The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  By lunchtime, she could taste the panic in the back of her throat. For the first time in four months, for the first time since they’d left the South and her village and everything she knew in the world, she was separated from Cándido. She walked in circles .and everything looked strange, even when she’d seen it twice, three times over. She didn’t speak the language. Black people sauntered up the street with plastic grocery bags dangling from their wrists. She stepped in dog excrement. A gabacho sat on the sidewalk with his long hair and begged for change and the sight of him struck her with unholy terror: if he had to beg in his own country, what chance was there for her? But she held on to her six little silvery coins and finally a woman with the chilango accent of Mexico City helped her find the bus.

  She had to walk back up the canyon in the bleak light of the declining day while the cars swished by her in a lethal hissing chain, and in every one a pair of eyes that screamed, Get out, get out of here and go back where you belong!—and how long before one of them tore up the dirt in front of her and the police were standing there demanding her papers? She hurried along, head down, shoulders thrust forward, and when the strip of pavement at the side of the road narrowed to six inches she had to climb over the guardrail and plow through the brush.

  Sweat stung her eyes. Burrs and thorns and the smooth hard daggers of the foxtails bit into every step. She couldn’t see where she was going. She worried about snakes, spiders, turning her ankle in a ditch. And then the cars began to switch on their lights and she was alone on a terrible howling stage, caught there for everyone to see. Her clothes were soaked through by the time the entrance to the path came into sight, and she ran the last hundred yards, ran for the cover of the brush while the cold beams of light hunted her down, and she had to crouch there in the bushes till her breath came back to her.

  The shadows deepened. Birds called to one another. Swish, swish, swish, the cars shot by, no more than ten feet away. Any one of them could stop, any one. She listened to the cars and to the air rasping through her lips, to the hiss of the tires and the metallic whine of the engines straining against the grade. It went on for a long time, forever, and the sky grew darker. Finally, when she was sure no one was following her, she started down the path, letting the trees and the shrubs and the warm breath of the night calm her, hungry now—ravenous—and so thirsty she could drink up the whole streambed, whether Cándido thought the water was safe or not.

  At first, the thing in the path wasn’t anything to concern her—a shape, a concert of shades, light and dark—and then it was a rock, a pile of laundry, and finally, a man, her man, sleeping there in the dirt. Her first thought was that he was drunk—he’d got work and he’d been drinking, drinking cold beer and wine while she struggled through the nine circles of Hell—and she felt the rage come up in her. No lunch—she hadn’t had a bite since dawn, and then it was only a burned tortilla and an egg—and nothing to drink even, not so much as a sip of water. What did he think she was? But then she bent and touched him and she knew that she was in the worst trouble of her life.

  The fire was a little thing, twigs mostly, a few knots the size of a fist, nothing to attract attention. Candido lay on a blanket in the sand beside it, and the flames were like a magic show, snapping and leaping and throwing the tiniest red rockets into the air round a coil of smoke. He was dreaming still, dreaming with his eyes open, images shuffled like cards in a deck till he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. At the moment he was replaying the past, when he was a boy in Tepoztlán, in the south of Mexico, and his father caught an opossum in among the chickens and he hit it with a stick—zas!—just above the eyes. The opossum collapsed like a sack of cloth and it lay there, white in the face and with the naked feet and tail of a giant rat, stunned and twitching. That was how he felt now, just like that opossum. The pressure in his head had spread to his chest, his groin, his limbs—to every last flayed fiber of his body—and he had to close his eyes against the agonizing snap and roar of the fire. They skinned the opossum and they ate it in a stew with hominy and onions. He could taste it even now, even here in the North with his body crushed and bleeding and the fire roaring in his ears—rat, that’s what it tasted like, wet rat.

