I loved you and did so in the barbarian way that is mine. For how many years have we known each other? Seven years, eight years already? We met seven years ago for the first time and we saw each other for the last time three months ago. You are only a little girl, a little girl forever. You are progressing in your career; I’m regressing towards old age inexorably. You know how to plan your life; I don’t. You are always strong, full of life, full of common sense and capable of using reason, but I’m apathetic and, adrift and tossed about, moving farther and farther away from the world of reality. Weariness and weakness drench my entire body to the tips of my nails and hair like a drizzle. I’m no longer keen to keep on living. What do you want from me exactly? Why don’t you tell me frankly that you don’t want to see me anymore? that you don’t want to know if I’m still alive? Do you think I’m so eager to meet you? If I still feel like seeing you once again, it’s for you only and not at all for me. Maybe I’ll go mad for good, maybe I’ll kill myself, and you’ll be tormented by a feeling of culpability as someone who was once close to me. You aren’t in a position to help me. Maybe I’ll go and see you once more, freshly polished up, freshly dressed up to look good and talk in earnest for you to feel better, and after that I’ll wander off on the path of my own delirium, dawdling at random along the unmarked path that is mine. If you’ve helped me without surcease, if you’ve borne with me without surcease, it is because you feel pity for me, right? So you think I’m someone pitiful? You must be mad. Who do you think you are? What makes you think that pitying other people is morally just? You act like the leftists of prehistory who put the entire people in the same basket. Damn it. I’m an individual provided with individuality just as much as everyone else. Each individual is a free state and has his own territorial integrity. In this world, on this planet, there are about five billion free states, as many as inhabitants. Have I ever told you that you are a state and that I am a state? When will we unite to form one and the same state, hey, when? to produce little states? I’ve never hidden the contempt I have for you. Most of the time you didn’t protest because you are a stoic – almost all Buddhists are stoics, people that do nothing but observe themselves and wish passionately to demand nothing from others. Over the years, my ‘extremist’ vision of the world had only sharpened and it was you who suffered most from the consequences. I was angry and resentful. I greeted everything with derision and you had to force yourself to listen to me. That was at a time when I read ravenously and spent all my time in the library, and I was showing the symptoms that some alleged sages (your Phutthathart for instance) qualify as symptoms of knowledge intoxication. The tide of books in room number fifteen at Chainarm was rising ceaselessly and from the floor almost reached the ceiling. You were glad that, nevertheless, I had no vices other than smoking and drinking coffee. I love you. Forgive me for going my own way. I’m not very good at humouring women, especially those I’ve slept with, as I hold that, from then on, there’s no point in fussing about them. I love you, but why did I rush so much into sleeping with you? Why didn’t I wait for you to give me your body and your heart as women give their bodies and their hearts to their betrothed on their wedding night? It might have been better, surely. Or is it because I put no trust in marriage, because I’m averse to life as a couple and the family institution makes me feel sick? I’ve never known what a warm and stable family life is like. I grew up in the atypical family of a timorous criminal and timorous adulteress while you thought of a united family. It can be said that with you it comes from instinct: you and a strong and courageous man whom you love and your home and your children reared to be good people in order to brighten up an increasingly black world. We used to be a couple. You loved me but I loved my own love. You have wings. You are a white swan. Whoever loves has wings. I have no wings. I stand amid wild flowers as dawn tries to break and gaze at you as you float farther and farther away, perfectly aware that I am unable to follow you, and I content myself with gazing at you with regret. Or if I have wings, they are bat wings. In the daytime, I’m not really mad, maybe because I sleep most of the time. But at night, I’m utterly mad. I come to wonder if sunrays weaken madness whereas moonlight kindles it. Exhausted. Why exhausted? Or maybe it’s because I’m trying to unload everything that’s on my chest? It was pretty shoddy of me to sleep with your friend and it’s pretty shoddy of me to consider leaving her. I’m trying to unload everything that’s on my chest, as after that I’ll sink into a vast and void silence, the silence of space, the silence of the cosmos. The human ear probably cannot perceive that silence. I take up free space in the world. The world takes up free space in the universe. I’m a tiny part of the world and I’m also a tiny part of the universe – for all times, from the farthest past before man appeared up until I came into the world and thus in the limitless future