Imperial (22 page)

I took two sleeping pills and awoke after a full seven hours, filled with hope from a fairytale dream which resembled one of those paper animals which hang in the doorways of Mexican
dulcerías,
one of those giant garish animals furred with curling paper shavings: I’d paid off all her debts again, thereby solving the only problem. My heart was not yet in extremis. It tried to be resourceful. Just as when toward noon in Imperial one’s patch of shade contracts and the head accordingly sinks down toward the chest, not only out of torpor but also to avoid squinting, so my heart drew in on itself a little, but disbelief still armored it against mortal injury; it could recover as soon as she telephoned or sent me the letter which I absolutely knew was coming. For a moment I lay there planning just how I would earn the money to accomplish this matter of her debts, and the grief crept back, staining my rising consciousness like some poison in the Salton Sea. I understood now how difficult it had always been for her to face the day, for she suffered from clinical depression. Often she could scarcely bear to get out of bed.

Early morning light in Imperial differs from evening light, the long shadows being softer, the light yellower, but in mornings as in evenings the zones of shadow remain so equally extensive that at, say, six-o’-clock A.M., old men can read their newspapers in comfort almost anywhere. Pigeons rise, transfigured into silhouettes like concretions of departing shade from the quiet streets. The mountains of Mexico stand beautifully clear behind the border fence. Certainly not on my next journey here, but perhaps on the one after that, if I could bear to make it, the Imperial mornings might soothe me with their beautiful proof of how unimportant I was, with all my buzzing little miseries; I wouldn’t need oblivion as much by then, because in Imperial I was already invisible in comparison to the horizon. But at that moment all I could feel was the nearly unbearable vastness of this long hot day which I must now traverse, unless I could lose consciousness. If I took more sleeping pills now, I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. As for that agony in my chest, it had resolved by now into a sort of sickness, punctuated by day-long fevers of crazy grief. (A month later, I would be more or less crazy, scrabbling to extract some sad or ominous meaning from every remark of anyone who knew both her and me. Because she hadn’t replied to my letter on a Saturday, she must surely be spending the weekend preparing a perfect compromise which she would mail on Monday, so I would expect it on Tuesday. I lost myself in a forest of mirrors and symbols.) Hoping to grow too listless to care about my own sorrow, I was now so unsure of myself and so weak that I couldn’t lift my big camera. I was supposed to be photographing the New River . . .

The alfalfa fields, fresh-shorn like a tropical girl’s cunt-stubble, were golden-green and dense, textured with the row-lines which my love always used to remark on. She was an oil painter.

Earlier I’d understood (although by now, as I’d said, the pain had become so great, an acid, physical ache in my chest) that all I could try to do was to cherish my suffering, because it brought me closer to her, first of all because she too must be crying alone somewhere not so far away (when I closed my eyes I could almost see her, although half a decade later I could scarcely envision her at all, and preferred to suppose that instead of crying alone she had laughed in relief), and secondly because I had been hurting her year after year, so that at last I could feel what she had felt; this was what I had done to her; I kept whispering to myself,
it’s my fault, my fault,
which comforted me, because then grief had a reason; I’d brought it on myself and needed to feel it so that I’d finally understand why she’d always sobbed and begged me to stay just another ten minutes; this desperate, inconsolable longing, which exploded from my eyes day after day, was also her longing for me, which she lost the capacity to bear. And all the time I’d kept soothing her: I’m so sorry. I understand.—But how could I have ever really understood until she went away, the love whom I loved more than my life (for I’d several times offered to kill myself for her), the one whose weeping presence had brought me guilty sadness and whose absence gave me agony? As the rift of days grew wider, I understood less, becoming stupider and baser every day; but I had to do my best to learn from this, and perhaps become a better person. I was one with her now, as long as I kept crying. (In our final conversation she’d angrily said: My recovery trajectory will be a lot slower than yours!—She had never been sweetnatured.) These feelings more than any childish pride saved me from lifting the telephone, dialling the number I knew by heart, and fruitlessly entreating:
Come back, come back, come back.

