The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

19




In his small kitchen-dining room in Santa Ana, Octavio Covarrubias made Araceli a breakfast of eggs with chorizo, fresh-squeezed juice from oranges plucked from the tree in the backyard, and a side dish of fried nopals, from the petals of an enormous cactus plant that grew in a vacant lot down the street. With every serving he raised the eyebrow that was hovering between his Jupiter eye and his moles Io and Europa, and asked if she wanted more coffee. Araceli grinned widely at the sight of this unshaven family patriarch of about fifty-five, a semiretired truck driver dressed in faded green work pants, holding a pan and making breakfast for her when, to her knowledge, he never even made breakfast for himself. “Ay, Octavio,” his wife, Luz, said, after she noted the irony too, “a mí nunca me haces breakfast. Qué bonito sería if you brought me breakfast in bed one morning.” Since Araceli’s arrival at his home last night, Octavio Covarrubias had a sudden and strange need to dote over her, a woman whose presence on earth had only faintly registered in his consciousness before.

Octavio Covarrubias was impressed that an ordinary mexicana could be put through an arrest and a symbolic flogging by the machinery of the English-language media, survive with her mexicana dignity más o menos intact, and then enter his living room, of all places. He was an avid reader and a faithful consumer of cable television news in two languages, and almost always this made him nothing more than a passive witness to the way his people were crushed, time and again, in American courtrooms, on desert smuggling trails, and in Arizona detention centers. He read and pontificated so much on these issues to his neighbors on Maple Street that they called him licenciado behind his back, because his outrage and verbosity reminded them of a certain kind of annoying politico-bureaucrat back home.

When Araceli was on her last mouthful of eggs, Octavio Covarrubias began to speak. “Proceso has a correspondent here in Los Angeles,” he said. “Maybe we should call him, because Proceso will want to write something about you, I’m sure.” Octavio Covarrubias was a Proceso subscriber, receiving the Mexican investigative magazine by mail from Tijuana every week. Before Araceli could respond, he began describing a report by this same Proceso correspondent about a facility for the detention of immigrant children in San Diego County, and a Televisa report on the same story, and then later more reports on CNN en Español, and finally on CNN in English. Octavio’s news appetite was such that he could explain to his wife and neighbors why the U.S. Army was to blame for the flooding of the Mississippi and the conspiracies behind the assassination of the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and the links between drug cartels and former President Salinas de Gotari. Having been forced to drop out of his final year of high school in Durango, his dream of a degree in political science unrealized, he studied the news instead, in the belief that he might understand the seemingly unpredictable events of the world, which were obviously orchestrated to keep his people poor, ignorant, and enslaved.

Araceli ignored the passing question about the Proceso reporter, and helped Octavio and his wife clean up. Her hosts obviously wanted her to fill in the silence with an insider’s account of her arrest and the news they had seen on TV. But she couldn’t think of where to begin.

“So, it looks like they treated you okay?” Luz Covarrubias said, as Araceli dried a plate with a cloth and handed it to her to put away. “No te veo traumada. Te veo tranquila.”

“No me imaginaba,” Araceli said suddenly. Octavio and his wife thought she meant she never imagined she’d be pulled into the depths of the machinery of hate, that she never imagined being tackled and having the humiliation broadcast on the airwaves, that she never imagined a million televisions would defame her as a criminal. But no. She meant she never believed she could be pulled so quickly and definitively from her stasis, from her comfortable but boring existence, from the cycles of meals and laundry, into the full mad circus of a life lived without a schedule or rhythm. For this reason, her face brightened with a strange, bemused expression as she said “No me imaginaba …” a second time. The break had begun with the arrival of that first rabble of barbarian gardeners, the men who took the machetes to Pepe’s tropical forest. Those men had ripped her from her roots too and tossed her from a shady jungle into the full California sunlight. Liberated now from jail and from the worry of the fate of Brandon and Keenan, she could appreciate the journey away from Paseo Linda Bonita and into Los Angeles for its carnivalesque qualities. The decaying art of the railroad tracks, the startling dream-sense that came from being in a jail one moment, and then in the silent, spooky glory of the nighttime streets of Aliso Viejo the next. Out here, in the world away from the paradise of the Laguna Rancho Estates, there was the silver skin of taco trucks on Thirty-ninth Street, and the fat tortillas the hungry men and women workers raised to their mouths, and the deep-sea purple of the dying daylight over their heads. Those images belonged in her sketchbook, and then later on a canvas as big as she imagined Picasso’s Guernica to be. She imagined a composition with orange and red explosions of fireworks in the background, and in the foreground the rabid teeth of a mob that marched and shouted. And why not the horizontal march of the electric transmission towers, and that corridor of feral grasses and palms, a road to unseen American provinces beyond? An artist needs to be out and about: Araceli understood that now. The study of the visual world while on her feet had informed her life in Mexico City, but in the defeat of her creative ambitions she had gone into a kind of retreat, she had accepted the little room the Torres-Thompsons gave her and the bills in the envelope at the end of each week. She felt like Brandon, who saw fantasy and wonderment in everything new. She wanted to find her gordito, the dancing painter Felipe, and tell him what she had seen.

