The Tortilla Curtain (45 page)

Cándido presented the groceries to América as if they were rare treasure and fixed her a meal in the aluminum dog dish on the grill that was the only thing left of their ill-starred camp in the canyon. It was late when they’d eaten and the air was damp and cold and Cándido was thinking of the cement blocks he’d seen out back of the Chinese market and how he could remove a pallet and make a wall of the blocks, with the fire on the inside to warm the place, when America took the baby from her breast and in the shadowy shifting light of the lantern fixed him with a look. “Well,” she said, “and what now?”

He shrugged. “I’ll find work, I guess.”

Her eyes had the look of pincers, that grasping and seizing look she got when she wanted something and had made up her mind to get it. “I want you to buy me a bus ticket with that money,” she said. “I want to go home and I don’t care whether you’re coming with me or not. I’ve had it. I’m finished. If you think I’m going to raise my daughter like a wild animal with no clothes, no family, no proper baptism even, you’re crazy. It’s you they want, not me. You’re the one.”

She was right, of course she was right, and he could already feel the loss of her like something cut right out of his own body, his heart or his brain, a loss no man could survive. He wouldn’t let her go. Not if he had to kill her and the baby too and then cut his own worthless throat in the bargain. “There is no money,” he said.

He watched her lips form around a scowl. “That’s a lie.”

Wordlessly, with a brutality that made him hate himself, he dug the nugget of plastic out of his pocket and dropped it on the scrap of wool carpet. Neither of them spoke. They lay there a long moment, stretched out beneath the green sheet of the roof, staring at the little bolus of plastic and the coins embedded in it. “There’s your bus fare,” he said finally.

 

 

 

She had her baby, and every living cell and hair of it was a miracle, the thing she’d done herself though her father said she was stupid and her mother called her clumsy and lazy and unreliable—her creation, beautiful and undeniable. But who could she show her off to? Who was going to admire her Socorro, the North American beauty, born with nothing in the land of plenty? For the first few days she was too full of joy and too tired to worry about it. She was in a shack, another shack, hidden away like a rabbit in a burrow, and she was alive because of Cándido’s bravery and his quick thinking, and she had her daughter at her breast and Cándido had delivered her. That was all for then. That was all she needed to know. But as he went out to scavenge things—a blanket he found on a clothesline one night, a beach towel to wrap the baby in—or left her to crouch in the bushes across from the post office and wait for Señor Willis’s car that never came, she began to brood, and the more she brooded the more afraid she became.

This wasn’t just bad luck, this was an ongoing catastrophe, and how long could they survive that? Cándido was the best man in the world, loving and kind and he’d never known the meaning of the word “lazy” in his life, but everything he did turned out wrong. There was no life for her here, no little house, no bathroom with its gleaming faucets and bright white commode like the bathroom in the
guatón’s
big astonishing mansion. It was time to give it up, time to go back to Tepoztlán and beg her father to take her back. She had her daughter now and her daughter was a North American, a citizen of Los
Estados Unidos,
and she could come back when she was grown and claim her birthright. But then, how would anyone know? Didn’t they have to record the birth in the village or the church? But what village, what church?

“Cándido, what about the baby?” she said one night as they sat before the hearth he’d constructed of cement blocks, laying sticks on the fire while water boiled in the pot. It was raining, a soft discontinuous patter on the plastic roof, and she was lying snug atop the sacks of grass seed, wrapped in the blanket. Cándido had been gone all day, scouring the roadside for cans and bottles to redeem in the machine outside the Chinese store, and he’d come home with sugar, coffee and rice.

“What about her?” he said.

“We have to register her birth with the priest—she was born here, but who’s going to know that?”

He was silent, squatting over his haunches, breaking up sticks to feed the fire. He’d managed to make the place comfortable for her, she had to give him that. The slats between the pallets had been stuffed with rags and newspaper for insulation, and with a fire even on the coldest days she was warm. And he’d got water for them too, spending a whole night digging a trench up the hill and tapping into the development’s sprinkler system, cutting the pipe and running joined lengths of it all the way to their little invisible house, and then he’d buried it and hidden his traces so well no one would ever suspect. “What priest?” he said finally.

