The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  With the clack-clack of Keenan’s suitcase resuming behind him, Victorino Alamillo took his Stars and Stripes and began to hammer, unaware that the sounds were rousing his neighbor Jack Salazar from his bed, causing him to pull back a curtain. Alamillo is putting up his flag. Finally! He waits until the actual Fourth! Jack Salazar also had a blue star in the window, and a son in Ramadi, Iraq, and two American flags that hung from the eaves 365 days a year. He noted that with the addition of Alamillo’s flag there were now three houses on the block that were bold enough to show their patriotism on Independence Day—a whole three!—though one of those belonged to a Pakistani family, and they almost didn’t count in Salazar’s right-leaning, fourth-generation Mexican-American opinion. The Pakistani family’s flag was plastic, and Salazar sensed they’d put it up so he would stop looking at them suspiciously, or so that he would come over and chat with them as if they were normal Americans, though the truth was that the Pakistani family put up that flag because their daughter Nadia had purchased it during an immigration-rights march in downtown Los Angeles. Nadia Bashir, a twenty-year-old UCLA biochemistry undergrad, had decided that hanging it over the front door would make for a personal and somewhat ironic statement about her family’s ongoing state of cultural evolution. On the day she put up the flag, she remembered her uncle Faisal and his tales of his first, carefree travels through middle Canada and middle America in a Volkswagen Beetle in the 1980s, selling bongs from the trunk. The U.S., he liked to say, was still the feel-good country he had known then.

  “There are no clans here,” he’d say. “That is why the Americans prosper. They don’t have these silly, inbred resentments like we do. We are too clannish. It’s always held us back.”

  To which Nadia very often answered, in the sassy and slightly nasal tones of a Los Angeles accent that sounded charmingly provincial to her Pakistani-born, London-educated uncle, “No clans? Gimme a break! Even in this tiny city, all we have is clans!” In Huntington Park there was a large Spanish-speaking Mexican clan, and the shrinking but still influential Mexican-American clan that never spoke Spanish, and a small clan of people who still called themselves white, and the scattered and reserved Koreans and Chinese, and now a very quickly growing Muslim clan, which was the newest in this part of the metropolis and thus the most feared and misunderstood by all the others. Add to this the warring clans of the street gangs with their baroque entanglements, and the caustic comedy delivered by the two political clans viciously facing off every other Tuesday at the meetings of the City Council, and it all looked as messy as anything on the subcontinent. There was an undercurrent of psychic violence to Huntington Park, Nadia thought, alive underneath a façade of coexistence that was as fragile as the quiet that had miraculously enveloped the neighborhood this morning, interrupted only by the clack-clack of three outsiders walking past her bedroom window.

  “Maybe we should show someone the picture of our grandpa, to see if he lives around here,” Keenan said.

  The same idea had occurred to Araceli, until she remembered how ancient the photograph was—she would only make a fool of herself. This neighborhood they were in now, Araceli noted, was clearly newer than the one that housed the shack where el abuelo Torres had lived a half century ago, and most of the people she could see stirring behind screen doors and windows were much younger than he was. They seemed unabashedly Mexican to her, despite the occasional U.S. flag. Araceli sensed they were, like her, relatively recent beneficiaries of the American cash boom, that they were housekeepers and laborers just a decade or so ahead of her in filling their dollar-bill piggy banks. No, they would not know John, Johnny, or Juan Torres, so she wouldn’t waste any energy asking. Instead, she would find Marisela’s uncle and ask him to tap into those rivers of American information that were still a bit of a mystery to Araceli, the lists of names and numbers that smart fingers could make appear on computer screens, and he would make a phone call, and liberate her from her charges and this journey.

