The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

23




“Somebody paid your bail.” The guard named Nansen, who had carried Araceli to safety just yesterday, looked a little disappointed. “Ten grand, paid in full.” Araceli walked through the jail corridors for what she hoped was the last time, trying to imagine who her benefactor might be—a man, a tall man, a gringo? Would his act of kindness present additional complications? After her clothes were returned to her at the Inmate Reception Center, she walked through one last set of doors into a room where the guards didn’t care about her anymore, a waiting area with plastic chairs and the feel of a seedy bus station. Standing in the middle of the room, with the lost look of a passenger who had missed his connection, was a thin, white-haired, and pale man of about fifty with ruddy, cratered skin, in a brown tweed jacket and a white cotton dress shirt that dangled over the top of his jeans.

The attorney opened his arms in greeting. “Araceli! I’ve been here for over an hour. I’m Mitchell Glass. From the South Coast Immigrant Coalition,” he said. “We paid your bail.”

“Why?” Araceli realized, of course, that she should say thank you, but her need to understand what was happening outweighed any pretense. There was a moment of awkward silence while Glass considered the question.

He explained, in slow and condescending English that sped up and was less condescending after Araceli frowned at him, that the coalition had received the funds to free Araceli from a group called the Immigrant Daylight Project, a large circle of benevolent and open-minded people from Manhattan, Austin, Santa Monica, Cambridge, and many other places. “Usually they pay bail for people who are in immigration detention. So they can get out and live among free people while they appeal the verdict. Out of the shadows and into the daylight. Get it? The directors thought that, given the attention to your case, they would pay your bail too. Plus, it wasn’t a huge amount.”

“¿Y qué tengo que hacer?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Glass said. “These people just want you to be free while you fight your case.”

Araceli did not know it, but not long after her second arrest the Daylight Project had sent off a flurry of emails and posted letters calling on its members to “help throw a wrench in the prison-industrial complex” by “emancipating Araceli N. Ramirez, the latest member of the fastest growing sector of the incarcerated population”—undocumented immigrants. The group’s fund-raising literature was a bit heavy-handed with its use of slavery metaphors, and included broken chains on its logo and references to the Underground Railroad in its brochures. But they dealt almost exclusively with those in federal detention and their decision to pay Araceli’s bail caught Ian Goller and his office completely by surprise. It had been ages since the Orange County District Attorney’s Office had a defendant whose fate worried faraway liberal crusaders. Generally speaking, alien inmates without family members on the outside stayed inside the big house, there was no habeas corpus for them, no writs, no appeals, no purchased freedom.

For the moment, however, Araceli was a happy and unlikely beneficiary of the Bill of Rights, as free of overbearing authorities as the New Englanders who stood up to King George, a startling fact which she confirmed by scanning the street and the parked cars as she walked toward the jail’s parking lot. No one is following me. Qué milagro. The sun is shining on my face. Daylight. She wanted to ask about her public defender, but instead Glass told her something about a “rally.”

“What?”

“We’re going to a little meeting,” he said as they entered his car. “Your case inspired us to organize this.”

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 texting 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 representative 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.”

Scott could see his wife would now approach the task of divesting herself and her home of these superfluous objects with the same vigor she had applied to their accumulation. The household was her domain, and he and all the children would live according to whatever principles she embraced: baroque beauty and excess, or simplicity and moderation. What do they call it when women run everything? Matriarchy? Feminoc-racy? He imagined a leaner household, smaller credit-card bills, and a less imposing flat-screen television. Or perhaps no television at all. Hadn’t it been that way once, in some other time, in the prehistory of his American family, a time his Mainer great-grandfather would remember? He allowed himself to imagine living in that emptier household with children, perhaps with a vegetable garden in the back instead of cacti or semitropical plants—and then he remembered the nagging matters of the present.

“We need to talk about some things.”

Maureen heard him but chose not to respond, because if she did she would lose the momentum that was carrying her through the domestic juggling act of her day. If she stopped she would curl up like a ball on the bed with a bowl of ice cream and the television turned on to faux courtrooms and talk-show hosts who filled the day with common sense and scolding rants delivered to knucklehead moms. Better to sort through this bookcase, separating out the old Dr. Seuss and other very early reader books Samantha might still enjoy. If she could leave the boys’ room looking less cluttered, the sense of minor accomplishment would stay with her and lift her through the preparation of lunch. Afterward, she would strap up Samantha for a walk through the neighborhood to see if she might fall asleep, because the baby was starting to skip her naps, which transformed her into a moody afternoon screamer. The visit of the representative of the district attorney’s office had thrown Maureen off, set her back, but now the sight of these books had her back on track again. Each book had a little of their past and their hope attached to it, and it would be hard to part with the brightly colored pages of trucks, trains, and spaceships, many with dates of purchase and a name written inside: Brandon’s favorite, Age 3. There was a poetic order, she could now see, in the seemingly haphazard collection of topics and images in these books. Here a slice of ancient Egypt brought to life with meticulous drawings, there a child’s primer on human evolution. Australopithecus, Homo habilis. They had purchased these books to transform their children into little cosmopolitan princes. But all this was too much. She considered a collection of art-history primers, which her sons never cracked open. Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel were gathering dust, because her sons were unmoved by the hand of God touching Man.

