The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

22




Araceli’s back ached because she spent much of the waking day turning and twisting on a thin mattress, feeling it slide back and forth over the steel sheet her jailers called a bed frame. She waited for night to fall and day to come back again. When the thin rectangle of her cell window briefly glowed orange in the morning, she could imagine she was somewhere else. Back in colonia San Cosme in Mexico City, where her last chilango boyfriend lived, the sun warming their faces, rows of fault-shaken buildings leaning over the sidewalks; or on the subway train when it climbed up out of the ground and ran in the open air, the passengers squinting in the sudden pulses of light. What a mistake it had been to leave Mexico City. Her step north had brought her to a cell in Santa Ana, to become familiar with the angles in the walls, the sounds of the corridors, among inmates hypnotized by the collective need to sleep. The ritual dispensing of pills caused a powerful drift of inmate will toward the recreation room at the end of the corridor, where a television set filled the jail with a perpetual stream of canned laughter and commercial jingles and their tin echoes. Her fellow inmates stayed in this neutral, half-conscious state even at three in the afternoon, when the natural sun was bearing down on people in the world. They were all in a kind of frozen storage, these women in their blue jumpsuits, sitting on their beds, some with charcoal blankets thrown over them, a hundred grungy little dolls in their cells stacked up like toy blocks, reminding her of a Diego Rivera piece from his red-star Marxist didactic days, a painting depicting bodies filling a bank vault. Frozen Assets.


On his first day back at work, Scott was chased away from his office by too many “Are you okays?” and too many hugs, and by not getting a single IM from Charlotte, who turned her head away with a snap when he caught her studying him through the glass. At home it was Maureen who averted her eyes, even as she handed him a shopping list for the grocery store. But at the market, with the list in hand, it was all stares. First, the Latino guy at the end of the line of carts, who gave Scott a good long look that passed quickly from initial surprise to irritated aggression. This guy was, what, thirty, thirty-five? His bald-headed look transported Scott back to South Whittier and to the first recruits to a lifestyle his father told him was “for losers who don’t want to learn good English.” He had a goatee and the unanchored expression of a man about to enter middle age unawares and unprepared. Five, ten seconds passed, and Scott gave him a what’s-up? raising of his chin, but the guy didn’t blink. Scott pushed forward into the grocery store and began to fill his cart dutifully, but when he reached the checkstand he endured another, shorter glare of recognition from the Latina cashier, followed by a frown and then a look of deliberate indifference. He had seen this cashier perhaps a half dozen times but never engaged in conversation with her, and he now sensed she was disappointed with him somehow, and that his surname had something to do with her reaction. I’m supposed to be one of them. This explained too the stare from the shopping-cart vato. Scott Torres was being judged by a set of rules of tribal loyalty, simply because he possessed a Mexican surname. So strange, the clannishness of these people. Scott, with his one Mexican name, was responsible for the jailing of a woman with three: Araceli Noemi Ramirez. She was just a face and a name on the television, and he their customer, a familiar face—and yet they scorned him. Scott’s presence here at the checkstand, his basket filled with jars of baby food and diapers for his daughter, and juice boxes for his sons, meant less to this cashier than the abstract construction of Araceli, a Latina martyr in a jail cell.

“Is there something wrong?” Scott asked the cashier, whose name tag announced EVANGELINE.

“Is there?” Evangeline asked cryptically, and he was left to think about the question as he wheeled out from the store with his purchases in the cart, grasping a receipt between his fingers that was nearly a yard long.


The representative of the public defender’s office was a tall, elegant woman with a low-key demeanor, a Filipino surname, and a button nose that suggested a heritage that owed as much to the Mayflower as to Manila. Ruth “Ruthy” Bacalan-Howland was about thirty years old, and she paused to think for a second or two whenever it was her turn to speak, looking down at her hands and then using them to pull idiosyncratically at the batik fabric of her long skirt. “Of course, you should not plead guilty to a crime you did not commit, no matter how good a deal it seems,” she said to Araceli. “Mucha gente lo hace, supongo, but really that’s not the way the system is supposed to work.”

