the way of the sinner
La seule honte est de n’en avoir point.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
But then, Darreit Waeojan, was it really love? Did we ever talk of love between us? We must have. Everything we did you and I was so foolish, Darreit! If we met again it’d be a meeting between strangers. You must’ve changed a lot, more mature, more beautiful – happier in life maybe also? This I doubt, though. Maybe you’re already married and have children. When we met you were only eighteen; I was just past nineteen. How many years ago was that? Nine years already? Quite a long time, long enough for us to have changed completely. You must have only a vague recollection of me by now and in your memory I’m probably nothing more than a pitiful young jerk. I still think about you at times, you know, Darreit, but not as seriously as I should, and I don’t think about you out of desire or nostalgia but rather with puzzlement or wonder. It could be said we met by chance. It could be, but it wasn’t the case: we met and knew each other in Bangkok, a place where everyone meets and knows everyone else. We became lovers and we lived together for a while like many a boy and girl who have it off discreetly before marriage, but that didn’t mean we loved each other firmly like the couple of the century all couples crave to be. It was more of a game – a game with fire. It was the result of strong sexual impulses on your part and on mine which escaped for a time the frame of conventions: we ran off it you and me by building a scrumptious castle above the pit of death, a candy castle, a chocolate castle, a puff pastry castle, a dairy ice cream castle. Japanese dream… American dream… We found happiness in it, skin-deep happiness; we found sorrow in it, skin-deep sorrow. Our tears were like drops of synthesised chemicals. Our sorrows seemed to be made of plastic. Our love at times seemed to taste of mint, at times seemed to taste of strawberry. Our craving for each other when we were separated at times seemed to taste of chocolate, at times seemed to taste of honey in lemon juice. Our relationship was but rainbow-coloured curlpapers and decorative candle lights in green, yellow, red, sky blue, royal blue, cobalt, ochre yellow, ultramarine and so many other damn colours before ending in blood. Nine years already? Demons help us! Let me heave a good long sigh. Time changes time and changes everything. Soon after we split, I wrote you letters, a sky-blue delirium on a background of flat and dull sky-blue despair. But those letters I never finished or sent. They were letters to be down right ashamed of. Just as well I didn’t send them. If you’d read them you would’ve wept. You’re very sensitive as it is and trembling like a flower petal, aren’t you now? Maybe you would’ve found your way back to me to beseech me to flee with you to the horizon once again, but don’t you know by now at least that the horizon is merely an optical illusion? I can see myself sitting fist under chin, gazing vacantly through the window, my other hand rolling between its fingers a pencil, then letting my eyes rove blankly over the words written on the page. Each letter had only seven or eight lines; each was written during days dimmed by a mist of sighs and during the never-ending nights of the ghost of misery. I loved you and I missed you… I loved you and I missed you… There was one occasion also when I tried to sketch you. Portrait of a young girl… But after a few strokes, I had to shake my head slowly. No, that wasn’t like it at all. I wasn’t goddamn able to achieve a proper likeness. Be that as it may, though, I see you in my head. What did you have in mind giving yourself the looks of a young Japanese girl? I mean your haircut and the way you dressed. I remember your navy blue outfit. You had such a suit and it suited you fine. Gosh, I’d never have thought a girl crazy enough to wear such a suit could be so ravishing! It almost made you look like a character in a modern novel or a character in a Japanese TV movie of today. Gosh, the first time you talked to me of your navy blue suit, I remember my chest constricted, you know. But when you actually put it on, I forgot the tension in my chest and started to imagine your true naked forms under that suit – an uncontrolled access of libido I owed to Japanese porn magazines. Then we went side by side to buy Japanese trinkets in a Japanese gift shop, cruise in a Japanese department store to buy clothes from Japan and taste Japanese food, buy mangas and a knitting-and-crochet manual from Japan. You bought; I looked at you buying.
The Japanese dream… the Japanese way of life… If there’s a people I detest and distrust, it’s definitely the Japanese! But with you I kept my displeasure covered up. It was only after I’d slept with you a great deal (fornicating the Japanese way, of course, itai itai) that I explained to you in detail how much Japan was exploitative and deceitful. I didn’t expect you to understand. I knew you too well to hope you’d become in time a quality adult or a quality political animal or something of the kind: you were yourself. Soap-bubble-like tastes and way of life had sunk deep into your being. When I told you that, in everything concerning Japan, I considered myself a Thai Theep39, you remained dumbfounded for a long while, not because of my aggressiveness at the time but because you didn’t know what a Thai Theep was. Oh, Darreit-chan, where are you now smoking Mild Sevens and drinking Suntori whisky or Kirin beer or Sapporo beer or eating raw fish or sukiyaki or yakisoba? Are you still as besotted with Chojotai’s songs? The Japanese village in Ayutthaya newspapers say is going to be rebuilt, have you visited it yet? What’s Thai Theep, you asked. I answered roughly Thai Theep is just sei ma koo tei.40 Actually, I didn’t want to offend you but I was furious to hear you repeat for fun you’d like me to be Kobori and you Angsumarlin41. I retorted with a bookworm’s sense of humour that what you were saying was moving me infinitely. Let me tell you something, shall I ? Do you know that we Thai people, these days, if we behave well, you know, once dead we’ll all go to Japan… Oh, the past! Step back; stand back and look at yourself. Look at that idiot with the mourning look of one who lives in death and is trying desperately to get out of it. You force yourself to enter the demented and absurd whirlwind of the past hoping it’ll help you know yourself better before you die. All the stories you tell are stories full of sound and fury told by a patented idiot. Look at your posture, half-sitting half-lying on the mat, the pillow and blanket still redolent of come and bearing traces of your sperm. Look at how you hold yourself as you blow out smoke, letting it float before your wrinkled face, dishevelled with tousled hair, unkempt moustache and shaggy beard. That’s clearly the attitude of a madman, of someone who’s no longer conscious of objective reality or, if he’s conscious, can only perceive it in snatches. Sometimes you hold out your hand as if you wanted to make a grab at something, with the look of a dog that snaps at its own shadow. Sometimes there are sighs, typical of one who wants to push back from his chest the weight of worry that oppresses it. In the stillness of the night, in the piercing coldness of the air, you are afraid. The screeching of branches against the roof, the occasional rustling of a bat by your ear, the lonesome growling of some dogs that sleep curled up around the pillars of the house and the odd noises coming out of the cremation site that you can’t quite make out, the furtive trot of rats out to find fare in the fields, the hardly audible crackle of snakes in hunt – all of this makes you shiver with apprehension and you must expend colossal psychic energy to force yourself to remain normal. The best is for you to swallow a sleeping pill and then fall asleep and get ready to confront your nightmares. But that’ll make you even more apprehensive than the threats of the reality you’re confronted with right now. You elected to travel back into the past in order not to stay idle. Sleepless nights full of sighs like this one are made undoubtedly to punish sinners. Chase you away: I have to chase you away as I’d chase a rabid dog and leave it to its fate. In these conditions, I must insistently urge you to get rid of your thoughts, heavy as lead and murky like cheap ore. I’m going to look at you dying. But what the heck are you doing now? You seem to be saying your prayers. Where the heck has it gone, your hidden ambition to be a god tormented for all eternity rather than a blissful animal? How laughable it is of you to have come up with this moronic ideal of sacrificing yourself for others, of being the legs of the cripp
