The Tortilla Curtain Read Online Free PDF Page A

the birds, and he didn't know where he was. He had no recollection of what had happened to him--nothing, not a glimmer--but he knew that he hurt, hurt all over. He staggered up from the damp blanket and pissed weakly against a rock, and that hurt too. His face was crusted. His urine was red. He stood there a long while, shaking his prick and watching the leaves of the tree above him emerge incrementally from the mist. Then he felt dizzy and went back to lay himself down on the blanket in the sand.
    When he woke again, the mist had burned off and the sun stood directly overhead. There was a woman beside him, black eyes bleeding through a wide Indian face framed in blacker hair, and she looked familiar, terrifically familiar, as familiar as the _huaraches__ on his feet. “What's my name?” she asked, her face leaning anxiously into his. “Who are you? Do you know where you are?”
    He knew the language and the voice, its rhythms and inflections, and he understood the questions perfectly. The only problem was, he couldn't answer them. Who was she? He knew her, of course he did, but no name came readily to his lips. And what was even stranger was the question of his own identity--how could he not know himself? He began to speak, began to feel the shape of the words on his lips--_Yo soy,__ I am--but it was as if a cloud had suddenly obscured the sun and the words were hidden in darkness. _Where are you?__ That one he could answer, that was easy. “Abroad in the wide world,” he said, grinning suddenly.
    America told him later that he'd been out of his senses for three hours and more, gibbering and raving like one of the inmates of the asylum on Hidalgo Street. He gave a speech to the President of the United States, shouted out snatches of songs popular twenty years ago, spoke in a whisper to his dead mother. He chanted, snarled, sobbed, screeched like a pullet with five fingers clamped round its throat; and finally, exhausted, he'd fallen into a deep trancelike sleep. América was mortified. She cried when he couldn't say her name, cried when he wouldn't wake up, cried through the long morning, the interminable afternoon and the eternal night. He slept on, inanimate as a corpse but for the breath scratching through his ruined nostrils.
    But then, in the heat of the afternoon on the second day, when she'd lost all hope and could think only of forcing her head under the surface of the creek till she drowned herself or leaping from one of the high crags and smashing her body on the rocks below, he surprised her. “América,” he called suddenly--from out of nowhere, from sleep, from the husk he'd become--“are there any of those beans left?”
    And that was that. The fever was gone. He was lucid. He remembered the accident, the _tortillas,__ the twenty dollars the _gabacho__ had given him. And when she came to him with wet cheeks and threw her arms round his neck and sobbed her heart out, he knew everything about her: she was seventeen years old and as perfect and beautiful as an egg in its shell; she was America, hope of the future, his wife, his love, mother-to-be of his first child, the son who was even now taking shape in ts c Q shape ihat secret place inside of her.
    She had to help him to his feet so he could find a spot to relieve himself, and he needed her shoulder to make his way to the blanket again, but at least he was back among the living. After that, he ate--_tortillas__ out of the package, pinto beans, the broth she'd been simmering for two days to keep it from going bad. He ate slowly, thoughtfully, one spoonful at a time, but he kept it down and that was a good sign. Still, the pain never left him--it was sharp and unremitting, like a nerve rubbed raw--and he fought it down with the chalky little tablets of aspirin, chewing them by the handful, his jaws working ruminatively beneath his battered cheekbone.
    For the rest of the afternoon he sat in the shade on the blanket and considered the situation, while