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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011 The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves--a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity
With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.
Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household--one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing--unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house--except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . .
With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience--as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno--to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
Author Notes
Héctor Tobar was born in 1963 in Los Angeles, California. He received an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine and became a reporter with the Los Angeles Times in the 1980's. Along with a team of writers, he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the L.A. riots in 1992.
He has written both fiction and non-fiction works. His novels include The Tattooed Soldier and The Barbarian Nurseries, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction. His non-fiction works include Translation Nation and Deep Down Dark.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tobar (The Tattooed Soldier) delivers a riveting, insightful morality tale of conspicuously consuming Americans and their Mexican servants in the O.C. When Maureen's failing tropical garden becomes a source of embarrassment, she charges its four-figure replacement, pushing her and software engineer husband Scott's already-tottering finances over the edge. A fight ensues, with Maureen crashing through a glass coffee table, and she flees with baby Samantha while Scott opts to repair his ego with another woman and by "taking a little break from being home," leaving their Mexican maid, Araceli, to care for their two young boys. The situation turns explosive when Araceli tries to ferry the boys to their grandfather, only to spark a full-blown Los Angeles media circus. Tobar is both inventive and relentless in pricking the pretentious social consciences of his entitled Americans, though he also casts a sober look on the foibles of the Mexicans who serve them. His sharp eye for Southern California culture, spiraling plot twists, ecological awareness, and ample willingness to dole out come-uppance to the nauseatingly privileged may put readers in mind of T.C. Boyle. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Los Angeles Times journalist Tobar's second novel (after The Tattooed Soldier, 1998) is brimming with interwoven stories that form a vibrant portrait of his hometown of Los Angeles. The Torres-Thompson family Scott, a programmer; his wife, Maureen; and their three children is living on a financial precipice, the mortgage on their lavish home overlooking the Pacific and the outlandish private-school tuition for sons Brandon and Keenan looming large as the recession hits. They are forced to let two of their Mexican employees go. That leaves Araceli, the housekeeper and cook who is not particularly fond of children, especially unruly boys. When Maureen's over-the-top landscape renovation exceeds their credit-card limit, the ensuing marital spat sends both her (with the baby) and Scott packing separately each one assuming that the other is home with the boys. Communication is impossible due to cell-phone glitches, and after three long days, Araceli piles the boys on a bus to central L.A. in search of their estranged grandfather. Their fanciful odyssey provides Tobar with the perfect vehicle for homing in on immigration law, Child Protective Services, and class differences in both Anglo and Mexican American communities. The result is a marvelous pastiche of social commentary ensconced in a family domestic drama.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE literature of Los Angeles must discern shadows in the sunshine if it hopes to transcend mere entertainment. Héctor Tobar knows this. A native of the city, Tobar knows the dark and the light, the high and the low; he knows the spas and the salvage shops, the wrought iron and the barbed wire; he knows the West Side, the Valley and downtown - and and he has put it all into his big new novel, "The Barbarian Nurseries." Mercifully, Hollywood did not make the cut. The mixed-race couple at the story's center is Maureen and Scott Torres-Thompson. Maureen is a Midwestern transplant who, despite a habit of chewing at the ends of her ginger hair, is the picture of composed elegance. Scott is a Stanford-educated software millionaire born of humbler beginnings. Half Mexican (English is his mother tongue), he is by all appearances the embodiment of the American dream. But social ascendancy has come at a price: he is estranged from his father, whose advice - "Never hang your hat where you can't reach it" - he has pointedly ignored. Scott and Maureen live high on a hill in a gated community. So much in their palatial home is overwrought, as if to compensate by excess for impoverishments nonmaterial. The children's room is jampacked with exquisite toys - an Art Deco mobile dangles planets of colored glass, pop-up books produce dragons and castles - but nowhere is their affluence more vividly displayed than in the tropical garden, the book's central, potent image. Here, banana trees and lush ferns thrive. Such profusion in the arid air of Southern California, a climate better suited to cactuses, owes its survival to Pepe, the Mexican