The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  Sitting next to his brother, in an aisle seat, Keenan was closer to the clusters of passengers who began to fill the aisle after a few stops, grabbing the bar above them. Keenan didn’t know it was possible to stand up in a moving bus. An older woman towered above him, carrying a plastic bag filled with documents and envelopes, the heavy contents swaying about as the bus lurched forward. Directly across from Keenan, a seated middle-aged man with green eyes held another plastic bag, his weathered hands covered with small cuts, and through the bag’s translucent skin Keenan could make out folded clothes, two thick books, and a pair of pliers. The man held the bag close to his body, inside the vessel formed by his legs and the metal back of the seat in front of him, and Keenan sensed that whatever was inside was very important to him. These people are carrying the things they own inside the plastic bags my mother and Araceli use to bring things from the market. Keenan was eight years old, but the poignancy of poor people clutching their valuables in plastic bags close to their weary bodies was not lost on him and for the first time in his young life he felt an abstract sense of compassion for the strangers in his midst. “There are a lot of needy, hungry people in this world,” his mother would say, usually when he wouldn’t finish his dinner, but it was like hearing about Santa Claus, because one saw them only fleetingly. He believed “the poor” and “the hungry” were gnomelike creatures who lived on the fringes of mini-malls and other public places, sorting through the trash. Now he understood what his mother meant, and thought that next time he was presented with a plate of fish sticks, he would eat every last one. Two passengers in front of him were speaking Spanish, and this drew his attention because he thought he might make out what they were saying, since he understood nearly all of what Araceli said to him in that language. But their speech was an indefinable jumble of new nouns, oddly conjugated verbs, and figurative expressions, and he only understood the odd word or phrase: “es muy grande,” “domingo,” “fútbol,” and “el cuatro de julio.”

  “Nos bajamos en la próxima,” Araceli said as she rose to her feet. “Next stop. We get off.”

  They stepped from the bus to the sidewalk and the door closed behind them with a clank and a hydraulic sigh. Araceli took in the yellow-gray heat and the low sun screaming through the soiled screen of the center-city atmosphere. Goodbye blue skies and sea breezes of Laguna Rancho, Araceli thought. This was more like the bowl of machine-baked air of her hometown: she had forgotten the feeling of standing in the still and ugly oxygen of a real city. “We walk. That way,” Araceli said, pointing south down a long thoroughfare that ran perpendicular to the street the bus had left them on, the four lanes running straight toward a line of distant palm trees that grew shorter until they were toothpicks swallowed up by the haze.

  “This doesn’t look like the place my grandfather lives,” Brandon said.

  “Is it close?” Keenan asked.

  “Sí. Just a few blocks.”

  They stood alone, housekeeper and young charges, on a block where only the bus bench and shelter interrupted the empty sweep of the sidewalk. So strange, Araceli observed, a block without people, just as on Paseo Linda Bonita, but this time in the middle of an aging city with buildings from the previous century. All the storefronts were shuttered and locks as big as oranges dangled from their steel doors, while swarthy men struck poses for the passing motorists from rooftop billboards, their fingers enviously wrapped around light-skinned women and bottles of beer and hard liquor. For a moment Araceli thought that Brandon might be right, that el viejo Torres could not live near here. Then again, you never knew in Los Angeles what you might find around the next corner. You could be in the quiet, sunny, and gritty desolation of a block like this at one moment, and find yourself on a tree-l ined, shady, and glimmering block of apartments the next. Mexico City was like that too.

  Once again, the wheels of the boys’ suitcases clack-clacked on the sidewalk as they marched southward. “This doesn’t look like where he lives,” Brandon repeated, annoying Araceli. “In fact, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the place.”

