T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

As tired as she was, as tentative and unsettled, she couldn't help being fascinated by the spectacle-and by the women especially. She watched them covertly, women her own age and maybe a little older, dressed like _gringas__ in high heels and stockings, watched to see what they were wearing and how they did their hair and makeup. There were older women too, in _rebozos__ and colorless dresses, _niños__ hurtling by on skateboards, workingmen ambling past in groups of three or four, their eyes fixed on some distant unattainable vision way out ahead of them in the haze of the endless boulevard. And the traffic-it wasn't like the traffic on the canyon road at all. Here it moved in a stately slow procession from light to light, every kind of car imaginable, from low-riders to Jaguars to battered old Fords and Chevies and VW buses and tiny silver cars that flashed by like fishes schooling in the sea. After all those weeks of deprivation, those weeks when she had nothing to look at but le stby lio Javes and more leaves, the city was like a movie playing before her eyes.

The second fifteen minutes were no problem either, though there was more of an edge to them, a hard hot little prick of anxiety that underscored the passing of each separate sixty-second interval. _Where is Cándido?__ was a thought that began to intrude on her consciousness, and its variant, _What's keeping him?__ Still, she was glad to be there sitting on that wall, glad to be out of that nightmare of leaves, and she was content, or nearly content. The people were amusing. The cars were brilliant. If she wasn't feeling nauseous and if her feet weren't blistered and if she knew where she was going to sleep tonight and if she had something to chew on-anything, a slice of bread, a cold _tortilla__-this waiting would be nothing, nothing at all.

There was a clock in the window of the appliance-repair shop across the way, and as the big illuminated pointer began to intrude on the third quarter of the hour, she realized that her nausea had begun to feature the brief powerful constrictions of hunger. She looked down at her feet and saw that they were swollen against the straps of her sandals (which she'd loosened twice already), and suddenly she felt so tired she wanted to lie back on the hard concrete wall and close her eyes, just for a minute. But she couldn't do that, of course-that's what bums did, street people, _vagos, mendigos.__ Still, the thought of it, of lying back for just a minute, made her see the bed then, the promissory bed at the _chicano's__ aunt's house, and that made her think of Cándido, and where was he?

During the final quarter hour a man in stained clothes appeared out of nowhere and sat beside her on the wall. He was old, with a goat's beard and eyes that jumped out at her from behind a pair of glasses held together with a piece of frayed black tape. She smelled him before she turned round and saw him there, not twelve inches from her. She'd been watching two girls in jeans and heels, with black lingerie tops and hair starched up high with spray, and suddenly the wind shifted and she thought she was back in the dump at Tijuana. The old man reeked of urine, vomit, his own shit, and his clothes-three or four shirts and a long coat and what looked to be at least two pairs of pants-were as saturated in natural oils as a plantain in a frying pan. He didn't look at her, didn't speak to her, though he was holding a conversation with someone only he could see, his voice falling. away to nothing and then cresting like a wave, his Spanish so twisted and his dialect so odd she could only pick up snatches of a phrase here and there. He seemed to be talking to his mother-to the memory of his mother, the ghost, the faint outline of her pressed into the eidetic plate of his brain-and there was a real urgency in the garbled message he had for her. His voice went on and on. América edged away. By the time the illuminated pointer touched the hour, he was gone.

Then it was the second hour and she was lost and abandoned. The sun was setting, the sky streaked with dying light, the storefronts trembling with a watery silver glow like puddles stood on end all up and down the street. There were fewer people on the sidewalks now, and America no longer found them amusing or even interesting. She wanted Cándido to come back, that was all, and what if he'd had an accident? What if he was hurt? What if _La Migra__ had snatched him? For the first time since she'd sat herself down on that wall, the reality of her situation hit her: she had no money, knew no one, couldn't even find her way back to that miserable pile of sticks in the canyon. What if Cándido never came back, what if he'd died of a heart attack or got hit by another car? What then?

After an hour and a half had gone by and there was still no sign of him, América pushed herself up from the wall and started down the street in the direction he'd taken with the _chicano,__ turning to look over her shoulder every few steps to see if by some miracle he might have come back to the wall from another direction. She passed antique stores, gloomy depthless places full of old gloomy furniture; a store that sold fish in every color swimming in water so pure it was like air; a closed and shuttered luncheonette; an auto-parts store that was a hub of activity. It was here, just past the auto-parts store, that she turned left, following Cándido's lead, and found herself on a side street, but a busy one, cars hurtling by against a yellow light, springs rattling, tires squealing. She saw groups of men in the lot out back of the auto-parts store, _gringos__ and _Latinos__ alike, the sprawl of their cars, hoods up, engines running, the music pounding from their stereos till the pavement shook with it. They hardly gave her a glance, and she was too timid, too afraid to ask them if they'd seen Cándido, her husband, her lost husband, and that other man. Then there was a bookstore, a few more storefronts, and the street turned residential.

It was getting dark. Streetlights blinked on. The windows of the houses had begun to glow softly against the shadowy shrubs, the flowers drained of color, the bougainvillea and wisteria gone gray in the fading light. She didn't see Cándido anywhere. Not a trace of him. The baby moved inside her and her stomach dipped and fluttered. All she wanted was to belong in one of those houses, any of them, even for a night. The people who lived in those houses had beds to stretch out on, they had toilets that flushed and hot and cold running water, and most important of all, they were home, in their own private space, safe from the world. And where was Cándido? Where was the room he'd promised her, the bed, the shower? This was shitty, really shitty. Worse than her father's house, a hundred times worse. She was a fool to have left, a fool to have listened to the stories, watched the movies, read the _novelas,__ and more of a fool to ever for a second have envied the married girls in Tepoztlán whose husbands gave them so much when they came home from the North. Clothes, jewelry, a new TV-that wasn't what you got. You got this. You got streets and bums and burning pee.

Finally, after she'd searched even the side streets off of the side street, she went back to the wall in front of the post office. She didn't know what had happened to Cándido-she was afraid even to think about it-but this was where he would look for her, and she would just have to sit here and be patient, that was all. But now it was fully dark, now it was night, and the foot traffic had begun to pick up again-teenagers in groups, men in their twenties and thirties, out on the prowl. There was no one to protect her, no one to care. All she could see was the image of those animals at the border, the half-a-_gringo__ and his evil eyes and filthy insinuating fingers, the fat white man with his fat white hands, and she withdrew into herself, dwelled there deep inside where nobody could touch her. “Hey, baby,” they called when they saw her there trying to melt into the darkness, “hey, _ruca,__ hey, sexy, _¿quieres joder conmigo?”__