gardener responsible for its maintenance. A foot-wide stream gushes forth with a flick of a switch. "La petite rain forest," Maureen has taken to calling it, a formulation that carries the whiff of cultural snobbery (Pepe would say pequeña). No novel that purports to tell the truth about Los Angeles can avoid the theme of artifice. How fitting it is that the house with a fake stream in its fake tropical garden is situated on a street with a fake Spanish name. Paseo Linda Bonita is, we learn, a redundancy. (Translation: Beautiful Pretty Street.) Scott and Maureen don't speak much Spanish, and their employees don't speak much English. Communication between employer and employee is limited to facial expressions, hand signals and a crude Spanglish that fails to express all but the most rudimentary notions. Communication between Maureen and Scott is strained, too. Maureen can't comprehend why her mild-mannered husband would punch a wall, and he resolutely declines to explain. Scott is given to moody silences, and encourages the attentions of a junior programmer at an outfit called Elysian Systems. The tribulations of Scott and Maureen receive compassionate attention here, but it is Araceli, their live-in maid, who commands the author's primary sympathies. So too, ours. Much of the potency of "The Barbarian Nurseries" comes from our knowledge, as privileged readers, of Araceli's thoughts and feelings, disclosures that bring forth some of its freshest imagery. We learn of her girlhood home in Mexico City, where she awoke to the sound of her mother sweeping the patio with a bundle of slender branches that played a percussive song: "Clean-clean, clean-clean, clean-clean." We learn that she attended art school at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, but economic hardship prevented her from continuing her studies; now, she constructs and hangs from her ceiling weird sculptures like the Garbage Phoenix, a menacing assemblage of colored plastic forks and knives scavenged from her employers' parties. At one such party, we find her distributing a tray of sopes and other hors d'oeuvres to Scott and Maureen's friends. The proximity of her homeland is felt in the sangrias they throw back, the taquitos they consume and the sopes' ingredients (tomatoes, avocados and Oaxaca cheese: "the colors of the Mexican flag"). Many of the partygoers are, like Scott and Maureen, mixed-race couples, but when one among them drunkenly voices his grievances about Mexicans in Los Angeles, an awkward silence ensues: "They avoided discussing race, as if the mere mention of the subject might cause their fragile alliances to come apart. 'Mexican' was a word that sounded harsh, somehow." The moment passes, the party resumes. The expression Araceli wears is as buttoned-up as her filipina, a boxy uniform that renders her silhouette shapeless. She remains, in the eyes of her employers and their friends, inscrutable, unknowable. Social and racial conflict assume a larger dimension when Araceli is accused of a crime, setting into motion a plot that brings about the collision of people from radically different worlds. The charge is child endangerment, child abuse or kidnapping, depending on whose opinion is solicited in Child Protective Services, law enforcement or the network news, and media frenzy feeds an institutional overreaction that culminates in an Amber Alert. What did Araceli do? Let it only be said that it was una mala comunicación. TOBAR, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Los Angeles Times, writes with authority about the machinations of Orange County-versus-Los Angeles municipal politics, and exhibits a seismographic sensitivity to the tensions along the fault lines of his cultural terrain. A story of scandal in a metropolis fraught with racial friction may elicit comparisons with Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," and though both may be classified as social novels, aiming to depict how contemporary society shapes our consciousness, the kinship is superficial. Both authors are alert to the absurdities of American culture, but the characters in Tobar's metropolis do not yield readily to caricature. The plight of an immigrant in Los Angeles was the focus of Tobar's first novel, "The Tattooed Soldier," and "The Barbarian Nurseries" broadens the scope, extending across social classes and over Mexico's porous border. The strength of this book is to be found in its sympathetic portrayals of people who struggle to find a common language yet persist in misunderstanding one another. The author devotes considerable effort to inhabiting his characters' inner lives. While characters' thoughts, presented in italics, invite us into emotional states of being ("No one here admires me, no one looks up to me") they fail to convince when we sense the author smuggling in thematic exposition ("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?"). More assured is the author's use of imagery to provide glimpses of psychological depth. After Araceli disappears, Maureen searches for a photograph to assist the police in her capture. The only one she can find shows Araceli in the background, her figure dim and blurred, suggesting "something furtive about its subject, as if she were already in flight when it was taken." Tobar's portraits, acute and humane, render his characters intelligible. His illuminations become our recognitions. Inscrutable to her bosses, Tobar's Mexican maid wears an expression as buttoned-up as her uniform. Rebecca Donner is the author of the novel "Sunset Terrace."
