The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  destruction of a dream

  Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

  Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

  You knew perfectly well that before it happened she didn’t love you. She didn’t have a young brother and had fun behaving with you quite as if you were her little brother, and if she acted like that, it was because of the totally absurd fantasies of a young girl. As a young girl, she could still be very mischievous. With you she behaved like an elder sister, so that for her it had become a habit. She liked to criticise you, tell you off, chide you or treat you in ways that always had to do with the process of punishment and reward, but strictly within the limits of her status as an elder sister. And you had to admit you felt happy fantasising about how nice it was to have such a darling sister. But this kind of feeling changed when you went back to see her three nights later and she told you she loved you, loved you very much actually, and you had to take responsibility for what you’d done, you couldn’t desert her, and she demanded from you all sorts of promises and insisted you keep them. You were puzzled because, only three days earlier, she and you didn’t dare look each other in the eye, didn’t dare speak to each other, didn’t dare walk side by side along the pine-shaded road on your way to catch the school bus and you even waited to let her walk ahead. After school, you loitered to sip some fizzy drink at the market in town, play billiards or chess, watch a blue movie, or else laze about in some friends’ rented house, and by the time you came back home night had long fallen. You closed the windows noiselessly and hurried to bed. You tossed and turned, worried at the thought someone might know of your daring act. Maybe you’d been seen as you went in or came out. San himself might have caught a glimpse of you in the stupor of his drunkenness. As for her, obviously she was much more anguished than you were, so that when she told you she loved you, loved you very much actually, and asked you to make all sorts of promises, you were a little taken aback. She no longer behaved like someone who held you in her power, warned you, pointed her finger at you or lectured you, but instead looked defeated and spoke with the beseeching voice of a sailor’s wife. After that night, you slept with her again and again and your infatuation with her diminished in proportion to the number of times you slept together. She little by little became a boring woman. You’d never have thought she could be such a pain in the neck. She, to the contrary, loved you head over heels. And you, you had it up to here the day she started to demand you didn’t stay overnight with this or that friend but came back home every evening because she was scared to death of ghosts, you know, she felt so lonely she could die, you know. She warmed up the dishes every evening for you and for you every new day cooked, so that if you didn’t come and see her, it had to be thrown away, you know; therefore please… She bought you a yellow shirt without telling you as a surprise and forced you to put it on wherever you went, even though you hate yellow, and she complained she never saw you wearing it. On Saturdays and Sundays you could go anywhere, no problem, but you had to tell her beforehand and come back on time. And oh, by the way, how much pocket money do you have every month? Do try to save a little. In the name of love, she’d laid siege to you and demanded that you surrender unconditionally. We saw each other almost every day and she still had the gall to say Oh I missed you, I missed you so much! The love of a young bitch… The tragic fate of a young bitch… All that came in the form of good wishes and sincere solicitude. That year you had to prepare for the university entrance examination and when the cold wind began to whistle and the mothers of cocoa began to blossom, you vaguely entertained the idea of starting to study in earnest. The sexual attraction you had for her had progressively lost its magic in favour of irrepressible boredom, so you started to study, but without zeal or conviction. Actually, studying for the exam was just an excuse to distance yourself from her. And in order to endure studying steadily, you knocked up various dreams to use as accumulators of enthusiasm and went delirious with those self-made dreams. They were utterly ritzy dreams.

  You were a master builder of castles in the air. You’d always been number one as a dreamer. You’d be a young idealistic journalist, a nimble newshound with a flair for news of all kinds, fearlessly defying dark influences of whatever ilk to proclaim the truth, an indefatigable traveller always up hill and down dale, flanked with a jumble of cameras, facing all sorts of danger, and at night in your hotel room you’d type out your article feverishly to send it to the biggest daily’s headquarters in Bangkok; you’d fall in love time and again and be broken-hearted time and again because those women would be too narrow-minded to share your ideal. You’d be an artist shut up night and day in a filthy room to turn canvasses as large as the walls into paintings of unreal beauty emanating from their own power of eternal fascination that the Louvre would beg to acquire; shoddily dressed, looking dreamy and absent, and with melancholy, disappointment or pain born out of a bitter past blatantly showing in your eyes, except that your silence would be more arrogant than Caesar’s and more tetchy than Beethoven’s. Or else you’d be a musician sitting drowsily in a seedy coffee shop, a lover of cats, and sometimes, taken with a sudden inspiration, you’d scrawl notes on your shirt sleeve, your face always downcast under your dishevelled long hair, beard and moustache, your lips so sensitive to the least change in mood always tightly closed and seldom ever letting out unnecessary words. Or you’d be a guide, resourceful and somewhat slithery, who spoke six mother tongues, smoked like a chimney, unbeatable on the sap and bark of history and archaeology, with an intimate knowledge of both down to the minutest cultural ramifications and a sense of humour to spare that would so impress your customers they wouldn’t forget you in a hurry. Or you’d be a lawyer of surpassing eloquence, one able to reverse the course of a trial as if by miracle so that the plaintiff flabbergasted at the thought of his ineluctable condemnation would snatch unhoped-for victory in the legal battle. Each of these options had its merits and charms, and when you compared them you realised they were equally attractive, so that you didn’t know which way to go. In the vast expanse of the future, which now belongs to the past, you were to travel on your own. Nartaya wasn’t with you. Whatever the dream, you’d know profound bliss on your own; you’d know excruciating pain on your own. Some things that seemed to stem from instinct rather than reasoned argument were sending you incomplete and mysterious warnings: you’d end up offering marriage to Nartaya; you couldn’t escape from that fate. Between Daen and San, between these two young men, friendship was deep to a point you couldn’t fathom. Maybe it had to do with the rigorous hierarchical system of the military school, with mutual trust, with honour, with courage. They both had known similar obstacles and sufferings and each understood in depth the obstacles and sufferings of the other. Theirs was a man-to-man friendship fastened with honour, similar to the relationship of yore between your father and