The Tortilla Curtain (8 page)

Two words, out of the darkness, and they cut him to the quick: “To work.”

He sat up and railed while she built a fire and made him coffee and some rice pap with sugar to ease the pain of his chewing, and he told her his fears, outlined the wickedness of the
gabacho
world and the perfidy of his fellow
braceros
at the labor exchange, tried to work the kind of apprehension into her heart that would make her stay here with him, where it was safe, but she wouldn’t listen. Or rather, she listened—“I’m afraid,” she told him, “afraid of this place and the people in it, afraid to walk out on the street”—but it had no effect. He forbade her to go. Roared out his rage till his indented cheekbone was on fire, got up on unsteady legs and threatened her with his balled-up fist, but it did no good. She hung her head. Wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Someone has to go,” she whispered. “In a day or two you’ll be better, but now you couldn’t even get up the trail, let alone work—and that’s
if
there’s work.”

What could he say? She was gone.

And then the day began and the boredom set in, boredom that almost made him glad of the pain in his face, his hip, his arm—at least it was something, at least it was a distraction. He looked round the little clearing by the stream, and the leaves, the rocks, the spill of the slope above him and even the sun in the sky seemed unchanging, eternal, as dead as a photograph. For all its beauty, the place was a jail cell and he was a prisoner, incarcerated in his thoughts. But even a prisoner had something to read, a radio maybe, a place to sit and take a contemplative crap, work—they made license plates here in
Gringolandia,
they broke rocks, but at least they did something.

He dozed, woke, dozed again. And every time he looked up at the sun it was in the same place in the sky, fixed there as if time had stood still. America was out there. Anything could happen to her. How could he rest, how could he have a moment’s peace with that specter before him?

América. The thought of her brought her face back to him, her wide innocent face, the face of a child still, with the eyes that bled into you and the soft lisping breath of a voice that was like the first voice you’d ever heard. He’d known her since she was a little girl, four years old, the youngest sister of his wife, Resurrección. She was a flower girl at the wedding, and she looked like a flower herself, blossoming brown limbs in the white petals of her dress. He took the vows with Resurrección that day, and he was twenty years old, just back from nine months in
El Norte,
working the potato fields in Idaho and the citrus in Arizona, and he was like a god in Tepoztlán. In nine months he had made more—and sent half of it home via
giros—
than his father in his leather shop had made in a lifetime. Resurrección had promised to wait for him when he left, and she was good to her word. That time, at least.

But each year the wait got longer, and she changed. They all changed, all the wives, and who could blame them? For three quarters of the year the villages of Morelos became villages of women, all but deserted by the men who had migrated North to earn real money and work eight and ten and twelve hours a day instead of sitting in the
cantina
eternally nursing a beer. A few men stayed behind, of course—the ones who had businesses, the congenitally rich, the crazies—and some of them, the unscrupulous ones, took advantage of the loneliness of the forlorn and itching wives to put horns on the heads of the men breaking their backs in the land of the
gringos.
“Señor Gonzales” is what they called these ghouls of the disinterred marriage, or sometimes just “Sancho,” as in “Sancho bedded your wife.” There was even a verb for it:
sanchear,
to slip in like a weasel and make a
cabrón
out of an unoffending and blameless man.

And so, after seven seasons away and six cold winters at home during which he felt like half a man because Resurrección would not take his seed no matter what they tried—and they tried Chinese positions, chicken fat rubbed on the womb during intercourse, herbs and potions from the
curandera
and injections from the doctor—Cándido came home to find that his wife was living in Cuernavaca with a Sancho by the name of Teófilo Aguadulce. She was six months pregnant and she’d spent all the money Cándido had sent her on her Sancho and his unquenchable thirst for beer,
pulque
and distilled spirits.

America was the one who broke the news to him. Cándido came to the door at his father-in-law’s place, bearing gifts, jubilant in his return, the all-conquering hero, benefactor of half the village, the good nephew who’d built his mother’s sister a new house and had a brand-new boombox radio in his bag for her even now, and there was no one home but America, eleven years old and shy as a jaguar with a pig clenched in its jaws. “Cándido!” she screamed, throwing herself in his arms, “what did you bring for me?” He’d brought her a glass Christmas ball with the figure of a
gabacho
Santa Claus imprisoned in it and artificial snow that inundated him with a blizzard when you turned it upside down—but where was everybody? A pause, release of the limbs, a restrained dance round the room with the inverted Christmas ball: “They didn’t want to see you.” What? Didn’t want to see him? She was joking, pulling his leg, very funny. “Where’s Resurrecci6n?”

