the festival of sprites
Exuberance is beauty.
William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
It didn’t seem possible: from teenage hoodlum I had become a university student; from tough guy well versed in all base acts, I had an appointment with myself at varsity; of the whole bunch of good-for-nothings that we were, I was the only one to have had the impertinence of passing university entrance. With one fell swoop I had jumped from hell’s roof to find myself dangling under heaven’s canopy. I had become an arts student in a venerable university as if by a miracle, so that on the very first days I was very much perplexed by the vagaries of fate, a fate so well disposed in my favour one had to wonder if it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. I hadn’t expected to find my name on the list of successful candidates. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, after rechecking the results, it was noticed there had been a mistake and I’d be expelled with an official apology from the university for making me wrongly rejoice for a few days as a student. Everything considered I expected a reversal of situation that’d see me go through the door, but I waited in vain and my wait dissipated as I soon had other fish to fry. As a newcomer I was surrounded with many senior students who saw to my every need, chatted with me in a friendly way, multiplied their advice, suggested I register for this course with this lecturer and that course with that professor, offered me to become a member of various social groups, from the dancing club to the Buddhist students’ association, from the chess club to the football club. Some of those seniors looked more mature than their age, judicious, level headed, considerate like brothers; some were friendly and open as if we’d always known each other; some had greeted us familiarly from the first and were forever pressing us to go out for a drink together. The new students watched their steps, disoriented, suspicious, subdued, lonely and impressed. They came from almost every horizon and from all social classes and watched one another timorously like newborns freshly out of the rotten uterus of high school. The first weeks were spent in meetings to prepare the reception of the newcomers in the various disciplines, faculties and associations and in the holding of the reception, a good-natured ragging held as a big do over two days upcountry. A few weeks later I was beginning to get used to the place and the people and I began to withdraw from the ongoing activities and to consider them as an observer, which I did with an increasingly critical eye, and I began to be more or less convinced university isn’t the place where to teach people to have a noble heart nor is it the place to frequent for people yearning for wisdom, contrary to what I’d been reading in books. But I didn’t express this opinion openly, as I didn’t hold myself altogether aloof from those meaningless activities, and many a time I enjoyed myself very much, in particular because of the eccentric behaviour of a group of seniors who seemed to live in the margins of the place and of time. Those were fine arts students who’d been trained to express their feelings freely, so that, fascinated, I found myself among them without realising it, and that, from the moment I started to play long chess sessions with them. They always dressed casually and sloppily and had skins speckled with paint blobs of all colours from their painting sessions and sometimes spattered with mud from their sculpture sessions and these saintly fellows didn’t seem to care enough to scrub themselves clean. Many of them slept in the very lecture halls and only went back home once in a blue moon as do conscripts. Some went to the extent of planting vegetables and flowers and rearing chickens they considered as the property of all, as if to demonstrate the existence of an artists’ commune. One day they dumbfounded the new students by grabbing a conical ashtray out of its wrought-iron pedestal, whose sand they replaced with chinks of wood doused with petrol, lit it, and one of them caught this improvised brazier and, carrying it at arm’s length, started to run under the acclamations of the others and at the first corner another student took over and so on around the entire university perimeter. It was their way of deriding the torch run during the opening of a sporting event. In front of the building of these denigrators of life, a narrow track went around a vast pond which gave out a suffocating fetid smell at all times. The pond was lined with age-old pine trees with thick foliage. Under each pine was a bench where they came to sit, lie down, discuss, chat, play chess, sing and make music, but as this track was very busy during the day, it happened one day that some oddball grabbed a pot of vivid paint and painted a pedestrian crossing in front of the fine arts building as if to indicate to the individuals who went about the track how much them fellows were disturbed when they came out of the building to go and sit down under the pines around the pond. And as the pond gave off an increasingly gagging odour, one day they made a dummy looking like a drowned man and had it float in the middle of the pond. The corpse, painted in hyper realistic fashion, was so lifelike that the rector, an eminent professor highly thought of by his peers and with a heart ailment besides, blanched at the sight of it as he really thought a student had drowned, and when he learned it was but a prank by students bent on satire, he burst into imprecations so primitive one would be reluctant to commit them to paper. And the day after the day the dummy corpse was taken out of the waters of the huge pond, which was entirely covered with vivid green jork haen23 so that it looked like a lawn, a large-sized panel floated proudly right in the middle and proclaimed, in big neat letters printed in the manner of an official proclamation that could be read even from Mr Rector’s luxurious and imposing office, NO WALKING ON THE LAWN. They also raised a dog, whose name was Superman. It was everyone’s dog at fine arts. It was a dog who didn’t quite mix with his fellow creatures, given that he reeked of linseed oil and was all besmirched with multicoloured paint, as it was on that poor animal that they wiped their brushes. Superman was taken to be a most perspicacious art critic, having squirted over untold numbers of daubs. According to a persistent rumour, them it was who’d been organising every year the ceremony to the memory of Suraphon Sombatjareun since the demise of the king of rural crooners, and to that of Mit Chaibancha since the demise of the giant of the screen, but they didn’t make a big deal of it which might draw outside society’s attention, and them it was who organised every year the music festival of advertising jingles, with all sorts of ads from the past, such as those of body repair specialist Mongkhon Service, the Sor Sapharn Morn driving school, ‘Look Kai (Chick) soap smells sooo good’, ‘Phan Ngarm, the right foundation for your complexion’, ‘Narm Jareun (Top-Level) men of the world outfits’, and so forth up to my ancestors’ time, such as for Kop (Frog) batteries and ‘Song Samai (Modern) sells all garments at fixed prices’, each jingle being sung, spoken or danced as close to the original as could be. And them it was also who organised every year a variety show, with a western play of the Romeo and Juliet kind, in which Romeo, before he parts from Juliet in the scene of tender love, throws to his beloved grinning like a simpleton on her balcony a very much blossoming rose made out of tissue paper, but throw as he might it won’t take off because that damn rose is too bulky and Romeo finally must squeeze the petals together in haste and the tapered rose is darted onto the balcony successfully now that there is no bulk to provide any resistance to the air saturated with amorous vapours, and Romeo, contrite and downcast, entreats Juliet to Have it blossom again yourself, won’t you, love? And in the spade duel scene between Romeo and Paris, as they cross swords the rhythm breaks down when someone shouts Hey! Not so fast! whereupon Romeo and Paris comply and exchange thrusts as in those Chinese movies shot in slow motion. There was the wedding scene where data sheets are piled up on the dinner table and the host invites the guests to partake of the collation. There was also a racy banter and song scene in which the man, scolded sharply by the woman for being late for their tryst, answers her, singing, that he’s on time and adds for good measure Mine is an Omega. It’s right ’n’ hard on time. There was a likei24 performance in which, when she hears the male part croon Eyes in your eyes / I’d like friendship to unite us / And tie us for life / Tell me, sweetie, do I have a chance? / I�
