The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  She walked to the bench, and a skinny, older man with thick glasses stood next to her. “We’re ready, Your Honor,” the older man said, and Araceli was puzzled by his use of the first-person plural, which seemed to join him to her for some purpose. “I’m your public defender,” the man whispered into her ear suddenly. “But just for today. For your arraignment. Later, you get someone else.”

  She nodded and looked back over her shoulder at the courtroom: there was, indeed, just a very short barrier separating the place where Araceli sat from the public gallery and the doors at the back of the courtroom. The only guard present, the bailiff, stood near the judge, and in the gallery there was a single witness, a man in business attire with a Mexican flag pin on his lapel. He gave her a twinkling-finger wave, and Araceli wondered if he was there to take her back to Mexico.

  “Are they going to deport me?” she asked the public defender in a whisper. Resigned as she was to returning to Mexico, she did not like the idea of having other people decide for her what she should do. A woman should be able to pick the road on which she traveled, and it riled her to think the men gathered in this room—because there were no other women present now, besides her—would decide for her. She looked up at the judge, a kind of anti-angel in his black robes and white hair, holding the keys to the gates of freedom.

  “I asked you a question,” she repeated to the public defender in full voice, loud enough to cause the other attorney, standing above a table next to hers, to look across. “Are they going to deport me?”

  “No, not for the moment,” the public defender whispered back from the corner of his mouth, and before Araceli could ask him to elaborate, he, the judge, and other people in the court began to speak in another language she only vaguely recognized as English, a torrent of numbers and terms that she did not understand, with roots that seemed to be in Latin, except for some of the very last words the judge spoke before she was directed back into the cube and the jail beyond.

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  Assistant District Attorney Ian Goller monitored the routine arraignment of Araceli N. Ramirez from his fourteenth-floor office, in a room adjacent to the office rarely occupied these days by the district attorney, because the boss was on the road, testing the political waters in preparation for a long-shot run for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate. Ian Goller was, at that moment, a worried man, though not for the reasons that should have preoccupied him. The matrices and spreadsheets that mapped and tallied the flow of cases through the courtrooms in the lower floors of his building, and in five satellite courthouses across the county, were arranged on his antiquated, smudged computer screen, and they pointed to a rising flood of drug trials that would eventually lead to a breakdown in the ability of the district attorney’s office to meet its legal mandates. But the slow drip toward judicial chaos did not concern him this morning, as much as the simple contents of a clear plastic bag, and a single piece of paper in a manila folder. Through the skin of plastic he could see the train and bus tickets retrieved from Araceli’s backpack, while the manila folder contained a copy of a hotel sign-i n sheet retrieved by a sheriff’s detective who had just returned from a trip to the desert. The tickets confirmed, with those stamped digital codes that juries loved, the truth of the time frame of the defendant’s version of events, and the document from the hotel-spa, along with a statement from one of the clerks, offered a disturbing contradiction to the statement of his primary witness.

  One day and it’s already falling apart. He hadn’t handled a case himself in a while, and it had been a long time since he’d been confronted with the elemental messiness of a criminal prosecution seen in its prosaic details, with prospective arguments and “facts” tainted by the poor memory and moral fallibility of human beings. This is why I’ll never go back to litigating. Because people are idiots and they lie even when, no, especially when you put your faith in them.

  If his boss were there, Ian Goller would walk into his office, past the door with the seal of the district attorney and its scales of justice. The Sage of Santa Ana, with his undeniable trial and political skills would then tell him how to handle this conundrum casually and effortlessly, but there were only pictures of his boss’s children in that office, and diplomas, and various photo-trophies of the district attorney’s encounters with national politicians and conservative celebrities, including a snapshot with a distracted and now-deceased President of the United States. Ian Goller could look at those pictures and the district attorney’s confident grin, and intuit what he should do next, and he could even hear the district attorney saying it: Just kick the can down the road and see what happens. Fifty-fifty, it’ll go our way.