  América was cooking something over the fire. Broth. Meat broth. She’d laid him here on the blanket and he’d given her the crumpled bill he’d earned in the hardest way any man could imagine, in the way that would kill him, and she’d gone up the hill to the near store, the one run by the suspicious Chinamen or Koreans or whatever they were, and she’d bought a stew bone with a ragged collar of beef on it, a big plastic bottle of aspirin, rubbing alcohol, a can of gabacho-colored Band-Aids and, best of all, a pint of brandy, E & J, to deaden the pain and keep the dreams at bay.

  It wasn’t working.

  The pain was like the central core of that fire, radiating out in every direction, and the dreams—well, now he saw his mother, dead of something, dead of whatever. He was six years old and he thought he’d killed her himself—because he wasn’t good enough, because he didn’t say his “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” and because he fell asleep in church and didn’t help with the housework. There was no refrigeration in Tepoztlán, no draining of the blood and pumping in of chemicals, just meat, dead meat. They sealed the coffin in glass because of the smell. He remembered it, huge and awful, like some ship from an ancient sea, set up on two chairs in the middle of the room. And he remembered how he sat up with her long after his father and his sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and their compadres had fallen asleep, and how he’d talked to her through the glass. Her face was like something chipped out of stone. She was in her best dress and her crucifix hung limp at her throat. Mamá, he whispered, I want you to take me with you, I don’t want to stay here without you, I want to die and go to the angels too, and then her dead eyes flashed open on him and her dead lips said, Go to the devil, mijo.

  “Can you drink this?”

  America was kneeling beside him and she held an old styrofoam coffee cup to his lips. The smell of meat was strong in his nostrils. It nauseated him and he pushed her hand away.

  “You need a doctor. Your face ... and here”—she pointed to his hip, then his arm, a gentle touch, the rag soaked in alcohol—“and here.”

  He didn’t need a doctor. He didn’t need to put himself in their hands—his bones would knit, his flesh would heal. What would he say to them? How would he pay? And then when they were done with him, the man from La Migra—the Immigration—would be standing there with his twenty questions and his clipboard. No, he didn’t need a doctor.

  The firelight took hold of America’s face and she looked old suddenly, older than the girl she was, the girl who’d come to the North with him though she’d never in her life been farther than the next village over, older than his grandmother and her grandmother and any woman that had ever lived in this country or any other. “You have to go to the doctor,” she whispered, and the fire snapped and the stars howled over the roof of the canyon. “I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid?” he echoed, and he reached out to stroke her hand. “Of what? I’m not going to die,” he said, but even as he said it, he wasn’t so sure.

  In the morning, he felt worse—if that was possible. He woke to fog and the inquisition of the birds, and he didn’t know where he was. He had no recollection of what had happened to him—nothing, not a glimmer—but he knew that he hurt, hurt all over. He staggered up from the damp blanket and pissed weakly against a rock, and that hurt too. His face was crusted. His urine was red. He stood there a long while, shaking his prick and watching the leaves of the tree above him emerge incrementally from the mist. Then he felt dizzy and went back to lay himself down on the blanket in the sand.

  When he woke again, the mist had burned off and the sun stood directly overhead. There was a woman beside him, black eyes bleeding through a wide Indian face framed in blacker hair, and she looked familiar, terrifically familiar, as familiar as the huaraches on his feet. �
�What’s my name?” she asked, her face leaning anxiously into his. “Who are you? Do you know where you are?”

  He knew the language and the voice, its rhythms and inflections, and he understood the questions perfectly. The only problem was, he couldn’t answer them. Who was she? He knew her, of course he did, but no name came readily to his lips. And what was even stranger was the question of his own identity—how could he not know himself ? He began to speak, began to feel the shape of the words on his lips—Yo soy, I am—but it was as if a cloud had suddenly obscured the sun and the words were hidden in darkness. Where are you? That one he could answer, that was easy. “Abroad in the wide world,” he said, grinning suddenly.