��d like to know everything / Are you thirteen at least? the female side retorts in terms that generations of students would learn by rote I’m over fourteen / Are you blind as a bat or what? / Waist, boobs, arse and haunches / All present and accounted for / Only last night, voice that breaks, blood that boils, I was all wet / Nubile to bursting point, so there! There was a satire of Chinese films, where the emperor, answering to the portentous name of Thang Kao Rua (Old Leaking Pail), has to announce his own arrival in a stentorian voice Make room! Here comes the emperor! among many other comical or farcical scenes. Several members of that group showed no sign of ever becoming true artists except that they were genuine sarong-chasers and inveterate drinkers, and several others were horrid daubers, obsessed with religion to an amazing degree. They were so touchy in matters of morality they’d have been better off on another planet altogether. Several others drank life experiences discriminatingly, kept them in their mouth for a while, deliberated before they swallowed or spat them out like the drunken devils in Chinese novels, by deciding whether or not to attend lectures, going on hippie-like votive pilgrimages or indulging instead in drink or sex, and proclaiming without compulsion that they would live in the most unruly way possible and spend at least seven years on a programme that normally took four. Some of them were sold on politically committed art and wrote demo placards with fiery formulas, were always available to produce posters, kept exposing the government to public contempt and analysed society angrily like post-October-1425 activists, whereas others pigheadedly defended art for art’s sake, dreaming but of ambrosia, paradise and creative ecstasy, cursing often and expressing the cocksure opinion that art is by nature of the female gender: to put art to the service of politics is like recruiting women to be sent to the front to fight, which is an inept and counterproductive way to go about things, like using a tennis racket to dry salted fish. For all that, taken in their entirety, they formed a tribe of jolly fellows who adored one another and got along well. Sure, they’d occasionally grapple with one another over trifles, but that was in the nature of things. Quite a few among them, especially the most senior, were inveterate bookworms, film buffs who haunted the cinemas in town and attended the free showings of the Goethe-Institut, the Alliance française, AUA and the British Council. It was them who went to borrow films from these cultural centres to project them in tiny screening rooms and invite younger students to attend the sessions. Those were films adapted from famous novels by Gide, Zola, Hugo, Gogol or Dostoevsky. I liked so much the French film adapted from Gogol’s Diary of a Madman in particular that I went to see it several times. Sometimes they were shown at night with a clunky projector and a bare wall as screen, and only a few viewers, each stretched out on his seat, smoking, drinking beer or his head on his sweetheart’s lap. The girls, who numbered few, had odd shapes and features, as if they had fallen off the pages of a fairytale or a Middle Ages fabliau; some looked like Japanese dolls, others like squaws; some looked like gipsies; some had long hair flowing in their backs which in the hot season they rolled into a bun kept in place by a small paintbrush by way of a slide, with funny thingies hanging down their ears, a leather bag strapped on the shoulder giving them the look of living tough, and flashy bracelets strung over the entire length of their arms; some wore short hair combed backwards, most often all-purpose jeans, most often men’s shirts with sleeves upturned to the armpits, smoked like chimneys and swore like troopers as if to match the boys’ callousness, flirted outrageously with the other girls, liked to draw naked, well-muscled women and acted arrogant and domineering; some, doleful looking, dressed in black or dull colours, gave the impression that for them the cold season lasted all year. They seemed to dwell on some loss in a distant past whose return they awaited, which made them increasingly look like Penelopes as days went by. They only read Gibran’s melancholy poems and only listened to Chopin’s melancholy piano fugues on the latest made-in-Japan sound system. Some wore miniskirts even during the cold season because they had beautiful legs, were haughty, heavily made-up and chewed gum all day long. Their boyfriends were in Italy and they wrote to them once a week as if they kept a diary, even though they often insinuated they’d like them to break their hearts, for their aim was in no way to paint a masterpiece but to devote themselves to poetry and there’s nothing like an unhappy love affair to bring forth great verse. The merrygo-round of their trinkets revolved only around tiger teeth, wild boar fangs, bear claws and porcupine spines, transmuted into bracelets, rings, hairpins and key rings they hung at their belts. These youngsters of both sexes each had his or her personality and, for most of them, the guts to live their lives as they must be and, even if they made mistakes and suffered and worried themselves sick like the rest of us, they loved life enough to weep or laugh about it while bucking conventions. From the very first month I cottoned on to those fine arts students and I progressively set about imitating them and resembled them in the end, letting my hair grow and wearing jeans, t-shirts and canvas shoes. I undertook to read like one possessed to enlarge the field of my cogitations as, although they were fine arts students, many of them, especially among the book addicts, had such a knowledge of literature that, for all my being an arts student, I was beginning to feel ashamed of myself. Some of them had a futuristic kind of imagination and stated under a chorus of gibes they’d encountered extraterrestrials on Phoo Kradueng26 on a clear night of the cold season and those aliens had told them it was mathematics, not music, that would allow man to communicate with the other intelligent living beings of the universe. They decried as stupid the man who uses only reason and common sense to apprehend everything and expressed their certainty that man is the only animal species in the world able to take the supernatural into consideration and it’s absolutely indispensable for him to do so. Others, on the other hand, only swore by elephants and gathered all sorts of data on elephants, books, documents, photos, in such quantities it was frightening – starting with everything about the calf mammoth fallen into a crevice in Siberia a million years ago whose corpse was found in perfect condition only recently. Its flesh was as fresh as on the day it fell. Dissection revealed its last feast before it fell into the crevice. Indian elephants have high IQs, African elephants low ones, so if you capture an African elephant and send it to the elephant school in our Lampang province, the mahout that’ll train it will soon suffer from headaches. They knew all about elephants in history, such as Jao Phraya Prarptraijak; elephants in literature, such as Phlai Prakaimart; the elephant in Buddha’s life which went to forage for food to donate to him and which will be reborn as a Buddha in the era after the era we live in, according to the prediction of the Book of Reincarnations; all about the prodigious elephant Keereemeikhlang, the most perspicacious elephant of a north-eastern village, who very often goes out to pick lotuses to adorn the image of the Buddha in the middle of the village; Thai mahouts, so competent Indonesia relies on them to capture her wild elephants; strange stories about Tha Chang27, elephant graveyards, the soldiers guarding the elephants’ feet in ancient battles, taphun28, the flag with the elephant emblem; the cow elephant who’s ashamed of her yoni when she’s adorned for a procession so that her mahout must cover it with a piece of cloth or else she’ll refuse to parade and, if someone stares openly at her slit, she sees red; the elephant penis, said to be a very expensive aphrodisiac worth thousands of baht per kilo, which is why elephants are so sought after by hunters, not for the ivory of their defences but for that other appendix… Some were interested in magic and mysteries, believed in the reality of previous lives and in the reality of lives to come, believed that not only men and animals are endowed with a soul but plants also, so that if they had to cut a blade of grass they asked the blade of grass for forgiveness and if they had to transplant a tree they asked the tree for forgiveness, and they told with conviction the story of an air force pilot who met Luang Poo Waen29 while flying at an altitude of ten thousand feet, and told of the delirious enthusiasm this same Luang Poo Waen elicited when he said he h