Guardian Review
Set in contemporary southern California, Hector Tobar's second novel energetically explores America's hidden seam of racial discord; here modest incidents can develop into controversy in a matter of hours. The story opens quietly, with a detailed portrait of the suburban Torres-Thompson family in decline. Scott, who has long since left his partial latino heritage behind, is a software designer doing a dreary corporate job after his start-up company failed. His anglo wife Maureen's decision to abandon her own career to look after their three children is starting to seem unwise. The only thing holding the home together is their live-in maid Araceli, an undocumented Mexican, who proves to be a wizard of domestic efficiency. Matters reach a crisis when Maureen impulsively upgrades their "la petite rain forest" garden after it is criticised by a party guest. Scott loses his California cool when he is presented with the huge bill and shoves his wife into an expensive coffee table. Maureen flees with their infant daughter to a desert spa for some "me" time, while Scott decamps to a colleague's house to sulk and play video games. Neither is aware that the other has gone, leaving Araceli in charge of their two needy boys. After a couple of long days without word from either parent, she panics and takes her charges on an ill-advised search for their grandfather in a Los Angeles barrio. When Scott and Maureen finally return to an empty house, they immediately assume the maid has abducted the boys. Police helicopters are dispatched and the border is closed as the search for the alleged kidnapper grips the region. Tobar is a Los Angeles Times journalist who won a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots. His take on southern California's complex social and ethnic strata is the strongest element of The Barbarian Nurseries. He moves easily from the "bloated and myopic" gated communities of Orange County, to the shockingly impoverished barrios just a few miles away. Not surprisingly, he also displays an insider's knowledge of the media, which is always ready to manufacture a crisis. With Araceli, meanwhile, he has created a compellingly nuanced character whose fate embodies the vast chasm that can exist between anglos and latinos, even when they share the same address. Considered mulishly dependable by her employers, she is instead a proud, complicated woman who refuses to abandon her dreams of becoming an artist. The provocative paintings and sculptures she creates in her maid's quarters give the white establishment all the proof it needs to judge her capable of committing a terrible crime. Where the novel proves much less successful is in its plotting. Too often, Tobar bends his characters to breaking point to make them fit into his ambitious, wide-ranging plot. This is most evident when the reader is asked to believe that Maureen, who for the book's first hundred or so pages is portrayed as a hands-on super-mom intent on micromanaging every aspect of her boys' lives, would suddenly abandon them for a long weekend at a luxurious spa without at least checking in once a day. Tobar also has a habit of suddenly introducing characters, complete with potted histories, whose only purpose is to hurry his narrative along. Ultimately, his novel is more of a panoramic painting than a dynamic story, capturing the textures of its Californian landscape without really evoking its human drama. Stephen Amidon's Security is published by Atlantic. To order The Barbarian Nurseries for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - Stephen Amidon [Hector Tobar] is a Los Angeles Times journalist who won a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots. His take on southern California's complex social and ethnic strata is the strongest element of The Barbarian Nurseries. He moves easily from the "bloated and myopic" gated communities of Orange County, to the shockingly impoverished barrios just a few miles away. Not surprisingly, he also displays an insider's knowledge of the media, which is always ready to manufacture a crisis. With [Araceli], meanwhile, he has created a compellingly nuanced character whose fate embodies the vast chasm that can exist between anglos and latinos, even when they share the same address. Considered mulishly dependable by her employers, she is instead a proud, complicated woman who refuses to abandon her dreams of becoming an artist. The provocative paintings and sculptures she creates in her maid's quarters give the white establishment all the proof it needs to judge her capable of committing a terrible crime. - Stephen Amidon.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tobar (The Tattooed Soldier) presents an original story of modern Southern California. Maureen and Scott Torres-Thompson live with their children in upscale Laguna Rancho Estates. Despite Scott's income as a computer game company vice president, bad investments and extravagant spending have forced them to fire their Mexican gardener and nanny. Housekeeper Araceli Ramirez must now do double duty. Though she's a dazzling cook, she's not up for child care, but her undocumented status forces her to accept the situation. Meanwhile, a disconnect is growing between Scott and Maureen. Without communicating to each other or to Araceli, they separately escape the pressures at home, and neither returns for four days. Araceli, alone and worried, has to do something, so she takes off with the two boys to Grandpa John's, with only a vague idea where he lives in central Los Angeles. When Scott and Maureen finally return, they are devastated to learn that their boys are missing with an undocumented Mexican nanny and make a call that changes all their lives forever. VERDICT Tobar's superb multilayered novel defines the social divide of Southern California, emphasizing in a complex and human way that there are no black-and-white answers in the immigration debate. [See Prepub Alert, 4/11/11.