The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  Even though it was a closeness between friends which you made it clear wouldn’t change into something else, in spite of that I was afraid. I was embarrassed as well. I had hardly any pocket money. My rented room was dirty and cramped and sometimes you deemed it to be your duty to clean it and put things away. You visited my room as Mother Teresa visits slums. You cleaned it and put it in order not because you were under my charm but because you couldn’t help wrinkling your nose at dirt and disorder. When I was broke, I shut myself up in there, wanted to see no-one, merely drank water. When I was dying for a fag, I gathered the butts in the ashtray and smoked that. Actually, I wasn’t at all pleased to be in debt and I struggled to try to find a job. When I mentioned it to you, you found me private tuition after the lectures at the U to the level of one hour per day, five days a week, to teach students in the first year of secondary at Sarthit, the school attached to the university. Teaching the offspring of the rich, what a rotten chore! Learning was the least of their worries. You too gave private tuition in the evening after lectures and on Saturday and Sunday mornings as well. I soon gave up. I told you I was utterly fed up. You reproached me for my lack of patience, but when I asked you bluntly to treat me to lunch, you never objected. I didn’t want to sponge but it was hard for me to do otherwise. I was determined to study myself stiff, but it was like all of my other resolutions: my determination didn’t last. In class, I mostly managed to sit by the window at the back of the room and I lost myself in some daydream while scribbling what I called poems. I posed as a fellow fed up with lectures, which was an attitude that deserved slaps in the face. I don’t like the U, no more than I like Bangkok. At first, you weren’t particularly interested in me. You acted properly, knew how to keep your distance. I too did my utmost not to be interested in you. Given that I often asked you to buy me lunch, some of my friends didn’t fail to snigger that it was an original way of courting. Not at all. I was really hard-up. Every time I found myself without a penny, I did everything to avoid you and you were sincerely worried on my behalf. At the end of my tether, I went to see Nart Itsara to ask him to help me find a job and I did find something. They were odd jobs that didn’t require much intellectual effort. I was proofreader in a small printing shop, layout artist in an economic and political news magazine with a small circulation and uncertain periodicity that finally folded, photocopy overseer in the sports daily and sports magazine of a company, which was night work, and eventually market analyst, which was what is called a half-time. Each job lasted two months, three months. It was an era of great hardship, but it was a life full of events. In any case, it was better than now. It was a constant to and fro between hostel, workplace and university, where I often took a nap openly and publicly, but taking a nap or even sleeping officially on one of the benches under the pines held nothing new for passersby. Sometimes my poems were published and I went to brag to you about it and with the fifty or eighty baht the publication earned me I offered you a meal or an ice cream at the White Bridge, a quiet little restaurant crammed with books and green plants huddled against the university precinct. You looked more pleased than I did. You read out slowly in a low voice and complimented me, saying I had a gift and you wished you could write. Sometimes I arrived fully wound up, telling myself I was going to ask you if you loved me to know what’s what, but you always behaved as more of an adult than you were. When I found myself before you, my recklessness deserted me, which caused me to wilt further, especially when I had neither wad nor work, which compelled me to eat only two meals a day and smoke ten cigarettes a day before reducing food to one meal a day and cigarettes to five and eventually give up eating and smoking altogether. With luck, I was left with coffee dregs to rinse my mouth out. Sometimes my pals of the circle under the pines came to see me and gave me what they could. Thanit Sukkaseim bought himself every month a stock of three dozen sachets of instant noodles and I sometimes asked him to give me a few. Khampan Seenuea bought himself every month a bag of rice and was always ready to give me some, even if at times we had to make do with rice with fish sauce. I relied so much on these two to feed me that I was ashamed. But penury then was nothing compared to what followed. When I found myself penniless, I sought excuses not to attend lectures and contented myself with holding my own ribs on the little narrow bed without mattress in room number fifteen at Chainarm. It was a grotty hostel as far from sanitary perfection as hell is from heaven. It was located in one of those dilapidated districts that clash with the ostentation of Bangkok’s main arteries, a mangle of little slanted hovels huddled one against the other in a labyrinth of footpaths and alleys, but you managed to find the hostel and come to me. You forced me to go and scour myself from top to toe. Meanwhile you waited, sitting at my rickety desk. When I came back, you selected the cleanest outfit on the clothesline and handed it over to me – the unavoidable patched jeans and a t-shirt of doubtful colour. You looked the other way as I got dressed. You made a wry face in the presence of dust, the smell of cigarette smoke wafting from everywhere and the heavy air, which seemed it would hang still as soon as my old fan stopped. Now that you’d come once, there were other times. Once, when I asked you bluntly while you sat on the bed and I fastened my belt, Entering my room like this, aren’t you afraid I might pounce on you? you found this enormously funny. Just you try! you answered daringly. But would you dare do such a thing? you asked in a more serious tone after being silent for a while. Of course not, I answered just as frankly as I had asked the question.

