The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  They arrived at the campus of a Catholic church and its affiliated school and parked on its basketball court, then marched briskly around the chapel, Glass leading the way to a collection of nearby bungalows and square buildings painted industrial-tan. Is this a political meeting? she wanted to ask. I am not a fan of politics. Araceli began to feel annoyed with this Glass, even though he had liberated her from jail. He was a step ahead of her, but she reached out to grab him by the dusty sleeve of his jacket.

  “Wait,” she said. “Necesito saber.”

  “What?” He stopped his forward march and gave her a mildly flustered look.

  “What do I have to do for the money?” Araceli demanded. “For the bail? What do they want?”

  “Nothing. All you have to do is go to court on the day they tell you.”

  “¿De veras?”

  “Yes. Let’s go now,” Glass said. “Please. People are waiting for us.” They resumed their frantic scurry across the school’s black asphalt playground, with Araceli wondering why the playgrounds and classrooms were empty of children, until she remembered it was the middle of summer and school was out.

  They entered a long room with high ceilings that was filled with people sitting in rows of folding chairs. A speaker was addressing the audience in Spanish from a small stage, a very short, light-skinned woman who spoke in an amplified, high-pitched whisper. “Es que son unos abusivos,” she said in a Central American accent. “A mí no me gusta que me hablen así.” Most of the audience turned toward Araceli and Glass as the door opened, and several people smiled at Araceli when they saw her, though none beamed broader than a wool-pelted, bureaucratic-looking, and unmistakably Mexican man and his equally well-dressed acolytes sitting in the front row. These men now rose from their chairs as one, rudely ignoring the speech that was still in progress onstage, and moved toward Araceli with outstretched hands.

  “No, Consul, not now,” Glass said brusquely as he moved his body forcefully between Araceli and the Mexican diplomat.

  “That’s the consul of Mexico in Santa Ana,” Glass whispered into Araceli’s ear as they climbed up the little steps to the stage. “A real publicity hound. Don’t talk to him. He’s useless.”

  Now Araceli stood on a platform, above an audience of about one hundred people, nearly all of whom were gazing at her with the delight of unexpected recognition. They knew her face from the television reports. She was a celebrity, a realization that brought a sardonic grin to Araceli’s lips which, in turn, only seemed to make everyone around her happier. The liberated inmate is grateful because our movement has set her free. Araceli had a moment to marvel at the power of television and newspapers to make her face known to strangers. There were younger people, most of them Latino college students, it seemed, and older people of European stock in distressed cotton. One of the college students, a young woman with hair worked up into a kind of half beehive, raised a phone to take Araceli’s picture.

  Glass stepped up to the microphone. “Just a few minutes ago, we posted bail for our friend here, Araceli Ramirez,” he began. At this the audience broke into a hearty applause. Was that big guy in the back Felipe? Could it be? No. Now everyone was beaming, except for three severe-looking young men with identical close-cropped haircuts and earrings that opened weird, hollow spaces in their lobes. They were members of a club with rules Araceli did not recognize, and their jaws were locked in grim defiance, as if they had been the ones put in jail, not her, and they seemed to be making a point of cupping their hands and clapping harder than anyone else.

  “We’re going to ask Araceli here to say a few words, but first …”

  Say a few words? She looked at Glass and wanted to tap his shoulder to ask if she had heard him correctly, but he was still addressing the audience. “You and I, we all know what this case is about,” he said, his bass voice finding a Brooklyn rasp or two as it rose in volume. “This is about racism; it’s about the powerful imposing their law on the weak.” Several people in the audience nodded in assent because Glass had spoken a truth that Araceli could see too, even through her stage fright. “Well, we’re here, all of us are here to say that we’re tired of the police raids, we’re tired of our young Latino men and women being harassed, we’re tired of the migra.” His voice rose even more to match the ascending volume of the audience, the people calling out, “Yes!” as if this were some sort of evangelical service.

