The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  On the walls of the room hung a portrait of Rama II and photographs of a dishevelled Beethoven and a lanky Paganini playing the violin, a photograph of an old Johannes Brahms playing the piano, a picture of Yehudi Menuhin hugging a violin, a photograph of Hem We chakorn72 playing the violin and a large reproduction of Raoul Dufy’s Violon rouge. Almost all the photographs came from magazines and had been carefully framed, but on the frames as on the glasses there was the same thick layer of dust and the paper of some of the photographs was shrivelled or crinkled for having been exposed to excessive heat or humidity. On the floor there was a fan which started to blow and revolve on itself as soon as he plugged it in before he excused himself to go and take a shower. The fan had hardly started blowing when it began to moan, sounding like an exhausted, senile mechanical insect about to give up the ghost. Beside one of the windows there was a music stand and, lying on the floor next to it, a guitar case with the violin’s smaller case on top of it. At times an offensive smell of urine reached you. When you glanced through another window you saw that the ground on that side was littered with bottles of booze, beer bottles, tightly tied plastic bags full of food remains and pieces of paper, crunched-up packets of cigarettes, broken bulbs and neon tubes, flasks of tonics he probably mixed with booze or beer as you had heard it said some drinkers did. You had been sitting for a while when his daughter appeared, looking at you with curiosity but still hesitantly. When you smiled at her, called her and held out to her the bag full of tangerines, she then grew bolder. On her forehead partly covered by her long hair, you saw the faint trace of the scar inflicted by the eraser, which made you wish in your heart that it would be gone by the time she grew into a young woman. When you made to hug her, she stepped back, but the next moment was compliant when you peeled a tangerine for her. When she found herself sitting in your lap, you felt embarrassed by her grimy little face, her grimy skin, her russet hair with forked ends, and above all her fingers with nibbled nails wrapped in plaster black with grime, while she popped the tangerine segments into her mouth and chewed noisily. You frowned in contrariety while the little girl became increasingly bolder, asked you what your name was and when you told her told you hers and then, with the frankness and enthusiasm of a solitary child that wants to be known by her new friend, she took you by the hand and led you to her father’s working table whose light blue tablecloth was soiled and was losing its colour to the benefit of other colours due to the carelessness of the one using it. On the table there were wilted red roses stuck into a funnily shaped bottle. There were pencils, fountain pains, copybooks and books lying haphazardly. On a corner of the table there was his framed diploma, there were several pictures of him, each in its small frame, set in a row. They were all photographs of the time he was a young man. Among them was a full-length portrait. He was wearing straight, narrow-legged trousers so well ironed that the front pleat was sharp, with the cuffs turned up, an impeccable and smooth shirt with a small collar, a thin belt, and his hair was combed backwards as was the fashion then. In the photographs that showed only his face, you could see that he had been a handsome young man with bushy eyebrows, limpid eyes gleaming with vital gaiety and an obvious arrogance that wasn’t found only in the eyes but also on the lips, which smiled slightly with self-importance and self-confidence. Two or three other pictures were collective shots taken with youngsters of the same age that revealed by themselves how haughty and solitary he was, as the boys all stood with their arms around their neighbours’ shoulders, all except him who stood on his own. They were all black-and-white pictures and there was no recent photograph, which made you think that he hadn’t gone to a photo shop in a long time, except one postcard-size photograph in a plastic frame of a lovely pastel hue. The little girl, leaning on the table, held out her arm and took that picture to show you and explain to you that the pretty young woman seated with a very young girl in her arms by his side was her mother and the child she held poised on a little white cushion was her shortly after she was born; she must have been three months old. You asked her if, beside that one, she had other photographs of her, as the idea had come to you that some parents take pictures of their children all the time and keep them all. You too had many photographs of yourself as a child. Parents who love their children tend to collect photographs, maybe out of a feeling of adoration only those who have children can understand. And you told yourself it was a very good thing as well, because a child grows quickly, barely out of the cot and into nursery school then starts to learn how to read and next thing you know here she is a teenager who begins to be interested in her own face and begins to pay attention to the clothes she wears, and you also told yourself it was a good thing because it makes it easy for us to follow our own evolution. There isn’t, the little girl answered simply, shaking her head in a swell of hair, and she took you by the hand to go and show you her toys – plastic musical instruments, dolls shaped as animals, strange animals, masks and modelling clay of various colours she boasted she could do anything with. You kept silent and still. You heard him hosing himself down in the bathroom, brushing his teeth vigorously and hawking up phlegm and making other rather unappealing noises people with manners spare others. That day, before the lesson started it was much later than the agreed time, and it was the same on the next sessions. Sometimes he hadn’t woken up yet or he had woken up but had gone out to buy cigarettes and, while he bought cigarettes in the caretaker’s grocery shop, he had happened to bet on the boxing match on TV with the other spectators gathered there, or sometimes he was neither at home nor at the grocer’s, his daughter said