“The child services people called this morning,” Scott said behind her.

“Uh-huh.”

Scott lowered Samantha to the floor and allowed her to begin walking through the room, thinking perhaps that would get his wife’s attention away from the books she was sorting. There was something remarkable, and also very predictable, Scott thought, about this moment: he and his wife had been thrust into a public crisis, suffered embarrassment on television, in the newspapers, and on the Internet, and yet the essential dynamic in their marriage remained unchanged. I’m trying to help us avoid disaster and she is still not listening.

“Maureen, we need to focus,” he insisted. “Child Protective Services got set off by the stuff about the spa. About you being at the spa alone. Apparently there’s another, quote, unquote, ‘wave of anger’ building against us. The media found out about MindWare, and me being a software millionaire, supposedly, and how much our house is worth. Peter Goldman said they’re calling us ‘symbols of excess.’ “

“Peter told you that?” Maureen asked, finally turning to face him. “You talked to him?”

“Yes. This morning. I called him after I talked to the child services people and that nut Ian Goller. Goller called just before his guy came out here. He said we should go to the courthouse when Araceli’s hearing starts. And this time we should take the boys.”

“But he said last week we didn’t have to.”

“Not to the trial. To a rally outside. On the same day.”

“A rally? A rally against the immigrants? What for?”

“Because of the kids. Goller says it’ll keep pressure on child services to leave us alone. That’s why I told that guy I wanted to drop the case. Because this whole thing is getting too crazy and weird. But now I don’t know. What happens if I tell the child services people the same thing I told the DA guy? That it was our fault. What do we say?”

Instead of responding, Maureen took a deep breath to gather herself, then walked over to the room’s large closet and opened it. She allowed the quiet to linger, and then focused her eyes and attention on the next challenge before her: a half dozen plastic containers filled with toys. The only solution here was to order the boys to go through everything and decide what they wanted to keep and send the rest to Goodwill. Responsibility: they are just the right age to learn a lesson about managing their living space.

“Maureen,” Scott insisted. “Please! We have to talk about this.”

She turned to face him and spoke in a calm but determined voice. “Don’t you understand? I’m trying to take control of our lives too.” She stretched out her arms and held her palms upward and gestured around the room filled with the artifacts of their frenetic overcollecting, the stuffed shelves of make-believe objects, and the overflowing plastic, paper, and fabric inside the closet. “What we need to focus on to keep our family in one piece is in here. In these rooms. Not out there.”


“I saw this woman and those two boys crossing the street on Broadway. And it was two days before they show up on the TV ‘kidnapped.’ I’m certain of it,” Judge Adalian told the cable host from the network’s Burbank studios. “I told this to the district attorney’s office in very clear terms. First on the phone, and then in writing. So what do they do? They ignore me. There is no follow-up. So I insist. I’m a judge and I’m used to getting my way, I guess. They still haven’t called back. I find this a bit irritating. So I called up the public defender’s office and told the very nice young deputy they have working on this case. And she was very happy to hear that a municipal judge is making a statement that corroborates the defendant’s version of events.”

