The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “They’re chopping down the garden!” Brandon said as he came running into the living room, drawn by the sounds. “Keenan, look! They’re chopping it down! The bamboo! Look!”

  Brandon watched them work and remembered the British children in Lord of the Flies, on a tropical island armed with spears and a knife, behaving like savages—and he thought he’d like to pick up a blade and join them.

  “They’re taking away our jungle,” Keenan said. Once the boys ran through shady caves formed by the healthy branches and jumped over the tiny stream, and arranged toy soldiers between the stalks of bamboo. They hadn’t played there in ages, not since Pepe left, as if they too were put off by the garden’s slow death in the dry, Pepe-less air.

  After forty minutes of chopping, nothing in the garden was left standing and the plants were an organic heap the men walked over like soldiers in a battlefield, checking to see if any of the vanquished were still living. For the first time, Araceli could see the entirety of the curving, adobe-colored cement wall that marked the boundary of the Torres-Thompson property. Like an empty canvas, it assaulted the eyes with its blankness: she could understand why Maureen and Scott had gone to the trouble of planting a big tropical garden to cover it.

  Maureen reappeared to examine the work, and tapped at some of the fallen stalks with her sandaled foot. The roustabouts began grabbing armfuls of chopped-up plants and carrying them back to the truck, and two of the workers appeared with rusty pickaxes and shovels, and started hacking away at roots. The men were covered in dust, soil, and a sprinkling of shredded bamboo leaves, ferns, and flower petals. Araceli heard an engine start on the street, and then a series of high-pitched, banshee screams. Following the sound, she stepped away from the glass doors facing the backyard and drifted to the picture window in the living room, but could still not see the source of this deathly wail until she walked out the front door. The roustabouts were tossing the remains of la petite rain forest into a machine attached to their truck, which was spitting a verdant cloud into the back. Pepe’s garden was being turned into green dust and Araceli watched, entranced, as the machine covered the workers’ arms and faces with a dappled chlorophyll skin that affixed itself to the sweat and soil on their faces and arms. Soon they resembled science fiction creatures, or maybe just the poorest of the poor castes of Mexico City, the people who scavenged through the trash all day until they were wearing the gooey black contents of discarded plastic cartons and boxes on their faces and arms.

  By 10:30 a.m., the workers and their foreman were smoothing out the empty black soil with heavy iron rakes. They picked up their equipment and were gone, the truck pulling away as Araceli watched from her post in the kitchen. I should have offered them something to drink. But they were in such a hurry.

  Forty-five minutes later Araceli was mopping one of the bathrooms when she was surprised, again, by the rumble of a truck and the squeal of brakes, followed moments later by a second rumble and squeal, and the opening and closing of doors. Once again she approached the picture window in the living room. An American woman of light complexion with oval-shaped sunglasses emerged from the first truck, followed by two mestizo-skinned men in identical forest-green uniforms. Four more men in green uniforms emerged from the second truck, and soon they were all walking up the path toward Araceli.

  The doorbell rang and this time Araceli beat Maureen to the door.

  “Hi, good morning!” the American woman said. “We’re from the landscape company.”

  “¿Cómo?“ Maureen quickly reached the door behind her and Araceli was forced to step aside before she could ask the many questions she wanted answered: What have you come to do to my backyard? Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming? How long will you be here? Did you bring your own lunch? Araceli could only watch through the glass as this new crew of workers traipsed around the side of the house, led by Maureen to the backyard and the fallow plot where the tropical garden had once stood. Araceli opened the sliding glass door to hear what the woman was saying to her patrona and watched as the stranger opened a scroll to show a large schematic drawing to Maureen, who beamed giddily in the scroll’s creative glow. Then the stranger began to talk, in English, to one of her crew members.

  “Fernando, did we bring enough base?”

  “Es un espacio grande,” he answered in Spanish, surveying the space before them. “Pero sí. Creo que nos alcanza.”

