The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “You’re taking care of Guadalupe’s kids,” said Carmelita, a stubby-legged woman from Peru. “Those are good boys. She loved them.”

  “This is one of the nicer parks around here,” said Juana, who had oily, uneven bangs, and the coffee-colored skin of her ancestors in the mountains of Veracruz. “They clean it every night. And the police patrol past here, so you hardly ever see any vagrants.”

  As the women gathered in the play area, Araceli had a fleeting sense of nostalgia for the company of colleagues, the banter of coworkers, the space that Guadalupe and Pepe had filled in her life. The women told her about their families and the American homes they worked and lived in, while simultaneously keeping an eye on their charges, who were swarming over the play structure and filling the air around it with the squeals their parents called “outside voices.” Carmelita sat on the mat a few feet from Araceli and allowed the boy in her care to stand in his leather shoes and overalls, walk toward her, and then fall into her embrace. Modesta, a freckled and green-eyed mexicana, raised a finger at a girl climbing the roof of the structure’s plastic cube, and the girl immediately clambered down to safety. They were all parents themselves (and María Isabel a grandparent), and their motherly self-assurance fell over and calmed the children around them like a rain of warm milk. Once they’d finished greeting Araceli, their conversation drifted, as it often did, to the practical problems of child-rearing.

  “This is a good place to practice walking. If he falls, he can’t hurt himself.”

  “If you don’t let them fall, they don’t learn to walk.”

  “I remember when Kylie was that age. Es una edad de peligros: they fall as much as they talk. She still has that scar on her forehead, underneath her hair.”

  “I finally got Jackson to eat the squash, after I tried that recipe with the food machine. Un milagro. But it didn’t work with his sister.”

  “Each one is different. God makes them that way.”

  Araceli watched and listened, saw the children on the play structure casting glances at their paid caregivers, and the caregivers looking back as if to say, You are okay, I am here. They knew that each child was his or her own shifting landscape because the estrogen that ran through their veins, and their own histories as mothers, allowed them to see these things: Araceli sensed that North American employers and Latin American relatives alike revered them for this power. They all seem to possess it—and to know that I do not.

  After a while their attention returned to Araceli, the quiet, awkward woman in their midst, and the small mystery and break in the park routine she represented. What, they now asked directly, had happened to Guadalupe?

  “I guess they didn’t have enough money to pay her what she wanted,” Araceli told them. “Or to keep her.”

  “Or she didn’t want to stay,” María Isabel said knowingly.

  “No sé.”

  “Yes, I remember her saying something about the money,” María Isabel said. “First they asked her to work for less. Then her patrón said they were going to need just one person to cook and clean and take care of the kids too. To do everything. Guadalupe said she thought it was too much work for one person. And that she wouldn’t do it, even if they asked her … So I guess they hired you.”

  Araceli said nothing.

  “Do you know where she went?” Carmelita asked.

  “No.”

  Suddenly the newcomer looked perplexed and agitated. Araceli could see now that all the scenery at Paseo Linda Bonita had been shifting around her, even before Guadalupe left: calculations were being made, consultations undertaken. Araceli worked harder than Guadalupe, she was infinitely more reliable, but she didn’t chat with her bosses, or make friendly with them, and so they had revealed their crisis to Guadalupe, the flighty and talkative one. But they hadn’t even bothered asking Araceli what she thought, and had instead simply foisted more work upon her. Araceli saw her standing in the world with a new and startling clarity. She lived with English-speaking strangers, high on a hill alone with the huge windows and the smell of solvents, and lacked the will to escape what she had become. She quietly accepted the Torres-Thompsons’ money and the room they gave her, and they felt free to make her do anything they asked, expecting her to adapt to their habits and idiosyncrasies, holding babies, supervising boys at the park, and probably more things that she could not yet imagine.

  “Sometimes, you just have to pack your things and go to the next job,” María Isabel said. “That’s how it was when la señora Bloom died …”

  “Again with la viejita,” Carmelita said. Juana and Modesta rolled their eyes.

  “I was telling the story to Araceli when you all got here. And I never finished.”

