The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “We left on a little trip, my husband and I,” Maureen began, and she resisted the temptation to say separately, which would have kept her closer to the truth. “You know, when you have three kids, you need a break.” No, I shouldn’t have said that. I sound spoiled. “And our boys are bigger now, and they’re easier to take care of, so we thought we could leave them overnight with their nanny and just take Samantha with us. Because Samantha is so little, we thought we should take her with us.” She paused, and inhaled fully, because she was stepping closer to blatant untruth than she wanted to go, and she made the mistake of looking down at her floor and away from the camera. Quickly she recovered herself, and felt strangely aware and alert. “Then we came home. And it was so quiet. So incredibly and unnaturally quiet here.” Now that she had returned to a full, solid truth she could see its power and how it made the newsman’s eyes sharpen their focus with anticipation. “Something didn’t seem right. And we went from room to room and didn’t see the boys. And I thought, This is so strange. How can Araceli not be here in the house with the boys? I mean, she doesn’t have a car, or permission to take the boys anywhere. At first I thought, Oh, maybe she got bored and took them walking to the park or something. It sort of didn’t make sense, because she doesn’t have a car. But you know how it is: you have in your mind this little voice that tells you not to think the worst. And then it started to sink in that they were gone. And this house started to feel so empty. So horribly empty. And I started to think about where they might be, and what they might be suffering, and how I wasn’t there to protect them. And I just couldn’t stand it.” Yes, this was true: she loved her boys and had lost them for an afternoon, a night, and then a morning, and had spent that time living with the deepest fears a mother can know, an ache she felt in those parts of her body where her boys had once lived and kicked and slithered into the world.

  Maureen was burying her subtle falsehoods in a larger truth unknown, until now, to the millions who had followed the story. Their Internet commentary would soon be peppered with sympathetic descriptions: “the screamer” was, in fact, a woman who sounded “quite reasonable.” She was an “educated and articulate” mother who “obviously loved her children,” had suffered “every parent’s nightmare,” and who was “clearly telling the truth” about discovering her sons missing.

  “Did you ever authorize this woman, your employee, to take your children to East Los Angeles?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “So they were kidnapped?” the interviewer said, making it sound as much suggestion as question.

  “Well, they were taken on … t his bizarre journey. They set off for L.A. And the hills there were on fire that day. So when we got them back, I swear they smelled like smoke.”

  “Uh-huh,” the interviewer said, and Maureen knew she had answered poorly.

  “But we did find some strange things in her room.”

  “What things?”

  “Strange art. Trash that she had played with. It’s strange. Because this is someone we thought of as part of our family. She lived with us. We trusted her implicitly. And then I realized I didn’t even know who she was.”

  “Now, tell us about this,” the interviewer continued. “There’s this clip I want to play for you. It’s become sort of famous now.” On a small monitor at the interviewer’s feet, her twelve-second rant played again, and she cringed at the way her nostrils flared and her jaw tightened as she shot back at the reporter, as if she were a suburban mother bear snapping at the camera-toting naturalist threatening her cubs, an effect heightened by the way she searched behind the cameras for the man who had insulted her.

  “Really, why were you so angry?”

  “I had just been reunited with my sons, and I hadn’t slept for two days. I was just incredibly stressed out. I mean, to go through all that: first, the worry of not knowing where the boys were, if they were okay. And then, you know, the joy of having them with us again. I was completely wiped out. Plus, I couldn’t even see this guy, because he was standing near the back. And here I am, the mom of these two kids who’ve been taken away, and he’s accusing me. But I shouldn’t have yelled like that. Like I said, I was just incredibly exhausted.”

  “Of course,” the interviewer said. “We can only imagine.”

  They wrapped up and when the four-minute, twenty-five second segment aired later that evening near the top of the 8:00 p.m. cablecast, Janet Bryson turned on her TiVo and watched it three times.

