The Barbarian Nurseries (20 page)

A
t that moment, Maureen’s boys were walking dutifully behind their Mexican caretaker, taking their first steps off the train at Union Station. They walked along one of several parallel platforms between locomotive behemoths, one of which was ringing a bell as it rolled away, roughly at the pace of a walking man, into open tracks toward the city beyond. Brandon and Keenan saw porters wearing stiff caps, and seniors defeated by the stacks of luggage on steel carts, and heard a speaker pronounce, “Last call for the Sunset Limited … all aboard!” and thought that at last they’d arrived at a real train station. The boys wanted to linger out on the open-air platform, in the meaningful presence of all that rolling stock and those travelers, but Araceli was telling them to follow her, with an impatient
“Órale, por aquí,”
and they descended down a long, sloping ramp, going underground.

They entered a long and wide hallway with low ceilings that reminded Keenan of airports he had visited. Araceli had passed through here during her first days in Los Angeles, and the sight of the crowds of people with huge duffel bags and boxes tucked under their arms reminded her of that other, more innocent Araceli.
Sola.
With a hard-shell suitcase the smuggler had mocked for its patent impracticality, dazzled
by the city’s alien and sleek feel, suffering a kind of weird agoraphobia because she was in a vast plain of unknown things. The reencounter with her recent past only made Araceli more uncomfortable, more anxious to reach her destination. She looked left and then right and decided to go right, beginning to walk very quickly, navigating smartly between the crosscurrents of passengers, like a
chilanga
again, almost losing Brandon and Keenan because she was in such a hurry.

“Hey, Araceli, wait up,” Brandon shouted, and Araceli turned back and gave him a mildly exasperated look identical to the one she showed him two or three times a day in his own living room, bedroom, and kitchen.

Walking side by side now, they passed an electronic sign announcing destinations and departure times,
LAS VEGAS BUS, TEXAS EAGLE, SURFLINER NORTH,
and then suddenly entered a room where the low ceilings disappeared and the space above them opened up, causing Brandon and Keenan to crane their necks skyward. They marveled at the vaulted ceiling, which was covered with tiles of vaguely Mediterranean or Arabic styling, exuding both warmth and largeness. Chandeliers resembling baroque spacecraft hung from the rafters and both boys silently mouthed the word
Whoa
as they walked underneath them. There were rows of high-backed, upholstered benches where boys in baseball uniforms and weary, sunburned Dutch and Italian travelers sat with clusters of nylon backpacks at their feet. A crew that was in the second day of a music-video shoot was packing up in the unused and locked wing of the station where tickets had once been sold, where the oak-paneled ticket windows served as permanent and oft-used sets.

“I’ve seen this place in the movies,” Keenan said. “I thought it was pretend.”

They passed through an arch high enough for the tallest troll or giant to fit through, and then walked out the main door of the station, where they were confronted by the summer sunlight, and cars and pedestrians all moving purposefully northward and southward on streets and walkways. Behind this shifting tableau stood the imposing backdrop of the downtown Los Angeles skyline, the glass skyscrapers of the Financial District, and the stubby stone tower of City Hall, which had a ziggurat pyramid on top, so that it resembled a Mesopotamian rocket ready for launch.

“No, por aquí no es,”
Araceli said, and she circled back into the waiting room again, the boys scrambling behind her.

She walked up to the information booth and the tall, lean, sclerotic man standing there, the name tag on his jacket announcing him to be GUS DIMITRI, VOLUNTEER.

“We are looking for the buses,” Araceli said.

Gus Dimitri was a spry octogenarian and a native of South Los Angeles, old enough to remember when that black and brown ghetto of today was a whites-only haven for Greeks, Jews, Italians, Poles. He had seen more L.A. history than any other employee or volunteer at this transit hub, and when he looked at Araceli and her charges he understood, immediately, that this was a servant woman from Mexico hired to care for the two children that accompanied her.

“Well, where are you headed, exactly, ma’am?”

