Imperial (83 page)

Dark stairs led down into black water; that was the cantina where the black velvet paintings were. He said that it would take three weeks to pump it out and he wasn’t sure about the price. Three weeks later I was back and he said that the pump had broken; he stood frowning with folded arms and said that the old Chino who would have shown me more had refused; I could tell that he wanted me to go away and never come back. But that was three weeks later; right now we still had an everlasting friendship ahead of us, and so after the flashlight finished glimmering on the stinking black tunnel in the cantina of the velvet paintings he took me up a crazy flight of wooden steps through the darkness to a concrete cell with three windows which looked down into that chamber of illegal butter and rice.

A Chinese lived and died here, he said.

There had been a stove, he told me, but the stove was gone. The dresser was still there. The bed was gone. It was a ghastly, lonely place.

It was a long time ago that he died, but I was already working at the supermarket, he said. I remember him.

He was silent for awhile. The place was so hot and humid that it was difficult to breathe. The Mexican said slowly: Our race is like Italians. We like to party. But they are very strange. Look down, and you can see that tunnel; it’s full of water . . .

Where does it go?

They say that that one also goes to the cathedral, but I don’t know.

We descended the stairs, happy to get out of that eerie place, and we went back out to the street, and he locked the inner door and the outer door. In the doorway of the abandoned supermarket he said: When I got here, fifteen or twenty people lived below.

You mean, where you first took me?

Yes. They never left.

He pointed to another building and said: When the fire came, this is where the Chinese came out, the old ones with the beards . . .

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE CHINESCA

Now what? I had established that the tunnels really existed and had seen them with my own eyes. Thanks to the letters, I could imagine, however incompletely and incorrectly, a little of what life must have been like for Chinese in Mexicali during the golden age of tunnels. (The Methodist church has a
subterráneo,
said Carmen Jaham. That’s where my school was; I went down there from when I was seven or eight until I was seventeen. I don’t know what they’ve done with it. It looked like a tunnel down there; when we had recess we’d come up and play basketball on the patio. We had desks. There were two teachers and about fifty or sixty students, organized by last name. We had an electric light and a big chalkboard; that was it. That’s where we had English, Chinese and Spanish classes. We were all brothers and sisters. At that time, we didn’t care if you had money or not. What was important was whether people were kind to us.)
¹⁴²
But I still didn’t know whether any tunnels were still active, and, if so, who or what might be down there. There might well be tunnels leading under the wall into Northside, but finding those, and seeing people smuggled through them, did not seem worth the expenditure of risk or treasure. I would be satisfied to find an illegal casino, which might or might not exist, or a few pallets where impoverished or illegal Chinese slept in the hot darkness.

Yolanda Ogás had claimed to have met an old man who’d lived in the tunnels for much of his life, and even to have seen the stove he used down there; unfortunately, when I asked her to introduce me to him, she neglected to return my telephone calls.

Lupe Vásquez proposed a procedure which probably would have borne fruit, but wasn’t quite my style: Go to a Mexican cop (he recommended his cousin), give the cop a hundred dollars, and tell the cop to put his pistol against the head of the nearest old gook. Then they’d goddamned sure as hell show me their fucking tunnels!

Clare Ng telephoned her Chinese friend in Los Angeles who was in the trading business; he went to Mexicali often, and assured her that in this year of grace 2003 there remained at least one locale where Chinese played mah-jongg secretly; she tried, and he tried, but they didn’t care to invite me. At least they didn’t refer me to a world-famous painter of horses named Mr. Auyón.

Once upon a time in the Chinesca I peered in through the closed cracked window of the store that sold sombreros; there was supposed to be a tunnel underneath but the owner had assured Yolanda and me that he’d never heard of anything like that. I looked in and everything was dim; how had I advanced my knowledge of tunnels? Now it was already six-thirty, and a few steps from me the fat lady was locking the white-painted, dirt-tinted gates of a roofed alley for the night. Sweet dreams to the store that sold Communion dresses! A pleasant rest to the barbershop! There went the white Number 99 bus, crowded with standees; a man wheeled a dollyload of boxes down the grey sidewalk; a female radio voice was babbling cheerily from a store, and beneath that Mexican
carnicería,
which was very old, there presumably lay secrets dormant or active.