  “It’s just a few blocks,” she insisted. In a few minutes she would be free of the care of these two boys and the pressure would be lifted from her temples. Their grandfather would emerge from his door, she would tell him the story of the table and the empty house, and he would make them an early dinner and she would be free of them. They advanced southward, witnessed only by the passing motorists, who were all accelerating on this stretch of relatively open roadway, going too fast to take much note of the caravan of pedestrians headed southward in single file, a boy with rock-star-long hair leading the way, his brow wrinkled skeptically, a smaller child behind him, and a big-boned Mexican woman bringing up the rear and studying the street signs. These were the final minutes before the clock struck five, and the drivers were eager to cover as much ground as possible before the skyline to the north began to empty of clerks, analysts, corporate vice presidents, cafeteria workers, public relations specialists, sales wizards, and assorted other salaried slaves. On this midsummer day, most of these automobiles proceeded with windows sealed and artificial alpine breezes blowing inside, but the air-conditioning was not working inside the Toyota Cressida of Judge Robert Adalian, a jurist at the nearby concrete bunker known as Los Angeles Municipal Traffic Court—Central District. Judge Adalian was driving with the windows open when Araceli, Brandon, and Keenan passed before him at the crosswalk on Thirty-seventh Street and South Broadway, thanks to the rare red light on his drive northward along Broadway, his daily detour of choice to avoid the Harbor Freeway. These pedestrians pushed the button to cross and broke the sequence of the lights, the judge thought as he took in the odd spectacle of a woman who was clearly Mexican with two boys who were clearly not. It’s not their skin tone that gives the boys away, it’s their hair and the way they’re walking and studying everything around them like tourists. Those boys don’t belong here. Through his open window he caught a snippet of their talk.

  “I think we’re lost,” the taller boy said.

  “No seas ridículo, no estamos lost,” the Mexican woman answered, irritated, and the judge chuckled, because he’d grown up in Hollywood with some Guatemalans and Salvadorans, and the Mexican woman’s brief use of Spanglish transported him to that time and place, twenty years ago, when Spanish could still be heard in his old neighborhood, before that final exodus from the old Soviet Union had filled up the neighborhood with so many refugees from the old country (including his future wife) that the city had put up signs around it announcing LITTLE ARMENIA. The light turned green and the judge quickly filed away the Mexican woman and the American boys in the back of his memory, alongside the other unusual event of the afternoon: the sentencing of a onetime sitcom actor whose career had been so brief and distant in time, only the judge recalled it. It had depressed the judge to think that, at forty-four, he was older than his bailiff, his clerk, and his stenographer, older also than the defense attorney and the representative from the city attorney’s office. Only the accused surpassed him in age, and when Judge Adalian finally realized that no one in the court was aware of the defendant’s contribution to television history, the fifty-two-year-old drunk driving defendant had looked at the judge and raised his eyebrows in an expression of shared generational weariness. “Time passes,” the defendant said, and this too struck a chord in the judge’s memory, because it wasn’t often that the alcoholics who passed through his court imparted any wisdom. The light turned green and the judge glided northward, unaware that in a few weeks’ time his memory of crossing paths with the faded actor and the Mexican woman with the two “white” boys on the same ordinary day would win him an appearance on cable television.

  Araceli reached the curb on the other side of Broadway and turned right, Brandon now bringing up the rear, because he felt the need to protect his younger brother by walking behind him, lest some monster or Fire-Swallower emerge from one of the shuttered storefronts.

  “Don’t look at anyone in
the eye, Keenan,” Brandon said.

  “What?”

  “This is a dangerous place.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “There might be bad guys inside these buildings,” Brandon insisted. “Look at the markings. That’s a bad number. Thirteen.”

  “Really?” Keenan said, and for a moment he saw the world as his brother did, thinking that xiii had to be some warrior code.

