by Bill Barich
“Why did you cross?” Nuñez asked.
The man shrugged. “To work,” he said.
Trabajar, to work. Throughout the night, whenever Nuñez asked his question, “Why did you cross?,” he got the same reply. People crossed the border to work, and they didn’t care what the work was like. They would do all the things I’d seen them doing—swab floors, swim in pesticides, harvest sea urchins, and pick grapes. They’d pour hot tar for roofs, handle beakers in meth labs, mow lawns, deliver circulars, and clean sewers. They would do anything at all.
The night dragged on. About eleven o’clock, Nuñez got a radio call about some Salvadorans who were being rounded up. He sighed. Central Americans were a pain in the ass. They required about forty-five minutes of paperwork each.
The Salvadorans would all insist that they were victims seeking political asylum, and by the time a court date was arranged, they would all be working somewhere. If they couldn’t find any work, they would go home.
Nuñez’s shift would stretch into the wee hours. He had accepted such hitches as part of his job, but some agents couldn’t tolerate the tricky metaphysics of their situation. They had signed up to be heroes, but they were just spinning in a revolving door and developed stress-related illnesses and marital problems and problems with booze.
Out on the mesa, they sometimes got terrible headaches when they realized that no one could tell for sure where California ended and Mexico began.
OTAY MESA was a different story in the morning. There were no illegals to be seen. Earthmovers were digging up the ground near Pacific Rim Boulevard and Maquiladora Court, two streets that had fire hydrants and electrical cables but no buildings yet.
Trucks in a steady caravan went through the port of entry, more than a thousand a day, carrying freight into Mexico and to the Zona Industrial of Tijuana. Businessmen reported for work at the American and Japanese corporations that operated assembly plants on the other side—Casio, Sanyo, Sony, Maxell, General Motors, Honeywell, and so on.
A hundred years ago, German settlers had dry-farmed barley on the mesa. Siempre Viva was the first town. It had a post office, a saloon, and a horse-racing track that pulled in customers from as far away as San Francisco, but it died in a recession, in 1893. Speculators drilled a useless oil well in 1928, and miners took bentonite clay from open pits through the 1940s.
An amusement park called “Captain Nemo’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” had once been targeted for the mesa, but it never made it past the planning stage.
Only now was Otay Mesa being fully exploited. Its developers had lobbied to have it included in a U.S. Foreign Trade Zone that gave all sorts of economic incentives to firms willing to locate there and take part in the maquiladora scheme, and they had succeeded.
Tijuana had more than five hundred maquiladoras at present. The workers earned much less than an American or a Japanese worker would earn for doing the same job. They were primarily young women, and they spent about half of their wages on a place to live and another sixth on transportation. The average maquiladora had a high rate of employee turnover, up to 25 percent a month.
In the Zona Industrial, the air smelled of exhaust fumes and was so thick with dust rising from dirt roads that I felt I could grab a handful of it. At the Maxell plant, the maquila girls were coming out of their fenced compound on a lunch break. They bought food from quilt trucks and carts—sandwiches, fruit, cold drinks. They were done up as though for a night on the town, lavishly powdered and lipsticked, their hair teased and pomaded and a fetching look in their eyes.
A handsome boy selling melon slices was about to wilt under their attentions. They were killing him with their perfume. Romance was dangerous in the maquila world and could strike at any minute.
I talked with a Japanese supervisor, who was sipping coffee and sucking on a cigarette. He had been transferred to Tijuana from L.A. He didn’t mind it at all, he said. His wife was petite like many Mexican women and had enjoyed great success in shopping for clothes.
Then the break was over, and I drove over washboard streets back to Otay Mesa on the California side. There was no Joe’s by any of the industrial parks, only a Chevron Station and a McDonald’s. I bought a Big Mac and sat on a lawn outside a corporate building to eat it. You win, Derrel Ridenour, Jr., I thought, stretching out on the lush grass and looking up at the circling birds.
AY, ¡CARAMBA! I couldn’t stop traveling. I followed California into Mexico, crossing the border again at San Ysidro port of entry on a Saturday afternoon, in the company of some moon-faced Lambda Chis already halfway drunk and some nuzzling couples soon to be enveloped in the margarita haze at Rosarito Beach Hotel. There were gigantic coeds flexing their volleyball muscles, secretive bald men after bargain-basement Rogaine, and dorky little poontang hounds who kept the strip joints in the Zona Rosa in business.
Now I understand the blandness of San Diego. For a century, its citizens had looked to Tijuana as the place to act out their passions. Mexico embodied all the honest life that was missing from their city. They craved its spicy cuisine and the fire in its loins. They, too, needed an occasional taste of blood.
Thousands of cars poured over the line. Californians were riding in donkey carts on Avenue Revolución and having their pictures taken in serapes and sombreros. At Hussong’s and Popeye’s they were pounding beers and tequila shooters and dancing in joyous stupidity to mariachi bands. Their hips moved as never before. The demons were coming out of their closets. Tongues would touch other tongues, and untoward liaisons would occur. Guilt could wait until tomorrow, resurrecting itself on the other side.
By midnight, the streets were wacky with reeling collegians all sunburned to a crisp and throwing up in unison. The maquila girls were just hitting their stride, arriving at discos with the flare of starlets on the verge of a breakthrough and trailing their killer perfume. I pitied the poor youths who were the target of their lingerie. Someday they might wake up as husbands in a new house in a yet-to-be-built subdivision, Mismo Acres, up Chula Vista way.
Sunday morning, there were church bells and atonement. I kicked at garbage as I walked through the centro. A kid with a shoeshine box gave me a shine. The maquila girls had finished their dreaming and had put on mantillas.
Tijuana was a city of 4 million people. There were at least three thousand applicants for any job. Grand homes sat on a hillside above the dusty air and were favored with views of a golf course, just as in El Norte. I saw pizza parlors, video rental stores, fancy dress shops, and fine Italian and French restaurants, but most people lived in colonias such as El Florido on the blanched earth at the edge of canyon country.
El Florido had not existed five years ago. Now it was home to fifty thousand, many of them maquiladora workers. They built their houses slowly, brick by brick and board by board. Compared to other provinces in Mexico, Baja California was the land of opportunity. Tijuana was at the center of a Mexican Gold Rush.
I bought a Coke from Lino Gonzalez Alvarez, a refugee from Guadalajara. He kept the sodas on ice in a metal drum. His tienda had a plywood counter and the usual complement of flies that could not be avoided in the city. Maquiladora workers were his main customers, and he made the equivalent often thousand American dollars a year, more than he’d ever made before.
Street musicians from Oaxaca played on the boulevards. The tourists were packing up to depart, forming a long line at the port of entry and squandering their last pesos on hideous ceramic dwarfs and neon-bright piñatas that would serve them forever after as a reminder of the time they were a little crazy down in Mexico and did some things they’d never do again.
JESS HARO HAD MADE A SMALL MISTAKE. Hotel El Rosal in Ensenada was Las Rosas Hotel by the Sea. It was Mexico sanitized, a playground for San Diegans and Angelenos, but I didn’t care. I took a room with a balcony overlooking the Pacific and kept writing in my notebooks and eating fish tacos and drinking Coronas.
The swimming pool was spectacular, indeed. It was situated
on an incline so that the negative edge appeared to flow into the ocean. Whenever I swam in it, I felt as if my body were weightless and floating into a new and unblemished world. That was my new dream.
Afternoons I sat at the bar saying, “Mas Corona, por favor,” and watching the San Francisco Gigantes and their pennant race on TV. I was postponing the inevitable, of course, the demise of my own little paradise.
Ensenada stank of fish-processing plants. I thought about Crescent City—so long ago, on another planet. The city had its share of maquiladoras, too, and also a Louisiana-Pacific mill.
One day, I drove aimlessly into the countryside to Agua Caliente, a hot springs resort seven miles down a dirt road into a canyon. An old man was sitting on a chair outside a bungalow at the resort, implacably patient, as if he knew I would come, as if my arrival were preordained.
“You like to go into the baths, señor?” he asked.
I looked at the pools, but the water in them could not be said to beckon. Old car seats were arranged around them, and there were motel units that the Joads might have been hesitant about staying in. I had a sense that creatures really owned the place, rats and mice and scorpions. Or maybe time did.
I said to the old man, “Just a cold cerveza, por favor.”
The next day, still aimless, I took another dirt road to the settlement of Ojos Negros. There were some farms, some horses in pastures, and some onion fields. Hawks rested on the graying wood of fence posts. On the horizon, I saw two figures about a half-mile away and watched them grow bigger as I got closer, going five miles an hour over the ruts and the bumps.
An old woman and her granddaughter. The old woman had kind eyes and an Indian face. The little girl clutched at her grandma’s fingers, not knowing what to make of a gringo in a Taurus. I slowed to a crawl to keep from burying them in dust, and the old woman flagged me down and made gestures indicating that she’d like a ride back to the houses at Ojos Negros.
“Get in,” I said, and they did.
They sat together in the backseat, my two mysterious passengers. I could see the old woman in my rearview mirror, smiling contentedly at this unexpected gift. The little girl wouldn’t let go of her hand. The car was as big as the world to her, and she loved it and was frightened by it and hoped only that it would take her home.
The old woman asked to be let out in front of a house. She shooed the little girl inside it, then came around and leaned against my door. She was still smiling. I thought that she’d probably been smiling like that for eighty years, smiling because she knew a secret.
“Gracias, señor,” she said, touching my arm, and I watched her go into the house and then drove home myself, to California.
PART SIX
EARTHQUAKE WEATHER
Rightly, in every age it is assumed we are witnessing the disappearance of the last traces of the earthly paradise.
—E. M. Cioran,
Anathemas and Admirations
CHAPTER 29
THE AFTERNOON of October seventeenth was unusually warm and muggy in San Francisco, and the Giants, our miracle children, were about to host the Oakland A’s in a World Series game at Candlestick Park. On Twenty-fourth Street, I heard somebody say, “Earthquake weather,” but I paid it no mind. In the city, people were always talking about an earthquake, the epochal one that was going to rip apart the turf and raise up Nostradamus with his final predictions.
At about five o’clock, the phone rang at our house. I chatted for a while with a neighbor down the block, filling her in on my travels and telling her that I was still restless and hadn’t yet been able to settle down. She interrupted me quite suddenly to exclaim, “Oh, my! I believe we’re having an earthquake!”
I felt nothing at first, but I could hear the distant tinkling of glassware, and then, all at once, the hardwood floor began to shift from side to side beneath my feet in a giant, rolling motion, like the deck of a boat in a rough sea.
Our hill seemed to be liquefying, turning to Jell-O. There were sounds of plaster ripping and joists creaking—cries of pain on the part of an old house as its brittle bones got rearranged. I watched in awe as a filigree of fine cracks appeared on the living room walls and ceiling.
The rolling motion subsided in about a minute, only to be followed by several sharp aftershocks, hard little jolts that were akin to the pinpoint jabs that a good boxer throws to keep an opponent off-balance. My wife, who’d been taking a nap, emerged from the bedroom, and together, still jumpy, we inspected the house and found that we had been lucky. The only damage that we’d suffered was some broken plates.
A few minutes later, a friend arrived in a trembly condition. He’d been driving to our place, idly thinking about the ball game, when the earthquake hit and the road before him started buckling and rippling, folding in on itself. He had never seen anything like it, he said. Craters were opening in front of him, and he had to swerve to avoid them and also the other swerving drivers.
We sat outside on the front steps. I could feel my heartbeat returning to normal, and I had a sense, too, of collecting a self that had been dislodged and shattered into fragments. The fragments had flown randomly into the air and were now being reintegrated into my system—a picture curiously celestial, like one of exploding galaxies.