There was the old, low Restaurant Dong Cheng (COMIDA CHINA MEXICANA), where from time to time for half a dozen years now I’ve dropped in to get a beer or a half-order of fried rice, which was always as comfortingly large as a fat lady’s breast. No matter how hungry I was, it was inexhaustible. Then a white fence stretched across a vacant lot, a palm tree behind; there was a parking lot, more Chinese restaurants, the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico, which as I might have told you three or four times already is famed for its beautiful whores, many of whom are Chinese or half-Chinese; this was the Chinesca.

Once upon a time, in a certain street whose name I have already mentioned, not far from the sign where it said BILLARES and
JAGUAR
and unsurprisingly near to the ironwork letters which spelled out CHEE HOW OAK TIN, there was a gate, and a Mexican woman pointed to it and said to me: All the Chinese go there.

Do you think I can go inside?

They won’t let you.

Why?

She shrugged. Who knows? A lot of Chinese come out of there to work. At night they come back here. Everybody says they live underground.

We were nearly at the volleyball court, which was also the basketball court and which Yolanda had told me was the place beneath which the Chinese supposedly lived. (The tunnels don’t exist.)

Every day that I passed by, I glanced at the CHEE HOW OAK TIN gate, but it was always closed until one morning in November when it wasn’t; nakedly interpreter-less, I went in, and there was a Mexican standing in the courtyard. I gave him twenty dollars and said to him:
Por favor, señor, dónde está una subterráneo?
He laughed at me. He could speak English perfectly well. He told me not to tell anyone his name or where the tunnel was, but I can let you know that it was less than three doors from there. And it wasn’t even a real
subterráneo,
only a
sotano,
a cellar, on whose floor a man in a blanket was sleeping; he was old and Chinese and might have been drunk; he did have a beard, although not as long as in the Mexicans’ stories; a bag of clothes lay beside him, so let’s say he lived there; perhaps I should have photographed him but it didn’t seem very nice to steal a picture of a sleeping man; I have done that sometimes if I hope to obtain a moving picture of the wretchedness of homelessness, but this man seemed neither wretched nor homeless, so I left him in peace; it all happened in a moment. And so now I had achieved my objective; I could say that people still slept in the tunnels; the myths were true; there remained secrets and subterraneans, just as there used to be once upon a time in the Chinesca. I came back into the sunlight, passing BILLARES and
JAGUAR
; and for some reason I felt very, very sad.

MISS XU’S FIRST TUNNEL

Once upon a time in the Chinesca I asked the waitress in the Dong Cheng if I could talk to her, and she said yes. (I don’t know why I bother to tell you this. This story has already achieved its climax; I’ve assured you that the tunnels are inhabited; it’s all over.) She was a tiny, pretty Chinese girl, aged twenty-six. Her parents had brought her to Mexicali when she was nine years old.

What do you remember from Kwang Tung?
¹⁴³

To tell the truth, very little. It’s hotter here, and there were more people there.

Now that you are grown up, would you prefer to stay here or go back to China?

Here.

Would you marry a Mexican?

It doesn’t matter to me, but my parents would want me to marry a Chinese.

Have Mexicans been nice to you, or do you feel like a foreigner?

Smiling, spreading her hands, she replied: My friends and the people I study with are very nice, but every now and then the people yell something at me in the street . . .

What are the personality differences between Chinese, Mexicans and Americans?

Chinese are more conservative, she said at once. Then she thought for a very long time, first smiling, then pursing her lips.—I don’t know exactly what Americans are like, but they’re more liberal. Mexicans are friendly and nice . . .