ad to smoke so many kheeyo, the long acrid cigars of the North, that his mouth and throat hurt, because people wanted the ashes of his cigars as they held them to be sacred and he often had to pull out his few remaining hairs because people wanted a hair of his as they held his hair to be sacred, told of the occult power of Luang Phor Ee’s palat khik30 by saying that young women truly received palat khik from his very hand but hastened to throw them overboard as they went back home by boat for the reason that they were maidens still untouched by male hands, yet couldn’t possibly have refused a gift from the master of occult sciences. People on both banks of the canal had seen the palat khik rise above the surface and swim in the boats’ sway, as they’d been endowed with life by the magical incantations of that matchless occult intercessor. And they told of the devil’s own cheek of Luang Poo Juan, nicknamed Turd Watcher, saying that while he was still a very young man he loved a woman he meant to marry but at the same time he wanted to renounce worldly pleasures, which are so fickle. Tormented for a long time by such a dilemma, on a fine morning he finally went to hide near the young woman’s house and when she came out to shit in the forest he followed her and when she’d left he went straight to look at the dame’s turd and that was when he took the firm decision to enter the monkhood and ever since he’s been the irreproachable monk that we know. And there were still others who were ramblers always full of projects such as hitchhiking all over Thailand to write up their adventures as Jack Kerouac had done in On the Road, travelling on George Coedès’s traces to see the changes that had taken place in the sites and landscapes since the time of his exploration, and even hitchhiking round the world. And some had their skulls chock-full of dirty jokes so that to the tune of one smutty story per night, a thousand nights wouldn’t have sufficed, it seemed, to exhaust their stocks of proverbs and lapidary sayings as well as of tales, poems, short stories, novels, plays and even epics, not to mention dirty jokes throughout the ages. And they were peerless creators of amazing spoonerisms, who proclaimed that all words are apt to spoonerism provided the sentence is turned and the words are assembled with a single objective: to reverse them down side up. One of their ambitions in life was to put together in one volume the kinky sayings of old monk Uncle Thein and old nun Auntie Chee, and almost all of them despised what they already knew and were constantly in search of new knowledge, each reckoning that the known wears out as a spouse fades and there’s no flavour but in the new. Yet, for all that, they all had the same dream, which was to possess the ideal library, and it’s thanks to the gestating ideal libraries in their rented rooms around the U that I read The Kings of Siam and Literary Criticism by Sor Thammayot, The One the Lord Rejected, a novel by Phra Sarrasart Phonkhan, The Epic of Gilgamesh by a Babylonian of yore, the whole works of Adi Shankara who contributed to the resurgence of Hinduism and the decline of Buddhism in India, as well as the clandestine literature of the left, whose pamphlets announced for example that General So-and-so was about to make a coup, which later turned out to be true. It’s partly because of them that I found myself obliged to spend hours in the library, play chess morning, noon and night, drink like a sink and loaf about raving like a madman, and that I began to know books and collect them in earnest. (Good grief, I can see myself most clearly: a chimpanzee in search of wisdom.) It’s around that time that I made your acquaintance, you who, for this constellation of fine arts students, were comparable to a shooting star, coming and going at will. Why did I become close to you though I could have been closer to others? Many others indeed had begun to brighten their lives with their idiosyncrasies, which were as good as yours. Doam Wuthichai at the time had a racing bike and he already had done Bangkok – Chiang Mai and back, which had muscled up his legs so that all his jeans were tight to bursting point at the thighs. Almost every month, Khampan Seenuea rallied all his chums and fighting cocks to go and bet in the cocky circles of Bangkok as well as upcountry with varying fortunes. Thanit Sukkaseim had laid his hand I don’t know where on a stamp bearing the effigy of Saint-Exupéry and he had a buyer offering no less than three thousand baht for it but he refused to sell. Sanphat Phongkaseit was hardly in the second year but he’d already read Ulysses three times and he was in an advanced state of depression as he’d been impudent enough to tackle Finnegans Wake and was completely bowled over as he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Jitti Phuaphisut was beginning to have the makings of a copywriter of genius, having conceived a poster for the Development Aid Volunteers’ Association aiming to encourage student youth to volunteer for training courses in upcountry camps with the slogan MAN MAKES CAMPS. CAMPS MAKE THE MAN. IF YOU WANT TO MAKE YOUR WAY IN LIFE THE SEVENTEENTH CAMP OF THE NORTHEAST IS WAITING FOR YOU. Marnit Seewa was beginning to be notorious as a photographer and he was always ready to discuss the ideas he had with me in particular. But I wasn’t as intimate with them as I was with you because they were too extraverted. Eh-eh-eh! Nart Itsara! So we meet again, you who are still alive and I who am already dead. I’m playing a game whose rules forbid you to avoid me. I’m already dead or at the very least I only live in death. Don’t be sorry for me. Don’t be sad. Keep your good intentions to tip whomever you please with. Who the hell are you and where do you come from? We know each other well, the two of us, and yet we hardly know each other at all. I play at being dead in this night of intense cold and solitude and, since you’re a character in the novel of my life, here you are summoned to appear. Not as a star guest: you’re not the star guest, but truly the only protagonist of the story, the novel of my life of which I’m not the main actor. It’s downright depressing, isn’t it? I shouldn’t be honouring you so much, even though you’re someone deeply intelligent and with noble aspirations that everyone praises – praises excessively in my view. We should never have met, I akin to a murderer, a wild beast, you akin to a saint, a god; I wildly volatile like a volcano and you iced over like an iceberg whose immersed mass I can neither see nor fathom; I who wait only for the end of the world, you who solemnly declare that human civilisation in its entirety is a civilisation bathed in blood whose unavoidable end is self-destruction, and all you’re doing right now is build a new civilisation that’ll be pure or, if one has to climb down, a civilisation less bathed in blood. No, I must be careful not to honour you too much and not talk too much of my own inferiority. Ah! Let me tell you here that all your good intentions appal me. I’m afraid I might forget it and I’ll remind myself of it every time I get the opportunity. And let me tell you frankly that if I go on living, sooner or later I’ll kill you. That’s a necessary act, as killing you with my own hands is the only way for me to live without becoming mad. It’s I, poor clod, who had the presumptuousness to introduce myself into the orbit of your life like an insignificant corpuscle. You weren’t paying any attention to me. I was younger than you, more inexperienced than you, more stupid than you, and I considered you as a hero. Having met you turned me feverish with inspiration. You were the ideal young man; you were like the rebel in a modern novel. I met you at a time when you were thinking of giving up university while I stupidly rejoiced to have made it there. You were then in the third year and I in the first. I was still a kid whose skull was full of dreams more than reality. You seemed on the verge of ditching your friends, solitary to the point of appearing to be haughty. It was chess that compelled us to know each other. I was using my old expertise from the rental bookshop to progress around the pine trees easily beating one player after another. The losers sent the best to measure themselves against me and in less than an hour per game I drove them to defeat. This being so, they told me Play with Nart and see. I contented myself with remaining silent. You were not only the ace of aces under the pines around the pond but the reigning chess champion of the university. Knowing that, I just smiled and shrugged my shoulders, saying that I’d been away from the game for a long while and wouldn’t measure up to the university champion. On several occasions your friends went to look for you to play a game with me, but you were too busy, as you worked then as a typogr
aphy designer for a small print shop and it was only once that job was done that you had the leisure to loiter at the U after lecture hours, and one evening we finally did come face to face over a chessboard. As you were older than I, I greeted you first, bowing with disdain. As for you, you smiled at me benignly as a monk welcomes a novice and said Easy does it, okay? There was a crowd around us, youngsters of my promotion as well as seniors of the fifth or sixth year who, everything considered, behaved as a mafia in the U even if it was a mafia that was open-handed. An old professor very keen on chess, whom the students called the Old Lion, had come to watch also and it was that professor who spiced up the event by declaring you were unofficially staking your title as champion and he ordered for someone to go and buy soft drinks at his expense for the competitors and the spectators as well; as for him, he’d take advantage of the occasion to drink beer, as it was past teaching time. It was an evening in mid-July when the air was limpid. Over the brouhaha of the people massed around were heard trumpet squeals coming out of the music room rather far away and exclamations from footballers warming up before practice. In the hall of the fine arts building, first-year youngsters thrashed about around four or five ping-pong tables and made such a racket the Old Lion had someone go and tell them to pipe down a little. I felt excited and drank up my lemonade in big gulps to be done with it, upon which the Old Lion handed over to me a glass of beer I gulped down without hesitation. He turned towards you and with a sweet smile told you surely you wouldn’t object to your opponent drinking beer as there was no dope in beer. In so easy going an atmosphere, I played every move in earnest. We had agreed on three rounds, unless one of the opponents won two. I knew from older chess fans that you were expert in the handling of bishops and your bishops were killers that ensured your victory almost every time. During the first round, I had the upper hand because you obviously were unaware I was trying to get rid of your bishops. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, I smothered one, which had you frown and groan in surprise, but while my castle swiftly got rid of your other bishop as well as one pawn amid spectators’ exclamations, your two castles planted in front of my king in combat formation on the left side of the chessboard went into action. The first one checked the king by knocking off the pawn that protected it. After being on the offensive for a long time, I was now cornered. I had to free my king as best I could, your other castle hot on its heels suddenly transmuted into an implacable killer. It hounded my breathless king on one side of the chessboard and my king was at mercy, with my castles and knights unable to intervene. The Old Lion, who officiated as timekeeper, announced I’d narrowly lost the game and the first round had lasted fortytwo minutes. We remained seated the both of us for a while massaging our temples and rolling our heads to soften the necks. Soon the second round started. I used the pawns to protect my queen, and my bishops in advanced formation to go on the offensive with the intent to carry out a massacre, whereas you set up a tight defence with limitless patience while leading occasional assaults as destructive as a bush fire to try to disengage yourself. That round was like a fight between gladiators who, constantly on guard, beat each other up oblivious of death. At times, one or the other would step back to disengage, stare at his opponent without lowering his eyes to intimidate him, before launching another offensive. The spectators didn’t make a sound. Only the Old Lion tried to joke from time to time to relax the atmosphere. I used my knights to protect the king and my pawns to make a break to the left. Once again, I clearly had the advantage, especially when my valiant knights gave you such a hard time you had to call your remaining castle to the rescue. But its progress was fraught with pitfalls and, by the time it intervened, the situation had become critical and it took only one of my pawns to huff it altogether. You spread your arms like a Christ on the cross, shook your head and mane sadly and said you admitted defeat. That round had lasted twenty minutes only. I launched another offensive right away on the third round, but it was too presumptuous an approach, which gave you the opportunity no fewer than three times to put me in difficulty, even though your game was much less enthusiastic, perhaps because you were restraining yourself. It was a never-ending round in which nothing exciting happened. In my impatience to win, I spread myself too thin and made lots of unforgivable wrong moves and an eternity went by before you were left only with your king, a bishop and a pawn. As for me, I was left with only one pawn, which danced shamelessly an exasperating minuet, hanging around my king like a rowdy kid, until I had it taken inadvertently, so that my solitary king ended up giving up the ghost once again in the left corner of the chessboard. The whole game had lasted one hour and fortytwo minutes. The Old Lion proclaimed you’d been able to preserve your title as a champion; even though I’d lost this time, I would have the opportunity to take my revenge some other time. And with the accents of a master of ceremony he invited everyone present here and now to go for a beer at Wanakharm, an invitation everyone had the right to refuse except you and me. It was pitch dark when we left. And that night the Old Lion got seriously plastered, ranted on about whatever crossed his mind with formulas a la Yarkorp or a la Mai Mueang Deum31, let fall a glass that broke, patted a young waitress’s behind in a deliberately involuntary gesture, sang Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte songs, declaimed ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ and many other poems by William Blake with a breath saturated with alcoholic vapours, exposed his personal interpretation of those poems with a luxury of details (I remember Blake’s formula Opposition is true friendship as of that night), cursed by invoking the phallus when he spoke of the mediocrity of contemporary Thai literature and said present literary circles in the kingdom considered as a masterpiece any poem that was only sixty to seventy percent valid, which had me wince, said of Michelangelo he wasn’t one to fell a tree to make only one chair, as in reality he’d been incapable of making even a single chair or even a single rung: all he’d done was shackle art and drag it into the prison of morality, said Krishnamurti was undoubtedly a genius and if the various types of genius were classified he’d feature among insipid geniuses, and advanced the thesis according to which the most obvious difference between man and animal is that man is unable to lick his own balls whereas an animal can – just take a look at dogs, cats, bovines, deer, rabbits, civets and other rodents. I, the skin of whose face was getting taut, objected that all sufficiently trained gymnasts could bend over and lick their balls or nibble their pussy as often as they felt like it, and you, whose face was getting flushed too, added that you seemed to have read somewhere, maybe in the Tripitaka, that some priests with a pliable spine got around the interdiction to indulge in sexual congress by proceeding to self-service fellatio, whereupon the Old Lion announced he was giving up his thesis and let out a stream of apologies on a sarcastic mode by saying that the exposition of his thesis proceeded from an obvious lack of reflection on his part and he thanked us and stood up to toast man and animal and then toast demons and gods as many as there were, from Agni to Zeus, and then toast the sole Kinnari, and when he put his glass down he said with saddened stupor he’d forgotten the reason why Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Sukhon Kiuliam32 wore the same moustache. That night, you and I and four or five sidekicks went to sleep at the Old Lion’s. I don’t remember who drove us there. It was a house on a piece of land of about four hundred square yards. There was nothing but a tangle of trees and plants, both in the front yard and in the garden at the back, which looked more like a jungle, as well as in the kitchen, the living room, the balcony and the toilet, so that you had the impression the house was but a passing guest and the jungle was the true owner of the place. There were dogs and cats on the prowl. There was an impish peacock which gave me a peck on the arm when I tottered up to the veranda. And you, as you sat down properly on the sofa without saying a word, a six yards long python appeared properly without saying a word and knocked on your tibia with its mouth by way of how do you do. There was an albino turtle the Old Lion tricked out of the small pond on one side of the courtya