  America told him later that he’d been out of his senses for three hours and more, gibbering and raving like one of the inmates of the asylum on Hidalgo Street. He gave a speech to the President of the United States, shouted out snatches of songs popular twenty years ago, spoke in a whisper to his dead mother. He chanted, snarled, sobbed, screeched like a pullet with five fingers clamped round its throat; and finally, exhausted, he’d fallen into a deep trancelike sleep. América was mortified. She cried when he couldn’t say her name, cried when he wouldn’t wake up, cried through the long morning, the interminable afternoon and the eternal night. He slept on, inanimate as a corpse but for the breath scratching through his ruined nostrils.

  But then, in the heat of the afternoon on the second day, when she’d lost all hope and could think only of forcing her head under the surface of the creek till she drowned herself or leaping from one of the high crags and smashing her body on the rocks below, he surprised her. “América,” he called suddenly—from out of nowhere, from sleep, from the husk he’d become—“are there any of those beans left?”

  And that was that. The fever was gone. He was lucid. He remembered the accident, the tortillas, the twenty dollars the gabacho had given him. And when she came to him with wet cheeks and threw her arms round his neck and sobbed her heart out, he knew everything about her: she was seventeen years old and as perfect and beautiful as an egg in its shell; she was America, hope of the future, his wife, his love, mother-to-be of his first child, the son who was even now taking shape in that secret place inside of her.

  She had to help him to his feet so he could find a spot to relieve himself, and he needed her shoulder to make his way to the blanket again, but at least he was back among the living. After that, he ate—tortillas out of the package, pinto beans, the broth she’d been simmering for two days to keep it from going bad. He ate slowly, thoughtfully, one spoonful at a time, but he kept it down and that was a good sign. Still, the pain never left him—it was sharp and unremitting, like a nerve rubbed raw—and he fought it down with the chalky little tablets of aspirin, chewing them by the handful, his jaws working ruminatively beneath his battered cheekbone.

  For the rest of the afternoon he sat in the shade on the blanket and considered the situation, while America, exhausted from her vigil, slept with her head in his lap. He’d suffered a concussion, that much was clear, and his left cheekbone was crushed, staved in like the flesh of a rotting pumpkin. He couldn’t see himself—there was no mirror out here in their crude camp—but his fingers told him how ugly his face was. A hard crusted scab ran from his jaw to his hairline, his left eye was swollen shut and his nose was tender to the touch—he must have looked like a fighter on the losing end of a fifteen-round bout or one of those monsters that crawl out of moonlit graves in the movies. But that was all right. He would live. And who cared how ugly he was as long as he could work?

  No, his face was nothing—it was the rest of him he was worried about. His left arm didn’t seem to want to do anything—it just hung there uselessly in the sling America had made from his shirt—and his hip was bothering him, drilling him with pain every time he got to his feet. He wondered if there was a fracture somewhere in the socket or the ridge of bone above it. Or if he’d torn a ligament or something. Any way you looked at it, he couldn’t work, not for the time being—hell; he could barely stand, and that was his bad luck, his stinking mala suerte that had got him robbed at the border and thrown up against the bumper of some rich man’s car. But if he couldn’t work, how would they eat?

  And then the thing happened that he didn’t want to happen, the thing he’d been dreading: America got up at first light on the fourth day after the accident and tried to slip off up the hill before he’d aroused himself. It was some sixth sense that made him wake when he did—she was silent as a cat, so he couldn’t have heard her. She stood off a bit in the mist, insubstantial in the pale rinsed-out light, and he saw her arms go up over her head as she shrugged into her dress, the good one, the one with the blue flowers against the beige background that she wore when she wanted to make a good impression. But oh, she was silent, pantomiming the motions of a woman getting dressed. “¿Adónde vas, mi vida?” he said. “Where are you going, my love?”

  “Hush,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

  The dew lay heavy on the blanket, on his shirt and the sling that cradled his arm. The day breathed in and out, just once, and then he repeated himself: “I said, where are you going? Don’t make me ask again.”

  “Nowhere. Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “You haven’t started the fire,” he said.

