Imperial (81 page)

Of course, with every passing year the tunnels did come that much closer to a state of nonexistence. Restaurant Nineteen, one of the oldest in Mexicali, was abandoned half a decade ago and in the early summer of 2003 had already been for three months now reincarnated as a poolhall with blue-felted billiard tables imported from Belgium. The Mexican owner, who wore blue to match his tables, was actually less interested in billiards than in carambola, which employs only three balls. He’d bought the building outright from the Chinese. He’d remodeled extensively, and knew that there had never been any tunnels. I asked if I could visit his basement but he didn’t hear me. I asked again but he still didn’t hear me. Yolanda Ogás, Beatriz Limón and José López from Jalisco were there; we each ordered a Clamato juice with real clams in it, and when he brought me the bill (I was the gringo; I always paid) it came to thirty-five dollars. He had one young Chinese customer who came to play; perhaps through him I could reach his father. The big fire? Yes, everyone still talked about that. He believed that it had happened in 1985; that had been when
those Chinese came running everywhere;
he didn’t know where they’d run from. He couldn’t care less about the past, except in one respect: He sighed for the days when cue balls were still made out of real ivory.

THE RED HANDPRINTS

Smiling a little grimly or more probably just anxiously, the Mexican girl held the candle-jar out before her. From an oval decal on the side of this light, the Virgin of Guadalupe protected her. Although her family had owned the boutique overhead for several years, she had never dared to go down here, thanks to her fear of ghosts. Behind her, the other girl struck a match; a whitish-yellow glob of light suddenly hurt my eyes. I looked up, and glimpsed a faraway ceiling’s parallel beams which might have been wood or concrete. Then the match went out. I went down and down. Suddenly the flashlight picked out something shiny-black: water. I thought then that it might be impossible to explore that tunnel, that it might be ten feet deep or more in feculence. When I was in high school in Indiana I’d once gone spelunking with some friends in a cave which required several hundred feet of belly-crawl with our noses almost in the mud and the backs of our heads grazing against rock; sometimes when it rained, fools like us were trapped and drowned. As I peered down into that Chinese tunnel, the feelings that I had had in that cave came back to me. And yet when I’d reached the bottom step and the flashlight split the darkness a trifle deeper, I could already see pale islands of dryness. Moreover, the floor appeared to be flat. So I stepped down into the wetness, and it came nowhere near the top of my shoe. Another step and another; that black water could have been a hundred miles deep the way it looked, but so far it wasn’t. As always, my concern was that there might be a deep pit I couldn’t see. I remembered helping a man from the Hudson’s Bay Company drag a boat across weak sea-ice, which broke under me without warning; that was how I took my first swim in the Arctic Ocean. This memory proved as inapplicable as the first. With pettish, trifling steps I made my way, and presently so did the others. In time the flashlight picked out the end of the pool; aside from a snake of darkness which narrowed and dwindled like the Colorado River, the rest of that tunnel was dry.

We were under Avenida Reforma. The two darkhaired Mexicanas said that they believed that in this wide, high-ceilinged chamber Chinese had lived. Always that pair stayed close together, often forming a right angle as they gazed or tried to gaze at something, usually close to the wall, whose blocks rewarded their candle’s nourishment with paleness.

Behind the stairs were three more huge rooms. At the end of the farthest, diagonal bars blocked us from the darkness’s continuation.

