the gypsy’s dream
We are the creatures of air, / Our roots in dreams / And clouds…
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
I’m not trying to think seriously about it to come to a conclusion. You and me… The relationship between you and me… Maybe there’ll be a conclusion, and maybe not. I’m not trying to think. To think is death. Trying to think is trying to seek death. We met around a game of chess at dusk. Everything began, went on and ended as in a dream. The Old Lion loved you and took pity on a young man like you. He practised simulacrum out of love and managed to get me to play along. He took great care of all his students. In the small territory over which he held sway, he behaved like a father to his children. Young people didn’t interest him particularly unless they had problems. Didn’t you play the young man with problems to try to catch the Old Lion’s attention? You annoyed me. I was beginning to dislike you increasingly as days went by. I was jealous of you. Yes, I admit I was jealous of you then, and even now. Someone like me able to feel jealousy? Jealousy is a form of respect for the narrow-minded. It annoys me to entertain such a feeling. Annoyed I was already at the time and annoyed I remain, even now. To be jealous of others is to trample your self-esteem underfoot. I shouldn’t show you too much consideration, even though you’re very superior to me, even though you’re my worst enemy, an enemy I’m incapable of subduing. But one of these days I’ll kill you. I’m capable of killing, even God. I am God, as everyone is. Thus I have the right to kill God. As far as I’m concerned, Lucifer interests me more than God, Theiwathat51 interests me more than the Buddha, Judas interests me more than Jesus, Choochok interests me more than Weitsandorn52. I am God. I’m not mad yet. I’m just pretending to be mad to see how the people around me, all the people who have their feet on the ground and flatter themselves they aren’t mad, react to me. I am God, as everyone is. I’m the God of darkness, the God of twilight, the God of pox, the God of clap, the God of canker. You’re the God of dawn, the God of truth, the God of dream, the God of wisdom, the God of love, of peace, of brotherhood. I’m the God of demons, the God of wild beasts, the God that holds the power of destruction. I’m the asura53 that can’t be fooled. God has but crude tricks and lousy puns. If you want to win over me, if you want to overpower me, you’ll have to make colossal efforts. You hold it to be your duty, don’t you, to free the world from ignorance. Deep down, that’s your ambition. You haven’t yet reached the age of crummy wisdom, which you decorate and prettify to comfort yourself, but you behave as if you had. You shit! And what rotten luck for me to have been knifed and what rotten luck for me to have had to stay in hospital under your patronage! You took advantage of it to play the hero, which you did in irreproachable fashion. I hate hospitals. I don’t trust hospitals. And regaining consciousness to find myself lying whacked in the whiteness and medicinal smells of a hospital almost turned me crazy. All of the particles of my body yelled and cursed against that whiteness and those medicinal smells. I left the hospital in an extreme state of drift and loneliness. I tried to free myself from my debt to you, in money as well as in gratitude. I hocked and sold the few valuables I had – radio cassette player, guitar, watch and fountain pen. I even sold my jeans and canvas shoes to the technical school students that stayed at Seewiang. I wrote a bullshit letter to Daen to ask him to send me more money each month. Back at Seewiang, I remained in my corner. I turned away from you and from all the other tenants. At the U, I tried to stay away from the group of players under the pines. Often I was struck unexpectedly with sudden bouts of sadness and I gave myself to them for lengthy periods, longer than those I was exempt from them. I put myself out to get a grant for bright but poor students, although at the time I was reluctant to claim I was poor compared to other students and besides, claiming I was a bright student would’ve been an arrant lie. In any case I did get a grant from the foundation created by a wise, old, long dead fuddyduddy who was of the very first batch of students at the university, someone who, while he was a student actually, didn’t have the wherewithal to eat three square meals a day and who, having become wealthy by dint of perseverance and determination, had ended up setting up a foundation in his name that made financial grants to gifted but penniless students without demanding anything in return. I was struggling over everything. I behaved like a cheeky beggar innumerable times. Sometimes, for a whole month I’d have lunch on Thanit Sukkaseim, Somphong Thawee and Khampan Seenuea and, the meal over, would slip out. I didn’t want to mix with them unless necessary. I even tried to do without cigarettes. I applied for a job at the university library. I scrounged on everything to repay my debt. Thirty thousand baht: an enormous amount. I had no close friend and I didn’t try to be close to anyone in particular. I knew that, under your impassivity, you were watching me discreetly and weren’t pleased because you knew that if I behaved increasingly erratically, it was because I was in debt to you. You were ill at ease. You never asked for your money back. You never did anything to show I was in your debt. But your mind always went to the essential, frank and lucid. Given that I was indebted to you, I had to reimburse you: that’s what you thought. You didn’t have it in you to cancel my entire debt. It was money you’d earned by the sweat of your brow. You had to save, you had to hoard up. You wanted to leave the U. You wanted to find yourself a nice place