he had gone off late morning she didn’t know where to and, after such a long wait you were about to go back home, he would arrive breathless, sometimes giving off a strong smell of alcohol and dripping with sweat. While you waited, you tidied the place up, as by nature you were unable to stand such a mess. You brought cakes and fruit to his daughter every Saturday and every Sunday. You didn’t dare drink the water he served you as any host must, not because you feared he might have designs on you and slip a sleeping pill or an aphrodisiac into that water, but because the glass had fingerprints and the coaster blackish streaks and you weren’t sure the water was drinkable. Each time, he apologised about the surrounding untidiness, sounding contrite and humble, but he never tidied up for the place to be cleaner. You could see house lizard eggshells between the piles of collections of songs and music manuals, and you could hear squeaks of rats or mice. The corners and ceiling were but sophisticated displays of cobwebs as so many works of abstract art, but all things considered it must be said he behaved with you with deference as if you were an adult, even if sometimes he sounded depressed to have to give private tuition to augment his income, since Saturdays and Sundays were ordinarily his rest days, but on some Saturdays and Sundays he absented himself without warning, and on some days, in the middle of a lesson, his friends – most of them civil servants still single and jolly fellows or else hoodlums – shouting their heads off, called for him to come out and join them, and he put an end to the lesson with a word of excuse and left in a hurry. In any case, the relationship between his daughter and you tightened all the while. You didn’t have a little sister and you would’ve liked to have one. Your mother was still young enough to have a child if only your father hadn’t been that old. But you didn’t dare to think of the little girl as your little sister. He knew your parents. Actually, saying that he knew who your parents were would be more accurate. But his treating you with deference meant that you didn’t know how to behave. Maybe it was because he saw you were more interested in his daughter than in him or maybe because your parents paid the tuition at a rate higher than the one agreed upon and, furthermore, in advance. At first he had asked to be paid at the end of the month but, at the start of the fifth week, he had asked in a deferent tone whether it was possible for you to pay him at the end of each week, as his financial situation was so bad he was ashamed. When you told your parents, they agreed. Every time he received your money he always
said it was too much. His eyes shone with gratitude. He protested every time you offered cakes and fruit to his daughter. He showed a humility that was out of place. Every time you went to study at his house, his daughter hung around you. It seemed she had more of a sense of music than you did, actually, and sometimes she’d make suggestions to you in all innocence. And so it went on until the end of the second term. You had the impression you had progressed satisfactorily, both in your way of playing and in your theoretical knowledge. You were beginning to be aware of what it is possible and what it is impossible to do with a violin and you understood its nature well enough – having reached that part of your tale, that’s what you were trying to explain to me. To no avail: I can’t play the violin. I don’t understand it. You can play chords like the guitar. I am too much of a buffalo to understand. Whatever you said, your explanations weren’t at all necessary for me. At that time, you were happy. School was over. You had before you a long succession of free days and you had all your time to practise the violin.

  thanthakhart73

  In other words, when self-expression is denied, then energy will find its outlet in crime and violence.

  Colin Wilson, The Outsider

  He told you that, for the duration of the holidays, giving you lessons in the music room wouldn’t be proper. Would you mind coming to study at his house, from four to five in the afternoon including Saturdays and Sundays? You had nothing against it, as you were getting used to his house and you rode your bicycle to go there to learn the violin – your white bicycle, the same you took to go to school. You already could play several easy pieces and dreaming of being able to play difficult pieces made you feel happy. When you listened to pure music, you only listened to the violin. You were almost seventeen. You were a young woman grown up in a green, clean and beautiful provincial town where people lived simply. You were as assiduous learning the violin as you were in the other subjects. You waited for the lessons to begin. You practised and revised your lessons in earnest. You wanted to show to the ones teaching you how determined you were to learn. It was then the hot season. The wind blew strongly almost all day long. Mango flowers cluttered the ground. Their terribly tart fruits grew and hung in profusion. It was truly the city of mangoes. The flame trees lost their leaves and got ready to blossom. A little before four in the afternoon you left your house, straddled your bicycle and pedalled along the road that skirted the river. Sometimes you hummed to yourself and sometimes you rang the bell of your bicycle just for fun. You were satisfied with all that had been your life up until then and everything was beauty and a source of laughter, the houses on both sides of the road, the river, the boats, the flowers and the people. You had no money problem, even though you knew quite well your family wasn’t all that wealthy. You still studied steadily. You had no problems at school, but your eyesight was failing again and you had to get new glasses. You didn’t like contact lenses, they required too much care, you reasoned to yourself. Your small town was beautiful. Even in the heart of it, you dared to take deep breaths: no pollution, no stagnant waters, no traffic jams, none of what permanently ruins people’s equanimity in Bangkok; nothing to dampen the mood. Living there, you heard wavelets break on the bank night and day and the river was still blissfully pristine in your dreams as in