Imperial (168 page)

The shame that they inflicted upon her (among other acts, they browsed publicly and contemptuously through her diary, much of which consisted of descriptions of her erotic feelings for me), caused me to hate them. The calm anger, not shame at all, which I myself felt when they emptied my wallet’s papers onto the counter and every officer who happened by could frown over my parking receipts or, worse yet, the following incendiary anti-American document, which will appear in its own proper place in the infamous terrorist manifesto entitled
Imperial:
hard and gleaming tomatoes, coated with food-grade vegetable-mineral-beeswax and/or lac-resin-based wax or resin to maintain freshness ... was irrelevant in comparison. They humiliated the woman I loved.

Sitting on that hard metal bench, from which I was not allowed to rise even to request a cup of water (they brought that to me), I lost my desire to imagine stories. When a man with a gun took me to the toilet and observed my urination, I hated him personally and wished him the worst. Either he or I should not have been a citizen of this country.
You will be governed accordingly.

I became familiar with the partition which separated me from her; they did not forbid us from leaning forward and speaking to each other occasionally, but I was not allowed to sit beside her or hold her hand. Above all, the supposition that whether or not we were criminals we had no right to question why we were under suspicion, or to know when if ever this would end, or sit together, or even read, was educational. (Every time the door would open I would see her lean anxiously into my view, hoping that this would be the end.)
It all comes down to desperation, and the smugglers—being as depraved as they are—they prey on people’s desperation and

human misery.
The waiting and waiting, the not being allowed to comfort her or get my belongings, the bitterness that I couldn’t even entertain myself with a pencil and a piece of paper while I awaited their convenience, these wore me down, to be sure, but in the end they accomplished something positive: I stopped being sorry for these officials and began to hate them. I still hate them. My plan is to hate them for the rest of my life, and to incite others to hate these un-Americans.

If I were a Mexican field worker, and they treated me like filth over and over, how would I feel about them then?

They took her away first, through the steel door marked
BROKEN
because it slammed. She was gone a quarter-hour. Then it was my turn to be fingerprinted. They did not like it when I looked out the window into Mexico, or when I asked what system they were using. But the woman who held my hand was female and gentle in her official way; I enjoyed surrendering each finger to her to be electronically scanned even though when I later looked back on the four-and-a-half-hour detention I found that being fingerprinted without my consent and having my fingerprints added to an unknown database offended me the most. They did something to my laptop computer, too; I suppose that they downloaded everything. If they infected it with spyware, all the better.

Whom did I
really
hate, though? Not the man with the nearly shaved head, nor Fatso at the desk, and certainly not the courteously hard-bitten FBI agent from El Centro with the twang in her voice, nor most of the various male officers who escorted me to and from the restroom whenever I needed to urinate, nor the kind female officer who got me a prison box lunch at about three-thirty in the afternoon. None of these had crossed
my
line. The man who ran his hands over me, first requiring me to lean forward with my hands above my head and against the wall so that I was off balance, at his mercy, I hate him and sometimes imagine punching him in the mouth. Well, wasn’t he just doing his job? If I had a chance to punch him, I would not; I’d never touch him.

Should I have blamed Eleven Negro, which was what Mexicans called September 11? I forgive the authorities their ignorance, but not their disrespect. We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

As for Southside, precisely because that utterly alien zone contaminated with multiple criminalities justified their existence, they must have feared it, as did the Pyrrans in Harry Harrison’s Deathworld Trilogy, hunkering behind their patchwork redoubt of flamethrowers and steel plates, on the defensive against alien life-forms which constantly mutated against them.
“The southern border is literally under siege . . . ,” Representative Solomon P. Ortiz, Democrat of Texas, said at a Congressional

hearing.
Or, as the Deathworld Trilogy explains:
Hundreds of thousands of years of genetic weeding-out have produced things that would give even an electronic brain nightmares.
Do you want to hear more?
“Praise Perimeter!” she breathed. “They found the napalm. One of the new horrors is breaking through to Ward Area 13 . . .”
In that connection, I remember what Dan Murray (who was not such a bad sort) always used to say:
They’ll pop their heads up again in a minute.

