The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  love offered as a sacrifice

  Il est du véritable amour comme de l’apparition des esprits : tout le monde en parle, mais peu de gens en ont vu.

  La Rochefoucauld, Maximes

  The first few times, making love is an adventure; on later occasions, making love is a boring chore. I loathe my memory when it tells me I got fed up with you even though right now I want you absolutely. I also hate talking about love. I’ve never found its definition. Love is only a superior form of rut. Sure, we did speak of love, but at the time we were still kids. The idea we had of love was like the idea two little novices have of nirvana. In love, there is inequality. I am a fascist. You are a slave. And even if I respect you as a sublime slave, you still are a slave nonetheless. You dreamed that even in encroaching old age we’d still be together since life as a couple would prolong life, but being husband and wife only destroys love. You dreamed that even in the memory lapses of old age we’d still be together, that even in the whispering echoes of death we’d still be together. You dreamed that sometimes we’d be sitting silently gazing at the sunset from the balcony of our cool and serene house or that sometimes we’d walk side by side silently in our peaceful orchard looking at the mango flowers wilt and clutter the ground or that sometimes I’d be sitting silently while you read out to me old poems or that sometimes I’d console you silently when you missed our children and grandchildren scattered to the four winds. We still would be together even as near centenarians and your hair would be white and my beard would be white and the shadows of our lives would be but an evanescent faint light. We still would be together since we would’ve each gone through lots of painful experiences, conscious both that a giant’s agony is better than a dwarf’s mirth. You dreamed we’d die silently, with pure hearts and baby smiles on our lips, we’d die understanding death. Sunset and evening star / And one clear call for me! – Tennyson, The Gentleman Poet. Your dream was weird and inane. You didn’t know I wasn’t made to last until old age, even though I’m aware that life is full of marvels. You didn’t know I was fed up with you. It was a boredom I didn’t dare to show. I knew perfectly well I mustn’t abandon you, as it would hurt you and you were my benefactress. All those that knew you and all those that knew me said we were a well-matched couple and no one would be surprised if one day we got married. I never dreamed to that extent. At the time, besides the dream of writing some significant work, I dreamed of travelling all over the world. I’m of this race of solitary and haughty men that sustain themselves on dreams, deride themselves through dreams and copulate with dreams. I was desperate to see the Kitchanakup peak with its profile of a vulture and the Nairanjah river besides which the Buddha spent many years of his life. I was desperate to see the place that might have led me to dare imagine in a realistic fashion the scene in which Theiwathat is swallowed up by the earth that parts at his feet. I would’ve liked to go to South America. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find myself a gaucho in the Pampas and to spend my life thus in a foreign land without ever returning to the old country. I would’ve liked to go to Africa. I would’ve liked to pay a visit to Karen Blixen’s acres of coffee land and to the tomb of Denis Finch Hutton. ‘I am the fighter of the fancy song.’67 I dreamed quietly, I wondered quietly if I’d be able to carry through those dreams. If so, if I could, I’d do it. You knew nothing of my dreams. You only knew I dreamed of one day writing some significant work. We were a couple. We were a lousy couple in that lousy university like so many other young men and women, but you were tougher than I was. You kept wondering what to do to finish your studies within three and a half years and when you learned there indeed was a choice of options that should allow you to be done in three and a half years, you were delighted and applied yourself to achieving that aim. You were of those students I could see dedicating themselves thoroughly to their studies. You managed your time cleverly. You had lots of crazy tricks for the twenty-four hours of each day of your life to be spent in the most worthwhile fashion. You worried about the future. You discussed all manner of social phenomena which you found strange and wanted to be ready to tackle. Why is there such a mushrooming of small shoe resoling enterprises? Why is there such a mushrooming of small clothes mending enterprises? Why do large enterprises announce mass redundancies? Why does the lotusflower bank put notices even in the toilets to ask the staff to save on toilet paper? It was a period of economic recession. You worried about not finding work. Your worries about me at the time were utterly absurd. You often took me on visits to your house by the river for me to think about the ins and outs were I to free myself from you. In fact, like so many others, you knew me very little. You knew nothing about Darreit or Nartaya. Of my scar on my belly I merely told you it was a wound received during a brawl at an age when one acts one’s very worst. At times, you examined me furtively the way your mother had examined me: were my intentions towards you really pure? Was I really serious regarding you? At times, you examined me furtively with an eye heavy with old questions: who was I? where did I come from? what were the heredity and environment that conditioned my nature? At times, you got discouraged. You’d say desperately you’d never imagined you’d fall in love with Satan. You were wrong: I’m not Satan; I’m only a Homo sapiens Satan often takes out for a coffee, that’s all. My potential to do evil didn’t amount to much at the time. Now you are entirely free from me. You are lucky. Look back. You’ll see that the relationship between us was laughable and pitiful. But at the time, I myself was afraid of finally having to live with you until old age. That much worried me a lot. Damn it, we never quarrelled! When I flew off the handle, you remained stony-faced. When I raised my voice, you kept quiet. When I burst into fits of temper of whatever kind, you used reason. When I daydreamed, you said or did something that brought me to my senses. When I let fly, you held me back. When I made a mistake, you used the patience of the maternal sex to correct it. Nobody knew how to keep me under control as well as you did. With me you knew when to be slow, when to be quick, when to be harsh, when to be lenient. In other people’s eyes we were a happy couple; our love seemed of an extreme limpidity and beauty; our love had everything to last. In the chronicle of our love, a strange character made his entrance. His name was Mister Chaweing. He was an old man of almost sixty. A porter, he was in charge of opening and closing the university gates. He saw us so often he recognised us, smiled at us and greeted us. He said he saw lots of other couples separating, but these two didn’t look like they’d ever split. On Loi Krathong68 night, he was drunk. He walked up to us, told us in his drunkenness to love each other for a long time, be honest with each other and not leave each other, then he appeared on the verge of tears. Some emotion must have been upsetting him. I behaved like a fascist. But actually, I was merely a puppet which had the opportunity to play the part of a fascist, and the puppeteer pulling the strings was you. I don’t know where you’d learned all that. Some friends started to remark I was beginning to look tamed because of you. My future was determined by you. What I got coming to me was office work, salary and savings, instalments on the house and instalments on the car, marriage and children. It was nothing else than the cramped, neat and orderly paradise of the middle class which, when you dwell in it, you soon realise is hell, a hell which a multitude queues up to be allowed in, even though anyone in his right mind can figure out it’ll be boring to death. It took me some time to realise it was going to be so if I let myself be manipulated by you, but I wasn’t doing anything yet to prevent you. And it even seemed I was happy. Kriangsak Chomanand was prime minister. I had no opinion on his pipe or his chicken stew with brandy or his 66/23 Political Directive69. The students who had fled into the jungle after the October 6 events were giving themselves up one after the other, which generated much turmoil among the progressives at the U. I had no opinion. Prem Tinsulanonda was army chief. I had no opinion. Sor Worrasing was flyweight world champion. I had no opinion. Jimmy Carter was president of the United States of America. I had no opinion. Argentina won the
World Cup and Mario Kempes was their leading goal scorer. I had no opinion. Nongkhai Sor Praphatsorn was crowned best Thai boxer. I had no opinion. Sombat Meithanee shaved his head to play Maha Hin. I had no opinion. David Chiang in a likei outfit played Phayak Yeekei. I had no opinion. Suphaksorn’s student romances climbed on to the bestseller list. I had no opinion. And when in no time the formula ‘I’m fed up!’ in the film adapted from one of those works was on everybody’s lips throughout the land, I had no opinion about that either. During the three years that I was your lover, my universe seemed to shrink and I was happy enough. We were just a crummy couple of lovers in that crummy university. In some ways, you were very young, unaware of the realities of the world to a worrying extent. You let yourself be easily influenced by your reading and you occasionally acted according to the books that impressed you. I guessed without fail that when you asked me to go to Bang Pa-in, it was simply that you wanted to follow the traces of Phloi, the heroine of Four Reigns. I didn’t say anything. The hate I have for Bangkok was too well anchored for me to turn you down. On the mornings we were free we both were glad to travel. We went to catch the train at the central station. The return trip can be done in the day, as Bang Pa-in isn’t far from Bangkok. You had prepared some food in a wicker basket and you acted as though we were going on a picnic. You wore pretty clothes and carried the basket that held foodstuffs and fruit. In Bang Pa-in we had the midday meal under the trees by the pond in front of I don’t know which palace. I can’t remember any longer. I only know it wasn’t the one with the throne of Rama V that we see everywhere on postcards. We were then still adolescents. There still was something puppy-like in your way of being and in my way of being. While you ate, you talked about Phloi and Choi and Khun Sai and Khun Preim and Mrs Pit, so much so that you even stopped eating because you were so excited by what you were saying. Sometimes I made as if to contradict you and prompted you to make as if you were quarrelling with me. At times, you gave yourself airs, pretended to be Mrs Pit, adopted poses a la Mrs Pit, spoke imitating Mrs Pit, and laughed at yourself. You lowered your voice after being silent for a while and said Mrs Pit was a sublime character and would be a sublime person if only a person like her existed. A blond, middle-aged westerner encumbered with a jumble of cameras and accessories, a tourist no doubt, photographed us on the sly without asking for permission, which bugged me a little, and if I almost flung my shoe at his mug it was because he seemed intent on taking your picture rather than mine and something in his eye when he stared at you seemed to be asking for it. But you got angry with me for not being friendly with a foreigner. Your only act of heroism as a young woman was to ask me for an outing to Samet Island. That was under the impulse of a book that impressed you. I guessed without fear of being wrong that, if you asked me to go to Samet, it was because you wanted to meet the shadow of Suwannee Sukhontha70, several of whose short stories take place on the island. I didn’t say anything. The hate I have for Bangkok was too well anchored for me to turn you down. Your only heroic act in your feminine adolescence. You confessed a little later: you’d gone to the seaside with a grimy man; you’d never done anything as extravagant. And yet, we had by then already slept together innumerable times. Eh! How is it that my memories of you are divided unwittingly into two parts I don’t understand? The first before you slept with me; the second after we’d slept together. Never mind. I remember everything anyway, but I’m too lazy to sort out my memories in chronological order. But by that time we’d already slept together innumerable times. And no matter what, that outing is part of the good memories. On the eve of our departure, I had read in bed very late into the night. In the airconditioned coach that drove us to Rayong province, I was drowsy throughout the trip and only fully awoke once seated in the boat heading for Samet. The boat rolled under a merciless wind. You hugged me strongly every time the boat leaned. You seemed about to be seasick. You weren’t quite used to the sea. There was also a group of young lads and lasses on the boat. They all had big suitcases and guitars, smiled at us in a friendly way and made fun of you for being afraid of the sea. I left it to you to decide on our dwelling once we were on the island. It was a bamboo hut, isolated from the other huts, with an elephant-grass roof. In front of the hut there were three or four very old pandanus shrubs pitting their wits against the sea breeze. Their leaves were full of graffiti from some itchy hands and they wore bright yellow fruit spiked all over with prisms like pineapples. That night and the following six nights, we stayed together in the grass-roofed hut by a beach of dazzling white sand. It looked like a fairy tale or a tale born of a pitifully depleted and putrid imagination rather than of reality. The sea and Beethoven piano sonatas – the piano sonatas recorded on cassettes, not the real ones. But the real sea was in front of us. When was it born and when will it dry out? We’ll never know. Sublime nights. When the sky was cloudless, hundreds of thousands of stars glittered. The most ordinary things took on mysterious and bewitching airs as if under a spell. The russet yellow moonlight, the islets, the rows of coconut trees, the dark masses of rocks took mysterious and peculiar airs as if under a spell. Ceaseless waves noisily reached the shore. How many a day? We’ll never know. We helped each other cook the rice and prepare simple dishes. With big stones we made a tripod and we used dead wood gleaned in the forest. Your cheeks were smeared with specks of soot and the smoke of the fire made you cough and sneeze so much your tears ran down. The beach curved into a moon crescent; the grains of sand, white, fine and polished to a sparkle by sun, rain, dew, waves and time; the little huts standing apart from one another, their front giving out on the sea, each discrete hut rapt in prayer like a monk’s cell in a meditation centre, though actually this was the paradise of promiscuity… Are the couples of lovers that had gone to the island together that time still couples? I wonder. The emerald sea where Sunthorn Phoo fancied he saw sirens and marine ogres. The undines in Thai imagination… The demons in Thai imagination… In those days, Samet was still very primitive, so that we had to swallow quinine pills against malaria, and the supernatural power of Mother Thapthim, the protector of the island, was still awesome. I don’t know how you managed it but a shell made a gash in your foot at nightfall and I had to walk alone in the dark along the shore in the thick shadow of tall trees with angry-looking foliage to reach the other side of the island where there was a jetty where fishing boats came to and lined up and a grocery store lit by a hurricane lamp where I was able to buy antiseptic and plaster. The wound healed and the scar remained. The plant of the left foot or the right? I can’t remember any longer. We were happy to cook simple food and to eat simple food and you must remember how gratefully I looked at you when I learned you’d brought coffee. With your foot wounded, you stopped bathing in the sea, but I kept taking you hobbling along around the island to fish on the rocks with an old fishing rod someone had discarded and shrimp or cuttlefish for bait. We never caught a