Imperial (82 page)

But why would the Chinese have wanted these tunnels to go everywhere in the old days? I could see having a storage space or sleeping space under your business on Juárez, but why would all the businesses in the Chinesca want to be linked by a tunnel network?

Well, you got me on that one. Maybe the purpose in that time was you could sleep in it and you could use it as a warehouse.

That very day I’d just heard another Mexican mention of the big fire, my informant this time being Lupita the ageing parking lot attendant. She had come to Mexicali in 1973 from points south. I asked her why so many of the Chinesca’s businesses had fallen into Mexican hands, and she said: The Chinesca burned. Two times. That was the end.

Did you see it?

Yes. It was all burned. Chinese were coming out of the ground and running like cockroaches!

Where did they come out from?

They used to live under the ground. Maybe they still do.

Why would they do that?

She shrugged.—Maybe no papers.

No, I never heard that, Mr. Leung insisted. Even though it’s true that locally, Mexicali has about ten to fifteen diferent clubs, for the New Yorker, for the East, for Baja; they have rooms for their members, to shelter them, so there were plenty of those spaces at the time. And it was some sort of reunion location for those people, to cook a meal or play mah-jongg or something. Each of them had their own incomes. Each of these Chinese clubs had their own President, and they would send their President to the main Chinese Association that would represent them to the Mexican government. I belong to one of these associations, and it’s called Sam Yap,
¹⁴⁰
and it has about ten or twenty rooms, and I’m the Treasurer of that association, and for the people who belong to that association, they can have shelter and rice; we expect them as soon as they got their job to move on and let other people use it. No business at all; it’s a shelter.

(The Chinese tunnel letters show that these organizations did help the destitute, and, as mentioned, subscribed to newspapers for the benefit of their members, who could not afford individual copies; furthermore they contributed to the Anti-Chinese Discrimination Organization, and investigated frauds, foreclosures and even murders.)

I looked at Mr. Leung and asked: Where do you think illegal Chinese might live now?

Well, in that alley you will see an apartment there and there’s old Chinese who live there; there’s about ten, twelve apartments; people without papers could be there, I guess. Anyhow, there’s plenty of spaces; they don’t have to live in a tunnel!

WOMEN ON BLACK VELVET

I remember tunnels which pretended to be cellars, and real cellars, and other tunnels of various sorts. I remember a plywood door partially ajar with two blood-dark ideograms painted on it, a hasp, a slender padlock. I remember cylindrical holes in the floor with locking hatchcovers; these were the old Chinese safes. I remember how the palings of one tunnel wall resembled bamboo poles packed together, and around the top of them ran a stained metal collar. Then over a gap hung a torn ceiling, with strings and wires dangling down. The floor was a forest of paint buckets, toilets without tanks, cardboard and upended chairs. To me it never stopped being thrilling. Well, well, it’s all in how we tell our stories, isn’t it? I could tell you,
I just went into another Chinese tunnel!
or I could tell you,
I went into a butcher’s basement.

Señor Daniel Ávila was that butcher. Late in the evening the sun caught the orangeness on the backwards Restaurante Victoria lettering on the white window-curtains, and the pleats of the curtains began sweating yellow and gold. A man on a crutch slowly hobbled out, and a boy held the door for him. For a long time I could see him creeping along outside, with backwards Chinese lettering superimposed across his journey. The girls were already working across the street in the doorway of the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico; I counted six of them; Señor Ávila, who’d worked at a certain supermarket for forty years and now owned a butcher shop, said that his son had once clerked at the Pacífico and that he had found tunnels but was never allowed to go inside them.

In your opinion, what is down there? I asked him.