  “I guess we start with the willow, right?”

  “Es lo que nos va a tomar más tiempo,” Fernando answered. “Y también el ocotillo. Eso va a ser todo un project.”

  “I had forgotten about that one. Let’s start with the ocotillo, then.”

  Fernando wore a white oval patch on his uniform that read fernando, and all the other workers had name patches too. These uniformed men didn’t whistle or shout as they walked around the backyard. Instead they examined the turned-up earth of the backyard with considered glances, sometimes kicking at a clump of soil, or picking up a stray leaf or flower stem. They worked with efficient and practiced movements, consulting with one another and their boss in short bilingual conversations like the one Araceli had just overheard. In this strange country that Araceli now called home, the market for labor in the soil was stratified, and these men were jokingly known at Desert Landscaping as “high-end Mexicans.” Most of them were natives of Guanajuato and Jalisco who had known one another for half of their adult lives; in many loyal years of work for Desert Landscaping they had developed an artisan familiarity with the root systems of the ocotillo, the saguaro, and the assorted Sonoran and African succulents that made up the Desert Landscaping catalogue. They earned triple the wages of their untrained, subcontracted morning counterparts, had some limited medical benefits, and, though Araceli did not yet know it, they had brought their own lunches, sandwiches, and burritos made by their wives and girlfriends and stored in black metal lunch boxes each had hauled to hundreds of work sites over the years.

  As the men carried bags of sand from the truck to the backyard, Maureen sat on the grass, holding on to Samantha while admiring the schematic drawing, thinking that the money involved would be well spent. The nervousness of the last few days lifted away, a hair-chewing anxiety heightened by the anarchic chopping, hacking, and slicing of the first crew of the morning. What am I doing, allowing these sweaty barbarians into my home? But no, she was taking charge of her little domestic empire again, and now there was this crew of handsome if somewhat older Mexican men, and this woman nursery manager/landscape designer who was the kind of desert bohemian you encountered in the inner Southwest. When Scott saw the finished product he’d say they should have done this years ago. She watched the uniformed workers bring a few plants that were growing inside wooden crates and plastic pots, including a specimen that resembled a tree in miniature; its thick branches had a taupe skin that looked like bark, and its fleshy petals seemed to be made of emerald clay, and the entire plant had the heaviness and simplicity of a work of sculpture.

  “Isn’t this the biggest jade plant you’ve ever seen?” said the nursery manager, who had caught Maureen’s perplexed examination of the specimen, which spread out some four feet and stood about three feet tall. “In the late fall, or the early winter, whenever you get the first good rain, it’s going to give off hundreds of tiny white flowers. Most of these plants are going to flower at one time or another. Some in the spring, others in the fall.”

  “It just makes so much more sense, from an ecological point of view,” Maureen said. “Down on the beach, it’s misty and cloudy right now. But up here, the sun is beating down on us—over time, it kills anything that needs water.”

  “You’ve got your own little microclimate here,” the nursery manager said. “I could feel the weather changing as I came up the hill. You’re getting a hot counter-draft to the ocean breeze from those mountains. That makes this like an African savanna. You can fool the plants in the garden, you can make them think they’re really somewhere else, but it takes a lot of wo
rk.”

  “I love this one too,” Maureen said. It was some sort of agave, an arrangement of concentric rosettes, one stacked inside the other, painted pale green and crimson, and all the colors in between. “It’s like a flower without being a flower.”

  “It’s called Morning Light. I’ve got a whole bunch more like that for you. We’re going to do a little section of Morning Light, surrounded by some nonthreatening succulents, like this one over here, Cheiridopsis africanus, which is from South Africa, of course. In general, I’m going to put your more barbed and spiny plants away from the edges and from the path, so it won’t be so dangerous for your kids.”

  “Excellent.”

  “¡Con cuidado!“ the nursery manager called out suddenly, and unexpectedly, in Spanish.