Then came his season in hell. He took the first bus to Cuernavaca, sought out Teófilo Aguadulce’s house and beat on the closed shutters till his hands were raw. He prowled the streets, haunted the
cantinas,
the markets, the cinema, but there was no sign of them. Finally, a week later, Cándido got word that Teófilo Aguadulce was coming to Tepoztlán to see his ailing grandfather, and when he crossed the plaza at twelve noon, Cándido was waiting for him. With half the village looking on, Cándido called him out, and he would have had his revenge too, and his honor, if the son of a bitch hadn’t got the better of him with a perfidious wrestling move that left him stunned and bleeding in the dirt. No one said a word. No one reached down a hand to help him up. His friends and neighbors, the people he’d known all his life, simply turned their backs on him and walked away. Cándido got drunk. And when he sobered up he got drunk again. And again. He was too ashamed to go back to his aunt’s and so he wandered the hills, sleeping where he fell, till his clothes turned to rags and he stank like a goat. Children pelted him with rocks and made up songs about him, rhymes to skip rope by, and the keening of their voices burned into him like a rawhide whip. He made for the border finally, to lose himself in the North, but the coyote was a fool and the U.S. Immigration caught him before he’d gone a hundred yards and pitched him back into the dark fastness of the Tijuana night.

He was broke, and he danced for people on the streets there, begged change from
turistas,
got himself a can of kerosene and became a
tragafuegos,
a streetcorner firebreather who sacrificed all sensation in his lips, tongue and palate for a few
centavos
and a few
centavos
more. What he made, he spent on drink. When his fall was complete, when he’d scraped every corner of himself raw, he came back to Tepoztlán and moved in with his aunt in the house he’d built for her. He made charcoal for a living. Climbed into the hills every morning, cut wood and slow-burned it for sale to housewives as fuel for their braziers and the stoves they’d made out of old Pemex barrels. He did nothing else. He saw no one. And then one day he ran across America in the street and everything changed. “Don’t you know me?” she demanded, and he didn’t know her, not at first. She was sixteen and she looked exactly like her sister, only better. He set down the bundle of sticks he was carrying and straightened out his back with an abbreviated twist. “You’re América,” he said, and then he gave it a minute as a car came up the road, scattering chickens and sending an explosion of pigeons into the air, “and I’m going to take you with me when I go North.”

That was what he thought about as he lay there in the ravine, fragile as a peeled egg, that was what America meant to him—just his life, that was all—and that was why he was worried, edgy, afraid, deeply afraid for the first time in as long as he could remember. What if something should happen to her? What if the Immigration caught her? What if some
gabacho
hit
her
with his car? What if one of the
vagos
from the labor exchange... but he didn’t like to think about them. They were too close to him. It was too much to hold in his aching head.

The sun had ridden up over the eastern ridge. The heat was coming on faster than it had during the past week, the mist burning off sooner—there would be winds in the afternoon and the canyon walls would hold the heat like the walls of an oven. He could feel the change of the weather in his hip, his elbow, the crushed side of his face. The sun crept across the sand and hit him in the crotch, the chest, his chin, lips and ravaged nose. He closed his eyes and let himself drift.

When he woke he was thirsty. Not just thirsty—consumed with thirst, maddened by it. His clothes were wet, the blanket beneath him damp with his sweat. With an effort, he pushed himself up and staggered into the shade where America kept their drinking water in two plastic milk jugs from which he’d cut the tops with his worn-out switchblade. He snatched up the near jug and lifted air to his lips: it was empty. So was the other one. His throat constricted.

