The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “There are many things happening in this city, but I haven’t heard of any Fire-Swallowers,” Tomás said, giving a philosopher’s rub to his chin. Tomás knew more about the real Los Angeles and its vagaries than other boys his age, and he had never imagined it to be anything other than a harsh kingdom ruled by adult realism and caprice. He was a semi-orphan (that’s what Isabel called him sometimes, “un semi-huérfano”), a wily survivor whose parents were slaves to a Colombian drug recipe, and each had dragged him separately through some of the filthiest single-room-occupancy hotels in the city. He had a four-inch-thick file in the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, a set of folders marked with red tabs in the cabinet of the social worker who had lost track of him at about the time he fell to Isabel. He had ridden on top of trains in southern Mexico, snuck into the backs of buses in Calexico, and had once called the Los Angeles City Fire Department’s 911 emergency line when his father’s eyes rolled back and he had stopped breathing on a bus bench on Main Street, an act of heroism that had later earned the boy belt lashes from his recovered father: “Don’t let me fall asleep like that again! You hear me?” Tomás knew his alphabet and went to school now that he lived with Isabel, and he was lucky enough to have a teacher who could see how bright he was despite the fact that he could not read more than a few words at a time. Tomás had learned to place himself in the path of generous and educated people from outside the calculating and cruel milieu that dominated his life—a patient teacher’s aide, an alert produce vendor willing to give a poor boy a banana or an orange or two. The well-read, English-speaking boy before him now struck Tomás as another one of those people, and he concentrated on every word the boy was saying, telling himself that he would one day learn to read books so he could study these stories himself. Tomás did not know books could contain dramatic and violent tales rooted in real life. As Brandon wrapped up the final fate of the characters in the movie, the boys were still dipping their hands into the bowl, and starting to chew at the few unpopped and salty kernels at the bottom of the bowl Isabel had set out for them.

  “A train crash? No way!” Tomás shouted in disbelief.

  Brandon gave a nod of solemnity. “It was a surprise to me too.”

  “¡Tomás!“ Isabel cried from the kitchen. “¡Venite para acá!” His exclamation had alerted Isabel to his presence at the moment she and Araceli were discussing what else to feed the children. Isabel was short of milk and other foodstuffs, and now she summoned Tomás for a quick run to the market. She believed that running errands was the one thing the Other Boy was good for, and when she saw him coming back with groceries, or hunched over the sink washing the dishes, or at the table chopping carrots, she felt less stupid for having been tricked into becoming his guardian. “Andate a la tienda y comprame leche y un poco de ese queso que le gusta a mi hijo,” she commanded. “Y pan también. ¡Apurate!”

  Isabel slipped two bills into his palm, money supplied by her Mexican visitor. Tomás was a lithe boy with luminous, summer-burned cherrywood skin, and was an inch or two shorter than Brandon, but when he moved through the house and street it was with the confidence and gracefulness of an adult athlete. He winked one of his smart brown eyes at Brandon as he stepped out the door.

  Brandon and Keenan jumped on the bed and watched through the window as Tomás walked away. He’s going down the street by himself! Without any grown-up! And now he’s jaywalking across the highway! Nearby South Broadway resembled a highway to Brandon, and seeing Tomás sprint across its four lanes of asphalt was like watching a diver jump off a rocky cliff into a narrow pool of water. Tomás slipped into a gray stucco prison labeled LIQUOR MARKET and emerged a few minutes later carrying one white plastic bag in his right hand and two in his left. Now he executed a return sprint across South Broadway, running with a scurrying gait thanks to the weight of the bag, and in less than a minute he was climbing up the stairs to the bungalow.

  “Esta vez no aplastaste el pan,” Isabel said at the top of the stairs in Spanish that was too fast for Brandon to understand, though he judged from the harsh tone that Isabel had given him a reprimand, or perhaps another command. Sure enough, a moment later Tomás was in the kitchen, slipping the jugs of milk into the refrigerator. Isabel snapped at him again in Spanish and the boy climbed up on the counter in the kitchen to retrieve a box from a cabinet near the ceiling. From these interactions Brandon was able to intuit that Tomás was not Isabel’s son, and that, in fact, he was a slave.