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., CO (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES (Chapter 1) Scott Torres was upset because the lawn mower wouldn't start, because no matter how hard he pulled at the cord, it didn't begin to roar. His exertions produced only a brief flutter of the engine, like the cough of a sick child, and then an extended silence filled by the buzzing of two dragonflies doing figure eights over the uncut St. Augustine grass. The lawn was precocious, ambitious, eight inches tall, and for the moment it could entertain jungle dreams of one day shading the house from the sun. The blades would rise as long as he pulled at the cord and the lawn mower coughed. He gripped the cord's plastic handle, paused and leaned forward to gather breath and momentum, and tried again. The lawn mower roared for an instant, spit a clump of grass from its jutting black mouth, and stopped. Scott stepped back from the machine and gave it the angry everyman stare of fatherliness frustrated, of a handyman being unhandy. Araceli, his Mexican maid, watched him from the kitchen window, her hands covered with a white bubble-skin of dishwater. She wondered if she should tell el señor Scott the secret that made the lawn mower roar. When you turned a knob on the side of the engine, it made starting the machine as easy as pulling a loose thread from a sweater. She had seen Pepe play with this knob several times. But no, she decided to let el señor Scott figure it out himself. Scott Torres had let Pepe and his chunky gardener's muscles go: she would allow this struggle with the machine to be her boss's punishment. El señor Scott opened the little cap on the mower where the gas goes in, just to check. Yes, it has gas. Araceli had seen Pepe fill it up that last time he was here, on that Thursday two weeks ago when she almost wanted to cry because she knew she would never see him again. Pepe never had any problems getting the lawn mower started. When he reached down to pull the cord it caused his bicep to escape his sleeve, revealing a mass of taut copper skin that hinted at other patches of skin and muscle beneath the old cotton shirts he wore. Araceli thought there was art in the stains on Pepe's shirts; they were an abstract expressionist whirlwind of greens, clayish ocher, and blacks made by grass, soil, and sweat. A handful of times she had rather boldly brought her lonely fingertips to these canvases. When Pepe arrived on Thursdays, Araceli would open the curtains in the living room and spray and wipe the squeaky clean windows just so she could watch him sweat over the lawn and imagine herself nestled in the protective cinnamon cradle of his skin: and then she would laugh at herself for doing so. I am still a girl with silly daydreams. Pepe's disorderly masculinity broke the spell of working and living in the house and when she saw him in the frame of the kitchen window she could imagine living in the world outside, in a home with dishes of her own to wash, a desk of her own to polish and fret over, in a room that wasn't borrowed from someone else. Araceli enjoyed her solitude, her apartness from the world, and she liked to think of working for the Torres-Thompson family as a kind of self-imposed exile from her previous, directionless life in Mexico City. But every now and then she wanted to share the pleasures of this solitude with someone and step outside her silent California existence, into one of her alternate daydream lives: she might be a midlevel Mexican government functionary, one of those tough, big women with a mean sense of humor and a leonine, rust-tinted coiffure, ruling a little fiefdom in a Mexico City neighborhood; or she might be a successful artist--or maybe an art critic. Pepe figured in many of her fantasies as the quiet and patient father of their children, who had chic Aztec names such as Cuitláhuac and Xóchitl. In these extended daydreams Pepe was a landscape architect, a sculptor, and Araceli herself was ten kilos thinner, about the weight she had been before coming to the United States, because her years in California had not been kind to her waistline. All of her Pepe reveries were over now. They were preposterous but they were hers, and their sudden absence felt like a kind of theft. Instead of Pepe she had el señor Scott to look at, wrestling with the lawn mower and the cord that made it start. At last, Scott discovered the little knob. He began to make adjustments and he pulled at it again. His arms were thin and oatmeal-colored; he was what they called here "half Mexican," and after twenty minutes in the June sun his forearms, forehead, and cheeks were the glowing crimson of McIntosh apples. Once, twice, and a third time el señor Scott pulled at the cord, turning the knob a little more each time, until the engine began to kick, sputter, and roar. Soon the air was green with flying grass, and Araceli watched the corner of her boss's lips rise in quiet satisfaction. Then the engine stopped, the sound muffled in an instant, because the blade choked on too much lawn. Neither of her bosses informed Araceli beforehand of the momentous news that she would be the last Mexican working in this house. Araceli had two bosses, whose surnames were hyphenated into an odd, bilingual concoction: Torres-Thompson. Oddly, la señora Maureen never called herself "Mrs. Torres," though she and el señor Scott were indeed married, as Araceli had discerned on her first day on the job from the wedding pictures in the living room and the identical gold bands on their fingers. Araceli was not one to ask questions, or to allow herself to be pulled into conversation or small