  And I really felt I wouldn’t dare. I didn’t dare and I’d never dare. Then you took me to the ground-floor cafeteria, bought me some food, sat down and watched me eat like a mother watching her wayward son. Sometimes you spoke, asked questions or told some story. Your parents gave you enough pocket money each month and, with what you earned giving private tuition, you had enough to indulge your whims from time to time. You’d been giving private tuition since your first year at the U. You were a good student and you loved children. The children you tutored seemed all captivated by you. You had to go back to your parents’ every weekend. You loved your home. Your eyes shone behind your gold-rimmed glasses and you smiled sweetly when you spoke of your home and of your parents, of your three or four dogs, of your garden and of your orchard and of the parrot you were teaching to talk and of your blackbird so naughty. I had the impression of being familiar with those things before I had the opportunity of going to your house. They formed an almost ideal image of a happy and united family. You are one of the rare beautiful souls that remain in this world, like such species of extremely rare flower, like such species of extremely rare bird. You received a good education. You are someone with a noble mind, which quite naturally makes you old-fashioned. You are the kind of person who, as a child, is rewarded for her good behaviour, who, on the day of the homage to the teachers, is chosen to present the offering of flowers or who, on Maka Puja day, is chosen to present the answers to the rhetorical questions on dharma. And that was what made you quite naturally old-fashioned – old-fashioned, self-assured, sincere and desirable. Many a time have I looked at you as if you were a strange creature from another world. I’m still surprised about it when I look back. It was so long ago though, years and years ago. At the time we were still very young, hardly over twenty the both of us. Relatively precocious, indeed, but for all of our giving ourselves adult airs, we were mistaken in thinking of ourselves as adults. I entered your life and you entered my life. How exactly did that happen? Heck, it looks totally unlikely as it happened in a most ordinary way. Long ago, since our first year at the U, way back then. By greeting each other with a smile when we began to get used to seeing each other as we often entered class at the same time. By meeting often in the library. By exchanging banalities, which allowed conversation to grow little by little to the point of going for a coffee together at the White Bridge, exchanging books, talking and exchanging opinions at length. Oh, while I still lived with Darreit Waeojan, way back then, while I still was a lively young
man with a heart bigger than a fist and who’d never been afraid of anything until I became someone reserved, glum and dreamy and all of a sudden found myself a slave to melancholy after having had to spend seven or eight days in hospital. You probably noticed that change within me. I started to walk you back to the hostel. I started to call you up in the evening. I invited you to go and sit with me on the lawn in late afternoon after the private tuition you gave, under the century-old ixora bushes or at the foot of cotton plants or flames of the forest, gazing at the clouds, the falling leaves, the wilting flowers and the belly of the sky. Still fearful, I began to become a little bolder. Some started to say we were sweethearts. I love you, Kangsadarn. Forgive me. I can see you now but, each time, I see you alone in the room, crying. I see only the image of a melancholy young woman surrounded by the smoke of misfortune that keeps getting thicker. There are but laments you must hold back in your chest. There are but your body’s contortions in pain alone in the dark, which you let no one see. In my consciousness, your sobs are the sobs of a white swan and I come to forget you are someone gay and extremely lively. You wanted to go to Russia. One day, when you’d earned enough money, you’d take a trip to Russia, you said. Everybody wants to go to the States because we’ve been brainwashed by the Americans, you said with the impassive look of a specialist in a symposium. You spoke of the Moscow and Saint Petersburg of your dreams. You imagined the Russian peasants, demonstrations, riots, hussars’ exactions, Russian ascetics, wasted, gaunt, doleful. Those were visions nurtured by your readings on Russia, no doubt very far from