Imperial (53 page)

As usual, a map increases reality’s impressiveness. By 1904, Mexicali boasts five named streets: Calle Luis E Torres and Calle Celso Vega running north-south; and Avenida Porfirio Díaz, Avenida Ramón Corral and Avenida Juárez running east-west. Of all these, only the last will retain its name. The border appears to run slightly northeast (it’s actually dead level), so that between it and Avenida Porfirio Díaz, which parallels it, the one unlabeled and the two labeled plazas form parallelograms and trapezoids; next comes Avenida Ramón Corral, which does in fact run east-west; so that the blocks of lots between it and Porfirio Díaz are trapezoids subdivided into smaller trapezoids on the north and rectangles on the south. After that, Mexicali’s all rectangles—or it would be if a certain wide and unnamed boulevard didn’t come arcing through it.

Could this ever be mistaken for any Northside town? The city where Wilber Clark lived for a time possesses—here’s that list again—its own water tank, creamery and the rest; it boasts Wilber Clark’s hardware store. But, after all, it’s
Headquarters for Surveyors and Visitors.
And it was established four years ago. That’s a long time for such doers of deeds as Wilber Clark, L. M. Holt, George Chaffey. Mexicali remains officially only two years old—never mind those settlers from 1898.

Do we blame the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, now fifty-seven years old, for Mexicali’s failure to be an irrigated Imperial boomtown in 1905? Arid America is young and well capitalized. Arid Mexico is simply poor.

—Oh, but I forgot. Without the line, why would Mexicali come into being at all?

But what would Imperial be to me without its two manmade accidents of the Salton Sea and the international line? Here’s a cyanotype of Mrs. Ethel Wellcome’s social at the boundary marking-stone in 1906. Some ladies are holding their hats, in order for me to admire their faces all the better. It’s certainly nice to see an image of Imperial which is blue and white instead of grey and white; it makes the place look almost cool.—On either side of the marker there’s nothing but flatness. Absent that imaginary line, why would Mrs. Wellcome have brought her guests here?

Still, delineation has begun to spawn consequences. Mexico established a customs house here last year. (Meanwhile, near Mexico City, the Virgin of Guadalupe’s shrine was upgraded to a basilica.)

What next? Well, Chinese laborers are arriving; and a secretive entity called the Lower California Development Company is now preparing to irrigate two hundred thousand acres
below the international boundary line . . . as has been done at Imperial.

Chapter 43

THE SWEET YOUNG NIGHT (2002)

But there was always Mexicali, a half hour south down Mexico way.
Mexicali
Rose, I’m dreaming . . .
As long as I shall remember, the great blazing signs
of the “Southern Club” and the “Owl” will loom aloft in the velvety night as
portals of a world that will never exist again.