  Logic told Araceli she was just two blocks away from the address on the back of the old photograph, but now she too was beginning to have serious doubts, given the ominous, spray-painted repetitions of the number 13 on the walls and the sidewalk. She sensed, for the first time, that her naïveté about the city might be leading them to the place where graffiti scribblers and gang members were nurtured under the opaque roof of the smoggy sky, a kind of greenhouse nursery of mannish dysfunction. Now they walked past a large vacant lot, a rectangle filled with knee-high milkweed and trash, which in the glory days of el abuelo Torres had been the Lido Broadway movie theater. As a young man el abuelo Torres had seen High School Confidential screened here, lusted after the curvy starlet Cleo Moore, and been pummeled by a couple of African-American guys who didn’t appreciate his comments during a midweek matinee of Blackboard Jungle. Juan Torres and his parents were still in the city-to-farm circuit then, forced with a number of other Mexican-American families to live among blacks. Juan fought the black guys over girls too. Living here and tasting blood in his mouth had shaped his sense of racial hierarchy, and his ideas about where he fit in the pigmented pyramid of privilege that he understood the United States to be. As dark as we are, we ain’t at the bottom. When he had a glass of sangria or a shot of whiskey too many, the brawling, proud, and prejudiced Johnny Torres of Thirty-ninth Street and the Lido Broadway was resurrected: as during Keenan’s sixth birthday party, when he remarked very loudly on how fair-skinned and “good looking” his younger grandson was—“a real white boy, that one”—a remark that led his progressive daughter-in-law to banish him from her home.

  If Araceli had not been trailing two children, if she had not been anxious to reach the place that would liberate her from her unwanted role as caretaker of two boys, she might have stopped and taken the time to study the rubble of the Lido Broadway, a half dozen pipes rising from a cracking cement floor like raised hands in a classroom. Time worked more aggressively in the heart of an American city than in a Mexican city, where colonial structures breezed through the centuries without much difficulty. Here, cement, steel, and brick began to surrender after just a decade or two of abandonment. The people who lived and worked here ran away. But from what? It was best to keep moving, quickly. She spotted a woman pushing a stroller on the next block and a young child walking beside her, two hundred yards away, next to a liquor store with a painted mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe on its side.

  Araceli walked toward the store and the Virgin, and soon she and the boys were entering a neighborhood with houses and apartment buildings that were occupied, clapboard structures, mostly, some with iron fences enclosing rosebushes. They saw a woman flinging a carpet against the stairs of a porch that led to a two-story building with four doors. Brandon noted the strange numbers above each entrance—3754¼, 3754½, 3764¾—and was reminded of the fanciful numbered railroad platform from a famous children’s book; he wondered if these doors too might be a portal to a secret world. They passed a two-story clapboard bungalow with the rusted steel bars of a prison, and both boys wondered if some bad guy was being held inside, but a few doors down, they saw an identical structure, with no bars and freshly painted coral-colored walls, an organ pipe cactus rising ten feet high in the garden, alongside a small terra-cotta fountain with running water and a cherub on top. “That’s a nice house,” Keenan said. “Muy bonito,” he added, and Araceli thought, yes, they must be on the right track, because the houses were suddenly getting prettier. But half a block farther along they encountered a square-shaped rooming house whose doors and windows had been boarded up, the plywood rectangles forming the eyes and mouth of a blindfolded and muzzled creature. “I really don’t think my grandfather lives around here,” Brandon said again, and this time Araceli didn’t bother answering him.

  Two blocks later they arrived at a street sign announcing Thirty-ninth Street and the final confirmation of Araceli’s folly: on this block, where the photograph and the street name on the back had led her, there was a collection of powder-blue duplex bungalows, apartments in a two-story clapboard building surrounded by snowflakes of white paint, and two windowless stucco industrial cubes. The address corresponded to one of the bungalows, which faced the street, with side doors opening to a narrow courtyard. Araceli reached into Maureen’s backpack, retrieved the old photograph, and matched the bungalow behind the young abuelo Torres to the structure before her: the windows were covered with steel bars now and the old screen door had given way to a fortress shield of perforated steel, but it was the same building. Together, the two images, past and present, were a commentary on the cruelty of time and its passage, and of Araceli’s chronological illiteracy, her ignorance of the forces of local history. After a day of walking and bus and train rides she had arrived at her destination, and it was clear that el abuelo Torres did not live here, and could not live here, because everything about the place screamed poverty and Latin America, from the wheeled office chair someone had left in the middle of the courtyard amid a pool of cigarette butts, to the strains of reggae-ton music pulsating from inside one of the bungalows.