reality, you admitted willingly. You very much liked the song ‘Somewhere my love’ in Dr Zhivago, which put me to torture because I liked it too. Whoever can remember the words of that song I want to marry. But at the time, I didn’t dare talk to you like this. I like neither book nor film, I told you. The novel is too long and deals with far too grandiose topics, I explained. Reading it, I had the feeling of having bought a twenty-baht ticket to see a 70-mm film. As a film, I don’t like it because I saw it as a video. You knew I was being provocative, but you didn’t react: you knew I thought nothing of the sort. If you don’t want to like a film, you only have to see it in video form, I added. You told yourself I wanted to play the villain just to deride those that like to act like saints. You didn’t know I’m an authentic vermin and I have the exalted tastes of vermin. Sometimes you said I was only trying to create an immoral universe with diabolical words, but that was nothing but a childish attempt. When you read War and Peace you liked Natasha and got particularly interested in Maria Dmitrievna and you said if Tolstoy was a painter he’d be a genius painter, as he painted vast and desolate landscapes that were absolutely marvellous and his characters were as life-like as they should be, although sometimes but not often his brush was a bit heavy. You were also interested particularly in the priests when you read the works of the Russian giants, Father Sergius, Father Zosima and even a priest like Rasputin. You were also interested in famous Buddhist monks. I was fed up talking about those boring stories and I told you that of all well-known Russians, the one I preferred was Ivan the Terrible, and I said many other peremptory things about goodness, truth and beauty, and stated heedlessly that the world has never known perfection since the word perfection was coined. The world has never known perfection since man existed or, at the very least, since man began to think about perfection. What’s the use of being interested in priests? They’re only good to threaten us with hell, and hell is nothing but a horror story for kindergarten kids. And what’s the use of delving in all those books? The more books we read, the more we resemble the eunuch who has mistakenly stepped into a sultan’s harem. We become contemplators of life but we don’t dare make use of life. The inspiration we derive from books is nothing but what’s called second-hand inspiration. You were shocked. You suffered like the sensitive person you are. You were convinced you had the delicacy of a poet and you were able to appreciate poetry. We saw each other more and more often. You invited me to go to the Suan Moak forest monastery and practically compelled me to listen to more and more classical music, on top of the books you bought for me and the flowers you offered me. My life at that time was damn cultured. You were very keen on music and from your first year at the U, you did the music appreciation course and, with your knowledge of music, you had excellent marks. At the time I’d never listened to the music of anyone else but Beethoven. There was a symphonic orchestra performing here and there. The student ticket was only twenty baht and you waited with excitement. When I went there, I would sit down and fall asleep, especially when they played Bach endlessly. You had a portrait of Franz Liszt framed and offered it to me. Who is he? I asked. I’ve heard that name somewhere, I think. You figured I was playing the fool to steal your thunder. Liszt, Franz Liszt, you repeated, sounding annoyed. Ah yes! I exclaimed. I heard his name in Tommy, you know, the Rock Opera. With Elton John and Roger Daltrey. You wrinkled your nose and said Next time I’ll bring you his tapes for you to listen to, all right? I don’t like him all that much, you added. But not as much as I hate Beethoven. Among those who admire Beethoven, there are even murderers. You weren’t making fun of me, but you could hardly stand Beethoven. Thank heavens, Beethoven isn’t the only composer in the world, you said. At the U, you practised the piano as soon as you had some spare time. I learned later that you also played the zither, but not very well. Sometimes, when you were in a mischievous girlish mood you bought white wine you put to cool in the cool-box of the hostel-operated restaurant downstairs, and you made us try some to know what it tasted like. You drank glass upon glass. You weren’t worried. You knew the alcohol content was low. And