Daen. You, who had the modesty to believe that no matter what you didn’t belong to their circle, were insidiously undermining that deeply rooted relationship while they both honoured you with their trust. Therefore, whenever your activities in the dark with Nartaya were to be dragged into broad daylight, you’d be punished. The smartest move was for you to stop yourself and stop her. From now on making love was totally out of the question. You’d better dedicate yourself to your studies and pass the university entrance exam so you could run away from her for good; distance and time would part you gently, turning you into estranged lovers as there are so many. But even then you merely fantasised fatuously. You knew perfectly well that your lousy brains were thoroughly damaged. You found the courses boring beyond belief. You positively hated those bloody schoolbooks. Besides, you weren’t ready yet to divorce Marijuana because she helped you escape the cruelty of reality in a wonderful way. You dreamed of finding yourself free but weren’t really seeking the path to freedom. Sure, you were unable to love Nartaya, but you were too compassionate to cold-shoulder her. You’d always been like that. It was weakness of a kind. But even though you’d done everything a
t times to please her and attended to her every need, it had only been a passing mood or the fleeting interest of a teenage boy for a teenage girl or else the imbecilic pride of being loved by a woman or maybe it was all of this at once that had you treat her well at times in all sincerity and intend to reform yourself, and you took pleasure in acting like that, and then you let yourself go and wallowed in that pleasure, forgetting everything else. You were just past eighteen; legal majority was still a long way out. Having a girlfriend sweetened your life, which until then had had a hard-to-endure sour taste. You were livelier and merrier, more inclined to see the world in a positive light, with a vulgar sense of humour that always revolved around dirty jokes. You went back to playing the flute and the guitar and sang lustily the corny love songs popular at the time. You took more interest in yourself and better care of your body. You woke up at dawn even before the bugle’s call, made yourself some tonic drink or milk and studied. There were days when you went out to run alongside a column of soldiers in training, clapping, singing and marking the tempo with your heels along with them, sweating profusely. And you clung to the horizontal bar and kicked a ball and did physical exercises. You showered turning the knob to full blast and the stream drenched your close-cropped head, which made you feel oddly dynamic and full of energy. You brushed your teeth hard and fast, sometimes making your teeth bleed. You stopped yourself each time you felt like smoking a cigarette or having a drink or sucking on a joint. You went to school and stayed at school to wait for the time to file in without ever again going to see your pals who loafed about at the monastery or in their rooms in town. You sang the national anthem. You recited the prayers. You took up the oath of allegiance in a voice turned dull by boredom – All of us Thai people /Of this nation / Ever so grateful… After that you went straight to the classroom to wrestle with maths problems that always were beyond your grasp, to try to learn by rote and understand the giddily complicated and punctilious rules of the various forms of versification in Sarmmakkhee Pheit Khamchan13 that you’d never before remembered or understood, or to gnash your teeth on the formulas and table of elements of basic chemistry, and to smile at the fabulous exuberance of fauna and flora in Biology. But all of that eventually gave you the appearance of an adolescent who takes his studies seriously and entertains modestly ambitious hopes about the future. One couldn’t state with certainty that your behaviour was diversionary: your schoolbag, which was crammed to bursting point and which, when you carried it, threw your shoulders out of kilter, could vouch for your seriousness. After only a few weeks, all of that began to earn you compliments from the teachers, to which you merely smiled sheepishly. You felt sheepish when you presented your homework on time, sheepish when a teacher put a question to you and you answered – oh wow! – correctly, sheepish when you let some of your friends copy your answers during a short test and it turned out the answers you’d let them copy were – by chance – correct, sheepish when you found yourself in the library during the midday break or during your spare time, sheepish when some of the loafers in your crowd of pals told you they too were considering getting on with it to follow your example – sheepish because you knew yourself well enough to be aware that in truth you were unable to do anything good for long. On some weekends you still endeavoured to study and you had the vague intuition that mathematics too had its own beauty, but unfortunately that intuition didn’t last because you weren’t dedicating enough effort to it and were too easily put off by difficulties so that you went on consolidating your status of stupid clod in maths. And in the end the old preventions returned: why were you being forced to learn maths and how come your brain was allergic to their rules but not to the swinging formulas of ’Rong Wongsawan, who to you was a terrifically cool writer? Then you began to cheat with yourself by reading novels or listening to music. Sometimes you took Nartaya to see a film or eat an ice cream or pop round to the bookshop or sometimes you jumped on a bus to get out of town or into a neighbouring province, to enjoy the dense jungle filing by the roadside, a wet jumble of clumps of rattan, strange ferns and tangled creepers; to look at the harbour, which had modern fishing boats painted in vivid colours – vermilion, carrot, sky blue, canary yellow – with names evoking water or the sea, long masts sticking out in all directions, the brine smell of the sea and sea animals, fishermen-sailors in loose trousers tied at the waist, barefoot, but almost all sporting pricey shirts, and the dark green mangrove stretching to the end of the promontory, and there, you took the opportunity to explain to her the fishing boats and the various methods to catch fish, as a way to show off the bits of knowledge you’d gleaned during your sea outings years before; to visit the waterfall she and you reached by climbing through slippery moss-covered steps off which you almost fell head first several times just so the two of you could be alone; to walk around in some friends’ orchard at the foot of a mountain where some tree trunks still bore traces of the passing visit of a bear two or three days earlier and it was there that you fondled her and took out her shirt to see her breasts in broad daylight as you had never seen her breasts in broad daylight before; to see the old mosque of which only the carcass and the secret and very much embellished legend of its origin remained. She and you always went side by side, only the places and times differed, walked side by side, smiled at each other, the one pointing out to the other something unusual and exciting, like a couple of daft lovers in a daft novel or a daft movie. Puppy love… Puppy behaviour… At times a little edgy with each other when we felt disgusted by too much sweetness between us. In the bus at times she slept with her head on your shoulder and you made sure she was beautiful in her sleep or sometimes took your handkerchief to wipe the sweat on her forehead, holding her hand of course, then you looked through the window at the scenery whooshing by while whistling some tune under your breath or humming some tune in your throat. On days when you had nothing better to do, you’d persuade her to go and fish in the stream. She went along although she disliked this pastime, arguing that you were only looking for an excuse to torment animals for the sole purpose of wantonly entertaining yourself, but it was she indeed who uttered excited shouts when a fish took the bait. Most of the time she brought a book to read, laid herself down on the grass in the shade of a tree, sometimes nibbled some sweets as she read, sometimes nibbled some fruit as she read. After a while she’d fall asleep. Then you might happen to steal a kiss on her cheek or her chest. You experienced this stealing as extremely exciting and really arousing. Sometimes you’d hide her shoes, and sometimes you’d disappear to go and fish at some other spot of the stream where she wouldn’t see you when she woke up and she’d set about looking for you, annoyed and still half-asleep. Those were the romps of puppies that haven’t grown up, like a couple of daft lovers in a daft novel or a daft movie. On some evenings, even after the bugle’s curfew call, one would persuade the other to go out to buy sweets at the stalls of the market located in the middle of the military camp, even though for that place it was rather late. You elected to take the back track that wended its way between copses rather than the road in front of your houses, the one you took morning and afternoon, because she was embarrassed and feared gossip for wandering like that who-knows-where after nightfall with a boy. On the deserted track at the back of your houses you put on airs as an intrepid adventurer, your mouth busy denouncing the sacred power of tutelary gods and genies of jungle and mountain in an insulting manner, full of foolish enthusiasm while she clutched your arm tight, implored you to pipe down, forced you to stop walking when she noticed something unusual, and her not yet completely full bosom brushed against your arm or against your chest without her being aware of it or meaning to and then you’d be so much more cocky as to deserve a kick in the butt, feeling strong and able to be the anchor of her heart. In the vicinity of the market, she had to stop and wait under a tree while you went to make the purchase on your own so it wouldn’t be claimed you two were having an affair, which, had someone said so, would’ve been dangerous, a military cam
p being the kind of place where gossip is a form of entertainment that spreads far and wide. When you came back to find her shaking with fear in the mist and the cries of night birds, your heart of stone softened somewhat, in spite of yourself, like someone who on occasion can’t help feeling pity for his dog, so that you couldn’t help asking yourself why you didn’t love her. Was it her fault or was it yours? And it was on those nights that she held you tight, took your face in her hands, stroked it in a surfeit of love and kissed you greedily, and all of that was nothing more than a young girl’s admission of defeat. But you couldn’t love her, even though she was a lovely girl who in the morning, schoolbag at the end of her arm, left for school with you, some days her hair still wet from having just washed it with not enough time to use the hairdryer. You couldn’t love her any better either in the evening, the two of you alone after dinner, when she wore white, frayed ultrashort jeans showing the curves and white smoothness of her legs off to advantage, and a loose cotton t-shirt, her back against the back of her chair, closing her eyes prettily, as she introduced a Johnson & Johnson cotton bud in her ear and rolled it between her fingers and spoke to you while uttering light groans of pleasure. You couldn’t love her when she cracked your knuckles and cut and filed your nails, asking with concern all along Does it hurt? Am I hurting you? You couldn’t love her any better either on her bed because you constantly dreaded San’s impromptu return and she was too ashamed to do what you asked her to, though it was nothing perverse or against nature, God knows, so that you gave up and merely insulted her by saying a girl like her would never know the art of conjugal love. But even when she asked you to teach her how to play the guitar and you taught her what you knew, which didn’t amount to much given that you’re left-handed and she wasn’t, when she didn’t manage to imitate you, you swore at her and derided her and she merely hung her head or made herself scarce without trying to reply. She asked you to help her with her English grammar homework ; you made suggestions as a self-assured know-itall and she adopted them and it happened all too often they were shamefully wrong when the copy came back all bloodied, but she never protested or did anything that might have hurt your delicate feelings. Sometimes you read out to her. Assuming superior literary taste, you chose poems or novels you deemed the best and read out the most moving excerpts – Kamanita and Vasitthi on the ashoka esplanade while the day of separation nears unavoidably14; Matsri going back at night to her ashram, lamenting all the while as she seeks her daughter Kan-ha and her son Cha-lee whom their father, the future Buddha, has given away to a passing beggar; Selma Karami and Khalil Gibran in the garden steeped in the scent of flowers and drenched with moonlight15 – you read and looked at her, read and stared at her, furious that she remained unmoved, and eventually enjoined her to see the beauty and depth you found in those texts. She smiled, ill at ease. If she agreed wholeheartedly with you, she feared you’d accuse her of being devoid of critical sense, so important to you; if she remained impassive, she was being called a dope devoid of any imagination. And to conclude the encounter, you took out your handwritten poems, as anxious as you were proud. They were mostly sexosyllabic and their inner assonances were mostly wrong; some had to do with the excess beauty of a beauty the poet revered and with said poet’s pain when the lady repelled his protests of friendship; some evoked at length the crushing distress of the poet deceived by some femme fatale and always ended with said poet’s oath to never again his heart bestow; some dealt with the loss of the poet’s cherished love due to the little schemes of a jealous heaven without the least sign of compassion from Cupid. While you read, your mind drifted, your old imagination went back to work with diligence. You told her over and over again you were going to write about Himaphan, the frozen jungle of northern India where kinnari16 and gandharva17 reside, about the white goddess who during our sleep visits our souls and fills them with dreams, about the days of indigo skies, radiant sun and flowers in bloom which are the days when lovers long parted by the train of sadness at the station of separation meet once again at the junction of eternity. And then, in a rage, you took it out on her with the stance of a student turned ferocious in that time of demonstrations, saying you positively vomited school, spraying it all with fierce words which pummelled her as if she were the minister running the bloody lousy ministry of education whose academic criteria you refused to acknowledge, and then you went into a litany of complaints as to your wanting to be done as soon as possible with high school so you could wear your hair as long as you pleased and smoke and drink openly and be a man at last, for devil’s sake, and you’d like to own a powerful motocross bike with an exhaust tampered to give out a deafening roar similar to the meowing of a cat whose testicles are being squeezed and you’d have her riding pillion and you’d travel to the end of the world at daredevil speed to ridicule forever the traffic police, to run away once and for all from moronic hindrances of all kinds, with desire as sole master. She smiled at your cold-season daydreams without in the least suspecting she was nothing but a field you’d carefully surveyed and the professional surveyor you were was ready to relinquish it for a more stimulating field, that is, a new woman. The more it went and the less you understood her and the less she understood you. She was agitated and withdrawn. From the day you’d slept with her, it seemed she’d decided to endure her sorrow from day to day without saying anything, for even on the occasions when happiness moved her, you still saw her heave sighs on the sly. She didn’t know how to act natural in San’s presence. She didn’t know how to behave when her parents came round to see her. She was afraid that in the presence of these intimates a gesture would betray her. She was sorry for them when they showered her with blind compliments and kept their trust in her without knowing that she was, in her own words, dissolute and depraved beyond forgiveness. She was often apathetic with her head in the clouds like, she said, so that on some days she understood nothing in class. She wasn’t in the habit of lying or keeping secrets and the burden of having to keep her secret was getting increasingly heavy so that she wanted to get rid of it for good in order to put a stop to her disquiet and distress. Many times she’d been on the verge of confessing what had happened to her to her brother or her closest school friends and she’d had to take very much upon herself to do no such thing. The mere fact of thinking about it depressed her for the rest of the day, and when thinking that she still kept accepting to sleep with you, it almost drove her mad. Every time after making love – frolics whose intensity had much decreased lately – she’d cry and wouldn’t sleep all night if you didn’t consent to stay with her and most of the time she held on to you until dawn so it didn’t look like you merely wanted to sleep with her and go as soon as you’d got what you wanted. She knew perfectly well how risky it was for her and for you to sleep together, as San could be back any time in that house or Daen in the house where you lived, but she kept hesitating, asking herself if it was better for you to stay for the night or go back home. As far as you were concerned, of course, you had but one itch: clear off as soon as the deed was done, and you needed utmost forbearance to withstand her demands and constant moaning. You couldn’t quite get used to the idea that a dream woman could be so boring. In your torrid solitary dreams before that, there had only been visions of women and even smells of women and you were ready to forsake everything you had for those dreams to become reality. But as soon as you found yourself a woman for real like everyone else, boredom caught you unexpectedly. The attraction of the woman with whom you slept diminished very fast, or at least only kept its power when sexual craving clouded your head. This kind of thinking almost had you claim your due for the huge sacrifice you were making by bearing with her without taking a new lover. All of what she thought, said and did was truly unforgivable, contrary to before you slept with her, when you were ready to forgive her everything. You were very much tempted to ask her to forget all that had happened between the two of you and to stop all relations when she said one night that, for all the love she had for you,
if only it were possible she wished she’d never met or known you. Every time you slept together, she felt like she was committing a sin, a sin which was being committed increasingly often nonetheless. When would that come to an end and when would she get rid of her guilty feeling? The future bore the darkest foreboding. Since she was born, she’d never known such unbearable torment. You listened to her grieving without demur, put up with her tears, smoked to keep calm, and you said, after heaving a sigh, pretending to consult with her, Huh well, in that case, we’d better separate, don’t you think? in a flat voice with the prudent tone of impudence, which resulted in her letting out a shout of stupefaction. She couldn’t understand how you could say such a cruel thing. Separate? Don’t even think about it! You’d understood nothing. She had no intention to separate from you. All she had said was only to vent her spleen. Separation had never entered her mind. If you wanted to separate from her, it wasn’t only because you were fed up but also because you were afraid, and the more you thought of the night you’d come in to see her while her brother slept drunk at the other end of the room, the more you were terrified and shook from top to toe. And there were times when you came to imagine that your shadow in the intense light was headless, a sure sign of imminent death as everyone knows, and when you started to think about Daen, you worried yourself sick all the more. Sure, he only came back home once in a while, but he did truly come at any time. He still went around the house and through the rooms one after the other, from the first to the ground floor, from the ground to the first floor, or went out to sit on the marble table under the crape-myrtle tree in front of the house and drank to relax while reading a weapons and hunting magazine or some Hemingway novel. His shadow seemed to appear everywhere, thick and steady. It was a dead-drunk shadow swearing like a trooper, eyes fizzy with life. It was a shadow that sometimes walked up to you only to tell you Shit man, that Mohammad Ali arsehole, even though he got his jaw smashed by Ken Norton, defying injury he still went on to fight another bout, or else to groan with mixed irritation and pleasure For fuck’s sake, when is that damn Pheit Phra Uma18 going to end? Would you believe it? He’s still crossing the dinosaur forest, or else you heard him shout out in front of the house in answer to the greetings of someone who was going back to his area of operation in the jungle Good luck, my good man! May Poh Su’s or Poh Yeh’s boys catch you and get you circumcised double quick! It was a shadow whose footsteps sounded heavier and more resolute than did yours and it was a shadow that made you shiver. Sometimes you came back from school and found him sprawled on the wicker chair on the house platform blowing into your harmonica or trying out your guitar with his big hands whose thick fingers were better suited to pulling a trigger, and he’d end up whistling a tune by Charn Yenkhae or Mueangmon Sombatjareun or a dancing number by Sunthara-phorn. And it was enough for him to call you and tell you casually Believe it or not, the new colonel is learning to play golf but he’s unable to solve the problem of officers’ pay that’s always late for you to start at the thought that that was his introduction before summoning you for an inquiry into your disgraceful behaviour with Nartaya. Or it was enough for him to ask you about a pet animal you were rearing and, learning it was dead, tell you Stop tormenting those creatures: if you can’t take proper care of them, then stop rearing them for you to convince yourself there and then that that stuff about a pet animal was but a curtain raiser before coming to the real problem, which was You little bastard, how could you do that to Nartaya? But he didn’t say anything more and you found yourself instantly on the defensive, asking yourself if by saying nothing further he wasn’t giving you time to speak, as it’s incumbent on any man who’s made a mistake to acknowledge that mistake by readily confessing without being asked. And in such a matter you saw yourself bound hand and foot like Ma Su about to appear before Zhuge Liang19. Gossip always travels fast. Maybe someone had seen you stealing out of Nartaya’s bungalow at night many times or maybe someone had seen Nartaya stealing out of your place at dawn, as lately she’d been telling you she couldn’t sleep alone any longer and kept insisting you were her only support, so that she was practically unable to bear being away from you. You were fed up. You were scared stiff. You wanted to end it all. Late in the afternoon after school, you began to no longer go back home but loiter with some of your temple-boy pals or at some other friends’ room rented for a hundred and fifty baht a month. It wasn’t only Daen’s shadow but San’s also that made you shiver. He’d taken care of you and helped you many years before and, when he saw you again right after his transfer, he told you, like an elder brother long separated from his little sibling, I say, you’ve grown so much I can hardly recognise you! and he came to you and put his arm around your shoulders in an affectionate embrace. Each time he came to see his sister, he’d invite you to eat at their place as he knew you must have it up to here with the daily mess-kit diet. And you’d paid back his sincerity and kindness with vileness! Get the hell out of here, you told yourself. Get the hell out as fast and as far as you can. When you found yourself far from her you felt you could breathe better. For an entire week you hardly went back home, except once or twice out of absolute necessity. And you soon had some of your chums jealous when you boasted you now had a woman oh boys! young, beautiful and pure, not a whore like we all score, and you told of your sexual adventures to your waster cronies with a luxury of details and as a bonus remarks that meant to be droll of the kind Then she did like this and then she did like that and then she panted and as soon as I did that she bit into the pillow. That wasn’t behaving like a gentleman, as you bloody well knew: that was demeaning the woman and furthermore demeaning her behind her back. You shrugged off the episodic warnings of your conscience. Your friends couldn’t care less. In this kind of confederacy of demons in the making, nobody gave a damn about good and evil. They plied you with questions, urged you to describe your carnal ecstasies without concealing anything, and you did so without hesitation. But mind: you didn’t love her, you concluded cold-heartedly. She was nothing else but a live utensil you used so that your way to orgasm had the taste of ambrosia and the colours of the rainbow. Ah, but that’s how it must be! your jubilant cronies would exclaim. That’s how it must be with real men. Don’t ever be taken in by women no matter which, whether teenage sluts who throw themselves into the arms of the first man that comes along or well brought-up goodygoodies. Those teenagers were brutal and crude beyond belief. Our wish to do evil was grandiose and crystal clear, barbaric and vehement, with strong tendencies towards delinquency. Breaking the law and moral tenets passed for audacity. Obedience was the symbol of defeat. We were beginning to compete among ourselves in matters of sex, gambling, drugs and scraps. We idolised criminals as we did heroes, we were gobsmacked in front of power stemming from the use of force and in front of riches stemming from the use of deceit. Onward Buddhist devils, let’s commit evil to satiety was the motto we’d encourage one another with. The will to pose as villains was firmly anchored in every one of us and showed itself at the merest opportunity, and the uglier we were, the better. Esteemed parents, teachers and guardians, may you all topple into hell! May you all pay back blood with a surfeit of blood! May everything be destroyed to avenge what the world has done to us! Be evil! Show your vileness with all the excess strength that you have, so that villainy might rule for ever and ever! Family and school were nothing but training grounds for mongrel dogs. Parents, teachers and guardians were nothing but breeders of mongrel dogs who dreamt that, under their control, through their teaching, through their culture, one day we’d become pedigree dogs, graduate dogs, foreign-diploma dogs, PhD dogs, prestigious dogs, dogs of daring morality, dogs fond of beauty and keen on wisdom, saint dogs, tyrant dogs, he-dogs ferreting for bones in all corners, prostituted she-dogs, he-dogs who smoke Havana cigars and sip French champagne, she-dogs with diamond G-strings obsessed one and all with cellulite, doggy dogs taking themselves for spokesdogs of Elysium and speaking of Dog the Father even before licking the blood off their
muzzles. Today’s puppies are tomorrow’s adult dogs. Good dogs are the pride of Dogland. To clever dogs a prosperous Dogland. Young well-self-trained dogs are the future of Dogkind. Crafty those dogs who breed themselves… Dogs’ individuality… Dogs’ democracy… Some dogs for whom each month was always the twelfth, the lunar month of coupling, even though they had a past history of heroic revolutionaries and the reputation of being dogs whose love of dog masses was unshakable. Others who served as models of dogs with noble souls who spent their time gnawing at the bone of idealism… In the pack of dogs of all breeds, we were but lowly mutts, but in that eventful year, those violent impulses didn’t find the words to express themselves and smouldered like lava. We were but dogs communicating between ourselves through instinct or in a primitive barbarous tongue, saying Let’s be evil, let’s walk on the road of abomination for exemplary atrocities. If we’d been asked What’s greatness? we’d have been incapable of giving an answer. But if we’d then been asked It’s the capacity to commit evil, is it not? we’d no doubt have nodded vigorously and might have added It’s the capacity to kill, it’s the capacity to contravene rules and taboos of all kinds, it’s refusal and rebellion. We all sought excellence as fornicators. We collected white-cover books. We collected pictures of sexual congregations. The walls of our rooms were papered over with photographs of naked women all the way up to the ceiling and sometimes on them as well. And when you proclaimed sadly to your cronies you were fed up with your woman, they all looked at you with admiration and envy. That’s right, you’re perfectly entitled to be fed up, some of them said, and to have the guts to dump her. Some suggested that if you really were fed up with her like you said, you could always take her to some friend or other so that they had the opportunity to admire her in turn. Would that bug you, do you think? – It’s a notion worth thinking about, the others cried. She follows you around like a dog, doesn’t she? Bring her to us. We’d like her to know us. This can’t be, you say? In that case, it means you still love her. Loves makes you weak. It’s hatred, comrade, which makes men tough. They guffawed as they spoke. Their eyes glistened with lust, even though they took care to look unconcerned. You didn’t know what to tell them to make them understand how deeply depressed you actually were. You were worried. You went back home less and less often. In a few months it’d be the end of the term and she’d go back to mum and dad like the good daughter that she was while you primed yourself for the entrance exam. Come the start of the new school year, you might flee her and be miles and miles away. The separation would detach you from her smoothly. So what? The relationship between you and her was going to force the two of you to stay together until death did you part, was that it? That beggared common sense. And you explained to her you had to have more private tuition in many subjects and when it was over it was very late so you slept overnight at a friend’s, that’s all. Once Daen came to see you at school to give you some money and he told you only In that case, I’ll tell them to stop delivering your meals at home: is that okay with you? You told him I guess so. Daen was talking to you man to man and seemed to trust you a great deal. So you told him you’d try to go back home as often as possible, as you knew this would please him. And you decided to actually go for private tuition, in mathematics as well as in English, in the evening as well as during the weekend, for if you let yourself go doing nothing you’d end up round the bend. You weren’t going to study in order to excel in learning. Your rotten brain was deteriorating more and more and retaining less and less. Alas, nothing happened as you thought, especially regarding Nartaya, for that same evening when you went back home she came straight at you and struck you with the strength of these words: I’m pregnant, which astounded you so much you groaned unwittingly. She looked distressed. Her swollen eyes told readily enough she’d already cried a lake. You yourself didn’t quite seem to understand what she’d just said. You merely felt obscurely that it was something hostile, something blurred, unsmooth, an unprecedented threat. You were as eager to shy away as to confront it come what may, as if you were presented with a death sentence. Bitch! So it’s you, isn’t it? Come closer! The catastrophe had to happen. You had to be punished in one way or in every possible way. You no longer could protect yourself. You’d been living in anticipation and wait of such an event for a long time, half-bored halfrestless, so that in your subconscious there was nothing but echoes that answered one another at close quarters, nagging at times like an eyelash stuck under the eyelid. And now there it was, the catastrophe, excessively arrogant and boastful, sure of its importance like a diva aware of having kept her audience waiting. Bitch! So it’s you, isn’t it? You stared at her in disbelief and then followed her to her home quietly. Violence and pain then exploded and spread in a thick, heavy smoke in your cranium. Nartaya sat herself down in front of the dressing table mirror in her bedroom. The table was covered with odds and ends – pots of skin lotions, ceramics shaped as bears, dogs, rabbits, belt buckles shaped as butterflies and as eyeglasses, hill-tribe dolls, a tin of talcum powder, short combs, a chap stick, a pocket mirror, cute multicoloured taper and screw-shaped candles. A discreet smell of talcum powder floated about, a woman’s smell. The bedroom of a young girl about to become a young woman… You kept quiet. With her nails she scratched the rim of the table, looking lost in her thoughts, head hung, and in a hoarse voice she repeated I’m pregnant as if she wanted you to realise it was true, and speaking slowly she added that suspicions had come to her when she noticed her menses were late but she wasn’t sure altogether and didn’t know whom to turn to for advice. You asked her in an impersonal tone of voice to describe her condition and pretended to conduct a careful and thoughtful examination with the rudiments of gynaecology in your possession to come to the conclusion that she might not be pregnant as she imagined and you endeavoured to pacify her without conviction as you were no more sure of yourself as she was of herself. But when she insisted once again that she was really pregnant, the whole world seemed to topple into darkness, full of bitter confusion extremely hard to clear up. By then the cold season was half way through. She was a little over two months pregnant. Your brain which, besides lousy musings, had room for nothing but objective data in examination sheets was threatened with temporary paralysis at having to cope with such a headache. As for Nartaya, she thought of nothing. She did nothing but cry and seemed ready to bury herself and putrefy in her own suffering. Her features were both gaunt and swollen. Big pimples were blooming at the tip of her chin and on her cheeks. Her long bent eyelashes were drowned in tears. In no time at all, this young girl had turned into a misshapen and incredibly stupid creature. You stared at her and thought, So that’s the bird you used to kiss and fondle all over? Do open your eyes wide: see how much she looks like a corpse. Don’t tell anyone, you hear, you said. Let no one know, especially Daen and San! She nodded absently. The next day you told your friends the crisis you were going through. They flocked around you and listened to you attentively. They all thought of you as a hero and each wanted to have his share of your problem. You don’t say! You should be proud to have such a hard nut to crack. What can I do to have this happen to me too ? I’d love to have a hard time and worry as you do, let me tell you. To sleep with a woman who isn’t a whore, that’s quite a feat, to be sure. Don’t think, chums, that anybody can do it – a chick about to become a respectable woman, like those nurses who shoot us with penicillin or procaine when we get a dose of the clap or like our women teachers at school who keep telling us off, chicks that smell good, what, soft and clean, for fuck’s sake, not your thirty-baht-a-trick hookers that restore their virtue with alum to tighten their twat and lie down tree-trunk stiff so you can’t help thinking next time you’d just as well screw an electricity pole if you must fuck a bint that way, or else start on those fake moans and if you fondle them a bit are taken with shivers just as fake and when you’re still at it already smoke a fag or chew gum – not whores but nice girls who after school file out of their provincial girls’ college on the
ir bicycles they pedal very proper, thighs stuck together, so that some of us tell themselves How I’d like to see my face in place of the saddle of some of these! Girls who when we tease them with our uncouth compliments sometimes can’t refrain from insulting us with a blunt You fugger! and the mere fact of being insulted by them is for us an extreme honour far superior to the lousy honour of lowly boy scouts or the crappy honour of trainee officers, and we take their insults, be they You fugger! or Get lost, you hick! to cherish them in our sweet solitary dreams, let me tell you. And here is one of us lucky enough to have slept with one of those respectable women to be. Besides he’s managed to knock her up. This is a unique occasion for dire celebration with grass bought in a greasy spoon at the bottom of a blind alley and rice whisky coloured with a drop of red syrup as can be found at any grocer’s nationwide – hooch whose bottle must according to custom be circulated anticlockwise and hash which must according to custom be circulated clockwise, hooch and hash being the two pillars of the festive temple of the barbarians that we are: hooch to make us reckless, hash to teach us how to use our imagination. Come now, chums, let’s celebrate! Let’s celebrate the fact it’s been a long time since we’ve had anything to celebrate. Let’s celebrate our godchild who’s going to come into the world six, seven months from now. Some were shouting in this way with an excitement they didn’t even try to hide. Some came to enfold your shoulders in their arms to comfort you when they saw you didn’t look as joyful as you should. Some punched your arm as a token of genuine indefectible friendship assorted with compliments of the kind Always forging ahead, aren’t you? How many times did you do it with your missus before she had a bun in the oven ? Did you count at least? Can you see yourself amid your coarse and vile cronies, aggressive and challenging everything, each of them feeling warm and safe within the group, some of them attending the lessons not because they were obliged to or liked school but because going to school was the only way for them to meet their friends? We strove on weird behaviours, be it in the way we talked, in the way we behaved or in the way we dressed. We wanted to call attention to ourselves. In the multitude we were minuses and we thrashed about to be focal points, to be accepted in a world too vast filled with people too many. Who’d notice us if we didn’t push ourselves forward? When we were decried as the very model of vile behaviour, we had the satisfaction to know that our names at least weren’t forgotten. We each dug out our crudest instincts and displayed them in all kinds of villainies. We had the impression the world was harming us and we were absolutely determined to take revenge on the world or at the very least thumb our noses at it. Those parent and teacher bastards only stuffed our heads as if they were all exceptional beings. Those bastards threatened us to sow fear, those bastards thrashed us, slapped us to distil shame, those bastards only knew how to say no, this isn’t allowed, that isn’t right. Those bastards’ laws… Those bastards’ morality… With such pretexts those bastards oppressed us in everyway. And they had the cheek to claim they wanted only our good or else demanded our gratitude for bringing us into the world, whereas actually they’d humped and we were born by chance. Ask them bastards how many times they’d done it for us to come to be born. They didn’t have a clue. And that fucking school, what’s the use of it? It’s for us to burn it down or throw bombs into it, isn’t it? It’s really the most odious place in the world. The best is not to be afraid of this sort of thing. We’re able to blow it to pieces. We’re able to run away towards freedom. The law is nothing but a rotten, tattered net and morality nothing but a scarecrow. And as far as you’re concerned, you the high school student who’s about to become a father, you’re luckier than we are at this point. Your problem, we’ve examined it from all sides and there’s nothing to panic about: have her abort; as simple as that. The oldest of your friends, talking in the name of them all, suggested a concrete solution. (That shit Tong – don’t think I’ve forgotten you; I’m not sure whether if ever I meet you I’m going to thank you or wring your neck with my own hands.) He was already twenty-one and had been arrested for attempted murder, but his father’s money and influence had returned him to freedom. I know someone who does that very well, he said simply. And all of us fellows want our share of pleasure in this matter and we’re going to give you a hundred or two hundred baht each as contributions. In this way you won’t have to worry too much because to ask her parents or your guardian a large sum would get them suspicious and pressed with questions you’d end up letting the cat out of the bag. Let’s say we’ll help you some and for the rest you’ll have to manage by yourself. After all, it’s your handiwork, so you must show you measure up. Women? Sure we can love them and do things for them, but everything considered never forget they’re only animals; only men are human beings. You’d better go along with our suggestions. Unless you give more importance to women? You took the monetary offerings intended to commit a sin, pocketed them and then left to meet Nartaya once again. You explained to her the simplest and most direct way to solve the problem. You didn’t feel embarrassed or even guilty. You expressed yourself slowly, calmly, simply as usual. You didn’t even defend your action by telling her you took pity on her or were worried about her. You spoke of abortion as if it were a repugnant if mysterious practice that secretly terrified you like a sacrifice, but at the same time you were burning with curiosity that demanded to be satisfied. No way! she exclaimed stupefied as she shook her head. It was obvious she’d never thought of such recourse. Besides she couldn’t begin to imagine how you could tell her things like that and, for a seventeen-year-old girl, the very fact of hearing of a practice of this kind was in itself repugnant. You did your utmost to control yourself and explain to her patiently. Had she already forgotten all her torments, how difficult it was to hide them from her brother, her parents, her friends and teachers at school, her neighbours and all the nosy members of a small narrow-minded community mired into a proliferation of calumnies and gossip? Her efforts not to divulge anything must eventually come to naught because the child in her belly kept growing. And if she didn’t accept your suggestion, what did she intend to do? So she should hurry to make a decision, as the longer she waited the more danger there was. Furthermore, it might not be as frightening as she thought. She kept still, and merely cried. Finally, one afternoon of the end of the cold season, after having lost days and days preventing yourself from rushing her, you succeeded in forcing her to go with you to see the hired abortionist. She let you drag her by the hand to a narrow, waterlogged lane that meandered between dirty crummy shacks tilted over a stretch of putrid waters. She was ghastly pale, her eyes shifty with fright, her free hand kneading a white hankie with which she wiped her tears ceaselessly. She walked slowly, reluctantly, so that you who went forward with determination felt fear rising in you also. You had to keep pressing her to hurry and consoling her. Come now, don’t be afraid. But she merely kept looking hither and thither with a pitiful mien like an animal dragged to the slaughterhouse. She must be prey to all sorts of terrors. She must be terrified at the idea of meeting someone she knew who’d ask her what she’d come to this slum for and whom she’d be at a loss how to answer. The house you were going to was an old wooden two-storey shack painted dark. Its shape and appearance made you think of a health centre. There was a signboard on which was clearly written CONSULTATION OVER ABNORMAL MENSTRUAL CYCLE AND FAMILY PLANNING, but it wasn’t a health centre. Besides, the lower floor was almost level with the stagnant water. The floor was covered with discoloured linoleum which went to shreds. There were four rickety imitation-leather chairs around a grubby wooden table entirely covered by a fogged and cracked glass sheet. On it, a dirt-grey plastic pot held inanimate plastic flowers. In a corner of the room two schoolbags and two pairs of small brown canvas slippers irresistibly suggested a rancid and musty smell. Two boys, no doubt brothers and the owners of the schoolbags and slippers, sat on the floor watching black and white television that showed a crummy Chinese movie. Close to them a middle-aged woman, probably the two
children’s mother, was busy folding paper into bags. She was fat and sinister-looking and wore a sarong and a sleeveless scoop-neck blouse. She was engrossed in her folding and from time to time looked up to glance at the TV screen. On the bench by the partition wall papered over with newspaper sheets and photographs of covers of variety magazines, three young girls sat still and mute: one stared absently at the screen, another cried noiselessly, the third with head bowed looked at the floor, her knees pressed against each other, her hands folded on her lap, while on the TV screen the hero of the kung-fu movie punched whack! whack! into the air while uttering Chinese-opera-like squeals, now roaring now jumping as he brawled his way through the approaches to the Xiao Ling temple. The three young girls were about the same age as Nartaya and no doubt confronted with the same problem as her. The middle-aged woman turned briefly to you and Nartaya and asked You want to see the doctor, don’t you? You answered with a nod. She said Sit down and told her eldest son to draw up chairs for us. Then she called her husband in a regal, deafening voice before sinking back into paper bag folding and glances at the TV. The middle-aged man who was going to abort Nartaya was a stout man with a cold and reserved manner, rather long and unruly greying hair and the bloodshot eyes of an insomniac or a drunk recovering from a binge. He wore crumpled silk trousers, and a dubiously white undershirt full of holes covered his paunch. On his face the pores of his skin were so big they could be seen clearly, like the face of an inveterate smoker, and the epidermis bore traces of devastating teenage acne. Seeing his blackish rough hands you couldn’t help thinking of the blood flooding them as he did his job and, at the thought, you felt faint and took fright. His nails were cut short, sure, but bore yellow traces of nicotine and were edged with black, and you couldn’t help thinking of the white clean hands of doctors and nurses in clinics and hospitals. The appearance of this man made you hold your breath unwittingly. As for Nartaya, she seemed about to faint. In the examination room, she answered his questions haltingly. How many months has it been exactly? – I’m not sure. – When was your last period? – I’m not sure. – What do you mean? Can’t you remember the date? Think again. I must know. – More than three months, almost four. – Ah but that’s the dangerous period then. Another ten or fifteen days and I’m not sure I’d want to take the risk of dealing with you. Why didn’t you come earlier? I don’t want to have a murder on my conscience. At three months, it’s already formed, you know; it’s got arms, it’s got legs and then, at four months, well then it’s even more obvious. It’s lucky you came the two of you. Usually there’s only the girl on her own or else with a female relative or friend. He spoke to you as if he meant to praise you. In the examination room at the back of the house, his laughter was stentorian and he spoke as if he didn’t give a damn about anything, which clashed with his cold and reserved manner, spoke and coughed between two questions on her symptoms, spoke and sniffled loudly and spat out a gob of spit into the cuspidor under his desk, then he undertook to promote himself by saying he wasn’t an abortionist devoid of qualification. The proof? He’d been a corporal in the medical corps during the war. While the others fought weapon in hand, I fought with weapon in one hand and first aid kit in the other. That’s why, he said, you can trust me. From then on he started to look down his nose at both you and her. People are having a good time without thinking about consequences and it’s on me that castigation falls. True, I keep breaking the law. I’m perfectly aware of that. When the police come to corner hash dealers or heroin addicts or small-time hoodlums around here, I shudder like a cow’s hide. What I do is illegal and besides maybe I’ll pay for it in hell. If I accept to practise abortions it isn’t to live a hunky-dory life, believe me. If someone is unhappy with me, it takes just a word in a cop’s ear and I’ll find myself within four walls waiting for visitors to bring me fried rice, a packet of Gold City or iced coffee in a plastic bag. As for my wife, there isn’t a day without her being the object of sarcasms and insinuations from the neighbours. My wife, let me tell you, she’s my assistant but she’s also my personal manager. All I earn she’s the one to cash in. My children at school are heckled by their friends. And you know what? My very own children don’t want me to eat at the same table as they do, though I’m the one working like a dog to feed them! Friends, I used to have a lot: they slipped away, every one of them, when they learned what it is I do for a living. Don’t think I’m taking it easy practising abortion on demand. Even municipal dustmen I have on my back. They keep telling me not to throw foetuses in the dustbin or the gutter and they make no bones about holding me to ransom, so to speak. They ask for money without batting an eyelid or else force me to offer them a bottle. If I tell you all this it’s for you to understand I have expenses and I’m not cheap, you see. Who is it who told you to come to see me? A friend of yours? Well, all right. Tong, you say? Yeah, he’s a friend who knows me well. In that case I’ll do you a special price: two thousand five only. And I guarantee you there’s no risks. It isn’t all that difficult, actually. There are whores around the harbour who’ve come here three or four times each. The first time, they cried their eyes out, but the next times they slipped into a sarong and went to wait on the operating table. I guarantee it’s really without danger. But I can’t do it today. An abortion requires composure. It’s an art in itself, in a sense. It isn’t like selling fried rice or noodles. No, not yet. I must take care beforehand of two other clients, the one who came with her friend, and the one who sits straight as a rod and doesn’t move, you saw her, all alone that one. Come and see me again next week. It’s too late for this afternoon. On Sundays, I’m here all day, morning and afternoon. You listened to that madman boasting non-stop. Your heart thumped. Nartaya’s hand in yours was drenched in sweat. Her deathly pale face was drenched in sweat. She sat head down, still as a dummy, and at one moment her body arched with a start and you thought something had happened to her, but she merely started to sob softly while the man insisted on safety and the absence of risk with all the confidence of a professional expert, and his way of expressing himself was utterly believable even if he had yet to examine Nartaya’s body with his hands. You asked him to lower his fee, and when he did you asked him to lower it further, a process which took some time as if he and you were trying to reach an agreement on a commercial basis. And that negotiation made you aware of one truth, which was that you were a totally harmless pushover. At a loss for arguments, you bowed to him with joined hands at forehead level and pleading poverty asked him to make do with two thousand baht, and when he finally accepted you showered him with mumbled thanks. Throughout all this Nartaya said nothing. She merely listened, glancing up at you on occasion. She wondered in her pain why you insisted on the need to depend upon him, which confirmed her more than ever in the idea that she wouldn’t escape from her tragic fate. As for you, you merely thought you were only doing what needed to be done and you’d go on doing it until you achieved your aim.