He laughed and said: Secrets.
¹⁴¹

He took me down into his snow-white cellar-tunnels, which had once been Chinese tunnels, and assured me that in a tunnel which had once connected with the tunnels under the supermarket and perhaps still did, there had been a cantina with paintings of naked women on black velvet; he knew for a fact that the paintings were still there, although he wasn’t sure what condition they might be in. He was positive that the Chinese still lived underground just across the street. He couldn’t say exactly where their tunnel was, because they entered at night
like rats.
I remember him standing far away at the end of his farthest tunnel, an end installed at the termination of Chinese prehistory; he owned the place now, and didn’t want thieves to get in. His whitewashed empire was a combination of a church and a nuclear submarine, being not only clean and grand, but also subdivided into compartments. In that wonderfully Mexican way he had, he made everything seem possible; anytime now I was going to descend through the floor of a pharmacy or watch-repair store and hear piano music; I’d smell opium; I’d hear laughter and the click of mah-jongg tiles.

He knew a woman who trusted him and who could help me, but the next time I saw him he was more doubtful that she could help me, and the time after that, he was in a hurry to go to the cemetery for the Day of the Dead.

“A CHINESE LIVED AND DIED HERE”

To the supermarket which he had mentioned there sometimes came a Mexican caretaker who requested that I not use his name. He had worked long and faithfully for the Chinese owner, who had recently died and whose memory he adored. The children did not care to operate it anymore, and goods sat decaying on the shelves. Really it was no supermarket anymore, but the shell of a supermarket. His job was to air the place out. He proudly said: This is one of the first stores that the Chinese opened in Mexicali, in about 1920.

(Scaffolding and shacks defining the curves of a wide dirt thoroughfare with two boxy automobiles on it, and several men, mostly hatted against the sun, striding across the blankness; that’s the corner of Reforma and Altamirano during the construction of the “Teatro China” in 1920. The supermarket was a few steps from there.)

After persuasion which did not entirely lack a financial character (twenty dollars), the Mexican took me inside and through the double red curtains to the back, past an elevator cage (one of the first elevators in Mexicali, he loyally announced), and then we went downstairs into a white corridor. He said to me: This passageway originally went all the way to the cathedral on Reforma.

That gave me an eerie feeling. Aboveground it would have been a good fifteen-minute walk to that cathedral.

With his hand on his hip, thinking for awhile amidst the humming electric whine of the lights, he finally said that the last time any Chinese had lived down here was in 1975.

Why did they stay in the tunnels?

They didn’t have their papers, so they hid here. Around 1970 was the big fire. A lot of them came out,
with long beards!
I saw them. All old people! Many went back to China.

He pointed down into a cylindrical hole like many which I had seen in other tunnels, and he said: The Chinese didn’t keep their money in the bank, but in the wall. Here you would have had a safe, but it is full of water.

The tunnel went on and on, wide and humid, with salt-white stains on the walls. Huge beams spanned the ceiling. It was very well made.

Pointing to a square tunnel which went upward into darkness, he said: An emergency exit. This is how they came out during the fire.

In a vast whitewashed chamber which was nearly filled with wooden pallets, I assume for produce, we came to another safe-hole, and he said admiringly: The old Chinese, if they earned ten pesos, they saved five. When they made a meal, they made it for a big group. Chinese are a suffering people. You Americans, you’re not as economical as you are commercial. With Chinese, it’s the opposite.

He laughingly told the tale of how one day the big boss approached a boy at the checkout counter and asked him what size shoes he wore; the boy, certain that he was about to receive a gift, replied that he was a size eleven.—And if I gave you size thirteen shoes, would they fit? inquired the boss.—Oh, no, sir!—In that case, when people buy something small, don’t put it in a large bag!

That was the kind of person the boss had been. But the Mexican had another story to tell: A Mexican woman had once been caught shoplifting food. They detained her until the boss arrived. He asked: Why did you steal? She replied that she was hungry. Instead of turning her over to the police, he allowed her to return to her children, and after that gave her free food once a month.

The large room had once been a Chinese restaurant called Super Cocina, and ideograms still remained on the walls, in various stages of obliteration. In the corner, a flight of stairs led up to the ceiling. Once they had gone to the street. The place had been very famous, sighed the Mexican; the food had been very good. And I could see that he, too, was happy to live for a few moments in the past.

Why don’t robbers and gangsters live down here? I asked.