where you’d be able to live your life as you wished. You’ve always been someone who knows what he wants. You know better than anyone that you’re able to make your dreams come true: a new civilisation, you’d confided to me, a civilisation less soiled with blood, an immaculate civilisation. It was a rather Himalayan programme that would entail huge expenses. But when you saw me running around to find money, like the epic monkey whose tail is on fire and who, in his panic, hesitates too long to make it back to Ceylon and thus thinks he’ll set Bangkok ablaze instead, when you came to see me in my room and saw it looked like a destitute hovel, when you saw me lying my hand on my forehead like a corpse stuffed with depression and worry, you no longer knew how to behave. You asked me awkwardly how I was. You were loath to speak, and when you expressed yourself, you did so with much reluctance to impose. You looked like Jesus paying a call on a debtor. Every time I opened my mouth to ask for a reprieve, you’d say Don’t mention it, don’t think about it. Between you and me, the fog of alienation was beginning to thicken. I paid no attention to what you were saying. I found enough to reimburse one or two thousand baht at a time or even five hundred baht or even a hundred baht. Reimbursing you, even in dribs and drabs like that, gave me the feeling I was preserving my pathetic dignity. You must no doubt have kept count in your head, that is, you’d got from me on such day of such month so much. Actually, maybe it was more than thirty thousand baht. The private hospital in question vaunted its services in magazines for the refined, at bus stops, on the buses even. You’d taken it upon yourself to settle the bill: you were the creditor, I was the debtor, and we were both embarrassed. You postponed your departure from the U sine die, even though you had no heart to go on with your studies and an almost unbearable disgust showed on your face, in your behaviour and in your words. You took flight into your feelings as if you’d never be back. I don’t remember how much money I gave you back altogether. Maybe not even ten thousand. I don’t know if you really kept count, but I know that as soon as I’d given you the totality of the outstanding sum, you’d tell me No need, that’s enough, but you never told me that. You and I were growing increasingly estranged. It was surprising nobody knew I’d been knifed. You’d told no one. I’d simply disappeared and one day I was back. Nothing odd about that for the oddballs under the pines: some seniors didn’t show up for months; others cut short their studies just like that. It was a good thing you’d told no one. I don’t like people prying into my affairs. If they’d known what had happened to me, they’d have taken pity on me. I don’t like to be pitied. Whoever takes pity on me is up to a kick in the you-know-what. I’m not mad: I’m merely pretending to be mad. When I’m sane I pretend t
o be mad. When I’m mad I pretend to be sane. I live here alone with clouds of fireflies. The old deserted, dilapidated house creaks in the freezing night. I’m well and truly mad but pretend to be sane or I’m sane but pretend to be mad or half-mad half-sane or all of that or none of that. I’m not sure what I am. The night is freezing. The night has mist bathed in moonlight, but for all that, it’s still a dark and delirious night. Something or someone is watching me. Something hostile. I don’t know, maybe I have frayed nerves. I have no god. I don’t think of Siddhartha as God. If I believed in God maybe I wouldn’t be mad so easily. You have no god and you don’t think of Siddhartha as God either. If you believed in God, maybe you wouldn’t be mad so easily either. Before I came here, your friends told me you’d become crazy. Has someone told you I’ve become crazy? Where the heck are you now? In Bangkok or in your hut by the river? Maybe I’ll go and find you and kill you for good. I won’t give a chance to my cowardice and self-restraint again. If ever I see you again, I won’t hesitate any longer. Nothing, no one will hold me back. Who do you think you are and who do you take me for? We know each other well enough or else almost not at all. What are you thinking about? What do you think about me? We’d better never meet again, ah-ah-ah, because if I find you again I’ll kill you. I’ll be sorry to kill you, but I’ll kill you nonetheless. You must be aware of my suffering better than anyone. Perhaps you’re asking some friends of mine about me to know where I am and it’s you who is going to come and see me frantically to console me, to be compassionate as behoves a meritorious saint. Ah, if you come, it might be just as well, as, even if I am in this state of damnation, I swear to you that at the very least I’ll spit in your face. It’ll be man’s gooiest gob of spit ever. And I’ll kill you. I’m craving blood. Killing: a necessary act to end all kinds of complications. My abdomen wound progressively closed up and everything went back to normal, but I’m not as certain about the state of my mind. I don’t think it stands a chance of being as before. I drift aimlessly and scare easily. Very often I start shaking under the tension that knots my guts. I have no god. One withstands crises more easily when one has God. White peddlers came to sell God to Asia. Some of them begged me to believe in God. I refused. I have no more trust in God than I have in any new product. As for you, it’s the opposite. You bore with God’s salesmen. You praised missionaries for their toughness and courage. You said that at the very least we needed Buddhists of that mettle. You’re a good man. How many times have I said I want to have nothing to do with good people? You pose as a superior being. You bastard! At most, you’re a man devoid of emotions. At most, you behave as if you weren’t an