reality. You were happy just looking at the shop signs with their old-fashioned lettering and what was left of the town ramparts in a long, twisted, slanted line, some sections so decrepit that you could see the bricks, some sections missing, some sections with cracks crammed with creeping grass. Some sections from which surged bodhi trees had you deep in thought and you tried to remember tiny events of the town history, like when Chinese secret societies fomented trouble, or else you asked yourself odd questions. You liked very much the legend of King Asoka the Great and the mighty bodhi trees. You liked the legend about why Buddha images have hair coiffed in the shape of a river snail shell and the legend about why Ananda found it so difficult to reach enlightenment. But above all you were beginning to like and respect bodhi trees with a pure heart and you didn’t understand why you felt so moved. It was an emotion that owed nothing to rite or tradition. You would’ve liked to plant a bodhi tree at home and you would’ve liked to have a Buddhain-meditation image you’d place under the tree, but you didn’t dare reveal this thought to anyone. You also liked old temples. For you, dilapidation and great age had their charms. It was a town which had its own history like all things. You liked to think of it from its origin, when it was only a small population nucleus hundreds of years ago. I remember. We used to stroll, you and me, after we had become intimate friends. And I remember. The rhinoceros mangoes have a shoot that takes from their top, unlike the other species. Why such a shoot? Maybe it’s an aberration of their growth. You too had asked yourself that question. Actually, we often thought alike or almost alike and we were interested in the same things. You sincerely believed in friendly relations and you were wrong in believing I was sincere with you. We strolled here and there. By train from Bangkok, we came to destination in late morning. From the station we took a motored tricycle as big as those motorcycle combinations that were used to transport Nazi soldiers’ kits during World War Two. The town where you lived as you turned into a young woman, biked to school, biked to your violin lesson… I’m trying to imagine the growth of a seventeen-year-old girl. The woman in you was no doubt blossoming fully like a flower that deploys its petals and there must have been some lecherous old men to eye you up as they would a nymphet or a Lolita. Did you happen to think at the time that man is an animal one must distrust to the utmost? You bicycled along the road that followed the meandering of the river, past a municipal park with its rows of flaming trees. Came the hot season, their flowers bloom and you liked to pedal doing figures of eight in their shade and sometimes you sat down at the foot of one and told yourself: Well, here I am under a tiered umbrella of red flowers, looking at the tiered umbrella of red flowers, looking at the river, breathing the smell of the river. The flaming trees, shortly after shedding their leaves, little by little covered themselves entirely with buds to the end of their smallest twigs. You would’ve liked them to flower all year round. You liked their flowers, red like ripe papaya, red like a fire in a field on a moonless night, at once cold and burning. Sometimes you kept their petals to slip them into your favourite books. The river flowed level with the banks, the water was deep, green, an emerald river – and the dark green of the trees on the opposite bank. A section of the road along the river had a row of rain trees whose foliage intertwined. You lived and grew up there. During the hot season, you read, you listened to music, you practised the violin frantically in the riverside pavilion as you had practised badminton frantically two or three years previously to the point of being reprimanded by your mother. You worried a little when a black spot appeared on one of your molars, hardly bigger than the head of a needle but quite visible all the same. You knew you were prone to tooth decay and it bothered you and you didn’t want it to grow as you had always been scared stiff of the dentist. You hesitated for a long time before telling me that when you were a little girl, you had long worn a brace and you had found it the most hateful thing in the world. Another small source of worry was that you thought yourself a little too fat and you would’ve liked to go out and do some jogging in the morning or else resume playing badminton. You were beginning to be an adult. Your house had nothing but good books, lots of them, and you listened to pure music so that you were familiar with the works of great composers. To my mind, everything considered, you were someone who could be qualified as excessively delicate. You had been raised to be someone educated and cultured. Those that are not only well educated but also cultured have something sad about them when they are confronted with the vulgarity of life. In some respects, your music teacher too was one of those beings delicate to excess. He was someone haughty coming down in the world, someone self-assured losing heart, someone proud at the end of his tether. You didn’t know much of what his life had been. O
ne could almost say you didn’t know anything for sure. His behaviour by and large improved when you went to attend his private lessons, but only sometimes. Maybe it was shame on his part, but you knew that deep down he despised whoever did not appreciate music, especially those who held themselves to be of superior education and gave themselves airs. Those only fancied dancing and he had to force himself to play for them. He said defensively that he didn’t have the right to speak like that: those who had such a right were the virtuosos only. He stated nonetheless that whoever doesn’t care for music fails in his quality as a human being and let’s be frank about it: the music course as it is conceived for pupils has nothing to captivate them enough for them to love music. He spoke to you as if you were an adult. You listened to him without saying anything, without venturing an opinion. You didn’t want to express an opinion with someone you weren’t close to and you didn’t see yourself being close to someone like