“I never imagined,” Araceli said after a brief silence, “that I could see things the way a little boy saw them.”

“¿Cómo?”

“Brandon. He’s the older boy. He loves to read. He thought the things he saw in Los Angeles were like the things in his books. He was funny. You see things differently when you open your eyes the way a child does.” There were children in this house too, Octavio and Luz’s kids, hovering nearby and listening for story details they might share with others.

“Well, it’s good to see you calm,” Luz said.

“Sí, me siento calmada,” Araceli said. Octavio looked a little thrown, a little disappointed by her light mood.

“Next time, Señor Covarrubias,” she said, “I am going to make breakfast for you.”


The lights came on and Maureen and the television reporter looked at each other through the layers of makeup that covered their faces, and Maureen had one last moment to think, Ah, this is really show businesses, isn’t it? before listening to the reporter’s first question. It had taken forty minutes to transform her living room into a studio. The point of this interview, as she understood it, was to make a public defense of her own motherhood. But as the crew ran black cables as thick as garden snakes along her tiled floor and raised a half dozen lamp stands to varied heights, her stage fright and anxiety had been replaced, momentarily, with a kind of morbid fascination at this glimpse of the inner workings of television news. The crew shielded their portable four-hundred-watt beams with transparent fabric squares until all shadows disappeared and an eerie, even light settled over her living room. They rearranged photographs on the bookcase and produced fresh-cut roses and a vase, and opened the sliding glass doors to the succulent garden and taped L’s onto the floor where a high folding chair was later placed, so that Maureen could be photographed with the roses, a family portrait, and a mini-landscape of cacti and the ocotillo plant all looming behind her. The producer, a woman of about twenty-five, had punched a message into one of those handheld devices that required much use of the right thumb, and waited a few minutes for a reply, and had looked up from the screen to announce that Maureen alone would be interviewed, with the boys, Samantha, and Scott making silent cameos in the “B” footage to be shot around the house afterward, in a simulation of their daily living, sans Araceli. Of course, Maureen thought, I’m the one they want on camera. Her twelve-second “rant” had been repeated enough in its thirty-six-hour existence for an observer or two on the motherhood blogs to call it “iconic.” Why is it, Maureen wondered, that in any walk of life, from corporate CEO, to U.S. senator, to harried flower vendor and distraught Orange County mother, an angry woman provokes such intense feelings? Why is it considered such a remarkable and noteworthy thing for a mother to raise her voice?

“Maureen Thompson, how are you doing? How is your family?” the reporter asked.

“We’re fine. We had a little scare. For two days and one very long night that seemed like an eternity. I mean, to come home to this house and find it empty, to expect to see our boys here, and then, well, to find them missing.” She was aware that her voice had begun to tremble, that she sounded tenuous and frail, and as soon as she became aware of this, she realized that this was not necessarily a bad thing. “And then to find out they were all the way on the other side of the city.”

“And they’re okay?”

“Yes, yes. They’ve got a story to tell, a wild story, but it appears nothing happened to them.”

“A wild story?”

“Yes. It seems our employee, Araceli, took them on a train ride. For what purpose, God knows. They were among the homeless at some point, or so it seems.”

“The homeless?”

“Yes. Which is very disturbing, of course.”

“But they’re okay?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us a little about yourself.”

“My husband, he’s a programmer. I teach art at my sons’ school. I’m an art teacher there. Well, a volunteer art teacher, I should say, because they don’t pay me anything, but I do get to be close to the boys and their school.” Her voice had lost its quaver suddenly. “And we’ve lived in this beautiful house for five years now.”

“Now, explain to us exactly how it was that you found your children missing,” the newsman said, and then looked her directly in the eye and added in a markedly more friendly voice, as if he were an actor speaking an aside to the groundlings, “And please, feel relaxed. We can do this more than once if we need to.”

“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 defy 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.