Good People

Oftentimes, we like to think of ourselves as Good people¹. Even the cruelest among us thinks that in their own set of corrupt moral standards, they’re in the right. More often than not, though, whatever our guidelines for Good/Bad behavior, we navigate day-to-day life without major stress tests against them. We don’t hurt anyone by buying groceries; we don’t go against our moral principles by driving our kids to school. We’re all nice people, basically.

In T.C. Boyle’s “The Tortilla Curtain”, we meet two characters whose capacity for Good gets tested, yielding different outcomes in our interpretation of the characters. First, there’s Delaney Mossbacher who upon having misfortune befall him and his family, finds that his flimsy liberalism is, well, flimsy and that when push comes to shove, there’s a violent racist impulse within him. Following the arc of the novel, his moral throughline is one that descends from “Nice” person who is basically non-harmful—earnest environmental conservationist, nature writer, loving stepfather and husband—to outright bigotted maniac who, if not for the too-perfectly-timed mudslide, would have shot one of or all of Cándido, Rincón, or their newborn. A man afforded incredible privilege and comfort falls to the brink of personal morality, seeking to enact murder for unjust vengeance. Delaney certainly had the right for anger and anguish. His family just lost two dogs; they just nearly lost their home to a wildfire; the sense of community safety has been eroding; his car was stolen. All valid reasons to be upset, no doubt. But his anger was misdirected. Aimed at an unwitting victim who caused none of Delaney and his family’s suffering. (Technically, Cándido did cause the wildfire, as Delaney concluded. But Delaney’s conclusion was based not on hard evidence, but rather conjecture founded on racist beliefs. The fact that he was “right” is incidental. And he certainly didn’t have any justification to murder Cándido even he were.) Delaney’s vitriol becomes symbolic in action. Pointed at the idea of Others, fruitless in its ability to effect change

Then there’s Cándido’s moral arc, of which we see someone engage in unjust acts of cruelty, and incredible acts of compassion. He’s at his lowest, undeniably, early on in the novel, in Chapter 6. Cándido and his pregnant wife, Rincón, had just been robbed. All of their meager possessions, canned beans, tortillas, lard, were ransacked by some belligerent boys. On top of that, he was recovering from the car accident, the incident that has left him both unable to work, making him unable to provide for his wife, forcing him to witness his teenage lover go out there into the dangerous streets of Los Angeles unprotected, without knowing anyone nor a spit of English, in hopes of her finding work. The Universe was giving the two of them a big Fuck You. And Cándido was not having it. When Rincón had come back from looking for work, and learned what happened with their stored food, she “threw it all at him, angry, hurt, terrified.” At this point, when Cándido is at a new low—though not the last time God will fuck with him, no he was just getting started—he responds by slapping the young woman, girl, really, hard, asserting his dominance through physical force, perhaps after having no other outlet in which he feels like he wields power. This was particularly evil of him because he demonstrates no empathy for wife. Not only is the abuse just plain wrong on its own, but it’s even more hurtful when we consider how Cándido failed to acknowledge the girl’s suffering. Here she was, 17 years old, married to a man in his early thirties, someone who was suppose to get her out her small village in Mexico, hungry, afraid, in a foreign country where no one respects you nor speaks your language and your days are spent looking for whatever scraps of labor you can find, little to no joy in the movement of day to day life. And the small amount of food and items they had, even her little dress, was all ruined. It’s super fucked up. And the man, her man, responds like that?

