The Barbarian Nurseries (28 page)

“Do we have a key for this door?”

For the next ten minutes, Maureen and Scott searched their home for a spare guesthouse key, until they found a plastic sandwich bag filled with keys in a drawer in the laundry room. They rushed back to Araceli’s room: neither had set foot in this locked corner of their property for the four years Araceli been their employee, respecting the Mexican woman’s privacy and trusting her to keep it clean. They opened the door and entered a space of unexpected clutter and mystery. Their eyes were drawn immediately upward, to an object hanging from the ceiling of the small living room. It hovered over a small drafting table and many drawings taped to the walls, along with pictures cut from magazines, a floating sculpture that drifted very slowly in the faint, hot breeze that seeped through the room’s lone, partially opened window.

Maureen stepped back to the doorway so that she could focus on the object in its entirety. It was a bird of prey, assembled from one hundred or more blue, white, red, orange, and yellow disposable forks, knives, and spoons that Maureen had purchased for the last few birthday parties. The utensils had been fused together into a bird about three feet long, its clawed feet made from broken fork prongs, while
many serrated knives were layered together to form the teeth, and two layers or more of utensils formed the body and wings, the smooth plastic covered, haphazardly, with ripped-up strips of discarded clothing and dishrags, the various textures creating an especially meaty-looking representation of flesh and feather. The sculpture had the crude quality of an object formed by a series of haphazard and violent collisions, and in a letter to one of her friends Araceli had called it
El Fénix de la Basura,
the Garbage Phoenix. Araceli liked it both for its disturbing, otherworldly quality and as a commentary on her situation in the United States: she dusted it once a month, but had recently considered taking it down, because in the one-woman artistic circle that followed her work, the Garbage Phoenix was becoming passé. Maureen studied this creation and then examined the drawings on the walls. There was a eight-by-eleven-inch self-portrait in which Araceli had enlarged the size of her own nostrils, and rendered the rest of her face in a Picasso-inspired abstract geometry, but without the master’s sense of balance and composition. There were several pencil and charcoal sketches of shoes and sandals ascending and descending the steps in the Tacubaya Metro station, their rotting laces and heels melting into concrete steps covered with swampy moss and dripping water. And there was a collage of hands, assembled from magazines that were stacked on the floor:
My magazines, the ones I threw in the recycling bin.
Maureen studied the hanging sculpture and the drawings, and felt she was looking into the mind of a woman upon whom various psyche-smashing torments had been inflicted.
Is this the same woman who has lived in my house for four years and fed my children and cleaned my clothes? No. This is a stranger. She sulks while she cooks for us, and then she sits here in her free time and creates monstrosities with the broken fragments and discarded objects of our home.
The grim aesthetic of the utensil bird, the cavernous nostrils, and the melting shoes suggested, to Maureen, self-hatred and a suppressed desire toward destruction. Understood in the light of her art, Araceli’s surly everyday nature took on new meanings, and this sudden, unexpected insight was all the more unsettling in the light of Scott’s announcement that “I looked and there’s nothing here, no note, no clue.” Araceli had taken the two boys someplace without giving word of where she might be.

Still holding Samantha, who had reached up to try to touch the
mobile, Maureen returned to the kitchen and wondered what they should do next.

F
orty minutes after the fiasco of the fireworks, Brandon and Keenan stood on the front porch of the Luján home on Rugby Avenue, having been drawn there, along with much of the Luján family and their guests, by the shouting and chanting coming from the street. With Araceli at their side, the Torres-Thompson boys cast a disoriented squint at a crowd of about one hundred people, all of Latin American descent, gathered in the middle of the roadway, under the flickering light of a streetlamp. Some carried beer bottles in foam sleeves, and others held folded lawn chairs, but all shared the disheveled, sunburned, and offended look of Fourth of July recreation interrupted and unfulfilled. They had come from the park, and they had come from their lawns, confused by the empty sky, the missing explosions, and the very ordinary, very unpleasant sounds of car alarms and car stereos and crying children left in the truncated show’s wake. The vacuum caused by the sudden lack of explosive noise was filled by their own voices telling them to be angry, telling them to remember where they lived. It was a holiday insult added to all the usual, daily HP insults—the dirty tap water, the aggressive parking cops, and the annual surprise of supplemental property-tax fees. “Those fucking council incompetents! Again!”
“¡Pinche ciudad de la chingada!”
And when a certain, very
metiche
woman at the park suggested Luján was to blame, they began to head off in a group to his home, gathering more people on the way.

