The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  Morality has been raped time and time again. I’m not a moralist, I keep scorning morality, but morality has gone to pieces anyway. Everything that’s happened is too much. It’s unbearable. What can you do? What can I do? I have the advantage of being a man and I’m indifferent to everything now. Enough of that – enough of the shame of having committed a sexual sin. I’d like to be a sublime rapist. I remember you used to say love is of the angel but sex is of the beast. The sublime rapist, if he is a tad romantic, is able to turn a rape into a frantic and fanciful fornication. All sublime rapists are romantic rapists. All sublime rapists are sublime lovers. The sublime lover, what’s the best definition? A man who accepts to sleep with the same woman no more than three times? Three times, is that too few? Seven times, then? Nine times? Playboys in ancient Rome, Nero and Caligula. (Camus’s Caligula, you’d told me you’d bring it for me to read, but you never did.) The sexual decadence of the Romans, the sexual decadence of the Greeks, the sexual decadence of the Chinese, of the Indians, of the Europeans, of the Thais, the sexual decadence of each nation and of each culture: one could easily write a book about this. Is it really certain that sexual decadence is indicative of the disintegration of each nation and each culture? Why is the way man copulates so complicated and varied compared to that of the other mammals and other living beings? Why are animals in a state of sexual arousal said to be in rut or in heat while our sexual urges are called love or desire? How is it that among primates, Homo sapiens is the species with the biggest sexual organ and the only one able to reproduce without taking seasons into account? Is this a reward from nature or what? Are bulls, buffaloes and male elephants sexually excited when they look at the mouths, eyes, chests, haunches of their females? The female of all mammals has udders exclusively to feed its young, but the udders of the female of the human race are also targets of sexual desire. O you non-persons, you would be better off placing your life-bestowing organ into a burning oven than in the yoni of the female, you would be better off slipping your life-bestowing organ in the mouth of a venomous snake than in the yoni of the female. Thus spoke the Buddha to mendicant monks caught in sexual congress. I don’t know much about Buddhists, but the Buddha is great. I know very well he’s great. I admire him as a great man. But I don’t like monks all that much. Maybe I’d like them a little better if they produced something with their own hands. Gandhi scrupulously respected the celibacy vow of the Brahmans. Gandhi is another great man I admire and he is truly great, as much as the Buddha. He contained himself to the end. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, said William Blake. Sex seen through the eyes of a saint is something disgusting, obviously a bestial activity, but it’s bloody fragrant and a source of indescribable happiness and felicity. I’ve experienced happiness in many forms and on many occasions, but when I try to measure the size and volume and quality of those experiences, it so happens that those that gave me the most happiness were when I slept with a woman, not when I followed the precepts or tried out opium, marijuana, heroin, philosophy, arts, music, literature and all that bullshit. Before taking the cloth, how many women did the Buddha sleep with? Try and count them. And did he never get one pregnant besides Yasodhra, his wife? As a prince, it was incumbent on him to procreate several other little princesses. Rahul probably wasn’t the only flesh of his flesh. And his progeny born of his numerous concubines must still have descendants in northern India or in Nepal, just like Confucius’s descendants, who exist even now. Don’t go and think this is a question raised by a heretic. It’s a matter of historical interest, rather, a matter pertaining to human sciences. In any case, sex is something wonderful and well worth being practised. But the Buddha rejected it while still in the prime of life. Was it that he could no longer perform? That would be the suspicion of an individual with a vile heart. He rejected the world of pleasures of all kinds as he knew there were more sublime, more delicate, more subtle and deeper things, and it was towards those things he turned, and it was compulsory for him to reject his former way of life. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about him, especially when I read the Tripitaka while trying to see through the fog of illusion. I know. He’s truly great. I’m merely trying to see him in a realistic way. I’m not at all presumptuous. But sometimes I happen to think about the origins of the chastity belt and the condom. These are very important stages, you know, in the history of mankind. As a woman, don’t you think of the chastity belt with bitterness? No need to look like an ogress with boiling water in her mouth. Suppose you never met me: I’d like to introduce myself as a lewd man intent on ribaldry and as a most casual nincompoop, but you wouldn’t love me if I introduced myself like that. That’s why I was polite and tender with you. I set my trap little by little, decorated it with creepers and flowers and cunningly had you stroll along a pleasant path up to the trap and thus achieved my ends. You are a woman. You must assume your condition as a woman. You must have menses, you must sleep with a man, you must get pregnant and you must rear children. All that is disgusting and terrifying. I couldn’t do it and I’d rather kill myself than have to submit to it. May the devils come to my help had I to sleep with a man and raise a child and, wanting no child, be taken to have an abortion. But for all my making you suffer, for all my making you cry, you keep worrying about me and helping me as much as you can, as if you remembered nothing at all. Kangsadarn Sakarwarat, professional saint. Kangsadarn Sakarwarat, ignored humanist. How can you be so stupid and so good? How much is it I owe you by the