She shrugged. Socorro lay sleeping at her breast. “I don’t know—the village priest.”

“What village?”

“I want to go home. I hate this place. I hate it.”

Cándido was silent a moment, his face like a withered fruit. “We could walk into Canoga Park again, if you think you’re up to it,” he said finally. “They must have a priest there. He would know what to do. At least he could baptize her.”

She dreaded the idea after her last experience, but just the mention of the name—Canoga Park—made her see the shops again, the girls on the street, the little restaurant that was like a café back at home. Somebody there would know what to do, somebody would help. “It’s awfully far,” she said.

He said nothing. He was staring into the fire, his lips pursed, hands clasped in his lap.

“What did you do with the cord?” she said after a moment.

“Cord? What cord?”

“You know, the baby’s cord. The umbilical.”

“I buried it. Along with the rest. What do you think?”

“I wanted that cord. For Chalma. I wanted to make a pilgrimage and hang it in the tree and pray to the Virgin to give Socorro a long and happy life.” And she saw the tree in her mind, the great ancient ahuehuete tree beside the road, with the crowds of pilgrims around it and the vendors and the hundreds upon hundreds of dried birth cords hanging from the branches like confetti. Socorro would never know that tree; she’d never be blessed. América had to catch her breath to keep from sobbing with the hopelessness of it. “I hate it here,” she whispered. “God, how I hate it.”

Cándido didn’t answer. He made coffee with sugar and condensed milk and they drank it out of
frijole
cans, and then he cut up an onion, some
chiles
and a tomato and cooked the rice, and she wouldn’t get up, wouldn’t help him, even if he’d tried to force her.

It rained the next day too, all day, and when she went out to relieve herself and bury the baby’s diaper, the earth was like glue. For all this time it had been powder and now it was glue. She stood there in the rain, looking out over the misted canyon, the roofs of the houses, the barren scar of Cándido’s fire, and the rain smelled good, smelled of release and reprieve—smelled, ever so faintly, of home. She had to get away, even if it meant bundling up Socorro and walking all the way back to the border, and if she starved along the way, then that was God’s will.

It was dark inside, dark as a hole in the ground, and when the rain slackened to a drizzle, she brought the baby outside for a breath of air. Sitting there high on the hillside, watching the clouds roll out over the canyon all the way to the sea and the cars creep like toys up the slick canyon road, she felt better. This was America and it was a beautiful place, drier and hotter than Tepoztlán in the dry season and colder in the wet, but she felt that there was peace here if only she could find it. Peace and prosperity too.

She looked down then into her daughter’s face and the baby was staring past her, staring up and away into a distance she couldn’t possibly contain, and it was in that moment that America felt the naked sharp claws of apprehension take hold bf her. She passed a hand over her daughter’s face and her daughter didn’t blink. She bent her own face to Socorro’s and tugged at those dull black irises with her own and they only stared, as if there were a wall between them. And then the baby blinked and sneezed and the eyes stared at nothing.

 

 

 

Cándido told her they were eating rabbit, but rabbit was hard to come by up here. Those other little four-legged beasts, the ones with the bells on their collars to warn away the birds, they were easier to catch. All you had to do was wait till midnight, slip over the wall and whisper, “Kitty, here, kitty.” So they ate meat, even if it tasted stringy and sour, and they ate kibble and rice and whatever fruits and vegetables he dared to take. They had water. They had heat. They had a roof over their heads. But it was all a stopgap, a delaying action, a putting off of the inevitable. He’d stared so long and so hard at that strip of road out front of the post office, waiting for the apparition of Señor Willis’s Corvair, that it wasn’t a real place anymore, but a scene he’d devised in his brain—if he blinked, it wouldn’t exist. There were no braceros there, not a one, and the word must have been out. Cándido didn’t dare show himself and if he didn’t show himself how could he get work? And if he couldn’t get work, no matter how many things he borrowed from the houses beyond the wall or how many cans he collected in the bushes, sooner or later they would starve. If only he could call Señor Willis, but Señor Willis didn’t have a phone. He could go back to Canoga Park, but there was no work there, he knew that already, and a hundred men ready to kill for whatever work might turn up. A little money, that was all he needed—with a little money he might think about going back to Tepoztlán, at least for the winter. His aunt might take them in, and he could always make charcoal, but América-he’d boasted to her, he’d promised her things—America would certainly leave him then, mewed up behind the gate at her father’s house till she was a hag scrubbing the floors and Socorro was married off to some
chingado
her old man owed money to.

