Imperial (21 page)

She was not my darling anymore. If I ever saw her again, I would not be able to say
darling.
She would never make love with me again. I thought about this all the way to Imperial on that Greyhound bus which reeked so richly of unwashed human bodies that it was strange to think of the scent of her flesh, to sit there greedily imagining licking her private parts.

TERRITORIAL CONCESSIONS

And so, as always, the Greyhound went east on Highway 10, until even though the land was still grassy and tree-claimed, the long dry mountains of Imperial began snaking along off to the right; the grass got browner, shrubs shrank and darkened. At Beaumont an arguable western border of Imperial was reached, but as I have already told you, Banning looked more like it, it being here that mountain-chains approached on both sides. Now came Palm Springs, which used to be Cahuilla Indian territory (there’s a Morongo reservation and casino now, and an Agua Caliente reservation also). I felt stone-cold, even when we passed within a few blocks of the restaurant where she always sweet-talked me into taking her. The Greyhound station there bore no associations except of previous Greyhound rides. Then we were approaching Indio (elevation: sea level), where I’d dreaded to see the Date Tree Hotel. I found myself feeling merely bored with Imperial, not to mention disgusted with myself for returning to collect more obscure details about a hot sad place when my life was draining away and everything felt stale.

Next the bus passed the sign for the Date Tree, and suddenly I
believed
that she wasn’t with me and never would be again. My eyes sought through the colonies of low white houses between palm trees; and there it was, the Date Tree, empty. All of its palm trees were stunted. It was a dead grey place now. I wondered how she and I could ever have wanted to go there. Then it was quickly gone; I lacked the courage to look back.

When we halted for half an hour at the Greyhound station I went inside to get a drink of water and saw the vending machine for Mexican decals, one of which I’d bought her a couple of years back. And there was the corner where on another occasion she’d kissed me goodbye. I couldn’t endure to approach it, so I went back out into the parking lot, where palm trees shook in the hot wind.

Well, she had taught me how to feel. Now that she was gone, I was struggling to unlearn the lesson for the sake of my own survival. As jilted lovers often will, I kept craving a death as cool and well-earned as Imperial’s darkness. Imperial’s mountains had gone away. It was freakishly cool (ninety-four degrees), and everything was dulled or else disappeared into haze. Here came the long line of palms she’d loved; it was dull and dusty, everything stained as if by smoke . . .

Suddenly I suffered a longing to telephone her and tell her that I was almost in sight of the palm-grove at Thermal where she had sketched and gouached so happily while I’d gone half a block away to photograph the sign for the Jewel Date Palm Co. (all the negatives from that trip appropriately disappeared in the mail, so that the catalogue entry for this image, number twenty-nine, reads:
IV-CS-THR-00-01. Wall of Jewel Date Co. Bldg, Thermal, mid morning, November, f/64 at 1/2 sec. Wall in shadow; camera in sun. Metered with incident dome flush against wall to stay in shadow. LOST.
); unable to leave her longer than a quarter of an hour, I’d rushed back into the cool darkness of the palm-grove to keep her company, and made other photographs there which also got lost. Her first gouache was almost done. She looked up and smiled at me. She’d loved that place so much that it was the heart of Imperial. How could I imagine not telling her that it continued to exist and that I was thinking of her? The way seemed so dreary, the whites greyish-tan with dust, the blues greyish with haze. There it was, and as the Greyhound went by, I saw the white shape of a person sitting in the darkness between palm trees, and wondered whether it could be her ghost, or the part of her which still loved me. No doubt it was just a legal worker, an illegal soul, a
body
who didn’t count.

Now rolling on south from Mecca between armies of palms and citrus hedges, the Greyhound, untricked by varying greens, carried me in sight of the Salton Sea, which would ordinarily have uplifted my heart. That narrow tongue of blue which overlay the green grapevines widened and darkened like a concretion of my indifference. Thanks to the strange weather it turned grey, hazing itself away into nothing. As we approached Niland, following the “worked” tan flatness of the shore, I suddenly and thankfully was permitted to feel a stab of almost unbearable grief. Perhaps she was throwing out my toothbrush right now, the one on which she’d written my name and drawn a little heart; or perhaps she was disposing of the photographs of me she’d once kept upon her wall. It was the ninth day.