until the day when the world, destroyed, will die out. This infinitely short period of time is the period of time in which I was born and in which I live. That is it, me. Lying motionless somewhere on the skin of the world at the same time as earth moves, at the same time as the sun, at the same time as the galaxy in the direction of the Milky Way, which is a trajectory whose parameters escape me. Starting from where? From the centre of the universe? Going where? I don’t know. Fuelled by the strength of the original blast I don’t remember how many million years ago, is that it? I don’t remember. The Big Bang theory, that’s what it’s called. But I know that a theory might be faulty. I’m on this earth like all of us that have ever existed, exist or will ever exist. For how long I’ve no idea. That the human species keeps propagating for an indeterminate period of time on this planet or on some other star, in any case, it’s from that moment that I’ve dreamed of writing, that I’ve dreamed of dedicating my life to writing, that I’ve dreamed of suffering, of boredom. The pangs of parched torment are born of writing: this is a thought of a masochist bend. But now I know its taste well and I’m thinking of putting an end to it forever. I hate writing – and I love you. Oh, don’t be afraid. Don’t be embarrassed. There is no one but you and me. You are there, I’m here, in different places but not at different times. The mind is faster than light. Thought travels without going through time. Stop focusing on the mysteries of light, you physicists of all kinds! Not so long ago, I came to realise that what I liked most in the world was me and, second best, writing. I didn’t like lousy society or lousy nation or lousy people or lousy democracy as much as I liked lousy me and my lousy writing. But from now on, I hate it, writing. Writing and thinking are the preserve of the gods. Being alone and quiet, reading or listening to music or gazing through the window and smoking a cigarette and thinking, that’s happiness. It’s such a deep and sublime activity, especially when you think in depth of deep issues and when you think supremely of supreme issues. But writing consists in trying to transmit those thoughts. That’s buffalo work. Only a buffalo has the patience to go through it. Whether a genius or a moron, a buffalo is still a buffalo. Day in day out, such work only earns a buffalo imprecations for buffaloes; such work only earns a buffalo honours for buffaloes. And even if a buffalo doesn’t care about imprecations or honours, it is only the lack of care of a buffalo. And the buffalo that isn’t a moron must care about at least two imperatives of writing, namely writing with integrity, which is impossible, and writing with intelligence, which is just as impossible. Impossible or practically impossible. But writing with integrity and with intelligence, isn’t that the same thing? I hate thinking. Thinking is death. Trying to think is trying to kill oneself. I hate writing. Writing is death. Trying to write is trying to kill oneself. I no longer dream of writing. I’m totally fed up with playing Russian roulette with fate. When was it man started to lie to man? For how many tens of thousands of years have we lost the ability to express ourselves frankly? But I love you and I like to think about you. I long to sleep with my head on your lap as a child longs to sleep on his mother’s lap. I see you crying all the time. And in my feeling of drift, the sound of your cries is the sound of the c
ries of a white swan. The memory I have of you is a memory as beautiful as a December sky, as a maze of coral, as love, as rock crystal, more precious than everything I’ve ever had in life. Cold. Here it is cold. But why the mosquitoes? Or is it because we are near the river? I see them clearly, the flowers scattered on your head, on your shoulders, on the pages of the book you are reading and even in your glass of coffee, yellow flowers – of yellow flame trees and, uh, of earpod wattle also. At that time, we hadn’t slept together yet and I gazed longingly and furtively at you on one of the benches of an open-air bar in the public park of a quiet little town, a riverside town, a town where you had the feeling you were at home. It was the first time you had taken me to see your parents. We were there as fledgling sweethearts, swimming in the emerald sea of the quivers of desire, forgetting everything. We didn’t have time enough to get wise to the fact that before long we’d be pathetic old people. We were lost in our original jungle. We travelled to the confines of our imagination. Man grows old quickly and dies quickly. Man is no elephant. Love makes us stupid and stupidity makes us happy. A deeper happiness than the happiness of stupidity there is not. How could we say that in Pali? Or was it that bright thoughts came to you as you walked holding my arm and chatted and laughed as we went to sit down at the open-air bar and let the golden rays filtering through the foliage draw trembling shadows on the skin of your body in the soft light of a July morning yellow like gold, like amber, like whisky, of a colour almost alike the colour of your skin? Your arms had the same fine down as your nape as I glimpsed furtively when you raised your hair. That was