talk, and her dialogues with her jefes were often austere affairs dominated by the monosyllabic "Yes," "Sí," and, occasionally, "No." She lived in their home twelve days out of every fourteen, but was often in the dark when new chapters opened in the Torres-Thompson family saga: for example, Maureen's pregnancy with the couple's third child, which Araceli found out about only because of her jefa's repeated vomiting one afternoon. "Señora, you are sick. I think my enchiladas verdes are too strong for you. ¿Qué no?" "No, Araceli. It's not the green sauce. I'm going to have a baby. Didn't you know?" Money was supposedly the reason why Pepe and Guadalupe departed. Araceli found out late one Wednesday morning two weeks earlier, following an animated conversation in the backyard between la señora Maureen and Guadalupe that Araceli witnessed through the sliding glass doors of the living room. When their conversation ended, Guadalupe walked into the living room to announce to Araceli curtly, "I'm going to look for some chinos to work for. They can afford to pay me something decent, not the centavos these gringos want to give me." Guadalupe was a fey mexicana with long braids and a taste for embroidered Oaxacan blouses and overwrought indigenous jewelry, and also a former university student like Araceli. Now her eyes were reddened from crying, and her small mouth twisted with a sense of betrayal. "After five years, they should be giving me a raise. But instead they want to cut my pay; that's how they reward my loyalty." Araceli looked out the living room windows to see la señora Maureen also wiping tears from her eyes. "La señora knows I was like a mother to her boys," Guadalupe said, and it was one of the last things Araceli heard from her. So now there was only Araceli, alone with el señor Scott, la señora Maureen, and their three children, in this house on a hill high above the ocean, on a cul-de-sac absent of pedestrians or playing children, absent of traffic, absent of the banter of vendors and policemen. It was a street of long silences. When the Torres-Thompsons and their children left on their daily excursions, Araceli would commune alone with the home and its sounds, with the kick and purr of the refrigerator motor, and the faint whistle of the fans hidden in the ceiling. It was a home of steel washbasins and exotic bathroom perfumes, and a kitchen that Araceli had come to think of as her office, her command center, where she prepared several meals each day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and assorted snacks and baby "feedings." A single row of Talavera tiles ran along the peach-colored walls, daisies with blue petals and bronze centers. After she'd dried the last copper-tinged saucepan and placed it on a hook next to its brothers and sisters, Araceli performed the daily ritual of running her hand over the tiles. Her fingertips transported her, fleetingly, to Mexico City, where these porcelain squares would be weather-beaten and cracked, decorating gazebos and doorways. She remembered her long walks through the old seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century streets, a city built of ancient lava stone and mirrored glass, a colonial city and an Art Deco city and a Modernist city all at once. In her solitude her thoughts would wander from Mexico City to the various other stops on her life journey, a string of encounters and misfortunes that would eventually and inevitably circle back to the present. Now she lived in an American neighborhood where everything was new, a landscape vacant of the meanings and shadings of time, each home painted eggshell-white by association rule, like featureless architect models plopped down by human hands on a stretch of empty savanna. Araceli could see the yellow clumps of vanquished meadows hiding in the unseen spaces around the Torres-Thompson home, blades sprouting up by the trash cans and the massive air-conditioning plant, and in the rectangles cut into the sidewalk where young, man-sized trees grew. When Araceli stood before the living room picture window and stared out at the expanse of the ocean a mile or two in the distance, she could imagine herself on that unspoiled hillside of wild grasses. Several times each day, she walked out of the kitchen and into the living room to study the horizon, a hazy line where the gray-blue of the sea seeped into a cloudless sky. Then the shouts and screams of the two Torres-Thompson boys and the intermittent crying of their baby sister returned her to the here and now. When there were three mexicanos working in this house they could fill the workday hours with banter and gossip. They made fun of el señor Scott and his very bad pocho accent when he tried to speak Spanish and tried to guess how it was that such an awkward and poorly groomed man had found himself paired with an ambitious North American wife. Guadalupe, the nanny, cooed over the baby, Samantha, and played with Keenan and the older boy, Brandon. It was Guadalupe who taught the boys to say things like buenas tardes and muchas gracias. Araceli, the housekeeper and cook, was in charge of the bathrooms and kitchen, the vacuum cleaners and dishrags, the laundry and the living room. And Pepe, with the hands that kept the huge leaves of the elephant plant erect, that made the cream-colored ears of the calla lilies bloom, and the muscles that kept the lawn respectably short. They filled the house with Spanish repartee, Guadalupe teasing Araceli about how handsome Pepe was, Araceli responding with double entendres that always seemed to go right over Pepe's head. "Your machine is so powerful, it can cut anything!" "Es que tiene mucho horsepower." "Yes, I can see how much power there is in all those horses of yours." Pepe was a magician, a da Vinci of gardeners, worth twice what they