Imperial (170 page)

MORE WARPED AND CRAWLING THINGS

In science fiction, Mars comes and goes. In Frank Herbert’s
Dune,
whose world is
the landscape beyond pity, the sand that was form absorbed in itself,
George Chaffey’s closest semblance is no careful engineer, but the outcast Paul Atreides, who lives out an exaggeration of Lawrence of Arabia’s tale. Indeed, Herbert’s Martians are not Mexicans, but robed Arabs who fight a guerrilla war against occupiers as cruel and corrupt as stereotyped Turks. Secret pools of water, much of it distilled from human metabolisms, have been decanted into caves beneath the dunes, building up for the distant time when Mars, here called Arrakis, can become green.
And no man ever again shall want for water.
Then Mars will be called Imperial.

But the desert is always present beneath our crops, waiting. That is why the psychologically deepest Marsscape of all is Ray Bradbury’s
Martian Chronicles,
in whose eeriest tale the Third Expedition lands on a Mars which resembles Green Bluff, Illinois. This shows what their home-fantasies were and how cruelly Mars disguised itself.
“Our primary mission is to prevent terrorism and terrorist weapons from entering our country,” El Centro Chief Border Patrol Agent Michael McClafferty said.
But Bradbury’s spacemen, forgetting to obey the primary mission, rush out to fraternize with the enemy, who take on the semblance of lost girlfriends, dead parents, etcetera, and in the night murder them all. The Other, you see, is most dangerous when he studies Northside’s ways and pretends to be one of us. Like the naive spaceman from Earth who cries out at the telepathic Martian woman: “You speak
English!
” we were tricked into believing that Mars was Imperial, but it will never stop being the Valley of Death.
“Our primary mission is to prevent terrorism and terrorist weapons from entering our country,” El Centro Chief Border Patrol Agent Michael McClafferty said.
The club motto is, “The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”

Strange to say, the Martians’ Northsider facade was not entirely a coldblooded ploy; Bradbury describes the manifold ways in which the Martians helplessly change into us, start looking like us, are drawn to us and trapped by our consciousness while at the same time manipulatively becoming what they wish us to be. Meanwhile they euthanize Earth men as incurable psychotics, or shoot them with guns which fire golden stinging bees.

Who then are the Martians? They are Southsiders, and so we can never understand them.

And what is Mars? What could it ever be, but home? Therefore, even though
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
, how can it not come back? In J. G. Ballard’s already-mentioned masterpiece,
The Drought,
we cannot escape the bitter trip from home to the salty sea, then the return a decade later to sand-rounded desiccations of the past, whose few survivors are more grotesque than ever, the final failing of everything being hastened by self-destructive vanities.
It is simply needless to question the supply of water.
Every setting might as well be Salton City, which is to say a place that Ballard refers to as a terminal zone, an abandoned, ugly, dangerous Detritus-ville. Once upon a time, Mars was an alien desert, possessed in fits and starts by exotic beauty. We made it into Calexico and Mexicali.
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.
Now the water is going away again. Ruins remain. In Ballard’s brilliantly bleak characterization of events, human relationships and even personality itself all gradually dry out. I can’t help believing in people.

Chapter 178

RANCHO ROA (2004-2005)

T
he caretaker said, This was one of the first ranches in Mexicali. His name was Leobardo Roa. His wife was named Brenda. And she is still the owner.

When did this ranch come into being?

I don’t know. But it’s more than fifty years old.

So the señora must have been very old.

She’s thirty-five. He passed away.

When did the señor pass away?

Now it’s been eight years actually since he died, the man said. He wore a gun at his hip and a T-shirt that bore the name of an American company. He was old, dark-brownskinned and wiry, and he could carry a crate of oranges on his shoulder as I can carry a book. Every time I saw him, he was just about to give notice and return to his home district, but for the señora’s sake he would remain at Rancho Roa just a month longer. Probably next time I came he would be gone, unfortunately. Each time I came, he was there. He was king of the chirping birds, the palm trees and metal sheds. His name was Natalio Morales Rebolorio.