  A group of men were entering the backyard with a ten-foot-long plant wrapped in white canvas, rolling it on two platforms, but they had gotten the wheels stuck at the spot where the cement of the driveway ended and the lawn of the backyard began. They carried the package sideways into the backyard, straining under its weight, and stood it on its end; then they began to unwrap it slowly and its branches opened up and stretched out like a man waking from a long sleep. “This, to me, is the pièce de résistance,” the nursery manager said. “It’s the compositional anchor to the whole garden.”

  “Oh, my God, it’s huge. Is that the … what is it called?”

  “It’s an ocotillo. I call it ‘the burning bush’ because it looks like something from the Ten Commandments. It must be a good twenty years old. This one isn’t from the nursery, of course, it’s a transplant. We rescued it from the Palm Springs area, from Rancho Mirage, to be exact. It was on some land that was being cleared for a subdivision, a stunning stretch of desert. I got five of these from those developer gangsters, and half a dozen amazing willows too, one of which is over in the truck. They didn’t just give them to me, of course. They sold them to me. Really nice of them. They destroy a bunch of native habitat for all kinds of desert animals, they’re chasing the roadrunners into the hills, literally, but they make a little extra selling off the flora. But I only paid them a fraction of what they were worth. I got them for a song.” The nursery manager gave the quick, sly laugh of a woman claiming winnings at a poker table. “Speaking of money,” she added with a congenial, gently pleading smile.

  “Yes, I have something for you,” Maureen said, reaching into her pocket. “You said credit was okay.”

  “No problem. Let me just phone this in.”

  As the nursery manager took a few steps toward the edge of the backyard to use her cellular phone, Maureen worried about the stack of bills that little plastic rectangle would have to produce, and swallowed. She wondered, for the first time in ages, whether the charge would clear. When the nursery manager got off the phone, the transaction apparently complete, Maureen felt a bit like a shoplifter. This ocotillo now belongs to me. The exotic arms of the “burning bush” rose above her from a rough-hewn planter box, each decorated with black barbs arranged in a swirling, candy-cane pattern; it was a beautiful creation from a land with a harsh but practical aesthetic. I would like to think of myself as being pretty and barbed like this plant, a survivor of three-digit temperatures, rescued from greed by muscled Mexicans in freshly starched uniforms. The workers brought in more succulents, including one with cone-shaped bursts of saffron petals, a desert equivalent to Maureen’s departed birds-of-paradise, and a tiny shrub with pastel turquoise branches as delicate as coral. A succulent garden played more to the sunlight than her subtropical garden ever could; la petite rain forest was dark and colorless by comparison.

  The workers brought in bags of sand, walking in a line from the truck to the backyard with the bags slung over their shoulders, like Egyptians toiling in some pharaonic project. They took pocketknives from their belts—each one of them had a tool belt—and soon they were ripping the bags open and spreading orange sand and rocks through the backyard, and for a moment longer the patch of ground looked as bleak and barren as Mars.

  At the offices of Elysian Systems, Scott Torres was moving the mouse of his computer in subconscious circles, making the white arrow on his screen flutter until he finally clicked and dispatched four words that bounced at the speed of light from his desk to the company mainframe in the basement, and back up to the programmers’ cubicles he could see through the glass and half-open shades of his office. As expected, Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki broke into a smile at the sight of the box that popped up in the lower right-hand corner of her screen, asking, Wanna have lunch???—Robustus. “Robustus” and variations thereof (Robus-tus65, Scotus Robustus) was his screen name on several email and message systems, a Latin nod to his roots in “robust” programming. Charlotte turned away from her screen and looked straight at him through the glass and gave him a groupie-girl smile and a thumbs-up. He discreetly raised his own thumb, then sent her another IM that read, Meet you outside at 1 p.m. This would be his third lunch with Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki in the past month, each beginning with a furtive meeting in the parking lot, because even though programmers were the employees least likely to spend time imagining the secret lives of coworkers, they could not fail to notice the evolving “special friendship” between the boss and his female underling. Scott did not find the round, fashion-challenged Charlotte attractive in any sinful way; he was drawn instead to her callow programmer enthusiasm, her youthful appetite for his old dot-com stories. During her interview she had made it known that she was aware of his small contribution to the early history of the dot-com boom: he was mentioned in the short Wikipedia entry on Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian, and in one or two others. In the last few weeks Scott had taken to plugging his name in several search engines, feeling narcissistic as he did so, and had been somewhat dismayed that the Scott Torres Ford dealership of Salinas, California, generated twenty search hits for every one about Scott Torres the programmer.

