You were no doubt an animal of another species, maybe even an animal for short, but certainly not a political animal, and you little by little distanced yourself from them, when you didn’t wall yourself in the silence of the chess lover that you were. Maybe that was Nart’s influence, who, though he seemed not to care about anything, kept an unruffled composure. It was during that time your intimacy with Kangsadarn grew to the point you often went for lunch or coffee together, but she was unable to distract you from your infatuation with Darreit. On a November day, as the Loi Krathong festival had just ended and Bangkok still seemed hung over, you went blindly ahead to see Darreit at the private college where she studied. It was the start of a new term at the U; you’d just scraped through all subjects; you’d celebrated the deed by going to the North with Nart and you’d come back to Bangkok full of life again, like the jungle when flowers bloom. You went to the administrative building of her college and asked to see Darreit. You made as though you’d dithered for a long time but finally couldn’t hold back. Darreit was both delighted and surprised to see you again, so that she almost greeted you with a hug and a kiss. You looked at her and a glance was enough to notice she was more of a woman and more beautiful than ever. She even seemed to have grown a little taller. As you walked side by side along the narrow lawn in front of the administrative building, you asked her most naturally, with the simplest words, whether she still loved you. She stopped walking and, standing in front of you, inspected you from top to toe. When she was certain your body and your face no longer bore any trace of physical abuse, she smiled and said just as naturally, with the simplest words, Sure I love you. You laughed so much your eyes crinkled and then you asked her, with an impassive look and in an impassive tone of voice, More, less or as much as before? She slipped her hands in her skirt pockets, appeared about to shrug and laughed before she answered More than before, of course. Hearing that, you said, as if you were inviting her to go eat an ice cream, In that case, let’s resume our life together, a proposal to which she not only agreed with words but with gestures also. Where was it you took her then, once out of the college? To an ice cream parlour – that’s right, an ice cream parlour, and you ate a papaya boat in the same papaya as her, huddled one against the other in a corner of the shop far from prying eyes, so smitten with each other you were both melting, and you went to a Siam Square cinema which showed a slushy film she and you scarcely understood, so busy were you exploring your reciprocal bodies as much as could be groped, which was far from straightforward, for all your complicity, as the place didn’t lend itself to it. The two of you went out half way through the film and you took her to visit your new room at Seewiang to see if she’d like it. After spending some two hours there, you went out and, thoroughly happy and exhausted, you tottered out to eat in a small, quiet restaurant nearby and there you asked her permission to drink a beer which put you in a slight and very pleasant state of intoxication. Then you asked her if she didn’t want to pay a call to her girl friends at Ailada, as you knew how fond she was of her friends, whom she hadn’t seen for a long time, to which she answered Good idea. If you acted like that it was to save face after those girls had sympathised with you, which you took to be a mark of disdain. Besides, you wanted to show them someone like you wasn’t to be looked down upon, as your relationship with Darreit had resumed its course, namely firm, captivating, daring and exhilarating. Darreit and you arrived at Ailada around five in the afternoon. Her friends, with quivering bosoms, looked at you both sitting in the same easy chair of the hostel’s parlour, where on other easy chairs two or three young girls each talked with their boyfriends and four or five others who had no suitors read a newspaper or a novel, nibbled preserved fruit, knitted away or looked at television as they chattered. At times, the phone would ring and one girl or another would run down the stairs to take the call. Girls came in and went out, some in casual attire, others still in student uniform or sort of, that is to say wearing their shirts over their skirts and having swapped their shoes for mules or open sandals. Sitting in the easy chair, you were reading a western translated by Pramoon Un-hathoop while listening to Darreit chatting with her friends. Sparrows chirping, you told yourself, soap bubbles. But you were obsessed by a soap bubble girl… Love doesn’t only make you blind: it gives you pimples on the face. But no, darling, you got it wrong: I use Fresh & Dry. Keep him waiting, but make sure you look your best. Each time I meet my friends they ask me how I manage to take care