ordinary man, which you are, though. You were looking for a way to turn away from art, from writing as from painting. But you were only trying, as you kept on painting and you kept on reading like a maniac and you kept on believing in serious writing, more serious perhaps than I’d ever perceived. Oh, I’m trying right now to do something you’ve already tried to do, which is not to think but act according to credible feelings. You were fed up with the people around you. You were close to several teachers and you debated with them as if you were on an equal footing. Your great virtue is to behave with the candour of a child. Didn’t some say your writings and paintings had the beauty and secret charm of the poppy flower? Indeed. Your dreams went very far. You found yourself in Bangkok in a circle of artists and pseudo-artists, in a circle of intellectuals and pseudointellectuals. But you managed to have a recollection clear as daylight of the places, moments and people you met, along with an overflowing imagination. Poppy fields with white and red flowers there truly were in your memory and in your imagination, with colours, furthermore, that were sharper and more ambiguous than in reality, and you painted them with mountain chains straddling one another in the background. Those were paintings of extraordinary beauty, as the painter rendered what he saw with an at once sceptical and inspired eye, as if in a trance, but with enough presence of mind to control himself when he was aware that apparent beauty is a calamity, that apparent beauty is death. And when you described maple leaves on Phoo Luang54, I felt the place’s very atmosphere as a paradisiacal park. You used words with the same deftness as you used colours. But it was only once in a long while that you came up with a painting you were proud of or with a poem you were proud of. Maybe because you were fascinated by the mystics. As a rule, I didn’t like your paintings. All those I saw at Seewiang were too enraged and sometimes too sad. You’re someone sad. You were made in the mould of sadness and you’ll be sad like that all your life, even when you find yourself at the apex of the pyramid of ecstasy. Have I already told you you’re a recluse, and more of a recluse than a moronic artist? A recluse – yes, my creditor was a recluse, in the literal meaning of the term actually, and besides, put to the test innumerable times by women’s beauty and seduction like all authentic recluses. Maybe because some hidden gift in you gave you charm, an apparently forever-imperturbable self-assurance, whatever turmoil it concealed, including as well your indifference to those skirts, the indifference of a rugged, desiccated and denuded mountain that turned them crazy about you, so that some of them showed their interest ostensibly. Deep down you were anxious, and of that anxiety you’d told me in a moment of total confession, and I’d been astonished that in spite of your reputation as a lady-killer, you were essentially nothing but a wimp. I don’t want to talk about God. I don’t want to talk about goodness. But why do I have to talk of these things in spite of myself? Or is it because I talk with you in the meek and delirious way I’m used to? You didn’t get involved with good women because good women meant responsibilities and, inasmuch as you weren’t ready to face up to your responsibilities, you didn’t fool around with good women. When you said no, you meant no. Or else was it because you were a good-looking fellow, even if a rather filthy one? Women who can’t control themselves, there are loads of, as university is a high school for children who have finished high school, that’s all, and it was that sort of birds that were after you openly. The times change quickly. Women these days are more at liberty to express themselves, which makes them all the more vulnerable. Dead is the slave at the oven and so is the very proper lady. Many a time did I hear many a woman say that if you only cut your hair and dressed as befits a gentleman, you’d be like a prince in a dream. Try as I might, I couldn’t see how, were you to act like that, you wouldn’t look awkward and in the way. Obviously it wasn’t something to do, even in one’s mind, as if one tried to have King Naresuan55 wear a tuxedo or James Dean a Raj pattern56. Your slovenly appearance fitted your good looks to a T. With that slovenly appearance of yours, you had a luminous mind; you were so to speak ‘a nicens little boy’, a teenage Stephen Dedalus. You were a dream little prince with shining white teeth, as you brushed your teeth with table salt. You stated that salt is the best toothpaste in the world. You were a dream little prince that wore no briefs. You claimed that great men such as Socrates didn’t wear briefs and neither did Jesus and neither did Confucius. Julius Cesar and Hannibal had proved their worth as warriors without wearing briefs. So you couldn’t see why you should wear any. Your brief on briefs had taken many people aback and strongly influenced Doam Wuthichai, Somphong Thawee and Thanit Sukkaseim. You were one of my creditors. I have no intention to show you respect. I hate you. If I sometimes say something positive about you, it’s only part of reality. You’re not Dr Johnson and I’m no Boswell of yours. You’re not Darwin and I’m no Huxley, who made as if he was Darwin’s bulldog. For sure, I’m not forgetting we spent together many wild hours in many places many times on many occasions, travelling on a whim, that is to say without a compass or any specific destination. We talked of gypsy wanderings, of bohemian life. As for me, I took that seriously, but for you it was no doubt but a whim or you only saw it as an interesting way of spending your life. Since I’d heard about you and since I knew you personally, you’d kept bunking off. You were absent over long periods. You travelled left and right thanks to the money you earned by undertaking vari