  In Santa Ana, Octavio Covarrubias missed the interview because he was preparing and serving a marinated carne de res barbecue in Araceli’s honor. An hour or so later, with the main course served to the small party of family and neighbors, he slipped into the empty living room for a moment to feed his news fix, and caught a few seconds of Maureen’s interview when it was replayed on the cable news station as an introduction to the show hosted by a very conservative man who Octavio Covarrubias watched, occasionally, with the same sense of stealthy intent that Janet Bryson felt when she studied the Mexicans in her neighborhood. Octavio needed to get back to the party, and told himself he shouldn’t watch this man tonight, but he allowed himself to listen as the man began to talk about “the illegal who was set free.” This television man was always well dressed, Octavio noted, and tonight he was wearing a black suit with rather bright white stripes, and Octavio thought that, if he ever bought a suit, it would be one like that, because it had a certain big-city, old-time gangster movie look to it, though the way he moved in his chair and talked to his guests suggested to Octavio a policeman: a man who runs his small fiefdom with aggressive self-assurance, who intimidates with a crackling diction and an unflagging faith in his right to do so.

  “Do we really want to entrust our children to these people from this essentially backward society?” the man was saying. He was in New York, but was talking, via satellite link, to the reporter who had sat down with Maureen Thompson. “Isn’t it a sign of weakness in our social fabric that we do this? It’s the most important job we have. It’s the foundation of our civilization, for chrissakes. Motherhood. Why should we sell it off, to the most desperate and least educated people, as if we were hiring a day laborer to dig a ditch? I’m telling ya, and I know a lot of people aren’t going to agree with me, but it just sounds to me like an essentially stupid thing to do.”

  Luz Covarrubias entered, with Araceli trailing behind her.

  “Octavio!” Luz snapped reprovingly. “¿Por qué estás mirando a ese hombre feo, ese hombre que nos odia?” his wife asked, not for the first time.

  “Porque hay que saber lo que piensa el enemigo,” he said.

  “Basta,” his wife said, and she grabbed the remote control from the front table and punched the mute button, because she knew from prior experience that he wouldn’t let her turn it off completely.

  Octavio Covarrubias turned to Araceli and put his hand on her shoulder. “Ese hombre te quiere encarcelar.” On the TV, the man who wanted to send Araceli back to jail peered into the camera without speaking for a few seconds, then gave a dismissive nod, followed by a playful bobbing of his head that, Araceli guessed, was meant to convey incredulity. His hair, she noted, was the color and thickness of a weak mountain stream during a summer drought, and his lips were arranged in a crawling half smile with the geometry of a roller coaster. Ese hombre, all by himself, Octavio added, might have the power to lock her up again. Millions watched him. “No lo entiendo.”

  Octavio drifted away, leaving Araceli with a plate of leftover barbecued beef she had brought in from the backyard, alone before the television. She had seen this commentator flicker past during the nighttime page-turning of channels on her television, but she had never stopped to watch him. Now she saw that his eyebrows and mouth, in close-up, were a theater all to themselves. He played to the camera with his eyebrows, which moved like elaborate stage machinery above the radiant blue crystals of his eyes. His eyebrows rose, fell, twisted, and contorted themselves in ways that appeared to d
efy the limits of human facial musculature. The camera pulled back as he brought his body into the show by leaning back in his chair, and he puffed his cheeks quickly with a suppressed laugh, and finally shook his head, and gave a forty-five-degree turn to face another camera.

  It was frightening to think that the brain behind that face could somehow shape her fate, and Araceli quickly reached over and turned off the television, the image of the man shrinking to a point and going dark with an electric pop. What other eyebrows, mouths, and brains were out there, conspiring to put her behind bars again, and what did they see in her, that they would want to punish her so? The thought made her want to put on running shoes, to see if she could outsprint the men in uniform this time. But no, she was tired of running. No voy a correr. She would wait and prepare herself. For starters, she would get another tortilla and make herself a taco out of the beef on this plate, because when a man is as good a cook as Octavio Covarrubias, you really shouldn’t let his food go to waste.

