The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

  “They may take it. You’re lucky; it’s a good time to buy. The prices have sort of stabilized the last month or so.”

  “Do you think the prices will start to drop?”

  “No. Not a chance.”

  Up on the second floor Brandon was still on his stomach, still looking out the window, a bit disappointed by the failure of this new landscape to trigger any vision or hint of adventure. And then a girl of twelve or thirteen appeared below. From his perch he watched her pass before the house, hands folded over her chest holding a book, a long black braid bouncing on the back of her neck, advancing with a slow, feminine glide over the sidewalk squares. The sight of her brought forth an unfamiliar sensation deep in his stomach. That’s a pretty girl. He quickly forgot about forest creatures and everything else on the street until the girl disappeared from his field of vision, and for the next hour he didn’t think about any of the books he was reading, about Holden Caulfield or the dragon in Eragon, and instead he secretly wished they would move to this house so that he might see that girl again and maybe even talk to her.

  Maureen walked out the back door and climbed down the stairs with Samantha, and allowed her little girl to roam the fescue lawn in the backyard. There was neither a pool nor room for one. Good. Better that way. The yard was separated from the neighbors not by the high walls of the Laguna Rancho Estates, but by a picket fence not much taller than Samantha herself. Standing at the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard, Maureen could look directly into the property of another Craftsman next door. She saw a woman there in a large straw hat leaning over a row of plants with a hoe. A garden occupied much of the woman’s yard, and it was filled with emerald globes and sunflowers reaching skyward, and corn plants that would soon be man-high, each looking as stiff and sturdy as a tree.

  “Hi, there,” the woman said.

  “Hi,” Maureen said.

  “That’s a great house.”

  “Yes, it’s lovely.”

  “Gonna buy it?”

  “We’re thinking about it.”

  The woman smiled and rose to her feet and grabbed a box. She walked to the picket fence and lifted the box to show off the contents, a collection of a dozen red spheres, each the size of a tangerine. Maureen walked across the lawn to take a look and the woman used her gloved hand to shake off some bits of loam and handed a tomato to Maureen.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “I’ve got too many, believe it or not. I’m taking these to a friend of mine.”

  “You grew all these?”

  “My summer crop. Black cherry tomatoes, planted in April. They’re heirlooms, organically grown.”

  “Organic,” Maureen repeated, and thought that the word carried lovely sounds to match its meaning—proximity to nature, purity, simplicity.

  “Do you garden?” the woman asked.

  Maureen opened her mouth to say no, then yes, but sputtered and said neither.

  Finally she asked, “Is it hard to learn?”

  “That hardly ever happens, you know that,” Ruthy said. “Every once in a while, we get these tiny miracles. I guess that’s why I haven’t quit yet.”

  “¿Se acabó todo?” Araceli asked. They were standing alone, outside the courtroom, and she was still confused. At one moment, she was a woman with the ligatures of United States jurisprudence affixed to her skin, at another she was free to leave the courtroom and travel about the continent again. The judge had decided the government was wrong, but was a judge allowed to do that?

  “Yes, it’s over,” Ruthy said. “The case was dismissed. There are no longer any charges against you. Like the judge said, you are free to go. Se puede ir. In fact, you should go now, and not hang around here at all. Because the DA’s office has gone totally nuts. The deputy DA wanted the judge to hold you for the immigration people, which is totally inappropriate. It’s sort of amazing to hear a county prosecutor say such a thing in open court. Did you see how angry the judge got? So don’t even go back to that address in Santa Ana. That’ll be the first place they’ll look for you—because he’s probably calling the ICE people right now.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much for everything,” Araceli said, placing her hands on Ruthy’s shoulders, as if to hold her steady. She gave her a Mexico City kiss on the cheek goodbye, and as Araceli made her way down the hallway alone, she took one last glance at Ruthy’s turning, round silhouette and the hand that rested atop the cotton hillside of her belly. She walked briskly toward the parking lot, to give Felipe the good news and to think about what she should do next. Just outside the courthouse’s glass entryway, behind the nylon cordons that blocked a patch of concrete now empty of photographers, Araceli passed Janet Bryson, who was standing alone with a rolled-up sign she had only briefly displayed on the courthouse steps.