rd by pretending to feed it an overripe banana, but as soon as it reached firm ground he lit a candle and stuck it on its shell and had it go round the courtyard in the dark to come and say hello to us. His wife, a Doctor of Physics, was drawn out of bed to make us rice gruel. She went to him and gave him a mighty nudge on the shoulder and told us his quirk of putting a candle on the turtle’s shell had nearly put the house on fire several times. She bent over to blow out the candle, but as soon as she had turned on her heel and walked away, the Old Lion lit up the candle again and badmouthed his wife, saying she wasn’t someone romantic but the only consolation left to a married man was to accept to obey his spouse once in a while, and he told us he’d caught the albino turtle, dipped its legs in viscous black ink, placed it on taut framed canvas and prodded it with a stick to make it move. That resulted in altogether mysterious and fascinating thick lines which, had Frank Kline seen them, he’d have been so amazed he’d have given up painting at once. And after that he seemed to have forgotten all that went before when he turned round to ask How you doing? to the civet which had come to nestle against him like a lonely child who sees its drunken father come back home, and he said, looking obviously soused, that that civet and he used to be bosom friends in a former life. Then he walked us into his study and there exhibited his matchboxes. There were matchboxes as can be found in any shop as well as matchboxes from hotels and nightclubs, bars, cocktail lounges, famous restaurants, etc. As for the matchboxes freely available, there were boxes with brands such as Sampan, Satang Daeng (Copper Cent), Heng Chia, Singto (Lion), Phaya Nark (Naga King), Nang Pla (Mermaid), Muay Thai (Thai Boxing), Hanuman33 and Sawatdee34 in incomprehensible Chinese characters as well as matchboxes from a multitude of foreign countries he’d set foot in or he’d asked people to bring back from. There were also matches as I wanted to get ever since I was a kid, that is to say cowboy matches the hero in a western movie cracks on any surface, a barstool, the edge of the soles of his boots or even the egg-smooth cranium of a villain. So I asked him for one box of those. After we’d admired this possibly unique to Thailand matchbox museum he led us to the back of the house to show us the giant scorpion he reared in a glass cage, which made me think its poison must be stronger than cyanide and if someone was stung even once his heart would explode from the pain. This giant scorpion, the biggest I’d ever seen, fed on cockroaches and, as I abominate cockroaches, it seemed to me, all things considered, rather friendly, and when you asked him why he was rearing it, he answered Because it’s useless; when you see something that’s useless you can be sure almost every time it’s beautiful. That night before we fell asleep it was very late since, after swallowing the rice gruel, we loitered still for a long time drinking coffee and, although his wife had forbidden him to drink any more given that the next day he had to teach from the first hour, as soon as she turned on her heel and left, the Old Lion discreetly poured brandy in his cup of coffee and in ours and the conversation progressively moved from religion and philosophy to social and artistic problems and finally hovered around the matter of women and you started to talk more and more while I shut up. I began to notice the Old Lion was asking for your opinion and listened to you carefully in matters of religion and he needled you most wittily on the matter of women. You expressed your opinions on religious matters in a relaxed manner to the point of sometimes giving examples related to art, as you knew perfectly well it’d further arouse the Old Lion’s interest. On women you expressed your opinions with humility, which between us was out of place, and I then realised you differed from other womanisers inasmuch as you didn’t at all think of exploiting women. You reduced everyone except the Old Lion to silence when, the conversation coming round to the ways of thinking of marquis de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, you strenuously denounced Sade by qualifying him without hesitation as inferior both as a thinker and as a writer, adding that Sacher-Masoch was superior to him but in any case one and the other were far from having the least elevation of thought. You didn’t understand why Dali admired Sade to the point of illustrating him, even if his illustrations weren’t worth a brass farthing, just as you didn’t understand why Sartre admired Genet but expressed reservations on Flaubert. The Old Lion objected in a conciliatory tone that Sade’s works were like a prefiguration of man’s future: if man persevered in his turpitudes, the abominable, repugnant and insane things that man does to man and that Sade evoked in his books would necessarily happen, and in any case Sade was the model of those who sacrifice even their lives in the name of their ideas. The both of you were beginning to be fuelled by caffeine and you debated on the validity of the classification of the artists Dali undertakes in his Journal d’un génie. All the more so as, if you take everything into consideration from Dali’s own viewpoint, Mondrian only gets half a point out of a total of twenty while Dali attributes a maximum of points to himself, even if he comes second to Picasso. At the time I knew Dali for his moustache rather than for his artistic production and I contented myself with listening to you as you displayed your science. The Old Lion, whose oratory flame didn’t weaken, led the conversation from the abysses and defiles of art upwards towards the lights of love, and the incommensurate limits of love narrowed before our very eyes, so that before long the only thing left was love between man and woman, of which the Old Lion asserted it was the only authentic form of love, that love of your neighbour or love of mankind is artificial as it doesn’t proceed from instinct whereas love between man and woman proceeds from instinct and all of us have sexual hormones. A mother’s love for her child also proceeds from instinct and, if an animal of whatever species has in its body a hormone of a certain kind whose name I forget, it’ll love its progeny. In biological terms, nature has bestowed the hormone in question on superior animals exclusively. That’s why man loves his children, the elephant its young, the lion likewise, and the dolphin and the whale, but the tortoise doesn’t like its young: it lays eggs, buries them, then crawls away to go back to the sea, because it has very little of the hormone in question, not to say not at all. Flies, midges, cockroaches and white moths don’t seem to love their young; neither do microbes and amoebas. And even though we were talking about love stories of that sort, there were those among us who stifled yawns and retired one after the other to go to bed, me included, leaving you and him alone to carry on the discussion. Later on, I progressively came to realise you didn’t quite respect the Old Lion like a student respects a teacher and actually he never showed himself superior to you by way of age or learning. What made you fear him a little was his diabolical skill at chess. And when I knew the Old Lion better, I was able to see that, oddly enough, he was learning