  “The Day of the Dead isn’t until November,” Carmelita said with a wry smile. Already Juana and Modesta were starting to drift away, walking closer toward their charges. “Why don’t you wait until nighttime to start telling your scary stories?”

  “There’s nothing scary about it. It’s a story about a human being. About two human beings. Me and la señora Bloom.”

  “Araceli doesn’t want to hear that story,” Carmelita said.

  “No, no, it’s not a problem,” Araceli said. Already, this woman’s rambling had revealed one unexpected truth, and if she allowed her to go on, she might reveal another.

  “Like I was saying, la señora Bloom lived by herself, with only me to keep her company. None of her kids even lived nearby. The one daughter who called to check in every week, she lived in New York. So one day, finally, la señora Bloom gave up and let go. I was talking to her, just like I’m talking to you right now, about my ungrateful children in Nicaragua. Then I looked at the bed and I saw her with her eyes open. I waited for them to close, but they never did. So I crossed myself about twenty times, and called the ambulance. Two very nice young men came, and they said, ‘She’s dead.’ And I said, ‘I know that.’ And then they said, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ They said I had to wait for the coroner. And they left her with me. So here I am all alone with a body in the house! I call the daughter in New York and there’s no answer. Just the machine. I keep trying, all day long, and I’m thinking, I can’t say that into the machine, Your mother is dead. So finally I tell the machine, ‘Please call your mother’s house.’ But she never did. I was all alone with that body for fifteen hours, until the brown van came and they took my viejita away.”

  María Isabel stopped and saw Araceli looking off at the ocean, but plowed on. “The house smelled like death to me: so I cleaned all night long, until all the disinfectant was gone. Finally the coroner called: they wanted to know what to do with the body. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t reach the family.’ So they tell me, ‘If we don’t hear from someone in forty-eight hours, we’re going to cremate her.’ Así de frío. So I started yelling at them, saying, ‘Don’t you have a mother? Would you burn your own mother?’ “

  “Increíble,” Araceli said flatly.

  “By the time I finally heard from the daughter, my viejita was just a box of ashes. After I got the box, then they all show up at the house. The daughter, the son-in-law, the other daughter, the long-lost brother, who I had never met before. Todos. And they start asking me questions as if it were all my fault. One of them wanted to search my things when I moved out, but when I started crying they let me go.”

  “I’ve never taken care of an old lady,” Araceli said distractedly. “And I’ve never taken care of children until now.”

  Araceli stood up, gave a perfunctory “Con permiso” to María Isabel, then walked over to the play structure, where Keenan was now running across the bridge with the girl María Isabel had brought. At the other end of the play structure, Brandon was sitting on a step, reading a book. Where did he get a book? Is he always carrying one, the way other boys hold toy trucks or security blankets?

  “What are you reading?” Araceli asked him. In four years of living with the Torres-Thompsons, it was the first time she had ever asked this bo
y that question: it felt like a correct, motherly thing to do.

  “El revolución,” Brandon answered, holding up the book to show her the title, American Revolution.

  “La revolución,” Araceli corrected.

  She sat next to him, another thing she had not done before, and looked at the pages as he read them. The book contained short snippets of text and pictures of long muskets, reproductions of old paintings of battles, studio shots of museum artifacts like rusting buttons and uniforms. There was something sad about a young boy sitting in a park reading about men in white wigs who were dead. She wanted to tell him that he should put down his book and play, but of course that wasn’t her business, to talk to him like his mother.

  “What happened to Guadalupe?” Brandon asked suddenly.

  “Yeah,” Keenan chimed in from the play structure. “Where’s Lupita?”

  Araceli was momentarily taken aback. Guadalupe had taken care of these boys for five years, she was like a big sister to them, and no one had explained her absence.

  “¿Tu mamá no te dijo nada?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “I don’t know why, but she is gone,” Araceli said, hoping to forestall any further questions.

  “She’s gone? You mean she’s not coming back?”

