Estella feels the crushing weight on her chest. The second of Turrón’s companions has helpfully knelt on her while Turrón spreads her legs with his boots and folds his mirrored sunglasses into his pocket. She has been kissed by only one man before. Not that you could call this mashing of mouths a kiss. The cowboy had kissed her hungrily, but Turrón kisses her greedily, like she is a forbidden helping of fruit he knows he’d better take while it’s still on the table. Considering the searing heat, Turrón’s lips are surprisingly wet, his breath sweet and sickly. The cowboy’s lips had been so dry. His fingers always cracked with dirt. Estella had tried to keep the pregnancy from her parents, believing he’d return for her long before they noticed the swelling under her dress. ‘I could take you back home with me,’ the cowboy had said in a moment that meant little to him and everything to her and at the time she had no reason to disbelieve him.

The first time El Turrón hits Estella she tastes the desert. The second time, her front teeth smash against a rock and her mouth fills with blood. Most people don’t really believe they’re going to die. It’s a state just too far removed from anything they are familiar with. So while Turrón grinds her into the ground, Estella hangs on to life and she hangs on to hope. She tries to think of everything she is walking towards but all she can conjure up is her past, those things she has left behind: the dirty faces of the Indian kids under the bridge, the smoke from roasting chickens drifting across the road. The smell of fresh corn. The naked light bulb which dances shadows across the doorway of her mother’s house.

After they’re through with her the Mexicans sift through Estella’s possessions. They take her pendant of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and of course the money – those bills of pesos that are the fuel of border economics, already slashed from the trouser pockets of the men and now ripped from the hem of her dress – but the cowboy’s letter, in which the money is wrapped, the men let fall to the ground. Words and sentences are of no use to them, but to Estella this letter is by far the most valuable thing she owns. It is the key to her future.