  “And this case, this case our friend Araceli has against her, this is the worst. She has done absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing!” He was spitting into the microphone now. “And if they can lock up Araceli Ramirez and take away her freedom for nothing, then they can do it to any of us. Now we’re saying we’re not going to tolerate this. We’re not going to allow our Latino men and women to be railroaded!” Nearly everyone rose to their feet, a few were shouting words Araceli couldn’t make out, they wanted to hear more, but Glass seemed to have run out of steam. He turned to Araceli, who was standing at his shoulder, and looked at her: it was her turn.

  She whispered into his ear, “No sé qué decir.” Out in the audience, a hundred people were standing before their folding chairs, their eyes locked on her.

  “Just tell them you hope there is justice,” he said.

  Glass put his hand at her back and nudged her toward the microphone. She brought her lips close to it and spoke softly. “Quiero justicia.” The sound of her voice, turned to metal, bounced off the walls. “No hice nada.” She stopped, wondering what to say next, suddenly at a loss for words, as if she’d picked up a text of her speech and found all the pages blank. Is that all I have to say? “No hice nada,” she repeated, feeling parrotlike. “Soy inocente.” They expected a waterfall of words, and suddenly she didn’t want to disappoint them, but her sense of urgency only muzzled her more. “No sé qué más decir,” she said, and the words came out with a nervous near-giggle that she would remember as the sound of her failure. One of the shaved heads in the back started clapping, all alone. And then it was as if he’d opened a faucet, because everyone joined in and the applause became a wave of sound, growing denser as it approached the stage and crashed at her feet. Now she thought of what more she could say: she would thank the people who paid her bail, and Glass for coming to get her out of jail, she would say that she agreed with everything Glass had said. But now that she had the words, she couldn’t speak them, because the applause kept on going, it had a momentum of its own, people were making a point of keeping it going, to show it would not die. All the clappers looked at her with what seemed to her an overwrought pride, as if she’d just had a medal pinned to her chest. There was a young, thin man in the first row, wearing a loose-fitting leather belt of chrome pyramid studs, and jeans fashionably ripped at the knees, and she had time to think that she liked his style. When she studied him closer, she saw he was crying. He would fit in in Mexico City, except for the fact that he’s clapping and crying at the same time—in my city, we are either happy or morose but rarely both at the same time. Maybe if she started clapping too, they would stop. Glass put his hand on her back again and she understood: she stepped away from the microphone and followed him down from the stage, where everyone reached out to shake her hand.

  If Giovanni Lozano hadn’t been crying and laughing when Araceli spotted him, she would have taken more time to admire his outfit, and the familiar, punk-inspiring stylings whose fashionability endured in Mexico City as much as Los Angeles. On his black denim blazer he wore a NO HUMAN is ILLEGAL button next to another of Joey Ramone, and he walked to his car in his ripped jeans with a studded leather belt and the leaning, I-don’t-give-a-shit gait of an oversexed musician. He tossed his raven bangs back before stepping in and listening to the engine of his old Dodge turn over with a clank and shuffle that sounded like the prologue to a folk song. As the engine revved and warmed up, he resisted the temptation to fire off some text messages to his friends, because the event he had just witnessed was too big, too monumental, he decided, to be reduced to the usual te
xting acronyms and abbreviations. Giovanni Lozano, a twenty-six-year-old Chicano Studies maven and perpetual Cal State Fullerton undergrad, had been following Araceli’s case on television for days. He was the most active and most read poster on the La Bloga Latina page dedicated to Araceli’s case, where he had a large following among the small but growing segment of Spanish-surnamed population that Giovanni called “the Latino intelligentsia, such as it is.” His readers were a largely college-educated and over-qualified bunch, their ranks including underpaid municipal employees, unpublished novelists, untenured professors, underappreciated midlevel executives, unheralded poets, and the directors of underfunded nonprofits seeking to house, feed, and teach a tragically undereducated people. These readers appreciated his Spanglish wit, his Orange County Chicano, Y-Qué attitude—thanks to them, he was winning the war on Google, outpacing the One California nativist website on “Araceli Ramirez” searches by nearly two to one. As he drove he began to craft, in his head, a succinct summary of the events that had just unfolded: Araceli Noemi Ramirez is free on bail! La Bloga’s campaign—successful! We just saw her at a church in San Clemente. ¡Qué mujer! Her speech: short and to the point. Her attitude: arty and defiant, como siempre. A tall, big mexicana, she waltzed past our local, do-nothing consul as if he wasn’t there! Ha! From his very first glimpse of her running in that footage shot under the electric transmission lines in Huntington Park, Giovanni saw in Araceli a symbol of mexicana hipsterhood victimized. This vision of her was only strengthened by the details he found buried in the news accounts of her two arrests and double jailing, including the revelation, reported near the end of a story by Cynthia Villarreal in the Times, that police had found “disturbing art” in Araceli’s room. Giovanni had understood, instinctively, that Araceli was being victimized not only for being a mexicana, but also for being an individualist and a rebel. He had studied the photo essay on the web that accompanied the Times story on the rearrest, and drew his readers’ attention to the tiny silver studs Araceli wore on her earlobes, the too-tight leggings, and the wide blouse with the wide-open neck and small embroidered fringe that was tastefully Oaxacan without being too folksy.

