The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,153
shook his head and, having determined that the young scribe with him was going to take a while to figure out what to do next, he began to shoot, capturing Araceli as she stood on the lawn, looking up at the sky. She searched for prowling helicopters, and then scanned the cars on the block and the distant intersections. The first frame the photographer shot, of Araceli’s worried squint searching the street for the authorities, would be on the web in an hour and on the front page of the newspaper the next day, a haunting and lonely close-up of a notorious woman in limbo, waiting for her abductors to arrive.
“Um, Kyle …,” the reporter said, but Kyle ignored her and held down his finger, the camera shutter opening and closing six times with the staccato beat of a flamenco song.
“¡No les tengo miedo!” Araceli shouted suddenly, turning to face the journalists. “I am not afraid! No. Why I be afraid? For nothing!” The photographer let off another burst of shutter openings as Araceli spoke, and those images too would appear on the web, in an essay of eleven images that his Los Angeles newspaper would headline “Arrest, Anger, and Drama in Santa Ana,” accompanied by the breathless audio narration of Cynthia Villarreal: “Araceli Ramirez knew that she would soon be taken into custody, but her response was a defiant one.” The second shot in that series featured Araceli looking directly into the camera, her mouth open and index finger pointing skyward at the moment she was repeating, “¡No les tengo miedo!,” an image with echoes of Latin American protest marches, as if Araceli were a market woman in a Mexican square, among tens of thousands of other women with open mouths joined in an outraged chorus over the price of onions, or the torture and murder of a comrade.
Now the rising pitch of accelerating engines announced the arrival of four sheriff’s cruisers: two parked in front of the Covarrubias home with red and blue lights flashing, the others taking position at either end of the block, sideways, as if to seal off the street. A burly but handsome sheriff’s captain emerged from the first cruiser. He was freshly shaved, with three bloody nicks on each cheek and an expression of wounded befuddlement that overcame him as it sank in that his “little reporter friend,” as she was known at the station, had tipped off the suspect to his arrival. He gave a plaintive opening of his arms and shouted at the reporter, “What’s going on?”
“I’m so sorry, Captain. Sorry!”
“Get that lens off me, jerko!”
“Negative, Captain,” the photographer said. “You’re on a public street.”
“Shit,” the captain said, and at that moment he decided that this was the last time he’d try to impress Ms. Villarreal, who was fifteen years younger and almost two feet shorter than him. He turned to Araceli, who now stood before him on the lawn, her arms folded across her chest. “You obviously know what I’m here for.”
Araceli said nothing and in the few heartbeats of silent standoff that followed, shouts could be heard coming from the homes and backyards around them. “¡La migra!“ An invisible but audible panic was unfolding around them, with the percussion of slamming doors and windows opening so that people could stare down at the police cruisers from second-floor windows, followed by more, indecipherable yelling from the next block, and the scratchy and hurried tennis-shoe strides on the cement sidewalk of a young man in a CLUB AMERICA fútbol jersey. The soccer fan walked with his hands in his pockets across the street, and then glanced once over his shoulder at the officers, and finally broke into a trot as he reached the corner. Get away, get away. The residents of Maple Street had been sitting snugly in their homes for two days, watching Araceli’s short sprint and capture looping on their televisions, listening to secondhand reports in Spanish detailing the English chorus of los medios norteamericanos for her rearrest. Word had spread that the subject of this broadcast frenzy was living among them, but now the arrival of the deputies’ brass badges and their dangling batons and the flashing lights of their cruisers transformed this novelty into a threat, and brought to life the goblins that haunted their daily consciousness. The paisana from the television has brought las autoridades to our neighborhood, and now they will take us all away before we can finish our breakfasts and wash the dishes.