The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,168
defendants to fit in the system—so we lawyers use tricks to squeeze you through. Against this there is a tradition in the law that says everyone should be treated fairly. My job exists, for example, because a poor man from Florida sat down and wrote a letter to the Supreme Court, with paper and pencil. From his jail cell. Thanks to him the laws were changed so now everyone gets a public defender, gratis. A fighter like that can change the law. United States history is filled with people like that.”
“Mexican history is the same,” Araceli said.
“I imagine it is.”
“But I am not a fighter.”
“Neither am I. Not truly.”
“But I think I want to be respected. Merezco respeto. And I want to respect the rules too. The rules say you should not lie.”
Above all, the thought of pleading guilty to a delito menor and accepting the convenience of a “deal” offended Araceli’s sense of order and decorum. It only added to the sense of unraveling about her: that she was living in a metropolis where all the objects, once arranged in order, had been shuffled out of place. When you live far away, you never associate California with clutter. When Araceli was in a messy home, when the beds were not made and the dishes were left unscrubbed, she invariably felt pangs of disappointment and loss. She had been this way as a girl in Nezahualcóyotl, when her mother slipped into those seasonal depressions that kept her from working for several days at a time, once or twice a year. And she was that way as a woman living in the guesthouse on Paseo Linda Bonita. Now Araceli could see that this place called California was like a home that had fallen into a state of obsolescence and neglect, a conclusion confirmed by the fact that this idealistic woman with the pink-trimmed boots had been forced to make an absurd offer: tell a lie and you can go free. The truth had been building for a long time now—it had been there for her to see intimately in the Paseo Linda Bonita home, in the increasingly frayed interactions between Scott and Maureen, the sense that she was living with two people confused and angry with the familial roles assigned to them. She felt this same unsettled sense when she first entered the center of Los Angeles with Brandon and Keenan, when the mob confronted the councilman in Huntington Park, and when the woman of los tres strikes plotted her escape and then surrendered and wept. She wanted to take all the exhausted American people she’d seen and give them freshly starched clothes to wear, and she wanted to take all the misplaced objects and polish them and put them back where they belonged.
“These laws you have. In some ways they are pretty,” Araceli said. “But in other ways they are ugly.”
The American police would politely release you if they knew the truth of your innocence; they would not accept bribes, apparently, and they placed the property they took from the people they arrested in transparent bags for later return. And yet their courts would blackmail an innocent woman into a devi l’s bargain, just so they could keep the flow of the accused moving swiftly through their concrete buildings.
“Entonces, a pelear” Araceli said.
Ruthy Bacalan beamed. “Yes, we fight.” She explained what would happen next: the court would schedule a “mini-trial” called a preliminary hearing. “I’ll push for that quickly. If we lose that, and we likely will, we go for a full trial.”
The two women shook hands and gave each other a half embrace before leaving the room via separate doors. Araceli took a slip of paper from the guard and followed a yellow line on the concrete floor that led away from the room and twisted and turned down a labyrinth of corridors. On those few occasions when she ventured out of her cell, the expanse and openness of the county jail surprised Araceli: the prisoners shuffled back and forth without escorts, up and down the hallways and escalators, women walking with leisurely strides in groups to the cafeteria, carrying trays of food and boxes and envelopes, guided by a greasy rainbow of painted floor lines. The jail had the structured bustle of a huge office building, a weird corporation where the secretaries wore their hair in dirty strings, or shaved at the sides, and every employee dressed in a blue or a yellow jumpsuit.