—Frank Waters, 1946

T
ime spends itself in Imperial as carefully and silently as the long old American automobiles. Past days and their future reenactments preserve themselves in the semblances of specific bars, currency exchange windows, Chinese restaurants. Mexicali’s wide-arched, white-lit arcades comprise a calendar as cyclical as the Aztec variety. One returns, for instance, to the Thirteen Negro dance hall, which never ceases to be itself even if the queen-sized mammaries and the moustache-underlined cowboy hats might wax and wane around a Platonic core, if the price of the drinks goes up a trifle and the streetfront gets decorated by variant assemblages of long, ancient, shining, angle-parked cars. By day, everything is still and bright, by night still and dark, warmish-cool. The leaden, pitted night sidewalks under those archways of light allow anybody to stroll about in time, scarcely impeded by fellow time travellers (for one characteristic of Imperial is low population density).
⁸⁴
The day of my birth will always be here, reified in the border crossing. I can wander over to it and even “document” it with my big camera if I choose, at seven dollars per click of the shutter, and God only knows how much per print, depending on the gold chloride I waste. The day of my death awaits my inspection also, except that I have not determined which edifice, nightscape or streetscape represents it, and which is a huckster-shuck. It’s probably some border feature—maybe even the same station I passed so easily and legally through when I entered this world of Imperial: I’ve told you that in 1900 the border was nothing but a ditch ten feet wide; in 1925 it sported “great wire gates” which closed at nine-o’-clock sharp, which is why
at five minutes to nine began the exodus back to the United States;
in 1942 only telephone poles marked it, but it remained
serious
all the same: a nightclub singer who’d larkishly intended to enter Southside on the shoulders of her date, a British airman, received instructions to cross on her own feet
because of the “White Slave Law,”
which had been written, they told her, to prevent prostitutes from being taken to Mexico against their will. Coming Northside in 2000 we entered an air-conditioned station and queued to show our picture identification cards, thereby delaying ourselves by an additional five or ten minutes; in 2002, thanks to terrorism in New York the previous autumn, three soldiers with machine-guns had been added for the purpose of teasing me about my big camera and teaching me erotic Spanish phrases.—But should my death be of the sordid, furtive or desperate variety, then I’ll need to “document” another alley, an old style one, cracked and dark, with shuttered luminescence reflected in its stygian puddles. No fear; we’re still alive, at least on the Mexican side (your eyes are border lights reflected in a pool of urine), but we’re going to scale the fence of crossing before we know it, in a state of grim and dirty panic, and on Northside death will be waiting in a silent Bronco: WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA. Therefore, please visit a different concretion of time—Good Friday evening, the church door swinging open and shut, briefly baring light as people enter one by one (some carrying flowers), or, much more rarely, exit; while a dirty man whose baseball cap has gotten censored by the night into the same warm grey pallor as the street itself (Avenida Reforma) sits on the steps, his elbows on his grimy knees. An amplified cousin of a Gregorian chant comes up the flat warm street-cobbles; the truck’s headlights blink slowly, followed by the Procession of Silence. Next year we might happen on a Corpus Christi Procession; the previous year there was a funeral. The crowd, not immense but a crowd nonetheless, collects itself in front of the church; and its first member, a middle-aged woman, glides forward, passing into sanctuary as she upholds her candle within a shade of paper so light-rich as to seem a glowing bell of glass. She ascends to the arched door. The lefthand member of that pair of wooden church portals, each punched with cookie-cutter holes delineating bells and crosses, now parts for her. She vanishes into the inner light where somebody else is sitting out of my sight—the woman who soon will leave me because she loves me too much; this will be our last evening together in Mexicali, and it will be short and sad since she is disappointed in me and I am afraid of her. Now a year has passed; a year has drained into the Salton Sea. She sits forever in the church as long as I do not attempt to look inside, just as whenever I happen to pass the Date Tree Hotel in Indio I am pleased to understand that she is there and will always be, subject to the same gentleman’s agreement. Here’s that palm-grove by the sign for the Jewel Date Co. She loves it there; I wouldn’t dream of disturbing her. As the
Imperial Press and Farmer
explained back in 1903:
The collection of pictures is unlimited, for they come from nature’s storehouse, and none will be used more than once . . . The pictures are the result of an Imperial mirage. The sun, as it rises, starts the images in motion . . . The setting sun is not far behind.
The pictures are as variously piquant as the red sauces on the table of a Mexican restaurant: the hot vinegar kind, the hot sweet kind, the gentle kind, the kind that is fire-essence. I want to taste them all, so I am making her wait while I complete another longish exposure—sixteen minutes at f/45—while she sits in the church thinking I now know what. (Eventually I made her wait too long.) Meanwhile, the flatbed truck approaches. I begin to spy the immense crucifix which it bears. Will it enter my lens’s omnivorous or should I say catholic consciousness? Around it, the first woman’s followers, imitators, siblings and descendants pool together ever more tightly, streaming up the church steps with their candles in the paper bells and paper cones. Oh, yes, past days preserve themselves: Here comes Judas, betrayer of Christ; he’ll betray Him next year as he did last year; in 1835, when Alta California still belonged to Mexico, a spy from Northside sailed across the ditch and witnessed the hanging and burning of Judas’s effigy in Santa Barbara. In Imperial, nothing is lost. The loudspeaker moans:
María, la Madre de Jesús.
And on the truckbed, María herself weeps over the wooden Jesus, her kerchiefed head bowed in a fashion whose stylized character does not at all reduce sorrow to a formula, but indeed focuses it just as each paper cone does its flame. Do her eyes truly utter tears? How can her sorrow be real when she knows as well as I that the one she mourns will return to life the day after tomorrow? Yet although I’m among the most nominal of Christians, I begin to feel it myself, perhaps by analogy with the death of my much loved little sister, on the anniversary of whose drowning each year I cannot escape the grief and horror again, again, again. The rest of the year she is dead, and on that late summer’s day (a day for swimming, hence for drowning), she dies simply deeper, at each reenactment sinking farther into the slime at the bottom of the pond where the decomposition of her memory-image leaves nothing but gruesomeness—or almost nothing; somewhere within the mucky skeleton there lives, in an inversion of quotidian anatomy, a shy, pretty six-year-old girl with brown bangs and brown eyes, who may still love me and has possibly even forgiven my part in the accident. For now, that’s as much resurrection as I can accept, which is why (does this mean I’m damned?) Easter frequently strikes me as the merest and most meretricious mockery even as I unfailingly feel Good Friday, Bad Friday my mother used to call it . . .

It was on this night, at this church not far from the border wall, that I first met the sisters Susana and Rebeca Hernández. Rebeca, who was always less shy (she was the “border girl” I’ve already told you about, the syncretic one, the one who’d made love but never had sex), said to me: In every Mexican city there’s a small group of rich people. Most of them don’t mix with the others. I used to go to church in my grandmother’s parish. The governor’s house was two blocks away, and if you ever dressed badly they would look at you really bad. So I started coming here. Here everybody is welcome. Did you see that dirty beggar who went all the way up to the altar on his knees?