  Slavery was another of those vicious human institutions depicted again and again in the various fantasy and history books Brandon pored through. In the prologue to Eyewitness: Civil War there were photographs of chains that wrapped around the necks and ankles of slaves, and etchings that showed slaves being whipped, and these images gave greater weight to the tales of slavery in Revenge of the Riverwalkers and other works of fiction he’d read. Clearly, Tomás wasn’t that kind of slave, since there were no chains to be seen in the house, but he wasn’t a free boy either, free to play and shout and read. Rather, Tomás was at the mercy of the pretty but angry woman who ran this household. Now she was making Tomás do something Brandon would never have imagined another boy their age doing: he was serving everyone dinner.

  What was left of Scott’s anger melted away in the early afternoon drive back from South Whittier to the coast, and when he made the final turn onto Paseo Linda Bonita, he realized Maureen had every right to hate him. He had behaved poorly the night of their argument, and aggravated his sins to higher orders of shame by leaving his home and his post as patriarch for seventy-two hours. The absence of his family’s voices and faces from his direct orbit had brought him a sense of clarity about his own failings, if not necessarily the courage to face the consequences of his actions. He parked the car in the driveway, not wanting to open the garage and set off the grinding motor and door slam that would announce his arrival to the interior of the house. Instead, he performed a quiet sidle into the living room through the front door, sensing that the element of surprise would work in his favor during the reencounter with his wife. He listened for the sounds that would give away the location of his children and Maureen, but heard nothing.

  He peeked into the kitchen and found the basins and marble counters in silent repose: the stainless steel sink was bone-dry, and the science geek in him kicked in and deduced it had not been used for several hours, at least. Now he noticed the stuffy air: the air-conditioning was off. This realization led him to begin moving through the house more aggressively and purposefully. When he opened the door to the garage, he was not surprised to find Maureen’s car missing, final confirmation that none of his family members were here, because his children would have to be with their mother. Unless …

  “Araceli!” he called out from the kitchen. “Araceli!” he called out again in the living room. Finally, he opened the sliding door and stepped into the backyard, walking up to the edge of the new desert garden, looking past the alien form of the ocotillo and into the garden’s deeper recesses, which were populated by shorter succulents and sandy paths. He turned away from the cacti and returned to the kitchen, and used the phone there to call his wife, but the call went directly to voice mail. Next he moved to the guesthouse, and gave the door to Araceli’s room three blows of his closed fist. “Araceli,” he shouted again, and then listened for movement in her room, but heard only the very distant whir of a leaf blower, and the taps of a hammer coming from another corner of the undulating hillside subdivision. “Araceli!” The absence of the Mexican employee in the middle of the week was more disturbing than all the other absences; it was a dramatic break in the routine that signaled, in Scott’s mind, that a kind of crisis, a deliberate flight, had played itself out here, as if word had come of an impending tsunami, a landslide, a fire. He stepped in a slow daze back through the interior of the house, wondering if he might discover a clue to his family’s whereabouts. In the bathroom he found a soap dragon on the mirror, pouncing. That’s weird.
It suggested boredom, like the scratching a castaway might leave in his cave while waiting to be rescued. In the boys’ room the beds were made, there were no toys on the floor, and this orderliness also felt unnatural. He opened the closet doors and noticed a conspicuously empty space on the top shelf, and after a few moments remembered that the boys’ suitcases were usually stored there.

  They’ve gone.

  They’ve run away.