from his students more than his students were learning from him. And such was the Old Lion, to whom I eventually became closer than to any other teacher at the university. It wasn’t long before I became his ‘disciple-comrade’, even though I was no fine arts student and his appreciation of literature was rather limited. Was it because of the Old Lion that you and I became intimate so fast? For, when he invited you to go somewhere, he invited me also. It so happened that one day, to get away from Bangkok, he drove us to a vast pond well stocked with fish on the outskirts of town. There was fishing gear, books and two young men, you and I. After fishing for two hours, he joined us, who were sprawled in the grass by the side of the pond, drinking beer as we read or chatted. He looked happy. It was a day with a luminous sky and a strong wind, and to breathe the pure air, to watch the flocks of herons flying across the azure and those of them that, with intent steps, sought fish in ricefield waters, made us think of the countryside that stretched beyond. In his presence, the coldness that reigned between you and me slowly dissipated and afterwards we went out, the three of us, to fish in the rice fields and canals and marshes around Ayutthaya or else in the direction of Chachoengsao to strike barbel in the Bang Pakong river. The friendship between you and me followed its inevitable course, but it took some time all the same before you invited me to go somewhere alone with you, and I slowly came to realise
you were only an ordinary individual, even if by many singular traits you unwittingly engendered perplexity. Under your apparent modesty there was the pride of the artist and one went well with the other, just as your independence seemed the necessary counterpart to your excellent human relations. Your melancholic taciturnity and your exuberance a la festival of sprites were inseparable comrades, like each other’s shadows. Your angelic softness went hand in hand, incredibly enough, with a more than beastly aggressive and coarse nature. Your frenzy for women encumbered itself with ethical scruples which only served as a rope to hang yourself with and myriad other goddamn contradictions of all kinds which would remain unaccounted for. The Old Lion was your supervisor and he was the first to become aware that you were fed up with the U to the point of being almost unable to stand it any longer. Him it was who spread the news, saying to one and all you were a model young man the likes of whom would be hard to find; we shouldn’t let you go and we should do everything we could to hold you back. That I was seemingly ordered to go everywhere with you both was also a ploy to keep you. He blew the chess games between you and me up out of all proportion with the hope you’d surmount your disgust with university so you would come more often, even if you didn’t attend lectures but went to sit in front of a chessboard or sip coffee or read a book at the cafeteria next to the library. But when I asked you what you thought of the Old Lion, you said without thinking, which wasn’t like you, that the Old Lion was just an old fogey who didn’t resign himself to old age and was trying to deny the law of nature by dyeing his hair. The nostalgia he had of his youth was excessive to the point of appearing abnormal and in spite of his age – he was only six years away from retirement – he remained an inveterate womaniser. And you didn’t try to hide your irritation at the exaggerated attention he paid you. You didn’t deny the fact that the Old Lion had the soul of a true pedagogue, even more so than of an artist, it seemed, but for all that he was someone almost unable to do anything besides thinking and dreaming and he prettified his thoughts and dreams with the exclusive recourse to sophistic types of formulas. Besides, from a personal point of view, those that are incapable of accepting old age without bitterness exasperated you. It may well be you were talking to me frankly about the Old Lion only to undermine the blind faith I had in him. With me, you tended to avoid discussing tricky issues and it seems you’ve always done so, even now. We began to have increasingly long conversations, but I never learned anything personal about you and actually I didn’t want to. How old were you then? Twenty-one or twenty-two, something like that, right? or maybe a little older. But you looked older than your age. At the very least you were older than I in the sense that you knew how to control your moods. All your acts, all your remarks were carefully chosen, whereas I was impulsive and excitable like a child. And where did you get your blasé looks from? It was a spleen born in the deepest part of your self which had spread to all your organs and expressed itself in your listless eyes and wetted the grain of your words and the inflexion of your most often involuntary sighs. It was indeed peculiar to one who, disgusted with worldly happiness, seeks the peace of nirvana or of something cool as all religions peddle, for gods’ sake. And you were indeed like that at times. But at other times you were sucked into contemporary society’s maelstrom of alcohol, women and promiscuous restlessness. To have me under the power of your thought didn’t interest you, contrary to most of the seniors (of whom I must acknowledge many had powerful personalities). It didn’t bother you that I didn’t agree with you on anything, but nonetheless you always told me which and whose book to read, which music to listen to or which painting to look at, and for all I know you almost never gave advice to anyone even when you were begged to. When you were absent for a long time, there was always someone to worry about you and it both impressed me and made me jealous, but I contented myself with mulling sadly over my powerlessness, given that there are people truly like that all over the world. How did you manage to be loved by one and all? Sure, you had accumulated sufficient aura during the three years you’d spent there. Your life seemed programmed as if you wanted to turn it into a beautiful legend known to all, predestined like the legend of an artist, the legend of a saint. I’ve thought on occasion that, had you died then, it would’ve been a good thing and you should’ve rejoiced: when Raphael died, the whole town was in tears, wasn’t it? Something in you gave me the unshakeable conviction you wouldn’t live to a great age or you’d sink into madness. You wore frayed jeans, filthy shirts and mouldy canvas shoes. Between your messy mane and the beard that ate up your face, under particularly bushy, sooty eyebrows, your big eyes blazed with the rebellious glint of one who refuses to be defeated by anything. You always had a large-size, grimy bag on your shoulder. It was a bag that held all kinds of things just in case, so that one might say it was your house, even if it was the house of the most simple man on earth. You always had a desk pad under your arm, so that all your shirts tore first at armpit level. Altogether, you looked like any fine arts student as can be seen at any street corner, but there were also times when some things in you gave you a singular look, like someone just back from the antipodes or a mountaineer right back from conquering the highest peak in the world or a poet rumoured to have conversed with spirits the night before – as so many warnings without words, meaning that you were someone inaccessible by any means whatsoever. When you spoke for the first time of eating vegetarian food, I thought it was a ridiculous idea, the incoherent and crass dream of someone with the nitpicking habits of a woman. How can we be fussy about what we eat when so many people have nothing to eat? But you explained that physiologically man is a herbivorous animal just like all bovines, sheep, rabbits, baboons and other monkeys, and unlike animals of carnivorous physiology such as tigers, lions, wolves and dogs, but that man came to eat animal flesh as tigers, lions, wolves and dogs do no doubt because at one time or another in the long history of mankind he felt compelled in order to survive to eat meat, so that since then we’ve been eating meat out of habit. And you said animal meat contributes to the appearance of cancer. Meat has a disgusting smell, so that when it’s being prepared spicy condiments have to be used, which makes taste buds work abnormally. Spicy food makes you feel like smoking, which is another source of cancer, whereas vegetarian food contributes to the elimination of the hiccups of the digestive system and of the excretion process and