Mexicans are kind of timid. They think there are ghosts here. I have been working with the Chinese since I was twenty-seven. Now I am sixty. I myself believe in ghosts.

How do the ghosts reveal themselves?

The doors will open and close; the lights go on and off.

I asked him what it had been like for him to work for the Chinese all those years, and he said: Chinese don’t trust people. They don’t want to lose their culture. But when a Chinese gives you his confidence, he’s the most faithful of all your friends. When I began to work at the supermarket, there was an assembly of the Chinese and they decided to accept me. El Jefe, the owner, had given me his approval. But before that, for five or six months, no one talked to me. It was very difficult. I don’t know why I put up with it. I could have just left. But when they saw that I was trustworthy and hardworking, they offered me their friendship.—By the way, since we’re below sea level now, water comes out of the walls.

We had left the restaurant and reentered one of the middle chambers. The floor was stained white. The Mexican said: They slept in rows on small wooden beds.

Could I see one of the tunnels where they slept?

All that’s disappeared. It was over where the Chinese Association is.

You mean Mr. Auyón?

That’s right. Twenty meters from there. They slept there and smoked opium.

He took me back upstairs, then up more stairs to the boss’s office. Sometimes he called the boss El Jefe and sometimes he called him Señor Chino. A rattle of keys, and we were inside the stifling room, with a chalkboard whose Spanish plans and phrases remained unerased, a dead adding machine on the table, and a photograph on the wall: An old Chinese was sitting palely, sadly at a desk.—This is my boss, said the Mexican with a strange formality. He’s dead. He came here with one hand behind his back and the other hand in China.

I said nothing, and the Mexican went on: In my eyes, he was like a godfather. And all came to him; the young people bowed to him.

Did you ever want to marry a Chinese?

No, he laughed, spreading his hands.

We left the office, returning to a sort of catwalk from which we could see down into the dark, half-empty market with its canned goods filthy and spiderwebbed on the shelves; then we ascended to the third floor, which was an atticlike space with brick partitions which resembled those of a stable; it would have been a hotel had El Jefe lived. At the far end lay a great chamber with many tiny windows; the Mexican said that this had been a place where the Chinese came to dance. A private staircase went to the street.

More stairs brought us to another unfinished hotel floor; finally came the flat roof, with a three-room suite running partway along one side; within these apartments, which reeked of feathers and bird droppings, many pigeons lived, and some had died and decayed upon the floors; they flew violently in and out when we peered in.

The roof was open and bright, the reverse of the tunnels, and yet it felt the same; it felt like death.

The Mexican was saying: My Chinese friends used to only need two changes of clothing, one to put on and one to take off. Chinese love gambling and women . . .

I was hardly listening. I could see the pinkish-orange cupola of the cathedral on Reforma, so far away across the roofs and palms; it was hard to believe that the tunnels went all the way there.

The fire started with a man who sold tamales, the Mexican was saying. It burned right down to here, and he pointed off the edge of the roof. This whole street was cantinas back in 1955. There was a lot of conflict, delinquency, prostitution. It was like an old cowboy town, he said longingly.

And you’re sure you can’t show me the cantina where the velvet paintings are? I asked, slipping a ten-dollar bill into his hand.

And so now we were in the street behind the supermarket—in an alley, I should say, a narrow dark place which smelled of the Río Nuevo and of birds, and on the far side of this there was a wall in which was set a white grating; when the Mexican unlocked this, the recess within was square, and within that stood another door. He had to go back to the supermarket to find the right keyring for that one. Laughingly he said: The Chinese have a lot of doors and a lot of keys.

This was all a cantina, he added with a sudden sadness. Pedro Infante sang here. Like Frank Sinatra.

He unlocked the inner door and pulled it open, a task which took most of his strength. Here at street level ran a very dark high-ceilinged space which seemed to have been gutted or perhaps was never finished; there were many wooden pallets, and he explained that illegal things had been stored here.—What kinds of illegal things? I wanted to know.—Oh, butter and rice, he hastily said.