The Tortilla Curtain

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