As the woman fumbled in her backpack for an address, Gus Dimitri took time to think that California had really pushed this immigrant-servant fad to the extreme.
Is it really wise,
he’d like to ask the parents of these boys,
to have a Mexican woman guiding your precious children across the metropolis like this? To have them in the care of a woman lost at Union Station?
At about the time Gus Dimitri had retired from the workforce, California had gone mad with immigrant-hiring—from front yards to fast-food joints, these people did everything now. They were good workers, yes, real old-fashioned nose-to-the-grindstone types. But jeez: Didn’t Americans want to do anything for themselves anymore? When he was about the age of this older boy here, he’d sold newspapers on the street himself, making a killing hawking extras on Crenshaw Boulevard for the Max Schmeling—Joe Louis fights. But did American kids even have paper routes anymore? His own paper was delivered via pickup truck by a Mexican guy (he assumed) named Roberto Lizardi, according to the Christmas card that arrived with his paper once a year.

“To Thirty-ninth Street,” Araceli said. “In Los Angeles.”

“That’s back, the other way,” he said. “Patsaouras Plaza.”

“Thank you.”

Araceli quickly circled back into the long, low-ceilinged passageway.

“Where are we going?” Keenan asked. “Why are we going underground again?”

“We are going to take the bus,” Araceli explained.
“Tenemos que ir a la otra estación.
Another station, not this one.” They reached a wide cement staircase and climbed into a sunlit atrium with several exits. This was the transit center where the buses departed, but Araceli could not remember which gate led to the buses serving the neighborhood in Los Angeles where
el viejo
Torres lived. She approached another information booth and the boys’ attention was drawn upward again, this time to the mural on the wall behind the desk: an old steam engine rushed toward a village set amid verdant fields, advancing through a series of orchards, leaving a column of black smoke in its wake. To the left, there was a second mural in which the steam engine ran alongside a blue ribbon of river, which itself snaked past a city thick with squat buildings; in a third panel to the right the same city gleamed with skyscrapers and the river had morphed into a concrete channel.

“Is that what was here before?” Brandon asked, before Araceli could get her own question in.

“Yeah,” said the man behind the counter, an MTA employee. “And let me tell you something else—this’ll really blow your mind. Where we’re standing, right now—it used to be Chinatown. There’s all sorts of archaeological stuff they found buried underneath here. Chinese stuff.”

“So what happened to the Chinese?”

“Ah, they knocked all that down ages ago. Flattened it.”

“Well, that’s disturbing,” Brandon said, parroting a phrase his mother used quite often.

Brandon pondered the revelation about Chinatown as the man explained to Araceli where she could catch the bus they needed to take. The ground he and his brother were standing on was older than the oldest person he knew, and probably older than the oldest Vardurian, which was a horizon-opening realization for an eleven-year-old boy. Probably if you dug down deep you could find not just Chinatown, but also the ruins of many other cities and villages of the past, just like in that picture book on his shelf where you see the Stone Age, the Roman Age, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Age all inhabit the same stretch of earth beside a river, with battles fought and buildings burned and people buried and cities rebuilt and torn down and rebuilt again as you turn from one page to the next.

“Ya, vámonos,” Araceli called out. “Es por aquí.”

The boys followed her to one of several parallel sidewalks and within seconds an empty bus had pulled up and Araceli and the boys climbed in. This bus, Brandon noted immediately, was a battle-worn version of the first bus they had taken in the Laguna Rancho Estates earlier in the day. It appeared to have traveled through a few hailstorms, given the scratches on the plastic windows, and as it headed out of the shady transit center and into the sun of the Los Angeles streets and the light shone inside, Brandon noted the worn seats and the assorted scribbling in the interior. “It stinks in here,” Keenan declared. A sweaty, vaguely fecal aroma seeped out of the seats, and the sour sweetness of spilled sugar beverages attached itself to the humid air molecules in the aisles, the smells riding the bus up and down and across the city all day for free.