The functionaries of Operation Gatekeeper liked to advise me not to get too close to the fence, in case a Southsider threw rocks. That could have been their experience. Nobody ever threw rocks at
me.
They said that it was dangerous on the other side of the ditch; I can well believe that it might have been so for them. Once upon a time in the hot darkness outside the Thirteeen Negro, a threatening drunk attached himself to me, walking at my side for block after block, demanding not just money but big money; informing me that a broccoli knife stood ready in his pocket, he molested me with his bloodshot gaze, which reminded me of an Aztec stone sculpture of a man’s head who glares and grimaces with his white strips of shell inlay for teeth, and his red-smeared shell-eyes with obsidian pupils make him hideous to me; it was with precisely such bloody eyes that this drunk assaulted me; he had just teased me with the third glimpse of his broccoli knife when I reached the Hotel Chinesca, passing inside with much the same relief as a child feels pulling the bedclothes over his head, and he remained outside, glaring redly at me through the glass door, waiting for me to come back out into his power. Could it be that to some Northsiders,
all
Southsiders were of his species?

Tunnel between Mexicali, Calexico discovered
, the newspaper announced.
One of the new horrors is breaking through to Ward Area 13.
That wasn’t the newspaper; that was the Deathworld Trilogy. But Imperial was science-fictioning itself into Deathworld.
We’re going to send a robot down,
announced the Immigration and Customs Service spokeswoman, because who knows what lurked in that tunnel twenty feet down? After all,
Tunnel to U. S. starts inside Mexican home.
The investigation was not in response to statements by a Mexican man who claimed to have used a tunnel in eastern Calexico to help Chinese terrorists into the country to build a nuclear “dirty bomb” to attack Boston.
So they sent their robot down. They discovered electricity, a closed-circuit security system, and other signs of sinister sophistication.
U.S. officials seize house at end of border tunnel.
Several altars with flowers and pictures of saints were also found inside.

Oh, it’s not easy holding the line, but they were doing it well enough that Kay Brockman Bishop could tell me: Illegals come through our property very seldom. They’ve put up some new cameras on our property that have really made a difference. I had one coyote on the Donlevy ranch that would wave to me every morning. But here we’ve had no problem that I can speak of.

Now let me tell you how that line appears nowadays.

THE LINE ITSELF (2003-2006)

It starts with grey ocean, cafés,
terraza de playas,
PESCADOS
,
MARISCOS
. Above the grey sea-swells, coconuts hang from a beam. Each year, Tijuana really does increase its likeness to San Diego. It is clean and grey, with families sitting on the grass. Americans sometimes buy or rent houses here. Going inland, the line becomes less built up, for which we must console ourselves with the following leftwing campaign billboard:
WHERE THERE IS BREAD YOU LIVE BETTER
. The line continues away from the sea and up the cut in the sand-ridge. In these hills, the box-houses are better than shanties, but as the line goes east they begin to resemble the assemblages of Mexicali’s Colonia Chorizo: tires hung in rows on doorways, a broken brickwork skeleton which proclaims itself
SE VENDE
, junked cars in steep ravines. Then suddenly there is a rolling vista of white houses with an uprising of green trees.

Going east, it gets grubbier and smoggier. Three beautiful prostitutes and two hotels delight the eye. Often these kind ladies are in white miniskirts, standing with crossed thighs.

