The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  Seat belts on a bus would be a good idea, Araceli thought as the grinding bus climbed and coasted toward the Metro Center transportation hub. The boys sat next to each other in the row in front of Araceli, grabbing on to the rubber safety bar attached to the seat in front of them, leaning forward with the wide eyes of boys taking a ride at the amusement park, and for a moment Araceli was struck by their smallness and fragility, and worried about the bruises and broken bones an accident could bring. These boys never traveled without the protection of seat belts and the crash-tested engineering of American family vehicles. A bus crash could send bodies flying against metal and glass. Araceli had learned this in Mexico City; she knew the dangers firsthand. True, this American bus driver did not bob and weave through traffic like his Mexico City counterparts, who plied their routes with homicidal aggressiveness in rattling and rusty vehicles. Once she had stumbled upon the scene of a bus accident, during her final visit to the art fair in Coyoacán, moments after purchasing a small oil painting rendered on a piece of wood that depicted a suited and masked lucha libre wrestler standing stiffly with his bride. The tableau of stupidity and suffering she encountered that day finally convinced her it was time to leave Mexico. The bus passengers had suffered no visible injuries, though a few were sitting on the edge of the sidewalk theatrically rubbing their necks while a taxi driver remonstrated with them. A few paces away a skinny teenager with chocolate skin and oily hair was gasping for breath as he lay on his back in the gutter, his eyes blazing open to the dirty blue sky as two dozen of his fellow citizens gathered around him, studying him with the distant, emotionless stare chilangos are famous for. Look. A young man is dying right here in front of us. This is something we don’t normally see. It’s all so more real than what’s on television, isn’t it? This isn’t an actor. He is a poor man like us, just trying to make a few more pesos like the ones he is still clutching in his hand. We can’t help him; we can only look and thank the Virgin that it isn’t us down there.

  “Is he dying, Mommy?” a child’s voice asked.

  “¿Y la pinche ambulancia?” shouted an irritated voice from the back of the cluster.

  The young crash victim was a street vendor: a few paces away his bicycle lay bent, while a passerby gathered his scattered load of loofah sponges and stacked them in a small pyramid next to the bicycle. Yes, the boy is dying, but they might need his loofahs in heaven. Araceli was standing at the edge of Coyoacán’s seventeenth-century plaza, in sight of the domed church and the gazebo, next to a line of trees whose trunks were painted white to discourage drivers from crashing into them. She felt bile rising in her throat as the other bystanders pushed their elbows against hers. A red trickle flowed from the young victim’s nostrils, and when he stopped blinking the crowd started to thin, people walking away in a silence as yet unbroken by the wailing of an ambulance. At that moment Araceli fully and finally comprehended the cruelty of her native city, the precariousness of life in the presence of so much unregulated traffic and unfulfilled need, a city where people born farmers and fishermen sprinted before cars faster than any horse or sailing ship. The crash cured her of any lingering procrastinator’s malaise and set in motion her oft-delayed plans to leave for the United States. That night she made a fateful phone call to a friend in downtown Los Angeles, and believed she heard in her friend’s upbeat voice a place where cars, bicycles, and pedestrians each occupied their own byways, sensibly and safely moving through the city.