your cheeks took on the colour of rose petals. And I merely told you in my language of doleful mute, You’re never as deserving of being kissed all over as when you’ve drunk several glasses like this. And sometimes you bought expensive cigarettes which you smoked. They made you cough and stifle so that your tears ran down, but you persisted. When we were alone the two of us in the room, you would on occasion pretend to strut like an actress and you’d say Do I look like a vamp? If you answer yes, very much so, my soul as a vamp is going to hurl insults at you and reduce you to a pulp. I answered, Of course not. I owed you so much. And in any case, I still had some hormones of gratitude left. On some days, you said you’d like so much to give yourself sexy airs. I answered blandly Well then, do it. And there was another day when you told me very seriously you’d like to be a man to be able to swear like a trooper, get dead drunk and say anything to anyone, to which I said blandly Well then, do it. You asked me to enlist in the dancing course, telling me that if I didn’t, you wouldn’t either. I hesitated. I was dying to hold you in my arms and it’d be a culture-sanctioned hug as well, but I didn’t dare: if we did that course, I’d have to buy myself a new pair of shoes and a new pair of trousers. So I refused. You’d have liked to know why some girls were so keen on dancing. You candidly admitted you’d very much like to try. The scene where Madame Bovary dances with the viscount, you know, it’s very scary, you said. No, you weren’t flirting or trying to seduce me. You are someone proper, one could even say a lady, but at the time we were very close, so that you sometimes forgot I was a man. We were very close and it seemed you didn’t suspect that I was as harmful as a venomous snake. I was placid, calm, sad. I hadn’t quite recovered yet from the bruises I had suffered. Nevertheless, no one knew better than I that my candour was the candour of a venomous snake after sloughing off and I kept berating myself, Take it easy, wait for her to get a little closer. My fear of you was fading and I was becoming more and more daring with each passing moment, but I felt all timorous again when you told me bluntly one evening as we were alone together, Be nice, don’t try anything with me, all right? Don’t desire me the way a man desires a woman. You must have pondered a long time before deciding to talk to me like that, which showed that you were far from blind. And your behaviour as an indefectible friend took over. Promise? you said when you saw I didn’t answer. I acquiesced with a sin
cere nod of the head and a shooting pain in the abdomen where the knife wound was. You heaved a sigh and patted me on the head. Does my saying this offend you ? you asked. No, I answered. Good boy! you said. You’re a good boy. And you sighed again. It often happened that you started daydreaming even though we were chatting animatedly with laughs I had derided you for saying they were laughs to be put into plastic bags to be brought back home. Sometimes, without reason, you cried silently, irrepressibly. At such times, I didn’t understand at all what was going on. You didn’t answer my queries. But as soon as you succeeded in controlling yourself again, you said to make me smile Don’t you know that crying often makes for beautiful eyes? Your eyesight wasn’t good. You wore glasses and you always carried a small phial of teardrops. Often at night, I became aware I couldn’t sleep and I kept lying, eyes wide open, in an incoercible muddle of thoughts, terribly alone in my cogitations, furious madness back like a tyrant from exile, coming back and throwing my mind into confusion. I disgorged all my memories of you to chew them again as all romantic oxen do, thought about what you’d said, your gestures, your eyes, the dimple on your left cheek, and repeated to myself ceaselessly that when I saw you again the next day, I’d confess my love once and for all. That you’d accept it or not was the same to me. But when I did meet you the next morning, you were in a hurry as you had to be in class five minutes later or else you were talking with a whole group of your friends of both sexes or you had no time for anything but some of those post-October-6 students’ moronic creative activities. I was doing my utmost to find the right moment. I suspended myself above the playing field of hesitation which was intensifying. I couldn’t understand at all why declaring my love to you was so difficult. Have you made a declaration