helps optic, auditory, olfactory and gustative nerves to function efficiently, whereas the heart is something else still, and might help eliminate mortal diseases such as cancer. And you went on explaining that, even if in the past man couldn’t prevent himself from assaulting other living beings, we’re fully capable of abstaining from assaulting men or animals if we really want to. Since eat we must, let’s eat cereals, vegetables and fruit (almost all varieties of which are endowed with therapeutic properties). I must say I had my doubts about the validity of your arguments, but at the same time I was surprised that while the others were only interested in knowing what to eat where, when and whether it was good and whether it was expensive, you were trying to eat what was the most useful and the least peccant. Even though you weren’t very strict with yourself on this matter, your neophyte’s enthusiasm has never ceased to amuse me, even now. I used to narrate all that to whoever cared to listen and behind your back qualified you as someone with the potential to develop yourself in outer space amid ‘the avant-garde of morality seekers’ and as a full-fledged member of the ‘jet set of soul searchers’. And worse still, you had a distinguished past, as a former staunch Marxist within the movement that wanted to topple a rotten society – Marxist or Marxian, by the way? – even though you were lending an attentive ear to the warnings of Orwell, Koestler, Bellow and the other authors of The God That Failed. To make a historic omelette, one must break eggs: that’s something unavoidable, just as a true political revolution couldn’t do without the red of blood. And even if you insisted that society must change, you also insisted that life is too sacred to be destroyed under any
pretext whatsoever, unless he who holds his life in his hand decides otherwise in complete freedom. Your political stand was in contradiction with your moral stand and you had to choose one way or the other and you hesitated for a long time before choosing the latter (although at the time the Communist Party of Thailand was getting strong as never before). Maybe it was your former political stand that gave you a mechanistic turn of mind you couldn’t get rid of, no matter how much you tried. But, even though you were turning your back on revolution, you didn’t despise the revolutionaries. You said they were suffering too much to be forced to hear themselves being denigrated and many a time you would accuse the state of being a gigantic and inhuman mechanism which had to be controlled or at the very least which we, as individuals, must have the guts to check. You made wry faces when you mentioned social injustices and even though you kept associating yourself with the commemoration of the October 6 and October 14 events, even though you kept playing the leftist by giving a hand during the celebration of Raphee Day35 and the First Gunshot36, even though you read and read over again ceaselessly Ten Days That Shook the World or went to see and see over again ceaselessly Reds, step by step you were sinking into the realm of Tao, Zen and Hindu doctrines and you were beginning to study the thoughts of Phutthathart37, Krishnamurti and E.F. Schumacher and, in your enthusiasm, you proclaimed yourself a vegetarian for life. You took up yoga, which had your young man’s body take the harmonious proportions of a Siddhartha. You surrounded yourself with a rarefied atmosphere that changed with your moods, from the serene eeriness of Buddhist meditation centres, of Plato’s Academy, of the Takasilas of ancient India and of the Zen temples in the mountains of Japan – the inspired facilities of Tao making me think of a hut under bamboo by the side of a pond – to the atmosphere at once splendid, scintillating and scruffy of Montparnasse cafés frequented by all manner of artists, as it was then you started to produce portraits to order in the grotty bars, drab hotels and debauchery lanes of Bangkok frequented by foreign tourists. This kind of work earned you loads of money and you invited me to keep you company for the hoodlums to leave you alone and you offered me beer after beer, which generally ended with me sloshed in your room full of paintings and books at Seewiang, a place where order seemed to be banished and where cleanliness was allowed to make extremely rare appearances when you happened to be fed up with ambient dust. Sometimes you and I quibbled about trifles for hours, but there were also times when each minded his own business, so that the words we exchanged could be counted, and there were many other times as well when we behaved as if we didn’t know each other, not that it was intentional on either side. I’m lying down in a deserted, freezing night as the moon shines softly and the sky is saturated with particles of mist. Isn’t it strange how recollecting one’s memories makes the past more romantic? That’s what I’m asking myself. In the night, the north wind moans. The gold-coloured moon and the thin curtain of mist float above the earth – terrible north wind that seems to blow from the other end of the word. I’m old by now. And so are you. We both got singed, wizened and crackled in the fire of all sorts of experiences and now I do nothing but think of the past that was mine. I’m playing with death and asking myself how it’ll end. Old people think about death. What about you? How often and how much do you think about it? Or do you try to understand it? Or do you think it’s meaningless, as death is the only thing that can’t be understood? Or are you trying to repulse it? Trying to be young again by drawing the ideal young girl, by writing madrigals, by creating a situation full of sentimentality and delirium that’ll enable you to clasp a bunch of flowers and go out in the twilight of dawn declare your love to some young lass one more time? Why do you squander women? You squander more of them than I do because your women are prostitutes or unruly youngsters or forlorn matrons or else women broad-minded enough to understand that fornicating is fornicating, an exchange of courtesies, not the control of one partner over the other. I don’t squander women as much as you do, because I don’t go for prostitutes if I’m not drunk, my phobia of venereal diseases being an inhibiting memory dating from the time I loafed about with my dissolute chums and even of the short period I spent at sea – whereas you’re burning with sexual cravings to the point of permanently having condoms in your bag to take advantage of the least godsend while suffering from a plethora of scruples. You bastard! The more you sank into your lousy ethical preoccupations and the more I was busy destroying my sense of right and wrong, and I was only sure of myself when I was certain my conscience suffered agony in the deepest and hottest hell. But, be that as it may, you and I continued to be guided by strong sexual stirrings. What exactly is sexual desire? Even now I firmly believe everything I’ve done I did to attract the attention of the opposite sex. I may happen to say that man aims for the stars, for paradise, but this kind of attitude is meant for women to be interested in me. One of these days I’ll climb the Everest or I’ll plunge to the very depths of the navel of the sea or I’ll write a treatise of morals thicker than the Tripitaka just so that women are interested in me or else I’ll do none of the above if doing none of the above makes women interested in me. I’ll force myself to death not to be interested in women if forcing myself to death not to be interested in women makes women interested in me. The realm of the subconscious is mysterious and full of truly terrible anguishes and terrors. Sexual impulses: do they drag into the mud the supreme aspirations of man? Fornication: does one learn something by fornicating besides how to fornicate in a more exciting way? Has anyone ever attained perfection in matters of fornication? the perfection philosophers and artists are so fond of and so often refer to. Does one fornicate sometimes with truly classic languor? Does one fornicate sometimes with Dalilike stretches of the imagination, with a harmonious mix of light and shadow, a display of elements, creative thought, technique and mystery? Politically committed fornication! Fornication for fornication’s sake! Here I am being sarcastic with you yet again, it seems, and furthermore it’s mockery that rather lacks wisdom. You always said we can do anything, but with the proviso of showing a little wisdom. The only thing you care about in the acts or behaviour of man is