Ian Goller listened to the news in his quiet office on a Sunday afternoon and rubbed his temples and tried not to think about the Angels’ pitching rotation instead, or the endangered state park at San Onofre, or any other of his usual topics of procrastination. He kept his focus on the news host as she went on to point out other tidbits of information that appeared to “tilt the scales of believability” in favor of the Mexican defendant: “the sighting of Mrs. Thompson, without her husband, at a desert spa during the alleged kidnapping,” and “numerous statements by a city council member of Huntington Park, who we choose to believe,” the host said sardonically, “even though he has a Mexican last name.” The case against Araceli was falling apart very publicly and very quickly—or so it seemed on one cable network. Against this latest and predictably skeptical report, there was the steady flow of letters, emails, and television commentary for his office to continue its aggressive prosecution of Araceli N. Ramirez, especially now that she had been unexpectedly set free on bail. Ian Goller had countered the flow of opinion favorable to the defense with a series of incriminating leaks, including selected passages from the transcript of Brandon’s description of his days in the mystery-land of Los Angeles. Ian Goller had fed these bits of info to three different reporters at a Santa Ana Denny’s, and had felt oddly spent and empty afterward. Media warfare was tedious and base, but he was forced to wage it: the alternative was to allow the district attorney’s office to look ridiculous, and to permit the idea that the DA was pursuing a “racially motivated prosecution” to taint the institution. The subsequent news accounts of Brandon’s tales of “war,” “slavery,” and “bombs” had done the trick, fostering the expected reactions of suspicion and revulsion—one talk radio host asked, “Where did that animal take those boys?” The clamor would not yet die, in some venues it was growing stronger, and for this reason Goller was optimistic. His own view of the case was that a misdemeanor child-endangerment conviction was entirely fair, because of the mental suffering, albeit of a passing nature, that Araceli’s actions had inflicted on the two children. He would almost certainly get a misdemeanor plea if he won at the preliminary hearing and the judge ordered her to stand trial on the felony charge—and there were several recent reforms to criminal procedures in California that aided him in that goal. Most important was an initiative recently approved by crime-weary voters that allowed police officers to give hearsay evidence at preliminary hearings, sparing the alleged victims the trauma of doing so. This new law would keep Scott Torres and Maureen Thompson and their sons out of the courtroom, which was especially fortuitous because it was clear that, despite her strong performance in her television interview, Maureen would likely fold on the stand. His lead deputy on the case, Arnold Chang, had returned from his one and only session at the couple’s home shaking his head.

“Our witnesses are a bit mixed up.”

“They often are,” Goller said. “Such is the nature of human memory.”

“No, this is worse.”

“I figured it might be.”

“It’s bad.”

“They’re traumatized parents.”

“No, this is worse. They don’t want to go forward. They don’t want us to charge this woman with anything.”

“Did you tell them that the case belongs to the People now?”

“Yes.”

Goller nodded that he understood. “Well, it doesn’t matter really.”

“Boss,” his deputy said, “I’m not sure this will fly.”

Assistant District Attorney Goller considered this assessment for a few moments and said, “Lucky for us, our case involves a deportable alien. So it only has to fly a little.”

“How little?”

“If you toss a chicken in the air and it flaps its wings for two seconds or so, you can call that flying. Right?”


“At least, Señor Octavio, allow me the pleasure of making a salad.” Araceli was cutting lettuce, slicing tomatoes in the living room, while in the kitchen Octavio Covarrubias toiled at another meal in her honor, this one to celebrate her rerelease from jail. In a bid to top his previous efforts on her behalf, and to communicate his ever-elevated respect for her immigrant martyrdom, Octavio had decided to prepare the most difficult dish he and his wife could make, the jewel of Mexican cuisine, a sauce so elaborate that he had called in his elderly aunt from the San Fernando Valley to help him prepare it. Mole, the chocolate nectar the Aztecs served their emperor and his court, spread over tender chicken breasts. “We spent four hours tracking down the Oaxaqueño with the best mole in Orange County,” Octavio said. “These people are harder to find than drug dealers.”

They sat for the meal, with Octavio looking expectantly at Araceli as she ate the first bite very slowly. Finally, she pronounced, “Espectacular. Like honey.” Octavio smiled broadly, as did his wife, though the aunt did not—she seemed confused as to why her nephew and his wife were infatuated with a tall indocumentada who lorded over the table and spoke as if everyone were obliged to listen.

“They are probably going to deport me, one way or the other,” Araceli said casually in Spanish, between bites. “That’s how my lawyer explained it to me, más o menos. They will probably offer me a deal, where they forget about the more serious and ridiculous accusation against me and just give me a traffic ticket—like when you go through a red light. A traffic ticket for taking the boys to a dangerous place. But if I sign the paper accepting this ticket, then they will take me away. Para el otro lado. If I don’t take the deal, I might go to el bote here in California for a couple of years before they send me to Mexico—that’s if we lose the case. And if I win, they might still come and get me. Probably here at this house, or wherever they find me.” She looked around the table to judge their reactions—Octavio lowered his thick eyebrows and gave a defiant squint, while his wife opened her eyes theatrically wide with worry.

“Can’t you just run away? Just leave right now?”

“No. Because I made a promise to the people who paid my bail. That I would go to court.”

“So what are you going to do?” Octavio asked.

“It seems that getting the ticket is the best deal,” his wife said.

“Well, a lot of people want to see me fight it,” Araceli said.

“Just to show them that our people won’t be intimidated,” Octavio said.

“A fin de cuentas, se trata de la dignidad de uno,” she said, and had time to think that it been a very long time since she had used that abstract word—dignidad—in reference to her person. “But sometimes you have to be practical. Why suffer in those cells, where any loca can hit you on the head, just to prove a point? There isn’t much dignidad in those American jails.”