him, he who, for all his decay, was intensely and darkly egoist, he who sometimes had to leave his lesson in the lurch because a creditor came to vociferate at his door. The amount of debt some of them mentioned was so puny it was laughable, but the amount of debt others mentioned was so high you were shocked. And he had to go out and beg his creditor to lower his or her voice and ask humbly to have payment postponed for a while, to wait for his salary at the end of the month so that he could pay another instalment. He had to make every effort to stay calm. At such moments, he left it to you to go through the lesson by yourself. Sometimes his friends came unexpectedly and invited him out for a drink and he told them to go ahead and he’d soon join them. The symptoms of drunkenness were too obvious for him to cover them up. But as soon as the others were gone, he showed by his attitude and by his words that, as you could see, he attached no importance to such a promise. This kind of behaviour made you secretly feel pity for him. But as soon as he placed the bow on the strings of the violin and the clear sound rose in superb scrolls, you frowned and turned your head in agony. When you saw silver shreds of clouds at the end of a vast and empty sky or flower petals flowing in the wind, the pity you felt for him disappeared. His virtuosity was so vastly superior to yours that you felt like a child taking her first steps. You told yourself you would no longer pay attention to his defects from now on; it was none of your business. You listened to him patiently while he reviled the musical tastes of the school ‘professors’ (those with academic degrees were qualified there as ‘professors’ and it was only the degree-deprived like him that were called ‘teachers’, he pointed out bitterly), but you knew perfectly well that he was more or less indebted to the very same teachers he denigrated. As it were, it was because he owed them money that he was lavish with sarcasms behind their backs. And you also knew that they had given up any hope of ever being reimbursed by him and that they all used the same procedure, which was that, when he mentioned his financial hardship, they handed over to him one or two hundred baht while stating that they too had difficulties and saying Here, take this. No need to reimburse me. You didn’t know who had come upon this method, but it turned out to be a good way out, as he didn’t dare to beg for money from them again and he had to turn to other creditors, whose children or grandchildren were sometimes his pupils, who whispered behind his back that he owed so much to dad or mum or uncle or auntie and that he wasn’t about to pay his debt back despite many reminders. The money he received, you were well placed to know that he spent it not only on drink and food but also on gambling in all sorts of games as there are everywhere. Sometimes he recouped his losses a little, true enough, at card games, high-low craps, the underground lottery or even betting on boxing matches on TV or on football matches, but those sums disappeared in feasts that very same day or in the next couple of days without ever reaching his creditors’ hands. Those were extravagant banquets from morning to evening which you sometimes had the opportunity to fall upon in his very house. He sat in the small trodden earth courtyard in front of his house covered with worn-out wicker mats among his shady-looking pals who stared at you weirdly with offending and impolite expressions. Some of them, dead drunk no doubt, lied curled up outside of the circle while those that sat in a circle to eat and drink talked or sang at the top of their voices. And there were many other similar occasions your friends at school told you about, even sometimes the female vendors who knew your mother when you went out to market in the morning or in the evening, or things you learned from your father’s civil servant friends who came to see him at the house. There were times when you’d start to think about him, stared deep into his torment and it left you stunned. But this despised man responded to despise with superior despise and prided himself on appreciating matters more refined, more subtle, more mysterious and more noble, matters that very few people are able to appreciate. One day, he confided in you that he would have liked to disappear from that town for a while and come back to it rich and famous so that those that despised him would realise how blind they were to have failed to see how valuable a sublime person like him was. He still dreamed to study music in a higher education establishment but he was handicapped by his age, as he was almost forty, and he had never been patient enough to consult manuals. True, no one was too old to learn and if he passed the entrance exam… But what about his daughter, then? Whom would she live with, given that his wife had disappeared God knows where for months? And talking about his daughter, he’d like to say frankly, exactly as he felt, that even though he didn’t take care of her as much as he should, he loved her very much, as much as any father loves his daughter. He stopped speaking for a moment and asked you if you knew his wife. You shook your head and kept your eyes down on your violin placed on your thighs while he said bitterly that she was a vile and vicious woman and, in his own terms, ‘a real bitch’. And he went on saying, looking disheartened, how much he was fed up with teaching and how much his wife made his life miserable, and he started to revile his wife compulsively. Then he shouted out that if his wife came back, he’d kill her. She hadn’t gone that far away and furthermore she couldn’t have gone for long. But as far as she might go and as long as she might be gone, she would eventually come back to him. He was certain of that. He knew her too well. When he realised he was talking to you, his pupil, of things he shouldn’t talk about, he suddenly stopped speaking and then apologised. It was because he had loads of things on his mind and he didn’t know whom to confide in, he explained. Once he told you, as if to take you into his confidence, would it be all right if he left the civil service? He kept thinking about it. He was fed up with this small town he had been living