  Araceli’s presence was an antidote, somehow, to all those sad stories of workplace raids and deportations; she stood for the sophisticated place he and his mostly American-born readers imagined deeper, urban Mexico to be. She was an event of history that had been dropped into Giovanni Lozano’s provincial corner of the planet, a force with the potential to separate the Spanish-surnamed masses from their complacency and denial. People like his immigrant mother, who tended to her roses in their home in Garden Grove, telling Giovanni that she felt the Holy Spirit in the faint breeze that blew between the flowers. His mother pretended not to care when he told her how she and her people were being belittled on the radio and on television, in the courts and in the supermarkets, by the racists who attached that slur “illegal” to anyone and everyone with Mesoamerican blood in their veins. Don’t you see, Mother? he wanted to say. They want to destroy us! Deport us all! It’s a war against our culture!

  No, my people don’t understand shouting. They understand victims and heroes, he thought. So he would give them an icon. He would take one of those photographs of Araceli from the newspaper website, and he would make a work of art, a portrait-poster. He would take Araceli’s face and multiply it, so that many Aracelis floated above the marching crowd at the next rally, in a Warholian statement about the power of her ordinariness and her celebrity. He would paste her to the walls, and put some text underneath her. Perhaps Araceli’s own statement from the newspaper. “¡No les tengo miedo!” And why not in English too? A Mexican woman with her mouth open to the words: “I am not afraid!”

  “I don’t know what I know anymore,” Maureen said fifteen minutes into the interview with Deputy District Attorney Arnold Chang. Maureen and Scott were confused and evasive about time and their own actions during the disappearance of the children, and they were unwilling or unable to say anything about the defendant that would bolster a felony child endangerment conviction. They were freshly showered and scented, appropriately polite, but also distant to the man who was there to be their champion in court against the woman charged with endangering their children.

  “She never did anything you found strange?” Chang asked.

  “Strange? Oh, yes, lots of things,” Maureen said. “We called her Madame Weirdness.”

  “You’d say hello and she wouldn’t answer,” Scott said.

  “I got kind of used to that after a while. Who needs to hear ‘hello’ all the time in their own house?” Maureen said. “But she did seem unhappy a lot of the time.”

  “Almost all the time,” Scott said. “But that’s not a crime, I guess. Unhappiness is not against the law.”

  “What was she unhappy about?”

  Maureen and Scott thought about this question for a few moments, reviewing their memories of the four years they had lived with Araceli for some insight into their employee’s inner life. They looked at each other blankly, then separately gave the prosecutor a startled and embarrassed shrug.

  “We have no idea,” Scott said.

  “I’m guessing that she was lonely,” Maureen said. “That she expected more from life—because, you know, she’s obviously very smart. But she worked hard. We have to give her that.”

  “She did everything,” Scott said. “Everything. And never complained.”