It was a cattle ranch, he said, all cattle.

How many hectares?

I don’t know for sure, but it’s a big ranch. It starts over here where you see the trees and it continues over there and it keeps on going back. There are probably a thousand orange trees and grapefruit trees. They come from all over, from Tecate, from Tijuana, from all over, to buy them.
³³⁴
Mostly, people who come by come by to pick a bag.

Once when I visited the old man it was January, and a certain buyer had contracted to box up the produce of the entire orchard.—Today I’m waiting for a man who bought everything, he said. He’s bringing his workers to harvest it and take to other places.—Señora Roa still owns it, he reassured me then.—It’s all still in her name; basically, people buy it just for the day.

She must be a very rich lady.

Not really, he said proudly, but . . .

I take care of it for her, he said. The trees, the animals. You see, the goats know me really well. I was just about to let them loose for the day. This one here was born only two days ago. The geese over there are just decorative.

Scraping with his plastic-handled machete, he uncovered more goose eggs under the palm trees.

She comes at two and lays the eggs, he said, and then she hides them.

That little white one over there, he said, that goat is only two months old.

A thousand citrus trees total! Valencias on the right, big moonlike grapefuits on the left, trees like islands in the pale golden grass, these were the treasures of Rancho Roa. He said that the custom was to wait for them to fall and pick up only the fallen. The trees went on and on, to the white horse on the horizon.

The season lasted from November through January; in January they harvested. Another time that I visited him, he said: It’s ending right now. The Valencias are all gone. So the man is supposed to come today to take all the grapefruits and sell them. If not today, he’ll come on Monday.

He said that on a Thursday. I could see that it did not greatly matter when the man would come.

I went with him across a plain of yellow grass, the orchard crowned with its myriad yellow moons. It was cool in the shadows of the grapefruits. The trees grew here and there as they liked.

In Coachella the grapefruit trees stand in straight ranks, I said.

That means they won’t develop as much, said the old man. They should have that much space between them, so that the air gets in, so that they can develop.

Which takes more work, the grapefruits or the oranges?

It’s the same. These orange trees have been here forty years and will be cut down.

And those palms also, he said, they also give fruit. Dates. Approximately fifty kilos per treee. We have eight trees.

In your opinion, did the Garden of Eden look like this?

Oh, yes, yes. This grove of palm trees, when I came here they were really small. But I’ve been watering them. It’s so pretty to walk beneath them. One of them had so much fruit that the limb broke. Oh, if you could have seen them in November! They were so full!

He broke off a branch for me and another for my interpreter, saying: I give branches to people. After two years it will give fruit . . .

Which fruit do you like the best?

I like the Valencias because you can choose them for juice. Of course you make juice from grapefruits also. On the other side of these grapefuits are the navel oranges. For people who just want to eat an orange, the navels are good because they don’t have seeds.

I’ve always liked the way grapefruits look, I said.

Inside the orchard there are some trees where you can get five or even six bags of grapefruit, he said proudly. Last year a man paid twenty thousand pesos for the whole orchard; he came five or six times.

He showed some of his best-bearing trees, and I felt quite happy between the lovely yellow grass and the brilliant yellow grapefruit. Two or three times he ascended a ladder to see how the ripening was coming along.

So the grapefruits that they’ve already picked up off the ground, he said, those they use to feed animals. But the ones they sell in the market, for those they use a ladder and cut them off with scissors and cut them and put into a bag. These fruits here, the goats will come and eat them when I let them out.

Later we will flood this with water, he said. There’s a canal
there,
and we’ll let it in
here
and it will fill up the orchard. It’s not very salty because it comes from the Río Colorado. You have to pay for it; it’s expensive.

How does it work?