Cándido took the risk. He waited till the rain began to crackle on the pavement and the hair hung wet in his eyes, and then he stepped out of the bushes, crossed the road and stood beneath the overhang out front of the post office, stamping his feet and hugging his shoulders to keep the circulation going. Surely somebody would take pity on him and bring him home to work in a warm basement, putting up drywall or painting or cleaning out the trash. He waited, wet through and shivering, and every
gringo
who got out of his car and ducked into the post office gave him a look of unremitting hate. If they didn’t know he’d started the fire personally, they all suspected it, and where there was once tolerance and human respect, where there was the idea of community and a labor exchange and people to support it, now there was only fear and resentment. They didn’t want to hire him, they didn’t want to see him warm, they didn’t want to see him fed and clothed and with a place to sleep at night that was better than a ditch or a shack hidden in the weeds—they wanted to see him dead. Or no: they didn’t want to see him at all. He waited there through the afternoon, and when he couldn’t take the cold anymore he went into the lobby of the post office, a public place, and a man in a blue uniform stepped from behind the counter and told him in Spanish that he had to leave.

America was strange that night. He huddled next to her, trying to stop shivering, and she didn’t mention going home, not once, though she’d driven him half-mad with it for the past two weeks. Now it was the baby—that was all she could talk about. The baby needed to go to a clinic, the baby needed a doctor—a
gringo
doctor—to look at her. But was the baby sick? he wanted to know. She looked all right to him. No, América gasped, no, she’s not sick, but we need to have a doctor check her—just in case. And how will we get to this doctor, how will we pay? He was irritated, feeling harassed, squeezed dry. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. But the baby had to have a doctor.

In the morning, Cándido put a pot of rainwater on the grill to boit—he’d run a length of PVC pipe off the development’s sprinkler system, easiest thing in the world, what with the saw and the cement and all the elbows and connectors right there in the shed for the taking, but he didn’t use it if he didn’t have to—and he skidded down the muddy slope, keeping low to the cover, and went back to the post office. It was overcast, with a cold breeze coming down out of the mountains, but the rain had tapered off at dawn and that was a relief. Cándido leaned against the brick front of the building, watching the earthworms crawl up out of the saturated earth to die on the pavement and trying his best to look eager and nonthreatening to the
gringos
and
gringas
who hurried in and out the door with Christmas packages in their arms. He could hear the creek where it cut into the bank out back of the post office before whipping round to pass under the bridge and plunge into the cut of the gorge. It was a sinister sound, a hiss that rose to a roar and fell back again as a crippled tree or boulder slammed along the bed of the stream and hung up on some hidden obstruction. They would have been flooded out if they were still camped below, flushed down the canyon like waste in a toilet, battered against the rocks and washed out to sea for the crabs to feed on. He thought about that, watching the earthworms wriggling on the pavement and the postal patrons stepping delicately through the puddles as if dirtying their shoes was the worst tragedy that could befall them, and he wondered if the fire hadn’t been a blessing in disguise. Maybe there was a Providence looking out for him after all.

The thought cheered him. He began to smile at the people going in and out, combing his mustache down with his fingers and showing his teeth. “Work?” he said to one woman riding up off her heels like a gymnast, but she turned away as if he were invisible, as if it were the wind talking to her. But he kept on, his smile growing increasingly desperate, until the man in the blue uniform—the same one as yesterday, a
gabacho
with a ponytail and turquoise eyes—came out and told him in textbook Spanish that he was going to have to leave if he didn’t have business at the post office. Cándido shrugged his shoulders, grinning still—he couldn’t help it, it was like a reflex. “I’m sorry if I’m bothering anybody,” he said, relieved to be explaining himself, relieved to be talking in his own language and thinking that maybe this was the break he was looking for, that maybe this man would be another Señor Willis, “but I need work to feed my wife and baby and I was wondering if you knew of anything around here?”