paid him. How long would the orange beaks of the heliconias in the backyard open to the sky without Pepe's thick, smart fingers to bring them to life? The money situation must be very bad. Why else would el señor Scott be outside in this white sun, burning his fair skin? The idea that these people would be short of money made little sense to her. But why else would Maureen be changing the baby's diapers herself, and looking exasperated at the boys because they were playing on their electronic toys too long? Guadalupe, the aspiring schoolteacher, was no longer there to distract them with those games they played, outside on the grass with soap bubbles, or inside the house with Mexican lottery cards, the boys calling out "El corazón," "El catrín," and "¡Lotería!" in Spanish. Through the picture window in the living room, Araceli studied el señor Scott as he struggled to push the mower over the far edge of the lawn where it dropped off into a steep slope. TORO said the bag on the side of the lawn mower. No wonder el señor Scott was having so much trouble: the lawn mower was a bull! Only Pepe, in a gleaming bullfighter's uniform, with golden epaulets, could tease the Toro forward. Araceli made el señor Scott a lemonade and walked out into the searing light to give it to him, as much to inspect his work as anything else. "¿Limonada?" she asked. "Thanks," he said, taking the wet glass. Beads of water dripped down the glass, like the beads of sweat on el señor Scott's face. He looked away from her, inspecting the blades of grass, how they were sprayed across the concrete path that ran through the middle of the lawn. "The work. It is very hard," Araceli offered. "El césped. The grass. It is very thick." "Yeah," he said, looking at her warily, because this was more conversation than he was used to hearing from his surly but dependable maid. "This mower is too old." But it was good enough for Pepe! Araceli glanced at the grass, saw the brown crescents el señor Scott had inadvertently carved into the green carpet, and tried not to look displeased. Pepe used to stop there to adjust the height of the mower, and Araceli would come out and give him lemonade just like she was giving el señor Scott now. Pepe would say "Gracias" and give her a raffish smile in that instant when his eyes met hers before quickly turning away. El señor Scott swallowed the lemonade and returned the glass to Araceli without another word. As she walked back to the house, the lingering smell of the cut grass sent her into a depression. Exactly how bad was the money situation? she wondered. How much longer would el señor Scott mow the lawn himself and wrestle with the Toro? What was going on in the lives of these people? They had let Guadalupe go, and from Guadalupe's anger she imagined that it was without the two months' severance pay that was standard practice in the good houses of Mexico City, unless they caught you stealing the jewelry or abusing the children. Araceli was beginning to see that it was necessary to take a greater interest in the lives of her employers. She sensed developments that might soon impact the life of an unknowing and otherwise trusting mexicana. Back in the kitchen, she looked at el señor Scott through the window again. He tugged at the cut grass with a rake and made green mounds, and then embraced each mound with his arms and dumped it into a trash bag, blades sticking to his sweaty arms and hands. She watched him brush the grass off his arms and suddenly there was an unexpected pathos about him: el señor Scott, the unlikely lord of this tidy and affluent mansion, reduced to a tiller's role, harvesting the undisciplined product of the soil, when he should be inside, in the shade, away from the sun. A moment after Araceli stepped away from the picture window, Maureen Thompson took her place, taking a good, long minute to inspect her husband's work. The mistress of the house was a petite, elegant woman of thirty-eight, with creamy skin and a perpetually serious air. This summer morning she was wearing Audrey Hepburn capri pants, and she strode about the house with a confident, relaxed, but purposeful gait. She ran this household like the disciplined midlevel corporate executive she had once been, with an eye on the clock and on the frayed edges of her daily household life, vigilant for scattered toys and half-full trash cans and unfinished homework. The sight of her husband struggling with the lawn mower caused her to briefly chew at the ends of her ginger-brown hair. Could la señora see the yellow crescents at the beginning of the slope, Araceli wondered, or was she just put off to see her husband dripping sweat onto the concrete? Araceli examined la señora Maureen examining el señor Scott and thought it was interesting that when you worked or lived with someone long enough you could allow your eyes to linger on that person for a while without being noticed: Pepe, a stranger, always caught Araceli when she stared at him. Much like her Mexican maid, Maureen Thompson had also sensed the disturbing non sequitur playing itself out on the other side of the glass: her theoretician, her distracted man of big ideas, the man she had once proclaimed, in a postcoital whisper, "the King of the Twenty-first Century," frustrated this Saturday afternoon by a technological relic from the previous millennium. They had been married for twelve years of professional triumphs and corporate humiliations, of cash windfalls and nights of infant illnesses, but nothing quite like this particular comedy. He's having trouble just keeping the thing running. It uses gasoline: how complicated can it be? Her eyes shifted to the drawn curtains of the neighbors' houses, the blank windows that reflected the blank California sky, and she wondered who else might be watching. She had not agreed