Do you have any knowledge of the tunnels?

The truth is, she said, I’ve never been in a
subterráneo.

So I took her down Avenida Juárez (every Mexican city offers us its avenue or boulevard named Benito Juárez) and through the red-lettered double glass doors of the Victoria; then with permission,
con permiso,
we passed through the kitchen and went down into the tunnel. Now we were home; now we were sheltered from the pure yellow loneliness of the Mexicali streetlights.

Have you ever seen a ceiling like that before? I asked her.

No, said Miss Xu.

Is it as you expected here?

I did not think it would look like this. I thought it would be more like a cave. This seems like a house.

(By the way, she never, ever let me see the inside of her own house. She lived in Condominios Montealbán. She was the one who’d said about Luisa’s
quinceañera: I don’t care for that sort of event.
Her dream for her life was to finish her studies in business administration and then work, maybe as a factory manager.)

The cook came down into the tunnel to visit me again; now that the boss had said that I was okay, he loved to use me as an excuse to descend into his memories. He was a jolly, pleasant man. He said: I used to eat and sleep down here with the Chinese. It was like a hotel down here! Mostly they have retired now; some have died; the rest went away. It’s been more than ten years since they’ve stopped living here.

I asked him if he could say more about what had changed,
¹⁴⁴
and Miss Xu gazed at him without any expression that I could see, and he said: After they rented out this space, water began to drip down from above. So I didn’t want to sleep down here anymore. It used to be like a new house. Now it’s like a haunted house . . .

He hesitated and said: I do mean haunted. You know, when one died, the rest leave . . .

That was all he would say. The Chinese waitress continued to be silent. In the darkness I could see her face surprisingly well, because it was so pale that it almost glowed; and now I watched the girl’s tiny pale hands gripping the loop of her belt; when the Mexican said
haunted,
her hands tightened, and that was all.

DARKNESS AND BROKEN CHAIRS

Those old, old letters, partially rat-eaten, and the memories of old men, the myths of farmworkers and drunks, the lies of Mr. Auyón and the evasions of Chinese and Mexican business owners alike, the photographs in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali and the passages in old books, they all added up to something beautiful, stinking, empty and infinitely rich, like Imperial itself. On the threshold of the tunnel under the Victoria where the letters were found, Rosalyn Ng had tried as I had to imagine herself back into that world, and decided however tentatively that
I believe the place was for public use and for entertainment purposes, especially since the sign at the entrance embodies that sentiment of fun and celebration . . .
What was she talking about, but a warped and mildewed wooden door with the rectangular wirework over the top of it and the Chinese ideogram affixed to it, an ideogram which to me resembled two figures dancing together with outstretched arms upon a bridge supported by the shoulders of two kneeling figures? Behind and around the door was darkness; to the right of it was a high wirework window giving on darkness; below the doorknob and the padlock which passed through the crude-bored hole was a Chinese notice, nailed to the wood. What was in the darkness now? Not much but broken chairs.

What really happened to turn the tunnels from restaurants and hideouts into cloacas constipated by their own trash? Was it all the fires? As had several Mexican boutique owners, the owner of the Golden Dragon Restaurant said that the tunnels used to be populous “fifty plus years ago,” but then came the great conflagration, which ruined and killed.
After that, everyone moved to above town or ran off to somewhere else.
For more information, he referred me to a certain artist and professor by name of Eduardo Auyón.

Yolanda Ogás for her part said to me: This used to be the commercial center of Mexicali, but when they built the Plaza Cachanilla with a lot of stores, the Chinese started going to buy those stores . . .

Señorita Xu’s uncle, that exceedingly smoothfaced old man with very narrow-lensed spectacles, stood in his shoe store and said that in 1992, when
all the Chinesca burned down and firefighters from the other side had to come; that’s the fire I’ve seen,

there were no people in the basements anymore. His own uncle had told him stories about
one fire when all this section burned down and a lot of people were living down there and a lot of people died.