The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “Qué gusto conocerte,” he said.

  “El gusto es mío,” she mumbled back.

  Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet had been in Malibu in the morning, having flown out from Mexico City to interview a Mexican actress who was a big crossover success in the United States. He had traveled to her recently purchased home, which cantilevered over a rocky stretch of the beach and the Pacific, and afterward he had phoned the network’s headquarters in the San Ángel district of Mexico City to suggest an interview with the famous paisana who had been falsely accused of kidnapping. Now he entered the Covarrubias home with a greeting of “¡Hola!” and raised a palm in greeting to Octavio, who had stepped out of the bathroom with wet hands, and who now stood dumbstruck in his own living room.

  “Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet?”

  In a few moments, the newsman’s crew began to fill the Covarrubias living room with lights and cables. Batres Goulet and his field producer had quickly decided Araceli would sit on the couch with the newsman facing her from a director’s chair. With its faded purple cushions, and with the velvet painting behind it, the couch was an evocative symbol of Mexican working-class humility and bad taste, and both Batres Goulet and his producer knew the setting would resonate with their demo-graphically diverse audience in many different ways. “You will sit here,” he told Araceli in Spanish, making it sound more like an artistic inspiration than a command.

  After the application of a few daubs of powder and makeup to both their faces, and a sound check, Batres Goulet began the interview. He smiled at her and addressed her with a gentle nod: “Araceli Noemi Ramírez Hinojosa,” he said, pronouncing her two given names and paternal and maternal surnames slowly and with the formality appropriate to the reading of an encyclopedia entry, as if recognizing her admission into Mexican celebritydom. Araceli heard the four names and thought about all the places in Mexico they would be broadcast: from her mother’s kitchen, to the television next to the stacks of cigarettes in the abarrote sundry store on the corner in Nezahualcóyotl, to her father’s village in Hidalgo and the little stands with small black-and-white televisions where children and men with machetes stopped to drink atole and watch the news, to the breakfast restaurants of Polanco in Mexico City, where businessmen would see her as they ate their chilaquiles.

  “… es usted una criminal, tal como nos dicen las autoridades del estado de California?”

  “No,” she answered, her face brightening with amusement, she was not a criminal, no matter what the California authorities said. “I am just a woman who came to this country to work and to do my job,” she said in Spanish. “And I ended up getting in trouble for trying to do it.”

  Guided by Batres Goulet’s gentle but skillful questioning, she explained the circumstances that had led her to leave the house with Brandon and Keenan, including the fight between her patrones and the broken coffee table, details that now became public for the first time.

  “It sounds like chaos, this house you worked in.”

  “It was only that night and that weekend. For a long time they were good people to work for. Exigente, yes. Everything had to be a certain way, but I didn’t mind that. You can imagine what it’s like to work for a norteamericano family with as much money as these people have, and with good taste. The food was excellent. This woman I worked for, la señora Maureen, she has a great eye for a tomato. And in this country, it’s harder to get a good tomato than back home. That I don’t understand.”

  The newsman laughed out loud and brought a winning smile to Araceli’s face, and for a moment she had the jolly look of a Mexican everywoman. He let her go on a bit more and then brought her back to the subject at hand.

  “So the moment came when you decided to leave with these boys.”

  Araceli now explained, because she assumed most people in Mexico would not know, how it was that the American authorities took children from parents and put them in an institution called Foster Care. “I had to decide. Between taking care of them or calling the police. Obviously, looking back, I should have called the police. Then the parents would be in trouble instead of me. I wish I had called the police!” She said this with a volume and vehemence that was unbecoming, and that bespoke her anger at being chased by the police, tackled on film, and tossed into jail—twice—and finally beaten, all for an act of selflessness. She mentioned all these indignities to Batres Goulet, though much of her harangue was never seen by the Mexican viewing public, because Batres Goulet and his field producer would later edit the three-minute segment to make Araceli look as sympathetic as possible. Her desire to protect Brandon and Keenan had only brought her trouble, she continued, and Araceli could see now that you survived in this country with a certain kind of coldness and distance from others. This was what people said back home about the United States, and it was a cruel thing to have seen that pearl of wisdom confirmed. “I don’t even really like taking care of children,” Araceli said. “But what was I going to do? Los niños no tienen la culpa. I couldn’t let them go to the place where the norteamericanos take lost children. No.”

