The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

4




Night had fallen and the kitchen window had become a mirror once again, leaving Araceli to catch glimpses of herself as she listened to the dishwasher, to its timed sprays and its rhythmic swishes, and the click-clack of cycles beginning and ending. One more load and she would retire for the evening, out the kitchen’s back door, past the trash cans, into the guesthouse. The last three glass bowls, two pots, and assorted serving spoons and spatulas were soaking in the sink, where steaming water and detergent worked to dissolve the final vegetable, olive oil, and fruit-fiber memories of the party concluded hours earlier. If this were her own home, and not the home of la señora Maureen, Araceli would simply take a sponge and scrubber to these dishes and be done in ten minutes, but la señora insisted on running everything through the searing, sterilizing water of the dishwasher. Still, Araceli could have ignored her jefa this evening, because la señora Maureen was fighting with el señor Scott and thus too busy to wander over to the kitchen and check on Araceli. The argument had been going on intermittently for three hours, with long and toxic silences in between, having started just moments after Maureen’s final goodbye, and it had filled several rooms with recriminations and miscellaneous shouting, with descriptions of the flaws in the tropical garden, passing on, through an odd and not entirely logical chain, to events deep in the couple’s shared past. Araceli wondered how it was that her jefa, clearly simmering with outrage after the departure of the last guest, had been placed so quickly on the defensive. “You said the same thing in Barcelona!” Maureen yelled from the living room. Araceli had missed what it was Scott had said that reminded Maureen of Barcelona, a city that came up in their conversation from time to time, most often in sensuous and nostalgic tones that suggested, to Araceli, the romantic postcard images of embracing middle-aged couples in certain magazine and television advertisements common to both English- and Spanish-language media. Araceli would like to visit Barcelona and the Gaudí towers, and if she had a passport with the stamps and stickers that would allow her to come and go from the United States, she would take the several thousand dollars she had saved and buy an Iberia ticket and be out the door with not more than a week’s notice.

“Jesus, I was twenty-five!” Scott insisted from another room, his voice muffled because he was deeper in the house. Araceli could only hear Scott intermittently, when the dishwasher paused, or when he wandered into the living room to parry one of Maureen’s assertions with a weepy, prepubescent voice one moment, and a husky old-man’s rant the next. “You’re so totally pathetic!” he said, following up with uniquely raw English vulgarity, which Maureen shouted back at him with a “you too” added for punctuation’s sake. Araceli guessed that if she were to leave the kitchen and burst into the living room and step in the acoustic line of fire, they would stop. She had done this before, entering to the scene of Maureen’s reddish eyes and Scott’s straining temples, one party or the other halting in midsentence at the sight of their underpaid Mexican employee. Other immigrant servants might be made uncomfortable by being forced to hear their employers baring intimate and apparently irreconcilable grievances, they might even shed a tear at the sense that “their family” was spinning apart—Araceli did not. She felt distant from their dysfunction. But it was annoying, all this shouting, so she quickly and without much hope for success took some basil leaves from the refrigerator and placed them inside a glass jar filled with water. This was an old Mexican folk remedy against angry spouses, one her mother used frequently. Fifteen minutes later, the arguing had stopped and the dishwasher too. She threw in the last of the bowls and serving spoons like the good employee she was, and snuck out the side door of the kitchen, across the lawn, empty and quiet under the yellow bug light, and into her room, her sanctuary.


