The Tortilla Curtain, page 22
Cándido felt his jaws clench. What were they going to do now? If there was no work here anymore and _La Migra__ to make sure of it, he and America would have to leave--either that or starve to death. That meant they'd have to go into the city, down to Santa Monica or Venice, or up over the canyon and into the Valley. That meant living on the streets, exposing America to the obscenity of the handout, the filth, the dumpsters out back of the supermarkets. And they were so close--another couple weeks of steady work and they could have had their apartment, could have established themselves, could have looked for work like human beings, riding the bus in freshly laundered clothes, seeking out the back rooms and sweatshops where nobody cared if you éreáared if yhad documents or not. From there, in a year or two, they could have applied for their green cards--or maybe there would be another amnesty, who could tell? But now it was over. Now there was no more safe haven, no more camp in the woods. Now it was the streets.
In a daze, Cándido drifted away from the group gathered round the pickup, the weight of the news like a stone crushing his chest. Why not kill himself now and get it over with? He couldn't go back to Mexico, a country with forty percent unemployment and a million people a year entering the labor force, a country that was corrupt and bankrupt and so pinched by inflation that the farmers were burning their crops and nobody but the rich had enough to eat. He couldn't go back to his aunt, couldn't live off her again, butt of the entire village, couldn't face América's parents when he gave her back to them like some precious heirloom he'd borrowed and sullied. And he had a son coming, _un hijo,__ the son he'd been yearning for since the day he'd met Resurrección, and what legacy did he have to leave him? Three hundred and twenty dollars in a peanut butter jar? A house of sticks even the prehistoric Indians would have rejected? A broken-down father who couldn't feed himself, let alone his family?
He staggered past the post office, his feet like lead, past the storefronts, the bright windows, the cars lined up like ciphers of the wealth that bloomed all around him, unattainable as the moon. And what was it all about? Work, that was all. The right to work, to have a job, earn your daily bread and a roof over your head. He was a criminal for daring to want it, daring to risk everything for the basic human necessities, and now even those were to be denied him. It stank. It did. These people, these _norteamericanos:__ what gave them the right to all the riches of the world? He looked round him at the bustle in the lot of the Italian market, white faces, high heels, business suits, the, greedy eyes and ravenous mouths. They lived in their glass palaces, with their gates and fences and security systems, they left half-eaten lobsters and beefsteaks on their plates when the rest of the world was starving, spent enough to feed and clothe a whole country on their exercise equipment, their swimming pools and tennis courts and jogging shoes, and all of them, even the poorest, had two cars. Where was the justice in that?
Angry, frustrated,, his face twisted into an expression that would have terrified him if he'd caught sight of himself in one of the windows he passed, Cándido shambled aimlessly through the lot. What should he do? Buy a sack of food and hole up in the canyon for a week until the Immigration lost interest and moved on? Risk hitchhiking the ten miles up into the Valley and stand on a streetcorner in the faint hope of work? Or should he just die on the spot and save the gringos the embarrassment of having to look at him? He was on his second circuit of the lot, drifting past the ranks of cars without purpose or direction, muttering to himself and refusing to look away from the startled eyes that swooped at him in alarm, when he came upon the blue-black Lexus sitting at the curb with the windows rolled down.
He was moving still, moving past it, but he couldn't help noticing the lady's purse on the passenger seat and the black leather briefcase wedged in beside it. What was in that purse--checks, cash, house keys, a little wallet with pictures and more cash? Hundreds of dollars maybe. Hundreds. Enough to take him and América right out of the woods and into an apartment in Canoga Park, enough to solve all his problems in a single stroke. And the briefcase? He imagined it crammed full of bills like in the movies, neat stacks of them bound with little strips of bank paper. To the owner of a car like that a few hundred dollars was nothing, like pennies to an ordinary person. They could just go juáould just to the bank and get more, call their insurance company, flash a credit card. But to Cándido it was the world, and in that moment he figured the world owed him something.
No one was watching him. He glanced right, left, swung round on his heels and strolled past the car again. The blood was like fire in his veins. He thought his head would explode with the pressure in his temples. _There it is, you idiot,__ he told himself, _take it. Take it now. Quick!__
And he might have, suspended in the moment between conception and action, all his glands discharging their complicated loads, but for the woman with the pale blond hair and see-through eyes making straight for him with a styrofoam cup clutched in her white, white hand. He froze. Stood there paralyzed in front of her car while she hid her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses, her heels clicking on the pavement, her skirt as tight as any whore's. She came right for him, and before he could move aside, before he could protest his innocence or fade back into invisibility, he felt the touch of her hand and his fingers closing involuntarily on the coins.
Her touch annihilated him. He'd never been more ashamed in his life, not when he was a drunk in the streets, not when Teófilo Aguadulce took his wife from him and threw him down in the square with the whole village looking on. He hung his head. Let his arms drop to his sides. He stood rooted to the spot for what seemed like hours after she'd ducked into the car, backed out of the lot and vanished, and only then did he open his hand on the two quarters and the dime that clung there as if they'd been seared into the flesh.
When she heard the news--“They closed down the labor exchange,” Cándido told her, his eyes defiant, spoiling for a fight--America had to struggle to keep a neutral face. She felt relief, joy, a surge of hope like nothing she'd experienced since the night she lay in bed at her father's house waiting for Cándido to tap at the window and take her away to the North. Finally, she thought, letting the breath escape her in a long exhalation that Cándido would have taken for grief. She kept her features rigid, let the hair fall across her face. Cándido was bitter, angry, ready to erupt. He was worried too, she could see that, and for a moment she felt the uncertainty take hold of her and she was scared. But then it came back to her: there was no choice now, no doubt but that they were going to have to leave this prison of trees, this dirt heap where she'd been robbed and hurt and brutalized, where the days crept by like the eternal years. She had no love for this place. Insects bit her. The ground was hard. Every time she wanted a cup of coffee she had to gather twigs and start a fire. What kind of life was that? She'd have been better off in Morelos, in her father's house, waiting on him like a servant till she was an old maid dried up like a fig.
“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, 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.