  20

  A pretty and tiny Latina woman of about twenty-five arrived at the Covarrubias residence first, with a long, thin notebook in her hand. She had swept-back eyes with chestnut irises and strands of thin coal-black hair; a significantly older and taller man of rugged features who smelled of cigarettes accompanied her. They were an odd, English-speaking couple in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, and a decidedly bad omen for a Mexican woman who expected to be arrested at any moment. Araceli might have taken the man for a retired cowboy, but for the camera in his hand and the nylon bag on his shoulder. These people have probably not come to arrest me, Araceli thought, and after they introduced themselves as journalists, she stepped outside onto the porch, and then onto the lawn, to see if there was a police cruiser lurking nearby. After a few moments of conversation on the grass it became clear that these two periodistas had not expected to find Araceli alone. “There’s no cops here,” the photographer said in a half question and half observation, after glancing inside the living room.

  “¿Cómo que cops? ¿Entonces sí me vienen a arrestar?”

  “Uh, I think that I, that we …” the reporter began, and she gave a guilty, girlish smile that was inappropriate to the moment. “Disculparme, por favor, no sabía,” the reporter began in Spanish, but stopped, because that language was obviously not her first, and was barely her second. She handed Araceli a business card, a stiff little rectangle with glossy letters that rose from the paper, inviting one’s fingers to linger over them, claiming the title Staff Writer for its owner, a Cynthia Villarreal.

  “Well, this is awkward,” the photographer said, and he reached inside the pants of his jeans and grabbed a cigarette and put it in his mouth but did not light it. “The captain will not be pleased to see us, I think.”

  “Well, they told me ten-fifteen.”

  “It’s ten-oh-five, my dear.”

  “Dang. I thought we were late. But we’re early.”

  The photographer shook his head and, having determined that the young scribe with him was going to take a while to figure out what to do next, he began to shoot, capturing Araceli as she stood on the lawn, looking up at the sky. She searched for prowling helicopters, and then scanned the cars on the block and the distant intersections. The first frame the photographer shot, of Araceli’s worried squint searching the street for the authorities, would be on the web in an hour and on the front page of the newspaper the next day, a haunting and lonely close-up of a notorious woman in limbo, waiting for her abductors to arrive.

  “Um, Kyle …,” the reporter said, but Kyle ignored her and held down his finger, the camera shutter opening and closing six times with the staccato beat of a flamenco song.

  “¡No les tengo miedo!” Araceli shouted suddenly, turning to face the journalists. “I am not afraid! No. Why I be afraid? For nothing!” The photographer let off another burst of shutter openings as Araceli spoke, and those images too would appear on the web, in an essay of eleven images that his Los Angeles newspaper would headline “Arrest, Anger, and Drama in Santa Ana,” accompanied by the breathless audio narration of Cynthia Villarreal: “Araceli Ramirez knew that she would soon be taken into custody, but her response was a defiant one.” The second shot in that series featured Araceli looking directly into the camera, her mouth open and index finger pointing skyward at the moment she was repeating, “¡No les tengo miedo!,” an image with echoes of Latin American protest marches, as if Araceli were a market woman in a Mexican square, among tens of thousands of other women with open mouths joined in an outraged chorus over the price of onions, or the torture and murder of a comrade.

  Now the rising pitch of accelerating engines announced the arrival of four sheriff’s cruisers: two parked in front of the Covarrubias home with red and blue lights flashing, the others taking position at either end of the block, sideways, as if to seal off the street. A burly but handsome sheriff’s captain emerged from the first cruiser. He was freshly shaved, with three bloody nicks on each cheek and an expression of wounded befuddlement that overcame him as it sank in that his “little reporter friend,” as she was known at the station, had tipped off the suspect to his arrival. He gave a plaintive opening of his arms and shouted at the reporter, “What’s going on?”

  “I’m so sorry, Captain. Sorry!”

  “Get that lens off me, jerko!”

  “Negative, Captain,” the photographer said. “You’re on a public street.”

  “Shit,” the captain said, and at that moment he decided that this was the last time he’d try to impress Ms. Villarreal, who was fifteen years younger and almost two feet shorter than him. He turned to Araceli, who now stood before him on the lawn, her arms folded across her chest. “You obviously know what I’m here for.”