Councilman Luján appeared on the porch, hanging both thumbs on his belt, and even the children in the crowd seemed enraged, their high-pitched voices adding a feminine squeal to the crowd’s collective chant.

“¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres!”

“Out with the three?” Brandon asked no one in particular. “What’s that about?”

“They mean my dad and Councilwoman María and Councilman Vicente,” said Lucía, who was standing behind him. Sensing the boy was smart enough to understand, she quickly explained the political dispute that pitted her father and two allies against a corrupt mayor. “So whenever
anything goes wrong, the mayor blames my dad. And his Special Friend, that lady in the back over there, she gets her rabble from
el movimiento
to come out and harass us because we want to reform things.” With that, Lucía stepped to the front of the porch and down the steps to the concrete path that ran through the front lawn, and leaned forward into a screaming shout: “Go home, losers!”

“
¡Rateros!
“ someone in the crowd shouted back, starting a new chant with the Mexican Spanish idiom meaning “bandit” or “crook.”
“¡Ra-te-ros! ¡Ra-te-ros!”

“You stole the money for the fireworks!”

“Get out here and defend yourself like a man, Salomón. We see how you spent the money for the fireworks on your own party.
¡Ratero!
“

Having heard Lucía’s explanations, Araceli scanned the back of the crowd and spotted the mayor’s Special Friend, a woman with a black head of hair-sprayed raccoon quills, her temples sporting identical white wings. She was light-skinned and small inside her wide summer paisley dress, and she held at her side a cell phone, which Araceli understood to be the instrument by which the Special Friend rounded up crowds and exerted her will. The Special Friend spotted Mr. Luján on the porch and gave him a long, self-satisfied stare, like a half-deranged chess master sizing up the effect of a game-changing move on her opponent. Finally she raised her eyebrows quickly, as if to summon a reply from her rival—but Mr. Luján seemed unfazed.
“No hay que hacerles caso,”
he said to his daughter and anyone else who would listen. Mr. Luján said this with calm conviction, a deepness of thought that hinted at reserves of belief and self-awareness. Now the Special Friend was back on the phone, summoning additional troops. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Mr. Luján were locked in a familiar struggle, the same one played out in village councils and big-city demonstrations in their native country, at inquests and in courtrooms, between those who understood that wielding power meant being a paternalistic shepherd to the stupid flock and those who dreamed of an Empire of Reason and a literate citizenry. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Councilman Luján were standing on opposite sides of Mexican history, even as they stood in the United States.

A man in the crowd wearing a backward baseball cap and an incipient beard stepped forward to stand on the edge of the lawn and send a glob of spit toward Lucía, causing Councilman Luján to remonstrate
with the spitter and then to pull back his daughter to the safety of the porch.

Keenan, who had never seen an adult use his saliva as a weapon, grabbed Brandon’s hand for security. “What is this?” he asked his brother.

“I think it’s a lynch mob,” Brandon said with the amused detachment of an anthropologist describing some primitive rite. He took a weird comfort in the idea that he had stumbled upon another case where life clearly and obviously imitated literature. He had believed lynch mobs were creations of novelists and filmmakers, but here was one before him, with real people showing their canine teeth and twisting their faces into other expressions that suggested incipient revenge. “I’ve read about them in books. In this lynch mob, no one is carrying torches. But I guess torches are not, like, required for it to be a lynch mob.”

“What are they going to do?” Keenan asked. “Are they going to hurt us?”