in for twelve years already. He was fed up teaching, which he had been doing for twelve years without it improving his life in hardly any way at all. Resigning would fetch him a certain amount of money, given his years of service, and once he had reimbursed his debts, he’d be left with enough to go and start a new life somewhere else. Then he started again explaining at length how much his debts tormented him. He had found himself so hard up he had asked you to lend him some money, telling you he’d reimburse you out of the tuition fee. And you had done so; it wasn’t much anyway. And when he received the money for the tuition, he reimbursed you as he had promised. That had set you apart from his other creditors. He had enjoined on you not to let out to anyone, and above all to your parents, that he had borrowed money from you. If your parents knew about it, they no doubt would be unhappy and wouldn’t allow you to get private tuition from him any longer, which would result in a loss of earnings for him, and if the others knew, it would earn him increased malicious gossip that would put him even more on edge and he had more than his share of it as it was. The money he borrowed from you he used as bets in gambling circles – you were shocked when you learned about it, but his daughter assured you it was so and you had no reason to think the little girl was lying. But when he asked you to lend him money the next few times, you didn’t dare equivocate or refuse. You are like that, someone good and damn stupid. You are someone who is easily taken in, like most Thais. You were tem
pted to give up the lessons but you hesitated, thinking of the progress you were making little by little on the violin. From then on, you paid his course for the week through his daughter, so that, if he took the money to use it extravagantly, at least he’d think a little about his daughter. But he seemed to be absorbed in something as if he was haunted. He didn’t understand or maybe didn’t even notice your ploy and its hidden meaning and he kept letting things go on as before. You were beginning to feel tense. As soon as you met him, you had the impression that blood was beating at your temples. That tension caused you to learn very slowly and, now that you had become his creditor, he no longer dared to make direct remarks to you. You were distraught. On some days, you found yourself excuses not to go and learn. When your father and mother asked you questions, you fibbed, saying he wasn’t free (an excuse he himself put forward with you often). Every time you lied, you were upset. You were afraid of being caught red-handed. When you started to lie, you started to feel as if everybody was after you, everybody could see through your lies. The next day, when the time for the lesson came, you grabbed your bike and went out, but you didn’t go to his house. You took to another part of town, went to sit in a small riverside restaurant with a book to read. At the ferry pier there was a houseboat transformed into a coffee shop which sold coffee and groceries as well. The houseboat, built like a Thai-style house with very large boards, was beautiful, clean and quiet, as it was in front of a monastery. I remember that coffee shop. You used to take me there. You went to take shelter there often without telling your parents and without him knowing about it either, sometimes three or four days in a row. During what should have been your violin course hour, you sat down on the houseboat deck, your feet in the water, looked at the houseboats on the opposite bank and the boats floating by, with a glass of iced black tea perfumed with lemon or else a glass of orange juice near you, and the violin, which you didn’t dare to leave in the front basket of your bike as you were afraid it’d get stolen. Sometimes, when you had had enough of gazing around you, you read or bought bread you shredded and threw the shreds at the fish swimming there in great numbers, as no one would fish in front of a monastery. There was also a Catholic church on the opposite bank, but a little out of line, not to be bell-to-gong with the monastery. You were almost happy, but at the same time above your happiness the waves of alarm gathered silently. It was the first time you shirked your duty. You weren’t used to that. You were afraid he’d go and look for you at your house, even though you knew he wouldn’t dare or at least shouldn’t. You were afraid of meeting some acquaintance. That compelled you to stay seated with your back to the road. The water was deep, cold and ran strong. The Bang Pakong was a clean river. The wind was so fresh you wished your hair was even longer. You were so much happier sitting there than during the violin lesson. But each time you were on the houseboat you told yourself tomorrow you wouldn’t come again. He must be waiting and worrying. You made him wait, although he was an adult, although he was your teacher. You knew perfectly well it was impolite to act like that. When you went back to study once again, he blamed you at length for having disappeared without telling him anything and he asked angrily why this was so. You kept silent. But when he insisted and demanded an answer, you answered sheepishly that you were fed up. It was a way of speaking so forthright, so violent it hardly sounded like you, but you didn’t want to lie. If you had made yourself scarce, it was because you were really fed up. Fed up and ill at ease. You tried to control yourself to explain as courteously as possible how you felt. You felt you feared him more than you could have thought possible. You were surprised nonetheless to be talking like that. You had been taught not to stand up to grownups, to show respect to people older than you. But he was even more surprised than you were. His face and eyes, which reacted instantly to the least of his moods, were deformed by suffering. You had hurt his feelings. That nearly forty-year-old man full of failures and disappointments, that man who had to run away from his own past, was no longer able to bear the least commotion. Even though he was older than you, all that there was in him that was respectable had been destroyed by the rude words and insults that he had received and that had damaged him, as everybody knew. As