I have to tell the man in charge of the canals to open the gate. And when the orchard is full, I go and tell him, and he turns it off.

How many times a year do you do this?

Every month, he said. Once a month. Look at the earth, how it gets. The hot times are coming. And the roots need the wetness. The hardest part is running the water. And the fertilizing. You have to fertilize when the water has already come through. You only fertilize once a year. You fertilize with ammonia. It’s a liquid. You wear gloves and boots. That way the bugs die and the trees live.

Now we were walking once again down the long white shadow-striped avenue of white-limed date trees, and he said: We give the dates away.—Truth to tell, the dates were a trifle hard; Rancho Roa could not compete with the industrial cathedrals of date palms in Coachella.

Citrus trees, as we know from Imperial County, do poorly in saline soils. Unable to believe in a happy future for the Mexicali Valley aquifer, I asked the old man: What is the future of this area?

The life of the trees depends on how well people maintain them, he replied. If a trees is not well maintained it will die.

In his mind, he had answered me accurately and completely. After all, what
was
this area but the pale yellow suns of oranges on the forty-year-old trees? So I asked: Do you think there will be more roads and houses here in the future? Will there be enough water for everybody? Will the city come here?

Yesterday I was talking about this with the señora, he said. Because some trees are dying. I told her that we need to buy more trees so that the orchard doesn’t run out. She agreed. They will send an agricultural engineer who will figure out how many more trees and how much it will cost.

In fifty years, will there still be ranches here or will it all be
maquiladoras
?

I think this ranch will be here in fifty years. The señora has two children, and a couple of days ago a Spaniard came to ask her if she would sell, and she refused because her children will be the owners.

Do you think the Americans are taking control?

I can’t really answer that question. I see a lot of Americans who pass on the way to San Felipe in their cars but they never stop, except for that one Spaniard.

I inferred that while a Spaniard was not quite an American, they were approximately the same.

He came from Chiapas, so I asked him what he thought about Subcomandante Marcos and the new Zapatistas whose doings we had heard about even in America, and he said: I don’t pay much attention. All I want to do is work. I work, work, work. Because if I don’t work, I don’t get money. And if I work, I get money. And that is also my honor. The señora trusts me . . .

He reminded me a trifle of Leonard, the visionary of Salvation Mountain. For each of those two very different men, where he was was everything to him. Leonard’s backyard was some dreamer’s or pensioner’s or outlaw’s, a part-silhouetted silver trailer with rounded corners and a satellite dish, beads of light upon the glamorous pallor of the Salton Sea, a ragged bar of mountains and then glowing orange sky. For Natalio Morales Rebolorio, there was orange fire-shimmering in the reflections of oranges in the brown water of the furrows. Seventy goats and thirty geese accompanied him, not to mention his black dog. He had hens,
not that many now.
He would always give me a cardboard box filled with fruit, which I sometimes presented to the campesinos who were picking squash or watermelon out in the
ejidos;
they grew joyful then. Once I gave Rancho Roa oranges to my favorite desk clerk at the Hotel Chinesca; she, too, was happy.
³³⁵
It was wonderful for me to become in miniature Natalio Morales Rebolorio, the Santa Claus of citrus! Closing my eyes now to remember him, I see him from the back as I follow him down the pathway through the orange trees.

Chapter 179

BROCK FARMS (2004)

B
en Brock was a third-generation asparagus farmer in Holtville. Richard Brogan knew him and said: They used to own a lot of farmland in the central part of the valley. They were really big here in early agriculture. They were the first packing house for asparagus. They were some of the early pioneers going into Mexicali. Lettuce for sure. Not necessarily carrots, I think.

Ben Brock said: In season, Imperial asparagus used to be ninety percent of the crop in the supermarket. That was ten years ago. Now it’s down to five percent.
³³⁶

Yesterday we had to pick, because if we didn’t pick, we were going to lose the product. It cost us eight dollars and ninety cents a field box.