  “Is there a message you would like to send to your family back in Ciudad Neza?” Batres Goulet asked.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called,” she said with a casualness that suggested she was not sorry at all. That remark too would be cut from the broadcast.

  Batres Goulet left the Covarrubias home, navigating through a crowd of about one hundred people that had gathered on the lawn, spilling over onto the sidewalk and around the van. News of his presence had spread quickly through the neighborhood, causing a sort of reverse effect of the appearance of the police on the day Araceli was rearrested. As long as Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet was among them, they sensed, his perfect skin and aura of Mexican television power would protect them, and they repeated the newsman’s name with the reverent tones in which one spoke of holy places and holy people. “Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet … Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet.” When he opened the front door and stood on the porch, there was a girl scream or two, and he waved at the crowd and shook some hands, and in two minutes he was gone and in his wake people still repeated his name.

  “Carlos Francisco was here! Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet!”

  Thirty minutes after the crowd and their chants had dispersed, Araceli was back on the porch with Felipe. They talked and joked in the restored evening quiet about the newsman and his visit, until the moment when a sport-utility vehicle rolled up and a semi-familiar face emerged at the head of a squad of suited men. The oldest of the men pulled at his lapels as he approached the steps, then gave a distracted “Buenas noches” as he peeked inside the Covarrubias home. “¿Quése hizo Batres Goulet?” he asked.

  “Se fue,” Araceli answered curtly. “¿Y quién es usted?”

  “Soy Emilio Ordaz Rivera,” the man said with the odd, faraway grin of someone accustomed to having his greetings rejected. “Soy el cónsul de México en Santa Ana.”

  Behind him stood three men who mimicked his general appearance, with dark sunglasses in their shirt pockets and cuff links and thin chains on their wrists, filling their tailored gray and black suits with the self-tmportant bearing of men groomed from an early age for glory in Mexico’s federal bureaucracy. They were pelted animals that had been baking all day in the California sun at a pointless community function, and judging from the ennui painted thickly on their faces, they thought these surroundings too were somehow beneath them.

  “I was hoping he was still here. So I could contribute a little to the story.”

  “You wanted to be on television? With me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The consul lowered his voice and spoke in her ear, with a deliberate frankness that he thought of as a kind of intimacy. “Why does anyone want to be on Televisa? Because it’s Televisa, of course.”

  The consul was in midcareer mire, looking for something more glamorous than Santa Ana, because he was thirty-eight years old and was losing the battle wit
h time and the byzantine hierarchies of the Foreign Relations Ministry. A year earlier, they had offered him the number two position in the embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and like an idiot he had turned it down, because it seemed that being inside the Southern California media market would be better, but he could see now that the consul in Los Angeles got all the press, all the photo ops with the starlets and the meetings with the visiting ministers. He’d even take the number two spot in Lagos now, if they offered him that, anywhere but Santa Ana, with its long lines of desperate and poor people, where the most important thing he did was ship home the bodies of paisanos killed in car accidents, roofing mishaps.

  Araceli did not know about the longings and insecurities of the overeducated, frustrated, poetically inclined career diplomats of the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, but she could feel this man’s desperation to please his superiors and to be noticed, even as she and Felipe retreated to the living room, closing the door as the consul squeezed in one last plea.

  “Call me if Batres Goulet comes back!”