le and the eyes of the blind, following your reading of The Book of Job. Faith and foolishness are first cousins, all full of tricks and ulterior motives. Faith plays the part of foolishness and foolishness of faith, but in the last analysis it’s imperative for you to have faith. As for foolishness, don’t worry, you trundle a full load of it in your evil skull. Why don’t you think of imposing a quota on your stupidity? You’ve got all your time, haven’t you, you the half-witted god, you the chimpanzee of genius, to impose a programme of voluntary limitation of stupidity on yourself. That sounds rather grand, don’t you think? What you ought to do now is read one of Alfonso Maria de Liguori’s meditations in Preparation to Death or some chapters of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. That should take care of your anguish. Oh and where is it you found all that junk? You lug it about everywhere with you and then pile it up in the filthy recesses of your brain. No book in the world can help you, not even those books allegedly written by God. No one is in a position to help you, no more than you can suffer from toothache in lieu of someone else, quite simply. I’ll force fate’s hand, I’ll force fate’s hand, I’ll force fate’s hand… Ah! So that’s what you wish for in your prayer! What are you thinking of to mouth such words sticky with blood? Fireflies frolic above your dishevelled mass of hair and empty eyes. The moon sends forth soft diffuse light above this deserted and silent land. Isn’t that the meritorious austerity you were dreaming of? So why are you so sad, so discouraged? This isn’t the right time to say doleful prayers to request the intervention of sacred powers. Not at all, Darreit. This isn’t the right time to meditate on the unfathomable mysteries of the metaphysics of death. This isn’t the right time to delve into the bloody boring solitude of the ascetic that one and all seek. Not at all. But this is the hour when I should drink myself comatose, roar vulgarly, laugh filthily and sing at the top of my voice while, standing at the rim of the now arid ravine of what used to be the link between you and me, I’d throw in there a rose by way of a scornful goodbye. Time is lead-heavy and exerts unbearable pressure on my mind like the clouds of a devastating storm that pile up before wiping out the city of evil and turn it into dust. Time, time that cracks my chest and compels me to lower my head in despair. You don’t understand, Darreit, because you’re more stupid than I. And that’s exactly why you’re happier than I. Time for you has the rainbow of love and the vastness of a starry ocean, has the dwelling of happiness pervaded with the fragrance of flowers and the cooing of lovebirds. Your soap-bubble young girl’s dream was more disgusting than a pigsty and I had to keep my objections to myself, not without bitterness. The love you proclaimed was merely the mask of desire; besides, it was something artificial, whereas desire is authentic stuff. Nine years already? In all this time you must have slept left, right and centre aplenty. I myself have slept left, right and centre as much as I could and I’ll keep doing so as long as I have the strength for it likewise. I’d like so much to see you again for us to couple anew as the demon of fornication demands, until we have each had enough and part. Diligent fornicators don’t go at it again and again for too long. Only goofy fornicators do so. It’s only intellectual fornicators and ultra-moralist fornicators that do so. Darreit Waeojan, come, let’s make love on the sacred Bible, on the pages of poems, on the flowerbeds, on the tombs and even in the sky like Hanuman and Benjakai. Once satiated, we separate, each turning into a propagator of supreme fornication, each being the decisive instrument pushing each country to organise a Fornication Week as there is a Correspondence Week, and eventually the United Nations Organisation will have to proclaim the International Fornication Year as it not so long ago proclaimed the International Youth Year. In every nook and cranny charity fornications will be held and will go multiplying like charity concerts or charity fashion shows or charity rallies. It’ll be the year when the government will fornicate with the people and the people will fornicate with the people for the people and the people everywhere will erect billboards with the slogans long live fornication! and orgasm is nirvana. Revolutionaries, soldiers, politicians will queue up to fornicate with the people, which will have the people thoroughly screwed, intellectuals and even high-society folk will go and vulgarise the correct methods of fornication among the masses, artists of all stripes will churn out art for fornication at top speed and will come to realise that the quarrel between art for art’s sake and politically committed art isn’t worth wasting their saliva on, and scientists and industrialists will produce a surfeit of fornication-conducive technology. It’ll be the year of the sans-culottes in high-society circles and the year of the sitting-with-legs-apart posture for their ladies. It’ll be the year of golden opportunities for manufacturers of condoms and contraceptive pills. Doctors will see their income shoot up from the sale of aphrodisiac medicine and treatment of sexual inappetence. There will be oyster farming all over the Gulf of Thailand and the huge deprived area of Kula Rong Hai in the Northeast will be covered with farms rearing Spanish flies… To me, your name has a weird consonance and deep charm. Darreit, what does it mean? I asked you. You answered as if you couldn’t care less, Don’t know. That name had dawned on your father as he was starting to learn golf. Never mind what it means. You wondered at my question, but your wonder was the same as your other emotions: it didn’t last long. You wanted a quality, very expensive tennis racket and, pronto! you got what you wanted. You then tried your hand at tennis as, you explained to me, everybody was raving about tennis and Bjorn Borg went to the head of all the girls in the world. You even put his picture on the cover of one of your schoolbooks. You had a photo of him on a wall in your bedroom, as well as of Sophie Marceau, Phoebe Cates and Momo-e, but you had yet to master tennis when you gave up, with the excuse that it was too brutal a game for a diminutive woman like you, it developed your arms unequally and it darkened your skin and ruined your complexion. A little later you felt like trying out swimming. The advantages of this kind of sport were that (you counted on your fingers) it put to work all parts of the body, which would give you harmonious shapes, your skin wouldn’t darken as you’d train early in the morning and late in the afternoon when the sun isn’t too strong, and the last argument was that everybody was learning to swim, such as your girl friends for instance. Whereupon you bought three extra swimsuits and you wore each of them only a few times before you gave up again, with the excuse that apparently you were allergic to chlorine, the instructor was too strict and his remarks often made you lose face. It happened once, I don’t know what came over you, you bought a baseball glove simply because it was pretty and the Japanese love to play this kind of sport. When you’d gone on vacation to Japan with your father, you explained to me proudly, you’d seen it with your own eyes and you’d been very much impressed. Wherever there was a playground or a bit of turf, it never failed: baseball was being played there, by children as well as grownups. You had an acoustic guitar (come straight from Japan, you didn’t fail to point out) which your elder brother had given you and which you played for me. At the time songs adapted from western and Japanese tunes were the latest thing and you were crazy about them. The way you played set my teeth on edge and I couldn’t stand the way you sang either. You sang out of tune all the time, which had me telling myself silently, when someone like you is able to memorise a text one considers oneself lucky, and I merely said aloud, half in jest half in earnest, Jeez! How I’d love you to sing on the radio or on TV! You smiled with pleasure before turning sullen when I went on, That way, I could switch to another station or channel or just switch the thing off. You boxed me or pinched me and then you asked me with a tender, slightly ashamed voice Did I hurt you? You didn’t hide at all what you thought of singers or film actors. Those were girlish infatuations: if you disliked you disliked intensely; if you loved you loved intensely; if you were indifferent, you were indifferent, but then intensely. Those stars and singers you adored, to me were but a shallow bunch. You loved to yell hoorays at the top of your voice during sporting competitions in the ultra-expensive private college (now