  The trial attorney he eventually assigned to the case would likely protest his inability to lift The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez over the low bar of proof required for a successful preliminary hearing. But a natural outcome already suggested itself, an obvious deal resting like a jewel box inside the charges the district attorney’s office had just filed. Simply negotiate the charges down from felony to misdemeanor in exchange for a guilty plea, give the defendant credit for time served and hand her ass forthwith to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement representatives at the county jail. She would then be swiftly deported, as were the legions of other foreign nationals without papers who landed there. News of the defendant’s erasure from the American justice system and media orbit would satisfy the constituents clamoring for punishment, and the defendant, in turn, would receive her freedom—in Mexico. Basic fairness to the people of California dictated such a result. After all, the defendant was one of two million residents of the state living every day in violation of Section 8, Title 1325 of the U.S. Code. It fell to county prosecutors to enforce this statute, indirectly, by waiting for each of those two million people to run afoul of some state law, be it a homicide or a DUI. Goller still saw in Araceli N. Ramirez’s actions a basic ignorance of American ways, and the recklessness and bad choices that characterized the existence of so many other, unambiguously guilty defendants. He believed the public defender would find the plea offer appealing, as long as the public defender did not see these train and bus receipts, and the hotel clerk’s statement, and realize just how weak the prosecution’s case really was. Thankfully, the rules and practices of discovery were such that the DA could plausibly delay releasing this information to the defense until after an expedited preliminary hearing. Given the nonviolent nature of the charges, the administrator at the public defender’s office would likely assign the case to a Deputy Public Defender II who would see the plea down to a misdemeanor as an easy and fair resolution, a quick deal that would allow him or her to bank a little extra time to work on the thirty or forty other cases on his or her plate. Deportation was, at any rate, a federal matter beyond the purview of mere county officials: every attorney in the two concrete buildings on the opposite sides of Civic Center Drive accepted such outcomes as a matter of course. There was a door at the end of the maze of jail cells and courtrooms into which a fifth of all the defendants in the county disappeared; the door opened to a vortex of weeping Spanish souls that drained into Tijuana and Mexicali and other forsaken places. Goller told his lawyers that each case that ended in deportation was, in its way, a victory for the rule of law. Even the most liberal member of the public defender’s office long ago accepted this state of affairs without effective complaint, and it fell to the PDs in courtrooms to explain to defendants again and again that they were about to be deported. Very often this information was relayed at ostensibly happy hearings during which sentences were reduced and probation granted, the news given by twenty-five-year-old PDs in quick murmurs relayed by whispering interpreters, which caused the oft-repeated paradox of defendants weeping inconsolably even as the judge was telling them to behave themselves after being “released.” They cried because they knew their American lives were coming to an end, and in the galleries their sons and daughters and wives wept too, once the truth set in. It was a cruel thin
g to watch, but it was as it should be, Goller thought. Soon, inevitably, his defendant and her problems would pass through the door that led to Mexico.

  As he contemplated the quarter-inch-thin newborn baby of paperwork called The People of the State of California v. Araceli N. Ramirez, Ian Goller could already see its final fate on that day when, as an inch-thick folder, it would be rolled away into that mausoleum called Archives.