He knew better than to drink the water straight from the stream—and he’d warned America about it too. Every drop had to be boiled first. It was a pain in the ass—gathering wood, stoking the fire, setting the blackened can on the coals—but it was necessary. America had balked at first—why go to the trouble? This was the U.S.A., plumbing capital of the world, the land of filtration plants and water purifiers and chlorine, and everyone knew of the
gringo
fascination with toilets: how could the water be unsafe? Here, of all places? But it was. He’d been here before, in this very spot, and he’d been sick from it. Could she even begin to imagine how many septic fields drained off of those mountains? he demanded. Or how many houses were packed up there all the way to the asshole of the canyon, and every one of them leaching waste out into the gullies and streams that fed into the creek?

He knew better than to drink the water, but he did. He was dying. He was dried out like the husk of something washed up at high tide and left for a month in the sun, dried out like a fig, a soda cracker. It was beyond him even to contemplate gathering up twigs, searching for a scrap of paper, the matches, waiting till the water boiled for five full minutes and then waiting for it to cool—way beyond him. Mad with thirst, crazed, demented, he threw himself down in the sand, plunged his face into the algal scum of the pool beneath him and drank, drank till he nearly drowned himself. Finally, his stomach swollen like a
bota
bag, he lay back, sated, and the afternoon went on and he dozed and worried and suffered his wounds only to wake and worry and suffer again.

It amazed him how quickly the shits came. When he’d drunk from the creek the sun had been just east of overhead and now it had settled a degree or two to the west, but it was still high and still hot. What did that add up to—two hours? Three? But there it was—the stirring in his gut, the cramping, the desperate uncontainable rush that every man, woman and child knew so intimately in his country, a poor underdeveloped place in which sanitation was a luxury and gastrointestinal infection the leading cause of death. Cándido had just enough time to get across the stream and behind the cluster of great splintered boulders he and America used as a privy before it came. And when it came, it came in an explosion, a raging cataract of shit that left him drained in an instant, and then it hit him again and again till he lost the strength of his legs and collapsed in the sand like a puppet with the strings cut.

Lying there, coated in sweat and sand and worse, his trousers ballooning round his ankles, he heard the first sharp cries from above—
gabacho-
accented cries—and he knew it was over. They were coming for him. They’d got hold of America and she’d told them where he was.
Ay, caray!
What a mess! How could he run? Half-crippled, bestrewn with shit—and even now he could feel his guts churning again. And América—where was America?

He mouthed a prayer to the
Virgen Sagrada
and became one with the rocks.

 

 

 

America sat in the shade of the wall-less shelter the
gringos
had built to keep the itinerant job-seekers out of the sun (and coincidentally off the street, out of the post office parking lot and out of sight) and brooded about Cándido. He was too stubborn to think she could help. Too much the boss, the man, the
patrón.
He treated her like a child, a know-nothing, someone who needed to be led by the hand and protected from all the evils of the world. Well, she had news for him: she was no longer a child. Did children bear children? In five months she’d be a mother, and then what? And while this new place terrified her—the whole country, the
gringos
with their superior ways and their almighty dollar and their new clothes and fancy hairdos, the strange customs, the language that was like the incessant braying of a four-legged beast—she was doing what she had to do and she could look out for herself. She could.

After sitting in the corner all day yesterday, afraid to talk to anyone, she’d screwed up her courage this morning and gone straight to the man in charge and told him her name and asked for work. Of course, if he’d been a
gringo
she never would have had the nerve to open her mouth—and he wouldn’t have understood her anyway—but this man was a
campesino
from Oaxaca, in battered jeans and a molded straw hat like the men in Tepoztlán wore, and he used the familiar with her right away and even called her “daughter.”

There must have been fifty or sixty men there at least, and they all stopped talking when she went up to the man from Oaxaca. No one seemed to take notice of her when she was off by herself, hunched beside a stump in the dawn, miserable like the rest of them, but now she felt as if she were onstage. The men were staring at her, every one of them, some openly, some furtively, their eyes ducking for cover beneath the brims of their
sombreros
and baseball caps whenever she looked up. Of all that mob, she was the only woman. And though she felt uneasy under their collective gaze—and nervous too to think that women must not get jobs here if she was the only one—she felt a strange sense of peace as she spoke to the headman in his battered jeans. She didn’t know what it was at first, but then it hit her: all these faces were familiar. Not literally, of course, but they were the faces of her own people, her tribe, the faces she’d grown up with, and that was a comfort in itself.