The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  Scott awoke on Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s couch, following a forty-eight-hour bacchanalia of popcorn, nachos, pizza, diet soft drinks, and power beverages consumed in front of Charlotte’s flat-screen TV and game console, fighting Persian armies and completing post routes to sinewy wide receivers. Charlotte listened to his complaints about his wife, she fed him munchies he consumed compulsively and without joy, and she nestled into a spot on her vinyl couch next to him, her leg and sometimes her shoulder touching his. She tried rubbing his neck: “You have to watch out for the carpal tunnel with these game controllers.” But she wasn’t able to stir those passions that begin below a man’s waist and reach, through circuits of nerve and muscle and irrationality, to moist lips and tongue. Instead, she had set free an inner boy.

  To steal a few minutes of play here and there was one thing, Scott thought: to fully indulge your inner gamer was another. These games were meant to be played by the hour, the better to appreciate their narrative mazes, the overwrought art of their virtual stages. Now, in his second morning here, Scott continued his playing tour of Charlotte’s impressive and diverse collection, chipping onto the green at Pebble Beach to the sound of the roaring surf nearby, negotiating with Don Corleone in his study, forging blades of steel in a medieval foundry, and carrying his new weapons into battle against hordes of bearded Vikings on a Scandinavian beach.

  They’ll probably put them in the Foster Care. Until they can find their parents. What else are they going to do?” That was Marisela’s considered opinion, rendered by phone, and it matched Araceli’s own assessment of what would happen if she called the police. “And of course they’ll start asking you questions. The police have to ask you questions.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, not for you.”

  “And the boys?” Araceli asked.

  “They’ll probably put them in the police car, take them to the station, and then to Foster Care.”

  “What else could they do?”

  Children who spent their nights under blankets decorated with moons and stars in the Room of a Thousand Wonders should not have to spend a single night in the Foster Care. Araceli imagined communal sleeping arrangements, bullying twelve-year-old proto-psychopaths, and cold macaroni and cheese without salt. Children raised in the recirculated air and steady temperatures of the Paseo Linda Bonita would not last long in the drafty warehouses of Foster Care. She imagined the boys cuddling under unlaundered blankets, and suffering the cruel admonitions of caretakers who did not realize how special and smart they were, how they read books about history, how they had learned to identify Orion and Gemini, quartzite and silica, from the library in the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Children with the sensitive intelligence of these boys—qualities their mother did not sufficiently appreciate, because she saw only their boisterous and disorderly masculinity—should not and could not be exposed to the caprices of Foster Care.

  Araceli did not want to be responsible for that loss of innocence. There was a finite amount of innocence in the world and it should be preserved: like Arctic wilderness and elephant tusks, it was a precious creation of nature. And what would the police say or do to her? Probably they would report her to the immigration agents in the blue Wind-breakers, the ICE people—it was difficult to imagine that a Mexican woman without a green card could call the police and present them with two unaccompanied and guardianless American children without herself being drawn into a web that would eventually lead to her deportation.

  Perhaps she was getting ahead of herself. If by Monday morning neither Scott nor Maureen had returned, she would call Scott’s office and demand that her boss return home immediately.

  Araceli was in a deep sleep on the floor in the Room of a Thousand Wonders, dreaming that she was walking through the corridors of her art school in Mexico City, which did not resemble her art school at all, but rather a factory in a desolate corner of an American city, when she was awakened by a series of screams.

  “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

  She sat up, startled, and in the yellow glow of the night-l ight saw Keenan yelling at the wall next to his bed.

  “Keenan, qué te pasa?”

  “Mommy!”

  “Keenan. ¡Despiértate! You’re having a night mirror!”

  “Mommy!”

  “It’s just a night mirror!” Araceli insisted, and with that Keenan stopped, turned, and searched for his Mexican caretaker. To his young eyes his room had become a small submarine in a deep ocean of darkness, a bubble of light and security in a frightening world without his mother and father. The captain of this craft was the Mexican woman with the wide face now looking up at him from the door to the hallway with startled and irritated eyes.