way? I’ll probably resume for good my journey without aim and I won’t go back to see you. If I meet you in Bangkok or wherever by chance, it’ll be no doubt as an amnesic, but you’ll have resigned yourself to it. Every time you gave me money, you knew it was impossible for me to ever reimburse you. Tell me, have I ever reimbursed you, be it only a little? How wrong! Acting like that isn’t clever. A debtor must always reimburse at least a part of his debt to put his creditor at ease. But even though I’ve never reimbursed you, for all the three months I’ve been here you’ve kept writing to me and sending me tapes, sending me money, sending me books. In your letters, you lecture me, you encourage me cautiously so that I’m strong enough to keep on living. Why don’t you do something really rotten to me? Enough, I say, of your oh so courteous, so sweet solicitude! It makes me puke. Do you intend to become a saint or what? That’s totally passé, you know, Kangsadarn. Never seeing each other again would be better, or else living together forever. What do you expect of the man you’ll entrust with your life and your heart? Love? Comfort? Financial security? Sexual gratification? Is there something else beyond that? Have you ever made a list of your needs? But everything considered, what is it I could give you? And if I were truly able to give you what you expect, would you accept it? Or is it you are angry with me? But that doesn’t mean you’ve already forgiven me. Or is it you are suspicious of men, that men disgust you and you intend to remain single all your life? Or that your lover is a woman? Are there cow elephants that make eyes to other cow elephants? Are there bull whales that come on to other bull whales? Of all living beings, is there only the human race that has the possibility to taste of the pleasures of homosexuality? Do other animals know sexual inversion? Nature is wonderful and full of pure goodness as it allows men to find sexual happiness with other men, just as it allows women to find sexual happiness with other women. Ah, here I am again provoking you, but I’m sure you know I’m only making fun, and mean no harm. Making fun, that’s what peels the romantic skin after skin like you peel an onion. But what is it I’m talking about exactly? Love and marriage, right? Oh, goodness gracious, I’m not competent enough to talk about such rich and deep subjects as those. In that case, what business is it of mine to talk about them? Maybe because of my dread of suicide. If someone is obsessed with the idea of killing himself, any sane psychiatrist will suggest he try to be joyful and not stay alone, and if we don’t want to stay alone, why not get married – statistics show that many more singles commit suicide than married people do. Once marri
ed, one endures living on, even when one’s life is so lousy it might be better to kill oneself for good. Life as a couple! May life as a couple go to hell! They may fool themselves day after day with their Gee, how happy we are! When you know how to fool yourself, life can be very pleasant. Fooling oneself is an art in itself. Fooling others is no art at all, but a base instinct of man’s and, as such, something that can’t be changed, and actually, I can’t see why anything should be changed. Up to the very last one of us we are too weak to accept the truth, and the more it goes the weaker we are. Lies pile up like grime on the skin of a little slob. The more complex civilisation becomes, the more man is compelled to lie. I’d like to be a caveman. Look at my face. My face is the face of a caveman with a toothache. I don’t want to kill myself yet. That’s why I’d like to marry you and I was crazy enough to ask you to marry me. And it was a process that required courage, you know. You told me I was talking nonsense. You refused point-blank. Furthermore, you got angry with me. You knew I’d be afraid of you if you were angry and I was really afraid. I wasn’t pretending. You were never angry without reason. But I wanted you truly, you know. You were my only, my last refuge. Didn’t you realise the state I was in? You had already met someone like that, hadn’t you? Someone wounded, someone desperate, someone whose life was full of mistakes, someone every aspect of whose identity was covered with wounds so sore you wouldn’t have touched him without him groaning. Had you never found yourself in such a state or in a similar state? When I spoke of my strong suicidal tendencies, you laughed, claimed I was joking and said that if I did die for good, you’d organise my funeral, which made me look at you with contempt. When we became closer, you asked me about my childhood, about the place where I was born, about my parents. You wanted to know how I’d grown up, according to which heredity and in which environment. Those questions, I knew they’d be asked of me. Sooner or later, they’d be asked of me. I tried to fudge the issue, so that eventually you gave up trying to know. You are too polite to pressure anyone. And when we were already intimate, it was then we started to take our distances from each other again. I did nothing but mess around with friends and women. When you were free, you went to read in the library or else practise the piano. You were learning music as an option and you also gave private tuition in the evening. We became intimate only after I was knifed, at a time when I was completely panic-stricken. That experience had an enormous influence on my life. I was scared. I worried myself sick. A mouse pulling the cab where a cat sits would be much happier than I was. I even avoided talking to you. Women always cause you problems. That’s what I kept repeating to control myself. But without much success, as you know. You took me to the Soviet Souvenirs shop on Soi Asoke to buy books by Soviet writers and look for various souvenirs, postcards, Russian dolls, and beautiful, carefully produced art books. They weren’t expensive compared with books coming from the United States, Japan or Europe. You had a phonograph. You frequently bought records there. Later on, it was a shop I went to often, even when it moved to Siam Square. Already at