  Araceli said nothing and in the few heartbeats of silent standoff that followed, shouts could be heard coming from the homes and backyards around them. “¡La migra!“ An invisible but audible panic was unfolding around them, with the percussion of slamming doors and windows opening so that people could stare down at the police cruisers from second-floor windows, followed by more, indecipherable yelling from the next block, and the scratchy and hurried tennis-shoe strides on the cement sidewalk of a young man in a CLUB AMERICA fútbol jersey. The soccer fan walked with his hands in his pockets across the street, and then glanced once over his shoulder at the officers, and finally broke into a trot as he reached the corner. Get away, get away. The residents of Maple Street had been sitting snugly in their homes for two days, watching Araceli’s short sprint and capture looping on their televisions, listening to secondhand reports in Spanish detailing the English chorus of los medios norteamericanos for her rearrest. Word had spread that the subject of this broadcast frenzy was living among them, but now the arrival of the deputies’ brass badges and their dangling batons and the flashing lights of their cruisers transformed this novelty into a threat, and brought to life the goblins that haunted their daily consciousness. The paisana from the television has brought las autoridades to our neighborhood, and now they will take us all away before we can finish our breakfasts and wash the dishes. Córrele, córrele.

  “For some reason, these people think we’ve come to enforce the immigration laws,” the captain said. “It’s because of you, little lady,” he said to Araceli. He cupped his hands and gave a halfhearted megaphone shout: “Attention, neighbors! I am not the migra. I am not here for any of you.”

  In a building down at the end of the block, a woman from rural Guanajuato grabbed her infant son and executed a panicked climb into the attic of her two-story duplex, then crawled into a nook of stacked boxes and took her cell phone to call el licenciado Octavio Covarrubias. The self-educated, self-appointed conscience of Maple Street often gave out his number to the new arrivals, presenting himself as a levelheaded, semiretired family man who might be able to help people in trouble. The ring tone on his phone sounded as he stood on the porch, and its burst of trumpets and accordions from a song by Los Temerarios broke the trance of the sta
ndoff on the front lawn, where the sheriff’s captain was trying to think of a way to persuade the woman named in the arrest warrant to get into his patrol car quickly, the better to calm everyone around them.

  “Sí, quédate allí escondida,” Octavio said into the phone, which caught the attention of all the Spanish-speakers around them, including one of the deputies.

  “Hey, Captain,” the deputy said. “There’s people hiding in these houses.”

  “Probably in the closets and the attics again,” said another deputy.

  “God, I hate that.”

  The captain ignored his underlings and turned to Araceli. “The quicker you come with us, young lady, the sooner the good people of this neighborhood will be able to come out of their closets.” Araceli was standing ten feet away from him on the lawn, but he didn’t want to step toward her and simply grab her, because if she tried to run away she might spread the panic to other blocks, and if she resisted and his deputies had to restrain her, they could have a minor disturbance on their hands, in full view of the press.

  “¿Y para qué me vienes a piscar?” she asked.

  “For child abuse,” said the captain, whose encounters with Orange County suspects had familiarized him with some of the basic Spanish idioms used in such cases, though he had no idea of the full range of uses of the verb “piscar,” a California-Spanish mongrel of the English “pick” that had managed to sneak into Araceli’s speech through the daily drip of Los Angeles television and radio. He looked down at the warrant and repeated three words he saw there: “Felony child abuse. Child endangerment, to be precise.”

  “I don’t understand,” Araceli said.

  “It means you put the children in danger. Peligro, los niños.”

  Araceli shook her head and gave the captain a murderous look. He was trying to be gracious, but he was an extension of the eyebrows on the television, and now it was clear that the eyebrows and the other faces on the news had persuaded the authorities to invent any reason to detain her. What’s more, the norteamericanos were at war with themselves over whether they should throw her in jail or allow her to live free, with the sheriff’s captain standing before her obviously in the latter camp, even as duty forced him to arrest her.