The Tortilla Curtain

narrow-shouldered houses of the millionaires growing up like mushrooms out of the sand--but the address the Guatemalan woman had given her was worth nothing. All the way there, all, the way out in the alien world, a bad neighborhood, drunks in the street, and the building was boarded up, deserted, no back entrance, no sewing machines, no hard-faced boss to stand over her and watch her sw Th Qatch hereat at three dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, no nothing. She checked the address twice, three times, and then she turned round to retrace her steps and found that the streets had shuffled themselves in the interim, and she knew she was lost.
    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 shoe g Qa magic w, 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