhearted concession to femininity. On this as on all other workdays, Araceli wore the boxy, nurselike uniform called a filipina that was standard for domestics in Mexico City. Araceli had five such uniforms and today she wore the pale yellow one because it was the newest. She took the cookies from the publicist with a frown that said: since you insist on giving these to me … The publicist suppressed a surprised chuckle. This is one tough woman, a no-nonsense mom. Look at those hips: this woman has given birth. Of course she is irritated, because she is separated from her child, or children. Carla Wallace-Zuberi was a self-described “progressive,” and a few days before this party she had spent twenty minutes in her neighborhood bookstore perusing the back cover, jacket flap material, and opening paragraphs of a book called María’s Choice, which related the journey of a Guatemalan woman forced to leave her children behind for years while she worked in California: How terrible, Carla Wallace-Zuberi thought, how disconcerting to know that there are people like this living among us. This bit of knowledge was disturbing enough to keep her from buying the book, and for the rest of the party, whenever Carla Wallace-Zuberi caught a glance of Araceli, guilt and pity caused her to turn her head and look the other way.

  When Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian appeared at the door five minutes later, his eyes caught Araceli’s directly in a way that was at once irritating to her and familiar. He was a tall, bulky man with curly chestnut-blond hair, and much darker eyebrows that were shaped like railroad boxcars. Now he raised both boxcars spryly as he made eye contact with the Mexican maid. The Big Man was the partner of el señor Scott in that business of theirs, and there was a time when he made frequent visits to this home, assaulting Araceli with this same impish look. A self-described “professional bullshitter,” the Big Man saw in Araceli an authenticity lacking in ninety-nine percent of the people who crossed his path. He had no line, no clever riposte with which he could amuse and beguile this woman, the way he could with people who came from his own, English-speaking, California software entrepreneur circle. He had seen Araceli out of uniform and with her hair much longer and not tied back like it was today, and had once managed to make her laugh with a bilingual pun. The memory of her laughter, of her round face brightening and the ivory sparkle of her teeth, had stayed with him. She worked with another girl, Guadalupe, who was too petite and too fake-cheerful to hold his attention, and today he barely noticed her absence. The Big Man also knew, because he had made a point of finding out over the years, that Araceli had no children, no boyfriend that Scott or Maureen knew about (on this side of the border, at least), and that Scott considered her something of a sphinx. Scott and his wife had coined nicknames for her such as “Madame Weirdness,” “Sergeant Araceli,” and the ironic “Little Miss Sunshine,” but she was also extremely dependable, trustworthy, and a dazzling cook. The Big Man’s stomach rumbled as he contemplated the Mexican hors d’oeuvres that would be on offer at this party, as
at all the others the Torres-Thompsons hosted. He entered the home ahead of his long-suffering wife, and son, without saying any other word to Araceli than a mumbled “Hola.”

  The lingering resentment in the chocolate swirl of Araceli’s eyes confronted all the other guests too as they passed through the front door and followed the sounds of screaming children and chattering adults to the backyard. None of the mothers invited to the party had a full-time, live-in maid, and to them Araceli’s subservient Latin American presence provoked feelings of envy and inadequacy. They knew of Araceli’s cooking and her reputation as a tireless worker, and they wondered, briefly, what it would be like to have a stranger living with them, taking away all the unpleasantness from the porcelain surfaces of their homes. Does she do anything and everything? Some associated Maureen and her summer fitness and frail beauty with this Mexican woman and the other one, Guadalupe, who for reasons unknown was not present today. Give me two extra sets of hands to do the housework and carry the baby and I’d look good too. For most of the husbands, however, Araceli blended into the domestic scenery as if she were a frumpy, bad-humored usher guarding the entrance to a glittering theater. The memory of her faded quickly before the birthday decorations in the living room and the eye-catching colors and textures of the furniture and ornamental touches to be found there—the mud-colored Bolivian tapestry thrown over the sofa, or the shimmering stone skin of the floor, which Araceli had mopped and polished the night before, and the bookcases and armoires of artificially aged pine where two dozen pictures framed in pewter and cherrywood documented a century of the Torres and Thompson family histories. The guests passed through the impeccable prologue of the living room, thence through an open sliding glass door to the backyard, a semicircle of grass the size of a basketball court framed by the restrained jungle of la petite rain forest, which was starting to look dry and wilted because the automatic sprinkler system had stopped working a week earlier. A humming engine accompanied a large inflated castle on the lawn, the swimming pool shimmered with ultramarine highlights in the sun, and a small tent covered a table stacked with toy swords and shields and papier-mâché helmets. Another viii made from cardboard and painted marble-white dangled from the roof of the tent.