She continued through Mexico, living for a while in the back room of an estate outside Guadalajara, working in the kitchens of a territorial governor. She was surrounded by Indian servants and didn’t go beyond the large wooden doors that divided the kitchens from the dining room. Once, when she heard the sounds of many people in the dining room, she peered through the crack of the door at a large table covered with food, surrounded by elegant women and men. Sometimes the governor came into the kitchen to speak to the chef; Catherine had been there three weeks when the governor saw her for the first time. He pulled aside the Mexican woman who was in charge of the servants and spoke to her as his eyes watched Catherine the whole time. When the conversation was over and the governor was gone, the Mexican woman kept looking at Catherine with concern. The next day the governor came back into the kitchen and smiled at Catherine; he spoke again to the Mexican woman. After that the Mexican woman avoided the governor whenever possible, and the governor began coming back into the kitchens more often. The governor’s wife, a tall thin but not unattractive woman with light hair and a long neck, noticed this pattern as well. She also kept looking at Catherine and had her own conferences with the Mexican woman in charge of the servants. Catherine found herself assigned to chores farther back in the house, until she was confined to the laundry area and then the grounds. The governor developed an intense interest in laundry. He toured his grounds with new enthusiasm. His wife regarded Catherine with frosty resolve. There were more conferences with the Mexican woman, and the other servants watched this spectacle with amusement. Finally the Mexican woman came to Catherine. Go away, she said kindly. It’s not your fauIt, but for your own sake you should leave. Catherine didn’t fully understand all the words but nevertheless grasped the point. The Mexican woman drew Catherine a map of where to go; Catherine had seen it before. The map looked like this: AMERICA. “America,” the Mexican woman said when she handed the map to Catherine. She repeated it until Catherine repeated it back.
She fell in with a caravan of wagons and mules led by a gypsy couple with four small children. The caravan made its way up through Durango and Chihuahua, across the flattest emptiest lands Catherine had ever seen, beneath skies that chattered with starlight, so bright as to pale the luminance of her own eyes. In the lives of the gypsy couple the magic of Catherine’s face was prosaic. The caravans moved five hours in the morning, stopped four hours in the afternoon so the couple and the children could sleep through the heat, and then moved another three hours in the early evening. In the second week rains came, stranding the caravan where it stood for four days. For two months Catherine lived with the gypsies and crossed fourteen hundred miles of Mexico to the northeastern part of Sonora, where they finally came to Mexican Nogales, which stared across the border at Yanqui Nogales. “America,” the gypsy man said to Catherine. “America?” she said. She parted as she had joined them, a stranger after two months. Outside the border crossing she walked up to a man leaning on his truck drinking a beer and said, “America?” pointing at the ground. The man smiled. “America,” he repeated and pointed across the border. “America,” he said again, and opened his empty hand. When she gave him half the gold coins she had left, he looked at them curiously, squinted at her suspiciously, smiled again and shrugged.
That night, in the back of the truck with two men, a boy and an old woman, Catherine rode across the border. She heard a discussion between the driver and the border guard, the talk was good-natured and friendly and there was laughter between them. There was a protracted moment of silence, during which Catherine understood the surreptitiousness of her journey. The old woman was watching her, and one of the two men raised his finger to his lips. They waited in the dark. One man made a signal to the other that reminded Catherine of Coba when he used to deal cards, except that in this case it was not cards being deaIt. When the driver and the guard had finished their business there was more laughter, discreet and conspiratorial, and the truck began to move again. After three hours the truck stopped, the driver got out and came around to open the back. The six of them were in the middle of Arizona in a desert not unlike the Mexican desert Catherine had crossed for two months. They looked around them in the dark. “America?” Catherine said to the driver, pointing at the ground. “America,” he said and pointed to the western black. “America,” he said again and rubbed his fingers together. Catherine gave him another coin, and when he continued to hold out his hand, gave him another. He looked at the coins still askance but smiled slightly and shrugged again, and after the others had paid him they all got back in the truck, driving west.
They drove all night. What woke Catherine the next day was not the glimmer of light through the edges of the back flap but the din, unlike any din she’d heard since the river sent her and the sailor roaring through the jungle. When she woke to this din it was ten and a half months since Catherine had left the Crowd, ten and a half months since the day she had watched Coba murder her father. It was nearly beyond memory aItogether. Some hours later, in the early afternoon, the truck came to a stop. Catherine and the other four passengers heard the door of the truck open and close and the footsteps of the driver coming around to the back. He threw the flap open.
The five got out. Catherine got out last.
They were on a hill. Trees were behind them, across the road; they stood on a dirt patch overlooking a basin.
The basin was filled with a city bigger and stranger and more ridiculous than the city she had seen on her one night walking through Bogota. She’d never imagined there could be such a big and strange and silly city. It appeared to her a monstrous seashell curling to its middle, the roof beveled gray and the ridges pink where the clouds edged the sky; and the din was the dull roar of all shells, she remembered the roar, somewhere beyond memory aItogether, from when she was a child, the sound of the sea her father had told her. Coursing through the city were a thousand rivers like the rivers of the jungle, except that these were gray rivers of rock, some of them hurtling into the sky, carrying thousands of the automobiles like the one she had ridden in with the professor and his companion, like the isolated ones she had seen struggling across South American countrysides. From one end of the panorama to the other ran this city, and in the distance was a black line she recognized as the sea. Carved in the side of a mountain was a huge map like the maps of ancient Indians she’d seen on pyramid walls. The huge white map looked like this: HOLLYWOOD. “America?” she said to the driver, unconvinced.
The driver took a beer from the truck and opened it on the door handle. “Not just yet, sister,” he said with a shake of his head; and pointed west. “America.”
“But there’s nothing else out there,” she said in her own language, looking at the sea.
For the next three nights the five new immigrants lived on a mattress beneath the Pasadena Freeway. They were waiting for the moment when the driver of the truck would come and tell them it was finally time to cross into America. Every morning the driver brought them fruit and bread and water. Catherine knew this meant sooner or later the driver was going to want more money. She had one coin left.
The dawn of the first day she found a small white kitten among the trash around them. The kitten was a couple of months old. A mongrel snarled at the kitten as she cowered in an empty tin can; Catherine woke to the sound of it and drove the dog off. Catherine took the kitten in her hand and kept her close to her chest. In this small kitten’s eyes was a familiar glint of refuge Catherine could not place; in fact it was familiar from the reflection in the river of Catherine’s own eyes. It didn’t seem possible a creature so little and new to the world could already have learned to be so desperate, but had she thought about it, Catherine would have realized this was familiar too. When the driver came that day with the fruit and bread and water, Catherine pointed at the kitten. The driver was annoyed; an hour later, however, he returned with a small carton of milk.