ous odd jobs, such as sketching portraits in the street, which sometimes landed you lots of orders and sometimes just enough to buy food. Nothing of your past was known. You had no guardian to worry about. You were free and answered your needs by yourself. I met you at the U and had really no idea of who you were. You had several tens of thousands of baht deposited in a bank. I don’t know how much exactly, but certainly more than thirty thousand. You kept in mind what you earned and what you spent, disbursed advisedly and carefully. I despised you for the importance you attached to money, but when I learned you were looking for a place where to take roots, I was dismayed and felt guilty like a lamp choking on oil. Vanished by my fault, the house and piece of land you had told me about and I could almost touch by merely stretching out my arm – a small house that would be perhaps a bamboo hut, a small piece of land of ten or fifteen rai, in the jungle, on a mountain, anywhere, so long as it was close to a water source, as water was essential to a programme of mixed agriculture such as yours, which would have a rice field, fields, an orchard, flowerbeds, stables, a henhouse, an organic fuel compost unit and even sheds to treat manure and slurry. The first time you talked to me of this sort of thing, I merely looked at you to make sure you weren’t daydreaming, but when I knew you better, I was alarmed at your determination. Among books on art, literature, travel, religion and the most progressive political weeklies, there were also bloody manuals of agriculture – how to graft rosebushes, plant anthuriums, rear bees, produce fuel out of animal dejections, make fertiliser by maceration and even how to prime soil. You were bulimic for knowledge. You pushed back the limits of your thirst for knowledge in all directions and all you knew you meant to know in depth. Everything you did at the time made me furious or distracted, moved and confused, to the point that when my brain got impregnated with all you were doing and saying, I thought I’d become irremediably mad and find myself cut off from the world of reality forever, holder of the unique privilege of a terminal short-circuit of neurones. If one is to risk a comparison, you were like a colossus who kept growing up and prevented me from seeing the horizon. You were lumbering, but a colossus still. I started to catch you out and to contradict you occasionally. I derided you behind your back as well as to your face. But you never retaliated, not even once. The fire of my envy transformed itself into jealousy that brooded, glowered and threw increasingly brassy sparks as days went by, but I never let any of this show. I was ashamed to be jealous and was well aware it was a negative feeling. Nevertheless, that jealousy tortured me, in particular during the brief period when Darreit came to live with me at Seewiang and made no secret of how attractive she found you. When she was in your presence, it was as if I didn’t exist, and she was often hanging around in your room, displacing your paintings to look at them, rummaging about your books to borrow some, asking you what you thought about this or that and believing and swallowing whole anything you told her with the stupidity of an animal under the yoke. And when she disagreed with me on some point, she went to consult with you and she went as far as asking you to do her portrait, because you’re a gentle man and, deep down, you have a limpid sense of humour and are candid like a child. You’re a man born to love women and to be loved by women, but when I showed irritation at your excessive intimacy with her, you changed your attitude. In this change of attitude, at first there was alarm and embarrassment, admixed later with a touch of utterly discreet derision. I hate you and everything I do now is to compel you to hate me too, even though it’s practically impossible: given what you are, it’s like compelling a standing stone to roar. If we ever meet again, I might do it, even if I have to provoke you so that you kill me, so that you savour the unbearable taste of the sinner’s condition, of what a murderer endures. I’ll die, sure, but happy to know that, demented and befuddled, you’re struggling blindly in this hectic and twisted world. I might really do it. Don’t forget I haven’t really decided yet whether I’ll kill myself tonight. I’m not trying to think about it seriously so as to come to a conclusion of some kind. You and me… The relationship between you and me… Even your shadow is denser than the essence of my self. You didn’t think only of taking roots and leading a simple, quiet life: you also dreamed of travelling the world. Of the magazines you possessed, National Geographic was the one with the most issues, which you read, it seemed, more often than you did the others, and besides you bought as many back issues as you could find in second-hand booksellers’ stands. You dreamed of hitchhiking around Europe and in America. You had several books written by veteran hitchhikers. When you read these kinds of stories or when you spoke of stories of this kind, you had a funny look, as if you couldn’t hold still but forced yourself to keep quiet and, soon after, you disappeared for a while with your beloved shoulder bag and tough tent. You told me worriedly, in a voice so low it sounded like a whisper as if to confess a damning inferiority complex you’d kept secret all your life, that the wind of the hot season always made you feel restless. Beginning with the Indian almond tree leaves turning dark red and finally falling before young leaves took over; the profuse blooming of tabebuia trees; the appearance of quirky and colourful kites in the sky; the shower