After the meal, Araceli was sitting alone on the porch steps, thinking about the choices she had made and how quiet the block seemed. Perhaps the neighbors had gone into hiding at the news of her return. She took in the summer stillness, the heat that was dissolving into the fiery twilight sky, the sparrows that were flittering about the jacaranda and maple trees. Just a few days earlier she had stood on the narrow cement walkway that cut through this lawn, facing the police sergeant who had come to arrest her. She was free again, at this same spot, but there was no one to photograph and memorialize her moment of liberated boredom. An ice cream vendor pushed past on the sidewalk, glancing up at Araceli and waving. A moment later, a big red pickup truck turned and pulled onto the street and parked in front of the Covarrubias home. The driver inside looked vaguely familiar.

“¡Gordito!” she called out, but quickly realized she didn’t know him well enough to address him that way. “Felipe!”

Felipe looked both taller and wider than she remembered, and his black curls longer. He waddled up the path in white pants splattered with yellow and peach paint stains, and gave her the expectant and nervous look of an autograph seeker. He thinks I’m a celebrity too. How funny! He reached the porch and stood before her with his hands tucked deep into his pockets. “They told me you stayed here, on this block, but I didn’t know which house. So I was going to park my truck and knock on the doors and ask around. But then I saw you sitting here.”

“¿Qué pasó? I was waiting for you to call me. And then everything happened with the boys.”

“I was going to call you, and then my uncle got us a job up in San Francisco for a week. When I got back, you were all over the television. No lo podía creer. I called that number you gave me three times, but they hung up.”

He sat on the porch steps next to her, putting a pair of large hands on his knees and releasing a big man’s exhale. An hour passed by as they talked about her arrest, and all the different television and radio shows in which her case had been covered and discussed, and what Mexico was like and how it would be for Araceli to go back there if she were forced to do so. Not having lived in Mexico since he was eight years old, Felipe had a benign vision of the place as a land where uncles and grandparents lived on ranchos amid cows, horses, and poultry, though he knew Mexico City was another world. “I’ve never been to El De Efe, but I remember Sonora as a beautiful place in the desert.” Felipe had gone to school in the United States for the most part, Araceli now learned, and he spoke both English and Spanish impeccably. She prodded him to say something in English, and when he did she gave a mock shiver and said, “¡Ay! Qué sexy eres when you speak English.” He was one of those people who moved easily back and forth between English- and Spanish-speaking orbits without being fully appreciated in either. With each minute they talked, Araceli heard more she liked. The sky began to surrender its glow, the lights turned on in the houses around them, and still they talked, stopping only when Luz Covarrubias stepped outside and gave them two glasses of agua de tamarindo and said, “Qué bonito to see a young man and a young woman talking so much on my porch.”

Out of the awkward quiet that followed, the noise of an engine emerged, and soon Araceli and Felipe were watching as a blue van with a satellite dish turned the corner and parked behind Felipe’s pickup.

“Oooh. La prensa,” Araceli said. “Vámonos.”

They rose to their feet, turned, and headed for the safety of the front door, but before they could escape Araceli heard a strangely familiar voice call out with the brio and accent of Mexico City’s upper classes: “¡Araceli! ¡No te me vas a escapar! ¡No te lo permito!”

They turned simultaneously to face a man in a midnight-blue suit and yellow tie who was sitting in the van’s passenger seat, with one leg hanging outside the open door. “Where have I seen that guy before?” Felipe said, though he was instantly recognizable to Araceli. He had a Mediterranean complexion and black-brown hair that was lightly moussed, and presented a sartorial package of male refinement so striking that Araceli could already imagine the cloud of sweet musk enveloping him, even though he was still on the other side of the lawn. Then his name came to her, and she spoke it out loud, the last of the nine Spanish and French syllables coming with the rising inflection of a question.

“¿Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet?”

“¡El mismo!” he said.

He was the second-most-famous man on Mexican television, the host of a morning news-talk show produced by a network with a near-monopoly on the Mexican airwaves. He walked up the path with an outstretched hand, and Araceli straightened her spine as if to greet royalty, remembering the television set her mother had had going in the kitchen every workday, this man on the screen sitting on a studio couch engaging in casual repartee with rock stars, rebel leaders, and cabinet ministers, or in the field with the weeping families outside a mine disaster in Sonora, or wearing a yellow parka while awaiting a hurricane before the turquoise waters of the Yucatán. Carlos Francisco Batres Goulet was only a few years past thirty, but he was already a kind of walking history book, and as he reached over to shake Araceli’s hand in greeting it was with the bearing of a benevolent, outgoing prince of the people.

“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 with 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!”