And now every time I saw something that reminded me of us in our once unbroken Imperial, my grief increased so sickeningly that I thought I would vomit.

Presently I was in Calexico with the knife-sharp evening shadows on the streets, and, a little weak after carrying my tripod, film holders and big camera through the streets after a day without much food or water, I entered the supermarket where she and I always shopped, went straight to the aisle of the foods which she liked best, and even started to pick up an avocado for her. I rushed back to my motel room and collapsed on the empty double bed for an hour.

I could not comprehend it. She loved me. Something was hurting me. Whenever something hurt me, I went to her. Now I could not go to her. Why couldn’t I?

She’d wanted me to keep
in touch
with her, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t . . .

I thought about walking across the border as I had done so many times before, but even Mexico didn’t interest me. I felt alone in the room, but outside would have been worse. I thought: I never should have come back to Imperial.

And of course Imperial never
has
been the same. I cannot escape all memories of the woman whose love for me, now lost through my own fault and hers, runs through many of these pages. That is why I so often longed to get rid of myself. Moment after moment it went on. I could pick up the telephone and dial her number, which I craved and which would be terrible,
³⁰
or I could pick up my gun. Pistol or receiver, in either case right at the ear! If I get through this minute, there would be another minute to get through, and another day, maybe for the rest of what appeared to be my ruined life. And now, some years’ worth of minutes since, I find myself grateful for my life and I’ve long since forgotten which corner of the Indio Greyhound station she kissed me in. This was but one subdelineation; now so many new ones have been overlaid upon it that if anyone asks me what is what, all I can hesitatingly reply is that Imperial is . . .

Searching the bedside drawer for a Bible, I found an Imperial County phone book on the front cover of which somebody named Piña had written: I LOVE YOU
Armando.
This comforted me slightly, to imagine that Piña and Armando might be happy. Then I opened the phone book and discovered on the inside cover:

I love you
I love you
I love you 9-8-00 3.22 a.m.
good by my Love see you soon ????
We will be to gether?????
Armando E————1958 to 8-8-0000
I love you Armando
Armando y Piña
you to will always

I felt horrified. Then I thought: She loved him. She refused to cede her heart’s Imperial. And so, if she’d had the guts, right now she slept with him for always.

I, of course, had only to pick up the telephone and make a certain promise which I could not make. Then I would have been with her. But the days of separation were widening; probably it was already too late; anyhow, I couldn’t do it. I was damned.

Although ever since my mid-twenties I’d rarely remembered my dreams, I now dreamed of her every night with searing vividness. Upon the windows of Mexicali’s seafood restaurants, painted representations of octopi and shrimp glow insistently, and the dreams were still more concentrated than that. I’d awake at once, gasping for air. At first the dreams offered dream-solutions: I paid off all her debts, and then we were able to be together; we agreed to change our names and hide from everyone who knew us, and so it was solved. But after a couple of weeks the dreams involved postmortem meetings with her: I fruitlessly begged her to take me back, and she replied with tears, anger, disgust. Knowing these scenarios to be accurate depictions of what would have happened had we actually spoken, I continued to squeeze out the strength to avoid dialling her telephone number for the next fifteen minutes,
³¹
and then for the hour after that; so it went day by day; that was the only thing to do, although I flattered myself that she, too, must be getting more miserable (and, knowing her, more angry) with each day of this silence which I’d imposed, not that that brought me any pleasure, for unkindness was never one of my faults. I knew very well that the instant I’d see her or hear her voice, I’d be my old self, relaxed, alert, capable, considerate and even joyous, because the undelineated portion of my heart (which we might as well call love) had not died at all. It was very strong yet. She was the love of my life. So I wanted to die.