The question of how vast the tunnels had been and still were preoccupied me. Old photographs seem to tell us how far they could have extended at any given moment: In 1925, for instance, when Mexicali finally got its Chinese consulate, Avenida Reforma resembled a long, wide, well-ploughed field of dirt, with little square wooden houses going up behind a rail fence; Avenida Madero was much the same. How or why could there have been any subterranean passages here? But evidently these views must have been taken far from the heart of things, perhaps even as far as the future cathedral on Reforma; for here’s a vista of the
edificio ubicado
on Reforma at Azueta
en zona “la chinesca,” circa
1920: a sign for the Mexicali Cabaret, pricked out in lightbulbs or wires, rises into the dirty-white sky above a two-storey corner block of solid brick, fronted by squarish-arched arcades. Why
wouldn’t
there have been Chinese tunnels there? Here’s Chinese New Year, 1921: Two young boys, uniformed like soldiers or policemen, clasp hands atop a great float upon whose faded legend I can just barely make out the word CHINA; flowers, perhaps made of paper, bestrew the scene; behind them comes another float like a tall rectangular sail; an automobile’s round blank eyes shine beneath it; a crowd of Chinese men and boys, their faces washed out by sun and time, gaze at us; everything is frozen, grainy, blurry, lost. Where are they? I don’t know. I tried to shine my feeble light as deep down into the past as I could, but I couldn’t even see the bottom step of the tunnel’s entrance. (The tunnels don’t exist.) And however many tunnels I ultimately got to enter, of course I’d never have any idea how many more remained unknown.

The two Mexicanas said that they thought this tunnel went all the way to the Restaurante Victoria, which would have been several city blocks from here. Shuffling with my careful old man’s steps, I came across a mysterious square well of black water which might have been one foot deep or a hundred. Had I been a drainage engineer I might have known what it was. Instead, I thought of Edgar Allan Poe.

The older girl, whose name was Karina, shyly said she’d heard that at one time people tried to kill the Chinese, so they came down here and hid. The other girl had already begun to feel nervous, and declined to tell me her name.

Each concrete pillar in every niche had many shelves of dark spiderwebs. (The tunnels don’t exist.) Receding rectangular arches of paleness made me feel as if I were inside some monster’s ribcage. Perhaps everything was reinforced so well on account of earthquakes.

In the large chamber immediately under the stairs we discovered an odd cabinet which was really a thick hollow wooden beam subdivided into shelves and compartments, with empty darkness above and below its dust—no, it actually had three sides which went from floor to ceiling; it was simply that some of the back’s slats had been pried off; on the back, in a niche whose ceiling was pegboard, someone had taped three picures of space shuttles beside an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who presided with clasped hands and almost-closed eyes over the two plastic flowers which her admirer had also taped to that wall; and then below the cabinet the Chinese tunnel went on to its barren bricked-up end. I found no evidence of anyone Chinese. On the front of the cabinet, in one of the compartments, lay an envelope containing the X-rays of Señor Herman La Roche; in the next niche, beneath several old telephones, a Mexican newspaper from 1982 announced the foundation of the Urban Female Soccer League, while
La Voz de la Frontera
(Mexicali, Friday, 11 May 1984), appropriately brittle and dusty, informed us all of
Frankness, friendship and respect between Reagan and Madrid
. In still another pigeonhole lay a hoard of pillbottles whose pills and whose whiteness were both long gone. The labels all said methotrexate. Not knowing my drugs very well, I wondered whether the
meth
prefix meant that somebody had been operating a methamphetamine lab in here. A doctor laughed: Somebody had a lot of arthritis!

The nameless woman had already gone almost to the top of the stairs, and my flashlight caught the impossibly white cylinders of her ankles almost out of sight, while Karina, holding the candle, stood sideways on two steps, gazing at me with her dark eyes. Her wet sandal-prints on the stairs were almost as dark as her eyes. I remember her standing there and looking at me, looking at the darkness I remained in, and I will always wonder what she was thinking. Then she ascended the stairs and was gone.

I returned to that framework of bars from floor to ceiling; the tunnel kept going, but only rats and water could get through. Then I searched the niche behind the stairs.

On one whitewashed wall the flashlight suddenly picked out human handprints made in red; at first I thought that this might be blood, but an experiment made with the rusty water on the floor proved that these handprints comprised a far less sinister game. Dashiell Hammett never wrote this.

Upstairs, the old woman who might have been Karina’s mother said that the pharmacy next door also had a tunnel. The pharmacist said that he was renting out his tunnel for storage, he didn’t know to whom; even the doorway wasn’t in his property. The tunnels don’t exist.