  “Is she working somewhere else?” Brandon asked in a distracted voice that suggested he already had an inkling that Guadalupe had quit. “Is she mad at Mommy? Is she getting married?” Brandon was continuously peppering the adults around him, including Araceli, with questions, and these queries about Guadalupe seemed more like the casually curious questions he posed to Araceli from time to time: “Why can’t we have turkey dogs two days in a row? … Why do you say ‘buenos días’ in Spanish but not ‘buenos tardes? …” In the Torres-Thompson family, doing your best to answer Brandon’s questions was a house rule. La señora Maureen was proud of her inquisitive oldest boy and liked to brag about the very first “brilliant” question he had asked when he was four years old: “Why do moths always fly around the lightbulbs?” Neither of his parents knew the answer and they scrambled to reference books and the Internet before giving their incipient genius the information his young brain demanded: moths use the moon to navigate at night, and the lights confuse them, so that “they think they’re circling the moon.”

  When a boy got answers as satisfying as that one, they only fed his desire to ask more questions. “An atomic bomb? Why? How does that work? How do bald eagles see fish in the water from way up in the sky? Who is Malcolm X, and why is his last name X?” The boy was destined to be either a brilliant scientist or an irritating attorney.

  “Did Lupita go back to Mexico?” Brandon asked his temporary caregiver. “What part of Mexico is she from? Is it the same time there as it is here? Can we call her?”

  “No sé,” Araceli said, giving an annoyed looked to make it clear that this answer applied to all of Brandon’s questions. “No sé nada.”

  Araceli felt a sudden warmness on her face: looking up, she saw a shimmering white disk of phosphorus eating through the clouds. The sun will come out, Araceli hoped, and then she said it out loud and Brandon looked up and nodded and returned to his book, lingering over a picture of two armies gathered at opposite sides of a bridge, engaged in a standoff of martial posturing. As he read the accompanying text, running his fingers over it, Araceli gave out a loud sigh.

  The nursery manager paid a quick visit to Paseo Linda Bonita and left Maureen three pieces of paper. First there was a schematic drawing on a sheet from her sketchpad in which small symbols represented the various succulents the consult ant proposed planting in the Torres-Thompson backyard. Second, there was a form in which the price of creating this desert garden was laid out, with separate quotes for “labor,” “flora,” and “base material,” and the alarmingly high figure of the sum total. The third and final piece of paper was a drawing that depicted the succulent garden as it would look from the perspective of the sliding glass doors of her home. The cylinders of a miniature organ pipe cactus would rise to the right, creating an anchor to the composition that would draw the eye leftward, toward the cluster of barrel cacti, mesquite shrubs, and large yuccas with arms blooming like human-sized flowers. When Maureen looked at the numbers on the smallest piece of paper she winced, and felt the dream of the drawing slipping away, becoming so many grains of pencil graphite dissolving into the white blankness of the paper. Then she remembered the argument that she would present to her husband, the logic that would make the garden real, the words the nursery manager had said in a matter-of-fact tone, because the truth of it was so self-evident: “I know it looks a little high. But in the final analysis you’re gonna save a good chunk of money each year off your water bill, and even more off your gardening bill. Because this is the sort of garden you just put in and forget about. Maybe two or three times a year you go in and weed the thing, but otherwise you just stand there and watch it look pretty.”

  The drawing of the garden looked like a desert diorama, and Maureen imagined the dreamlike effect you got at an old-fashioned natural history museum, the sense of standing in a darkened room before a window that looks into another, brightly lit world. The succulent garden would create the illusion that their house was a portal into the unspoiled landscape of old California. Only Scott and his calculator stood between Maureen and the diorama coming to life. Against this obstacle, there was the accelerating decay of the current garden: in time, it would resemble a dried-out mulch heap, or one of those corners of Brazil ravaged by cattle ranchers. She could make this argument to her husband, or she could simply take control of the situation—as she did with every other problem in this home—and present him with a rather costly fait accompli. He’d be angry, but he’d pay the bill, because he always had before.

  7

  Every other weekend the Torres-Thompson family engaged in a ritual of austerity, a temporary purging of the primary luxury that smoothed over their lives. It had been Maureen’s idea, years back when hired help in the home was still a novelty. They would reconnect with their self-r eliant past and spend forty-eight hours cooking their own meals, doing their own dishes, making their own beds. This act of self-abnegation required getting their full-time live-in off the property. Maureen had dreamed up the maid-free weekends after realizing that Araceli didn’t expect to have days off, that she was content to spend her weekends in the guesthouse in the back, entering the main home to cook meals and wash dishes on Saturday and Sunday with only slightly less energy than on the weekdays. “If you want to, it might be good if you took a couple of days off every couple of weeks,” Maureen told Araceli. “Leave the house, you know. But only if you want to.” In Mexico bosses did not give their employees choices, and ambiguous statements like Maureen’s were a common way around the unpleasantness of a direct command: so Araceli took the suggestion as an order.

