The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,131

were juxtaposed with the footage of the searches and lines at the border, and of Araceli being tackled, and of the gleaming white home in a neighborhood most often described with the adjectives “exclusive,” “hillside,” and “gated.” As interest in the story deepened in the early Eastern Daylight Time evening on national cable news, the class of professional tragedy-pundits chimed in. They were former prosecutors and defense attorneys who specialized in taking small bites of nebulous information and chewing them until they became opinions and insights based on “what my gut tells me” and “what we know and what we don’t know.” Some opined, why not, on what they believed they knew about Mexican women and the well-off families that could afford to place their children in the care of foreigners. These comments intermingled with those of faceless callers to nationwide toll-free lines, for whom Araceli grew into a figure of menace and dread, while Maureen and Scott became objects of pity splashed with a touch of envy and populist scorn. “There’s a good reason to stay at home and be a mom, and not leave your kids with a Mexican girl, even if you can get one for ten bucks a day,” a caller opined in Gaith-ersburg, Maryland, speaking to the woman of the flaring nostrils, who nodded gravely.

In those American homes where Mexican, Guatemalan, and Peruvian women actually worked, mothers and fathers digested the news, and looked across their freshly dusted living rooms and tautly made beds and gave their hired help a closer look. They asked themselves questions that they usually suppressed, because the answers were, in practice, unknowable. Where is this woman from, and how much do I really know about her? Many of them were familiar with the superficial details of their employees’ lives. The most empathetic among them had studied the photographs that arrived in the mail from places south, little faraway images with KODAK imprinted anachronistically on the back, of wrinkled parents in village gardens of prickly pear cacti and drought-bleached corn, of children in used American clothing celebrating exotic holidays involving the burning of incense and parades with religious icons. The knowledge of that distant poverty provoked feelings of admiration, guilt, and mild revulsion in varying degrees, and also a sense of confusion. How can we live in such a big world, where hooded sweatshirts and baby ballerina dresses circulate from north to south, from new to old, from those who pay retail to those who pay for their clothes by the pound? Now toss into this mystery a villain, and the possibility of hidden peccadilloes and secret motives of revenge, and the result was a slight but noticeable uptick in the volume of phone calls in the greater Southern California region, as mothers in cubicles, mothers leaving yoga sessions, mothers leaving staff meetings, mothers at the Getty and the Huntington, at the Beverly Center and the Sherman Oaks Galleria, looked away from their monitors and turned off their car radios, and picked up office phones and cell phones and called home, just to check, just to listen to the accented voices of their hired help, to see if they might hear an intonation suggesting deception, the verbal slip of the schemer. “Everything okay? ¿Todo bien? Sí? Yes? Okay, then.” When they returned home they counted the items in their jewelry boxes and some examined the arms and necks of their children for bruises, and a very few even asked their toddlers, for the first time in weeks, if Lupe and María and Soledad were really “nice” or if they were ever “mean,” to which the most common responses were, “What?” and “¿Qué, Mommy?”

17

Brandon sat with his legs crossed on the floor of the living room, telling the story of the journey he and his brother had taken to a distant land called Los Angeles. For the first time in his young life he had an audience of strangers listening to him with the same expression of urgent concentration that adults put on their faces when they talked and argued among themselves. The grown-ups sat on the edge of the couch and the love seat, and on a chair from the dining room, four adult men and two women in various states of formal dress, and with assorted metal and plastic badges and communication devices attached to their garments, accessories that, in Brandon’s eyes, established their membership in officialdom. None of this made Brandon nervous. Rather, he saw in the presence of