The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,148
her knowledge, he never even made breakfast for himself. “Ay, Octavio,” his wife, Luz, said, after she noted the irony too, “a mí nunca me haces breakfast. Qué bonito sería if you brought me breakfast in bed one morning.” Since Araceli’s arrival at his home last night, Octavio Covarrubias had a sudden and strange need to dote over her, a woman whose presence on earth had only faintly registered in his consciousness before.
Octavio Covarrubias was impressed that an ordinary mexicana could be put through an arrest and a symbolic flogging by the machinery of the English-language media, survive with her mexicana dignity más o menos intact, and then enter his living room, of all places. He was an avid reader and a faithful consumer of cable television news in two languages, and almost always this made him nothing more than a passive witness to the way his people were crushed, time and again, in American courtrooms, on desert smuggling trails, and in Arizona detention centers. He read and pontificated so much on these issues to his neighbors on Maple Street that they called him licenciado behind his back, because his outrage and verbosity reminded them of a certain kind of annoying politico-bureaucrat back home.
When Araceli was on her last mouthful of eggs, Octavio Covarrubias began to speak. “Proceso has a correspondent here in Los Angeles,” he said. “Maybe we should call him, because Proceso will want to write something about you, I’m sure.” Octavio Covarrubias was a Proceso subscriber, receiving the Mexican investigative magazine by mail from Tijuana every week. Before Araceli could respond, he began describing a report by this same Proceso correspondent about a facility for the detention of immigrant children in San Diego County, and a Televisa report on the same story, and then later more reports on CNN en Español, and finally on CNN in English. Octavio’s news appetite was such that he could explain to his wife and neighbors why the U.S. Army was to blame for the flooding of the Mississippi and the conspiracies behind the assassination of the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and the links between drug cartels and former President Salinas de Gotari. Having been forced to drop out of his final year of high school in Durango, his dream of a degree in political science unrealized, he studied the news instead, in the belief that he might understand the seemingly unpredictable events of the world, which were obviously orchestrated to keep his people poor, ignorant, and enslaved.
Araceli ignored the passing question about the Proceso reporter, and helped Octavio and his wife clean up. Her hosts obviously wanted her to fill in the silence with an insider’s account of her arrest and the news they had seen on TV. But she couldn’t think of where to begin.
“So, it looks like they treated you okay?” Luz Covarrubias said, as Araceli dried a plate with a cloth and handed it to her to put away. “No te veo traumada. Te veo tranquila.”
“No me imaginaba,” Araceli said suddenly. Octavio and his wife thought she meant she never imagined she’d be pulled into the depths of the machinery of hate, that she never imagined being tackled and having the humiliation broadcast on the airwaves, that she never imagined a million televisions would defame her as a criminal. But no. She meant she never believed she could be pulled so quickly and definitively from her stasis, from her comfortable but boring existence, from the cycles of meals and laundry, into the full mad circus of a life lived without a schedule or rhythm. For this reason, her face brightened with a strange, bemused expression as she said “No me imaginaba …” a second time. The break had begun with the arrival of that first rabble of barbarian gardeners, the men who took the machetes to Pepe’s tropical forest. Those men had ripped her from her roots too and tossed her from a shady jungle into the full California sunlight. Liberated now from jail and from the worry of the fate of Brandon and Keenan, she could appreciate the journey away from Paseo Linda Bonita and into Los Angeles for its carnivalesque qualities. The decaying art of the railroad tracks, the startling dream-sense that came from being in a jail one moment, and then in the silent, spooky glory of the nighttime streets of Aliso Viejo the next. Out here, in the world away from the paradise of the Laguna Rancho Estates, there was the silver