Yes—

In that long misery ahead of me, I often returned to that church on Avenida Reforma, because Rebeca had said that everybody was welcome—therefore, even me, who had and was nobody, being no longer part of the woman I still loved; and one hot Tuesday toward the end of the following month, which was to say about two weeks after she had left me, I entered that church, and sat in the rearmost bench of one of the four rows, while people came in around me, sighed, fanned themselves, knelt on the
prie-dieux,
and began to pray. There were perhaps a dozen souls in all. Some entered just for a moment, praying briefly and in silence, then rose to cross themselves. Boys with doffed baseball caps, a broken old woman, three anxious dirty men who might have been about to try their luck at the border fence, they came and prayed while birds spoke faintly from somewhere outside the tall white stained-glass-inset coolness. It was a very ordinary church, consecrated in 1955, neither particularly clean nor well built; it had rickety benches. An old grey man knelt on the floor; a taper flickered near the altar. Everything was humdrum, and all the more sincere for that; there was nothing here except faith.

Presently the priest came in. His Mass seemed to me perfunctory, echoing and void; maybe that was the good of it; and maybe thanks to heartsickness my perceptions were as sharp yet distorted as the shadow of a moving bus on a Mexicali street. I prayed: God, I don’t ask for Your help. I can’t even ask You to help the woman who loved me. All I can do is apologize for my failures, and try to believe that You will do whatever is best.

I refrained from asking for comfort, and got none, but it seemed somehow befitting to watch the other prayers flow past me as steadily and unspectacularly as the brownish water in the drainage ditches, which crawled away, sinking into the dry earth. Around not so very many corners, another heavyset whore stood leaning in the doorway of the Hotel 16 de Septiembre.

Sometimes I walked past the Restaurante Nuevo Oriente, which was the last place I ever sat in Mexicali with her whom I’d loved; after visiting the cathedral we quarreled on a sidewalk bench and then entered the restaurant to keep a hungry friend company; the two of us didn’t eat anything, but he did (chow mein; I myself would have ordered
carnitas coloradas:
a heap of scarlet pork garnished with emerald cilantro, another mound of rice on a separate plate, the breasts of life and death); as soon as his plate was bare, we all three returned across the border, and I can’t even remember what she and I did then for the remainder of our last night together in Imperial; I do recall that on the following night, coming to rest a few miles outside of Imperial, we also quarreled . . .

But there was more in Barbara’s Desert now than pictures woven magically in the air. There were beautiful scenes of farms with houses and barns and fences and stacks, with cattle and horses in the pastures, and fields of growing grain . . .—
not to mention that swanlike girl in a white slit gown, showing leg and showing more leg and showing hip and showing buttock and flicking her long dark hair as the disco ball’s lights rushed over everybody like foam on the Río Nuevo. A flash of green light on her breast, her panties very white in the cool darkness; off with those, and she slid down the catpole to please the young men who kissed her and tipped her, not to mention the old men who stared. Back in 1925, before there was a church, when Avenida Reforma was still flat dirt crisscrossed with trenches, furrows and the scaffolds of emerging houses, there had been elegant gaming rooms where
not a vulgar greenback, not a piece of silver was allowed to cross the felt. Only gold. Heavy, yellow gold.
Now silver was permitted; surely it must be the constituting element of those cracked grey streets (paved in 1947) whose bumps seemed all the more interesting because thanks to the heat one tended to wander across them so slowly. In the 1830s, back when San Diego still belonged to the entity which I call Imperial, men threw silver dollars at ladies who danced “El Son.” Had one of them danced beautifully enough, or if they were relatives or lovers, the man might place his hat on the woman’s head at the end; that promised a present. Oh, yes; past days hoard themselves like silver and gold in the vaults of Imperial; nothing is lost. In 1925 the lights of Mexicali’s gaming-houses went out promptly at nine, and the whores stood in the courtyards, illuminating their offerings by torchlight. In 1997 they stood in the hotel doorways in the streets, mutely presenting themselves to a world they seemed not to acknowledge, a world of men who would use them, as they used the channels of prayer, like drainage ditches; and these women for their part would use the men for their sustenance. The sky was cool now. Dreams stopped sweating and began to rise into the sky. I dreamed of the woman who’d left me; I yearned; I could have been one of these men who came slowly striding with backthrust shoulders and upraised heads, majestically reaching toward the sweet young night. Moment by moment, more people came out. Mexicali became inhabited. But I wasn’t there anymore. I felt hollowed out, ready to cross the border from life to death, from the urgent color and filth of Mexicali to the museum called Calexico, whose regular sidewalks empty long before dusk.