  “They’re letting her go?” Janet Bryson said, having heard the news seconds earlier from the departing deputy district attorney. “Where is the media? Where is the outrage?”

  Next Araceli walked past Giovanni Lozano, who had his poster-portrait of her dangling upside down in his grip. “They’re letting you go?”

  “Sí,” Araceli said breathlessly. “¡Me voy!“ She hustled as fast as she could without breaking into a jog, the memory of her failed sprint from the Huntington Park police alive in her thighs and the panicked tom-tom beat inside her chest. Don’t run, because that will get you in trouble, but move quickly, mujer, because they might grab you at any moment. The ICE agents wore either stiff forest-green uniforms or navy-blue wind-breakers, and she scanned the path to the parking lot for them. There was a man following them back from the courthouse yesterday, in a car, driving slowly—perhaps he was with the ICE. Now she turned and saw a swarthy, middle-aged man in a suit, running after her with long strides of his tailored wool pants—could it be? Yes, it was the Mexican consul. “¡Araceli!” he called out. “¡Ramírez!” She was about to break into a run when she felt a hand land decisively on her shoulder and heard his Mexico City accent call out her name: “¡Araceli Noemí Ramírez Hinojosa!”

  With his full arm over her shoulder, the consul now guided a still-surprised Araceli back down to the courthouse plaza and a waiting cluster of suited men.

  “We’re here to help you,” the diplomat said, and Araceli detected that sly sprinkling of irony with which Mexican officials flavored their pronouncements. “And, more important, we have something to give you.”

  One of his suited assistants produced an envelope and gave it to the consul, while another stepped back and aimed a camera.

  “We received a request from some people in Santa Ana,” the consul said. “We took the account number they provided us. And with the very kind cooperation and signature of your former patrón, el señor Torres, we secured the money from your account. As you requested.”

  “I never requested that. From you.”

  “Well, someone contacted me. And you should thank them. And thank me. Pedro here works in the consulate and is also a freelance writer and photographer for Reforma. He’ll do a little article for us. Right, Pedro?”

  “Por supuesto, licenciado.”

  Araceli peered into the envelope. “This is a check.”

  “A cashier’s check. Safer than cash. And, if I may be permitted to say, for an amount that is surprisingly large. It’s so good to see one of our paisanas doing so well for herself. It’s made out to the name on your voting card. And if you lost that one, here’s another I had made for you and sent from the Distrito Federal. And also a passport, which I think you never obtained.”

  She examined the new documents, with their seals and hologram squares, and remembered how people suffered a via crucis of lines, forms, waiting rooms, and belligerent officials to get these in Mexico City. Now they gave them to Araceli without her even asking: it was a bureaucrat’s idea of a Christmas present.

  “If you don’t mind, we’d like to take a photograph or two to illustrate the story.”

  “You want to take a picture of
yourself giving me my own money?”

  “It will just be a second. And it will help us here at the consulate tremendously.”

  Araceli could not say whether the consul was a good man or a bad man. Clearly, he was at the mercy of that clubby Mexico City culture that took bureaucrats, professors, and even painters and poets and transformed them into obsequious babblers. Araceli had escaped from all that, and she thought she should tell the consul to go to hell and leave her alone, because, after all, what had her government done for her? They said they would give me classes in drawing and professors who could teach me to master oils, but it was all a trick, because they don’t give you brushes or a canvas, or a studio, or the time to become what you dream. Instead our government gives us the roads we take in our northward escapes, and the policemen picking at their teeth and sizing us up to see if we can pay a bribe. It gives us the cartoon pictures of Juarez in our textbooks, and the lessons about the agrarian reform and the Constitution of 1917.