A MEMORY-PHOTOGRAPH

Perhaps I have already betrayed her privacy a trifle, and certainly mine, in what’s been written here. In this book, which attempts not only to delineate an arbitrary, semi-imaginary area called Imperial, but also to investigate how and why delineations are made, a revelation of the life we had, with its secret anguishes and now forever lost joys, would be disrespectful not only to the memory of that life but also to her. I will always cherish her so much that I must cherish her reclusive dignity, too. But precisely because I cherish her, my solace now, however inadequate, is to preserve my images of her. She was frequently annoyed at my poor memory, and already the stretch of days between our last day and this day has widened like the Salton Sea, and I am forgetting more. I don’t think I will ever forget the way her mouth made a silent O when we made love, and the way she would suck her thumb when she came. But I never thought to really
look
at, for instance, her pretty little hands, and now it’s too late; my memory-photograph of those has blurred. A week after my first visit to an Imperial now eternally withered and lost, I engraved her name into the sand near Ocotillo with a stylus of volcanic rock, and watched the hot wind very slowly begin to fill in the letter-grooves. Should I kill myself, all my pictures of her would be lost; if I lived to be old, her image would gradually blur away just like her name in the sand. What can I save here? (She’s gone away. These words are all I can keep.) I lack the right to reveal who she was, the nature of my dirty secrets, or why I failed her. Let me say only that she was better than I. (Years later I add: And worse. And the same.) She was a woman, a human being; she had faults, perhaps the worst of which (the result of many bad experiences in earlier life) was an extreme mistrustfulness, which reacted with my own weaknesses to cause us misery. I might add that we were both sad and anxious people, sufficiently love-thirsty as to make nightmarish misdelineations of each other’s fears, especially at first. But while I suffered unhappiness in the relationship, as she certainly did, to the harm of her health, there remained about it, and her, an almost indescribable quality, often masked by our own failures, which stood separate and perfect like that white figure I saw in the date palm grove, the being which seemed for a moment to be her spirit. Specifically, she had an almost boundlessly noble compassion for anything small, maimed or defenseless in this world. She possessed a rare capacity to love, even to her own destruction. One wellspring of this love was an immense sincerity. She could not be dishonest, nor mask her feelings; as a result, everything she said and did caught fire with its own spontaneous if volatile truth. She adored me. I will love her to the day I die.—So what? A friend saw her adoring someone else. I have had several sweethearts since.—She was never pretentious; much more intelligent than her insecurities permitted her to perceive, she expressed complex and interesting ideas in the most plainspoken way. Adorned with many talents and much artistic and technical knowledge, none of which unfortunately gave her joy in herself, she was more capable than most people of taking an interest in subjects new to her and discussing them without preconceptions. My own character, for better and worse, is rigid. I know what I know, and I follow my own muse; one of my university professors called me unteachable. Maimed, like her, by the cruelty of others in my younger years, I remain too often indifferent to the opinions and enthusiasms of others. Yet she was able to teach me. Above all she helped me to see the patterns of things, from the furrows in Imperial’s fields to the architectonics of a Russian symphony to the nicely springloaded power dynamics implicit in all human relations. As much as the long hours when we lay in each other’s arms I treasure the talks we had and the journeys we took, the books we gave each other, even the board games she taught me to enjoy. It was because she took such pleasure in Imperial that I began to write this book. In my mind’s sad confusion after she was gone, I could not distinguish, much less define, any Imperial which did not include her. And so for the last time, as a way of saying goodbye to her, let me delineate her for you. Let me describe her.

She had a fair and freckled face, with thick eyebrows which I loved to stroke when we were making love; and, when she was not out of sorts, her brown eyes were extraordinary with some gentle painful truth shining out of them. (Again and again I cannot forbear the word “truth” when I speak of my darling.) She had long brown hair. On the rare occasions when she was happy enough with me to smile, that smile thrilled me with grateful joy. The very first time I saw her face, I was enthralled by her. She was the most beautiful woman in the world.

She was haunting, fascinating, dangerous, submissive, cautious, affectionate and affection-starved, intuitive sometimes to the point of telepathy but often paranoid, sensitive in both the good and bad sense, loyal, graceful, possessive and cruel, erotic, weak, indomitable, ethical, compulsive, generous, sweet-smelling, disorganized, sharp-tongued, anxious, and lavishly loving. She was my heart. She was my sorrowful angel.