  24

  Araceli had told herself she wouldn’t look at the crowds, and as she ascended the courthouse stairs with Ruthy Bacalan, she kept her gaze fixed downward, using a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. When she raised her head for an instant, a flash of black-and-white caught her eye, a poster of an enlarged X-ray of a skull with a rod running through the middle. There was a caption that meant to explain the image, but did not: KILLED BY ILLEGALS. She looked at the protesters grouped behind and around the X-ray and saw a tired-looking woman in a nurse’s uniform holding it up, and alongside her stood a group of men and women clutching at various pieces of red-white-and-blue fabric, shouting at Araceli and shaking their fists, raising the volume because she had deigned to look at them. They carried other signs that were just words: MEXICO = DISEASE + DEATH + DESTRUCTION. They screamed “Go home!” to Araceli and also to the group of counterprotesters standing to her left, and now Araceli followed their shouts to study this other group too. Araceli recognized a few people from the gathering at the church where she had failed to give a speech, and they were all holding posters composed of a ridiculous photograph taken when she was about to be arrested for the second time. There were ten two-dimensional Aracelis bouncing on the staircase, and she thought that she should turn and raise her finger and open her mouth in silent imitation of her pose in that impromptu portrait—that would be a good joke—but she stopped herself when she remembered she was standing on the steps of a courthouse and should respect its solemn function even though the competing bands of protesters were not. A policeman took a step toward the flag people, walking down and across the wide staircase, his arms outstretched, saying, “Keep back!” She had a moment to think how unusual that was, to have a policeman protecting her, and looked to her left when she heard someone yelling her name: a young woman was swinging a Mexican flag back and forth, and Araceli caught the eagle in the coat of arms and thought her bandera seemed awfully medieval next to the Stars and Stripes on the other side. As for the United States flag, she didn’t understand why so many stripes and stars were crowded into such a small space. That flag is written in English. Both sides seemed to be held back by some invisible boundary, allowing Araceli and her attorney to advance in the wide path between them, and Araceli wondered if there was a line drawn on the steps to keep them back, like the Chinese chalk she scratched on the floor underneath the cabinets and inside the closets to keep away the ants on Paseo Linda Bonita. There were a few more students in the group of people who had come to support her, people in their twenties it seemed, their lithe frames inside bright and seductive cottons. Their expressions were wounded and aggrieved, like children who’ve been betrayed by alcoholic parents. Araceli thought they looked handsome and dignified next to the older and less lithe red-white-and-blue crowd, who all seemed to share the outrage and embittered superiority of good people who’ve been victimized by slum-born criminals.

  Suddenly, the woman in the light green nurse’s uniform crossed the invisible line and rushed toward her, causing Ruthy Bacalan to scream, “Hey!”

  “Tell the truth!” Janet Bryson screamed a few inches from Araceli’s face, and then she uttered the first complete sentence she had ever spoken in Spanish, a four-word phrase she had manufactured herself with the aid of an Internet translation program: “¡Diga la verdad, usted! ¡Diga la verdad, usted!”

  Standing on the other side of the steps, Giovanni Lozano watched in outrage as the woman in green verbally assaulted his martyr-hero, and now he too crossed the invisible line and rushed toward Araceli, reaching out to push Janet Bryson away. A man of about forty in a bus driver’s uniform shirt rushed forward to grab Giovanni, and in seconds the two groups had merged into a single mass of vocal cords and flexing muscles on the staircase behind Araceli and her lawyer. Ruthy Bacalan grabbed Araceli by the elbow and said, “Almost there,” as they reached the top of the stairs and stepped between a grunting squad of sheriff’s deputies heading down into the crowd with batons drawn, and a moment later Araceli and Ruthy entered the still quiet of the new Laguna Niguel satellite courthouse and its concrete plaza.