  Araceli wanted to be angry, but in the end she felt pity, and she turned and posed, foot forward and leg extended, like a beauty contestant, because in the end it was all a joke, and because if the police or the ICE caught her again, she might actually need this bureaucrat’s assistance. Click. Click-click. Click.

  “¡Gracias, paisana!”

  He offered his business card and she took it, mumbling “Gracias” and slipping away, and thinking that a paper rectangle printed in Mexico City was a poor defense against the ICE. They can grab me at any minute and send me back into tiny, locked cubes, because the eyebrows on the television and the screaming woman on the staircase demand it.

  Araceli found Felipe asleep in the cab of his truck, a baseball cap pulled down tight over his eyes, his largeness barely contained by the weather-scarred red skin of his pickup. His mouth gave little wet puffs, but even in this unflattering state, she found him attractive: above all, because she sensed an innocent, incipient devotion in him. He would wait for her an entire day, without eating, if he had to. Finally she woke him up.

  “You’re back,” he said, startled.

  “Ganamos,” she said.

  “You won?”

  “I am free. Se acabó todo.”

  “¿Estás libre?”

  “Yes, except that now I have to run away.” “Right.”

  “How much gas do you have in this truck? Because I need to get far away.”

  Felipe maneuvered his pickup through the streets of Laguna Niguel with an aggression she had not seen before, squealing through a couple of turns, accelerating with controlled desperation, and after a few minutes they were on the freeway, headed north, his truck settled into a fast cruise. “We need to get out of the city,” Araceli said. Towers covered with razorlike antennas loomed over the highway, and danger seemed to lurk in every off-ramp, in every Denny’s and every Taco Bell, in every parking lot: a reporter, police officer, or immigration agent might ambush her from any of these urban hollows at any moment.

  “So we go to the desert, to the east,” Felipe said. “That’s the fastest way out.”

  “And after the desert?”

  “The desert is big. If we keep going, we get to Arizona. To Phoenix.”

  “Will you go with me, that far?” Araceli asked.

  “Anywhere you want to go. For as long as you want. After Phoenix is New Mexico. After that, Texas, I think. And then, no sé. Tennessee, maybe? It’s a big country. All the way on the other side is Carolina. Carolina del Norte y Carolina del Sur.”

  Felipe looked out over the asphalt, the white lines, the traffic drifting toward him and away, and turned and gave Araceli a gentle, mischievous smile. They were beginning a journey without a destination, without limits, on the spur of the moment, with only the clothes on their backs. Araceli guessed he was not normally a rule-breaker or risk-taker. Probably he owed money on this truck. He took no chances with his wardrobe either; he was a man of steady and unchanging habits. And yet, he kept driving. Soon they were on another freeway, headed east toward a place called Indio, according to the green signs that floated over their heads. Felipe said the hard part of the drive started after Indio, when you passed into the Mojave Desert, which you had to cross to get to Arizona. But before they got to the desert there was more city to contend with, the serpentine flow of trucks and campers and convertibles and station wagons all moving very slowly, as if each bumper were attached to the next, a conga line of blinking red lights following the curves of the freeway around office complexes, up into hills of dry grass and their crowns of nectarine-colored condominiums. Felipe’s air-conditioning didn’t work, so he lowered the windows, the roar of the traffic and the wind joining the grind of the engine, and when they spoke they had to shout. “I think we should buy some water!” she said. “So that we can drink when we cross the desert!” They pulled off the freeway and stopped at a gas station and jumped back on again. Araceli expected to see cactus at any minute, but the traffic was slow and the metropolis went on, exit after exit announcing a new district of the city unknown to her—Covina, Claremont, Redlands—more malls and parking lots extending from the freeway’s edge like crops growing along a riverbank. Los Angeles did not want to let her go; it kept its hold on her with its sprawl.

  “It’s a long drive!” she shouted. “When do we get to Indio?”