  Araceli’s biweekly excursions took her to the home of a friend in Santa Ana, an hour away by foot and bus. After a while, Araceli had grown to appreciate the routine that got her out of the Torres-Thompson universe and into the Mexican-flavored neighborhoods of Santa Ana’s barrio, squeezed in between the railroad tracks and the bargain shopping of the city’s Main Street. On this particul ar Saturday, she swung by the dining room to say goodbye to Maureen and discovered her patrona on her hands and knees, with several sheets of newspaper spread over the tile floor of the dining room, trying to interest her two sons in a Saturday morning art project using three fist-sized blocks of sculptor’s clay. Keenan was kneading a lump, and the baby Samantha had ocher-colored fingers after sticking them in a bowl of clayish water, while Brandon was on the couch reading a book. Maureen looked up at Araceli with a smile of parental pride—We are doing something educational, my children and I—and if Araceli had a slightly more cynical bent she might have concluded the scene had been arranged for her benefit. Yes, Mexican woman, you are leaving us to fend for ourselves, but as you can see we Americans can manage okay.

 
“Adiós, I am leaving now,” Araceli said, tapping at the small travel bag hanging over her shoulder.

  Maureen looked up from the table and said, “Okay. See you Monday,” and then added a gentle reminder. “Morning. See you Monday morning.”

  “Sí, señora.”

  With that Araceli was through the door and free from work, relishing those first few, very light and liberating steps down to the sidewalk, a happy reencounter with the person she once was, the woman who lived in a true city, with crowds, art, subways, and beggars. The twenty-minute walk to the bus stop took her downhill along the curving streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates, past one block where, for reasons Araceli never understood, all the houses were exactly alike, each a copy of a tile-roofed home from a white Andalusian village, each with the aesthetically misguided and culturally inappropriate addition of garages with tiny arched windows in their tin skins. The garages were as Spanish-phony as the made-up names on the street signs, which still brought a smile to Araceli’s lips. Mostly variations on the words “vía” and “paseo,” the street names had lots of pretty vowels that, when put together, meant absolutely nothing. Paseo Vista Anda. Via Lindo Vita. Her jefes lived on Paseo Linda Bonita, which was not only grammatically incorrect, Araceli noted, but also a redundancy.

  Paseo Linda Bonita and all the other paseos and vías in the Laguna Rancho Estates bent and twisted in arbitrary ways, as if the designers had intended to frustrate impatient motorists, unpunctual deliverymen, novice mail carriers. When Araceli first came to work here she too had been disoriented by the anti-linear geography of the place, more than once finding herself turning into an unfamiliar dead end, having to retrace her steps back out of the maze. Now she reached the front gate, a stone portal with a guard shack and two big black iron gates with the letters l, r, and E superimposed in polished steel. A man of chocolate skin and cornrow braids was posted there, and he gave a distracted half wave back as she walked past, headed to the bus stop marked by a fiberglass sign, orange county transportation authority. Only the maids and construction workers used this bus stop, so there was no sidewalk, just the dust and pebbles of the shoulder and a post driven into the undeveloped meadow that ran down to the beach. Araceli turned her back to the road and gate and faced the rolling expanse of yellow grass that mamboed in the breeze, the remnant of the “rancho” the Laguna Rancho Estates were named for, the millennial silence interrupted only infrequently by the sound of a vehicle moving behind her with a low purr. Looking past the meadows at the blue ocean beyond, she saw a large vessel many miles offshore, a black box drifting northward across the horizon, like a flat cutout in an arcade game. It was routine to spot ships as she waited at the bus stop, and seeing another evoked a fleeting sense of hopelessness: their slow, industrial drift seemed free of any romantic purpose, and their presence somehow tamed the Pacific and robbed it of openness and adventure.