From the whores, flies and shoe stores of Centro to the freeway between the two overpasses, from the graffiti’d yellow castle (taste of exhaust in my mouth) to the giant white Jesus on the grimy hill, Tijuana lives with the line. One poet of the illicit secrets of Coahuila Street, of
piss and mortuary candles,
of meth, of
transvestites with enormous bullet tits,
and of above all
las niñas las niñas,
the girls the girls, sings of a certain billard parlor where one must go to obtain
the essential address of the tomb of
that rapist-saint
Juan Soldado,
about whose life and death this book has already written
³³⁰
and
who bestows the miracle of invisibility required to cross the border, without
la migra
seeing, without
la migra
seeing.
That tomb, of course, lies but three blocks south of the border. Someday I will go there, and pray never to become invisible to the girls the girls. What does John the Soldier stand for, but the occasionally crossed divide between evil and sacredness? Yes, in Tijuana the line lies everywhere! Even on Insurgentes, where flocks of young workers pass in and out of that gate in the long stretch of Óptica Solas, while under a blue tarp, two ladies sell tacos and potato chips at a factory’s edge, they talk about how the wages are better here than farther south, and how much better still—ten times better—they must be
on the other side.
A woman sells
EXPRESS FRUIT
on a metal siding near Metales y Derivados on this drizzly January morning, waiting for customers in the huddles of job-seekers at this or that
maquiladora.
Occasional groups of half a dozen-odd chunky young women in cheap windbreakers pass rapidly, chattering. From Metales y Derivados, the Northsider-conceived nightmare, abandoned to poison the people and other organisms of Southside, there comes a piquant solvent smell in honor of the line.

And the line continues east! In sight of the wall grow a few sunflowers. At the freeway entrance two girls are hitchhiking, one of them holding a baby. Then on a fresh-shaved sandy hillside I see a housing development like some white conglomeration of salt crystals. Ahead, a mountain veils itself in dust. Two wide concrete ditches whose emptinesses echo that of the Los Angeles River mark some kind of delineation best known to engineers; then the highway climbs out of the Tijuana Valley, which from above appears more hellish than it really is.
³³¹
We now say goodbye to the blue restaurant Yi Wa.

In deference to the line, many cars bear California license plates, but Californians can be of any color and these vehicles most often hold brownskinned people.

At the strip malls where the Tecate toll road begins, you can easily find a Pollo Féliz to eat in, along with its American counterpart. Also awaiting you are Industrial Tools de México, Veterinaria Azteca, and a photocopyist. A vendor wheels his cart and rings his bell at the intersection of Industrial and Maquiladora, which is appropriately solvent-smelling; then comes a hill like a double-toothed volcano, a roadside cross in honor of some dead victim, and the Río Tecate, which today is a brownish streamlet. Now begins the ascending desolation; it’s similar to what one sees when flying from Los Angeles to Imperial: the same mountains, orangish-tan with wisps of green on top. Rapidly it becomes beautiful. Occasional
rancherías
show off small tan hay bales, as rounded volcanic-looking cones rise over the trees. Whitish round rocks burst out of the reddish grass, just as in California’s Sierra foothills. The wall can occasionally be seen.

Next comes Tecate in its rocky, grassy bowl. It is a cool town of generous trees. In many places the wall stands out from far away. It is still possible to slip through the waist-high and shoulder-high gaps; indeed, wall-less segments remain. But Northside keeps building.
³³²
Here at sunset there is often a yellow sky over the mountain and behind the Telcel sign and between the Burger King and the Pollo Féliz, from one of whose two silver pipes comes dark smoke.

A man starts to polish the car. I give him ten pesos, enter the taquería, and eat dinner. At the end of the meal he is still earnestly working.

Past a yellow sign for the
TECATE GATEWAY COMPLEJO INDUSTRIAL
, the route arrives at the high country’s ranches, many of them for sale, after which we descend into a wide grassy plateau, the grimy air hiding mountains, pine trees, grass, rocks, a Campo Turísto, El Rancho Concordio. Then for a time the wall cannot be seen at all; nor are there any ranches, only the Sierra Juárez, where I am told that there are several old Indian sites where ceremonies of fertility were once conducted: boulders convoluted into massive vulvas. I have not found them here but then I have never asked.

Then comes Rumorosa, very small and hilly, where the composite rock dolmens begin.