for you, it wasn’t as if you didn’t understand anything at all. Deep down, you too looked at him in a negative way, even if you kept warning yourself that it wasn’t up to you to pinpoint other people’s shortcomings. I know. I know you well. You have that rare quality which is spiritual equanimity, which you owe to a prolonged strict education. You were cross with yourself when he said slowly as if guiltridden that, if you were fed up and felt ill at ease, you might as well stop studying. You hastened to apologise to him. You insisted that studying was what you wanted from the start and assured him that you did mean to carry on studying. He said it was as you wished. He would’ve preferred not to have to tell you that he too was fed up, fed up and ill at ease about everything. Actually, he wasn’t all that eager to waste time with you. He had plenty of things to do more pleasant or more important than teaching you the violin. You told yourself that if he spoke like that it was to preserve his face and to regain confidence in his way of life. That day, before the lesson began, it was very late. Furthermore, it ended before the set time, because of the sudden appearance of a plump middle-aged woman who refused to sit down when he invited her to, ignored his request to calm down so they talked things over quietly in private and wouldn’t lower her voice, but stood right in the middle of the room and undertook to demand the return of what he had borrowed from her. Once again the amount involved was enormous and when you heard it you were shocked, all the more so as it was for you the occasion to learn that the borrowing had been done in legal forms and that breach of contract would surely send him to jail given that he had deliberately put off repayment even though she had given him more than plenty of time to do so. She shouted out as if she intended to humiliate him publicly. Since he wasn’t leaving her any other solution, she threatened, she was going to consult a lawyer. His voice, by contrast, was increasingly low, so shocked was he by that assault of rudeness and ashamed of being thus disgraced. You took your violin and slipped away. In front of the door of the room, you bumped into his daughter, who stood there furtively peeking at what was going on inside. What could the girl be thinking? What was she feeling? Painful questions and difficult answers. You stroked her head and forced a smile. She followed you, asked you to take her with you to your house while stretching out her hand to clutch firmly the carrier at the back of your bike and making as if to climb onto it. You softly refused saying No, come now, you can’t, while feeling how awful it was to leave behind the little girl who, standing still behind you, was looking at you going away. By then it was the end of the hot season term. You went to pay a visit to relatives in their Thonburi orchard and for about a week you didn’t attend the violin course. When you returned, as you rode into the school precinct you realised for the first time how deserted and desolate it was, teachers and caretakers having already gone back home. It was holiday time and that was it, your school had closed down, now another world only recently still full of movement and noise. The grass on the sports grounds was dry and shrivelled. Doors and windows in all classroom buildings were locked up and their balconies empty. Dead leaves cluttered the ground. The rows of Indian almond trees along the road and the beds of decorative plants along the alleys seemed to have grown old all of a sudden. There was only the administrative building where a few people still worked. The teachers’ lodgings at the back of the school were all closed and silent, as was the caretaker’s house that sold groceries. Of the teachers lodged at the school, he was the only one who hadn’t gone back home or gone visiting someone. He was always there and you kept on going to study the violin with him every day, until one day he left the lesson unfinished. He told you he had run out of cigarettes and looked for some change and called his daughter and told her to go and buy him a packet of cigarettes. As the caretaker’s shop was closed, he told the little girl to g
o and buy it at a store in front of the school and with the remaining money to buy herself some sweets and he softly pinched her cheek once, bent over to whisper something you didn’t quite catch and laughed softly as was his habit. You found yourself alone with him. You should have been on your guard. But unfortunately for you, you weren’t. All that happened then was simple and so ordinary. Later when you thought back, you’d tell yourself he had told his daughter to take her time. How it all began, you hardly noticed. It happened too fast for you to understand. You put up a struggle, you protested when you were assaulted, too stunned and panicky to know what was happening. Maybe because you had hardly ever thought about this sort of thing, you were totally unaware of the important fact that no matter what, he was a man still in the prime of life and deprived of a woman for months. He must have been waiting for such an opportunity for a very long time in the desolation of his days and of his nights, torn between fear and daring, but at the same time burning with the fire of lust, and when his self-restraint snapped you became his prey, the prey of a famished wild beast. And it was as a prey that he handled you. He rushed at you and raped you savagely. You cried out of pain as he roared with his greedy hot breath stinking of alcohol and tobacco. You put up a struggle, you fought desperately. You were being raped by a wild beast. Later on, thinking back to all that, you’d shiver with disgust and push back this memory with all your might. It wasn’t true! You’d force yourself. It hadn’t happened to you. It might have happened to someone else in another world. It wasn’t true! There never was a cramped and dirty room where you had been dragged to roughly. There was no old bed with its grey and soiled sheet under a greyish mosquito net with its sides up. It wasn’t true! A place like that there was none in reality and furthermore he didn’t exist either. You had never met him, never had any kind of relationship whatsoever with him. You