  Scott had been raised not to worry about leaving a mark on the world. Both his mother and father limited their ambitions to their private universe, to the steaks whose fat sizzled and crackled over charcoal briquettes, a beagle panting on a concrete patio, and the unassailable moral rewards of family safety and health. Escape from work in the strawberry and cabbage fields of California, or from the horizonless hamlets of Maine to the modest affluence of South Whittier, was accomplishment enough. Scott followed this path and was thus content to dedicate himself to solving the mathematical and logical challenges that make computers do magic, and took his greatest pleasures in the wide-eyed astonishment that greeted his creations when they came to life. Back in the day, the Big Man responded to Scott’s programming feats with manic bursts of verbal excess that usually began with “This is going to change everything!” Scott’s professional success changed his image of himself, as did a mysterious shift in the culture at large, which had caused Scott to lose his geekiness, though now he seemed to be getting it back again.

  Two and a half hours after surreptitiously meeting in the parking lot, Scott was sitting opposite Charlotte at the Islands Restaurant in Irvine, working on his second mango margarita and winding up his long story about the development of MindWare’s “virtual university” software, having taken special delight in describing the poor skills of the first group of hackers who tried to defeat Scott’s security and cheat on a medieval history test. He looked down at his watch and noticed the time. “Holy shit, it’s almost four.” They rushed back to the office, with Scott registering only briefly the way Charlotte squeezed his hand for two seconds when they said goodbye in the parking lot, Charlotte taking the elevator while Scott took the stairs. How incredibly lame of me, Scott thought as he walked into the office. Like they’re not going to notice we were gone for three hours.

  He stayed late at the office for appearance’s sake, and it was nearly sunset as he meandered out of the building. By the time he reached home, the long summer dusk was almost over, the last glowing embers of daylight had dropped below the silver blue Pa
cific, and in the half light he didn’t notice the clods of dirt in the driveway, the scrapes in the cement left by the second gardening crew as they rolled in the willow and a bush of desert lavender. When his field of vision passed the sliding glass doors, he failed to focus on the strange silhouettes in the backyard cast by the new flora. The significance of his wife’s announcing “Honey, they put in the new garden today” escaped him as he worked to corral his two boys into the bathroom for their nightly shower, and for a half hour of reading in their bedroom. What a relief to have these familial tasks to throw himself into after an agonizingly slow and pointless day at the office. Here, in these neat and orderly rooms with his sons and his daughter, he was king, provider, and executive rolled into one. Not for the first time Scott thought that the private satisfaction of reading to his sons in this bedroom with the Art Deco solar system floating over his head was a very good exchange for the adulation of the past. When he spotted his daughter walking in the hallway in her pajamas, smiling up at him and raising her arms in a wordless request to be lifted, and when she wrapped her small arms around his neck and tucked her head against his cheek, the sensation that Scott the Geek had miraculously found his place in the world only increased. “I can never be mad at you, Samantha, even if you wake up ten times at night.” Fatherhood was a medal and a slap every ten minutes: you could be a persecuted pygmy holding back a scream of surrender at one moment, and then an immortal hero and prince the next. Scott forgot about the snide executives and the money evaporating from his bank account, and tucked his children into bed and kissed them good night.