The Tortilla Curtain

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 changedsiz qshe chan. 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