promoted to university ranking) where you studied. Some of your friends, you told me, just to play basketball, right, they spend an unbelievable time choosing themselves a pair of underpants and all that to win four to two, as if it were football, duh. For all that, you shouted frantic hoorays because you reckoned it was a way to be trendy. But all your behaviour was utterly innocent, so that pretence played no part in it, or maybe pretence had become your way of life. You wanted or you didn’t want. You loved or you didn’t love. You blossomed or you withered. Everything and its opposite had become your true belief. It happened once that you beseeched me to stop smoking and practically obliged me to come and fetch you after classes, and that because you had a friend who’d succeeded in convincing her boyfriend to stop smoking and fetch her after classes and had mentioned it to you. You told yourself Oh how nice it’d be to hold a man in my power! and you wanted to have power over me, and I was stupid enough to oblige. What rot, really, that love between you and me! As it happened, if you accepted to be dragged here and there with me, it was merely because you wanted to be trendy. You thought studying and having a boyfriend – unbeknownst to parents or tutors – was a necessity among all necessities and if you allowed me to kiss you, hug you, grope you moderato, it was because you found that daring, something cool in its way, according to your expression. Your life approached perfection if you had a boyfriend who took you everywhere during the day and if he called you up to flirt in the evening, and the more often it was and the later it was the more excited you were, even if you took the call with a sleepy voice. It was so tasty to bring round, pamper, bamboozle, sulk at, tease and tame a boy! It was so great to be alone, to be sad, to be lonely, to be discarded, to be bitter or to shed a few tears when you quarrelled, to be all sugar and honey, to be all ecstasy, to be all shivers, to be drunk with songs and dazzled with stars when you made up again, to grumble, bored and cocky, Oh the room is so full of roses they’re all dried up. Should I keep them or throw them away? You could have sweet daydreams when you received a present or a get-well card or a letter written on exquisite paper slipped into an exquisite envelope. I can see you among your girl friends while you spoke about me, half-embarrassed half-assertive. Of course, you overdid it at times and you underdid it at times, just so your friends would admire and be jealous of you. In your spare time, you read a women’s magazine. You’d subscribed to the most risqué of all. I like daring stuff was what you said. You zeroed in first on the horoscope, then delved into the serialised romance, examined the fashion pages and let fly your criticisms: This model is pretty. Lovely this one, don’t you think? But this one here, well, not a stir. Oh wow! That one’s really at ground zero; with just enough to hide your cherry, who’d dare to wear stuff like that? You read the gossip columns, played the guitar and sang in a warm and clear voice, out of tune as usual. You were absolutely convinced that singing in a warm and clear voice would always be fashionable. You worried over the frequent written tests and you cried your eyes out if your marks weren’t as good as they should’ve been, and when you really had lots of spare time, with your pack of girl friends you went to buy gear or shoes around Siam Square or else in Bang Lamphoo, trying them on to see what the others would say, leaning left and leaning right, twisting your neck to see yourself from the back, chest thrust forward, tummy tucked in front of the mirror, went to buy cakes or sweets or else eat in a gourmet-recommended restaurant. To be served in this kind of establishment and talk, chitchat, criticise, compare this restaurant you’d chosen with the restaurants you’d already been to took time, as you spoke and then it was a friend’s turn to speak and then another’s and then another’s. Sometimes your differences of opinion generated such resentments that crushed feelings kept parties silent for days on end. At exactly ten p.m. you couldn’t keep your eyes open, and you always woke up early in the morning, which more than anything else gave you the looks of a child, a child not yet grown up but used to having everyone giving in to her every whim. Once I went to see you at your hostel although it was nearly ten at night. You were called up to come down and receive me in the parlour and you came out of your room and appeared wearing a diaphanous nightdress under the shocked eyes of your friends who stayed up later than you and mine which didn’t know where to look. You yawned several times without inhibition while we talked, but for all that didn’t try to hide your delight. When I left you, for all I know you told your friends casually you’d already slept with me several times or merely wanted to show them you had guts, and when you were asked if coming down to receive a man in such dress was to titillate him, you must have answered Of course! This way at least I’m sure tonight he’s going to dream about me. And the fire of lust smouldered in my chest and in my imagination your body was always naked and of neon-light whiteness. I never told you what I really wanted from you. No man is stupid enough to do so. I wanted to sleep with you. It was a period of ceaseless excitement and tension. I didn’t love you at all. You’re not the sort of woman I could respect or could lower myself to be the slave of. I knew perfectly well the relationship between you and me was but a kind of child’s game which neither of us actually played in earnest and which would end soon, like a rainbow or a soap bubble. I knew I’d lose you in three possible ways, either by ditching you or by you ditching me or by common agreement, you and I deciding to put this matter behind us. I don’t know where you are now. Maybe not even in Thailand – in the Philippines, in Japan or in Europe or in the United States, continuing your studies, working or married to a foreigner. Are you already dead or still alive? A few days ago, I found again your phone number of when you were still at the Ailada hostel for young women, three-nine-two two-eight seven-seven. I found it by chance in a book of poems by Angkharn Kanlaya-naphong. At the time, I called you up almost every evening in that hostel where you lived with your girl friends and I always ended with the formula Sweet dreams. And you answered You too. Oh goodness gracious, what a lousy puppy kind of love! So sublime it could have been used as a receptacle for a TB sufferer’s mucus or something of the sort, you poor thing. But you were too stupid for words and that’s why I couldn’t love you. I know well one doesn’t speak like this, and certainly not to a woman. I’ve raised myself sufficiently well to know women are made to be treated with deference, mildness and courtesy, admired and comforted and even loved or adored, even when you have a furious urge to send them packing with a kick, all that in order to be able to sleep with them and ditch them in the end. One mustn’t criticise women or start off at them in a vulgar and offending way as hoodlums do. But you were bloody stupid, darling, busy as you were with your so-so magazines, your so-so songs and your so-so girl friends. Why, when there were sports competitions at your college and you played volleyball – your darn sky-blue team, right? – why did you have to pamper yourself as if you were to take part in a fashion show? And why didn’t you feel any shame at secretly hoping to become the goddamn star of your class? And why did you have to fall under the illusion you were a modern young girl by wearing your nails long and putting liquid soap and a whole makeup paraphernalia in the bag you carried on your shoulder at all times and which you forced me, beseeched me who at the time was even more bloody stupid than you and more bloody stupid than a buffalo even, to carry it for you? Who had taught you to venerate the ideal according to which a young girl must be beautiful, energetic, daring, lovely, bursting with charm and decent in every respect, ideal which you endeavoured to attain without knowing it’s the ideal of the sow? I dared not speak to you of those rather unsavoury things as they would’ve made our love less savoury. You were a woman of yesterday’s world. You were born to be a wife, to be a mother, to be a sexual object of quality. And me, my forehead was flushed and my eyes blurred with the craving I had of your body even though at the time I thought like a leftist babe. With me you showed yourself enterprising and daring. You gave yourself small airs of audacity and unflappability. You followed me in my room, but once you were in my arms you shook and begged me not to hurt you. You cried