AND ONE MORE TIME

Whenever I went to Imperial, my chief joy was to record through words and photographs the splendid colors, the fruits and stories of that world, to map it and as an act of worship to fix it in time.
³²
And it was literally exciting to lay down on the light table my latest negative of the El Granero bar in Mexicali, or of Leonard the prophet and builder who was grinning and waving sweetly in paint-smeared overalls as he stood before his mountain.

I did not often photograph the woman I loved, because cameras made her shy; I had to coax her, and sometimes I thought that it was (to use one of her words) “invasive” to do that. Besides, I already knew that every time I saw the perfectly regular slanting evening shadows between orchard-rows I would think of her.

But, as it happened, on that very last trip of ours, about which, of course, as with the last time we made love, I had no suspicion that it was the last time, she requested that I photograph her, which she almost never did, and so when I think back on that April afternoon I have an eerie feeling, as if her heart already knew, and I suppose it did. (I kept asking her: When did you know? When did you finally arrive at this decision? Because the night before she left me, when we spoke on the telephone as usual, she seemed much less anxious than usual, cheerful even; she was going swimming with her friends. Next morning she said that she’d forced herself to be that way because it wasn’t fair to tell me until we were face to face; in fact she’d gotten hysterical after hanging up the phone. She was correct, and I thank her for it, but it was so, so horrible.)

So I had my black plastic rectangles in a stack, and I laid them on the light table one by one as impatiently as I used to rip her clothes off. Yes, thank God, there she was. But I refrained from allowing my vision inside that special sheet of film just yet. I turned off the light table and let half the day pass, so grateful that I didn’t crave suicide even once. Finally I went back upstairs to my study, locked the door, reached for the switch at the right side of the light table, and found my loupe. Now I was going to look at her face, her dear face, and by the miracle of photography I’d be able to see the way she’d been looking back at me when I was still hers and she still mine; and, most of important of all, that moment was the
true
last moment, which I’d not yet consumed; I was now about to live it, that is, experience it for the very first time, which is the only time one can live a moment, the reason being that when I take a photograph with a large-format camera, the cumbersome mechanics of preparation preclude more than the most superficial seeing of my own composition—the arrangement of it, mere geometry of upside-down shapes on the ground glass—whenever the subject is a human being, for should I take too long, she’ll move on, just as she eventually did, and then life will pass me by! Moreover, after the focusing has been completed, the loupe lifted off the glass, it remains necessary to close the shutter, insert the big black film holder, set the f/stop, verify the speed, withdraw the dark slide and
then
click the shutter, feeling released by the spring-driven whirr. Of course I am locking eyes on my subject at this moment, but not to
see
her, for I lack the time; merely to persuade her to stand still just a trifle longer; and meanwhile any number of subtle positional shifts or alterations in her expression could have occurred. So it was that for the very last time I still had a future with her. Her few letters to me, my other photographs of her, all preserved a past in which she’d been my darling. If three weeks or ten years from now I did meet her, she’d be only my “friend.” And beginning this night, my dreams of her no longer involved my solving everything, nor even my pleading; instead, they had to do with her arriving, wearing that gentle, distant smile, for she’d come to confiscate all the negatives, letters and memorabilia of our dead love, which she now must carry into oblivion.

To repeat, this negative yet existed in futurity. Because I had yet to learn how she was gazing at me in that photograph, it truly would be an unpredictable experience, a present moment stolen from within the boundaries of a lost past. This meant that I really
could
make love with her for the last time. I felt as happy and excited as when her face had swum toward mine to kiss me for the very first time. Already as I brought the negative toward the light table I could see the pure white arch of her negative-hair against black sand and black sky. I laid her down on the frosted glass. There she was, alive. Carefully I polished the convex glass surface of the loupe with the cleaning cloth. Then, sobbing in absolute anguish, I began to lower my head toward her, the loupe clenched against my right eye; any instant now I’d see the expression on her face.