yelled and repulsed with all your might the memory of such an event, but it was stronger than you, it was like an eagle that swooped down on you and smashed your conscience; it always came up unexpectedly and treated you as it pleased. Finally, you had to accept the bitter truth: you were only a foolish and careless young girl and it was your foolishness and carelessness that had led you into disaster. You could no longer pretend to forget the day when your world of beauty was smashed to pieces. It was the most violent pain you had ever endured and its burning would stay with you for a long time, probably until your own demise. Such was the reward of the trust that you had in him, that you had in a human being. You lay face buried into the pillow which stank of his sweat and musk, and cried even though you had no more tears. After he had thoroughly satisfied his craving, he tried to cheer you up, let out a stream of excuses, endlessly cursed himself in filthy terms, but you wouldn’t listen to anything any longer. You didn’t care what he was saying. Finally he fell silent, got up and started pacing back and forth and after a while came back to the bed and sat on it. You heard his heavy breathing very near. It sounded like the breathing of a prehistoric beast. He flipped you onto your back. His face got close to yours. His bloodshot eyes stared deep into you. You could have sworn those were the eyes of a murderer. His hand, tapering like the paw of a dead animal, went down to your neck and squeezed it convulsively. You tried to utter a shout but your shout remained stuck in your chest, echoing like the echo in a valley full of ghosts, of demonic caves and of streams of death. Help! Help! Your throat crushed by steel pliers, you couldn’t breathe any longer and a dull pain born you didn’t know when spread out like masses of thick smoke and those masses of smoke mutated into as many zombies which, with their fangs and claws, rooted life out of your body with a brute force you couldn’t withstand. His face got even closer, blocking off all the things in your life from your consciousness. His eyes sank deep into your eyes as if to hypnotise you. His reedy low voice resounded as if it came out of the dark heart of aberration, drowning out all other sounds. You nonetheless perceived abject vulgarity and incomprehensible suffering in his features, in his eyes, in his voice, vulgarity and suffering that welled up and flowed like blood out of a mortal wound. In the confusion of your perceptions, as cold as if you were in the eye of an icy whirlwind and as hot as if you were burnt alive, you heard a voice saying, like a sinister curse, If you ever tell this to anyone, you’ll die. I will kill you! That was an evil declaration whose charge of terror you were the only one to know. He didn’t say anything further. Your body kept shivering and seemed to disintegrate. Hold me tight, you told me as if you wanted to wake up to the world of reality. Hold me tight and let me cry. O Kangsadarn! Even now, in this icy night which is but moonlight and fog, I still hear your white swan’s scream. Between the glass walls of silence that stretch to the horizon, scratched only by the roar of the wind and crackle of insects and cries of birds of the night and lugubrious howling of dogs, I hear your white swan’s scream, a white swan fallen in a devil’s clutches, desperately and confusedly reverberating under a sky of pure crystal, a scream ensnared there, which I am the only one to hear. All young women each have their white swan. But your white swan is drenched in blood and under the spell of an evil curse, and that evil curse is real. You contented yourself with keeping that story secret. You buried it in the darkest corner of your memory as one buries the corpse of an evil spirit in a horrible tomb where terror waits in the night for the heart of darkness to explode and cover the world, a tomb from which that evil spirit hasn’t stopped rising, as the magic you possessed wasn’t powerful enough to maintain him there. Before you separated that day, he told you to behave normally. Be careful not to arouse suspicion. Do nothing that might betray me. He was God and that was the only commandment you received from him. Henceforth, he had absolute power over you and he was proud of the power he had just acquired. You were afraid, you were ashamed, you were demoralised. You hastily took refuge in your room, telling your mother you didn’t feel well. Luckily your mother was busy; otherwise she’d have observed you with suspicion, even though you had always been trusted. You were taken with incoercible shivering when you remembered one thing you had never thought about, which was that you might get pregnant. You had practically no knowledge in terms of sexual education, even though your father, who was a modern man, had on several occasions warned you that you should know those things and had undertaken to explain them to you, but you had hardly understood anything, you changed the subject or else you laughed and said you weren’t quite old enough. The thought of being pregnant terrified you; you became restless, cried, sobbed and had to bite the pillow not to be heard. You washed yourself again and again, soaped yourself again and again, brushed your teeth again and again. You had turned the jet to full blast as they do on neurotics to calm them. You meant to wash off every trace of those revolting juices. The next day you told yourself that whatever happened you’d never go back to learn the violin. But a little before lesson time, you were called to come out of your room. In the courtyard in front of your house your mother, who that day was at home preparing to make sweets, was talking to someone. You opened the window curtain and glanced out and were seized with panic. His daughter! He had told his daughter to come and fetch you. And he himself had come with that grimy child. He hadn’t come into the house but had his daughter come in instead, arguing that he would’ve been embarrassed to go inside as, according to his daughter whom he must have instructed, he was only passing by and had nothing special to say, apart from simply asking whether you were going to attend the violin course or not, as lately he felt you were often late. You were terrified at the idea that he might tell your mother that in fact you had missed the course several days in a row, as if he said so your mother wouldn’t fail to ply you with questions to know where you had gone and why, even though she trusted you, and you didn’t feel at all like being questioned, especially at such a moment. Oh, he had come to compel you to go to him. That was indeed a trick from someone who knew the ropes. In desperation, you forced yourself instantly to be natural. You shouted to your mother that you were getting ready. As for him, he sat