Yet Cándido’s moral appraisement doesn’t stop there, for the novel was barely a third of the way through. The man had more to prove, and later on, we empathize with him. Not because of his violent tendencies, but rather for his earnest desperation to find steady work, to be able to provide for his family. Say what you want about this man, but with his back against the wall, he tried his fucking hardest to secure a stable home for wife and future child. That deserves some praise.But it’s not until the very end of the book that us readers get to see Cándido’s true character. He and his wife had their life turned up, again. On Thanksgiving night, the two lucked into a turkey that two guys in the supermarket gifted Cándido. From there on out, their luck went down the drain. While roasting the surprise gift, an accident brush fire starts and their whole encampment and the surrounding area goes ablaze. Fuck. The two have to escape this uncontrollable blaze while Rincón’s belly is the size of a watermelon, her being nine months pregnant. They try their best to scale the canyons, slowed down, understandably, by Rincón’s immense belly and after getting some distance, though certainly not enough for any standard of safety, her water breaks and she begins the divine act. The two are on a hill being consumed by a great fire hurtling directly towards them. Thankfully, they manage to find a large utility shed located on the back of a residential community. In this dark shed, lit up just by a candle lamp, at risk of being consumed by the wildfire at any moment, Rincón gives birth to their first child. Fast forward a bit and the wildfire, through another act of luck, is blown towards a different direction by the Deus ex machina wind. Good for them. They could catch their breath. But now they had another problem. Where were they going to live? Their encampment was ruined, and later on they learn that the roughly $500 they’ve saved up for an apartment was melted by the flame. (They secured the money inside a peanut butter jar and dug it beneath a rock. They didn’t have the time to take it with them when the fire broke out. And when Cándido went back to retrieve it a few days after the fire, he saw that it was all melted.) Cándido constructs a makeshift-home using pallets and other materials he steals from the residents in the community. They’re temporarily housed behind the gated community. All is fine and dandy, well, as fine as things can be all things considered. A few days later, while Cándido is about to cross the street a car comes right at him, almost hitting him. A rainstorm was brewing and he realized it was the same car that hit him in the beginning of the novel. The car was driven by Delaney. When Delaney confronts him, Cándido gets saved by angry drivers who screamed at Delaney for blocking the road. Cándido slips away as Delaney has to deal with the angry drivers. His car gets hit and he had to walk home. But the night was young and the hunt was not over. He walks home and gets a gun, deciding to end the life of this Mexican who, apparently, caused him great suffering. Delaney eventually finds the makeshift shed and opens the door, readying to fire at, to his surprise, a man who has a wife and a baby (?). But before Delaney is given the choice of finishing his objective, all hell breaks loose and the ground starts moving beneath the four of them, the shed collapses, and these strangers, linked by unfortunate circumstances, slide down the canyon in an incredibly timed mudslide. As they get towards the bottom, Cándido loses his grip and falls into a river barrelling with immense power. He’s nearly about to drown when a hand, his wife’s, saves him by pulling him off the running water and onto the roof of a post office building. Sadly, in the chaos, the baby was lost and it was just the two of them again, alone, afraid, mourning the loss of a life they’ve just created. It was in this moment of incredible, and I mean incredible, suffering and despair and anger (I’d be pissed off at the universe, at God, at whomever for the way things turned out) that Cándido elects to tap into something inside of a him, a deep capacity to forgive, to Love. For in the closing line of the book, Cándido grabs the white hand of the man who was drowning in the same river he nearly lost his life in. The white hand of the man who nearly killed him and/or his family if not for the opportune mudslide. The white hand of the man who not only perfectly damaged and disfigured him with the initial car accident, but also hounded him for reasons that Cándido could never know. That man. That man, who in Cándido’s eyes is nothing more than an angry racist pig with a vengeance. That man is the guy who Cándido elects to save. Even when given the choice not to. Delaney could have drowned and many would have said “Good Riddance”. Cándido wasn’t going to be held accountable for the man’s death. Nope. Part of the accident. An unfortunate death caused by the mudslide. Cándido had nothing to risk by letting Delaney go on. And yet, despite that. Despite the justifiable anger he may have felt towards Delaney et al, and the sudden deluge of sadness and despair that must have befallen both Cándido and his wife for having lost their newborn, Cándido saves him. He closes the book with an undeniable act of Good. That’s Good People. For sure.