The Tortilla Curtain (29 page)

“We’ll have to leave,” she murmured, and the city she knew—alien, terrifying, a place where blacks roamed the streets and
gabachos
sat on the sidewalk and begged—gave way to the city she dreamed of. There would be shops, streets lined with trees, running water, toilets, a shower: They had three hundred and twenty dollars—maybe they could share a place with another couple, somebody like themselves, Tepoztecos or Cuernavacans, pool their resources, live like a big family. No matter how small the place, no matter how dirty it was, with rats and cockroaches and gunshots outside the windows, it had to be better than this. All this time Cándido had been stalling because he was afraid—they couldn’t go yet, they needed more money, have patience,
mi vida,
have patience—but now he could stall no longer.

“Not yet,” he said.

Not yet? She wanted to jump up and shout in his face, pummel him with her fists. Was he crazy? Did he intend to live down here like a caveman for the rest of his life? She controlled herself, sat there in the sand hunched over the
novela
she’d read so many times she could recite it from memory, and waited. He was like her father, just like him: immovable, stubborn, the big boss. There was no use in arguing.

Cándido sat at the edge of the pool in his undershorts, his skin glistening with beads of water. He’d just come back from above, just stepped out of the pool and thrown himself down beside her with his momentous announcement. It was the hottest hour of the day. Everything was still. America could feel the sweat under her arms and down below, where she itched, itched constantly, though at least her pee no longer burned. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to walk up the canyon,” he said, “early, while it’s still dark, before
La Migra
comes nosing around the post office and the labor exchange. I’m going to keep my eyes open—I was thinking of Canoga Park maybe—and see if I can find anything.”

“An apartment?”

“Apartment? What’s the matter with you?” His voice jumped up the register. “You know we can’t afford an apartment—how many times do I have to tell you?” He turned to look at her. His eyes were dangerous. “Sometimes I just can’t believe you,” he said.

“Maybe a motel,” she said, “—just for a night. We could take a shower, ten showers, shower all night. This water’s dirty, filthy, full of scum and bugs. It stinks. My hair smells like an old dog.”

Cándido looked away. He said nothing.

“And a bed to sleep in, a real bed. God, what I wouldn’t give for a bed—just for one night.”

“You’re not going with me.”

“Yes I am.”

“You’re not.”

“You can’t stop me—what are you going to do, hit me again? Huh? Big man? I don’t hear you?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

She saw the bed, the shower, a
taqueria
maybe. “You can’t leave me here, not anymore. Those men... What if they come back?”

There was a long silence, and she knew they were both thinking about that inadmissible day and what she couldn’t tell him and how he knew it in his heart and how it shamed him. If they lived together a hundred years she could never bring that up to him, never go further than she just had. Still, how could he argue with the fact of that? This was no safe haven, this was the wild woods.

“Indita,”
he said, “you’ve got to understand—it’s ten miles each way, and I’ll be on the streets, maybe getting work, maybe finding someplace for us, someplace to camp closer in to the city. You’re safe here. Nobody would come up this far.” He’d been looking her in the face, but now he dropped his eyes and turned away again. “It’s the trail that’s dangerous,” he murmured, “just stay off the trail.”

Indita.
She hated it when he called her that: his little Indian. He passed it off as an endearment, but it was a subtle dig at her, a criticism of her looks, her Indian blood, and it made her feel small and insignificant, though she knew she was one of the beauties of Tepoztlán, celebrated for her figure, her shining hair, her deep luminous eyes and her smile that all the boys said was like some rich dessert they could eat with a spoon, bite by bite. But his skin was lighter and he had the little hook in his nose that his family had inherited from the
conquistadores,
though his stepmother was black as a cane cutter and his father didn’t seem to mind.
Indita.
She sprang up suddenly and flung the
novela
into the water,
splash,
and he was wet again. “I won’t stay here,” she said, and her voice rose in her throat till it shattered, “not one more day.”

