Neither man could claim English as his mother tongue, but it was the only language they shared. The tenant, Antonio Bernal, was from Guatemala. Through the narrow opening of a door pushed slightly ajar, he was speaking to the building manager who was about to evict him from his apartment, a Korean immigrant named Hwang. Both men squinted, each confused by the other's diction, trying to decipher mispronounced words. After several minutes of mumbled exchanges, they began to toss night-school phrases back and forth like life preservers: "Repeat, please." "Speak slower." "I don't understand."

Los Angeles was the problem. In Los Angeles, Antonio could spend days and weeks speaking only his native tongue, breathing, cooking, laughing, and embarrassing himself with all sorts of people in Spanish. He could avoid twisting and bending his lips and mouth to make those exotic English sounds, the hard edge of the consonants, the flat schwa. English belonged to another part of the city, not here, not downtown, where there were broad avenues lined with Chinese pictographs and Arabic calligraphy and Cyrillic, long boulevards of Spanish enes where Antonio could let his Central American ches and erres roll off his tongue to his heart's delight.

"What?" Antonio said.

"I ask what you say?" replied Mr. Hwang, a squat man in khaki pants and a freshly starched shirt.

"I said, How much time? More time. Time, Hwang?"

"What time? Say again."

"Say what again? Time?"

"I don't understand."

Antonio was tired, and his accent felt a little thicker than usual. Mr. Hwang crossed his arms impatiently, as if he suspected that this confusion of tongues was only a stalling tactic, a ruse to postpone the inevitable eviction. Or maybe he was just callous, maybe he didn't care that Antonio had stayed up most of the night worrying about what he would do this morning. Antonio loosened the chain on the door and opened it wide to show Mr. Hwang that the floor of the apartment was littered with clothes and old paperbacks, proof of what he had been unable to communicate with words: he and his roommate were not ready to leave, because they had just begun to pack.

"We are trying, Mr. Hwang," Antonio said slowly. "We are trying."

"If you don't leave by two," the manager blurted out, "I have to call police."

Antonio took a deep breath and tried to compose himself, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, a habit of his at moments when he felt close to violence. They were circle glasses, and when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror he would sometimes remember the day he first put them on, a decade ago, when he was a student at the university in Guatemala. "These are my intellectual glasses," he told a friend once. "I can't decide if they make me look like a chemist or a Maoist. What do you think?" He had kept his circle glasses through all his travels, all the way to Los Angeles, and had worn them at his last job, as a bus boy at a now defunct diner on the Westside. One of the cooks made fun of him and called him "professor." Somehow, the ideas and learning that made him strong in Guatemala had slipped away once he crossed the border, lost in the translation.

Granted, he did not speak English well, but who did? That in itself was not an explanation for what was happening to him today. Spanish was as good a language as any other. In Spanish, I sound like the intelligent person I really am. In English, I am a bus boy. But even that was dignified work. To have lifted dirty dishes, poured coffee, and worn a servant's brown uniform was nothing to be ashamed of. The little brown cap did not demean him, nor did the name tag that had begun to fade after so many months until it read ANT NI.

Voy a ser uno de los "homeless." It did not seem right to him that a man who loved to read, a man with Crimen y Castigo and El Idiota and countless other works of real literature scattered on the floor of his apartment, would be called this ugly work. And at the same time it made perfect sense, the logical conclusion to years of living in this cold, alien country. No Spanish equivalent captured the shame and sooty desperation of the condition, and so this compound, borrowed word would have to do: home-less.

"You are making me homeless," Antonio told the manager.

"If you don't leave," Mr. Hwang said in suddenly perfect English, "I will call the marshals."

Antonio pushed his glasses up again. He really would like to hit this coreano. there would be some satisfaction in that. But no, he could only blame himself for this fiasco, for having failed at the mathematics of his finances. He had decided to be polite to the building manager, apologetic, because he thought he detected a note of regret in Mr. Hwang's voice when he first knocked on the door to say, "You must leave." But now Mr. Hwang was threatening to call the marshals, the police of evictions. To have the police come here and treat me like a criminal. I was a bus boy, but that doesn't make me a criminal. He imagined himself being led away in handcuffs, his arms pulled behind his back, the public indignity of being marched past the neighbors.

"Call the police!" Antonio boomed six inches from the man's face. "Call the police!"

"Thirty minutes!" the manager yelled after taking a step back. "You have thirty minutes!"

"Come mierda!" Antonio shouted. "Hijo de la gran puta."

"Sip sae ki!" the manager hissed in Korean.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: If you are brave enough to travel through the seedier parts of downtown Los Angeles, you can see several of the sites that are the backdrop of my novel: homeless camps in abandoned tunnels, the brick tenements that are home to thousands of Central American immigrants, and the shopping strips that were turned to cinder and ash a few years back. At its root, The Tattooed Soldier is the story of the conflict between the idea of Los Angeles as a place of unlimited freedom and opportunity, and the truth of the poverty and decay that have come to eat away at the very heart of the city. These concerns parallel my own dual life as a native Angeleno with roots in Guatemala. While I was growing up in affluent, ever-optimistic Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, my family in Central America lived under a violent anti-Communist dictatorship. A war was being waged in Guatemala, just one of the many conflicts known collectively as the Cold War, all fought in the name of preserving the Pax Americana. Eventually Los Angeles itself--perhaps the quintessential American city of the Cold War era--paid a price for maintaining the empire. I saw this firsthand when, in the late 1980s, I became a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and ventured into neighborhoods that had been assaulted by recession and the austerity of Reaganomics. Many of these neighborhoods were flooded with war refugees. It was here that I met the people and heard the stories that coalesced into The Tattooed Soldier.

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