This wasn't just bad luck, this was an ongoing catastrophe, and how long could they survive that? Cándido was the best man in the world, loving and kind and he'd never known the meaning of the word “lazy” in his life, but everything he did turned out wrong. There was no life for her here, no little house, no bathroom with its gleaming faucets and bright white commode like the bathroom in the _guatón's__ big astonishing mansion. It was time to give it up, time to go back to Tepoztlán and beg her father to take her back. She had her daughter now and her daughter was a North American, a citizen of Los _Estados Unidos,__ and she could come back when she was grown and claim her birthright. But then, how would anyone know? Didn't they have to record the birth in the village or the church? But what village, what church?
“Cándido, what about the baby?” she said one night as they sat before the hearth he'd constructed of cement blocks, laying sticks on the fire while water boiled in the pot. It was raining, a soft discontinuous patter on the plastic roof, and she was lying snug atop the sacks of grass seed, wrapped in the blanket. Cándido had been gone all day, scouring the roadside for cans and bottles to redeem in the machine outside the Chinese store, and he'd come home with sugar, coffee and rice.
“What about her?” he said.
“We have to register her birth with the priest-she was born here, but who's going to know that?”
He was silent, squatting over his haunches, breaking up sticks to feed the fire. He'd managed to make the place comfortable for her, she had to give him that. The slats between the pallets had been stuffed with rags and newspaper for insulation, and with a fire even on the coldest days she was warm. And he'd got water for them too, spending a whole night digging a trench up the hill and tapping into the development's sprinkler system, cutting the pipe and running joined lengths of it all the way to their little invisible house, and then he'd buried it and hidden his traces so well no one would ever suspect. “What priest?” he said finally.
She shrugged. Socorro lay sleeping at her breast. “I don't know-the village priest.”
“What village?”
“I want to go home. I hate this place. I hate it.”
Cándido was silent a moment, his face like a withered fruit. “We could walk into Canoga Park again, if you think you're up to it,” he said finally. “They must have a priest there. He would know what to do. At least he could baptize her.”
She dreaded the idea after her last experience, but just the mention of the name-Canoga Park-made her see the shops again, the girls on the street, the little restaurant that was like a café back at home. Somebody there would know what to do, somebody would help. “It's awfully far,” she said.
He said nothing. He was staring into the fire, his lips pursed, hands clasped in his lap.
“What did you do with the cord?” she said after a moment.
“Cord? What cord?”
“You know, the baby's cord. The umbilical.”
“I buried it. Along with the rest. What do you think?”
“I wanted that cord. For Chalma. I wanted to make a pilgrimage and hang it in the tree and pray to the Virgin to give Socorro a long and happy life.” And she saw the tree in her mind, the great ancient ahuehuete tree beside the road, with the crowds of pilgrims around it and the vendors and the hundreds upon hundreds of dried birth cords hanging from the branches like confetti. Socorro would never know that tree; she'd never be blessed. América had to catch her breath to keep from sobbing with the hopelessness of it. “I hate it here,” she whispered. “God, how I hate it.”
Cándido didn't answer. He made coffee with sugar and condensed milk and they drank it out of _frijole__ cans, and then he cut up an onion, some _chiles__ and a tomato and cooked the rice, and she wouldn't get up, wouldn't help him, even if he'd tried to force her.
It rained the next day too, all day, and when she went out to relieve herself and bury the baby's diaper, the earth was like glue. For all this time it had been powder and now it was glue. She stood there in the rain, looking out over the misted canyon, the roofs of the houses, the barren scar of Cándido's fire, and the rain smelled good, smelled of release and reprieve-smelled, ever so faintly, of home. She had to get away, even if it meant bundling up Socorro and walking all the way back to the border, and if she starved along the way, then that was God's will.
It was dark inside, dark as a hole in the ground, and when the rain slackened to a drizzle, she brought the baby outside for a breath of air. Sitting there high on the hillside, watching the clouds roll out over the canyon all the way to the sea and the cars creep like toys up the slick canyon road, she felt better. This was America and it was a beautiful place, drier and hotter than Tepoztlán in the dry season and colder in the wet, but she felt that there was peace here if only she could find it. Peace and prosperity too.
She looked down then into her daughter's face and the baby was staring past her, staring up and away into a distance she couldn't possibly contain, and it was in that moment that America felt the naked sharp claws of apprehension take hold bf her. She passed a hand over her daughter's face and her daughter didn't blink. She bent her own face to Socorro's and tugged at those dull black irises with her own and they only stared, as if there were a wall between them. And then the baby blinked and sneezed and the eyes stared at nothing.
Cándido told her they were eating rabbit, but rabbit was hard to come by up here. Those other little four-legged beasts, the ones with the bells on their collars to warn away the birds, they were easier to catch. All you had to do was wait till midnight, slip over the wall and whisper, “Kitty, here, kitty.” So they ate meat, even if it tasted stringy and sour, and they ate kibble and rice and whatever fruits and vegetables he dared to take. They had water. They had heat. They had a roof over their heads. But it was all a stopgap, a delaying action, a putting off of the inevitable. He'd stared so long and so hard at that strip of road out front of the post office, waiting for the apparition of Señor Willis's Corvair, that it wasn't a real place anymore, but a scene he'd devised in his brain-if he blinked, it wouldn't exist. There were no braceros there, not a one, and the word must have been out. Cándido didn't dare show himself and if he didn't show himself how could he get work? And if he couldn't get work, no matter how many things he borrowed from the houses beyond the wall or how many cans he collected in the bushes, sooner or later they would starve. If only he could call Señor Willis, but Señor Willis didn't have a phone. He could go back to Canoga Park, but there was no work there, he knew that already, and a hundred men ready to kill for whatever work might turn up. A little money, that was all he needed-with a little money he might think about going back to Tepoztlán, at least for the winter. His aunt might take them in, and he could always make charcoal, but América-he'd boasted to her, he'd promised her things-America would certainly leave him then, mewed up behind the gate at her father's house till she was a hag scrubbing the floors and Socorro was married off to some _chingado__ her old man owed money to.