The Tortilla Curtain: Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The narration shifts to Delaney’s perspective. His car having been stolen, Delaney is back at Kenny Grissom’s dealership. Grissom tells Delaney that car theft “happens all the time,” and Delaney thinks: “It happened all the time, but why did it have to happen to him?” He feels he has been “violated, taken, ripped off” and he is frustrated that no one seems to be taking his situation seriously. Even Jack Jardine has “used the occasion to deliver a sermon,” telling Delaney: “We’re under siege here—and there’s going to be a backlash. People are fed up with it. […] You’re fed up with it too, admit it.”

Delaney buys a new car from Kenny and heads to his lunch date with Kyra. When he arrives at the restaurant and has the valet park his car, Delaney realizes that he no longer knows his license plate. He feels he is “losing control.” He heads inside and talks to Kyra about the approval they have recently gotten to raise the height of their fence, so their dogs will be better protected. Delaney wishes he could talk to Kyra about the “stab of racist resentment” he felt when he handed his keys to the Latino parking lot attendant moments earlier, but he feels he can’t.

Kyra and Delaney eat a quick lunch because Kyra needs to leave to close a house. In the parking lot, Kyra says she’d like to take a brief look at Delaney’s car, but the couple is distracted by the sound of a dog barking. Delaney and Kyra realize that someone has left a dog locked in a car. Kyra becomes furious and demands that the parking lot attendant tell her who owns the car. The boy, however, does not speak English, which only frustrates Kyra further. Though Delaney tries to stop her, Kyra storms back into the restaurant and demands that the dog’s owner identify himself. Delaney succeeds in ushering Kyra back outside.

In the parking lot, Delaney comes to think of Kyra as “glorious in her outrage, a saint, a crusader.” For a moment, he forgets about his own “growing sense of confusion and vulnerability.” The dog’s owner appears and Kyra angrily confronts him; the man responds, “Why don’t you just fuck off, lady,” and drives away. Delaney laments the fact that people are “so nasty all the time,” and Kyra responds, “Urban life,” with “a depth of bitterness” that catches Delaney off guard. Before he can respond, Kyra hurries off to her meeting.

Leaving the restaurant, Delaney finds himself, once again, “in a rage.” He decides to go for another hike in the hills, since “the day [is] shot anyway.” Delaney parks his car and gets out to begin his hike but then realizes there is nothing “to stop them from getting this [car] too.” Instead of going for a walk, Delaney hides himself in the bushes; he knows he is being “paranoiac,” but he nevertheless resolves to “sit here through the afternoon, hidden in the bushes, sit here and watch.”

The narration switches to Kyra’s perspective. She is going about her afternoon, stopping in at her office and driving around on other work related errands, when she notices a group of fifty men waiting on the sidewalk, hoping to secure work. She thinks: “There were too many of them here and that was the sort of thing that scared buyers away from the area.” Kyra pulls into the larger grocery store on the street (not the one frequented by Cándido and América). Inside she unproductively questions the cashiers about the men outside.

Back outside, Kyra crosses to the corner where the men are standing and looks around, conscious of the men’s eyes on her. She feels “overwhelmed with anger and disgust and a kind of sinking despair.” She thinks: “Somebody had to do something about these people—they were ubiquitous, prolific as rabbits, and they were death for business.” As Kyra returns to her car one of the men asks her if she wants to hire him but she declines.

Kyra stops home at Arroyo Blanco to see how Al Lopez and his team are doing on the fence. At Al’s suggestion, Kyra agrees to pay more for a wire mesh that will supposedly stop rattlesnakes from entering the yard. While chatting with Al, Kyra spots Cándido, one of the workers; from his limp and his swollen face she recognizes him as the man Delaney hit and she feels “a space open up inside her, a great sad empty space that made her feel as if she’d given birth to something weak and unformed.”

Later in the day, Kyra heads to the Da Ros house to close it for the night. She notices a shopping cart along the side of the road and she drags it out of the ditch. Kyra makes her rounds of the house, musing about how the shopping cart could’ve gotten there. She thinks about the men Delaney told her he saw camping in the canyon and feels panicked that perhaps people are camping on the Da Ros property as well—“How could you explain something like that to a prospective buyer?” she thinks. Just then she notices movement on the lawn and spots two men: José Navidad and his friend. She walks over to confront them without “[thinking] to be afraid.”

Kyra accuses the men of trespassing, but José’s demeanor quickly makes her nervous. When José questions whether Kyra owns the property, she lies and says that she owns it with her husband, and that he and her brother are inside the house making dinner. José insists that he and his friend are “just hike” and Kyra, on edge, replies that it is no problem. Before leaving, José says: “You have a nice day, huh? […] You and your husband. And your brother too.”