  “Una hora más. I do this drive once or twice a year. To see my family in Imuris and Cananea. Sometimes I go with my father. We go to Phoenix, then Tucson, and from there we drive south, into Mexico. I was born in Cananea, did I ever tell you that? You know, we could go there. I wouldn’t mind that. It would be a good place to get a new start. Mexico isn’t that bad. You’re poor there, but it’s más calmado.”

  She thought about Mexico and the check in her pocket. The amount was a small fortune on the other side of the border. She could start a small business, or buy a house and build a barbecue in the back and cover the patio with bricks. Or she could rent a studio with big windows to let in the light and a concrete floor that she could spill paint on.

  On the other hand, there was still the United States, and the promise of even greater riches, and the smooth satisfaction of being a woman who stood her ground. She could find an apartment in this Phoenix place if she wanted to. It was a city in a desert valley where people couldn’t survive without air-conditioning, and Araceli wondered if she could live in such a place, without rain, clouds, and seasons, especially now that the traffic had sped up and they had finally reached the outskirts of Indio, the landscape turning dry and chalky. They drove past trailer parks rising from dirt lots, the wind spraying brown dust devi ls along the ground. A tumbleweed bounced along the strip of dirt in the middle of the freeway, and she sat up and pointed it out to Felipe. “Mira, Felipe, es una de esas malas hierbas. ¿Cómo se les llama? Tumbleweed!” She felt proud of herself for remembering the name, wondering how and why she would have learned such an obscure Americanism. Tumbleweed, the plant that rolls like a wheel, which is what the specimen she had just seen was doing, headed toward Arizona like Araceli and Felipe.

  A hot wind blew in through the window, the heat of the desert and the black highway rising into the pickup truck, making Felipe sweat, the perspiration dripping down his neck and covering his T-shirt. She reached down between her feet and pulled up another bottle of water and opened it, handing it to him, and you would have thought she’d given him a bouquet of roses. Even the smallest kindness from me makes him happy—he must be in love. But when will he kiss me?

  “How far is Carolina?” she asked.

  “Very far. Maybe four or five days.”

  “Would you drive five days with me?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “About what?”

  “Getting caught. By the immigration.”

  “No. I’m a citizen.”

  “Of the United States?”

  “Yes. I got my papers last year. Through my uncle. It took ten years.”

&n
bsp; “But I don’t have papers, and you could get in trouble for helping me. You’re breaking the law.”

  “So?”

  “And you still want to drive with me. And help me escape?”

  “Yeah.”

  It took a moment for this small miracle to sink in and feel true. Yes, it was there to see in his serene and satisfied study of the road ahead of them. It was the look of a housepainter after a day of flawless work. He was a big man with big sexy hair, and he was hers. He would even break the law for her.

  “¡Qué romántico!” she shouted, and laughed, and he laughed too, in a muted and nervous way.

  “After we get to Phoenix, we have to decide,” he said. “There’s two ways we can go. We can keep going east, and go to Texas or Carolina. Or we can go south, to Sonora and to Nogales and Imuris—to my tierra. If we go south, we can’t come back north, because there are checkpoints with la migra.” He turned to look at her and asked, “Where do you want to go?”

  “A mí me da igual,” she said, because she could see herself following either path.

  Soon the last human settlement was behind them and they sped across a vast, open plain of sand the color and texture of flour, covered with skeletal shrubs, maroon mountains rising in the distance, rocky and lifeless. “We reached the desert,” Araceli shouted. The road had become a straight line, dipping over the horizon in a watery mirage.

  “It’s the Mojave,” Felipe shouted back.

  They were in an eastward flow with sports cars in bright primary colors that zipped past their truck like low-slung missiles, and big sedans with people inside reading books and looking at tiny screens, passengers and drivers cool and comfortable behind shields of tinted glass. They were people of all the American colors, and carried an air of affluent confidence and anticipation: The road belongs to them and they know it, Araceli thought, and they even appreciate it. There were great big vehicles the size of small homes too, with license plates of many different colors that announced their owners resided in the LAND OF ENCHANTMENT and VACATIONLAND, or that they were headed to a SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE.