Imperial (77 page)

There still is, but not underneath, said the fat man.

Were there ever any opium dens? I asked.

The barber said: I worked in the Hotel Cecil for six years. I started in ’49 as a waiter. Then I became a manager of the laundry department. When I was up there washing clothes, I saw the Chinese people smoking opium. There was a basketball court—

Oh, the same, said Yolanda.

And under there were six or seven Chinese men with a big pipe, passing it around. The pipe was as long as my arm!

Another old man had come in to get his hair cut, and he said: Yeah, I was there then, too. They were up all night smoking and gambling. They were playing
baraja
for a lot of money. That happened in the tunnels. I am seventy-six and I was born here.

Were there prostitutes in the tunnels?

No, that was above.

Did anyone live in the tunnels?

Over in this part, in the Chinesca, sure.

Can we see the place where the water is? I asked.

A woman named Inocencia had the key. I never had the key.

Who would have it now?

It’s probably closed. It’s very dirty. The smell would make you sick.

That sounds perfect, I said. I think I’d really like to go there.

Why?

It would be interesting. As far as how it might smell, I took a boat ride down the Río Nuevo, so I don’t think I’d mind.

The Río Nuevo? That’s pretty much how it smells.

We thanked the barber and wished him good business. As he was saying goodbye to us, he remarked: In all the
callejones
you see a lot of vents.

For the tunnels?

Yes.

He also said, very sadly: There really aren’t any businesses here anymore. It’s all boutiques. All the Americans come here to buy medicines.

And I knew that he himself, like me, would have loved to go back in time, even just for a day, to wander in the tunnels when they were crammed with life, glamour, commerce and vice.

As we were walking down the next alley I said to Yolanda: If I were the owner of one of these properties, I would fix up my tunnels, make them exotic, and charge the gringos a lot of money to come down inside them and drink.

But people like to walk in the streets with music! replied Yolanda. Here in the
callejones,
it’s where they take out the trash.

MY FIRST TUNNEL

Near the Hotel Capri there was a certain clothing business owned by an elderly Mexican who knew Yolanda quite well since, after all, he had already taken her into his Chinese tunnel, not that the Chinese tunnels existed, and behind the counter, next to the water closet, there was a metal door which the man unlocked, inviting us into a concrete room where clothes hung on a line. The man lifted up a trapdoor, and I wish I could tell you how thrilled I felt. I saw stairs. Yolanda had her flashlight, and Terrie was carrying the other flashlight, which we had bought an hour earlier for just this occasion. Smiling, the man stood aside, and there were the stairs.

Yolanda wanted me to go first, because as I said she was afraid of rats, so I did, and she came after me into that sweltering darkness, gamely half-smiling with her pale, sweat-drenched shirt unbuttoned almost to the breast and her head high and sweat shining on her cheekbones and sparkling in her short grey hair and her kind, proud eyes alertly seeking just as the straight white beam of her flashlight did, cutting through the darkness like a knife. Terrie’s flashlight was very steady. Where were we? The humidity was almost incredible. Dirt and darkness, flaring pillars comprised my immediate impression. Lumber-heaps leaped up as pale as bone-piles under those twin beams of battery-powered light. I saw no rats. How stifling it was! Graffiti’d beams (a sample of their announcements being EL MEMO 13 Sinaloa 19/01/92) ran overhead, higher than I would have expected but still in arm’s reach; and wire hangers with flaring underparts hung like the skeletal outlines of headless women. I glimpsed the folding X-frames of something, a table, and a metal wheel of protruding spokes. Beneath the heavy rectangular archways, the tunnel went on and on. Quite evidently it was much vaster than the store above it, even allowing for the fact that everything is always larger in darkness. Somewhere ahead of us, skeletal perspective-lines approached one another palely within the ceiling-darkness; the place where they lost themselves seemed to be a hundred feet away and was probably ten. I thought I could see a squarish passage. The floor was littered with trash, and broken chairs and empty cardboard boxes. Here gaped an open safe. I picked my way as carefully as I could; for all I knew, ahead of me there might be an uncovered well that would lead straight to death in cheesy black currents of the Río Nuevo, which, thank God, I couldn’t smell at the moment. Yolanda and Terrie were out of sight; they were in other worlds; I could see only one or the other of their flashlight beams. I felt almost alone. Chamber after chamber went on, connected by squarish archways. How many rooms were there, actually? I can’t say now, but probably no more than half a dozen. A palish blotch on the black wall gazed at me; my mind was beginning its usual game of dreaming up faces. Drumming and music came down to me from somewhere above. The old Mexican who owned the place had said that he thought there had been a casino down here, and when I heard that music I could almost imagine it.

