The Barbarian Nurseries (44 page)

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?”

“A
t 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.