with the calculus her husband had made, the scratched-out set of figures whose bottom line was the departure of the more-than-competent and reliable gardener, a man of silent nobility who, she sensed, had tended the soil in a distant tropical village. Scott was a software kind of guy--both in the literal sense of being a writer of computer programs, and also in the more figurative sense of being someone for whom the physical world was a confusing array of unpredictable biological and mechanical phenomena, like the miraculous process of photosynthesis and the arcane varieties of Southern California weed species, or the subtle, practiced gestures that were required, apparently, to maneuver a lawn mower over an uneven surface. Later on he'll look back at this and laugh. Her husband was a witty man, with a sharp eye for irony, though that quality had deserted him now, judging from the sweaty scowl on his face. Hard labor will cleanse you of irony: it was a lesson from her own childhood and young womanhood that returned to her now, unexpectedly. It was a short walk across the living room to a second picture window, this one looking out to the backyard tropical garden, which was suffering a subtle degradation that was, in its own way, more advanced than the overgrowth of the front lawn had been. They had planted this garden not long after moving in five years earlier, to fill up the empty quarter acre at the rear of their property, and until now it glistened and shimmered like a single dark and moist organism, cooling the air that rushed through it. With the flip of a switch, a foot-wide creek ran through the garden, its waters collecting in a small pond behind the banana tree. Now the leaves of that banana tree were cracking and the nearby ferns were turning golden. Not long after Scott dropped the little bomb about Pepe, Maureen had made a halfhearted attempt at weeding "la petite rain forest," as she and Scott called it, making an initial foray into the section of the garage where she had seen Pepe store some chemicals. She had no green thumb but guessed that keeping a tropical garden alive in this dry climate took some sort of petrochemical intervention: pest and weed control, fertilizers. Unfortunately, she had been frightened off by the bottles and their warning labels: Maureen had stopped breast-feeding only a few weeks earlier and was not yet ready to surrender the purity of body and mind that breast-feeding engendered. If she hadn't yet given in to the temptation of a shot of tequila--though she suspected she soon would--why was she going to open a bottle marked with a skull and crossbones and the even more ominous corporate logo of a major oil company? A downpour of dust and dirt was killing their patch of rain forest; she would have to step in and care for it or it would wither up in the dry air, and as she thought this she felt a pang of anxiousness, a very brief shortness of breath. It isn't just the garden and the lawn, is it? Maureen Thompson had spent her teens and her twenties shedding herself of certain memories forged in a very ordinary Missouri street lined with shady sugar maple trees, where the leaves turned in October and it snowed a few days every winter, and the weather aged the things people left on their porches and no one seemed to care. Those days seemed distant now: they fit into two boxes at the bottom of one of her closets, outnumbered by many other boxes filled with the mementos of her arrival in California and life with Scott. Here on their hillside, on this street called Paseo Linda Bonita, one day followed the next with a comfortable and predictable rhythm: meals were cooked, children were dressed in the morning and put to bed at night, and in between the flaming sun set over the Pacific in a daily and almost ridiculously overwrought display of nature's grandeur. All was well in her universe and then suddenly, and often without any discernible reason, she felt this vague but penetrating sense of impending darkness and loss. Most often it happened when her two boys were away at school, when she stood in their bedroom and sensed an absence that could, from one moment to the next, grow permanent; or when she stood naked in the bathroom, her wet hair in a towel, and she caught a glimpse of her body in the mirror, and sensed its vulnerability, her mortality, and wondered if she had asked too much of it by bringing three children into the world. But no, now it passed. She returned to the living room and the picture window, where the drama on the front lawn had reached a kind of conclusion and the King of the Twenty-first Century was sweeping up the grass on the walkway. When Scott Torres was a kid living in South Whittier he cut the lawn himself, and as he pushed the machine over the slope of his bloated home in the Laguna Rancho Estates, he tried to draw on those lessons his father had passed down two decades earlier, on a cul-de-sac called Safari Drive, where all the lawns were about a quarter the size of the one he was cutting right now. Try to get the thing moving smoothly, check the height of the wheels, watch out for any foreign object on the grass because the blades will catch it, send it flying like a bullet. His father paid him five dollars a week, the first money Scott ever earned. Like the other two adults in this home, Scott had been put in a reflective mood by the unusual events of the past few days, by the departure of two members of their team of hired help, and by the June shift in domestic seasons. Summer vacation was upon them and yesterday had been filled with the summing-up celebration of their two boys' return from the final day of third and fifth grade with large folders filled with a semester's worth of completed homework and oversized art projects that their mother oohed and aahed over. Now he