It might well be that the quality of the tunnels which haunted so many of us was quite simply their
goneness.
When I imagine them, my ignorance allows them to be what they will. Before we knew how hot the surface of Venus is, we used to be able to write beautiful science-fiction stories of swamps and greenskinned Venusians. I could almost see myself descending the stairs into this place in the years when the electric lights still worked. What if it hadn’t been a casino after all? I refused to believe that. Sometime between the first and second fires it might have been perfect down here. (That so-called Great Fire which the sisters Hernández had told me of, the one which in their telling strangely resembled the Biblical tale of the Deluge, that must have been the second fire, because the tunnels were almost uninhabited by the time of the third fire, and before the first the Chinesca was still very, very small.) Having smoked opium in Thailand, I could imagine that one of these chambers might have had mats on the floor where I could have lain, watching the opium smoke rise sweetly from my pipe between inhalations. And from Thailand I also remembered Chinese men in black trousers, shiny black shoes and white dress shirts; at an open-to-the-street restaurant in Chinatown, with stainless steel tables and white tile walls, we were all drinking delicious sweet chrysanthemum juice the color of urine, and the handsomest man of all leaned on his elbow and gazed dreamily over his crossed fingers. Was this how the Chinese would have dressed when they went underground to drink, gamble and womanize in Mexicali? Or would they have possessed nothing but the rough cotton clothes of the braceros? (Since Mariano Ma had been seen at the horseraces with the Governor of Baja California, very likely he at least possessed shiny black shoes.) There might have been a piano player here as there had been at Cecil Chin’s, and when he paused to take a drink of Mexicali Beer, I would have heard all around me the lovely bone-clicks of mah-jongg. One hot summer day in the Chinese city of Nan Ning I wandered through a park of lotus leaves and exotic flowers to a pagoda where ancient women sat, drowsily, happily playing mah-jongg amidst the scent of flowers, and that excellent sound of clicking tiles enchanted me; I was far from home, but that long slow summer afternoon with the mah-jongg sounds brought me back to my own continent, and specifically to Mexicali, whose summer tranquillity never ends. (How I love Mexicali! Everyone tells every story slightly differently; every secret is delightfully inconsequential. Ultimately, what’s the difference whether this tunnel was a casino or not?)

I remember a lady who smiled when she was dancing naked, a sweet smile of black eyes and glowing white teeth; she seemed so hopeful, so enthusiastic, so “sincere,” if that word makes any sense between two strangers, and she was smiling right at me! She held my hand; that’s right, she held my hand all the way to the hotel; I kissed her plump red lips and sucked on them as much as I wanted; she kissed me back.
Caliente!
the men in the street said approvingly. She rode me as a bull rides a cow; delicious hot drops of sweat flew off her face, breasts and shoulders, landing on my mouth; and although she faked nearly every moan, she did it with such enthusiasm, I say again, with such
sincerity;
and when it was my turn to be on top, she slapped my buttocks so happily with every thrust, that I felt her to be inexhaustibly perfect. Afterwards we walked hand in hand back to the dance hall, and all the men applauded.
¹³¹
She was Mexican, not Chinese, and the place where she’d rented me her illusion of love lay several blocks beyond the edge of the Chinesca; all the same, it was she whom I now thought of in that tunnel whose revelry had turned to lumber and broken chairs; those clickclacking mah-jongg tiles in Nan Ning, the laughter and preposterously exaggerated moans of that prostitute, the sensations of opium intoxication in Thailand, these were the buried treasures which my flashlight beam sought in the Chinese tunnels of Mexicali, my memories, my happy dissipations, let’s say my youth. No wonder I’d wanted to believe Leonardo the “tour guide”! Waiting for nothing in the hot thick night, with the ducklike quacking of a radio coming from one of the tin walls of that alley, that rather evil sand-paved alley overlooking Condominios Montealbán, I was already a citizen of this darkness; I was a spider luxuriously centered in the silk web of my own fantasies.

Don’t we all do it? Can’t you see the smile on that barber’s face as he descends into his past?
The Chinesca was the center of Mexicali; there was nothing else,
said Carmen Jaham.