  Huntington Park more fully awakened in the half hour it took Araceli and the boys to return to Pacific Avenue and cross to the other side, into a neighborhood where they were greeted by the creaking springs of two sets of garage doors opening. Freshly showered patriarchs began to retrieve oil-barrel grills, lawn chairs, and other Fourth of July accoutrements, while behind kitchen curtains stoves sizzled with cholesterol-spiking breakfasts. Brandon felt an order in these sounds and their growing volume, the power of routines repeated behind fences and inside homes, while Keenan grew more convinced they were closer to his grandfather, because these were noises he made with his clumsy, old-man hands. As the day progressed further the neighborhood noises would grow louder and more varied: they would become electric and gas-powered, amplified and transmitted far beyond property lines, with pirated MP3 melodies and power-tool percussion jams ruining the quiet inside next-door living rooms where old men were trying to read, goddamnit, to bedrooms a block away where adolescents were trying to sleep past noon. The growing holiday din reminded every resident of the existence of their many neighbors and all their irritating habits, of their penchant to shout for Mom and their poorly maintained toilets, their excessive hair-drying, and how they badgered their sons and daughters and disrespected their parents. With each hour the noise grew, and it grated, serving as further proof, if any were needed, of the central, inescapable fact that subtracted from Huntington Park’s pleasantness: the existence of too many people, too close to one another, in too little space.

  The residents of Huntington Park were going to try to forget these many irritations during a Fourth of July they planned to fill with hamburgers and carne preparada with cilantro, and mesquite charcoal and the not-necessarily-patriotic acts of crabgrass-lounging and beer-can-lifting. It was a time of down-market plenty in Huntington Park, thanks to second mortgages and their illusory windfalls, and the extra cash on hand from copious overtime working at ports and railyards and warehouses unloading goods from an Industrial Revolution taking place on the other side of the Pacific. Les va bien, Araceli observed, because the Americans still have plenty of money to spend on the things that people like me and these people can do for them. Araceli did not know, however, that the flow of containers marked with Asian logograms had begun to slow, imperceptibly, and that the burden of mortgages here had begun to grow, as it had elsewhere, leaving the working people of Huntington Park worried about all the purchased pleasures of second cars and debt incurred when garages were converted to playrooms, and thus a bit relieved, relaxed, and decompressed by the prospect of enjoying a free pleasure this evening. For the Fourth of July there would be no tickets to buy, no parking to pay for, no lines to form, but simply the joy of resting and having the show brought to them when the inky curtain of the post-sunset sky fell over the horizon. At that hour they would turn their lawn chairs and their necks toward Salt Lake Park and the municipal fireworks show, and all the neighborhoods across the city grid would be joined together by the light and the explosions of Chinese powder, louder than any other noise on that noisy day. They were sounds of simulated battle meant to unite the respectfully quiet families of Huntington Park and their dysfunctionally loud neighbors in place and purpose, reminding them all of the name of the sovereign land upon which they were standing: Los Estados Unidos de América, the USA. It was a land held together by paychecks with tax deductions and standardized forms available in just about any language, and police cruisers that sometimes stopped late at night at the homes of the most serious violators of aural tranquillity, to tell them to keep it down, if you would, please. And it was home to a suburb where two boys wandered with their caretaker, scanning the doors and windows for a grandfather who had never lived there.

  The rest of the home was as perfect as the kitchen. Maureen found no truant dishes wandering about the house, no bowls filled with cereal and curdling milk in the living room. No dirty clothes marred the hallways, none of the small Danish building blocks were tossed about, the windows were free of smudges. In Ara
celi’s orderliness Maureen sensed an explanation for the emptiness. They’ve gone off to do something, it seems, and Scott has taken Araceli with him, which would be the sensible thing to do, and Araceli cleaned before they left, because Araceli is like me and cannot step away from a disorderly home. But what about Scott’s car? Had they left on foot, on an expedition to the park, almost a mile away? Or a picnic in the meadows?

  Maureen decided she would wait for them to return, and made lunch for her daughter, leaving the pan and dirty dishes in the sink for Araceli to clean. When they had finished, she said: “Come on, Sam, let’s go find your brothers … and your father.” They were probably walking back from the park. “Let’s go rescue them, because that’s a long walk uphill. Wonder if poor Araceli can make it.”

  Five minutes later Maureen and Samantha had pulled up to the same park where she had deposited Araceli and the boys in a fit of pique two weeks earlier, but it was empty, all the maids who usually gathered there absent because it was the Fourth of July. She accelerated away quickly, drove back toward the Estates, and stopped at the bus stop, and from the front seat of the car she looked into the knee-high grass of the meadow, which had been bleached golden-green by the sun, remembering that she actually picnicked there with Scott and the boys a few years back, to take in the unobstructed view of the ocean. They would have returned, but for the cow chips that littered the field and ruined the taste of her sandwiches and of the Pinot Noir. Now she searched the shifting surface of the windblown grass for her husband, or her children, or the tall, thick shape of her Mexican employee.