  For the first few days without Araceli, the disorder at the home on Paseo Linda Bonita began to gather momentum at first light with the unmade beds, whose comforters and sheets endured in the shape of lumpy cotton corpses until late in the afternoon. Only Maureen tackled that essential household task, until she finally scolded Scott into action: “If you could make our bed, at least, before you leave in the morning.” He grumbled and complied, but left it all uneven. Was it that he didn’t care that the comforter was drooping on her side of the bed, or was it some kind of eye condition that prevented him from seeing it? She was going to have to teach the boys to make their own beds, and give them some incentive to do so, perhaps an allowance. They’re old enough to do chores now. I swept floors and folded clothes when I was a girl. Then there was the kitchen, whose crowded sink soon evoked the dishwashing station of a cheap diner, with sticky pots and pans beginning to climb upward and over the edge of the sink by 10:00 a.m., their leftover contents becoming encrusted as noon approached. All three bedrooms, the hallways, and the living room were littered with the sweaty fabric of shirts, socks, and underwear of every size but her own. She found Samantha’s soiled socks hiding under the couch, and pajama tops in the backyard, and children’s picture books on the floor underneath the dining room table. And then there was Samantha herself. Though the smallest member of the family, she tossed more objects into the splatter of disarray than everyone else put together. No one could tell her to pick up her hand puppets, her dolls, her stuffed lions, her rubber blocks, her Tinker Bell wand. Apparently, Araceli had spent a good amount of her day picking up after Samantha, who required a pair of eyes on her at all times and thus subtracted from Maureen’s ability to be in all the corners of the home where she needed to be. Samantha, you came to this world to make your mother’s life more beautiful, and feminine, but you’ve also made it infinitely more complicated.

  The only solution was to spur gadget-man into action.

  “Scott. The dishes. Could you, please?”

  He studied the spread of steel bowls and plastic plates across the kitchen’s marble counters, three complete sets associated with the preparation and serving of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “Why didn’t you use the dishwasher?”

  Maureen didn’t answer this question, and allowed the aggression in her silence to linger until she heard the water start to run in the sink.

  When the school year began and Maureen started volunteering three days a week at the boys’ school it was going to be very difficult. She was going to have to find day care for Samantha because they could never again hire a stranger to work in their home.

  The consequences of their years of comfort, their pampering by Mexican hands, were there to live with. Voices of judgment continued to occupy the space beyond the pine, glass, and tile cocoon of Paseo Linda Bonita, and she sensed they were growing in volume and meanness. The need to escape that noise gave a greater focus and purpose to her cooking, scrubbing, folding, and other domestic pursuits, as if each muscle exercised in domesticity were building walls that sealed her off from those profane outsiders. But how long could you transform your home into a monastery, with all the televisions and radios permanently off, and the phone off the hook, before you went crazy? She tried calling Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, but the awkward silence and transparent excuses that followed her invitation for Max and Riley to come and play in the backyard and swim in the pool dissuaded her from calling again. What have I done for my friend to treat my family with the frigid distance the uninfected have for the diseased? For the rest of that day, Maureen understood that she had lost a part of herself when she stepped out the door with Samantha that fateful morning. Goodbye, happy innocence. She suppressed the recurring thought that she should call her mother. No, that would be much worse. Instead, she turned on NPR because she knew she would find dispassionate, adult voices, and for forty-five minutes she allowed the reasoned cadences of its afternoon news report to fill the living room and kitchen. She listened to a Prague coffee machine, the musical speaking-voice of a Louisiana shrimp fisherman. It was all very eclectic and relaxing, until she heard the sudden teaser: “Next, from California, a story that many people say defines the social divide in that sunny place. It’s a case involving two children, their parents, and a Mexican woman …” Maureen took three leaping strides across the room and hit the OFF button. Social divide? My home is a social divide?

  Her “social divide” was, at any rate, erased now because Araceli was gone and in jail again. This knowledge caused Maureen to feel a pang of guilt every time she did something in the house that Araceli would have done. When she picked up a sponge at the kitchen sink, or emptied out the dishwasher, or took out the trash, she felt she was standing in Araceli’s footsteps. Is there a special place of torment, down there in the circles of hell, for those women who betray their sisters? I can speak the words that will set her free: but if I do, will I lose my children? The anger that she felt toward Araceli in the first days of her sons’ disappearance had dissipated. It’s a natural, motherly thing, to seethe at the person who took your sons. Now her guilt was assuaged only by the information provided by the assistant district attorney at her front door this morning—he had come to “warn” her that the “alleged abductor” of her children would likely go free in a plea bargain. He seemed to think this would make her bitter, that she would spew motherly recrimination, and she pursed her lips in a kind of simulated grimace, but in fact she was relieved. We worked on this house together, Araceli and I, it was our joint project. The orbit of men, of news and jurisprudence, has driven a wedge between us. Then the prosecutor had added that Araceli would be likely deported, and this had caused Maureen to ask her only question: “Deported? For a misdemeanor?” Araceli probably would have been deported anyway; it was inevitable once the police descended on her home. I am responsible for the exile of the woman who worked in my home. Or rather, Scott is. And me. We are. She thought these things as she prepared and poured her daughter’s milk, and in her distraction the white liquid spilled over the top of the bottle and onto the table where Samantha was sitting.