CREATION MYTHS

Do you want to know how they started? Clare Ng told me how she and her daughter Ros went down to Condominios Montealbán as I had asked them to do, trying to find tunnels or at least ask about tunnels, and she told it like this: Night time, it was that big apartment down there, and we saw some Chinese woman who was give the water for the vegetable down there, and in the beginning she was scared to talk. The husband has been there for ten years and she has been there only for three years. I asked how do you like it, and she said just since my husband is here I like it; that is the only reason.
¹³⁸
The daughter is not speak Spanish yet. The husband told me actually ninety-five percent of the Mexican people were really nice to them. (Actually I feel Mexican people were very friendly and as long as you don’t kinda overdo it they don’t care. Their thinking is, why you American people and you Chinese people wanna work so hard? They are not very aggressive.) So we were there, and they opened their heart. They told us it’s many many years ago, and it’s too hot. These Chinese people cannot take the heat, so they decide to live under in the tunnel. There’s a big fire, and everything was burned. They don’t live there anymore, but they still keep some things there anymore. They say there’s still a casino down there. Maybe it is kind of secret, or . . .

According to a certain
world-renowned painter, known especially for his paintings of horses and nude women,
as noted in the top-secret Ng Report on Nonexistent Tunnels,
Mexicali started off being 90% Asian; the other 10% was made up of Mexicans, white people and a few Japanese. [He] proudly said that the city Mexicali was originally started by and built up by the Chinese people due to the fact that only the Chinese were strong enough to tolerate the extreme heat.
¹³⁹
He went on and on about how Mexicans and Americans can’t bear the heat and only the great Chinese could. Clearly, this man has a lot of Asian/Chinese pride even though he is only half.

Mr. Auyón then ventured a few meters deeper than he had with Lupe and me, relating to the ladies that
as a result of numerous people dying above ground due to the heat (especially sleeping on the sand), people would dig holes in the ground and sleep in them like frogs because it was cooler underground . . . Eventually, these developed into the tunnels and became a huge city network underground. At first, there were tunnels that connected only the people that were in that specific community. Soon after, tunnels that connected communities to each other evolved . . . Initially, there were surfacing holes from the tunnels about every ten acres, but then people began digging their own and they began to pop up everywhere.

(One Mexican I met in a cantina authoritatively located the very first tunnel
at Calle 18 down the walls at where the advertisements start.
Why not? His word was at least as good as Mr. Auyón’s.)

Mr. Auyón then added that
there are about 26 tunnels left now. They also happen to all be linked to each other.

“MAINLY THEY WAS MADE BY THE MEXICANS, ACTUALLY”

That was one version. But since Chinese tunnels are involved, no version is definitive. When I asked Steve Leung where the tunnels had come from, he first advised me to meet a certain Professor Auyón, then, when I continued to question him, proposed this explanation:

Mainly they was made by the Mexicans, actually. Way before, there were Chinese tunnels, to smuggle Chinese across the border, actually; but then they were taken over for the drugs by the Mexicans; they copied our idea, but that was taken over ten years ago. Of course there were some casinos, three or two that only served exclusively Chinese people, and they are all closed now, due to Mexican pressure. It is still a corrupt government, definitely, but it is more elegant now; it used to be you didn’t need much connection as long as you got the money. Now you need the connection, too.

Were these casinos in tunnels?

They were in a room that was closed. Of course there’s a lot of individual gambling going on every night, but not a casino the way it used to be. It looked just like a room, a few tables for pai gow and mah-jongg. And there was a Chinese poker that has thirteen cards and you make a hand with it.

Are there any Chinese without papers who are still living under the ground?

Yes, he said. Some of them.

We were both silent for a moment, and then Steve Leung said: It used to be, a lot of Chinese people liked to live under the ground because there was no air-conditioning at that time. It was sort of a little bit cooler. But with air-conditioning nowadays, I don’t know anybody who would live in a tunnel all the time.

Nobody at all? I asked.

I know a block from here there is a Chinese restaurant and there is a room under the ground to play mah-jongg, but not because it is illegal, just because the space is there. And I heard at the time that there were some tunnels that were crossing the United States. Whether they’re still operating, I don’t know and I don’t want to know.