At eight-o’-clock the smell of manure was in the air, and night had come to the asphalt of the streets, oozing upwards to dim the dun walls of hotels, freight trucks, arcades, supermarkets; but the sky itself remained so luminous that it seemed the same as ever, imperishable as my image of her; the place within my heart could not, could not die, it seemed—now it is an old gulley nearly filled in with drift-sand—and yet this peculiar sky hovered in disconnection from the ground’s darkness, where I weakly wandered, longing to disappear forever behind the silhouettes of palm trees.

A drunk, more drunks, drinkers not yet drunk, and drunks as yet unmentioned populated the so-called International Friendship Park. I paced there, more and more rapidly. Why wasn’t she here? I could have been with her, but I couldn’t have been with her. And then the guilt for failing her, as painful as myriad diagonal sun-glares across a set of railroad tracks! I’d begged her forgiveness in the end, and thank God she’d forgiven me for everything, but I . . . A kind bullet, or . . .

I reached the border where a government sentinel’s white vehicle watched the cars swimming like minnows through the narrow channels in that articulated reef of exclusion. Just out of my sight, they passed into Mexico.

A little girl in a pale skirt was dancing and swinging her pale purse, which resembled the crescent moon as it whirled about in the darkness. She was in Mexico; I gazed at her from between the metal bars of the border. Backlit by the red tail-eyes of the many cars waiting to cross into the country where I stood, she leaped joyously. Couples touched through the wall; pairs did drug deals on Southside; and the fence seemed to rock slightly; a man had jumped down illegally into the United States of America! I stood in Calexico, staring into the congested otherness of Mexicali, and felt that I would never comprehend the reason for differentiation of any sort, let alone separation. Yet what I watched brought me an instant of peace. It was possible to wait and to watch through walls. I would do this for the woman I loved, even though she no longer waited for me, so that the wait was hopeless. I refused to confess that. I would be very patient and good, and she would miss me enough to come back to me. Why not? The little girl had been waiting for her mother to return from Northside. Here she came; the child shrilled with delight, and they went off together, down the steps under the street and up again into Mexico.

So I did the same. I passed through the two clicking turnstiles, wound through that white pedestrian tunnel where the Mexican border guard sat with his head in his hands, and found myself gazing westward at the shacks whose high, pallid rows of lights on poles somehow resembled palm orchards. The streets were darker and meaner than I remembered. Well, I was unhappy, so of course I felt vulnerable, almost powerless.

My feet took me back to the red-lit Thirteen Negro dance hall where I’d come for half a dozen years now, sometimes with her, never once to dance. The beauty of the Mexican women, the way they swayed like underwater weeds, that fascinated me as much as ever, but this time they seemed so far above me, higher even than the sea-level mark on the squat white silo of the Holly Sugar Company, that when the waiter came to see whether I wanted a dance partner, I literally couldn’t speak, so I shook my head. Sitting in the corner, I slowly drank my beer, watching the girls laughingly chattering to the men in white cowboy hats who were grinding their hips against them. I felt afraid and did not know why. I wanted to run back across the border and hide in my motel bed. I was afraid, but I pretended that she was beside me again, and that I was helping and protecting her from whatever I feared, because doing that had never failed to make me brave. Yes, she would always be with me, but only as my conscience, reminding me of the promise that I’d failed to make (and years later I insert the observation that “always” may not endure exceedingly long). It is no exaggeration that her presence tortured me; of course her utter absence would have been worse; I
had
to believe that she’d always be at the Date Tree Hotel, the palm grove in Mecca, Leonard’s mountain and the cathedral in Mexicali.

Nowadays when I pass the Date Tree Hotel I sometimes feel a trifle sad, and sometimes the sight of the Jewel Date Co. creates a sensation not pleasant enough to be called “nostalgia.” If I am with someone else, I hide my sadness, and my companion suspects nothing. Before I know it, the sorrow has gone. Frequently these places lack the power to hurt me. The cathedral has now presented itself to me in so many contexts that her ghost rarely attracts my attention. As for Salvation Mountain, who can visit Leonard and not like him? Who can resist his cheerful-ness? There is a certain arch that Leonard built; it says LOVE. Never mind. And when I go to the Thirteen Negro year after year, I am happy. Well, that place always meant more to me than to her.