THE TUNNEL LETTERS

Next came the Restaurante Victoria, a tranquil paradise of coolness and reliably bland food (the Dong Cheng was better) where the waitresses were the only ones who hurried; the customers, who were mostly Mexican, lived out the hours with their sombreros or baseball caps on, lingering over their rice; here I had tried and failed on several prior occasions to find out if there might be any tunnels in the neighborhood; come to think of it, the all-enduring José López from Jalisco had been twice honorably expelled from the Victoria in the cause of duty, for which suffering he charged me five dollars, plus two dollars for two sodas. I don’t have the receipt. But it was just as my father always said,
It’s not what you know; it’s who you know,
and I knew Yolanda, who happened to be here, and who knew Miguel, the Chinese owner, a slender youngish man with jet-black hair who’d come here from Canton two decades since. He led us through the restaurant—white ceiling, white incandescent lights, white tables, at one of which a fat old lady and a young girl, both Chinese, sat slowly eating while the television uttered music which was sad and dramatic and patriotically Mexican; I had once spent a very happy day at that very table, interviewing an old Communist journalist about Mexicali in 1950; now the white walls gave way to pinkish bathroomlike tiles as we passed beneath the rapidly whirling white fans and admired from afar the Chinese-captioned painting of the red sun floating on a turquoise sea—and through the swinging doors he led us, straight into the kitchen, where the Mexican cook and the Chinese dishwasher goggled at us; turning right, we came into a long narrow courtyard and entered a detached two-storey building with what appeared to be an ancestral shrine just within the entrance. To the right, next to a shopping cart full of stale burned bread and a hand mill to grind the bread to flour for gravy, wide stairs descended.

This tunnel was less dark, uncluttered, and more self-contained. Indeed, it disappointed me at first; it appeared to be little more than a concrete cellar. Then I noticed that a five-socketed chandelier crouched on the ceiling like a potbellied spider, four of its sockets encased in ornate floral doughnuts, the fifth a bare metal bell. The ceiling itself was comprised of fancy-edged blocks like parquet flooring. But some blocks were stained or charred and some were moldy and some were entirely missing, leaving rectangles of darkness peering down from behind the rafters. It was a wide chamber which could have held many people, especially if they’d lived together like cigarettes. What had they done here? Had they gambled or simply banqueted? Had this place been an opium den? Thanks to F. E. Johnson, Special Agent, U.S. Customs, I knew what to look for (dateline Los Angeles, 1915):
Round one-pound tins coated with crimson lacquer, with gilt letters on red side label bearing the following Chinese and Japanese inscriptions: “Number one smoking opium . . . The Monopoly Bureau, Government of Formosa. Anyone found imitating this mark or label will be imprisoned. The smoker of this opium must have a license to smoke opium.”

And what did I find? A tub held old Chinese porcelain bowls with floral designs. Then there were several dark and empty side-chambers.

The Victoria was in Miguel’s estimation sixty years old, maybe eighty. (Upstairs, according to the Victoria’s posted autobiography, one was informed that it had been FUNDADO EN . . . but here the red letters ended; the refrigerator case prevented me from learning when it had been founded.) Since we were in the heart of the Chinesca, this tunnel would possibly already have been here, but so what and how could I possibly speculate anyhow? On my second visit to this tunnel I saw a few more traces of fire and I also found what might or might not have been a trapdoor in the concrete floor of the first chamber; it would not budge. In the dark room beneath the beds was a stack of bedframes.—
Muchas prostitutas!
opined José López from Jalisco.

At the extreme end of the farthest room, another passageway had been bricked up. I asked Miguel how much it would cost me to have that obstruction broken down and then sealed up again when I had seen whatever there was to see. Smiling, he replied that there was no need for that; all I had to do was ask the pastor of the Sinai Christian Center down the street to let me into
his
tunnel. This I later did, with the ever helpful José López from Jalisco. To José, who slept every night in places whose decrepitude resembled that of the tunnels, it was going to be a bus-man’s holiday. But as a woman once told me when I requested her to perform certain sexual acts, we can’t always get what we want. I helped the pastor, whose whitewashed church (denomination: Pentecostal) had held these premises for only three years, to drag the wooden cover aside—I can’t really name it a trapdoor because it wasn’t attached to anything—and there lay a grubby plank running end to end across a square shaft down which went other grubby planks called stairs, these being filthy with dust, dirt, ashes, scraps of newspaper, rags, used plastic utensils and other garbage; the farther down I looked, the more garbage there was. It wasn’t sickening, merely dirty. Down I went; down went José. Yolanda and Beatriz Limón, that
Crónica
reporter, were both with me that day; they peered into the hole and refrained from descending. I can’t say they missed much. To be sure, there were also many doors, each one of them sealed; once upon a time this so-called cellar must have led to many other branches of the underworld. The tunnel ran at right angles to the Victoria’s. In the glory days its primary axes must have gone westward under all the businesses in Avenida Juárez, maybe even to Condominios Montealbán, although I was now quite sure that if there were in fact any tunnels in or around Condominios Montealbán, I was never going to see them. Another toilet without a tank, more chairs; that was what I found; this was like the first tunnel but smaller. The pastor, who stood above with the two ladies, would have liked to turn these subterranean quarters into a place of study or recreation but hadn’t the money; his rent was far too high, he complained; his landlord was the Chinese Association. And here was the other side of the Victoria’s brick wall.