of my hair. It’s no fun being a woman, really: wherever we are, no matter what we do, when we sit down we must always keep our legs together; going for meditation at the Thammakai temple would be just as well! To me, it’s in the navel that the mind is located. I say, suppose through meditation we could get a preview of test papers, that’d be great, wouldn’t it? Let me tell you: to love is to cry forever and a day. Ah, those high school kids! You know what they told me? That they no longer want to salute the technical school fascists. The super chic scruffy fashion for blokes these days, personally I find it gross. Did you see me wearing a kimono on those pictures when I was in Japan? Rather difficult to deal with in the loo, by the way. But actually, I seldom pee. Ever seen anyone who looks good on an ID picture? Gee, I’d really like to see Arpatsara’s48 ID picture when she was seventeen. Oh, but he’s just a kid and there he was making advances to me, so I told him Little fellow, go back home and put on a Luft Junior to begin with; clear off! One evening I came down to answer the phone, I don’t even know who it was, and then he was insisting to have one of my panties. Ah yes, grilled saba? I had some when I was in Japan. My boyfriend, he’s not trying to be thin, he’s just thin like his friends, and then he has the cheek to tell me I’m fat and before long with my back jowls I’ll look like a piggy bank… That night, Darreit spent it with you at Seewiang, and the next day in the afternoon she went to fetch her belongings and moved in. Her uncle Chalat was in Phuket with his wife on business. She had few books but loads of clothes. Your large room at Seewiang was rather cramped once the two of you found yourselves in it, and before everything had been properly sorted out, you were fairly tired. She and you together again: it felt like a dream. You didn’t feel at fault and she didn’t feel at fault. She hadn’t hesitated at all to resume living with you, which had you wondering incidentally whether she’d be ready to live with anyone anywhere so long as she didn’t have her father or uncle on her back. Coming back to live with you this time, she didn’t look as cheerful as she should have, due to her old anxiety, which overcame her from time to time. You yourself didn’t look too sure you weren’t overdoing it. The previous woman in your life had just died but you’d practically forgotten her. You were not truly afflicted, as if you perceived that affliction is a stupid luxury. You’d just been beaten up because of a woman. You were looking out for being beaten up a second time by getting back together with that same woman. You didn’t have time: you were busy fuckin’, as Americans say. Being with Darreit this time, you were engrossed in fornication as if you wanted to dedicate yourself to the search of its sublime secret, as if you wanted to make yourself mature through earthly pleasure in order to shorten the distance separating you from spiritual pleasure, for the latter to get nearer so that one day you could definitively renounce the former. Your tongue hurt, your lips were numb and incessant shivers of ecstasy fatigued your body. She and you practically never left each other and that had you and her sleep soundly and travel away from anxiety occasionally. It was you who’d taken the decision to let her move in, whereas discreet assignations would have been an easier, safer option – in other words, a smarter move. What the heck were you thinking at the time? You’d decided to live with her until old age as an ideal fucking couple, was that it? Not at all. And what about her then? Instead of objecting, she’d agreed wholeheartedly with you. What was she thinking? Or wasn’t she? That living with you made her freer? That she was less bored? That it showed daring? That it was cool? Or maybe she had it up to here with her uncle Chalat, because, once she was w
ith you, her life so to speak knew no rules, and in her eyes the absence of rules was the basic definition of freedom. She’d really moved her gear and books and you were fucking proud to have so much meaning for her and you admired her courage, which actually was a daft way for her to take excessive risks. She went to college as usual; you went to university as usual. Sometimes you loitered there until nightfall. As for her, she went to see her friends at Ailada or else invited them to come to Seewiang. Your room, when there were three or four persons in it, was chock-a-block, and Darreit started to remark she’d like to rent a small house and even if it’s a bit far never mind. But you turned a deaf ear as the room, old though it was, was clean and had two windows. The owner didn’t say anything if tenants took a woman in with them. You’d begun to get used to the place as in the immediate vicinity there were lots of shady trees – coconut, jackfruit, custard apple, mango, pomegranate. There were decorative plants in pots, well displayed and