  “What?” Keenan asked in a high, perplexed voice suddenly stripped of his fear.

  “You said he’s having a what?” Brandon said from the perch of his bunk above Keenan.

  “A night mirror.”

  “What?”

  “A night mirror,” Araceli repeated. “You know, when you see ugly things when you’re sleeping.”

  After a pause to digest her faulty pronunciation, Brandon said in a scholarly voice, “No, in English we say nightmare.”

  “Pues, una pesadilla entonces,” Araceli said angrily. “Nightmare,” like many other expressions with Old English origins, was a word she would never be able to wrap her tongue around, especially since it bore no resemblance to the Spanish equivalent.

  “Yeah, a pesadilla is what you say in Spanish,” Brandon said diplomatically. With that he and his brother put their heads back on their pillows, and both boys thought that “night mirror” was in many ways a more apt description than “nightmare”: Keenan looked at the wall and thought of it as a reflection of his motherless room and a window into a parallel world, and within a few minutes he was asleep again, as was his brother.

  Araceli listened to their boy-sized puffs become rhythmic, the quiet song of children at rest. This is the third night I am spending alone with these boys. I should be the one crying out in my sleep. I should be the one screaming for my mother. ¡Mamá, ayúdame!

  Unable to fall back asleep, she decided to get up and make herself tea. She took her steaming cup of manzanilla to the silent living room, lit one of the lavender-scented candles there, and sat on the couch. Maureen never brought a match to these candles—why buy something and never use it? Araceli sipped her tea and watched the yellow flame flicker and cast long shadows throughout the room, the soft, dancing light falling upon the pictures in the Torres-Thompson gallery, coloring the faces with nostalgia and loss. Here are people related by blood, but distant from one another. Pobrecitos. The photograph of the younger version of el abuelo Torres was the one most closely related to her own experience: the urban setting was familiar, along with the mestizo smile. Had he run across the desert to reach the United States as Araceli had? Araceli had a photograph like this of her mother in Mexico City, a snapshot taken by one of those men with the big Polaroids in the Zócalo, when her mother was a young woman recently arrived from provincial Hidalgo. My mother still felt like a tourist in Mexico City then, and so does the young man in this picture—he is a young man in the first days of his Los Angeles adventure. In this picture too there was a just-arrived feeling, the brow raised in something between astonishment and self-assurance. Now something behind the young man caught her eye. Three numbers could be seen floating above his slicked-back hair, attached to a wall behind him: 232. A street address. She remembered how her mother carefully wrote dates and other information on the back of family photographs. On a hunch, she picked up the frame, turned it around, and moved the tabs that held the photograph in place and pulled it out. She found words and numbers written on the back in the elegant, masculine script of another era, the florid penmanship of a teenager educated according to the standardized rules of Mexican public education, the looping letters teachers of the Secretaría de Educación Pública had tried to force upon Araceli too, until she rebelled.
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  West 39th Street, L.A., Julio 1954.

  On Monday morning, Araceli approached the preparation of the oatmeal with a sense of finality. After breakfast was cooked and served she would be free, because el señor Scott was sure to be at his office, the desk altar where he never missed a weekday prayer. When they finished eating, the boys went directly to the game room and within a minute or so the sound effects of steel striking steel were wafting toward the kitchen, where Araceli stood before the refrigerator, a tremor of anticipation in her hands as she picked up the telephone and began to punch in the number.

  “You’ve reached Scott Torres, vice president of programming at Elysian Systems. I’m currently on the phone or away from my desk. Please leave a message or press zero to talk to the operator.”

  Startled to hear another recorded voice, she pressed zero. After a single ring, an actual human voice answered, a woman.

  “Elysian Systems.”

  “Con Scott Torres, please. Mr. Scott Torres.”

  “I’m sorry, he called in sick today.” “¿Qué?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He called sick?”