single fish but we were happy. One afternoon there was a downpour. The opaque white raindrops fell in hatchings twisted by the gusts. A fishing boat came into view through the curtain of rain like a long-lost prehistoric animal, cleaving the waves in two towards the coast where it would anchor. When the rain stopped, we met a young western traveller who was strolling alone along the beach. Bare-chested, barefoot, his slight body emerged from patched-up jeans. He smiled at us with a child’s smile, pointed at the rainbow with his finger and said as if in a dream, Paradise! Paradise! On the fourth night, the other couples that had come on the same boat as us had organised a very simple party by making a campfire on the beach and insisted on us joining them. Someone played the guitar while singing an ultra-sad Simon and Garfunkel song about the wanderings of a young poet and singer – ‘Homeward bound’… Someone else played the harmonica beautifully. Yet another, with long hair under a white cap, sang and played the guitar well. That night, I knocked back many beers and I was three sheets to the wind as should be. Late into the night, when everybody had run out of tunes and songs to interpret, I played ‘The
starlight of faith’ on the harmonica with great difficulty but, being drunk, I gave it my all. None of these youngsters knew that song – don’t you think that’s amazing? – but they found the tune very nice. That night, the stars were beautiful, the breeze blew hard, the flames danced. I could see my reflection in your eyes. You happened to be the prettiest of the girls gathered there that evening. The boys in the group had suspicious and envious glances. How could a fellow like me, looking coarse and ferocious like a beast, have conquered your heart? I remember a young girl in the group with a bizarre charm. She liked the sound of my harmonica and I gave her a wink on the sly as an inveterate seducer, totally forgetting that one fellow in the group was probably her boyfriend – this kind of move, if her lover had seen it, would easily have earned me a correction. She sang without any accompaniment from either guitar or harmonica after having long let her friends coax her and having long sought excuses and declined out of embarrassment. And she had only sung a few lines when she burst out laughing and made as if to give up, saying she couldn’t remember the rest of the song. And I, well intentioned, helped her to carry on, so she could sing the song to the end. She smiled at me to thank me. ‘Green, green grass of home’, by Joan Baez. She had a very natural voice. Her eyes, in the pulsating light of the campfire, made me almost forget you. Oh, she wasn’t as pretty as you, but she had incredible charm. She wore her hair short like a boy and when she smiled, two little creases appeared on either side of her nose, and she wore a white American singlet that showed off the roundness of her milky white arms and shoulders and, almost every time she raised her arm, I could see without trying to the rim of her flesh-coloured bra. Funny girl who kept laughing in embarrassment! The creases around her nose, that must be what gave her charm, or was it that I liked the song she sung? An ancient song that stirred the dust of memory, a marvellous invitation to regret a very varied past, including the bittersweet taste of times gone by, of hard to recall laughs and cries, of magnificent dreams, of sublime hopes, of errors and deaths and many other things besides. During the hot season of that year, I alleged again that I was to follow summer courses not to have to go back and see Daen. Had I gone to the South, I would no doubt have learned what had happened to Daen, which would’ve resulted in changing my life, but given that I didn’t do so, I knew nothing. He wrote me a letter including a postal order to tell me he’d been slightly injured, he had to be operated on in hospital and he added that he was thinking of leaving active service. He told me I didn’t have to worry about tuition fees. He’d keep handling them until I finished my studies or until I found work or until I was established in life. On the following months, there were no more letters from him, only postal orders. I was stupid enough to just cash in the postal orders without writing to him. Furthermore, not to go back to the South was tantamount to neglecting the means to extend my deferment of military service. And furthermore, I hadn’t gone through the third year of training course prior to military service which, had I completed it, would have exempted me from conscription. I knew that the only way for a young Thai to avoid military service was to go through the training course. But I had already lived a lot, and in complete freedom. I could no longer stand regulations and discipline. I thought very little about military service and it cost me much frustration later on. Military service was a warning that, no matter what, I was an integral part of the state, an integral part of human society, and I had to put myself at the service of society. Being a soldier means putting yourself at the service of your race. Being a soldier is nothing more than that. Refusing service is against the law, which is something I don’t want to care about, be it written by man or given us by the gods. Mark Aurelius himself led his troops in combat, for all his being a rapt and thoroughly sad stoic. I was living my life. I’d had an inept life under the heavens where I was born and where one day I’d die. I was in love again.