of mango tree flowers spreading white velvet over the streets of provincial towns – all of that made you feel like an eagle in a cage looking at the other eagles flying in liberty. Your heart drifted all the way to the bookstands on the quays of the Seine in Paris where you would’ve loved to show yourself as a dreamer with great imagination, a place where the chilly fogs of the West forbid common mortals to come into close contact with one another. You felt like finding yourself in a dusky thoroughfare lined on both sides with picturesque buildings and dwellings crouching darkly in the darkness of a town that would be new to you. You felt like wallowing on the sand of a neglected beach where during the night your imagination would see flowers spring out of the sea and on the rumble of rocks a siren smooth her hair and chant alluring lyrics as man has never heard, or lie down by a camp fire on a biting cold peak from where in the daytime you’d see the clouds down below floating like hallucinations and at night the stars scintillate so near you could pick them up by stretching out your arm. One day you pulled travel books out of your stacks of books and said this one was Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, the story of the crossing of the Atlantic on a nine-pieces balsa raft; this one, The Ra Expeditions. Heyerdahl built a papyrus boat and sailed thousands of miles at sea to prove to the world Egyptians of the Antiquity were outstanding navigators and it was possible human civilisations had a common origin despite their being separated by oceans. And this one is Taiki. Kuno Nobble and Arnaud Dennick used a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to reach the Pacific coast and then head for Alaska and thus demonstrate that the Chinese of yore used junks to reach Central and South America. And this one is Saint Brendan. Timothy Severin built a boat with ox hides and ash wood and he left Holland and crossed the Atlantic up to Newfoundland, as Saint Brendan had done twelve hundred years earlier, several centuries before Christopher Columbus blundered upon America. Those books you’d read to surfeit and you gave them all to me as well as the map of Ferdinand Magellan’s first travel around the world. You had a crazy urge to put to sea. But your practical turn of mind compelled you to delay those dreams indefinitely. You kept restraining yourself, reminding yourself that in life one must take reality into account, and you endeavoured to save up as much as you could for your most earnest dream: the house and piece of land that at the time you had yet to buy. You said the house and land you were dreaming of would be an admittedly small-sized universe, but you had the satisfaction to tell yourself it’d be a universe in which you’d control everything. You’re a perfectionist. You’re a fascist. Sometimes, when things don’t go the way you want, you’re boiling mad and behave like a fascist, which is, I believe, what only some exacting editors, some composers and some geniuses allow themselves to be. Those tens of thousands of baht you had, how many rai would they buy? Ten rai? Fifteen? More? Somewhere, in some distant countryside, perhaps even in some jungl
e in the mountains – which at the time you didn’t specify, and as you hadn’t quite specified it, it was beautiful like everything that remains in the matrix of dreams. Water: all you asked for was that it be near a water source and for that water source to have water all year round so you could plant crops all year round. And once the land was acquired, the first thing you’d do would be build a hut with cheap materials, bamboo or mangrove or anything local. And once the hut was built, the roof would be of palm, elephant grass, reed or even climbing lily or a bamboo roof with strips right side up and right side down like farmers’ huts in the North. It’d be a hut not very big but clean and comfortable, which would provide protection from bad weather, and you wouldn’t allow the overall cost to exceed three thousand baht. You told me the basic concept of the dream hut was inspired by the huts so conducive to meditation of the monks of Suan Moak and Santhi Asoak57, though you were no full-fledged member of either community. You even allowed yourself to criticise Santhi Asoak in veiled terms by saying its members were too strict, to the point of being anti-natural, and you told me, in the subtle and impassive tone of the chess buff, what you were going to do so that your dream hut turned out sturdy, beautiful and cool. Since you’re well versed in interior decoration, I couldn’t help but approve and tell myself you were not off your rocker, as it’d be a dwelling under huge trees of various species, surrounded by potted decorative plants and clay water jars, with cows or goats with sonorous bells round their necks that you’d rear for their milk and for their dejections out of which you’d make cooking gas, with flocks of hens and flocks of ducks whose eggs you wouldn’t eat but could always gather to sell if need be, and flocks of bantam cocks you’d rear for their cock-a-doodle-dos. You were practically worrying ahead of time about those cocks’ amorous zeal. They not only covered their own hens but also those of fighting cocks, and Chinese hens and some grouse, and some of those bantams even went after hen pigeons. It’d be a dwelling that would blend with its original surroundings so that birds wouldn’t take fright, and such would be your hut, you who understood deeply the splendour of the black Taj Mahal in Shah Jehan’s dreams58. And you added that, as soon as you’d succeeded in drawing a decent subsistence from it, which would take you quite some time, you’d try to enlarge your domain and you’d create a natural park in which at the very least you’d rear stags no doubt, deer or roebucks and pheasants and hornbills and peacocks and rollers – animals that would live together without endangering each other, without endangering you and your crops. And you almost presented a petition to the government so that, first, it modified the antiquated law on the protection of wild animals in order to allow private sector participation; second, it stop altogether delivering permits of forest exploitation so that not a single tall tree be felled henceforth; and third, the basics of ecology be taught in the last year of primary or at the latest in the first year of secondary school. You were wild with rage and swore without restraint when you evoked the accelerated shrinkage of the share of forests in the total area of the country. And you got even hotter under the collar when you proclaimed that reforestation is a battle that must be engaged as fast as possible and carried out consistently, and you asserted that in the end it’d be preferable to order wood from abroad and we should forbid the importation of cars, clothes, beauty products, fruit and luxury products of all kinds. You kept repeating our forest was in crisis just as you used to keep repeating our society was doomed to unavoidable destruction, just as you used to keep repeating we were faced with spiritual bankruptcy. I forced myself to listen to you speak. I forced myself to listen to your silences. I was younger than you were; I was more stupid than you were. You were a colossus that kept growing; I was a dwarf that kept shrinking. I couldn’t help comparing myself to you. I was lambda. I didn’t restrain myself. At times I thought of fleeing, of finding myself another room elsewhere, of no longer talking with you when we met at the U or anywhere else, as it made me worry about my own stupidity, thus feeding an inferiority complex whose burden I found increasingly hard to bear, so that your culture and brilliant intellect would no longer impress me. But I was just a plaything of events. I’d been knifed. Searing pain had shot up from the wound and irradiated my entire body. And what had I obtained in exchange? A haunted knife that’s the symbol of raving madness and indebtedness, which have no other effect than reducing man to the level of animal or quasi-animal that knows nothing but worry. And you, my creditor, you had lost some of your money because of me. Your fabulous plans collapsed all of a sudden. You forced yourself to continue to attend lectures, full of bitterness. At the end of the term, you passed by a whisker. As for my results, they were at their lowest, but we still went everywhere together as before. We were always each other’s shadows. I walked behind you. I had become your de facto follower. I was a weed that grew in your shade. But enough is enough. I no longer feel indebted to you. Thinking about it all again now, I’m sorry to have made friends with you and to have associated with you for too long. Let me put it plainly: I was too sincere. For me, friendship is something that matters. You were very happy when you spoke of Suan Moak and Phutthathart and Narkharratchun and Arrayatheip and Krishnamurti and EF Schumacher. Besides, you were also interested in Tibetan mysticism. It’s through you I heard for the first time of Tibetan mystics such as Chögyam Trungpa, Fitjob Kappra or Lobsang Rampa, and you knew all sorts of anecdotes about the dalai-lama. Dalai-lama apart, all those names filled me with perplexity and I was utterly incapable of guessing the nationality of those that bore them. And when you said of the bizarre creeds and rites of the Tibetans that it was one of the heights of human wisdom, I didn’t agree at all and much time elapsed before I was ready to delve into their works. It was an era of totally confused spiritual search, even though Suan Moak had yet to become Disneyland and nirvana wasn’t yet in fashion among the new generation, with the exception of the few oddballs of the Buddhist association at the U. It all sounded like a fairy tale, especially when you devoutly sang the praises of Krishnamurti, one of the great teachers of the world and a spiritual master of such outstanding reach, given that you kept sleeping with woman after woman and time after time as if you wanted to purify your sexual appetite and many a time came back dead drunk in the dead of night once you were through with your ‘pathetic chores’, that is to say freelance portraits in the street or in some scruffy bar or the lobby of some rundown hotel. Dead drunk or half drunk, yet the more alcohol in your veins the more lively and gay you were. Your melancholy and taciturnity slipped out, and such indeed is the power of drink, that mood-altering liquid that truly alters the man whose thirst it quenches, and you were no exception. And I remember the wild life, the wandering life, the life always on the move. During the hot season vacation full of events that year, three or four of your friends in senior years who dedicated their lives to art absolutely and dedicated their art to society absolutely invited you to go for character-building by doing heavy work and thus better appreciating the tough condition of workers and farmers, a good training to accede to the status of ‘new youth’ according to the Maoist ideal. You figured that was a pretty good programme and invited me to join it as well, as at the very least we’d leave Bangkok behind for a while. During the hot season I didn’t know where to go. I took pen to paper to bluff Daen by pretending I’d signed in on a holiday course in order to avoid him beseeching me to go back to his place in the military camp in the South until the new term began. And when I received the monthly money order, I divided the amount into two equal parts, one for you, one for me, thus acquitting myself of part of my debt to you. Then we each slipped our belongings in a bag, looking like overgrown children. You took me to Tha Phra Jan59 and a long-tailed boat, whose deafening roar annoyed riverside residents and excited foreign tourists, took us right up to Bua Yai district in Nonthaburi province. From there, we went deep into a grid pattern of orchards, fields and rice fields where you guided me with the ease of someone familiar with the grounds and sometimes you stopped to greet a vi
