The Tortilla Curtain: Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The narration shifts to Cándido’s perspective, and backward in time. Three days after the fire, Cándido returns to the canyon and finds that his apartment fund money has been destroyed; all that remains is “four dollars and thirty-seven cents in coins fused in  hard shapeless knot of plastic.” Sitting in the canyon, devastated, Cándido considers leaving América and Socorro, thinking that, since the police will be looking for him, “the agent of all this destruction,” his wife and daughter would be “better off without him.”

Eventually, Cándido climbs up to the canyon road and busy groceries from the grocery store he usually doesn’t visit—“where they wouldn’t be so sure to recognize him.” Back at the new shelter, América tells Cándido that she wants him to buy her a bus ticket home to Mexico. Cándido thinks: “He wouldn’t let her go. Not if he had to kill her and the baby too and then cut his own worthless throat in the bargain.” When América insists, Cándido dumps the “little bolus of plastic” in her lap “with a brutality that [makes] him hate himself,” and says: “There’s your bus fare.”

The narration shifts to América’s perspective. She has been living in the shack for several days, while Cándido goes out to look for work, waiting for hours outside the post office (since the labor exchange is long gone). América wishes she had someone to “show [Socorro] off to” but she can’t help but wonder: “Who was going to admire her, Socorro, the North American beauty, born with nothing in the land of plenty?”

One day América tells Cándido that she would like to have Socorro baptized somewhere, and her birth registered. Cándido doesn’t respond. When América then asks what Cándido did with Socorro’s umbilical cord, he replies that he buried it along with the placenta. América is devastated by the news; she was hoping to make a pilgrimage to the town of Chalma and leave Socorro’s umbilical cord on a tree there, as a prayer for a happy life. América has to “catch her breath to keep from sobbing with the hopelessness of it.”

The next day, the rains begin and América feels caught between a desire to “get away, even if it [means] bundling up Socorro and walking all the way back to the border” and a persistent sense of hope that “there [is] peace here if only she could find it.” Standing in the rain, América looks down at Socorro and notices that the baby’s eyesight is unfocused. She waves a hand in front of the baby’s face and Socorro does not respond. América realizes with horror that her daughter is blind.

The narration shifts to Cándido’s perspective. He and América have been eating cat meat for several days (though Cándido has told her the meat is rabbit). He has been unable to find work, even though he waits outside the post office for hours. One night América cryptically tells Cándido that Socorro needs to see a doctor. Though he feels frustrated by this, Cándido uses it as motivation as he stands outside the post office the following morning. While there, he realizes that “they would have been flooded out” if they had remained camped in the canyon, and the thought heartens him: “Maybe there [is] a Providence looking out for him after all,” he thinks.

A post office worker comes outside and tells Cándido he has to leave. Cándido asks if the man knows of work he can do “to feed [his] wife and baby” but the man “look[s] at him […] really look[s] at him” and says, in Spanish: “This isn’t a good place for you to be.” Cándido leaves and waits near the lumberyard, hoping of work. After several hours, he gives up and starts walking down the canyon road, “looking for cans to redeem.” As he is walking, a car suddenly swerves onto the shoulder and Delaney jumps out with a look of “pure malice” on his face. Cándido freezes and Delaney shouts, “You stay right there!”