The Barbarian Nurseries (42 page)

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

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

“Creo que sí
,” Araceli said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Dad? What’s going on?”

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

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

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

“And living with us.”

“In this house?”

“In the guesthouse, yes.”

“Why?”

“Not my idea.”

“Can we make him leave?”

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

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

“Enjoy,” he said flatly.

“Thank you,” Maureen answered weakly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are we Mexican?”

“Just a quarter. By me, I guess.”

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

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

“Is less Mexican better than more?”

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“I thought you were the boss there.”

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

“Man, this is gross,” Scott said.

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

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

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

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

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

“S
omebody 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.

I
f 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.