  “Milk!” the baby screamed.

  “Oh, my God, Sam, you talked! Your first word!”

  “Milk!” her baby girl repeated.

  Maureen gave her daughter a kiss on the forehead and reached for a rag to clean the spill. When she knelt down to wipe the white drops on the floor, a small moving object at the foot of the table caught her eye. It was an ant, and she watched it join the flow of one of two serpentine threads that converged on the tile underneath her daughter’s high chair. The ants were bumping, circling, and shifting around a spot of spilled and dried Cream of Wheat. Maureen followed their highway across the dining room to the kitchen, and found it led out into the backyard, passing underneath the door that Araceli once opened every morning to begin work.

  While Maureen studied the ants and remembered Araceli, the story of the seemingly soon-to-be-deported doméstica caused the mayor of Los Angeles to daydream while ostensibly perusing the menu at his favorite downtown eatery. “The filet mignon here is so tender,” the mayor’s political consultant said, “you can cut it with a spoon.” The mayor of Los Angeles glanced across the white cloth of the table and the sweating goblets of water and gave the consultant a listless and distracted shake of the head.

  “I’m thinking the Asian tuna salad,” the mayor mumbled. “Lost my appetite.”

  The mayor had slipped into a brooding funk, a rare twenty minutes of reflective silence, causing his consultant and even the regular customers at the Pacific Dining Car to take
notice. He was a man who spent most of his waking day in conversation and monologue—on the phone, in his City Hall office, in parking lots and passageways, in elementary school auditoriums, at doughnut shops, in Westside receptions, in his official Lincoln Town Car. The mayor was a self-described pathological talker who liked to brag that he’d been talking nonstop since the age of four; he knew his consultant had two small children and that he could call and find him awake at dawn. Six hours earlier, he had done just that, after catching the appearance of an up-and-coming state senator from Fremont, California, on Univision’s ¡Despierta América! talk show. “Hey, I just saw Escalante talking about that Mexican nanny again,” the mayor had said, without preamble. “He’s going to town on this. He was on Telemundo yesterday. And someone told me they heard him on the radio a couple of times.”

  “Really,” the consullant had said wearily into his kitchen phone, while watching his eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter eat Cream of Wheat and simultaneously twirl their chestnut ringlets. The consultant was a New Jersey transplant of Italian heritage with a wild shock of gray Beethoven curls, a lefty pamphleteer who had risen from 1980s rent-control battles to become the master tactician of the progressive wing of the state Democratic Party, helping a variety of principled and competent leaders win election to office. “I think it’s obvious why Escalante’s doing this,” the consultant began. “He’s not on anyone’s radar, because he’s never done anything. A Latino politician who has to wave his arms like crazy to get the attention of Latino voters isn’t going anywhere. He’s got no shot at winning any statewide primary. None.”

  Araceli Ramirez was a cause célèbre and a deepening obsession among the mayor’s core Latino supporters, but the consultant’s position on what the mayor’s position should be in her case had not changed. It was the same at 6:45 a.m. in the kitchen of his Northeast L.A. bungalow as it had been in two previous conversations on the subject: keep closed lips and fight the temptation to opine. “You’re the mayor of Los Angeles—this is in Orange County. Leave it alone. Because if you don’t, this crazy family and their nanny could blow up in your face.”