  No answer. The mist, the trees, the birds. He heard the sound of the creek running beneath its mats of algae to the sea, and in the background, the faint automotive hum of the first commuters coming down the canyon to work. A crow called out just behind them, harsh and immediate. And then she was there, kneeling before him on the blanket, her face fresh-scrubbed, hair brushed, in her good dress. “Cándido, querido, listen,” she said, milking his eyes, “I’m going up the road to the labor exchange to see if I can’t ... see if I might ... find something.”

  Find something. It was a slap in the face. What was she saying—that he was useless, impotent, an old man fit for the rocking chair? Viejo, his friends called him because of the gray in his hair, though he was only thirty-three, and it was like a prophecy. What good was he? He’d taken America from her father so they could have a better life, so they could live in the North, where it was green and lush the year round and the avocados rotted on the ground, and everyone, even the poorest, had a house, a car and a TV—and now he couldn’t even put food in her mouth. Worse: she was going to earn his keep.

  “No,” he said, and his tone was final, clamped round the harshness of the negative like a set of pliers, “I won’t have it. I didn’t want you to go out the other day on that wild-goose chase just because some woman gave you a tip—and you got yourself lost, didn’t you? Admit it. You were nearly separated from me—forever—and how would you expect me to find you, eh? How?”

  “I’m not going to the city,” she said quietly. “Just to the exchange. Just up the street.”

  He considered that scenario—his wife, a barefoot girl from the country who didn’t know a thing about the world, out there among all those men, those lowlifes who’d do anything for a buck—or a woman—and he didn’t like it. He knew them. Street bums who couldn’t keep their hands in their pockets, sweaty campesinos from Guerrero and Chiapas who’d grown up abusing their livestock, indios from Guatemala and Honduras: coochie-coochie and hey baby and then the kissing noises. At least in the garment trade she’d be among other women—but up there, at the labor exchange, she’d be like a pot of honey with a hundred bees swarming round her.

  They’d been living in the canyon three weeks now—there was no way he would expose her to life on the streets, to downtown L.A. or even Van Nuys—and though they didn’t have a roof over their heads and nothing was settled, he’d felt happy for the first time since they’d left home. The water was still flowing, the sand was clean and the sky overhead was his, all his, and there was nobody to dispute him for it. He remembered his first trip North, hotbedding in a two-room apartment in Echo Park with thirty-two other men, sleeping in shifts and lining up on the streetc
orner for work, the reek of the place, the roaches and the nits. Down here was different. Down here they were safe from all the filth and sickness of the streets, from la chota—the police—and the Immigration. Twice he’d gotten work, at three dollars an hour, no questions asked—once from a contractor who was putting up a fieldstone wall and then from a rico in a Jaguar who needed a couple of men to clear the brush from a ravine out back of his house. And each morning when he went out looking, not knowing whether he’d be back at noon or after dark, he’d warned America to douse the fire and keep out of sight.

  He hadn’t wanted to frighten her, but he knew what would happen if any of those vagos from above discovered her down here while he was away. It would be just like that girl in the dump at Tijuana. He could see her now, skinny legs, eyes like pits. She was a child, twelve years old, and her parents poor people who were out working all day, sifting through the mountains of trash with broomsticks fitted with a bent nail at one end, and the drunks in the place had come after her. The girl’s parents had a shack made out of wooden pallets nailed together, a surprisingly sturdy little thing set amid a clutter of tumble-down shanties and crude lean-tos, and when they went off in the morning, they padlocked the girl inside. But those animals—they howled outside the door and pounded at the walls to get at her, and nobody did a thing. Nobody except Cándido. Three times he snatched up a length of pipe and drove them away from the shack—junkies, cementeros, bottle suckers—and he could hear the girl sobbing inside. Twelve years old. One afternoon they managed to spring the lock, and by the time Cándido got there, it was all over. The sons of bitches. He knew what they were like, and he vowed he’d never let América out of his sight if he could help it, not till they had a real house in a real neighborhood with laws and respect and human dignity.