  Surrounded by palms and a crowd of briefcases and the men and women who carried them, the building’s faux-Mission architecture and terra-cotta tile roof suggested a resort where lawyers came to unwind. Araceli and Ruthy joined the line of barristers and passed through the center of three tall arches and headed toward a glass door, where a group of men and women with cameras formed a phalanx. They’ve come to photograph me again, Araceli thought, and she raised her head and gave them a good look at her mestiza face. But only one of the photographers stepped forward to snap her picture, with all the others looking behind her, causing her to turn to see what had caught their attention, but there was only the empty concrete plaza she had just walked through. She was vaguely disappointed and felt a brief and absurd sense of rejection. What? There’s another celebrity mexicana bigger than me? Who is she? A serial killer? She must have done something very, very bad.

  Araceli swung open the last set of glass doors, and she and Ruthy Bacalan stepped into the courthouse and its icy air.

  When Olivia Garza was twelve, a Kern County social worker visited her home. Young Olivia was impressed by the ability of a woman armed with mere plastic credentials to put the fear of God and the law in her father, who never again got quite as drunk or angry. In the years that followed, her mother was never again forced to visit an emergency room on a Saturday night with her children in tow, leading Olivia the young woman to conclude that she wanted to become that person—a stranger who could wield the power of reason and the law over a family in their own living room. After she went to college and joined Orange County Child Protective Services, she came to realize that there were certain mothers who had seen her in their dreams long before they had met her, because they too had been girls who watched a stranger with a clipboard step into their living room. As Olivia Garza entered Paseo Linda Bonita alone for the first time, she sensed that Maureen was one of these people—it was the peculiar air of recognition and fear about her, the sense that she was being forced to repeat a very old and demeaning family ritual.

  “Is it just you?” Maureen asked as she guided Olivia toward a large, long dining room table with a platter in the center. “We made you some cupcakes. The kids decorated them.”

  Maureen had been preparing for the scheduled arrival of the representative of Child Protective Services for two days, drafting everyone in the family but Samantha into the cleaning of the home, and then including Samantha in the final spreading of cupcake frosting and sprinkles, which allowed Maureen to announce to the social worker that “even our little girl helped with these.” El abuelo Torres had cut the front lawn—again—Brandon swept the path, Keenan helped clean his sister’s room, Scott finished the bathrooms, and Maureen had wandered into the succulent garden to pick the tiny explosions of milkweed and sow thistles. It was like the preparation for another birthday p
arty, except that Araceli wasn’t around to help this time, which left Maureen more frazzled than she would have been otherwise, and the boys sulking, because they didn’t like the idea of “working,” since that was something grown-ups did. “Are we slaves now?” Brandon asked his mother, who did not hear him. If the social worker knew my mom had me sweeping, Brandon wondered, and that my hands will soon have blisters from holding that broom and that rake, would it get us all in trouble?

  When Olivia Garza arrived, Brandon and Keenan greeted her in the living room with freshly combed and moist hair, and their hands in their pockets, in a loose approximation of soldiers standing at attention, until their mother told them they could go to their room to read while the adults talked in the dining room. Maureen brought coffee and sat at the table next to her husband, and Olivia felt compelled to reach over and take a cupcake. “Thank you,” she said. Looking at the couple and at the baby who was sitting on her mother’s lap with frosting on her worm-sized fingers, Olivia Garza asked, “So, how have you been doing?”

  Maureen kneaded her lips and looked down at the oak table and the Guatemalan embroidered place mats that covered the freshly polished surface, and said nothing because she was trying very hard to convey her mastery over the situation, and saying just one word about how she was “feeling” would unleash her emotions and set them off to entertain this stranger. As she blinked against the tears welling in her eyes, she did not know, or intuit, that Olivia Garza had arrived at the conclusion that this family’s essential normality posed no threat to its children, and that she would soon make the final entry in the case file before formally closing it. It was a decision she’d arrived at moments earlier, in a burst of insight triggered by seeing this living room without police detectives or district attorneys for the first time. She could now feel this home and see it properly. And what she saw was a mother whose only crime was trying too hard.