  “Yes,” the operator said, speaking slower now, because the person on the other end of this call was obviously English-challenged. “He called in sick.”

  “¿Cómo que sick?”

  Now the operator was amused by the incongruity of a woman with a thick accent and poor telephone skills calling a cutting-edge, if somewhat small, software company, and asking for a midrange executive in the same tone of voice these people probably used to order their spicy food.

  “Sick, yes. Ill. Unwell. Would you like me to transfer you to his voice mail so you can leave him a message?”

  “A message? Yes. Please.”

  Araceli thought quickly about what she should say while Scott’s message unfurled again over the phone, her pulse racing anew.

  “Señor Scott. Estoy sola con los niños. I am alone with the boys.” She stopped and seconds passed as she thought how she should elaborate on that central fact. “¡Sola! Por tres días ya. Se nos está acabando la comida. The food is gone almost. No sé qué hacer. La señora Maureen se fue. I don’t know where she is …”

  A loud tone sounded on the receiver and the call went dead.

  Scott Torres was not at his desk because he was recovering Monday morning in a hotel room, alone, having fled Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment after two nights, his marital fidelity more or less unblemished. Thanks to the hotel minibar, he was hung over and had awakened at 8:45 in a bright, sun-drenched room with open curtains, stumbling over to the phone to report in sick to the office switchboard some ten minutes later, having forgotten, in his unsettled state, that he’d given the entire programming department, including himself, the day off for a four-day weekend. He showered, dressed, and paid the hotel bill in cash. It was time to go home and face Maureen.

  After hanging up the phone, Araceli lingered by it for several minutes, because it seemed within the realm of possibility that Scott could receive her message immediately and call her back. She had already decided that she would not spend another night sleeping on the floor of El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas. Before the day was out either she would have reached one of her patrones with the message of her plight, or she would head out for the Los Angeles address of the Torres family patriarch, the clapboard building depicted in the glossy photograph. During her first few weeks in California, Araceli had lived at a similar address, a 107 East Twenty-third Street, and she believed that if the address corresponded to the logical system one expected from an American city, a 232 West Thirty-ninth Street must not be far away. It was not within Araceli’s experience, or that of most people who had been born and raised into adulthood in Mexico, that families picked up and moved themselves and abandoned their old properties every few years, in the same way one might discard a dress that had been worn once or twice too often. Property in Mexico stood as a constant. Once in possession of a deed, and sometimes without a deed at all, a family would plant itself on a patch of topsoil and allow themselves to become as rooted as noble old oak trees, their branches of children and grandchildren a canopy blossoming over the land. Either old man Torres himself or someone related to him would certainly be living at this West Thirty-ninth Street address, just as one could find twenty to thirty people connected by blood, marriage, and poor judgment to Araceli at Monte Líbano 210 in Nezahualcóyotl and the adjoining houses.

  This escape plan liberated Araceli’s mind of the mocking ticks of the clock, of her dependence on absent bosses. She had taken control of the situation.

  At 10:45 a.m. she entered the gaming room and found the two boys sitting on the couch amid the ambient noise of a cheering crowd. There was a football game taking place on the flat screen in front of them, only the players were frozen in their positions, several stopped in midstride, an image that seemed unnatural precisely because the players looked so lifelike. The virtual football teams were waiting for one or both of the boys to set them in motion with controllers that had been tossed on the rug and forgotten. Having grown bored, finally, with the pleasures of computer-generated fantasy, the boys were both reading, Brandon immersed in a Bible-sized tome, Keenan with a book of brightly colored cartoons depicting the adventures of a journalist mouse, the text rendered in a crazy pasticcio of changing fonts.

  “When are Mom and Dad coming home?” Brandon asked.

  “Get ready,” Araceli announced, ignoring the question. “After lunch, we go to your grandfather’s house.”