wisdom, and you deem you’re able to consider wisdom under every angle in so far as your own wisdom allows. That’s a remark that deserves a kick in the you-know-what, and the only way to give it a kick in the you-know-what with wisdom, inasmuch as my wisdom can judge right now, is to knock it senseless at one stroke. As for you receiving a kick in the you-know-what with more or less wisdom, that’s for you to determine. You often talked in English of wisdom, you often talked in English of intellect, you often talked in English of sensitivity, which was a way of talking that deserves kicks in the you-know-what, even if you were damn careful not to appear too pretentious. And you always said the only thing necessary to assess wisdom was wisdom. We shouldn’t measure the depth of the sea with a punting pole, which is another saying deserving of a kick in the you-know-what. The more we knew each other, the more I admired you and the more I had the secret urge to give you a kick in the you-know-what, and when that secret urge grew enough for me to worry about it, instead of watching it closely and finding ways to suppress it (I don’t hesitate to see in it the worm in the apple of friendship), there I was feeling altogether delighted and very lucky and I took care of it with the tender love of a mother pampering the child she’s sure will grow to conquer the world. But there was in you, it seems, something sublime, so that I didn’t dare touch you: something that might be called virtue. In which period of the world history did that famous virtue appear? Is it older than granite or basalt? Who discovered it and who gave it its name? Whatever period it did come about, I find its name a really bad omen and itself as devoid of beauty as it is of the least usefulness, except to adorn the ego of respectable people when they talk about themselves, as respectable from birth to death is what all beings in the world without exception deem they are compared to all the others who aren’t them and who therefore aren’t respectable, QED. I contented myse
lf with the hope that when you’d found fulfilment in marriage you’d be a husband virtuous enough to wash you virtuous spouse’s underwear. Forgive me. I’m getting carried away. I always do bad things, always worse than I am when I’m with a gentleman. Your virtue meant not worrying about others enquiring about your virtue, and that, would you believe it, that was precisely one of Confucius’s qualities. And furthermore you persisted as relentlessly and quietly in holding yourself above the notions of good and bad the world lays claim to and you lost yourself in your dreams. And everything considered, at a formal level one could say you were a handsome young man, though a little on the scruffy side, and there were young girls at the U to steal glances at you or look at you openly or tell you frankly or with ulterior motives that they’d be happy to be the thread of your screw and ready to elope with you, be you taking them to hell or to paradise. But you played dumb and many a time you brought fixed-price women and other night butterflies, your temporary lovers, to us, and all doors and windows shut we drew nudes with those bints as models, whom you paid with the contributions of those who took part in those sessions, a most civilised arrangement which had those long-faced broads that had designs on you say you needed the honey of sex but didn’t want to be tied up. Even though you bored me to death with some of your speeches, I knew perfectly well that at the very bottom of you there was silence, a silence which deepened from day to day like the silence of the world before the first cell appeared or of the world whose last cell will have disappeared. Even if at times you were gay to the point of singing or getting up to dance, I knew perfectly well that at the very bottom of you there was sadness, a sadness which was crystallising and which nothing could prevent from crystallising, not even the beatific smile of a goddess, and many a time when you became withdrawn into your fragile self like a jellyfish I took care to keep my distance. I began to move away from you when I began to go out with a woman. I was madly in love, I was in rut or call it what you like. You and I went places together often, we met and talked often like bosom friends, but there was a moment when I turned away from you. No doubt because I was fed up hearing your opinions on women all the time and I wanted to express my opinions on women for you to hear them in turn. You kept saying Don’t pay attention to women – a waste of energy, a waste of time. One must know how to contain oneself, and when you saw that I listened without saying a word, you went on to say how great a hassle women were and as far as you were concerned one of these days for sure you’d practise chastity as Gandhi had done. You were utterly fed up with women, or so you said, even though you changed partners several times a month and your sexual promiscuity made your ideal of chastity hardly credible at all. Every night you cruised the sex tracks of Bangkok and that’s where you’d often pick up girls, bring them back to sleep with you and sometimes pass them on to me. When I distanced myself from you while I went out with Darreit Waeojan, you lost yourself into circumlocutions that can be summed up as follows: going out with a good girl is looking for trouble as one can easily fall into her clutches and, for a man, bachelorhood is something precious that’s worth safeguarding. I answered with skilful evasion that smelled of beer, saying that for me it was a challenge and I was always ready to take up a challenge. But who can tell what his future portends? Having taken up the challenge, I went through all sorts of events which made me giddy and I almost lost my sanity. And when you add to that an idiotic behaviour of the kind of a moronic spider getting stuck in its own web, I found myself practically driven to the dead-end of a cul-de-sac. At the time I rented a flat with three wayward friends from the South who’d come to carry on their studies and seek work and who later left each on his own and we never met or contacted one another again even though we’d fled from school together, travelled far together, wandered around and loafed about together, drunk, played cards and smoked grass since high school in the South and those three were among the five or six who’d given me money to take a piece of skirt get herself a scrape. Life at the time was of unthinkable freedom. I ceased to frequent the circle of players under the pines, oddballs all in all, as I distanced myself from you, an oddball you too. It wasn’t a sudden and definite flight, but it seemed I needed more time to myself. You smiled an almost disdainful smile when you learned I had a girlfriend. You seemed on the point of forewarning me but you stopped yourself and told yourself I’d better be left to learn on the job. The way I swelled with conceit must have passably grown on your nerves, as on my very first date with Darreit I almost dragged her over to introduce her to you. It was too much and something to be ashamed of. It was like shouting out to you who only went for prostitutes that you had to know the ‘clean form of love’ I was demonstrating for your benefit. Only a decent woman makes a man proud, but in the case of a loose woman, even if you conquer her and she lets herself be had gratis, there’s really nothing to be proud of. You showed yourself irritated when you saw me go into excessive raptures over my new love and you changed the subject as if the ecstasies of a kiddo over his heart’s desire reminded you of the whimpering of a milkdeprived puppy, as if you’d never whined thusly and would never whine again. You jerk! Don’t you understand we all whine when we’re in love? But heck, who can tell what his future portends? At the time, I had no idea where the road where I stood was going to lead me. Everything in me was but gracious beauty adorned with exquisite colours and fluid movements like a golden dragon fish swimming in the aquarium of an excessively dreamy breeder who sees a rare pearl slip off a white fairy’s tapering fingers and sink into the emerald sea straight down to the coral reef at the very bottom allowing only light bubbles to float back up by way of goodbye, while you no longer believed in love and said enigmatically that the era of reinforced concrete in which we lived wasn’t conducive to a literature that would bring forth a Song of Solomon or a Gita Govinda38. That remark of yours, before I understood it, it was almost too late.
The White Shadow Page 10