your synthetic tears and it made me weak and when I let you go you got up, laughed, fled and slammed the door in my face. And I was mystified by your fairy’s trickery and all I did was to stare at you with the look of someone who lusts after a heavenly rose beyond reach and all I did was to make a solemn vow to myself to crush you utterly at the first opportunity. We remained nonetheless good lovers to each other. Of the loads of books you borrowed from me you never finished reading one. You had to take upon yourself to hold back your dreariness for good each time you found yourself with me in bookshops or in front of the second-hand booksellers’ displays on one side of the Royal Esplanade, and the moron that I was had to be constantly wary not to put you in a bad mood. I myself pretended to be delighted when I found myself with you in clothes shops for youngsters in the city centre, which disgorged deafening music with frantic rhythms and dazzling multicoloured lights and trousers, skirts, shirts, belts, shoes, handbags with funny shapes giving the whole area the looks of an amusement park rather than ordinary shops. Touting for custom with hands and voices, competition was in full swing and I moved awkwardly amid colours, accents and fluxes all muddled and deafening. The new wave of trendy Bangkok youths gave me the impression of being Rip Van Winkle gone asleep at the Woodstock gathering to wake up in the midst of the Bee Gees’s nightjar whooping and Bonny M’s slipshod beat and all I did was dog your steps, bored stiff and stunned, and you’d take care of my moods. At the time, I began to get addicted to coffee and I felt kind of happy when you dragged me into the cafeteria of this or that hotel to have me taste filter coffees and strange blends which you said it was a mark of good taste to consume. Irish coffee and cappuccino and espresso and Kilimanjaro and Brazilian Santos: you told me that if you had to drink coffee you’d only drink such brews, and you advised me to enlarge my horizons as a coffee drinker instead of merely drinking bitter and acid black. You showed yourself delighted when you stirred a cappuccino with a cinnamon stick and you slurped the frothy cream through the stick and, lowering your eyelids, you lowered your face to smell the heady aroma of the coffee with an air of fulfilment. Sometimes you went back to your native town, Mahachai, a small town less than a hundred kilometres from Bangkok in Samut Songkhram province, and you filched your father’s cigarettes and cognac to pass them on to me, John Player Specials in black cardboard packets, the only brand your father smoked, so you said, and Otard in hieratic black bottles, which you told me was your father’s favourite brandy. I wasn’t particularly eager for this sort of thing but rather frightened and shocked by the power of money, as in spite of everything I didn’t forget I originated from the sandy soil of Phraek Narm Daeng. You received each month two or three times more money than I did. Sometimes you couldn’t prevent yourself from showing you were superior to me and said or did something as a warning not to forget the signal favour you were doing me by condescending to be my girlfriend. In such cases, I swore in my beard with resentment and I would’ve loved to answer you with a slap on the face, but all I did was to disappear for a few days, and as punishment I didn’t go to wait for you in the evening after school and I didn’t call you up. Finally it was you who came to me and my mates hastened to leave us alone in the room as all true roommates do… Yes indeed, such was the tender age, the dreamy age, the lovely age, the daring age, the pubescent age, the age with the colours of your rainbow. You must resign yourself to it. You started to write to Nartaya about a month after your arrival in Bangkok, which wasn’t very clever of you, no matter how you look at it. What needs to be pointed out is that it was you who wrote first. Throughout the first month, you waited for her letter as you thought she was going to write. She had your address at the U, which you’d given her before you left, and as you kept waiting without any news of her, you ended up writing to her. You wrote to her to tell her that, even though you were far away from her and you were satisfied with your new life as much as could be, you had no intention of abandoning her; then you evoked the days gone by which, you assured her, remained present in your mind as if they were yesterday, and you beseeched her very sincerely to forgive you to have been the cause of her suffering, and you ended by saying that the more time went by the more you missed her. You should never have sent that letter or the next three ones either. Actually you could just as well have disappeared for good from her life as if you were dead. But why didn’t you act like that? From love? From pity? From nostalgia? Go figure. You didn’t receive any letter from her, even after you wrote to her four times (with on average an interval of one month and one week between letters). In your fourth letter, you complained in rather sharp terms, and you assured her this would be your last letter: if she didn’t answer, you’d never write to her again and everything would be over between you. That’s when you received her first letter, duly sealed and registered. It was a letter whose length you didn’t expect. You were hardly finished reading it when a second arrived, and then a third and then a fourth, with the character, one could say, of lightning attacks. Each of her letters was a litany of complaints on the theme of separation. In each consonant you heard insane delirium; in each vowel you heard the incoherent mumbling born of a nightmare; in each space between words you saw the heaving panic of someone in search of a lifeline before dying; in each clause you perceived the smell of tenebrous and icy despair; in each paragraph, like a last breath. It was a way of writing that seemed to be a transcript of the taped confidences of a simpleton or a mad woman. Ideas were incomplete and didn’t cohere. The text was riddled with grammatical mistakes. The fanciful spelling betrayed extremely unstable moods. You were torn between indignation and shame as your eyes coursed through those delirious and grieving sentences and phrases, besides the compassion that distressed you and made you gloomy like dusk in the cold season. You were a bit angry. It was an anger which came automatically from the evil doings of your selfprotection mechanism, which consisted in covering up your fault by accusing someone else instead. But look at this letter, you told yourself. Doesn’t she have any education or what? Simple words any dullard starting primary knows how to write she manages to misspell every single time! And for that reason you wrote to her less and less often. And your increasingly delayed letters expressed an evanescent solicitude, expressed increasingly formal regrets. Wishing her much happiness sounded hollow and contrived, and ending with a protestation of love seemed to offer no guarantee for the future. If you wrote to Nartaya less and less it was also because you were more and more intimate with Darreit and, the longer it went on, the more your intimacy got tightened in the irons of the rainbow. But you kept perusing Nartaya’s letters. As you read, you kept thinking of the saying No matter how many times you get rid of a snake it always comes back to coil itself around your neck. She spoke of her bleeding and uterus infection, which kept getting worse and tormented her so much she slept badly every night. She kept getting thinner, she kept getting weaker. She was losing weight at an alarming pace and it seemed that sundry illnesses forced her often to remain confined to bed for days on end. To set your mind at rest, you told yourself it probably wasn’t as serious as all that, she must be worrying over nothing much, she was panicking for nothing, she was laying it on a bit to be pitied. But once again your personal sky was covering with louring clouds whose shapes changed from one species of demon into another species of demon increasingly terrifying as days went by. If ever Nartaya was afraid of dying and told the truth to San, even if of course she had no intention to act like that, or if ever San fell on your letters and tried to reconstitute the puzzle and at the end of tight crossexamination managed to extract the truth from her, he’d come after you at the U and would tear you to pieces undoubtedly. So you wrote a new letter to Nartaya to ask her to burn all your letters including the one she was reading, emphasising it was a matter of life and death. When she wrote to tell you she’d done what you asked her (even though she’d so much have wanted to keep them in memory of the first and only love of her life), you heaved a sigh of relief. You took out all the letters she’d writ
