Imperial (33 page)

I’m going to fuck you up, whitey! he said. Then he shot me in the face. After I was dead, he took out his truncheon and began to beat some women who were weeping in handcuffs. That was when I realized that I loved Big Brother. I sold out at a fancy price.

And so we all write stories to suit ourselves, and I wish happy endings, happy landings to all of us.

FLAUBERT’S HEROINE

There’s a cleaning lady I know in Sacramento, a coarsely beautiful schoolteacher who now scrubs out other people’s toilets; when her brother the accountant flies up from Mexico City to visit, he comes from house to house to help her; and if the homeowner’s there, he’ll rush to show his picture identification card, and his expression is pitiable beyond abject; it must be a reflex, the reflex of submission to this foreign power which took half his country but which repays the theft by oozing money from its bowels—what phrase could better locate his sister who cleans toilets?—She has encysted herself in Northside for many illegal years; unless somebody drops a dime on her, she’ll probably die here. Wouldn’t she be perfect to write a novel about? All I’d need to do to get inside her head is scrub toilets in Sweden for a few years, furtively and for cash. No, come to think of it, Sweden wouldn’t be quite right; while it’s true that it’s cleaner than the United States and that I can’t speak the language, Sweden hasn’t taken anything from me; moreover it would be difficult for me to feel afraid there; finally, if they caught me scrubbing Swedish toilets and kicked me out, I’d get over it. So how could I learn enough about María’s life to express the respect I have for her endurance, and the compassion I feel for her intellect which wastes itself on drudgery?—Parenthetically, I’m not saying that nobody should have to clean other people’s toilets or that María simply because she’s real to me is better than anybody else, only that it would be unfair to a janitor to make him teach high school, and it’s unfair to María, who taught high school, to make her clean toilets—but
why
is it unfair? María chose to come here; it’s not my fault, or my government’s, or hers, so what am I saying?—How could I best pay tribute to María’s life? I know how to invent character, upon which I suppose it would be possible to drizzle a few droplets of local fact, much as a Mexicali street vendor beset by July splashes water on his oranges and cherries. But life’s sufficiently dishonest already; my oranges might taste like candy, but why? The truth is that I do not understand enough about border people to describe them without reference to specific individuals, which means that I remain too ill acquainted with them to fictionalize them. Only now do I feel capable of writing novels about American street prostitutes, with whom I have associated for two decades. The sun-wrinkled women who sell candy, when they sit chatting beneath their sidewalk parasols, what stories do they tell one another? I could learn Spanish and eavesdrop; then I’d know; but I wouldn’t
really
know until I could invent their stories. Making up tales about María’s life would not only be disrespectful to her, it would be bad art:
Suddenly, as a beast checked in its spring, they were still and motionless. By the side of the old frontiersman on the platform under the light stood Barbara.
The best compliment I can pay María is that I cannot imagine her life, especially the drudgery of it but also its various helplessnesses, humiliations and apprehensions. (What happened to those brownskinned women who were crying? What did the one in handcuffs see when the elevator doors opened?) Writing a novel about María would be like slapping her face. Someday, if I ever get out into the world and see more, suffer more, which might not be worth it, writing a novel about her might be an act of beauty and truth.

Have you ever read Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart”? It begins:
For half a century the women of Pont-l’Évêque envied Madame Aubain her maidservant Félicité,
and then we follow that half-century to its end, when Félicité leaves behind her a life of drudgery whose main enrichment was her capacity to love.
⁴⁷
She keeps an old frock-coat of her mistress’s long dead husband; she adores Madame Aubain’s daughter Virginie at least as much as does the mother. The passion of her life is for her mistress’s cast-off parrot. When it dies, she gets it stuffed, and gradually comes to associate it with the most perfect entity she knows: the Holy Ghost.
And as she breathed her last, she thought she could see, in the opening heavens, a giant parrot hovering above her head.
Félicité is, in a word, stupid. One of the reasons that “A Simple Heart” is a masterpiece is that Flaubert never hesitates to make her stupidity plain, meanwhile permitting us to realize that of all the characters in this story, she’s by far the finest, a fact never noticed by any of the busy, self-absorbed human beings around her, who remain ordinary as she is. What “A Simple Heart” did for
my
heart when I first read it many years ago was to alert me to the probability that among the people whom I myself overlooked, there might be Félicités, whose hidden goodnesses would do
me
good to find. Later, when I began to write books, it occurred to me that discovering and describing those goodnesses might accomplish some external good as well, perhaps even to Félicité and María, who have less need of our pity than we might think (but more need of our cash). Suppose that Madame Aubain, after reading my version of “A Simple Heart,” refrained just once from assaulting Félicité with harsh words. Or is that aspiration ridiculous?

Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to do something of the kind when she wrote
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Our President is supposed to have said when he met her: So you’re the little lady who started this great big war.—Nowadays an Uncle Tom is somebody who’s servile, contemptible; yet his author meant him to be a martyr.
⁴⁸
What made tastes change? What would Lenin say about Félicité? He would certainly call, as Flaubert never did, for the abolition of Madame Aubain. (He’d despise Uncle Tom.)

Anyhow, might not María be far worse off than Félicité? That must be what I want: somebody who’s badly off. And aren’t the women who work in Mexicali’s
maquiladoras
worse off than María? Their take-home pay is only one-fifth of hers. At the end of the twentieth century there were six hundred and thirty thousand of them,
primarily young women, who account for one-third of the republic’s labor force . . . They are 10 to 15 percent more productive . . . than American workers . . . the
maquiladoras
have generated during the past years “a 47 percent increase in productivity coupled with a 29 percent decline in real wages” . . .
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
Few hire pregnant women, and some plants have compulsory pregnancy tests. A
maquiladora
in Ciudad Juárez, according to complaints by workers, requires new hires to “present bloody tampons for three consecutive months.”
In other words,
in material advantages they are already well supplied.
This makes me so furious and sorrowful to read. (In another chapter of
Imperial
we’ll find out whether it’s true.) Even Napoleon before he hypnotized himself with domination’s glittering honors is credited with having said:
Respect the burden, Madame.
He was referring to a workman who was carrying a heavy load.