  “La fregué,” Araceli muttered to herself, which caused both boys to look up at her in confusion.

  “Is this it?” Brandon said. “Is this the address?”

  “Sí. Y aquí no vive tu abuelo.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Brandon said. “His house is in a big apartment complex, with a big lawn in front. It’s yellow. And there aren’t any ugly buildings like those over there.”

  “Now what?” asked Keenan.

  Behind the security door of the bungalow directly before them, Araceli could hear a second, inner door opening. “¿Se le ofrece algo?” a female voice asked through the perforated steel shield.

  Araceli walked to the door and held up the photograph. “Estoy buscando a este hombre,” she said. “Vivía aquí.”

  Seeing no danger in a mexicana with two young boys, the woman opened the steel door and reached out to take the picture, revealing herself to Araceli as a world-weary woman of about thirty whose smooth skin and long, swept-back eyes appeared to have been carved from soapstone. Her nails were painted pumpkin and her hair seemed oddly stiff and perky, given the circles under her eyes, but those same eyes quickly brightened as she took in the photograph.

  “¡Pero esta foto tiene años y años!” the woman declared, and chuckled after recognizing the black-and-white porch and arriving at the realization that the little shotgun house with the sagging floors and peeling faux linoleum in which she lived had been standing so long, and that once it had been possible to live there without metal barriers to keep out predators: she wouldn’t live there now without bars on the windows. She returned the photograph and gave Araceli and the boys the same dismissive look she gave the impossibly earnest young men with narrow ties who visited her earlier in the day searching for the family of Salvadoran Mormons that had once occupied this same bungalow. “Ni idea,” the woman said.

  Araceli stomped on the wooden porch in frustration. A day on foot, in trains, and buses, from station to station, neighborhood to neighborhood: for this? In the time they had walked from the bus stop the sun had dipped below the buildings on the horizon, the western sky had begun its transformation into the colors of a smoldering hearth. She looked down at the boys and wondered if they would be able to make it all the way back to Paseo Linda Bonita and how much trouble they would become once she told them they would have to start walking again.

  The woman at the door sensed Araceli’s predicament, which was centered on the presence of the two
boys behind her, both of whom seemed to be English speakers. “I think someone I know can help you,” she said, switching languages for the benefit of the boys. “El negro. He lives right here behind me. Apartment B. I think he’s the oldest person who lives here. They say he’s been here forever.”

  A minute or so later Araceli was knocking on the steel door with the B next to it.

  “Who the hell is it? What are ya knockin’ so loud for, goddamnit!” Behind the perforated steel sheet, an inner door of wood opened, and Araceli saw the silhouette of a large man with thick arms and a slightly curvy posture. “Oh, shit. Didn’t know you had the kids with you,” the voice said. “What? What you need?”

  “I am looking for this person,” Araceli said.

  “Huh?”

  “I am looking for the man in this picture. His name is Torres.”

  The man opened the door, slowly, and stretched out a weatherworn hand to take the picture, examining it behind his screen. “Whoa! This takes me back!” the man shouted. Now the door opened fully and the man looked down the three steps of his porch to examine the woman who had given him this artifact. He was a bald black man, inexplicably wearing a sweater on this late afternoon in July, and when he fully opened his door the sound of a television baseball announcer filtered out, causing Brandon to stand up on his tiptoes and try to look inside. The man from Apartment B was easily in his seventies, and still tall despite the stoop in his back. The spaces under his eyes were covered with small polyps, and his cheeks with white stubble.