They were in the attorney conference room, which they had all to themselves. Ruthy Bacalan, a deputy public defender, had listened to Araceli explain the series of events that had landed her in “a very strange North American circus,” as Araceli put it in her accented but clear English. The attorney had then laid out the government’s offer, speaking the occasional confident if somewhat accented Spanish. She translated “misdemeanor” into the closest Spanish equivalent she knew: “delito menor,” a phrase that didn’t quite carry the innocuous shadings of the English original. “So if you plead guilty to this delito menor they will release you from jail—but directly into the hands of migración. To the American legal system, it’s considered a crime as serious as going through a red traffic light. But it does mean that you will never be able to return here again—legally—since they will hand you over to the immigration people that work inside the county jail even when they are, technically, ‘releasing’ you from jail. Of course, even if you fought the case and won, you still might get deported.” Ruthy Bacalan sat perpendicular to Araceli at a square table, with her long legs crossed one over the other, exposing her leather hiking boots, which had pink trim and pink shoelaces. The deputy public defender wore these shoes because she was seven months pregnant, with swollen feet that kept her perpetually off balance. “If you fight it, you get a chance to call witnesses. I would be your attorney, and the government would pay for everything. Gratis. But, once again, if you lost,” the public defender continued, “you could go to a prison for five years. Then you would certainly be deported.” Araceli forgot, momentarily, what the attorney was saying, and remained fixated on her footwear. These are shoes for an active outdoor woman, Araceli thought. Girlie-pink and rugged leather. With those, you can climb a mountain in feminine style. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen shoes like that in Mexico City, not even at the Santa Fe Mall.

“Can I ask you, señorita, where did you buy those boots?”

Ruthy Bacalan was momentarily taken aback—apparently, people whose futures hung in the balance did not often interrupt the conversation to ask about her shoes.

“Oh, these. At the Sport Chalet.”

“If I am ever released from this place and allowed to live in the United States,” Araceli said, “I will go to this chalet and buy a pair of those shoes. In fact, I will tell you that I want to stay here, and not accept the very generous offer to be deported directly to Mexico, because Los Estados Unidos de América is a country where women can wear boots like that.”

“So you’re not going to accept the government’s offer?”

“No. ¿Para qué?”

“Fantástico,” Ruthy Bacalan said, her face erupting into youthful brightness, as if an undergraduate had suddenly arrived to chase the gloomy attorney away. Ruthy Bacalan had been preparing to resign from the public defender’s office, and not because she was pregnant and carrying forty-seven cases as a Deputy Public Defender II. Her recent conversion to Buddhism helped her with the stress, and she felt quite prepared to be a working mother. No, what was causing Ruthy Bacalan to doubt her commitment to the public defender’s office was the lack of fight and purpose in the work, her servitude to the assembly line of advancing manila folders, and the flow charts that established all the hearings and procedures through which a soul had to be squeezed before emerging either guilty, exonerated, or in various legal limbos on the other side. She had come to this job out of a sense of civic duty and compassion, a belief that she might be able to reduce the suffering of the defendants who passed before her and imbue them with at least some constitutional dignity. In the cramped office she shared with two other deputy public defenders, she had sat down to meditate for ten minutes before leaving for this interview, and realized immediately afterward that she needed to place herself in a job where she might more directly confront the inequities of her time. Maybe as a teacher in an “inner city” school, or as a union organizer, or perhaps simply as a stay-at-home mom raising future citizens with good Buddhist values. And now this defendant had appeared before her, prepared to take a defiant stance in a case that might attract some media notoriety and send a small message to the city and the nation beyond.

“I think you can win this case,” Ruthy Bacalan said quickly and eagerly. “Everyone in the office was expecting you to take the guilty plea.”

“Why would anyone plead guilty if they did not commit the crime?” Araceli asked. “That makes no sense.”

“A lot of people do it. There are a lot of things about the law and the courts that don’t make any sense.”

“What you were saying before, licenciada? Let me make sure I understand correctly,” Araceli said. “You were saying I might be punished for trying to tell the truth. I mean, if I lose the case. Because I would be telling the truth—that I am not guilty—but they could send me to prison for a longer time because I tried to tell the truth.”