  He felt his wife’s anger at work in the empty stillness. After twelve years, could this be the long-feared final break, the end of their family project? This is what happens when you strike and injure your wife. She leaves, of course. What else did I expect? A bland, numb, and lonely future loomed, the silence and emptiness of this child- and wife-free moment stretched out into a future of carpeted and sparsely furnished bachelor apartments. What is a father without his family? A lonely object of scorn or pity. He would be transported back to the directionless, passionless days of his adolescence and young adulthood, when algorithms were his only progeny. Daydreaming about his children, about the daily routines that would no longer be his pleasure to share, he unconsciously followed the same path his sons and Araceli had taken some hours earlier: out the door, into the cul-de-sac, and downhill toward the front gate, accompanied by the same canine protest. He drew the stares of the Mexican landscaping crew that had failed to take notice of Araceli nine lawns and gardens earlier, his distant eyes suggesting to them the sorrow of a wealthy man. You see: even a big house in a flawless neighborhood like this one cannot guarantee happiness. At the front gate, the pregnant attendant watched him approach and asked, “Sir, is there something I can help you …?” but he was soon past her, headed toward the bus stop and then into the meadow behind it, following a ghost trail through the grass that led down toward the Pacific.

  We Californians drift to the sea. I will fall asleep on the beach and the rising tides will pick me up and carry me westward, like those Mexican fishermen who left their village chasing sharks, only to find themselves with cracked lips and sunburns weeks later on an island in the South Pacific.

  After they had finished their meal, the four boys and Isabel’s daughter sat on the front stairs of the bungalow, with Araceli and Isabel behind them in the living room, Araceli making sure she didn’t allow more than thirty seconds or so to go by without glancing at Brandon and Keenan as she listened to Isabel recount in great detail her romance, pregnancies, and eventual falling-out with Wandering-Eye Man. Isabel had opened the inner door to catch an evening breeze after a day in which the sun had beat down on her little structure, and the children had gravitated to the steel security door, and had been drawn outside by the air molecules that squeezed through the pinholes. In between pauses in Isabel’s monologue, Araceli heard the occasional passing car on Broadway, a whistling firecracker exploding several blocks away, and a merengue from the building next door that was going on about lips and kisses, and more kisses, in a chorus of Bésame, bésame, bésame.

  On the porch just past the open door, Tomás was telling the newly arrived visitors the story of the neighborhood he, Héctor, and María Antonieta lived in, as Tomás understood it from two years of observations made from the doorway and his bed, which was under the window that faced out onto the street. Many a night he had crawled out from under the covers and peeked out the window to investigate the source of a noise, relaying whispered descriptions to Héctor, who was usually too frightened to get out from under his covers and look for himself: “It’s the police. They’ve got a guy, I haven’t seen him before. He’s sitting on the curb. They’re pulling back his hands.” “It’s just some drunk guy.” “She’s crying and she’s hitting him on the chest and now he’s hugging her again …”

  In Tomás’s mind the window and the doorway were like a television of constantly switching channels, with new actors and dramas arriving to perform on the Thirty-ninth Street set before departing for new lives in other neighborhoods offstage. Having himself survived a transient existence, this did not strike Tomás as an abnormal state of affairs. He watched people pull up to the neighborhood in Chevy Novas brimming with boxes and towels pressed against the curving glass of rear windows, or jumping off the backs of pickup trucks, or on foot carrying their belongings in big duffel bags they dragged forward on the sidewalk like stubborn farm animals. They came chatting and laughing in large family groups, or quiet and alone with flight bags tucked under their arms, squinting up at the street names on the sign poles to make sure they hadn’t taken a wrong turn. Tomás secretly took in their stories with his eyes, and now he tried his best to relate what he had seen, to show his new friends that he could tell tales too, even though he had never read a book. Thirty-ninth Street was a book-story, Tomás now realized, although one with characters more varied and fleeting than those in Brandon’s readings.