They rolled slowly away from the transit center, to streets that brought them closer to the glass towers of the Financial District. Brandon and Keenan had seen this stretch of the city many times before, in the company of their parents, from the high perch of a car speeding along elevated freeways. That was the Los Angeles they had always known, the city center that was home to the Dodgers and the Lakers. On those trips they had glided over the heart of Los Angeles, traveling near the tops of its palm trees, driving to museums and parks that were somewhere on the other side of a vast grid of stucco buildings and asphalt strips that stretched as far as one could see into the haze. Studying this landscape from the ground level for the first time, Brandon noticed how every object appeared to be built from bare metal, brick, and concrete, arranged into simple geometric forms: the right angles formed by the traffic lights welded to poles, the open rectangular mouths of the storm drains, the strange tower on the roof of one building assembled entirely from triangles. It was all more linear and rough-edged and interesting, to his young eyes, than the curvy contours of Paseo Linda Bonita.

Sitting next to his brother, in an aisle seat, Keenan was closer to the clusters of passengers who began to fill the aisle after a few stops, grabbing the bar above them. Keenan didn’t know it was possible to stand up in a moving bus. An older woman towered above him, carrying a plastic bag filled with documents and envelopes, the heavy contents swaying about as the bus lurched forward. Directly across from Keenan,
a seated middle-aged man with green eyes held another plastic bag, his weathered hands covered with small cuts, and through the bag’s translucent skin Keenan could make out folded clothes, two thick books, and a pair of pliers. The man held the bag close to his body, inside the vessel formed by his legs and the metal back of the seat in front of him, and Keenan sensed that whatever was inside was very important to him.
These people are carrying the things they own inside the plastic bags my mother and Araceli use to bring things from the market.
Keenan was eight years old, but the poignancy of poor people clutching their valuables in plastic bags close to their weary bodies was not lost on him and for the first time in his young life he felt an abstract sense of compassion for the strangers in his midst. “There are a lot of needy, hungry people in this world,” his mother would say, usually when he wouldn’t finish his dinner, but it was like hearing about Santa Claus, because one saw them only fleetingly. He believed “the poor” and “the hungry” were gnomelike creatures who lived on the fringes of mini-malls and other public places, sorting through the trash. Now he understood what his mother meant, and thought that next time he was presented with a plate of fish sticks, he would eat every last one. Two passengers in front of him were speaking Spanish, and this drew his attention because he thought he might make out what they were saying, since he understood nearly all of what Araceli said to him in that language. But their speech was an indefinable jumble of new nouns, oddly conjugated verbs, and figurative expressions, and he only understood the odd word or phrase:
“es muy grande,”
“
domingo,” “fútbol,”
and “el
cuatro de julio.”

“Nos bajamos en la próxima,”
Araceli said as she rose to her feet. “Next stop. We get off.”

They stepped from the bus to the sidewalk and the door closed behind them with a clank and a hydraulic sigh. Araceli took in the yellow-gray heat and the low sun screaming through the soiled screen of the center-city atmosphere.
Goodbye blue skies and sea breezes of Laguna Rancho,
Araceli thought. This was more like the bowl of machine-baked air of her hometown: she had forgotten the feeling of standing in the still and ugly oxygen of a real city. “We walk. That way,” Araceli said, pointing south down a long thoroughfare that ran perpendicular to the street the bus had left them on, the four lanes running straight
toward a line of distant palm trees that grew shorter until they were toothpicks swallowed up by the haze.

“This doesn’t look like the place my grandfather lives,” Brandon said.

“Is it close?” Keenan asked.

“Sí. Just a few blocks.”

They stood alone, housekeeper and young charges, on a block where only the bus bench and shelter interrupted the empty sweep of the sidewalk. So strange, Araceli observed, a block without people, just as on Paseo Linda Bonita, but this time in the middle of an aging city with buildings from the previous century. All the storefronts were shuttered and locks as big as oranges dangled from their steel doors, while swarthy men struck poses for the passing motorists from rooftop billboards, their fingers enviously wrapped around light-skinned women and bottles of beer and hard liquor. For a moment Araceli thought that Brandon might be right, that
el viejo
Torres could not live near here. Then again, you never knew in Los Angeles what you might find around the next corner. You could be in the quiet, sunny, and gritty desolation of a block like this at one moment, and find yourself on a tree-l ined, shady, and glimmering block of apartments the next. Mexico City was like that too.