ten to you to read them once again. You found that second reading even drearier than the first, so that as you read you took your cigarette and singed holes into the sentences you’d already read and you singed holes in all the letters and watched them burn with a dispassionate eye. The sky-blue paper with rose patterns seemed to shrivel and groan in pain as if it were alive. To help the letters die faster you took a match to them until they were reduced to ashes you threw in the wastebasket. Even the postcard-sized picture of her you’d begged her to give you (it was a black-and-white photograph whose contrasts and composition were rather well done) in your distress you punched full of holes with the tip of a pencil. One day, Darreit came into your room and found that picture in one of your books and asked you whom it belonged to. With a dolt’s unreadable face you told her you’d once been madly in love with the woman on the picture, but then you backtracked by saying Oh but what’s the use for you to know? It’s a rather corny story, you see. She’d dropped you when she met another man better than you in every respect, that’s all. Then you told her in a pleading tone Forget it! The wounds that come from the thorns of love heal completely if they’re properly attended to. That’s what you believed. But Darreit kept asking for details and showed she was ready to feel sorry for you, to sympathise with you and to love you more than before. But you told yourself that to improvise a plausible story would require prodigies of imagination and you’d sooner or later make a blunder, so you cut the matter short by saying you were trying to forget that woman and to recollect the past would only make you suffer more and feel lonely. Then you showed her once again the pencil holes to reaffirm how determined you were to forget the past, bitter like poison and dark like the dead of night and deeper than the navel of the sea and, caught in a surge of romanticism as happens in the presence of the opposite sex, you said without raising your voice, your face impassive and serious, that your determination would surely bear fruit sooner or later depending on how much she’d help and how intimately. That was a fairly innocuous way of courting but it somehow frightened her. Confusion turned her cheeks pink, as good authors have it, for she had perfectly understood the hidden meaning of your words (words that had the proper dose of affectation once distilled). She was embarrassed and her embarrassment was so natural you couldn’t help feeling surprised. Darreit wasn’t a native of Bangkok. She shared a room with two or three girls from back home. Actually, she could’ve stayed with some relatives of hers, but she reckoned living with her friends made her more free. Her hostel was down Sukhumvit, near the flat you lived in and not very far from her college, one bus ride away only. Given that you didn’t live far from each other, you met often and you arranged for these meetings to multiply. At first you did as if it was by accident, but soon you did it deliberately, as a way to say in body language I’m interested in you, you know, miss. She and you looked at each other, smiled at each other, greeted each other and exchanged a few words as is the custom, and since you were a male and young and dashing, you built up a reserve of courage from day to day and when you figured you’d filled up, you went out to wait for her since morning. That day you’d showered, dressed up, combed your head and powdered your face to look proper for once, and when she walked past, you expressed the wish to keep her company and asked permission to accompany her to her college, to which she consented out of curiosity. You phoned her every evening to wish her goodnight and sweet dreams, which soon had the two of you going out together to see films, stroll in shopping centres, huddle up against each other in coffee shops or take a walk with your arms around each other in public parks until you were thoroughly tired and wet. When you took her back to her hostel, it was pitch dark and you were reluctant to part. Then you got lost in the red swell of roses of her lips, in the perfume of her breath whose spell made you forget even your name. You swam in the blue stream of bliss when you kissed her and felt about to die drowned in that blue stream when she answered your kiss. You were stunned by her whispering and you were softly sucked underground when you heard the faint tremor of her breath. Many a time did you climb to the top of the cliff of uncertainty to let yourself fall into the bottomless pit down below that had but a musky smell of jelly, which made you crave to faint or die a little. She herself was melting out of weakness and kept saying It’s too much, it’s too much. She told you she felt stiff all over and her tongue hurt, so that many a time all she did was to keep lying still, allowing you to fondle her in the grass behind a discreet grove or clump of bamboo in the Khlong Jan botanical gardens, in the Dusit zoo, in Lumphini Park, in Suan Samphrarn or in the cinemas or the dim shops for youngsters, although she was still wearing her college uniform. We went to roll about on the sand at Hua Hin and we tried to meld our bodies into one behind the rocks at Siracha or even in the thick shade of the lettuce trees in the mini-park of her college, where she told you to beware of keepers lying in wait. The place swarmed with mosquitoes and our faces, arms and legs were covered with blisters and one day, on an ultra-romantic late afternoon a bee which had come from who knows where and which resented you over who knows what stung you on the shoulder blade. Darreit was as greedy and violent as you were, as insatiable as the sea is for water, the gulf for boats and death for lives and the sky for stars. Nevertheless, she remained a lotus with doggedly closed petals which let the crazed insect that you were gather pollen from her from the outside only, which made you utterly frustrated. But finally, after she accepted most willingly to be led to your room and you remained there alone only a few times (thanks to your roommates’ complicity), she and you decided to live together. All of that took less than three months. Your room, even though it was rather cramped, had been conceived in such a way that each of its residents was able to have a measure of privacy. As for hers, it was cleaner, bigger and more comfortable, but privacy was out of the question. You thus had to start seeking a new dwelling, which you finally found in a housing estate in Minburi. The unit was no bigger than a seaside bungalow and slummy with old age, surrounded by a tangle of grasses and trees and lost in that distant Bangkok suburb with a faintly rustic atmosphere, which made you spend more time travelling back and forth to go to classes. Several other houses of the same style in the vicinity were devoid of tenants or residents and left to deteriorate and no one cared. Because of the cheap materials used and their rough-and-ready construction, these dwellings, once pretty like dolls’ houses, were depreciating before your very eyes, but she and you had the satisfaction of being together, alone in this calm where at night you heard the strident clamour of crickets and cicadas and the eerie croaking of frogs and toads as if you were in the countryside. On rainy nights you saw the jumping flashes of the torches of seine fishermen. The other houses and clumps of trees were desolated blocks of shadow. Thanks to the meagre light by the roadside, people caught ricefield scarabs. Most of the telephone booths were out of order by dint of depredations and almost all emitted lingering odours of urine more or less pronounced. The housing estate was rather distant from the main road. During the day, there didn’t seem to be any danger, but after ten at night it would’ve been imprudent for a woman to venture there alone. You warned her about this and enjoined her not to leave the house at night, which made her laugh as if she couldn’t care less. And it was there, even before you’d finished putting away your belongings, that you blithely gave yourselves to each other without using any prophylactic. From the day she’d informed her friends of her intention, they’d raised all sorts of objections, but she’d kept on packing without paying attention to them and had even turned the whole affair into a joke, saying that her friends must be jealous. Sure, to have a lover and sexual relations before marriage wasn’t exactly new, but it didn’t cost anything to try, and as far as sexual relations were concerned, if her friends had already had a go at them, she’d have plenty to make them jealous; then she added heedlessly she felt like living with you and that’s what she was doing, that’s all; if she got fed up, she’d leave, ditto. She didn’t understand why her friends made a song