In the morning—it was early, three a.m. maybe, she couldn’t tell—she folded bean paste,
chiles
and slivers of cheese into corn
tortillas
and wrapped them up in newspaper for the trip out of the canyon. They’d agreed to leave their things behind, just in case and because they’d attract less attention without them, and to try their luck overnight at least. Cándido had even promised they’d find a room for the night, with a shower and maybe even a TV, if it wasn’t too dear. América worked by the glow of the coals and the tinfoil light of the moon that hung like an ornament just over the lip of the gorge. She was giddy with excitement, like a girl waking early on her saint’s day. Things would work out. Their luck was bound to improve. And even if it didn’t, she was ready for a change, any change.

Cándido unearthed the peanut butter jar; removed twenty dollars and shoved it deep into his pocket; then he flared up the fire with a handful of kindling and had her sew the remaining three hundred dollars into the cuff of his trousers. She pulled on her maternity dress—the pink one with the big green flowers that Cándido had bought her—tucked the
burritos
into her string purse and made them coffee and salted
tortillas
for breakfast. Then they started up the hill.

There was almost no traffic at all at this hour, and that was a pleasant surprise. Darkness clung to the hills, and yet it was mild and the air smelled of the jasmine that trailed from the retaining walls out front of the houses along the road. They walked in silence for an hour, the occasional car stunning them with its headlights before the night crept back in. Things rustled in the brush at the side of the road—mice, she supposed—and twice they heard coyotes howling off in the hills. The moon got bigger as it dipped behind them and America never let the weight of the baby bother her, or its kicks either. She was out of the canyon, away from the spit of sand and that ugly wrecked hulk of a car, and that was all that mattered.

When they reached the top and the San Fernando Valley opened up beneath them like an enormous glittering fan, she had to stop and catch her breath. “Come on,” Cándido urged, leaning over her as she sat there in a patch of stiff grass, “there’s no time to rest.” But she’d overestimated herself, and now she felt it: a pregnant woman grown soft in that prison by the stream. Her feet were swollen. She could smell her own sweat. The baby was like a dead weight strapped to the front of her.
“Un momento,”
she whispered, gazing out on the grounded constellations of the Valley floor, grid upon grid of lights, and every one a house, an apartment, a walk-up or flat, every one the promise of a life that would never again be this hard.

Cándido crouched beside her. “Are you okay?” he whispered, and he, bent forward to hold her, press her head to his shoulder the way her father used to do when she was little and his favorite and she skinned her knee or woke with a nightmare. “It’s not much farther,” he said, his breath warm on her cheek, “just down there,” and she made him point to a place beyond where the office buildings rose up like stony monoliths to a double band of lights running perpendicular to the great long vertical avenues that stretched on into the darkness of the mountains on the far side of the Valley. “That’s it,” he said. “That string of lights there—see it? Sherman Way.”

Sherman Way.
She held the words in her head like a talisman,
Sherman Way,
and then they were moving again, along the black swatch of the road that chased its own tail down the side of the hill. Cándido knew the shortcuts, steep narrow trails that plunged through the brush to pinch off the switchbacks at the neck, and he held her hand and helped her through the worst places. Her feet were like stone, clumsy suddenly. Needlegrass stabbed through her dress and things caught at her hair. And now, every time they made the pavement again, there were the cars. It wasn’t yet light and already they were there, the first sporadic awakening of that endless stream, roaring up the road opposite them, and there was no joy in that. America kept her head down and skipped along as fast as she could go, eaten up with the fear of
La Migra
and the common accidents of the road.

By the time the sun was up, the ordeal was behind them. They were walking hand in hand up a broad street overhung with trees, a sidewalk beneath their feet, pretty houses with pretty yards stretching as far as they could see. America was exhilarated, on fire with excitement. All the fatigue of the past hours dropped magically away from her. Clinging to Cándido’s arm, she peered in at the windows, examined the cars in the driveways and the children’s things in the yards with the eye of an appraiser, gave a running commentary on each house as they passed it by. The houses were adorable,
linda, simpatica,
cute. That color was striking, didn’t he think so? And the bougainvillea—she’d never seen bougainvillea so lush. Cándido was mute. His eyes darted everywhere and he looked troubled—he was troubled, worried sick, she knew it, but she couldn’t help herself. Oh, look at that one! And that!