  Many of the events in the neighborhood book-story took place underneath the four streetlamps visible from the front porch, Tomás said. They were nocturnal machines that came to life with a snap and a buzz an hour after sundown, and their yellow glow had the curious property of subtracting the color from the street, so that the events of the night played out like a black-and-white movie. For many months the neighborhood story was dominated by events that took place at the far edge of what could be seen from Tomás’s window, at the corner of Calvino Street, underneath a streetlamp recently repaired by a crew of city workers with a truck that had a stretching bucket that lifted a man into the air. A group of young men used to gather underneath the lamppost on Calvino Street, not for its light (which they repeatedly broke with rocks) but for the markings they had painted on the post’s metal skin, a tangle of letters and swirls that made the post resemble a stiff, tattooed arm. The young men gathered for conferences, listening with their hands in their pockets as the members of their group took turns making speeches, and then they would wrestle one another and shadowbox, and sometimes they would pick one boy and pummel him while they counted to thirteen. The lamppost was no longer covered with graffiti, and the cluster of young men no longer gathered there because they had gone off to battle in another neighborhood, Tomás had heard, and afterward their spot under the lamppost was occupied for several weeks by police cruisers staffed by bored officers with leaden eyelids.

  With the young men gone, other people spilled out onto the streets, Tomás said. On some nights the male workers from the factories played soccer using the no-longer-tattooed lamppost to mark the goal, and their shouts, whistles, and laughter echoed against the buildings. There was a teenage girl who sat in a doorway of the apartment directly behind the lamppost, and for several months a teenage boy had come to court her. They talked for an hour or two each night at the open door, the girl’s awkward silhouette framed by a kaleidoscope television light flickering through the doorway. Once the girl came down and sat on the steps next to the boy, pulling down her skirt and adjusting the straps on her blouse, her leg touching the boy’s, until the bulky shadow of the girl’s mother appeared in the doorway. Tomás said he watched the couple talk for eight nights until the boy stopped coming, leaving the girl on the front steps with her elbows resting on her knees, waiting. After two nights she slipped inside the room with the television, leaving Tomás with a peculiar and enduring desire to see her again, though he never did.

  Over here, to the right, on the sidewalk underneath the lamppost near the corner of Thirty-ninth and Broadway, a street vendor had come one Saturday evening to sell toys, Transformers, at a price that lured buyers from distant places. As the crowd of milling people around his wares grew, the vendor gave both Héctor and Tomás a Transformer. The next week more peddlers appeared, men and women selling toy cars made of steel, balloons, dolls, and other objects made of plastic or wrapped in plastic, and the crowds grew even further, enticing vendors of churros and hot dogs to come and sell also. These vendors laughed and chanted the names of their wares, and drew other strangers, who came to glue posters on the lampposts, and finally the crowds on the narrow stre
et grew so large that people were blocking the Saturday traffic. Then the police cruisers returned, their lights strobe-flashing rosy light against the factory buildings, the apartments, and the bungalows, and the vendors disappeared. Today the only reminders of that noisy marketplace, Tomás said, were the broken Transformers that he and Héctor still had and the two or three layers of posters glued to the lamppost a few feet from the bungalow, the paper slowly bending and peeling with age. Tomás pointed out the old posters to the visitors and Brandon rose to his feet and briefly examined the lamppost from the front steps of the bungalow, seeing words and pictures half exposed by weathering.

  “Los Tu-ca-neys de-el Nor-tay,” he enunciated slowly, taking delight at the phonetically exotic sounds emanating from his lips, foreign words that appeared to derive a meaning from the black leather vests and tiger-print shirts worn by Los Tucanes, a group of troubadours who traveled, apparently, in the tractor-t railer depicted behind them. He imagined them rolling into this neighborhood, which was clearly a crossroads, an outpost, an oasis of some kind. Brandon’s books were filled with accounts of such places, gathering-spots in jungles and deserts, in caves and on mountaintops, market towns where the protagonists rested before important battles and other plot shifts. Some secret force drew people to this place. How else to explain all the comings and goings of travelers, warriors, and traders, and then his own arrival with his brother and Araceli on their long trek from the Laguna Rancho Estates?