and dance about it and after all she wasn’t the first woman in the world to decide to open her legs to a man. Such was her sincere opinion as a worldly-wise young woman. Obladi oblada… Life went on so smoothly as to be worrisome, so easy, so free as to make you wary. You went to classes, she went to classes. You went to fetch her at the college and you came back home together late in the afternoon. At the mouth of the street you bought fruit and readymade dishes to eat at home. On clear nights, you dragged the canvas chair onto the balcony and you looked at the stars with a map of the sky you’d bought at the Planetarium, sought out this star, sought out that one, that constellation, that other one, then you mused passim about the birth of the universe, about life on other planets, about the curse of physics that has matter unable to travel faster than light, about the indivisible relationship between space and time. Before long, you moved heaven and earth to lay your hand on a telescope. You still dreamed of writing poems and you reckoned it was as noble a task as astronomy. On some nights, on that very balcony, came to your mind funny images and punchy formulas you tried to remember to turn them into poems, but you ended up forgetting them all and you were upset and cursed your devious memory (one always values too much what is no longer) and then, with a disapproving click of the tongue, lest you forgot you took the notebook in which you consigned your thoughts and put it by your side. Whenever an interesting thought came to you, you hastened to jot it down. But once put down in writing it had nothing profound or beautiful or creative as when it had come to your mind but on the contrary took the lightness of a slab of concrete, the finish of a kitchen mortar and the elegance of a dumbbell. And what about the rhythm, then! hobbling along like a yaws case treading gravel. As for Darreit, she flipped through a magazine as she listened to music lying on the bed or else did her homework as she listened to music sitting at her desk or else played the guitar and sang along with the music sitting on top of the stairs or sometimes slept as she listened to music under the not very well stretched out mosquito net (Oh ho! There sure were hordes of mosquitoes there!). Far from her friends, she complained she felt lonely and told herself she’d like to bring a television set back from home to stave off her solitude, but even her boredom didn’t last to the point of becoming alarming. You observed her with perplexity, wondering what it was exactly that made her who she was. Her beautiful, well-rounded and naturally red lips, which had a supreme ability to utter fiery comments and ill-considered remarks, her eyes always ferreting around in search of pretty clothes, her nose which wanted the fragrance of Dutch flowers and the perfumes of France, her ears attuned only to muzak and her earlobes pierced only to wear weird earrings, her heart which was pining to be Japanese – who was she? where was she from? what sort of environment had she grown up in? what had she gone through and known in the course of her short life? No doubt fate wanted to get an eyeful to have placed her and you in the same bed like that. Under the soft light of the bedside lamp, her face was ravishing like dawn on the day Hiroshima was bombed. Under the folded blanket, her breasts as big as Tsukuba apples (her own expression) rose and fell slowly. Her skin was creamy and immaculate by dint of costly lotions and creams and her retarded sylph’s face was smooth and spotless as she regularly went to Dr Montree’s clinic. Then you devoured her with your desperate delirious eyes and you’d have liked your life together to be a honeymoon for all eternity, for this body that breathed in and breathed out never to waste away. But in any case you were proud of yourself, and not a little, as you’d hardly got rid of one woman when you found another to join your fraudulent number. According to the criteria of the moronic male that you were, the physical characteristics of the universe held for you in the sole physical characteristics of the yoni. But Darreit truly was a dream young girl – obladi oblada – for she was unable to do anything at all with her ten fingers. Her clothes, she hired someone to wash and iron them. To cook morning and evening, no need, as she claimed it was more convenient to buy precooked meals, though actually she still didn’t know how to cook rice in the rice cooker and her basic knowledge in the matter of cooking was worryingly scant. Even coffee she managed to make tasteless. As for the floor, let’s not talk about it: she never wiped or washed it. The piles of your books she’d taken the liberty of ransacking she never put back in order, and neither did she tidy her own piles of books and tapes. The dishes she didn’t wash either as, sorry my love, she was allergic to washing liquid as she was to detergents, you see. She wanted to be what she was, that is to say not burden herself with any chore at all. Her brain she reckoned was a no-worry zone. She was at an age where she thought she had the right to enjoy life. She did you the honour of explaining to you she was in fact between two ages: not quite a girl any longer and not yet a woman. When you’re a girl there are too many constraints and rules and when you’re a woman, well then, sure you’re free, but you have the duty to be responsible for yourself so that in this uncertain interval between two chords of the violin, she wanted to be happy flat out. That’s when you told yourself you were nothing to her but a form of happiness. Sometimes she even asked you to wash her hair and give her a bath, which you did most willingly and – ah yes, even now you remember with nostalgia how excellent a partner she was in bed. Her little voluptuous body excited your senses tremendously and generated in you inextinguishable cravings. And her naked whispers, then! enough for you to choke and drop dead. You learned from her that there is nothing strange in a man falling dead in the arms of a woman. At such moments, your brain always worked overtime and you found yourself crippled with fear afterwards as usual, reproaching yourself to be too negligent so that one day or the other she’d find herself pregnant. And you still remember with nostalgia how beautiful her hands and arms were. One night, as you lay on the canvas chair on the balcony, she came to you from behind, tiptoeing to surprise you, but you smelled the scent of talcum powder and soap that lingered on her body right after the shower along with the aroma of the coffee she had gone to the trouble of brewing for you. Was it one of the first nights you were together? You knew she was preventing herself from laughing. She held out the cup of coffee under your nose but finally put it down on the railing and threw her arms around you from behind. The coolness of her fingertips and the softness of her arms and the smell of her body threw your heart into jolts and it seared in pain for no reason, a sharp spasm, nothing much more than the pinprick of a rose thorn or the bite of a tear of wax on the finger. You stroked her arms and kissed them. Those arms you’d already stroked and ogled innumerable times staggered you at the fleeting thought that they were clearly the arms of an actress, arms of a glowing white that seemed to give out their own light – what was their colour like? ivory? jade? moonlight of the third night of the first quarter behind a shred of cloud in December? She was like the woman in the imagination of bards of yore much more than the ideal woman of Marxists, you remarked to yourself, mouth pinched, not knowing whether to be pleased or not. She lay herself down on the same canvas chair, raised her legs over yours, curled up as if it was icy cold, took out the cigarette from your mouth which she kept busy with her own and it was the prelude to the after-midnight of a fawn once again. You were still very young even if you were losing your innocence fast, but you still remember that after making love with her the first few times you weren’t happy. Once done, you were sad, tired and discouraged. You only blamed yourself. From your experience with Nartaya you knew that after love for a while the woman is damn boring and you had to forbid yourself fast to think like that. Darreit wasn’t happy either. She was hurt. She was afraid. She realised she had to confront certain internal contradictions. It was only the next few times that she began to get excited about her discoveries. Her chest, her belly, her thighs that were her very own and that she had fingered so often didn’t seem to belong to her any longer. She confessed that it was different when it was her who touched herself. Why ? she asked herself and asked you directly. The hands, those human hands, your hands, her hands, almost of the same shape and having the s