of love to anyone today or not yet? A declaration of love helps activate blood circulation and erases boredom deep down to the roots of your hairs and eliminates fatty deposits on the face of emotion. A declaration of love is a good thing in life. This being said, I wasn’t the only male friend you were close to. Many were interested in you openly or secretly, half-seriously and quite seriously, especially among the fellows of the circle under the pines. Dom Wuthichai invited you to see the film Town and Fog by Pheumphon Cheui-arun. You went to see it with him and I often saw you going discreetly together for a coffee in the cafeteria near the library. Thanit Sukkaseim found I don’t know where stamps with the portraits of American writers and offered you twenty of them and you thanked him profusely, which gave him sweet dreams for many nights so that he had the cheek to find I don’t know where an original edition of Karleimarntai65 , with the signature of its owner, which he offered you and you thanked him profusely, which gave him sweet dreams for many other nights. Feum Maya was stuck on you to the point that he made you the heroine of one of his poems and in that poem he said he wanted to slip the rings of Saturn on your finger by way of engagement ring, which gave you a funny voice and look when you talked about him. Khampan Seenuea had bred a brood of chicks from his best breed of cocks and hens and offered them to you with exhaustive instructions on how to take care of them so that those chicks became outstanding poultry in future. Sanphat Phongkaseit hastened to enrol for the music course as a minor for the sole purpose of having the opportunity to chat you up, although if truth be told he’d never been interested in music before and couldn’t even whistle a tune even if his life depended on it. Marnit Seewa discovered the Montra by chance. It was a Thai restaurant with an authentic Thai atmosphere. The meals were accompanied by live Thai music with a xylophone or a zither. But when you went there alone with Marnit, the zither player had just resigned. The venison curries there were delicious. The salted fish soup with tamarind and onions there was delicious. The grilled prawn salad there was delicious. You pretended everything was delicious and you went to eat there three times in a row with Marnit Seewa, like Phloi going out of home to have a meal with her Khun Preim66, and you didn’t stop complaining that you didn’t play the zither well enough, because if you’d been good enough you’d have tried out to play the zither there, and Marnit agreed wholeheartedly with you and told you you should try all the same. All those blokes were getting on my nerves, making me morose, making me incensed, and I told myself I’d very much like to take summary action soon. Especially, your going three times in a row to Montra with Marnit Seewa had me consumed with jealousy. The flock of ignoble thoughts not only flew across my brain but also did a U-turn and came to build their nests in earnest, so that I shaved one eyebrow to make fun of that fucker. You were shocked. You said I thought too much, Marnit was a friend of yours and a friend of mine. I listened without saying anything. I didn’t reply. I merely said that, if you didn’t stop, I’d cut off my little finger. But that part of my consciousness that functioned normally, even if it was lethargic and apathetic, told me I’d better not overdo it. My room became cleaner. You brought me an old typewriter just in case I’d be in a mood to type a masterpiece, as well as an old radio cassette player. I had books, good music, coffee and cigarettes. And all that I owed you, even though you told me there was no point in keeping the old typewriter and radio cassette player at home given that nobody used them, and the books you merely lent them to me. You asked me one day if I’d like to play the violin. I told you I’d like too, but had no time for it. You told me you had a violin and you’d bring it to me. Did I want it? You’d already given me too much. I answered you Better not. To have a young woman in one’s life as a sad young man should be enough for a penniless and uprooted student like me, but to declare my love to you was too impertinent and too indiscreet and might ruin everything as you might take it the wrong way. I was afraid you might get angry. Good people scare me. I don’t want to harm good people. In the company of someone good, I feel too evil. And at the same time, good people grow on my nerves. If someone good