well kept. There were three or four bantam cocks in a big cage against the fence near your room that went cock-a-doodle-do all day long. There was also a cage with two guinea pigs you liked to tease and sometimes gave grass to. You still didn’t think of moving and were waiting for the father’s or the uncle’s reactions. Several days went by. Dead calm. You were annoyed. You were bored. You hated waiting idly and you were beginning to wonder if they’d finally admitted defeat. Actually, you didn’t know what to do about the fact that she lived with you and you didn’t know either what to do next, all the more so as your decision to invite her to live with you struck you as far from correct and stinking to high heaven. But as time went by, she and you little by little recovered from your apathy and were increasingly happy going to classes, frolicking about headlong in the room, strolling in department stores and public parks. She resumed trying to sing her Japanese songs and started to collect odd jars of all sizes and decorative patterns. You started to stay up late and resumed writing poems on a young man who collects a string of heartbreaks as mementos of the swarm of butterflies you’d seen in a public park (and the idea that it might be the last swarm of butterflies in Bangkok gave you a shock), on the dusk of the past and the dawn of the future, on the blind, unavoidable fate of society eaten up by cancer, on idealistic young men destined to a life of pain and solitude, on the shimmer of clouds above the horizon of hope and the sun of struggle, on the cohorts of destitute fleeing towards the capital, and on all that your blunted mind could reach and grasp. You were going back home later and later in the evening because it was the time of university games and you killed time by going to see one match after the other: sepak-takroh matches some of which lasted as long as four and a half hours; one football match in which the winning team suffered three goals within the first nineteen minutes before giving its all and ending victorious five to three; the amateur boxing final bout which, though it lasted only three rounds, was gripping as it took place at a frantic pace throughout; and female volleyball, where you eyed up the players’ curves and listened to their weird shouts rather than mind the score. You began to feel like going out for a run every morning and drinking milk and riding a racing bike. Your health was beginning to deteriorate and your face was smeared with straggling hair and a bushy beard. Your skin was lacklustre and you had the ethereal behaviour of the inveterate rhymester. And all of a sudden you developed a great passion for astronomy books. You began to think at times of your true place in the universe. You thought about the plausibility of the Big Bang theory and the notion that the end of the universe is the maximum entropy. And then you read nothing but books about death, you dreamed and mused about death, but then, what do you know, you fell in love with kung fu novels and you started to devour them, even though the best works of the best writers in that vein are but secondclass novels and a far cry from serious literary creation. Though you had the opportunity to read lots of good books during that period, most of the time you were only reading for reading’s sake. Books are like mirrors: when a buffalo stands before a mirror, the image that appears on the mirror is that of a buffalo, and in no way that of a god. You read a great deal, you read non-stop, voraciously. You went out of the library and straight into book rental shops and you read. You read even as you walked along the pavement, read because you felt like reading, read as if you were afraid of being as stupid as Wolfgang the Vulture. Fire turns wood into ash but toughens steel. A live rat is worth more than a dead lion. There are two kinds of people who, once they’ve taken a decision, will not change their minds: the imbeciles and their opposites. Who wants to climb high mustn’t look down below. If you want to peddle something, you must show where you stand. It isn’t difficult to remain in someone’s memory: just borrow money and don’t return it. To kill an infant in the cradle is less of a sin than to want to do something and not do it. Art is a haven for impostors. A diamond in mud is worth more than a grain of dust in the ether. All of that remained in your head for a while and finally was forgotten. Books change nothing to nothing. You turned to dirty jokes and guardroom songs which you sometimes told or sang to Darreit. She blushed with embarrassment but asked for more of the same and sometimes told you a smutty story in turn, her ears on fire, and you realised that when a woman is embarrassed she’s lovely in another way. You were happy; she was happy. Obladi oblada. You never spoke about your common future and she never begged you to stay with her until the end of time, which women demand