They turned next onto a commercial boulevard, the main one in this part of the city, Cándido explained, and this was even better. There were shops, wall-to-wall shops, restaurants—was that a Chinese, was that what that writing was?—a supermarket that sprawled out over a lot the size of a
fútbol
stadium with thirty shops more clustered round it. After Tepoztlán, Cuernavaca even, after the Tijuana dump and Venice and the leafy dolorous hell of the canyon, this was a vision of paradise. And when she came to the furniture store—the couches and settees and rugs and elegant lamps all laid out like in the Hollywood movies—Candido couldn’t budge her. “Come on, it’s getting late, you can look at this junk some other time, come on,” he said, tugging at her arm, but she wouldn’t move. Not for ten whole minutes. It was almost as if she were in a trance and she didn’t care. If she could have done it, she would have moved right into the store and slept on a different couch every night and it wouldn’t have bothered her a whit if the whole world was looking in at the window.

Canoga Park was different.

It was pinched and meaner, a lot of secondhand shops and auto-parts stores, dirty restaurants and
cantinas
with bars on the windows, but there were people just like her all over the streets and that made her feel better, made her feel for the first time that she too could live here, that it could be done, that it had been done by thousands before her. She heard Spanish spoken on the streets, nothing but Spanish. Children shot by on skateboards and bicycles. A street vendor was selling roasted ears of corn out of a barrel. América felt as if she’d come home.

Then Cándido took her into a restaurant, a little hole in the wall with five stools at the counter and a couple of Formica tables stuck in a corner, and she could have wept for joy. She fussed with her hair before they went in—she should have braided it—and tried to smooth down her dress and pick the fluff out of it. “You never told me,” she said. “I must look like a mess.”

“You look fine,” he said, but she didn’t believe him. How could she? She’d been camping in the woods without so much as a compact mirror for as long as she could remember.

The waiter was Mexican. The chef behind the grill was Mexican. The dishwasher was Mexican and the man who mopped the floor and the big swollen mother with her two
niñitos
and the five men sitting on the five stools blowing into their cups of coffee. The menu was printed in Spanish. “Order anything you want,
mi vida,”
Cándido said, and he tried to smile, but the look of worry never left his face.

She ordered
huevos con chorizo
and toast, real toast, the first she’d had since she left, home. Butter melted into the toast, sweet yellow pools of it, the
salsa
on the table was better than her mother had ever made and the coffee was black and strong. The sugar came in little packets and she poured so much of it into her coffee the spoon stood up straight when she tried to stir it. Cándido ordered two eggs and toast and he ate like an untamed beast let out of its cage, then went up to the counter and talked to the men there while she used the bathroom, which was dirty and cramped but a luxury of luxuries for all that. She looked at herself in the mirror through a scrim of triangular markings and slogans scratched into the glass and saw that she was pretty still, flushed and healthy-looking. She lingered on the toilet. Stripped to the waist and washed the top half of her body with the yellow liquid soap and let the water run in the basin long after she’d finished with it, just let it run to hear it.

Later, Cándido stood on the streetcorner with two hundred other men while she shrank by his side. The talk was grim. There was a recession. There was no work. Too many had come up from the South, and if there was work for them all six years ago, now there were twenty men for every job and the bosses knew it and cut the wage by half. Men were starving. Their wives and children were starving. They’d do anything for work, any kind of work, and they’d take what the boss was paying and get down on their knees and thank him for it.

The men slouched against buildings, sat on the curb, smoked and chatted in small groups. America watched them as she’d watched the men at the labor exchange and what she saw made her stomach sink with fear: they were hopeless, they were dead, as bent and whipped and defeated as branches torn from a tree. She and Cándido stood there for an hour, not so much in the hope of work—it was ridiculous even to think of it with two hundred men there—but to talk and probe and try to get the lay of the land. Where could they stay? Where was the cheapest place to eat? Was there a better streetcorner? Were they hiring at the building supply? In all that time, a full hour at least, she saw only two pickups pull in at the curb and only six men of all that mob climb in.