“Yes.” Any layperson could see it, Ruthy Bacalan thought. The shock of seeing principles of the law sullied and mocked—it was the expression on the face of every idealistic attorney after a week or two inhabiting a deputy public defender’s skin. “There is this beautiful idea. A word with Latin roots: ‘justice.’ Of course, it’s the same word in both our languages. Justicia.” These were the opening words to a little speech Ruthy Bacalan sometimes gave to undergraduate classes in the law, but never before to a client. “The justice system is like plumbing. In cases like yours, the basic problem is that there are too many defendants to fit in the system—so we lawyers use tricks to squeeze you through. Against this there is a tradition in the law that says everyone should be treated fairly. My job exists, for example, because a poor man from Florida sat down and wrote a letter to the Supreme Court, with paper and pencil. From his jail cell. Thanks to him the laws were changed so now everyone gets a public defender, gratis. A fighter like that can change the law. United States history is filled with people like that.”

“Mexican history is the same,” Araceli said.

“I imagine it is.”

“But I am not a fighter.”

“Neither am I. Not truly.”

“But I think I want to be respected. Merezco respeto. And I want to respect the rules too. The rules say you should not lie.”

Above all, the thought of pleading guilty to a delito menor and accepting the convenience of a “deal” offended Araceli’s sense of order and decorum. It only added to the sense of unraveling about her: that she was living in a metropolis where all the objects, once arranged in order, had been shuffled out of place. When you live far away, you never associate California with clutter. When Araceli was in a messy home, when the beds were not made and the dishes were left unscrubbed, she invariably felt pangs of disappointment and loss. She had been this way as a girl in Nezahualcóyotl, when her mother slipped into those seasonal depressions that kept her from working for several days at a time, once or twice a year. And she was that way as a woman living in the guesthouse on Paseo Linda Bonita. Now Araceli could see that this place called California was like a home that had fallen into a state of obsolescence and neglect, a conclusion confirmed by the fact that this idealistic woman with the pink-trimmed boots had been forced to make an absurd offer: tell a lie and you can go free. The truth had been building for a long time now—it had been there for her to see intimately in the Paseo Linda Bonita home, in the increasingly frayed interactions between Scott and Maureen, the sense that she was living with two people confused and angry with the familial roles assigned to them. She felt this same unsettled sense when she first entered the center of Los Angeles with Brandon and Keenan, when the mob confronted the councilman in Huntington Park, and when the woman of los tres strikes plotted her escape and then surrendered and wept. She wanted to take all the exhausted American people she’d seen and give them freshly starched clothes to wear, and she wanted to take all the misplaced objects and polish them and put them back where they belonged.

“These laws you have. In some ways they are pretty,” Araceli said. “But in other ways they are ugly.”

The American police would politely release you if they knew the truth of your innocence; they would not accept bribes, apparently, and they placed the property they took from the people they arrested in transparent bags for later return. And yet their courts would blackmail an innocent woman into a devi l’s bargain, just so they could keep the flow of the accused moving swiftly through their concrete buildings.

“Entonces, a pelear” Araceli said.

Ruthy Bacalan beamed. “Yes, we fight.” She explained what would happen next: the court would schedule a “mini-trial” called a preliminary hearing. “I’ll push for that quickly. If we lose that, and we likely will, we go for a full trial.”

The two women shook hands and gave each other a half embrace before leaving the room via separate doors. Araceli took a slip of paper from the guard and followed a yellow line on the concrete floor that led away from the room and twisted and turned down a labyrinth of corridors. On those few occasions when she ventured out of her cell, the expanse and openness of the county jail surprised Araceli: the prisoners shuffled back and forth without escorts, up and down the hallways and escalators, women walking with leisurely strides in groups to the cafeteria, carrying trays of food and boxes and envelopes, guided by a greasy rainbow of painted floor lines. The jail had the structured bustle of a huge office building, a weird corporation where the secretaries wore their hair in dirty strings, or shaved at the sides, and every employee dressed in a blue or a yellow jumpsuit.