as soon as you sleep with them, making it a life and death matter. She even talked to you about other men openly and told you frankly also in which way they looked sexy in her eyes, and you told her often about other women. It was a behaviour which, as strange as it might seem, was most ordinary and natural, and you both knew that if one or the other showed jealousy, it was pretence, it was just a way of having fun. So that the relation between her and you was cool in its way. There was no morrow, because the next day one of you may well have left the other. The person left behind might suffer a little but you could be sure there’d be no scene of deep distress or raging despair as are so often displayed to express sorrow at the loss of one’s beloved in the pages of magazines or in variety programmes for youngsters on the radio. There’d be no supplicating missive or resentful poem or if there were, it’d be without much conviction. She and you weren’t lovers of the kind to appeal to the sad. She and you were happy. Maybe because there weren’t yet any money problems, as you still received Daen’s money orders and she still had a fairly sizeable amount on her bank account. It could almost have been an ideal love if only she’d known how to do some cleaning and wash occasionally the much-used sheets instead of leaving all that to you. And when we’re in the room, don’t dress too provocatively because we aren’t alone here – and with her habit of poking her nose into everything, she was in and out of the rooms of one and all, and those were men’s rooms, of course. You managed to find a shoot of devil’s ivy and she found you an empty wine bottle for it. It was a slender and tall bottle and when you put the devil’s ivy in the bottle, a new stalk grew out practically overnight. You put the plant in the darkest corner of the room and the reflections of its leaves sent a suffused light in the dim recess. And you bought an orange jasmine tree, a tangerine tree and an asoka tree, which you planted in stoneware pots in a row at the foot of the bed, which was flooded with sunlight every day, and the orange jasmine tree blossomed, making the entire room fragrant, the tangerine tree produced yellowish fruit, but the asoka looked rather depressed, and you couldn’t help telling yourself it was a bad omen. You also bought a kabuleka in a pot, which you hung by a window, and it blossomed every day for you in red, white and pink. You found an empty flowerpot, filled it with humus-rich soil taken from the tree-loving landlady, pressed down the soil, covered it with coconut fibres, thoroughly watered, and studded it with red ixora stalks which grew green again three or four days later. The wooden floor of the room was waxed to gleaming point, the piles of books were sorted out and the room was all the prettier for it, with the bantam cocks’ crowing as background noise almost
throughout the day. Calm and coolness. A private corner, not bad at all for a big city like Bangkok. When you begged her to take care of the plants, she bought a vaporiser and undertook to spray them morning and evening and, as a bonus, she gathered red grains of palm trees strewed over the park of her college to grow them in one of her glass jars with the aim of turning them into bonsais, and those damn palm trees grew and grew as if they wanted to shame any bean sprout. She scrupulously discharged the duty you had bestowed on her. She seemed to have grown a passion for plants and gave you news of each every day, and she couldn’t help dreaming that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to plant a cherry tree to admire its blossoms. The buds of the ixora began to open and the devil’s ivy covered itself with leaves the size of five-baht coins without a spot of dust on them. The kabuleka cloaked itself in a profusion of scarlet flowers, the flowers of the tangerine tree fell out, the yellow fruit came out in abundance and, at the same time, it began to shed its leaves. The leaves of the orange jasmine tree turned dark green but it refused to blossom any more. As for the asoka, it kept growing slowly but it remained still very small all the same compared to the asokas one can see in the streets and the asokas you saw in your imagination on Vasitthi’s asoka esplanade. It was the first and the only one you grew, but you were satisfied, as in any case you’d long felt like having one and you seemed to prefer it to the other plants, whereas she found it very ordinary as a tree and not at all decorative and she even told you that, each time she saw the kabuleka, she couldn’t help but think of the pink moss those pigs that love to waddle in marshland mud like to feed on, and the ixora reminded her of the interminable, deadly boring ceremony on the Paying Homage to the Teachers Day which had her humming to herself defiantly panyawutee karei teitei49 almost every time she watered them. But you forgave her. How long did she live with