IMPERIAL

by

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

1

F
or five years the other foremen in the shoe factory envied Raúl Hernández his star worker, María. Only the bookkeeper knew her last name. María was absent for work only once, on the day her father died. She brought in a bloody tampon every month, and on demand she slept with Raúl Hernández, a service for which she asked no favor other than the continuation of her employment. Long after he had lost his sexual interest in her, Raúl Hernández continued to be fond of María because she could turn out more soles per shift than any other worker he ever had.

Once upon a time, I thought that I wanted to write a novel like that—what style! I understood
respect the burden.
That novel about María would have failed, because respect must encompass more than the heroine’s victimhood. It needs also to embrace her various happinesses and her silliness about parrots.

In 1968, a doctor who works with poor people in the Deep South and Appalachia writes a book which breathes shame, guilt, compassion and indignation in a manner which I can only consider noble; the doctor is haunted by
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
whose passion may indeed have been one of the primary reasons he stands present in the land of goiters, stinking outhouses and seven-year-olds with degenerative joint disease—in which case James Agee and Walker Evans truly accomplished something; he looks at the photographs in their book and feels a sense of
déjà vu;
yet the people in his own book
seem different—perhaps more lonely, more confused by the ironies and paradoxes which this nation presents to them as much as to those of us who feel educated and sensitive.
It is very important to this doctor that his patients be different, because Agee has said over and over that no portrait of an individual family can stand in for everybody; there can be no types because human beings, so the doctor puts it, are
preciously unique and different even in the way they face starvation and die.

Indeed our attitudes toward poverty are reflected in the two distinct stereotypes we apply to it. In order to earn . . . quickly forgotten sympathy, the lives of perfectly respectable and determined people are caricatured and distorted so that they emerge as useless, semi-retarded, pitiful creatures, in need of charity . . . Or else those lives are made so exclusively “different,” so intractable, so proud, so “happy,” so uncomplicated, natural, unaffected, stoic, beautifully patient and enduring—that awe or envy becomes the only suitable and justifiable response from “us.”

What then does the doctor want? It may well be that the people with the leisure and inclination to read
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
all the way through are not the go-getter people who have the ability to control resources, and thereby to direct them toward the poor. What does more good, a generation of indignant college students or several million dollars’ worth of beans, flour and powdered milk sent to this nation’s poorest counties? This is by no means a rhetorical question; I would be grateful to learn the answer.

The smell of fresh tortillas, the songs of birds, and the silences of the prostitutes young and old now standing in their doorway chrysalises, ready to fly into the cooling evening (the temperature has already fallen twenty degrees, down to ninety-four), these can go into a novel or an essay; it doesn’t matter which; they could even be working notes for a poem. But once on a Greyhound bus from Calexico to Los Angeles I met a Mexican-American man whose best friend had lost three sisters, ages sixteen, fourteen and thirteen. It happened right on the eastern border of Imperial, in Yuma, Arizona, and the reason that the man told me his friend’s story was that fourteen more
pollos
had just died of thirst when their coyote abandoned them in the very same spot; so it must have been 2001 when I heard the story, which took place about fifteen years earlier; and you already know the ending. They’d paid their big money, then waited and waited, after which forensicists identified the decomposed bodies of those three young girls. They never found the coyote. The mother went crazy. And the man told this steadily and so softly that I thought that only I could hear, but when he had finished, everyone on the bus fell silent. How could it be right to make art out of this? And yet of course it
would
be right to make a poem or a song, a painting or a novel about it, if doing so would help anyone to
feel.
Steinbeck might have been able to do it. Maybe someday I will attempt to do it. At the moment, I cannot presume to do anything with this story except to show it to you, tiptoe around it, and walk away.

THE TIDE IS OUT

For now, all I can hope to do is learn as I go. I’ve kept returning to Imperial year after year, just as I promised; and I know the most important thing, which I know only because I’m getting old—namely, that I’ll never do enough of that learning. As for the landscape, at least, I’m finally beginning to find my bearings in it; so many Imperial views are familiar now; when I come to them, I recognize them from my own photographs. (Sometimes the photographs trick me. I’d forgotten how yellow the Algodones Dunes are, since I mostly see them in black and white.)—It’s night here, the tide out, the dark mud rivelled and wrinkled with water, studded with rocks and clamshells, consecrated by blue, pink, yellow and green stripes of reflected neon. Steinbeck almost got this far, but here at San Felipe the Sea of Cortés can be dangerously shallow; can you see these fishing boats sunk in the mud? In 1539, Cortés’s lieutenant, Francisco de Ulloa, did get here, or near enough; after inspecting the whales, sheep, Indians and tortoises of Imperial he concluded that
the game was not worth the candle.—
The tide is out; the tide is out, and those white streaks of ocean have become long low flat subdued lines, scarcely worthy of being called breakers. The clean smell of Gulf proclaims finality; this is Imperial’s frontier, and these long foamy lines whose whiteness seems phosphorescent in the night, they lie within another zone. My air-conditioning man in Sacramento sails out of here for his fishing vacations. Last time he caught a thirty-five-pound grouper and three squids ranging from eight to twenty-six pounds; they changed from reddish-brown to milky-luminescent while they died; but those successes occurred two hundred miles south of San Felipe, not in Imperial at all.