  “She grumbled,” Maureen corrected. “She was rude. But did we ever hear a real complaint? No.”

  The “victims” wanted the case to go away, the deputy district attorney concluded, and that was a common enough reaction. They wanted to return to their normal, untroubled lives. But then the husband took it a step further.

  “I’m not sure Araceli needs to be prosecuted,” Scott said suddenly, bluntly. “I really don’t think she did anything wrong.”

  Maureen lowered her eyes, feeling suddenly exposed and naked, but not entirely surprised. She allowed Scott’s statement to fill the space above their dining room table unchallenged, knowing that her silence was a loud proclamation of assent. If Araceli didn’t do anything wrong, then what about me? She had contributed to Araceli’s jailing with that small lie to the 911 operator, and then she had all but denounced her former maid in a television interview, with insinuations that caused the Mexican woman to be jailed again. A simple statement by her husband had forced her to confront these truths. And it was all happening here in the living room, before yet another stranger.

  “But she took them, or placed them, rather, in a situation of peril,” the deputy district attorney said.

  “Because of us,” Scott said. “It was our fault.”

  “Stop,” the deputy district attorney snapped, raising his palm like a traffic policeman, and both Maureen and Scott understood why.

  “Can’t you just let this go?” Scott said, with frustrated insistence. “Because the longer it goes on, the deeper you’re digging us into a big mess. I mean, the media, everything. It’s going to swallow up our family.”

  “There’s something you need to understand,” Deputy District Attorney Chang said after a few moments. “It’s not your decision to make. This case doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the People now.”

  “Well, that went smoothly,” Scott said once the deputy district attorney had left.

  “We spent the last twenty minutes talking about the desert garden and about his kids,” Maureen observed, and with that she turned away from Scott and walked over to the portable playpen in the middle of the living room and took out Samantha.

  “She’s spending a lot of time in there,” Scott observed, but his wife ignored him and gave him the baby, and in a few moments she had disappeared into the kitchen and then emerged again with an apron.

  “There’s some things we need to talk about,” Scott said. Before the arrival of the representative of the district attorney’s office, Scott had spent the morning on the phone, speaking to a rep
resentative of Child Protective Services. He had to sit down with his wife and sort through how they were going to work their way out of this mess, but now she walked away from him again, tying the apron around her back and disappearing into the kitchen. How is it that women are so good with their fingers behind their backs and we men are not? The image of motherly dexterity and purpose stuck with him as he took the baby and headed for the backyard. He took Samantha outside and rolled a ball around the grass with her, and enjoyed the crazy, baby-tooth giggle she gave when it slipped away from her. “Ball,” his daughter said, her voice mostly a big, squeaky vowel. When they had finished playing he looked for his wife, thinking that he might grab and hold her attention with the momentous news that their daughter had just uttered her first word. He found her in the boys’ room, on her knees, examining the contents of the boys’ bookcase.

  “Hey, Samantha is talking now.”

  “I know. She said ‘milk’ a few days ago. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No.” He studied his wife, who was taking books and dropping them into a box with harried relish. “What are you doing?”

  “I had an epiphany,” Maureen said, giving a scan of the room Araceli called El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas. “We have too much stuff.”

  “What?”

  “The kids have toys they haven’t played with in two or three years. And books like these that they’ll never read again.” She held up two slim volumes from a series of detective mysteries written for young readers, one for each letter of the alphabet. Their precocious younger son had finished whipping through all twenty-six more than a year earlier. “Why have we kept these? It’s all this stuff gathering dust that’s just making it that much harder to keep this place clean.”

  “Okay,” Scott said in the tone with which one addressed children and madmen.

  “Of course, the real solution is to move to a smaller house,” Maureen continued. “That’s what we should have done a while ago.” It pained her to think she’d soon have to leave this home built with so much time and care. But there was no other way out. Not any she could see. “We can’t have your dad staying with us forever. And if we’re not going to have any live-in help, then we can’t be in a place that’s this big. If we can get rid of about half the stuff we own, we can fit into a smaller place. Maybe a place with a public school district that’s halfway decent.”