  Scott’s route from the Irvine Hampton Inn to his hillside home took him along the five northbound lanes of Interstate 5, a highway that was considerably thinner and less traveled in Scott’s youth, when it had been known as the Golden State Freeway. The highway was an immense channel of metal and heated air, and at forty miles an hour or seventy-five, its straightness and width exercised a hypnotic power over drivers. As he navigated through the thinly populated fringes of Orange County, at a late-morning post-commute hour with only moderate traffic, Scott found his thoughts about the coming reencounter with Maureen intermingling with the running dots and dashes of the white lines that demarcated the lanes. The lines were a siren speaking in murmurs of rushing air that bade him to follow-me, follow-me, follow-me, to mountain passes, meadows, and interchanges as yet unknown, to places where no one would know he had pushed his wife into a table. When this trance of happy forgetfulness ended, Scott found himself just one hundred yards from his turnoff, but still in the number-one lane, too late to cross the three lanes of traffic to reach the exit for the freeway that led to the coast and the Laguna Rancho Estates. Damn! Scott gritted his teeth and gave a second half curse as his usual exit and overpass grew smaller in the rearview mirror. He was speeding toward the metropolitan center of Orange County and the course correction back home required shifting lanes and taking the next exit, but Scott’s hands resisted moving: instead, they allowed the car’s momentum to continue carrying him forward and away from Maureen. Maybe I’m not ready to go home yet. The car stream was like a data stream and maybe he needed to see where the information took him, so to speak. He passed Disneyland, left Orange County and entered Los Angeles County at La Habra, and a short while later approached the Telegraph Road exit to his old South Whittier neighborhood. Now, at last, he exited, and headed for the inelegant, weed-happy patch of suburban sprawl where Scott the adolescent and teenager had been introduced to the joys of FORTRAN and masturbation.

  He entered the late twentieth century industrial parks of an old oil patch called Santa Fe Springs, onto surface streets plied, at this hour, by fleets of tractor-trailers, then past a baseball field and a high school with soccer goalposts, where a single, middle-aged Latino man was sprinting with a ball at his feet. Scott followed the splintering posts that carried telephone voices, antiquated analog signals pushed through copper, toward the horizon and the Whittier hills beyond. He reached the first neighborhoods, where the homes boasted miniature gabled roofs, and jumbo vans and pickup trucks in the driveways of mini—Spanish cottages and mini-ranches, their humble size a kind of camouflage. South Whittier does not want you to remember it; it wants to pass unnoticed.

  When he reached the intersection of Carmelita Road and Painter Avenue, the vista changed abruptly, shifting Scott’s mood along with it, because everything at that familiar crossroads was laden with painful memories from the predigital, pre-Internet era. The homes here were taller, and yet flimsier than those he had just passed, and were more uniform, each having been built by the same developer from the same “Ponderosa ranchette” kit. He hadn’t been to his old neighborhood since his mother’s death, and for a moment the weathered, fairy-tale pastels of the two-story homes glimmered as strangely as they had on the August day of her funeral. He slowed the car to the speed of a brisk walk as he turned the final corner and saw the old Torres family homestead and its watered-down mustard stucco with a flavoring of avocado trim, hiding behind an overgrown olive tree. He had expected to feel a superior satisfaction returning to this place, because he had become bigger and more worldly in the decades since, conquering the nodes and networks that united the world. Instead, he felt smaller. We were still fucking poor and I didn’t even realize it. He looked for a place to park his car on the dead-end street, but found all the available spaces taken up with sedans of dated styling, pickup trucks abused by their loads, and a station wagon. Did they even make station wagons anymore? There were never this many cars when he played baseball here.

  Scott parked a half block away and stepped out of his car, surveying the workday quiet as he walked toward his old home, but he stopped when something in the backyard of the next-door property caught his eye. The Newberrys had once lived here, with their Ozark cheeks and corduroy jeans. Peering down the end of the driveway, he noticed something that was foreign to his memory: a large glass and metal box with a pitched roof and a small crucifix on top, plastic party streamers flowing out from the roof to the adjacent garage. Stepping closer, he saw a statue of a suntanned Virgin Mary inside the box, her cl
asped hands and powder-blue mantle rendered in painted plaster, a garland of fresh white roses draped around her neck, votive candles aflame at her feet. This is so strange, so Mexican. These people had taken his old neighborhood, once connected to the rest of modern America by AM radio and VHF television signals broadcast from zinc towers, back into history, to a rural age, a time of angels and miracles.

  “Buenas tardes,” a woman’s voice called, startling him. “¿Le puedo ayudar en algo?”

  Scott looked to his right and saw a woman of about fifty in sweatpants: she held a broom, and judging from her otherworldly smile she believed he was in need of spiritual direction.