the time, a great many books by Soviet writers were available as they had been translated into Thai by now defunct translators such as Jit Phoomisak, Seeboorapha and Arsa Khojitmeit as well as by translators still alive such as Taweephaworn, Sitthichai Saengkrajang, Udorn Tharppano-sot and Makut Aruedee. So you read a whole slew of books by Soviet authors. And it was you who told me jokingly to be careful not to be the victim of propaganda, hey, comrade. We each wanted to get the works of Yuri Kasakov and we agreed that He and You in December and The Blue and the Green were superb romantic stories. I’m not sure I’d still like them if I read them again. To me, most Soviet writers are boring. The writers of the old generations wrote oppressing works and those of the current generation no longer dare curse society or analyse it. Some are nothing but poor-quality mouthpieces for the party; some who still have some sense of shame have turned to love stories and childhood memories – cheap tearjerkers. Russia has produced many worldimportant individuals but I don’t like Russian writers very much. I’m as much impressed with Russian composers as I’m irritated or bored by Russian thinkers and writers. Even if she had only Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky, Russia would have the reputation of having given the world a first-rate progeny. To give the world a first-rate progeny is the highest duty of each people, just as the highest duty of each family is to give the race a first-rate progeny. That’s why I’d like to marry you, with no need for Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov or Turgenev. I don’t like to speak on all these big topics, but I like Stravinsky’s music very much. If Rimsky-Korsakov had been a writer, his style would no doubt have been oppressing and compulsive like Dostoevsky’s. His Scheherazade is damn beautiful, damn melancholy, and yet damn boring. It’s a stream limpid like a crystal tear fallen from paradise, but a damn boring one. Stravinsky had a go at a new mode of expression. The mode of expression is as important as the idea or emotion one wants to express. You had me read a biography of Nijinsky. Nijinsky was half-crazy and his thinking was close to Dostoevsky’s. If he danced the way Dostoevsky writes, how lucky I am to know nothing about ballet! I jeered, with the provoking tone of a hoodlum. That’s because I despise melodrama; I hate for anyone to stir emotions wilfully. But you know perfectly well I’m very weak and delicate, yet patient enough to have read several books by Dostoevsky. Prince Myshkin tried to act like Jesus Christ, don’t you think? Nijinsky was gung ho about that character and tried to behave like Jesus Christ. He was the kind to try to follow a great man in his tracks and to behave as if there was only one great man in the world, namely Jesus Christ. The missionaries, same thing. Why is it I’ve met this sort of people often, as if they were under orders from God? A priest of the Roman catholic church actually told me that much, as he thought I was almost crazy and he said it was God who’d sent him to me to help me find the way to spiritual salvation, and he pressed me, beseeched me, practically ordered me to change religions. I told him I have no religion. He told me Perfect. In that case, I’m asking you to be a catholic. I got away but he followed me while keeping rehashing all kinds of arguments. I told him that if I were a Buddhist I’d have on my back the sins of my former existences and if I were a Christian on top of that I’d be a sinner from birth. So, like that, no need to do sweet fuck all: only thing left would be spending one’s life feeling guilty. I am not a Buddhist that loves and is jealous of his religion to the point of trying to protect it against aggression. If one day I start to chase away missionaries, it’ll be only because they get on my nerves. They act as though, in those countries where the Christian religions are well established, everybody has found the way to spiritual salvation, there are no more frauds, there are no sexual perversions and other crimes any more. All those that have a religion, whatever it is, are extremely proud that their religion is contributing to shoring up the world and bringing peace to mankind. It’s untrue: if man doesn’t dare to do evil, it’s rather because he fears the law; it’s not because of his conscience. Jail and execution post are whips good for man. Man is an animal that needs to be threatened or to be led by whip or chains permanently. Hell is a cheap whip and a useless chain. Paradise is just a dessert that tries to change recipes often to keep in fashion. Though you disliked my nonconformist ideas, you liked to listen to them nevertheless. I liked to provoke you and put you in a bad mood. But all in all, I didn’t dare all that much with you, or I looked daring whereas in fact I was more cowardly than a mouse. Since the stabbing, I no longer had any self-confidence. It was much later that I dared to whistle or sing or laugh aloud. It was much later that I recovered my self-confidence. My second year at the U was hard because I had to use part of the money I received each month to reimburse my debt. My studies suffered from it. If I wasn’t able to improve my general average, I could expect to be kicked out of the university. I came to realise I didn’t like Bangkok at all. I wanted a town with beautiful roads where to stroll, I wanted canals with clean waters, but all corners were bu
t pollution for the ear, polluted waters, polluted air, and those fucking skyscrapers were pollution for the eye. On weekends I would manage to spend some time somewhere else, sometimes only in Amphawa or Chachoengsao, or sometimes only at the Samut Prakan estuary. Large cities aren’t friendly. Bangkok is that kind of city. Those people able to stay there year in and year out are really smart. I left Seewiang for Chainarm because the rent was lower. Nart had already left the university. The circle under the pines had become the shadow of itself since the Old Lion had left for the United States. I was afraid, as you were getting increasingly close to me.