another beautiful morning in life. Why do I find it beautiful? Maybe because then we hadn’t slept together yet. Why is it that these days people are in such a hurry to sleep together? I’d like to love someone, love her for a long time without sleeping with her, as previous generations did. I’d like each step in the walk towards love to be punctuated with sacred heartbeats. No doubt, that would be better. But then there I was forcing you, and that, because I’m far from being someone with a noble heart. So far that… so far – so far that I can’t find the words needed to express it. Thirty-seven million light-years away. I underestimated you. I behaved with you like a wild beast. You said afterwards that you felt as if the sun had burst, covering the sky with cracks before everything was swallowed by darkness. Your sky had cracked and tumbled down like broken glass, and then you were forever blaming yourself for trusting me too much. How could I have done that to you? One day, at dawn, we went together to the piano lesson room. At the time, we’d only had a few serious conversations. I had got up very early and gone to wait in the coffee shop near the library. The students were hardly beginning to arrive, one by one or in small groups, but those that stayed in the neighbouring hostels were still in sweat-drenched sportswear. A cold season morning. Everything all around was of a sullen tranquillity. You greeted me casually. You smiled at me with your spontaneous childish smile. You asked me whether I’d go to the music room with you. I’d have been a bloody fool not to accept. I swiped my books, slipped the packet of cigarettes in my shirt pocket and chucked in my glass of coffee and my daydreams. The room for piano coaching was a small room in a corner of an old school building. Through the window, you could see centuries-old rain trees that shed their leaves freely. I opened the window wide and took a long, deep breath for the fresh air to vivify my nerves enough so that I’d be in close touch with reality again. As you bent over your notebook, you said without turning towards me that you didn’t play well at all and you had to train. You weren’t trying to find excuses; you spoke in a very natural way, without any trace of embarrassment. I looked at you from behind, looked at your long black glossy hair, your white, clean uniform shirt. I don’t understand how girls always manage to have impeccable white shirts. Your sea-blue skirt made your complexion all the more radiant. And when the piano notes arose, a poignant pain got hold of me. I had no idea which sonata of which composer you were playing or if you merely hit the piano keys, but in any case that’s a beautiful memory and if it’s beautiful, it’s because I hadn’t slept with you yet. It seems I don’t know how to respect women or I show respect to them only to sleep with them. But I didn’t pretend to have a fever, you know. It happened just like that. And my symptoms were in no way serious. And you cried, which made me think of the tears of a white swan. But once I had slept with you that first time, I slept with you again and again and you still cried. You were dumbfounded. You were weak. You couldn’t resist. You found yourself in a condition you didn’t understand. You tried to flee from me as much as you craved to be near me at all times. Before sleeping with you, I had already felt like that, and I was rather pleased with myself that it was now your turn to feel it and there I was holding all the aces. Men have nothing to worry about. Women have to worry about the eyes of society and have to worry about what to do if they get pregnant and have to worry about whether the man with whom they sleep isn’t going to pass some nasty disease onto them. But I’m truly ashamed, darling, of sin. Except that, if I slept with you so often, it’s because I have irrepressible sexual urges. They come ceaselessly, they come every day, more or less, and I’m an ordinary being, not a gentleman in a novel polished until it is pure and clean to the point that you can smell its cleanliness. Every time I thought hard about you, my resolutions and common sense lay in smithereens. It’s you yourself who took me to Suan Moak with the members of the Buddhist circle. It was before we slept together and it’s yet another beautiful memory, even if before we left I sulked and told you off, saying it wasn’t necessary for me to pretend to be with it. At the time, whoever wished to be with it had to go to Suan Moak. But once we reached the place, I realised I could be happy there. I had long given up going to the temple. But over there, it was a monastery unlike any other, full of trees of all sizes and which was nothing but calm and serenity, with its monks’ cells, small old huts wide apart from one another. Sometimes, when I made noise walking, I felt guilty as I was afraid to disturb the contemplation of the others. Over there I saw jungle cocks, slight and nimble, that came to peck in the small yards in front of the cells at the rice the monks gave them. And I saw big-sized flying lemurs dashing in and out of treetops and I saw mouse deer as well and I had great pleasure following the slow flight of racket-tailed drongos. The atmosphere was solemn and restful, with subtle whiffs of early Buddhism that gave me the feeling that in the course of my stroll I was any minute now going to run into the Buddha. During our stay there, it looked as though you and I had grown apart as, after all, it was a monastery, not a public park. We met and talked to each other in full view of everybody. We went to the central pavilion to listen to talks on dharma and exegeses on points of doctrine to which I understood nothing or which I didn’t fancy at all. The dormitories for women and for men were separate. Electricity was turned off at ten every night. It was a period devoid of worries and I felt my health improve amazingly. And most surprising during those six or seven days I had no sexual urges, until the idea came to you to ask me to go up the Nang Ei hill – how was it they said it: Nang Ei or Nang Ae? You wanted to see the panorama from a high spot. At first, we were due to go there in a group but the fellows of the Buddhist association had scattered I don’t know where, so I suggested we went ahead and when we sat down to wait for a while we didn’t see anyone coming to join us (we later learned they had gone to bathe at the mineral water spring instead). We took a narrow footpath that wove between clumps of trees with monks’ cells on either side increasingly wider apart from one another and eventually we found ourselves alone you and me. In the forest, there was only the sound of the wind, the call of squirrels that jumped from branch to branch, the whisper of water on rocks or else the collective scansion of children in the elementary school close to the monastery. I let you walk ahead. You seemed to enjoy yourself like a child in search of adventure. You wore jeans so old they were a faded white, white sports shoes and a white t-shirt tucked into the jeans. You looked spruce, self-assured and without worr
y, like a model in a sanitary towel ad. Sweat covered the back of your t-shirt so much it formed streaks. You looked here and there, your eyes on trees and rocks as if afraid to lose your way. Yet for all that you were beaming. The path turned increasingly steep. As I was behind you and lower down, I speculated on the shapes of your dressed body to compare them with when you’d be naked. When I think of a woman in whatever context, sooner or later I must think of her naked body. I am an animal and, in the condition close to death that is mine, I do not wish to disguise the animal in me under all manner of finery culture produces to camouflage emotions. You weren’t aware of anything. You had other things on your mind than sexual concerns. As you hoisted yourself onto a rocky overhang, you turned round and held out your arm to me and asked me jokingly if I needed a hand. I took your arm by way of an answer just as you started to pull me up gently. I hoisted myself to your level, heard the cooing of a dove somewhere, which weakened and stopped only to start anew, weaker than before, and finally stopped. You were softly gasping for breath. Sweat covered your face. You were no taller than my chin. You lowered your eyes behind your thin gold-rimmed glasses. Your chest heaved out of exhaustion or surprise or under some emotion, I don’t know. I didn’t dare to guess. I was still holding your hand. It was wet with sweat. The hand of a country girl. The hand of a girl learning the piano. Very softly, you squeezed my wrist to imply I should release you. I pretended not to understand the gesture and drew you to me and kissed your red lips with the feeling of eating a red rose, so fast you didn’t have time to react, but then you pushed me away and hit me with all your strength and took flight. In front of us there was a rest pavilion. You stopped and waited for me there, pulling on your wet t-shirt that stuck to your skin. High above, the sky was black with clouds. Gibbons called out and in a furious flapping of wings, turtledoves caught the wind sideways and were gone. Don’t ever do those tomfooleries of yours again, you hear, you said firmly, pointing at the fronton of the pavilion, which bore the inscription ‘No immoral acts’ as if to find protection under it. That means there must be a lot of them, ‘immoral acts’, I thought angrily. Suan Moak is riddled with couples in love. But I shouldn’t have slept with you. You were furious. You were crying out of resentment. And it happened so fast. We hadn’t been intimate all that long. Our friendship was still fairly new. You spoke on a wistful tone and you shook, disgusted with yourself that it had happened so fast. You only thought of blaming yourself, thoughts I could guess and hear formulated thus: I behaved like a slut, I behaved like a slut. Came the weekend, you almost didn’t dare to go back home, didn’t dare meet your friends or acquaintances. You weren’t able to behave normally. Whatever you did or thought, you finally realised that your thoughts were getting bogged down in a whirl of sterile mud. When I slept with you the first time, I thought you were a virgin. Even though I wasn’t born yesterday and was influenced by western thought enough to be indifferent to virginity in a woman, this belief of a kind had me rather jolly while you remained inert and let the tears roll down your face. One day, before we slept together, you asked me candidly why the figure 69 had an obscene meaning. That question provoked in me an irrepressible lust for you. In the room, there was only one chair, in front of the desk, and you sat on it. I was reclining on the bed. The room was too cramped and you were very near me and it would’ve been easy for me to grab you and hug you had I let myself go to madness in the least. I answered, I know why but I can’t explain it to you. That’s it, I remember, it’s coming back to me, under my boiling cranium bathed in sweat on this freezing night, icy like the realm of death. I remember: Chainarm number fifteen, the indigent digs of a famished student. I can see now how you started then, pursed your lips and went straight to the half-open door to open it wide. Your face was flushed. That’s what made me think you were a virgin. A virgin that would be boring to deflower, boring and annoying, as it would require the patience of a bonsai enthusiast and the minutia of an engraver of minting plates, and to hell if those two qualities weren’t most limited in me! Even though I didn’t like virgins, I didn’t find them repugnant. It’d be madness to invent for oneself such a crummy bias against women. Why are there virgins, if not to be sacrificed? But that day I didn’t touch you, not even a hair. And now, with hindsight, how beautiful it is that I didn’t touch you! If I always thought you were a virgin, it was that some of your spontaneous attitudes led me to believe it, like the day it rained and you came on your bicycle under the rain to meet me as I waited for you in front of the library, do you remember? It was almost eight in the evening. One hand on the handlebar, the other pulling on the white shirt of your uniform so that it didn’t stick to your skin, so that you could hide the curves of your chest from prying eyes. And I looked up and glanced discreetly and told myself those indeed were breasts no hand had ever touched but yours when you took a bath or on some nights in the intimacy of your bedroom when erotic urges came to you, most natural urges as everyone has but no one dares to mention because morality reproves and represses them absolutely, or when you have a sudden mischievous curiosity and you touch them comparing them mentally with those of other women or you touch them as you worry about a serious disease such as cancer or want only to check they are of the same size or they have nothing abnormal. Seeing your hand pull on the bottom of your rain-soaked shirt I thought you were a virgin. And that other time as well, the time I sat with my back to a pine tree on a bench by the pond. You came and stood in front of me and bent over to tell me Let’s go and eat together. If you are broke, never mind. You bent over me and slapped a book against your décolleté for fear that my mischievous eyes would dive down between your parting breasts. So I never saw a hint of what I should’ve seen, but I liked you to be proper and on your guard. Women are not sexual commodities. Virgins are especially on their guard. Your hair was getting long and you asked me If I cut it it’d be better, wouldn’t it? – No way, I answered. I like it. I like women with long hair. So you didn’t cut it, but wore a ribbon. That way, in the bus, it might not slap a neighbour in the face. When it was really hot, you complained because it got tangled up and was bathed in sweat. But you didn’t cut it. On some days, when you came to the U, you sat down and kept still for me to redo the knot, but we were both still very young. That it was I who redid your knot had nothing improper, and it was something stupid and lovely and it was beautiful that we were only more or less official sweethearts and still hadn’t slept together. You were always careful that your body didn’t touch or brush against mine, even in crowded buses. But in any case you were an ordinary woman and you had to handle the zany problems of your womanly condition. When you tried to wear high-heeled shoes, you told me that walking gave you cramps, the shoes were too tight above the heels and you had to stick plaster there, which made you grouchy for days. When you put on your student uniform, you had to secure your skirt to the belt in your back with a paper clip so that the hem at the back didn’t stick up. That was yet another thing that made you grouchy. You once entrusted me with your handbag while you went to buy a bottle of water. I’ll be right back, you said, and I opened it discreetly just to have a look. There was a comb and a hair slide, there was a small ruler and a small eraser, there was a Snoopy cartoon and there was a well-wrapped-up adhesive sanitary towel. What the heck did women do to suffer the malediction of menses? Dreadful. Truly dreadful. The most repugnant thing of their most fascinating organ. What a big contrast! as they say in English. Poets wax lyrical over the beauty of women and make as if they didn’t know women have menses. I love you. But the echo of my musings on you is jammed; it no longer has the purity of crystal. It was before I slept with you that the echo of my musings on you had the purity of crystal, like an astronomical lens. But you were no virgin, as you know. I had got that entirely wrong. When you revealed the truth to me, it was as if a hard object had bashed me on the nape or behind the ear, generating dull pain and bewilderment. And vindictive fury. But vindictive towards what, I knew not. I only knew it was an absolute fury