ame functions… She was bewildered. She was scared. She was curious. Our entire body is erogenous, is that it? Everybody, all couples, is that it? Oh ho oh, easy now. Slowly now. Softly now. Is that how it’s done? Everybody, all couples, is that it? Princes and princesses? Our parents too? Oh ho oh. She was embarrassed. She was ashamed. She wanted to know. She wanted to try. Her nails were nicely curved and true pink. The sweat in the hollow of her palms reflected light, scintillating like a salt stain. Her breath still had the smell of the mouthwash. The dimness in your soul; the dimness in her soul. Your fault, her fault. Your sin, her sin. Your travel towards sin; her travel towards sin… Kreetharrat – nuptial bliss, you say? Nai Tamra na Mueangtai42 calls it nuptial bliss, really? What a lovely word, nuptial! A name to give our daughter, don’t you think? What? You call that rub-a-dub, do you? Very funny. But why did you have to feel at fault, demoralised, hopeless, old? You always felt like that after the ritual of love and it would always be thus, even if you fornicated with a goddess. But maybe not. And not either if you fucked like a god. Eyes meet and it’s orgasm. Eyes meet and eyes meet again and again and it’s orgasm, double, triple. Help, Dr Nopphorn! To sublime fornication, sublime orgasm. Phloi, dear Phloi, have you ever been to the shrine of the Buddha footprint?43 She and you immersed yourselves in the muck of sex and consented to rot in it. All roads in your mind at the time led to sex. You made sex your refuge and your memory. Karmarrommanang saranang khatchami.44 The craving for sex between her and you was rather indiscreet and seemed to happen any time. It seemed making love was for you a roundabout way of taking revenge on the world. Sexual frenzy formed a halo above your head and hers. You were still inexperienced; she was still inexperienced. You were still robust and in good health; she was still robust and in good health. She, like you, lived in Bangkok, the town at the vanguard of sex in the world, comparable to Mecca for the multitude of sinners of the planet who come in pilgrimage there at least once in their lives. Everything kept on going well between her and you until the day a girl friend she’d shared a room with at Ailada, good old Or, maybe because she was a stickler for the noblest principles or because she nurtured the best intentions regarding her friends in all sincerity or through sheer jealousy, manifested herself in the role of the model young girl, which is a praiseworthy behaviour, and took it upon herself to do what was necessary by contriving to repeatedly call up Darreit’s uncle, Mr Chalat, a middle-aged businessman who had been highly successful in the sale of insurance policies, to whom she reported in detail Darreit’s depraved activities and heterodox behaviour, whom decent people like her (good old Or) couldn’t stand being witness to without intervening, which had for immediate result to very much worry that mature man, who took off a little of his precious time to rush to see Darreit at the college in order to set the matter straight, whereupon Darreit proudly confirmed that it was true without hiding anything as soon as he asked her, which left him speechless. He thus tried another tack, opting for diplomacy, and undertook to list the pluses and minuses of the situation which was neither here nor there, pointed out to her that what she took for love wasn’t love at all but a mere infatuation, a passing caprice of the heart, to which she answered Yes it might well be so, an answer which, when a little later she told you what happened, sounded to you like a misplaced sarcasm worth its weight of kicks in the you-know-what. That retort having somewhat taken him aback, he took out his expensive handkerchief which was square-cut from the times of Marie-Antoinette to wipe the sweat of worry that pearled on his successful businessman’s forehead, heaved a sigh of frustration and started again from scratch by asserting that in point of fact her only duty as a young girl was to do everything to succeed in her studies and if she amused herself once in a while in order to relax she couldn’t be faulted but to set up home with a devil like you who didn’t have enough to pay his return ticket to hell, that was truly inadmissible behaviour. Why didn’t she think about what her father would feel, he who’d reared her ever since her tootsies were no bigger than oyster shells, and why didn’t she ask advice from himself, who was nothing less than her uncle, a very close relative who’d known her since she was in the cradle and when she’d almost died of whooping cough while still in her infancy it was he who’d kept her company day after day in that ultramodern hospital and once out of danger it was he again who’d arranged for her the propitiatory ceremony by inviting monks to come and have their eleven o’clock collation and chant the appropriate prayers, and he went on to say that, not only was Phamorn, her elder brother, a first-class tearaway who’d never amount to anything, but here she was seemingly following in his footsteps even if it wasn’t in the same direction! He’d never have believed she and her brother Phamorn would turn into difficult children. He’d always thought you only found disturbed children’s mischief in tabloids short of copy and to meet one in the flesh was disturbing to say the least. And this dyed-in-the-wool conservative set about decrying changes in society, cursing without restraint the pernicious methods of modern education and condemning the laxity of laws and police incompetence as he was beginning to ask himself if her hand hadn’t been forced, to which she answered that not at all, nobody had forced her hand, she was concubining of her own free will. When for the third time he pressed her to admit that her hand was being forced, for the third time she protested that that wasn’t the case. He lit a cigarette, took out his glasses and excused himself to go to the toilet without forgetting to urge her to watch over his briefcase given that it held tens of thousands of baht he had just withdrawn from the bank. He came back after having spent quite a long time looking for the toilet and with a softened voice beseeched her to stop behaving in a way that upset him. He promised her he’d keep her brief affair secret and never mention it to her father. She answered she didn’t see why she should move all her belongings to find herself back among her girl friends given that she was happy in the house she’d rented with her boyfriend. He became angry and told her in an infuriated voice he wanted to ask her for the last time to do what he suggested, otherwise he’d have no choice but to tell her father to come and settle the matter himself. She was well aware he was exploiting his position to force her hand. His endless arguments made her vacillate. His seasoned-politician-type eloquence convinced her at least when he evoked her father’s violent reactions if he ever found out about her affair. She was aware her father was like all fathers in the world who hate dishonourable stories of this kind: if he had the least suspicion she’d land herself in a fine mess. So she told her uncle in a slightly guilty tone she was most willing to take into consideration all of his suggestions but he should leave her a few days to think things over. Once she had reached a decision, she’d let him know personally by phone. Thus ended between the two of them the least romantic meeting that ever was. When you met again late in the afternoon on that same day, she told you the whole encounter in detail as one would do who has time to waste. She talked to you while stuffing popcorn into her mouth and crunching it. Her fright mixed with the excitement of finding herself confronted with a perilous obstacle in her young-girl adventure, every twist and turn of which she seemed to want to absorb in order to narrate them to her progeny once an old crone. But when her excitement petered out she had the chagrined look and empty eyes of a bird fallen from the nest and she asked you insistently what she must do, to which you answered nonchalantly while smoking one of her father’s cigarettes that in your opinion there was no need to do anything at all. With your experience, you were afraid of nothing. Good grief, it wasn’t for such a puny story that you were going to go into a panic. He could well threaten and frighten anyone but not you, a young man who’d already had four or five of his poems published and who’d go far, in the opinion of an editor who lavished praises in lieu of fees. No need to do anything at all, you repeated, and that was really what you meant to say – maybe because you were more preoccupied with the problem of Nartaya, like a crow scared stiff at the sight of an archer. You were afraid San would present himself before you as