  “To Grandpa John’s?” Brandon asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent!” Keenan said. They had not seen their paternal grandfather in two years, a time at the very limit of young Keenan’s pool of memories, though the old man had left a lasting impression on both of them because he was a bit of a libertine, a dispenser of large quantities of hard candy who didn’t care if a movie was rated PG-13, and who often handed over meaningful sums of cash that raised the eyebrows of their parents. The boys associated him, most strongly, with visits to a soda fountain in his neighborhood, a place where a certain dish of chocolate in excess was served. They remembered their grandfather sitting in a booth across from them, wringing his hands in delight as they devoured their dessert and turning down their offers of, “Wanna try some, Grandpa?” Brandon and Keenan packed their rolling suitcases and backpacks with extra speed, anticipating another visit to that temple of sugar, and the condominium with the expansive recreation facilities where the elder Torres lived alone in a long-dashed hope that his grandchildren might visit him and use the kidney-shaped swimming pool. They packed their bathing suits and Game Boys too, until Araceli told them to leave all toys behind and to bring more underwear instead.

  12

  Brandon and Keenan led the way, rolling small suitcases that click-clacked along the cement walkway, backpacks filled with books and a few small toys hanging from their shoulders. Araceli locked the door behind them and crossed herself, against her secular inclinations: she would be traveling with two children and one never knew what one might encounter on the road. At the corner and the first turn that led away from the Paseo Linda Bonita cul-de-sac, Brandon stopped to look back at Araceli, his eleven-year-old eyes finding reassurance in the plump image of improvised motherhood she presented. She wore jeans and a billowing cotton blouse, and over her shoulder she carried one of his mother’s old backpacks (used, in its day, to transport Keenan’s diapers and bottles) and a floppy khaki safari hat Maureen liked to wear on all-day summer excursions to theme parks. Minutes earlier, she’d packed the very minimum for herself—two changes of clothes, the unspent and unbanked cash she had on hand, tucking away her savings passbook in a drawer. In the backpack’s front pocket she placed the photograph of their destination, along with a package of the moist wipes Maureen used to clean the baby’s bottom, and the only piece of identification in her possession: a Mexican voter registration card. Then she’d announced to the boys the route the
y would be taking, speaking with a voice of confident authority and in clipped clauses that wedded English nouns with Spanish verbs. “Primero bajamos al front gate, y luego al bus stop, y después al train station que nos lleva a downtown Los Angeles, y finalmente tomamos the bus a la house de tu grandfather.” The boys were eager to leave, imagining their grandfather’s conspiratorial whispers, his aftershave aroma, and his swimming pool at the end of their journey. But before taking his next step forward, Brandon waited until Araceli’s eyes caught his one more time, because after less than a minute walking under the July sun, he was struck by the strangeness of what he was doing: undertaking an expedition through streets he knew only from the windows of his parents’ automobiles. From the edge of the sidewalk he looked up at Araceli and then once again at the street: heat waves shimmered up from the asphalt in imitation of a lake, as if they were standing at the edge of a pier, in a skiff about to push off into roiling waters.

  “Vámonos,” Araceli said, and Brandon resumed the march, Keenan and Araceli behind him in single file. Brandon listened to the barking of unseen dogs that marked their advance down the hill, the animals communicating through what Brandon concluded must be a language: Humans! Alert! Unknown humans! Alert! Until they reached the front gate the only people they encountered were two Spanish-speaking gardeners trimming the edges of a freshly cut fescue lawn who were too engaged in their work to take notice of a countrywoman leading two North American children down the street on foot. When Araceli and her charges reached the gate of the Estates, they failed to capture the attention of the pregnant young woman on duty at the guard kiosk that morning: she was on the phone and was simultaneously inspecting the credentials of a battered moving van and its Mexican driver. They walked another block down the sidewalk-free public access road, Araceli leading them now, trying to get the boys to walk on the grass shoulder, which required them to grab their suitcases by the handles and carry them. Then, for the first time in their young lives, Brandon and Keenan waited for a city bus. “What color is the bus?” Brandon asked. “Will it have seat belts?”