When the argument finally exhausted itself, Maureen withdrew to her bedroom and slipped inside the cotton and wool cocoon of her quilted comforter, alone. On any other day she wouldn’t have been able to go to bed before restoring order in the rooms beyond the closed pine door, without forcing her two sons to help recover the scattered toys around the home and backyard, returning them to storage bins and shelves, but the boys had retreated to their room hours ago. Now she took comfort in the silence and order in this one room, where a vintage clock gave a steady and reassuring click and an incandescent bulb glowed through the maroon fabric of the lampshade, its light suggesting a hearth in a mountain cabin. Once again, she’d take the lamp’s companionship over her husband’s. He was sleeping on the couch, or in his beloved game room, and in his absence this shared niche of theirs had a feminine pulse, it was an organism of finely spun fibers, wood grain, and old metal. Scott sullied it daily with his discarded clothing, the stacks of memos and the electronic toys masquerading as office tools that she gathered up and placed in the drawer of his nightstand. How many computer chips did a man need to order his life? This gadget man, this collector of ring tones and black plastic slabs with glowing green lights, had wounded her with viciousness and sarcasm for daring to express her hurt and humiliation over the garden fiasco.

All that was left was to surrender before the weight of sleep, a mass made heavier by the torture-memory of many nights of sleep interrupted by Samantha’s crying in the predawn darkness. Would the baby have a nightmare as she remembered her father’s straining eyes and gritted teeth, like the toothy goblins that populate a child’s scary story? Maybe we would be better off alone, my daughter and boys and I. She pulled the comforter up to her chin, and was aware how childlike that gesture was, to seek solace in the softness of fabric. Nothing looks right when you haven’t slept. Sleeplessness made them both slaves to their reptilian brains and brought them to the brink of shouting. That is why he is less forgiving, why he is less willing to bury what I said on La Rambla. In the morning, when they were rested, they would see the abundance of blessings in their lives, the sharp and clear voices of their boys, the flower-bud mouth of their daughter, the powerful sense of nurturing purpose she felt when the five of them traveled and ate together, when they assembled before breakfast tables with pancakes, orange juice, and chocolate milk.

There was still so much to do in this house, but it was getting late. Araceli would take care of it all in the morning.


Stepping out of her room the next morning, Araceli noticed bits of trash in the backyard that had escaped her attention in the fading light at the end of the party the day before, shredded pieces of papiermâché armor that gave a light dusting of newspaper snow to the grass. The vanquished shell of the piñata, a traditional Mexican ball with seven spikes representing the seven deadly sins, had been split into several pieces, with one spike at the base of the banana tree. She moved quickly to pick up what she could and resolved to return later with a rake, then opened the door to the kitchen, where the white-tile sparkle and faint scent of detergent told a story of order and calm. There was nothing left to do here. She was about to walk out to survey the damage in the living room when she noticed a note in Maureen’s handwriting on the tile counter of the kitchen’s center island: Araceli: We went to The Strand for breakfast. Be back around noon. Sorry about the house. Ah, the warring couple made up this morning. Qué bueno.

In the living room she found a few tossed red fabric capes Maureen had made, along with toys and dolls the guests’ children had looted from the boys’ and Samantha’s rooms and left scattered on the furniture and floors. She gathered plastic board-game pieces in her palm, a foam ball, and a book entitled Airplanes, and proceeded to the boys’ room. Harvesting toys and placing them in the appropriate receptacle was another element of Araceli’s daily routine and it could be said she knew the children’s play and reading habits better than Maureen did. Araceli visited the boys’ room at least three times a day and had given it her own, private nickname: El Cuarto de las Mil Maravillas, the Room of a Thousand Wonders, because it was filled with objects designed to amaze and delight, from the colored-glass Art Deco mobile of planets and comets hanging from the ceiling, to the Viking ship made of interlocking Danish blocks and the collection of two or three hundred books of widely varying sizes. When she was in this room alone, Araceli sometimes spent several minutes with the books, especially the series of twelve hardcovers designed to introduce young children to Michelangelo, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Picasso, and other great masters of art. There were other books that produced three-dimensional dragons and castles when opened, or that made cricket sounds, jungle hoots, and whistles. Any child anywhere in the world would kill to have such a room, and to have a mother whose chief preoccupation was to “stimulate” her progeny, though of course these boys didn’t appreciate it. If I had grown up with a mother like la señora Maureen … The mental comparisons between Araceli’s own austere childhood and the abundance that enveloped the Torres-Thompson boys were inevitable when she entered this room—it was the only time in her workday Araceli felt self-pity and resentment at the absences and inequalities that were the core injustice of her existence. It is a big world, divided between rich and poor, just like those humorless lefties at the university said. What would I have become with a mother like Maureen and a room like this?