She walked back to her cell block, ten minutes through a corridor maze, and remembered what she had told the deputy public defender: “I am not a fighter.” But perhaps she was. She could be a Mexican superhero wrestler, the Masked Inmate, springing into the air in her yellow jail overalls, with ankle-high pink leather boots and a purple cape trailing behind her. She gave another solitary chuckle and thought that it was nice to be able to get out of her cell and talk to Ruthy for an hour, and then to jostle through the rushing crowds of secretaries in the yellow jumpsuits who crowded the passageways.

Halfway back, just past the point where the orange line turned off toward the cafeteria, Araceli felt a jolt to the head and stumbled, tumbling through an instant of blindness. She landed facedown on the floor and regained her sight, touching yellow and blue and green lines on the cement, trying to remember which one she was supposed to follow. “Baby stealer!” someone shouted above her. “Kidnapper!” Someone kicked her in the spine as she tried to rise to her knees, sending her back to the hard coolness of the floor. Someone is trying to kill me. The inmates formed a circle around her, she could see their feet sticking out through the rubber sandals everyone had to wear, toenails freshly painted ruby and tangerine. Where do they get nail polish in here? How did I miss the dispensing of the nail polish? A whistle sounded and all the painted toenails ran away, replaced by the heavy black shoes of a guard. Araceli looked up and saw a tall uniformed and muscular Scandinavian giant with a ponytail. The guard pulled her up, but Araceli’s head wanted to stay on the ground. “Gotta get you outta here, girl,” the guard said. “Get up. Or the crowd will re-form.” Araceli’s legs wanted to give up, but the guard wouldn’t let her fall, and they started to walk back toward the cell, Araceli taking three good steps for every bad one that couldn’t support her weight, being held up by this woman with the torso of a weight lifter. “You gonna make it?” the guard asked.

“Creo que sí,” Araceli said.

They started to move forward again, the guard’s arm around Arace-li’s waist. Suddenly the guard lifted her into the air with a grunt, and all of Araceli’s thoughts were erased by the unexpected sensation of being embraced by the stout construction of the guard’s arms as she carried Araceli over the lines on the floor. Araceli wanted to coo, it felt so good, all the tension in her spine and face and the pain of the blows suddenly slipping away.


Maureen opened the front door at 4:50 in the afternoon, thinking that it was Scott, but found instead an older, heavier, and slightly darker version of her husband. John Torres carried a suitcase and wore the expression of a man forced to rescue a drowning woman too stupid to know she couldn’t swim. “It has come to my attention that you guys are kind of falling apart here,” he announced. “That’s why I’m back. And that’s why I’m gonna move in. I’m going to take that little house in the back your maid had, since I’m assuming she ain’t coming back. I’ll stay four nights a week, which is probably as much as I can take.”

Maureen opened her mouth to speak, but could not find words to resist the affront.

“I can cook. I can clean as well as anyone,” he said, with a kind of wounded determination. “And I sure as hell know how to make a bed, which is more than my son knows. I won’t do the dishes, but I can cook a pretty mean pot of beans and just about anything these kids will eat for breakfast. You can leave your boys with me here and I can babysit, and you can take a break with my granddaughter, which I take it was what led to this mess anyway. And I’d say you probably need a break too, because, to be frank, you’re looking kinda worn down, daughter-in-law.” He took in her frazzled appearance with a quick up-and-down. “I know you’re not supposed to say something like that to a woman, but let’s get down to brass tacks here. You need the help. You’re wearing out like some of the guys I used to pick lettuce with. I’ll work for free. Just let me eat my own arroz con pollo is all I ask.”

El abuelo Torres disappeared into the kitchen and then into the backyard and the guesthouse. Scott found him thirty minutes later, with his head in the refrigerator.

“Dad? What’s going on?”

“I’m looking for a decent cheese to make these kids a quesadilla. That’s something I know they’ll eat for dinner.”

Scott walked away, feeling he had entered a nightmare in which he sleepwalked through scenes from his childhood, the past returning with an eerie and familiar sense of doomed domesticity.

“My father is cooking dinner?” Scott asked Maureen in the living room.

“And living with us.”

“In this house?”

“In the guesthouse, yes.”

“Why?”

“Not my idea.”

“Can we make him leave?”

“I suppose we could,” Maureen said. She took in the smell of melting cheese wafting in from the kitchen. “But can we afford to?”