a messenger from hell and drag you there forthwith. Darreit was surprised by your indifference and complained it might be because you weren’t directly concerned that you didn’t seem to be worried. You explained that even if your uncle knew she and you lived together, he didn’t know where, right? and after all Bangkok was huge. She objected in a worried tone that her uncle could learn it from her friends, as before she moved she’d given them her new address, as is only natural for someone like her who loved her friends. You retorted that even in that case the house wasn’t easy to find as it was way off the main road and furthermore none of her friends had come here. Darreit seemed about to cry and you had to waste much time pacifying her. Confronted by a real problem, especially something that happened to her unexpectedly, she panicked and was depressed, which was contrary to her way of being as you knew it. Nevertheless she said gallantly she was going to stay here, that’s all. She wasn’t going to go back to stay with her friends. She was fed up with moving. After all, nothing dramatic had happened. There was nothing to be afraid of. The first few days neither she nor you were really at ease. Darreit was depressed and often found herself excuses not to attend classes and beseeched you to stay with her at home, which you did reluctantly. Staying at home doing nothing made you feel nervous and, torn between anger and challenge, when Darreit asked you if she should call her uncle Chalat to inform him of her decision, you answered that there was no need. Several days went by without anything happening. Obladi oblada… You questioned her with your eyes: so then, where is that danger you’re expecting? During that period she candidly revealed to you her family background, which you didn’t really want to know. Her father wasn’t only very rich and highly respected at province level, you see, he also had an occult influence she didn’t quite understand, actually; yet she didn’t believe it was really something extraordinary: almost all of her father’s friends seemed to have some too, more or less, and her father wasn’t as influential as all that. He only had a few underlings and they didn’t meet all that often at her place. They stayed there only during the electoral campaigns of candidates to the provincial assembly, the municipal assembly and the powerful national assembly. But when she became a big girl, her father undertook to withdraw from shady dealings to earn his life honestly and lead a peaceful existence. For all that there were still war weapons hidden at home and there still were lots of people who respected him. Many came to ask him for money and advice, be it for the preparation of Thort Kathin and Thort Phapa45, for alumnae meetings, galas, fetes, cremations, ordinations – numberless occasions for which her father had to dig into his pocket more or less, depending on the cases, but while he’d given up on fishy business (at this point, she couldn’t help arching her back with pride) her elder brother, on the other hand, who had inherited his father’s hot blood so to speak, had begun to gain a reputation among the hoodlums of his age by being a nuisance to people in the neighbourhood. She said that had he not been his father’s son he’d have long been shot dead. You listened to her without saying anything and with the looks of someone attending a boring entertainment, and you only had a little fun when you thought fleetingly about violent crime stories replete with gore, mysterious, exciting and rousing, under the matchless pens of a Phanomthian, a Seikdusit, a Sor Naowarart or a Pheichorn Satharban, and thought further of some pages dense with dangers the hero must go through, of the titillating love the heroine will experience at the cost of many a tear, of secret societies that must be destroyed because their activities endanger the security of the nation, of heroes every last one of them hefty, handsome like gods and valiant like the knights of old, who’ve come alone or in twos – back to back to coolly confront the villains – or even three if not four at a time, and wherever they appear the villains end up beaten to a pulp, all ferocious as lions with troublemakers and meek as lambs with the dames, fiercely patriotic, true righters of wrongs even in orgasm and unable to see physical abuse without quivering with indignation. You listened to her while having fun with your mental wanderings so much so that you let yourself feign a cruel smile, stubbed out your cigarette to let off steam so forcefully the stub almost leapt out of the ashtray and, when she told you her brother used to attend two or three vocational schools a year and had done so for years and finally never finished his studies, you had a soft throaty laugh. You felt like kicking that moron, though you didn’t know why. According to his sister, he was a womaniser; and us fellows, the more we womanise the more we protect our little sisters, each and every one of us. You pacified her on the theme If there’s any problem, I’ll take responsibility for it, and you told yourself with jubilation that to have responsibilities made you credible as an adult to the power of 42, so that instead of being worried, you felt much brighter. See how you are! You lost yourself in a grandiose daydream: you were a hero, an authentic male; you had to keep calm, be firm and daring and shoulder a whole lot of lousy virtues until your back gave way. With your two arms you’d protect her from imminent dangers, she who was your goddess. Your chest would be warm battlements for the one who was like your own heart. Your daydreaming swelled to world proportions, which only made of you a toad in a calabash, became the longest-lasting in the world, which only made of you a centipede in a calabash, and the most brilliant in the world, which only made of you a firefly in a calabash. You stamped like a thoroughbred at the starting gate, excited like an athlete before a competition, but you began to relax after ten days had gone by, and after two weeks you started to be bored stiff. You kept on going to the U in the morning and came back at nightfall. You loitered with your friends of the circle under the pines, played chess or philosophised on the love of mankind or went to sit alone in a quiet corner beneath the trees and wrote a smutty poem or else settled in the library and read a Chinese action novel until it became a habit and only went back home when the library closed. As for Darreit, she kept thinking up reasons not to go to class and wanting to do nothing, even though ordinarily she did almost nothing anyway, so that you were telling yourself that separating for a while wouldn’t be so bad, as this woman, who was truly a dream woman, forced you to have the patience to constantly push back the limits of your patience indefinitely. You were beginning to be fed up having to answer her questions when you came back late. Slip away to spend the night at some fine arts friend’s you couldn’t do; drift away along Bangkok’s epicurean nights, you couldn’t either. You were fed up also having to meet her again after her lessons day after day in the joint that served the oxtail soup she wanted to eat, the fast-food places where she gave appointments to her friends, at the entrance of cinemas which showed films you didn’t want to see (don’t forget to get a ticket for me). You were beginning to find no fun in having to sweep, dust, wash in the house, do the dishes, put out blanket and mats to dry, wash the sheet and pillows, clean the bathroom (I beg you: your underwear, how many times have I told you to put it to dry outside or else it’s going to smell musty and besides it messes up the bathroom). The decorative indoor plants you’d taken the trouble to bring back from the market were covered in dust it’d never have occurred to her to wipe out. That shirt you’d just washed to wear she grabbed and wore instead. Mangas and Suphaksorn’s romances, I’ve nothing against your reading ’em, but I forbid you to put ’em on my books, you hear? Your used socks, you mustn’t stuff ’em into your shoes but stretch ’em out under the sun; hey, look, that’s why a scorpion hid there and bit you. But as you didn’t react, as you said nothing, she didn’t detect the smell of your boredom and impatience at all. And she must’ve begun to be fed up with you similarly. It was beginning to be no longer as fun, as pleasing as she had expected. That politically engaged literature you make such a big deal about, she told you, in my opinion it’s rubbish. That the sky on one night is different from the sky on another night, what the hell does it matter? Where does it get you to know they aren’t the same? And when someone who doesn’t know how to count very well like you talks about the importance of the theory of relativity, don’t you thin
k you’re overdoing it, uh? And if she was a failed Japanese as you said, well then you were a failed westerner and to know that the NASA budget is one fiftieth of the Pentagon’s and that when the mummy of Ramses II was sent to the United States to be analysed, it was taxed by American customs at the tariff of dried fish, I can’t see what’s so exciting about that. Or even the letter of King Rama V instructing Prince Damrong to find him ‘confidential’ photographs of a young Lao girl or even the interview of Rama VIII: when you found them in the library and hastened, all excited, to talk to her about them, she told you: Oh, yeah, right, and then what? As for the Tripitaka episode where a Brahman asks the Buddha to show him his testes, she had to force herself to listen to you with the impression you were being excessively insolent. And why did you have to laugh at Wimon Siriphaiboon46 by saying that if she was so smart, let her have the Bangkok buses lean to the right instead of letting them all lean to the left, given that the lady was fiercely right-wing and also her heroine? And why did you have to mock Samak Suntharaweit47 by imitating exactly his way of speaking to say But finally journalists have never been able to fault me for anything but my nose, when this gentleman was her favourite politician? And everything you did she found irritating.
The White Shadow Page 11