Next Araceli made all the beds in the house, picked up the pillows and blankets from the couch where el señor Scott appeared to have slept, and folded them up and put them away. She returned to the living room, to run a duster over the furniture, turning its feathers lightly as she touched the tall, distressed-pine bookcases and the vases, as if applying a touch of invisible rouge on everything. She lingered a bit longer, as she usually did, over the family photographs arranged inside one of the bookcases, including a sepia-toned picture of el señor Scott’s father: in the photograph, the elder Torres was a boy only slightly larger than Brandon was now, but scrawnier-looking, his eyes an expression of startled confusion as he leaned against an adobe wall in ill-fitting corduroy jeans. Northern Mexico, Araceli guessed, a dry village where nopals offer the rare green touches to a khaki landscape. Araceli never lost the momentary feeling of paradox that came with finding this relic of a Mexican family history in the home of a wealthy California family. Next to it was a second photograph of the same boy as a teenager, in front of a bungalow in a city that Araceli guessed was Los Angeles in the 1940s or 1950s. A few times the person depicted in these two photographs had come to this house to visit, transformed into a senior citizen with a penchant for irritating remarks. “El abuelo Torres,” Araceli called him, with mordant irony, since the old man never spoke a word of Spanish, despite the faint accent that flavored his English and suggested a tongue that was secretly hoping to pronounce an eñe or an erre or two every time he opened his mouth. He never answered Araceli’s “Buenas tardes” with a “Buenas tardes” of his own. Araceli had the impression that he had been banned from the home, since it had been about two years since she had seen him, and what Mexican grandfather doesn’t want to see his grandchildren every chance he gets?

Araceli allowed the feathers to tickle the poor Mexican boy in the photographs a few times more than necessary, then went to the laundry to begin sorting through the clothes. The few things to be ironed she left for last, then stacked the rest in piles according to family member, from Scott’s sweatshirts and pajamas, to the tiniest stack of onesies and little skirts for Samantha. One o’clock and the Torres-Thompsons were still away. ¿A dónde habrán ido? The clothes were destined for the orderly backstage of the Torres-Thompson home, the walk-in closets in each bedroom, spaces organized with design-magazine minimalism. The shelves were thin white wafers of metal that floated in the air, sweaters and towels and blue jeans forming rectangular clouds above Araceli’s head. She derived a good deal of satisfaction from the uniformity of these stacked clothes, from the way the folds rose in neat, multicolored waves from the shelves, and from the light scent of mothballs that she had strategically placed here and there after Maureen discovered some telltale holes in a sweater.

When Araceli finished with the ironing she was done for the day—and it was only two o’clock. There was still no sign of the Torres-Thompsons as she closed the kitchen door behind her and stepped into the backyard for the short walk to the guesthouse, which was a baby clone of the main home, with the same cream-colored paint scheme, the same window moldings, the same black wooden door, the same brass doorknob. Opening this door was the small triumph at the end of Araceli’s workday, her principal North American achievement, to have a room of her own for the first time in her life. It contained the baroque collection of recycled objects that constituted her possessions: posters that had been salvaged from la señora Maureen’s “spring cleanings,” various art pieces Araceli had assembled (including a mobile hanging from the ceiling), and a spare table with a particleboard top that she used as a work space. One of the room’s two windows opened to the backyard, where the adobe-colored wall that defined the Torres-Thompson property was visible through the retreating foliage, and for a moment she imagined Pepe walking through his old garden, shaking his head knowingly. She took off her uniform, purging herself of her servant identity as the big blouse and pants fell into her hamper. Probably she wore the uniform precisely for this moment when she could put on her own clothes, a pair of leggings or jeans that transformed her into the Araceli who once haunted galleries and clubs in Condesa, Roma, and other Mexico City neighborhoods. Thank you, family, for these uniforms. I send you thousands of dollars earned with my sweat and you send me five filipinas. Then into the shower, and away with the smell of cleaning agents and fabric softener and into a nimble wakefulness in which she was fully herself.

