Northside executes statutes no more cruel and arbitrary than those of Southside, perhaps less, but unlike the law of Southside it does consistently execute them. I mentioned the vendors, beggar-children and prostitutes of Mexicali. In Sacramento, California, where I live, such people risk getting arrested. There used to be an excellent Mexican restaurant on wheels there; it had an Aztec name, and the burritos were as good as any in Mexicali. The sole proprietor couldn’t afford a business permit, so he trolled his stand to and fro until omnipotence stepped on him. He could barely speak English; I wonder if he understood why they closed him down, fined him and arrested him for not being able to pay the fine. Enough. That didn’t even happen in Imperial, so who am I to waste ink on his misfortune? The point is that to anxious semiliterate immigrants of any legal hue, authors, anthropologists, photographers and journalists—in short, record-taking outsiders—may well be authority’s spies. Hence it is better to tell them nothing. (The man from El Centro again: So many people over here are either selling drugs or busting drugs. You learn who’s who, and you shut your mouth.) On the Mexican side, people can afford to be more trusting, more confident, for it’s unlikely that I with my mild deportment, ignorance of the Spanish language and foreign address could be in collusion with Mexican authority. And if I’m not asking questions related to drugs or illegal immigration, I probably don’t work for the American government, either. But should my interlocutors and I happen to meet northwards of la línea, the line, who can say what I am? And so if we roll a trifle farther south on Highway 111, into Thermal, where the Jewel Date Co. building relieves us briefly from any eastern glare (the company itself, by the way, has moved), and if we then keep on past the Oasis Date Gardens and the subsequent desolaton of baked dust-flats, the traffic light with the sign which says MECCA, and if we in fact make the leftward turnoff into that aforementioned town, that small huddle of houses (to the east one quickly gets subsumed into fields; then the tan badlands of Painted Canyon with their smoke trees and soft sands run northeast all the way to Highway 10), the tightly closed enigma within it may not call any attention to itself. Just off the highway lies a small triangularish park of topheavy palms, a shade-haven where in summer Mexicans sleep on the grass, especially during the grape season, and where all year round certain shadowy souls sit in broken chairs. It could be a park in Mexicali, except that those shadowy men are much less friendly, and in place of, say, the brotherhood of sidewalk barbeque vendors perfuming the world with their savory white smoke; in place of the hulking, weary Indian peddler-woman strolling from shade to shade, with her shelf of stuffed animals strapped below her breasts, there’s exactly no one, thanks I suppose to that American practice I’ve mentioned of extorting licensing fees from street vendors who are too poor to pay them, and thanks without a doubt to the Border Patrol, and thanks also to that same reclusiveness of Imperial life-forms, which would translate anybody who wandered through those sizzling open spaces in hopes of doing business with the public into a suspicious anomaly, especially since there’s really no public to be found in Mecca, with the exception of those immensely private shadowy men. Just as from a distance, palm orchards seem to draw themselves up into compact armies of lushness, rich and dark between the desert and the Salton Sea, so these men appear to represent the same cause, compadres of idleness or perhaps illegality, 17 until one actually enters the park to see how in the afternoons, when their numbers are greatest, they subdivide into cliques. In their baseball caps or their white sombreros, they sit on chairs and sometimes even on kitchen stools in the park, watching
Similar Books