  “No, nothing, nada,” he sputtered. “I used to live in the house next door. I came to see, sorry …”

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” the woman said in accented English, and Scott sensed a religious speech about to begin and backed away. “No tengas miedo,” the woman said, trancelike, as Scott scurried away. He was afraid: of her statue, her Spanish, her weird religiosity, and the power of all those things to chase away his old neighbors. What had they done to the Newberrys? The Newberrys weren’t rich. They were from Little Rock. “She wants to help you,” the woman continued in English, and Scott wondered how many years ago the Newberrys had left and if they knew there was a Mexican lady praying to a statue in their old backyard.

  The Laguna Niguel train station was a typical example of the soulless functionality of late twentieth century American public architecture, and as such it deeply disappointed Brandon, who expected the “station” to be an actual building, with schedules posted on the wall and long wooden benches inside a high-walled waiting room. When Araceli had told them they would take a train, it had conjured images in Brandon’s head of locomotives spitting steam, and passengers and baggage handlers scrambling on covered platforms underneath vaulted glass ceilings. Instead the station consisted of two bare concrete runways, a short metal awning where six or seven people might squeeze together to find shelter from the rain, and four refrigerator-sized ticket machines. Brandon thought of train stations as theatrical stages where people acted out momentous shifts in their lives, an idea shaped by a trilogy of novels he had read in the fifth grade, a series in which each book’s final scene unfolded inside the Gare du Nord in Paris. His only previous train ride had come some years back on the Travel Town kiddie train at Griffith Park, and there too the station consisted of a kid-sized replica of an actual building, complete with a ticket booth and a swinging Los ANGELES sign. The small steel rectangle that announced LAGUNA NIGUEL in the spare, sans-serif font of the Metrolink commuter rail network didn’t rise to the occasion, and Brandon frowned at the recognition that actual life did not always match the drama and sweep of literature or film. Nor were there the large crowds of people one associated with trains in the movies. In fact, Brandon, his brother, and Araceli were the only people on either side of the platform.

  As the boys projected hopeful eyes at the rusty sinews of the tracks that stretched away from the station, Araceli scanned the space that immediately surrounded them. Until she got them to their grandfather, these were her boys. It was one thing to be in charge of children inside the shelter of a home, protected by locked doors, or in the fenced boundaries of a park—it was quite another to be herding them about a city. She wanted to cover them with sheets of protective steel. The thought that an accident of man or machine might hurt them filtered into her consciousness and caused brief and irrational pangs of loss, followed by the manic darting of her eyes at each of their stops on the journey from the gate of the Laguna Rancho Estates to the empty platform and the stairways leading to the street and the bus stop and parking structures beyond.

  “Hey, here it comes.”

  A double-decked white commuter train with periwinkle stripes moved toward them as a snake would, the locomotive yawing back and forth on uneven tracks.

  “Atrás,” Araceli commanded. “Back until the train stops.”

  The boys opened their mouths as the cars rolled slowly before them, their massive weight causing the ground beneath them to shift and rise. “Tight!”

  “Awesome!”

  “¡Cuidado!”

  The train stopped and two sliding doors opened before them, the boys entering ahead of Araceli, rolling their suitcases straight into the car, whose floor was conveniently level with the platform. With a quick turn of their heads the boys found the stairway leading to the upper deck and began to climb, Araceli scrambling after them, muttering “¡Esperen!“ at the backs of their feet. They found two pairs of empty seats arranged before a table.

  “Hey, we’re moving.”

  The train began its advance away from the station, and Brandon and Keenan were briefly mesmerized by the illusion of flight that came from looking through the railcar’s large windows and watching their enclosed space move against the low skyline of the transit center’s false downtown, a Potemkin village of parking garages masquerading as office buildings. As the train rolled away from the station, past gates with flashing red lights and waiting cars with daydreaming drivers, Araceli threw herself back into her seat and let out a sigh. Halfway there, more or less. The train itself was a clean comfort, with its white walls and stainless steel poles and vinyl seats with aerodynamic shaping and the plaque by the door that proclaimed its provenance: BOMBARDIER, MONTREAL. After dropping off the boys and the briefest of stays at the old man’s house, she would set off south again for Marisela’s and await news of Scott and Maureen. She imagined different outcomes for their family debacle, including a divorce that ended with an empty house and Araceli vacuuming after the movers had left, or a tearful family reunion and ample thanks from Scott and Maureen to Araceli for seeing their boys through the crisis.