She went to her worktable and reached inside and pulled out a piece of construction paper on which she was assembling a collage. The half-started project before her was taking form, in this early phase, with pictures cut out from the magazines Maureen discarded every month: International Artist, Real Simple, American Home, Smithsonian, Elle. Reaching under the table, she picked up a handful of magazines and then opened the table’s small drawer and took out an envelope. A collection of hands fell out. Araceli couldn’t draw hands very well, and she had begun gathering them as a kind of study, a communion with the anatomy of fingers, cuticles, and lifelines. There were hands from a Rembrandt, hands from an ad for skin lotion, hands wearing gardening gloves, a hand reaching out to shake another hand. There were just two hands glued to her construction-paper canvas so far, and she had placed them at the center of the composition-to-be. Painted in oil and open in a pleading expression, they were from Caravaggio’s painting Supper at Emmaus, a favorite of one of her art history instructors at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes; for some reason they had popped up in an insurance advertisement.

After an hour of trying out various hand arrangements, searching for more hands in the magazines, and attaching a few to her collage,

Araceli stopped, rubbed her eyes, and tossed herself onto her bed for a nap. She looked at the framed picture of her four-year-old nephew, the only family picture in a gallery dominated by shots of old friends from Bellas Artes. All had been scattered to the winds of employment and migration, to jobs in restaurants in the Polanco district of Mexico City, and to American cities and towns with exotic names she had collected on a handful of envelopes and postcards: Durham, nc; Indianapolis, in; Gettysburg, pa. At moments like this, when she was alone to encounter the lonely contradictions of her American adventure, the natural thing to do was to turn on the television and forget. Instead, she threw her arm over her face and closed her eyes, embracing the exhausted darkness and the acoustic panoply it contained: a singing bird whose call was three short notes and a fourth long one that sounded like a question mark. The very distant bass of an engine, and then the much sharper and high-pitched vibrations of a car pulling into the cul-de-sac of Paseo Linda Bonita, the motor puttering to a stop, the driver setting the brake. Now the voice of a woman talking in the next home, less than five feet from her second window, which opened to the narrow space between the two properties. She heard a girl responding to the woman, and though the words were indiscernible, it was clearly a mother-and-child dialogue, a series of questions and observations perhaps, moving forward at an unrushed rhythm. Each time Araceli heard these feminine voices she remembered the room in Mexico City she’d shared with her older sister, and their whispered conversations in the post-bedtime darkness. In the dry winters they awoke to the sound of their mother sweeping away the daily film of grainy soot that settled down from the atmosphere and built up in the courtyard her family shared with five others. The broom was made of thin tree branches tied together and made a scratchy, percussive sound as it struck any surface, leading Araceli the girl to think of it as a musical instrument that produced a rhythmic song many hours in length: clean-clean, clean-clean, clean-clean. During the day, her mother, aunt, and cousins gathered on the courtyard’s concrete to sort beans, hang clothes, and tend to a bathtub-sized planter filled with herbs and roses. Araceli had run away from that home, but sometimes in a restful moment she returned to the cold skin of its cement walls, to the steel front door that popped like the top of a can when opened, and to the rough, pebble-covered floor of the courtyard outside. Araceli missed Mexico City’s unevenness, its asymmetry and its improvised spaces. She missed those women and those voices, and her mother’s observations about tomatoes and men, and the aroma of sliced onions and marinated beef in industrial pots floating about the courtyard when they gathered outside on a good-weather Sunday, a table and conversation squeezed in between parked cars.

When she woke up, some twenty minutes later, Araceli expected for an instant to see her mother, and for an instant longer she felt the faint sensation that there was a household chore for her mother she had left undone.