“Well, I don’t see them carryi ng any rocks, so I guess they can’t stone us. I predict they’ll start throwing those bottles and cans. Unless the police get here first. In a situation like this, it helps if the police show up. They call that ‘restoring order.’ “

A minute later two police cruisers slowly wheeled up to the block, each painted white with slanted steel-blue letters proclaiming
POLICE,
and progressively smaller letters declaring
HUNTINGTON PARK,
and the department’s wordy motto:
DEDICATED TO SERVICE THROUGH EXCELLENCE IN PERFORMANCE.
Police Chief Mike Mueller emerged from one of the vehicles, standing tall and thick and midwestern in navy wool, and strode into the space between the contending parties, raising his hands like an announcer in a boxing ring. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to remind all of you, once again, that we have a whole new city ordinance related to so-called political gatherings on residential streets.”

He kept his arms raised and turned his beef-fed torso 360 degrees, his preferred method for ending these “Mexican standoffs.” “Okay, all right, everyone go home now.” The crowd in the street obeyed, as did the members of the Luján family on the porch, until Lucía stood alone on the front steps and started a chant directed at the retreating lynch mob.

“¡Re-for-ma! ¡Re-for-ma! ¡Re-for-ma!”

Brandon soon joined the chant too, his voice squeaking as he tried to match Lucía’s. “Ray-for-mah! Ray-for-mah!”

Keenan stood on tiptoe and joined them too, trying to mimic the Spanish sounds, as his brother was. When the last of the lynch mob was gone and the chanting had stopped, Keenan turned to his big brother and asked, “Who’s Ray Forma?”

“No sé
,” the boy answered.

M
aureen and Scott stood in the kitchen looking at each other, studying the main work area of their servant, the unwashed plastic tumbler and bowl in the sink the only objects out of place: the leopard skin of the marble countertops gleamed, spotless, even the windows suggested they might squeak if you put a cloth to them. The perfect kitchen and the disturbing art were both the work of the same Mexican woman, and Maureen felt blind and ignorant in the face of this newly revealed proof of human complexity:
I took her for granted, allowed her to seep into the white noise around me.
It was not immediately obvious what Maureen and Scott should do next, and they wandered about the house, hoping that the ring of the phone or chime of the front door would liberate them from waiting for something to happen. For the moment, it seemed likely, or at least probable, that their two sons and their employee might appear at the door at any moment. It was Maureen and Scott’s experience as parents that all crises eventually ended and their home returned to its placid normality. Fevers dropped, cuts were stitched up, X-rays were taken, and doctors pronounced the children resilient and fated to healthy lives, and when it was all over the home’s routine comforts—the hum of television sets, the salty smell of cheese and prepared meats cooking in the kitchen—confirmed their faith that good parenting values and vigilance would protect them.

But very quickly the passing time and the empty home and all its objects and boyless silence became an excruciating judgment on their own actions, a slow ticking punishment. “Where could they be?” Maureen asked as she wandered into the boys’ bedroom and studied the modular plastic boxes that contained their toys. “Where did she take them?” Maureen repeated the questions out loud several times as she
moved from the boys’ room to the media room and the kitchen, carrying Samantha through the house on her shoulder, trying to get her baby girl to take the noon nap that was now two hours overdue.
The time is all wrong for her to go to sleep now. She will be awake late into the evening. She can sense something is wrong; she can sense her parents are panicked.

Maureen ran through her mind what she knew about Araceli, wondering if she could summon a fact or name that might provide an answer or clue to the question of where she had taken the boys. The mother who had given Maureen Araceli’s name was in South America as of three years ago, having become an expatriate for a U.S. company in São Paolo, Brazil, and Maureen had no number for her. Araceli was from Mexico City, if Maureen remembered correctly. It took some effort of memory to produce Araceli’s last name: Ramirez, a name confirmed moments later when Scott found, in Araceli’s bedroom, a stack of postcards addressed to her and also the bank book for the savings account Scott had set up for her four years ago. The savings book revealed the last name Ramirez too, but the address was their own. “We have a full name, but that’s it. What else do we know?” Maureen had no idea what Araceli’s parents’ names might be. How many people lived in Mexico City? Ten million? Twenty? And how many Ramirezes might there be in such a metropolis? Such a common last name offered these Mexican people a kind of anonymity.
They’re all Ramirez, or Garcia, or Sanchez.