After serving his grandsons and granddaughter a dinner of quesadillas and sliced apples, with the boys grinning at him and calling out, “Can we have another one, Grandpa?” the elder Torres returned to the silver range. He prepared baked potatoes and chicken thighs spiced with tarragon, the kind of simple but hearty meal you might get at a diner, and slid it across the kitchen table to his son and daughter-in-law.

“Enjoy,” he said flatly.

“Thank you,” Maureen answered weakly.

When they were finished he left the dishes in the sink for Maureen and went out in the backyard and grabbed one of the footballs and yelled out to Brandon, “Go long.” After a few tosses Keenan joined them and they played catch for thirty minutes, until the elder Torres began to cough and he plopped down on the grass and said, “Let’s sit down and take a rest and look at this pretty desert we’ve got growing here.”

Grandfather and grandsons admired the stiff petals of the prickly pear cactus, the spiny yuccas, and held very still when they saw a crow perch itself on top of the ocotillo. It turned its head side to side to examine the humans below with each of its eyes.

“Damn, that’s pretty,” the elder Torres said. “It’s been a long time since I seen the desert like this. Grew up in the desert, you know.”

Brandon sensed his grandfather was drawn to the cactus in some profoundly adult and emotional way, and he half heard and half imagined a cowboy twang in his speech. Perhaps he was a south-of-the-border cowboy like the venal gunslinger with a Mexican accent in that spaghetti western Brandon watched with his father once, until the cowboys started cussing and his father told him he had to leave.

“Is this what Mexico looks like?” Brandon asked.

“Wouldn’t know. I’m from Yuma, in Arizona.” The elder Torres looked at his grandchildren, saw their expression of innocent confusion, and allowed his natural defensiveness to slip away. “My father was from Chihuahua. I was born there, but it’s been a long time. I suppose it probably still looks like this.”

“Are we Mexican?”

“Just a quarter. By me, I guess.”

“Only a quarter?” Keenan said. He thought about the math lessons at the end of second grade, and did not understand how a human being could be divided into fractions. One-quarter, two-thirds, three-eighths. Were his bones and muscles split into Mexican parts and American parts? Could his greenish-brown pupils have a quarter Mexican pie slice, two American pie slices, and an Irish pie slice, and if he looked in the mirror with a magnifying glass, could he see the slices and tell them apart?

“Yeah,” their grandfather said. “Just a quarter.”

“Is less Mexican better than more?”

“Don’t know. Some people think it is. These days, though, I ain’t so sure.”

At 8:45 p.m. the elder Torres retired to the guesthouse, and by 9:15, when Maureen entered the kitchen to make herself some tea, she could hear him snoring, a faint animal rumbling of stubborn helplessness squeezing through the two walls that separated them.

The next morning he awoke at 6:00 a.m., entered the kitchen, and made his son a ham, tomato, and cheese omelet for breakfast. When Scott had finished eating, his father gave him an order.

“Do me a favor and scrub out a couple of toilets before you leave for the day.”

“What?”

“Listen. Your wife is allergic to the toilet bowls, and I’m gonna have a lot on my plate today.”

“But I’m going to work. I’ll be late.”

“I thought you were the boss there.”

Twenty minutes later the elder Torres found his son on his hands and knees in one of the home’s four bathrooms, attacking the porcelain with a scrubber.

“Man, this is gross,” Scott said.

“You’ve got two boys. What did you expect?”

Scott rose to his feet, lowered the toilet cover to sit, and took a break, studying the sink and the tub, both of which were awaiting his attentions.

“Did Araceli really do all of this? By herself?” Scott asked. He looked at his hands, which smelled of bleach. “You made breakfast, and dinner last night. Maureen’s doing the baby’s laundry. I’m cleaning the f*cking toilets. I can’t believe that one woman did all of these things.”

“Yeah,” the elder Torres said. “And she did them well.” He examined his son’s work on the toilet, and added, “Don’t forget to scrub down on the sides. You need to get back down on your hands and knees to do it right.”

For the next few days Scott and Maureen remembered Araceli in their muscles, and in their wrinkled and bleached hands, until the tasks became familiar and routine and her prominent place in their memories began to fade, very slightly.