, like a volcano that wants to smother the entire world under its lava. I should never have met you or become intimate with you or slept with you. I would never have had to know anything about you. Sorry. I can’t control myself. The night goes on quiet and increasingly icy. Silence shatters against the howling of dogs, the noises of insects, the mowing of cows, the sad breathing of odd things, the faint laughs of odd things from I don’t know which direction or how far away or what they are exactly. But soon silence swallows them entirely like dormant water. I’ve hurt you again. I keep hurting you. You were increasingly weak after you slept with me, whereas before that you probably didn’t love me. Sleeping with me had made you weak. You started to have female demands and you started to worry about the future. You were afraid I’d leave you and you kept waiting for me like a cheap prostitute. Darling, you are a good and damn stupid woman, a slave similar to a cheap prostitute. You had to be downtrodden like a doormat. You couldn’t accept the idea that the sex drive concerns only the flesh, is nothing but the search for physical happiness. You were afraid of it. It took you a long time to take timorous pleasure in it, and as soon as you took pleasure in it, you were scared of being able to take pleasure in something so repulsive. It was so disgusting and shameful for you to be able to find pleasure in something as vile and repulsive! The first times we slept together, you refused adamantly to go back home and you cried non-stop and no matter how I tried to coax you, you wouldn’t listen. In front of a woman’s tears, I turn to jelly. I know: I’m not an exceptional man, I mean not particularly rotten. I have a weak heart, and feel pity easily. You cried like a little girl. You cried like an abandoned child. You were scared your parents would notice surreptitious changes. That had you worrying yourself sick all day long and all night long. I was struck with incredulity when you told me you were no virgin. There was nothing extraordinary in my women having slept with other men. But someone like you should never have slept on the sly with anyone. I knew you well enough. You had nothing of the wild bimbo who beds the first man that comes along. You could be many things, but what you couldn’t be was a sex adventuress. And, all the time I had known you, I had never seen you being particularly intimate with anyone, although you had lots of male friends. With whom? I asked. On the one hand, I told myself you were joking. He must have been someone to envy: you must have loved him a lot to have slept with him. But on the other hand, I felt the heat wave of jealousy swell. It was a feeling I’d never have thought I’d be capable of. I made as if I wasn’t really interested in that fact, but I couldn’t pretend for long. You yourself were ill at ease, anguished. You were tormented by the secret you had to keep and it had become an increasingly heavy burden you didn’t succeed in getting rid of. You were condemned to bear it all your life. You were trying to forget, but couldn’t. Each attempt led to despair. Have you ever had a secret? you asked out of the blue. You didn’t expect any answer. You asked just to be able to say, In that case, you don’t know what torture it is to keep a secret; it’s awful. I feel like I’m impure, you said as if to exchange commiserations. We were lying together alone the two of us, in Chainarm number fifteen. A March afternoon was ending, stifling and dim. Tension had risen slowly and long before that, because you were unusually quiet and sad and you kept lying on the bed you’d got used to, your face buried deep into the pillow. When I turned your face towards me, I noticed your eyes were red and your eyelids swollen. You hugged me fiercely and you started to cry. You had nothing of the adult you flattered yourself to be; you were only a terribly weak child. I liked it that you dared to cry in my presence. You’ve never pretended to be strong when you weren’t strong as women do these days. I didn’t know how to console you. No one had ever consoled me. I’ve never learned from anyone how to console someone. I’ve learned to console myself on my own. What you were confronted with was an emotional crisis. It was you yourself who had decided to face it rather than avoid it as usual. Was I part of your decision? I didn’t try to fathom your suffering. No, I didn’t even try to understand it. No one can truly understand someone else’s suffering. As for tormenting oneself for someone else, forget about it. It may happen that one torments oneself for someone else, but that’s only because one hopes to profit from so doing in one way or another. You had been thinking about it night and day for quite some time and for quite some time night and day tormenting yourself. Finally, you spoke up. You had to confide in someone. It might make me suffer, but not necessarily. You only told yourself I had to be told. You were taking the risk to divulge for the first time what you’d buried deep in the secrecy of your heart four years earlier, four years before I slept with you. Since then, the poison had spread all over and