llager as if you lived around there. Then we floated alongside a durian orchard, a mango orchard, a flower garden with discrete countryside dwellings here and there, almost all of which required boats to travel about, and eventually we reached the shallow irrigation ditch of a neglected orchard covered with wild grass, creepers and coral trees. There stood a derelict hut where three friends of yours already were. One of the three was a musician of some renown in university circles who composed politically committed songs and played several instruments, with a predilection for the Indian lute. Another was a journalist on a hot season break who could stay with us for only seven days. He was a cheery fellow who liked to speak his mind. On whatever topic of conversation, he always managed to tear the government to pieces with caustic humour. He was the owner of the piece of land, and his house, an old Thai-style dwelling so big it might well have been thought haunted, stood some five hundred yards away from there. Even though he could stay with us only for seven days, he promised to come and see us as often as his work allowed. The third fellow was a painter like you, reserved and a fervent disciple of Krishnamurti. He’d just left the monkhood and his hair had yet to completely grow back. That fellow had the obvious idiosyncrasies of the mystic, as I’d meet so many others afterwards. But at the time I was too innocent to know what he thought and believed or even if he thought and believed anything. You always had plenty to talk about with him in particular, as he behaved like a defrocked monk who didn’t have to go alms begging to feed himself, slept in a hut, looked after his flower garden and his bees in Lampang, and drew and painted what took his fancy without worrying over whether it’d sell or not. I came to believe myself in a heavenly cenacle, like Kamanita as a young man among the ambassadors on their way to Kosampi. From the very first day I arrived there, an ambiguous atmosphere prevailed. It was an atmosphere which hesitated between equal doses of rest and frenzied work. We all set about repairing the bamboo hut and its nipa-palm roof, building a bamboo platform, digging a cesspool and draining the irrigation canal. We’d brought loads of books. We played the guitar and sang politically committed songs. We turned the buttons of the wireless to listen to the broadcasts of the clandestine radio of the Communist Party of Thailand and Radio Peking. At the time the ‘firebirds’ of the jungle weren’t back in town yet. The revolution was racing ahead at full hope. The Communist Party of Thailand was growing as never before. The strategy of ‘surrounding towns from the countryside’ (in CPT parlance) was bringing the hour of victory closer. Mao Zedong’s little red book was forbidden, and because it was forbidden it was easy to get and we read it at night by the light of a roaring camp fire as if it were a sacred book (it was forbidden to pronounce Mao Zedong’s name without showing respect) after a day of physical labour and the official session of recreation in the early evening. We still found the time to lie down and look at the sky at night. It was there I learned to play ‘Under faith’s starlight’ on the harmonica, which our musician companion taught me. It was there you allowed yourself to enjoy happiness and showed a trait you’d never really shown before, as a valiant knight without equal in oratorical jousts. There were tense and sincere discussions on topics regarding society, politics and economics which I merely listened to, as I didn’t have enough knowledge to express an opinion and was too intimidated to even ask a question. At the end of seven days, the journalist left and in the following two weeks the defrocked monk said he was worried about his bees and his flowers and he politely requested permission to return to Lampang and, some ten days later, the musician left, as his wife had come to fetch him while he was groping for a new manner of song, which he found over there and it turned out the song he completed was a success later on thanks to a band of soap-bubble singers who didn’t have a clue the lyrics had been written for the purpose of waking up society from its slumber so that the era of oppression would come to an end. The two of us found ourselves alone. We still worked as hard, busy draining the irrigation canal, weeding and clearing the undergrowth, felling the coral trees and pulling up their stumps. You were stronger than I, as you exercised by practising yoga regularly and furthermore you were more industrious than I was. You’re someone, I’m certain, who’ll never let yourself go to idleness and, wherever your cogitations may lead you, one thing you venerate is hard work. It was at that time you let your basic natural gaiety appear fully by singing plaintive local songs at the top of your voice, and you quoted to me Gorky’s formula according to which only gay tribes sing. You told me how impressed you were with the loads of books you’d read and the lots of films you’d seen and you took tentative dance steps imitating the old milk seller in The Fiddler on the Roof and you made as if to veil your face with your shirttail in the manner of Omar Sharif in the scene where he appears for the first time in Lawrence of Arabia, and you said of The Wild Pack, which I’ve never seen, adapted from Jorge