brought the mower over the last patch of uncut grass and gave it a haircut too. Scott stopped the engine and breathed in the scent of freshly cut grass and lawn mower exhaust, the pungent bouquet a powerful memory-trigger of his days of teenage chores. He remembered the olive tree in front of the Torres family home in South Whittier, and many other things that had nothing to do with lawns or lawn mowers, like working on his Volkswagen--his first car--in the driveway, and the feathered chestnut hair and the Ditto jeans of the somewhat chunky girl who lived across the street. What was her name? Nadine. The olive tree dropped black fruit onto the sidewalk and one of Scott's jobs back then was to take a hose and wash away the stains. The neighborhood of his youth was a collection of flimsy boxes held together by wallpaper and epoxy, plopped down on a cow pasture. The Laguna Rancho Estates were something altogether different. When Scott had first come to this house the lawn had not yet been planted, there was a patch of raw dirt with stakes and string pounded into it, and he had watched the Mexican work crews arrive with trays of St. Augustine grass to plant. In five years, the roots created a dense living weave in the soil, and he had struggled to make his haircut of it look even; in fact, he failed. After he raked up the grass he noticed the blades that stuck to his sweaty arms, and as he wiped them off he thought that each was like a penny when you added up how much you saved by cutting the lawn yourself. Two weeks earlier, he had quickly calculated what he paid the gardener over the course of a year and had come to a surprisingly large four-figure number. The problem with these Mexican gardeners was that you had to pay them in cash; you had to slap actual greenbacks into their callused hands at the end of the day. The only way around it was to go out there in the sun and do it yourself, because bringing these hardworking Mexicans into your home was expensive, and in the end all those hours the Mexicans worked without complaint added up. That was also the problem with Guadalupe: too many hours. Scott's parents were frugal people, much like Pepe the gardener: Scott could see this in his methodical, cautious count of the bills Scott gave him. Pepe scratched out the amount with a stubby golf course pencil he kept in his wallet along with a piece of invariably soiled paper. Scott's father was Mexican, which in the California of Scott's youth was synonymous with poverty, and his mother was a square-jawed rebel from Maine, a place where good discipline in the use of funds was standard Protestant practice. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Scott remembered his late mother standing in the doorway of that South Whittier home under the canopy of the olive tree, watching him earn his five dollars with her frugal eyes, and felt like a man waking up from a long drinking binge as he looked back at the white house with the ocher-tile roof that rose before him. His home had become a sun-drenched vault filled with an astonishing variety of purchased objects: the coffee table handmade by a Pasadena artist from distressed Mexican pine and several thick, bubbling panes of hand-blown glass; the wrought-iron wall grilles shipped in from Provence and the Chesterfield sofa of moss-green leather; a handcrafted crib from the Czech Republic. We have behaved and spent very badly. Scott held on to this idea as he rolled the creaking, cooling mower into the garage, feeling a meek, half-defeated self-satisfaction. I cut the goddamn grass myself. It wasn't rocket science. He reentered the house and his Mexican maid gave him an odd smile with some sort of secondary meaning he could not discern. This woman was more likely to ignore you when you said hello in the morning, or to turn down her lips in disapproval if you made a suggestion. Still, they were lucky to have her as their last domestic employee. Araceli was the only person in this house besides Scott who understood frugality: she never failed to save the leftovers in Tupperware; she reused the plastic bags from the supermarket and spent the day turning off lights Maureen and the children left on. Scott had never been to the deeper reaches of Mexico where Araceli hailed from, and he had only once been to his maternal homeland in the upper reaches of Maine, but he sensed they were both places that produced sober people with tiny abacuses in their heads. A few moments later Scott had slipped out of the kitchen and looked through the sliding glass doors that led out to the backyard and felt like an idiot. He had forgotten about the garden, the so-called, misnamed "tropical" garden, which was actually a "subtropical" garden, according to the good people at the nursery who had planted the thing. For the first time Scott contemplated its verdant hollows and shadows with the eye of a workingman, a blister or two having formed on his palms thanks to his efforts on the front lawn. He remembered Pepe wading into this semi-jungle with a machete, and the crude noise of his blade striking fleshy plants, emerging with old palm fronds or withering flowers. Scott wasn't ready to enter into that jungle today, although he would soon have to. It seemed to him it would take a village of Mexicans to keep that thing alive, a platoon of men in straw hats, wading with bare feet into the faux stream that ran through the middle of it. Pepe did it all on his own. He was a village unto himself, apparently. Scott wasn't a village and he decided to forget about the tropical garden for the time being because it was in the backyard, after all, and who was going to notice? THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES Copyright (c) 2011 by Héctor Tobar Excerpted from The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.