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 America, exhausted from her vigil, slept with her head in his lap. He'd suffered a concussion, that much was clear, and his left cheekbone was crushed, staved in like the flesh of a rotting pumpkin. He couldn't see himself-there was no mirror out here in their crude camp-but his fingers told him how ugly his face was. A hard crusted scab ran from his jaw to his hairline, his left eye was swollen shut and his nose was tender to the touch-he must have looked like a fighter on the losing end of a fifteen-round bout or one of those monsters that crawl out of moonlit graves in the movies. But that was all right. He would live. And who cared how ugly he was as long as he could work?
No, his face was nothing-it was the rest of him he was worried about. His left arm didn't seem to want to do anything-it just hung there uselessly in the sling America had made from his shirt-and his hip was bothering him, drilling him with pain every time he got to his feet. He wondered if there was a fracture somewhere in the socket or the ridge of bone above it. Or if he'd torn a ligament or something. Any way you looked at it, he couldn't work, not for the time being-hell; he could barely stand, and that was his bad luck, his stinking _mala suerte__ that had got him robbed at the border and thrown up against the bumper of some rich man's car. But if he couldn't work, how would they eat?
And then the thing happened that he didn't want to happen, the thing he'd been dreading: America got up at first light on the fourth day after the accident and tried to slip off up the hill before he'd aroused himself. It was some sixth sense that made him wake when he did-she was silent as a cat, so he couldn't have heard her. She stood off a bit in the mist, insubstantial in the pale rinsed-out light, and he saw her arms go up over her head as she shrugged into her dress, the good one, the one with the blue flowers against the beige background that she wore when she wanted to make a good impression. But oh, she was silent, pantomiming the motions of a woman getting dressed. _“¿Adónde vas, mi vida?”__ he said. “Where are you going, my love?”
“Hush,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
The dew lay heavy on the blanket, on his shirt and the sling that cradled his arm. The day breathed in and out, just once, and then he repeated himself: “I said, where are you going? Don't make me ask again.”
“Nowhere. Don't trouble yourself.”
“You haven't started the fire,” he said.
No answer. The mist, the trees, the birds. He heard the sound of the creek running beneath its mats of algae to the sea, and in the background, the faint automotive hum of the first commuters coming down the canyon to work. A crow called out just behind them, harsh and immediate. And then she was there, kneeling before him on the blanket, her face fresh-scrubbed, hair brushed, in her good dress. “Cándido, _queridotan Q _quer,__ listen,” she said, milking his eyes, “I'm going up the road to the labor exchange to see if I can't… see if I might… find something.”__
_Find something.__ It was a slap in the face. What was she saying-that he was useless, impotent, an old man fit for the rocking chair? _Viejo,__ his friends called him because of the gray in his hair, though he was only thirty-three, and it was like a prophecy. What good was he? He'd taken America from her father so they could have a better life, so they could live in the North, where it was green and lush the year round and the avocados rotted on the ground, and everyone, even the poorest, had a house, a car and a TV-and now he couldn't even put food in her mouth. Worse: _she__ was going to earn _his__ keep.
“No,” he said, and his tone was final, clamped round the harshness of the negative like a set of pliers, “I won't have it. I didn't want you to go out the other day on that wild-goose chase just because some woman gave you a tip-and you got yourself lost, didn't you? Admit it. You were nearly separated from me-forever-and how would you expect me to find you, eh? How?”
“I'm not going to the city,” she said quietly. “Just to the exchange. Just up the street.”
He considered that scenario-his wife, a barefoot girl from the country who didn't know a thing about the world, out there among all those men, those lowlifes who'd do anything for a buck-or a woman-and he didn't like it. He knew them. Street bums who couldn't keep their hands in their pockets, sweaty _campesinos__ from Guerrero and Chiapas who'd grown up abusing their livestock, _indios__ from Guatemala and Honduras: coochie-coochie and hey baby and then the kissing noises. At least in the garment trade she'd be among other women-but up there, at the labor exchange, she'd be like a pot of honey with a hundred bees swarming round her.