  Through the window, the boys saw a landscape of shrinking backyards shuffle past: the repetition of laundry lines and old furniture did not hold Brandon’s attention for long, and he finally looked across at Araceli and asked, “Can you draw me a picture? Here in my notebook? Like the dragon you drew for Keenan. That was cool.”

  “Yeah, it was tight,” Keenan said.

  “I didn’t know you could draw,” Brandon said.

  “¿Qué quieres? What do you want I draw for you?”

  “How about a soldier?”

  “¿Un soldado? Fácil.”

  She took his lined notebook and pencil and looked for a blank page, glancing quickly at his crude war scenes, little stick-figure Brueghels in which one army of stick men set off cannons and laid siege to rectangular forts and pummeled enemies who raised up stick hands and ran from scribbled explosions. This boy is very smart but he does not know art. Brandon watched, intently, as she traced some initial lines and a man in uniform with a weapon held across his chest took form on paper. It was a musket like the ones in his book American Revolution and Araceli drew it from memory, though she gave her soldier a modern uniform, with a row of medals and a steel helmet. Then she worked on the face, choosing features that were deeply familiar to her, and made it stare straight back at the viewer.

  “Wow,” Brandon said when she finished. “That guy’s face—he looks really tough.”

  “Really mean,” Keenan added.

  The face belonged to Araceli’s mother.

  Her art session was interrupted, suddenly, by the jolt of the train’s arrival in Fullerton, the last station before Los Angeles. Four people waiting on the platform quickly stepped on board and the train lurched forward anew. Soon the train was entering the industrial districts southeast of Los Angeles, one windowless warehouse followed by another as the train accelerated and began to vibrate slightly. The buildings began to age, the neutered, primary-colored plaster of the late twentieth century giving way to the earth-toned constructions of brick and cement of earlier eons. Suddenly the warehouses had windows, many dark and frosted over with dust and cobwebs so that they resembled thousands of cataract-infested eyes. The train went faster still and vibrated violently, causing Keenan to squeeze Araceli’s hand. Brandon h
eld on to the armrest and felt his head strike the window, and wondered if the train might disintegrate, or if the forces of acceleration might transform this rolling steel box into a time machine that would transport them from the archaic era of brick now visible outside the window, to even simpler ages of wood, smoke, and stone.

  The train slowed suddenly as it entered a switching yard with at least twenty parallel tracks. They rolled slowly past rusting hopper cars that had made hundreds of journeys from Kansas with wheat and corn, past tank cars oozing black tar, and container cars with German and Chinese names and bar codes stamped incongruously on their sides. The train made a long, sweeping turn under a freeway bridge and Araceli watched the haphazard cables and wires that followed the tracks moving like a black, horizontal rain. She noted too the random dispersal of trash on the embankment, the plastic bags and food containers sprinkled over the track gravel, the rusting iron overpasses, the graffiti-covered switching boxes, and a lone, stubby brick control tower with wooden doors chained shut. There was a spare beauty to all this decay, it was the empty and harsh landscape of an unsettling dream; these were spaces you were not meant to see, like the hidden air ducts and trash chutes of a glittering mansion, where cobwebs and dust and rat droppings collected freely and concerned no one. Her aesthetic lived in barren places like this, and she missed them. Here the wind, rain, and sun are free to shape and cook the steel and cement into sculptures that celebrate forgetfulness. She took a small notebook from her backpack and tried to quickly capture the manic, twisted essence of electrical lines, the bounce of the trash in the wind, the fluid shape of the rust patterns, until Keenan proclaimed, “Everything is really dirty here,” and her reverie and her concentration were broken.