Amado’s novel, that it was a bloody provocative film, and you spoke of Père Bienvenu in Les Misérables and of Kalo in He Who Rides the Tiger, of a horse in Zola’s Germinal and of a dog in Homer’s Odysseus, and also of many other books I should read and many other films I should see. You sketched a lot during that period and you went at it practically as soon as you had some spare time – drawings of fields cracked by drought as far as the eye could see under a cold sky of cruel nakedness; there were carcasses of cows and buffalos lying around; there were grains of rice and grains of plants which endured strewn over the ground with sticks of dead wood sticking out here and there; there were dejected crows on twisted branches; a drawing of a ragged pauper sleeping in a bundle at Hua Lampong station in dirty moonlight; a drawing of a beggar and his scratchy old violin made out of a milk can and his battered begging bowl, his head lowered under an all-patched-up woven hat; a drawing of an over-the-hill prostitute sitting with her back against a bedroom wall, her sarong with faded flowery patterns knotted under her armpits, a cigarette between her fingers, a few months’ pregnant, gazing into space aimlessly; a drawing of a trishaw driver in a provincial town waiting in front of a cinema for the end of the midnight show; portraits of Gorky, Ostrovsky, Lu Xun, Che Guevara and Jit Phoomisak. But no self-portrait, no beautiful landscape, though the landscape over there was beautiful. Over there the waterways reached every nook and cranny of every orchard. In the morning, flower sellers paddled their boats heaped with flowers to the gunwales looking like so many giant moving vases to go meet the middlemen who’d convey them in turn to the Pak Khlong market in the heart of Bangkok. They were mostly roses, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, Transvaal daisies and asters. In all your drawings, the message was more important than the treatment. You read the communiqués of the communist party and went as far as tackling Das Kapital, as you were more at ease than I in English, given your experience as itinerant portrait artist in the hotels and street corners around Sukhumvit and Hua Lampong, at the Grace Hotel, the Malaysia Hotel and even the guesthouses of Bang Lamphoo where young westerners gathered, whom you mixed with to the point of practically looking like them. But Marx, Lenin, Mao or Chou weren’t quite my cup of tea and, everything considered, I was far too stupid to appreciate their genius. I understood more or less the genius of a Tolstoy or of a Gandhi, but to speak of Tolstoy or Gandhi to students who only swore by the revolution earned me funny looks as if I’d come to the wrong place, and I did my best not to pay attention to it. If I had a smattering of political consciousness, it was rather because I’d read works illustrated with pictures on the events of October 14 and October 6 printed and sold illicitly. They’d made me feel the impropriety, the injustice, even the terrible cruelty of what the state had done to those whose opinions were objectively different, but political theory or political economy only made me feel dizzy. I wasn’t a part of the historical era of contestation. One could almost say that, to me, it was an inferiority complex to have been born a man; I had not the least remarkable feat to my credit. During the October 14 events, I was still with my gang of temple-boy friends, all of us spaced out in hashish fumes. At the time, I was in the fi
rst year of high school, a true tearaway who could have turned into a hoodlum or even a hired killer. During the October 6 events three years later, I was finishing high school in the South and too stupid to understand the true meaning of freedom and democracy. The scenes that had filtered onto television screens thanks to Sapsiri Wiriyasiri’s talent had terrified me and I knew instinctively it was pure cruelty, but that was nothing but a humanitarian feeling. You couldn’t compel me to be the same as you. And, if truth be told, very few of the politically committed songs you insisted on singing all day long could be qualified as songs. As for innovative literature and all that jazz, I came to realise later that in most cases it was so superficial and repetitive as to be dead boring. It was sheep following one another around more than anything else. Furthermore, I’d never yet been part of the crowd of democratic patriots, be it to demonstrate somewhere or to protest against whatever. Furthermore, none of my friends had ever gone underground to fight in order to liberate the Thai masses. Furthermore, I wasn’t up to using leftist formulas that make whoever utters them sound far too bigheaded. Everything considered, I was too inferior for someone like you to care about me, and that you lowered yourself to associate with someone like me was a signal favour. No, it hadn’t reached the stage where I reacted against you or against those who thought and felt like you or against your friends, but if I didn’t dare to show any reaction, it was because I was pusillanimous. Whenever I saw former revolutionaries or former militants anywhere, I made myself as small as possible and, no matter what they did, even grope women, even practise partner swapping, all of that deserved respect and praise. Don’t think I’m being sarcastic or scornful. Being revolutionaries, being militants who fought for society gave them a brilliant aura. It was truly what I felt and it translated into respect and veneration, and what I always did was to go and crawl at their feet and entrust myself to them. It was much later, much later indeed, that I learned to salute with my feet, and much later still that I understood that among justice lovers there are also sons of bitches who love justice.
The White Shadow Page 17