It was oddly calm and pleasant outside. There was no electricity, the telephone lines were down, and the cars were few and far between. Evening was coming on, and candles burned in windows against a dusky, blue sky. We were seeing the city as it must have looked more than a century ago, at a time when the wheels of existence turned more slowly. The many hills were cupped in a pastoral silence.
We had the contentment of survivors, but our feelings changed when we dug up some batteries for a radio and listened to the early news reports from around the Bay Area—the ball game canceled, houses falling down, freeway ramps collapsing, and sporadic incidents of looting. We learned that people had died. Scientists had measured the earthquake at 7.1 on the Richter scale, a magnitude of shaking that none of us had ever experienced before.
The bulletins were like dispatches from a battlefront in a war that was not ours. Except for the power outages, Noe Valley was relatively unaffected. We went about cooking dinner in an alternating mood of hilarity and gloom, switching the radio to a call-in show where sundry “eyewitnesses” were supplying the testimony to prove that the earthquake was both a collective and an individual phenomenon, rattling each private universe to a greater or a lesser degree.
After dark, my brother showed up at the front door with his wife and his daughter. He was carrying a bottle of red wine and two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, the only canned food that he could find on the ravaged shelves of his corner grocery. His family had the dour look of the dispossessed. They had just moved into a new condo across town, and their fireplace chimney had come unmortared and had crashed through a window. Their plaster had not just cracked. It had ripped free in chunks to reveal the lath behind it.
They were afraid that if a particularly strong aftershock were to strike, the entire structure might tumble down and kill them in their sleep, so we set them up in the spare bedroom, fed them, and uncorked the wine. The night was taking on a festive, end-of-the-world edge.
In the morning, with the electricity back and the telephone lines repaired, we could almost pretend that the earthquake hadn’t happened, but scenes of destruction had been playing on TV across the nation, and we had to field a succession of calls from worried relatives and friends. Once again, California was being portrayed in the media as a danger zone, even a mortal threat, where the chance of striking it rich was equalized by the chance that a catastrophe would wipe you out.
I could hear the admonitions echoing in Oneida, in Orlando, and in Pittsburgh. You see, Charlie? Aren’t you glad you didn’t move out there? The fundamentalists had probably concluded that we were being punished for our sins.
The calls were a comfort to us, anyway. They reestablished connections. The desire to be connected to s
omeone, anyone, was overwhelming after the earthquake and clearly evident in our neighborhood, where there were twice as many people on the streets. If you’d got caught alone, the trauma had reinforced your loneliness, and you didn’t want to experience that again.
In a few days, when the emergency measures were lifted, I visited the Marina District, where the devastation had been the most severe. Many plate-glass windows on Chestnut Street were splintered or demolished, and the pavement was riddled with small tears. Driveways had split in two, as though a huge ax had cleaved them, and curbs had torn away from sidewalks. Bricks lay everywhere in heaps.
Entire blocks were cordoned off in the Marina. Looking down one, I saw a row of about twenty apartment buildings that were drifting away from plumb, tilting forward and backward like a bunch of tipsy men in a lineup. On the Marina Green, a grassy park along the bay, army tents were bivouacked. Some of the grand houses with water views were deserted, all the furniture gone from inside them, as if thieves had run off with it.
Elsewhere, young renters were loading chairs and beds into a van. They were fleeing from San Francisco before the next calamity hit, surrendering their identity as Californians and hoping to turn themselves back into blameless Iowans or Pennsylvanians before it was too late.
The quiet in the marina was exceptional. It resembled the hush that you encounter among the faithful during a church service. The earthquake had made everything solid seem watery. It had drawn into question the very stability of our so-called terra firma. For a single minute, we’d been liberated from our orderly illusions and subjected to the chaotic laws of nature, our lives tossed into the sky, and a new set of transformations was beginning.
AN EARTHQUAKE SHAKES THINGS LOOSE. At my house, the stalemate got worse, not better, and soon I had moved into a furnished apartment by myself and had reluctantly acquired two more badges of a Californian, a therapist and a legal separation.