  “Where are they, Samantha?”

  Wherever they are, they have to pass by here. On foot, or in a car, they have to enter through this gate. She had turned off the engine, wondering how long she would have to wait, when she saw a figure emerge on the horizon, a man walking where the meadow dropped steeply, struggling to keep his footing, as if working against an unseen tide.

  Araceli unlatched the front gate, followed a straight path through a crabgrass lawn, climbed up to a porch, and rang the doorbell. Her long journey to reach this address was rewarded, delightfully, by the sudden appearance at the door of a ruggedly handsome man in his forties who greeted her with a chivalrous “Buenos días” and the same pencil-thin mustache and jaunty smile that had broken hearts when he left Mexico City two decades earlier. Salomón Luján was expecting Araceli and her charges, because an hour earlier he had half listened to his niece’s explanation of the Torres-Thompson family saga, while simultaneously watching two work crews install a canopy tent and trampoline in his backyard for the big Luján family Fourth of July fiesta.

  Now Mr. Luján stood at his door and heard Araceli tell the story of the absent parents herself. “Estás haciendo lo que debes hacer, y tus jefes te lo van a agradecer,” he said. Once a common laborer, Salomón Luján believed that being loyal to your gringo employers was the secret to mexicano success on this side of the border, his barrel-chested exertions on behalf of various warehouse owners and construction contractors having lifted him through many layers of North American achievement, including the purchase of this home, his triumphant entry into the water-heater business, and his oath-taking as an American citizen and his recent election to the Huntington Park City Council. He sized up Araceli and decided she too was destined for something better, and, judging from the free-flowing hair styles and leather-sandaled feet of her charges, she was the one who kept order in the hippie household where she worked.

  “Stay with us today and tonight if you like, and tomorrow I will find the grandfather,” he said, switching to English for the benefit of the two boys. “Today is impossible, because it’s the Fourth of July and all the city offices are closed. But first thing in the morning I’ll call the city clerk and check voter registration and we’ll find him. For the moment, come to the backyard. Our party is just getting started.”

  He led Araceli and the boys through his living room, which was decorated in a style Salomon’s smart-aleck Ivy League daughter called “Zacatecas Soap Opera Chic,” with an oil painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on one wall. The Knight-Errant of La Mancha stood for the idea that the Lujáns were descended from a place of nobility and history, where men stood tall on horses and looked proudly over the dry, yellow hills of their patrimony. Don Quixote shared the living room with assorted horseshoes, mounted vintage revolvers, and a sofa-bench and love seat with fragile, wood-carved legs and cream velvet cushions embroidered with gold swirls, both pieces shipped in from “the best kitschy furniture maker in Durango,” as his daughter put it. Scattered among these symbols of his romantic outlook were family pictures, including one portrait of the aforementioned daughter in cap and gown, and another of the family patriarch raising a clasped hand on election night with the mayor of Huntington Park. Brandon and Keenan looked at that picture a second or two without knowing what its precise meaning might be, though Brandon surmised from both the image and the air of steadiness and authority of Mr. Luján that he had recently been named president of Huntington Park.

  They moved to the backyard, where six rented white tables had been arranged under the mustard-colored light that seeped through the tarpaulin skin of the tent. Salomón led Araceli and the boys past a cluster of half-awake young people gathered at the tables, to the edge of the backyard, where two men with shovels were standing and conversing around a mound of beige dirt that seemed to have bubbled up from the lawn.

  “We’re having carnitas, the way they do it in the ranchos,” Salomón told the boys. “There’s a pig buried in there.”

  “Underground?” Brandon asked.

  “Yeah, we got hot rocks down there. And the pig, wrapped in foil, cooking. We let it cook for some hours. When it finish, you have very juicy meat. Sabrosísima.”