you that time? A little over one month. On a full moon night, you opened the windows wide to let the cool breeze and soft moonlight flood the entire room and you turned out the light and had Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto play for the plants to hear and the trees and her and the moonlight and yourself as well. You sat smoking, your back to one of the walls, slurping very strong and fragrant coffee while she lay on the bed. You leaned to one side to put one hand behind your head. You were sitting quietly, observing the dark shadows that the moon moved slowly across the floor – relaxed and at peace with the whole world. Darreit too was relaxed and at peace with the world, except the music, and she pointed out that that fellow Stravinsky had the face of a grocer. It was a beautiful night of happiness you’ll still remember even after your body has rotted away. At the end of November that year it rained a lot, flooding from the North swept down and Bangkok found itself flooded as if the Chao Phraya mistakenly believed the capital was besieged by the Burmese as Ayutthaya had been in the old days and was promptly coming to the rescue to safeguard national independence. It rained every day. Bangkok was bleak. Bangkok was dirty with stagnant water. Rats and roaches swarmed about in search of new shelters, theirs having been flooded. A good many people in Bangkok had to shit in plastic bags, piss in plastic bags, which they threw onto the rubbish dumps the refuse collectors went to discharge who knows where. Sandbags sold well, umbrellas sold well, rubber boots sold well, medicines for colds sold well. The water rose then withdrew quickly then came back, but young girls in shorts still gloriously went for strolls in Siam Square and were still as attractive in the defiled surroundings. The rich fled and slept in first-class hotels or went on junkets abroad. The middle class and the common folk shared the trouble equitably. In the streets you saw snakes, centipedes and sometimes turtles, and do you remember how you found a gourami lost in a gutter around Sukhumvit? The university had closed down. You had to stay listless in the room all day: Darreit’s college wasn’t flooded, so she had to attend classes even though the water gave her feet fungal infections. That day, where did you go? The Goethe-Institut showed a German film free of charge. You went there after staying dejectedly in your room for days. You got out of the bus at the Royal Esplanade terminal and walked along the road at the back of the Public Relations Department building to enter the Goethe-Institut compound through the back door. Like every time, you stopped, taken with admiration at the sight of the long row of wooden Chinese shophouses that slithered motionless above an all-cracked basin of stagnant water. It was a building all in one piece, old and dilapidated, looking gloomy and rotten, with something like thirteen or fifteen dwellings, all lived in. Very, very old, a hundred years, possibly more. Actually, you’d told Marnit Seewa to hurry to take pictures of it before it was pulled down one of these days. And that day you stopped again to look at it for a long while and you thought Damn, if only I could paint! The stark red of crown of thorns in the dragon-patterned flowerpots on the little wooden bridges joining the edge of the street and the narrow threshold of each dwelling; the vivid blue and odd patterns of the shimmering sarongs spread out on the balcony railings; the almost two metre high dragon trees with acid green leaves stuck into big aluminium cans and the orchids with stalks as white as jade; the yellow plastic hammock in which a baby of the male sex looking difficult to deal with lay after his bath, his hair not yet dry, talc-white from feet to scalp, a plastic sword in his tiny hand, with an old woman in a sleeveless round-neck blouse and a loincloth folded the old-fashioned way sitting against the doorjamb and nodding off, one hand on her lap, the other holding the hammock to swing it; a cage with budgerigars provided with a miniature house in which one of them brooded, three others peaceably conversing on the perch, a fifth examining itself in the mirror with conceit; a cat stretched on the chapped floor licking its coat with as much minutia as sloth; a young woman with a sour mien, sarong knotted over her chest and fag stuck in her mouth, asked you with a bellicose look what the hell was your problem standing there gaping… No, all of this is irrelevant. And then what? Then, you must remember. At the Goethe, you met Nart Itsara in the library. That day, there was a free film show and that’s why both Nart and you had gone there. No, you hadn’t agreed to meet there. Which film? Chinese Roulette or Bread of the Early Years? Not too sure. You can’t remember very well. Rather the latter. Do you remember that when you came out of the Goethe night had fallen?
The White Shadow Page 15