gets near, I feel like giving him or her a kick, including all those that try to pass themselves off as little saints and all those that are in the religion business. And before long there I was imagining you stark naked. Well, I’m a man, damn it, and one who doesn’t know how to stare at women without the filter of sexual craving. And then women, damn it, aren’t made for us to kneel before them. I remember as if I had you right in front of me of that day when we were alone in the room, a day of great sweltering weather, and I don’t know which fucker in a neighbouring room started to broadcast a white-cover cassette. Well, it’s like white-cover books, I answered when you asked me What’s that racket? – The only difference is there’s no text or images, only sounds, but you get a pretty good idea about the scene, like when you listen to a play on the radio. You pursed your lips and said nothing. Well, you know, it’s a men’s hostel, I said. You reddened in confusion and put a piece of music on the old radio cassette player to cover the sounds of the porno tape. I laughed, amused and taken by a storm of sexual emotion. Man knows how to adapt technology to his obscene and immoral objectives, isn’t that wonderful ? I said. You greeted the remark with a forced laugh and I told you bizarre sexual experiences I’d read about in magazines for men. I know how to use the language in a beautiful way when I want to, except that I don’t understand why I should use the fucking language in a beautiful way. And I told these anecdotes to you as oddities. You said nothing. With both your hands you raised your hair at the nape and I saw that your nape was very white, an astonishing white. Maybe it was the hairline that produced such a striking effect. You have a very light complexion anyway. From that day, every time I thought about you, I started by stripping you, by taking off all your clothes and sometimes, both naked on the bed in the room I imagined, we discussed poetry or serious philosophical issues. All of that I merely imagined. Our brains are so stuffed with all sorts of bookish stories, don’t you think? You craved for knowledge. You were a bookworm and a musician, but in any case, you must have been aware of how much I respected you. Ah, here I am having smoked yet another cigarette. The coldness of the air seems to increase all the time. I play at supposing I’m dead and all I’d say I’d say as a de
ad man and I imagine how, if the people I’ve known in my lifetime come to see my corpse, I’d talk to each. Why do I have to act like this? Because it’s necessary. I play at supposing I am dead and it may well be that I’ll really feel like dying. I haven’t made any plans yet. As far as I’m concerned, death is a total bore. I think too much about it. I dream too much about it. Death prowls inside and around the pyramids, death prowls inside and around Angkor Wat, death prowls inside and around the Taj Mahal. A total bore and yet, its sortilege, its charm, is never insipid. I slept with your friend. Lately, every time I sleep with a woman, I find myself unwell in body as in mind, in mind especially. The body after a day or two recovers, but the mind, well then, darling, the mind bursts and scatters. Once this happens, the urge takes me to bash my head against the ground and crawl in circles like a beast and roar or else bay at the moon or else I’d like to turn into a worm that wriggles or else I’d like to turn into a snake and slither away or be an iguana, a monitor lizard or a crocodile, and wallow, crawl, fidget towards – towards what? I don’t know. But there I must go. Being a man fallen from his condition as a man. And if I were a beast, I’d no doubt be a beast fallen from its condition as a beast. Here I am smoking again. Coffee and cigarettes – strong black bitter coffee without sugar, four cups a day, and untipped American cigarettes with a bitter strong taste, two packets a day; coffee whose power fights the power of sleeping pills and keeps me with glazed eyes from somnolence all night long and with frayed nerves; cigarettes that give me pains in the chest and the throat, whence from time to time a dry cough comes out like of a raw-boned cow dying of tuberculosis, so much so that blood vessels in the throat burst – a bloody cough, what! You told me to smoke less and the first time you saw me spitting blood you took me to have my lungs examined at the Phaholyothin pulmonary centre. It isn’t cancer, the doctor said. When we cough hard, it may happen that blood vessels burst.