  Brandon gave the mound a look of innocent puzzlement, causing Mr. Luján and the two sweaty, stubbly-faced men with the shovels to grin: he was, in fact, deeply troubled by the idea that combustion was taking place in the unseen hollows beneath his feet. “I thought fire needed oxygen to burn,” he said, but Mr. Luján had turned his attention elsewhere and did not answer, and his two cousins with the shovels didn’t speak English well enough to explain the simple physics of their carnitas barbecue. After thinking about it for a few seconds, Brandon came to the disturbing conclusion that he was standing over a pit of buried flames, as in the underworlds often depicted in the books he read: souls trapped in subterranean passages, evildoers building infernal machines in caves. He considered, for a moment, running away, until Mr. Luján returned and put his arm on his shoulder.

  “Let me introduce you to the people here,” he said to the boys. And then he turned to Araceli and said in collegial Spanish, “Y tú también.”

  For the moment, the only guests were the four young adults sitting half asleep at the table, seemingly hypnotized by the piano resonating from two transistor-radio-sized speakers. A single piano note repeated inside the swirl of a flute, and then a tenor began to sing, pushing into falsetto, and Araceli found it odd that these people with their obvious Mesoamerican features were listening to a rather effete voice singing words in English.

  History involved itself,

  mysterious shade that took its form.

  Or what it was, incarnation,

  three stars,

  delivering signs and dusting from their eyes.

  “¡Buenos días!” Councilman Luján said, causing his daughter, Lucía, to startle and sit up straight, and her three friends to emit wake-up groans and coughs.

  “This is Araceli,” he said to Lucía. “She’s a friend of your cousin Marisela. And she’s visiting us for Fourth of July with the two boys she takes care of. ¿Cómo se llaman?”

  “Brandon.”

  “Keenan.”

  “Look, they just finished with the trampoline,” Councilman Luján said. “Vayan a jugar. Go play.”

  The boys ran off, while Araceli joined the four young adults. Lucía Luján was nineteen, and Araceli rec
ognized her immediately as the girl in the cap and gown in the living room, even though the thick braids into which she had woven her hair for summer had the curious effect of making her look younger than in the photograph. Her friends wore jewels and studs in the crooks of their noses, and loops inside their earlobes, and presented Araceli with the realization that she was losing touch with urban fashions. Probably they were already wearing these things in Mexico City, or would soon be, Araceli thought. “Hola, ¿qué tal?” Lucía said, after rubbing the sleepiness out of her eyes. “I think my cousin told me about you once.”

  Lucía was wearing the same clothes she had put on the night before, but even in this wrinkled and weary state, she presented a picture of hip and fashionable mexicana femininity. She wore a vintage pin-tucked blouse of caramel silk, its shimmering skin playing an odd lightgame with the copper tone of her skin and the half dozen friendship bracelets on her wrist. That blouse looked one hundred years old to Araceli and brand-new at the same time. Lucía was two weeks back from Princeton and still suffering from the cruel cultural whiplash caused by her return to Huntington Park: she had lived nine months among assorted geniuses and trust-fund children from across the United States, none of whom understood the contradictions of being a young expatriate from her own, wire-crossed corner of mexicano California. A week before finals she had split up with a young man who hailed from a moneyed Long Island suburb, in part because he had talked about coming to Huntington Park this summer, and the thought of him entering her home in his Tommy Hilfiger summer-wear was too much to bear. She imagined him reciting to her friends those Lorca poems he had memorized—¡verde que te quiero verde!—and thought, No, that won’t go over well in HP. She was still trying to figure out where she stood after a nine-month waking dream of calcified eastern tradition and unadorned American ambition. I am not the same Lucía. She was trying to figure out too how to tell her father that she had already dropped the premed classes in favor of Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, and James Baldwin. Lucía the Ivy Leaguer did not smile or laugh as easily as before, and sometimes she laughed harder and louder and with a kind of cynical meanness her friends did not recognize. Both Lucía’s father and her friends had been giving her strange looks as if to say, Is it possible you think you are better than us now? It was, therefore, a pleasure for Lucía to fall into conversation with an educated Latina from outside her Huntington Park and Princeton orbits. After just a few minutes of casual conversation, she had learned a lot about Araceli, the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and what it was like to clean houses in Orange County.