was showing its noxiousness without respite. You’d thought it wouldn’t take you long to forget, but it was like a spectre haunting you when you were or thought you were alone. I didn’t know what you were up to and I began to wonder whether I had taken leave of my senses, even though I still didn’t know how bad it was, and dull pain spread out in a hard to understand way inside my cranium like food-loaded ants fleeing a flood, like animals caught in a jungle fire. You went silent again, which further thickened the heavy atmosphere that reigned in the room. I was adrift and bewildered, going so far as to think you were telling me you were about to leave me and getting ready to receive that pain. You stopped crying but you still went on moaning and whispering incomprehensible words. The shriek of the fan was a real pain, its breath scattering the cigarette ashes. You repeated that I had to know, I must absolutely be told. Whichever way one looked at it, I had to know. It wouldn’t be fair for me not to know. I said that if it was something hideous you didn’t wish to reveal, you might as well keep it to yourself, but you insisted on speaking up. In any case, if there were negative consequences, you’d be the one to bear them mostly. You had been dissatisfied for a long time, especially since you had made the mistake of giving in to me. Anxiety and frustration surged through you wave after wave. You didn’t want to be alone and that’s why you came to see me often. Your nights were a torment. You found you couldn’t hold still in your room and couldn’t find sleep. You procrastinated nonetheless, telling yourself that I was going to despise you and eventually I’d try to break away once I knew you’d already slept with a man. Most men react like this, don’t they? Even if they pretend to be modern and broadminded. You speak as though you didn’t want it to be so, but in any case I’m not like that, I said, uneasy, feeling pity for you also. I didn’t quite realise how much you were suffering. With you, I’m totally conscious of my condition as long as I’m still able to control myself. My remark made you smile wryly. You remained lying still for a while and lit a cigarette to relieve your frustration. You inhaled the smoke deeply and coughed. You were still silent. You made as if to squash the cigarette in the ashtray but then had a last drag before stubbing the cigarette and hugging me hard. That man was very different from me, you told me. Did you invite him home as you had with me, I asked. Never, but your father and your mother knew him. What did he look like? I couldn’t picture him in my mind. And what was his name? I didn’t ask, or else maybe it was that I didn’t want to know what you didn’t want me to know or I knew the time and place weren’t right or maybe it was my jealousy that prevented me from daring to ask. O Kangsadarn, in my dreams I see you crying. I am sorry for you. I am sorry for myself. For the both of us. I’ve had enough of listening to music, even if at times I’m dying to listen to some more. It’s one of the dirty tricks of life. It leads life to destruction. Exactly like books, actually. One day that we were together in the library, you brought me the photograph of someone. I asked Who is it? – Yehudi Menuhin, you answered. Do you know him ? you asked. I’m pretty sure I heard his name somewhere, I answered. I only know he is a violinist. – He performed once at the National Theatre, you said. And you said, after being silent for a while, that at one time you received private tuition in violin. You wanted to play the violin as a virtuoso like Charles Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder�
��s book which had impressed you so much. Didn’t that make you want to know how to play the violin, you asked. When we talk in the library, we must whisper, so you lowered your head towards mine and got very close. No, I answered. Oh! you growled in a voice that sounded like it. It means you didn’t appreciate it enough. All those who read this book and appreciate it feel like playing the violin and owning a rocking chair. You were certain of it. You sounded like a child. Your voice and the way you spoke above all were those of a child. You told me you’d practised the violin for a while but eventually had given up. I myself had played the guitar for a while until I grew calluses on my fingers when I was a teenager but had given up, disgusted, for lack of any progress. I thought you must’ve given up for the same reason. You asked me if I remembered you had told me that at one time you had played the violin. I answered Of course I remember. That violin was a birthday present from your parents on the day you were sixteen. You are very different from me. We all were children once. We all had a childhood and, no doubt about that, childhood has its sufferings. We often look at our past with contempt in our eyes and turn in hope towards the future. On some days, I recall your peaceful house and its orchard hidden in the dense green of the trees by the river and desperately seek your past with the eye. I can’t imagine how you could ever have been a little girl. It seems that, in that past, you grew up under another sky and under another sun. You told me that sometimes it was what you felt as well.
The White Shadow Page 25