on the saddle of a bicycle he had borrowed from who knows whom, under the yellow flame tree in front of the house. When he heard that you were getting ready to attend the course, he called back his daughter, who was fascinated by the sweets of all kinds and seemed to be wanting to come up and see you or most likely loiter in your house, be it because she would be eating sweets or because she was taken with your mother or even with you who knew instinctively what the child wanted, and he told her to hurry up to come out and go back home. You left the house like a condemned woman on her way to the scaffold – surely condemned to capital punishment although she’s done nothing wrong, with no possibility to escape or to rebel – and when you reached his house, you realised you’d have to stay alone with him. Once again he apologised profusely. He lowered himself and clasped your feet and after that undertook to rape you gently, you whose nubile body was all flesh and blood and sensations. In room number fifteen at Chainarm, you hugged me tight and you had to keep silent for a long while before you could say that you had been swayed and had gone along. And furthermore you felt pity for him when he said, as if he could guess exactly what you were thinking, that you shouldn’t worry about getting pregnant as he was sterile. His confession shook you up a lot. In that case, it meant that the little girl wasn’t his daughter! It was yet another bitterness among the strata of bitterness that had formed a turbid layer of enormous weight in his mind. That child with a grimy doll’s face was the daughter of he didn’t know exactly which other man. It might well be that even her mother hadn’t a clue either of who it was among the men that had passed by in her fickle and vagrant life. But she, his wife, was a good person, he kept insisting. She ran after men out of spite, for her own gratification. She destroyed everything she could destroy, monstrously and cruelly, to compensate for something. She was destroying even him, he who had pulled her out of the quagmire of abjection in which she rotted and, as a mere individual, he was unable to stand her cruelty and occasionally he’d hurt her back also, and that was his own fault. His fault, his fault, his fault since the very beginning, since he had taken her off the gutter seven years earlier, and at the time he had done so to avenge himself of something too. You stared at him, trying to measure once again the acuity of his suffering, but you were totally disconcerted. You had never thought you knew him truly until he had chosen you as his prey. Before that, he was only what you thought he was. But why did he have to choose you as his prey? If only he had chosen someone else as his prey, you would’ve been ready to endure and try to understand all of his bad mistakes and perhaps even to forgive him perfunctorily. According to moral criteria which all of us would like to correct, we can show magnanimity by demanding of ourselves or of anyone to endeavour to understand the guilty. We can even forgive a criminal, until that criminal commits a crime against someone we love or against something we love or against ourselves. We then realise that there is a flip side to the truth, which is that a criminal must be punished as he so richly deserves to be. This exigency stems from legal criteria – but at the time you didn’t have the words to express what you felt. You only knew that, no matter what, even if you felt pity and sympathy for him, or even if you came to weaken under his greedy caresses, you’d never forgive him, and you said in a tone of desperation which startled him, as if he didn’t know you at all before that, that you would kill him if you could. The expression on your face and in your eyes as you said that was such that I had no doubt that it was truly what you wanted to say, but in any case, whatever you did to stop yourself and force yourself, even though you kept repeating that you’d never let him touch you again, you went to see him every day and you let him ravage you as he wished again and again. You had already lost and capitulated before the formidable power of his eyes, before his embrace and caresses and kisses, and before his saucy and expert tricks of all kinds. If you let him treat you like that, it was in part to punish yourself to have been foolish enough to become his prey, to well and truly sink into your cranium the terrible truth and impose that terrible truth to the world of your conscience full of vague dreams and paralysed with fear. With him, you became a model sexual object. With him, you became a young woman craving sex. You were blindly infatuated with him as all young women are blindly infatuated with the first man that lays waste to their virginity. You looked at him with the eyes of a loyal slave, with the eyes of a dog for its master. You knew perfectly well that what you were doing wasn’t correct, but you weren’t lucid enough to prevent yourself from doing it. He held you at his mercy. Not only your body, but your conscience also. But in some ways he had become your slave too, and his infatuation with you was greater than your infatuation with him actually. He’d kneel down on the floor and enfold your legs in his arms. He’d kiss even the sole of your feet and you remembered how disgusted you were, ashamed, embarrassed and happy at the same time. So you loved him? No. Absolutely not. As blindly infatuated with him as you were, you could swear you absolutely didn’t love him. Life went on in that way day after day until one particular day shortly before the start of the new school year. That day it was almost five p.m. and you were getting ready to go back home. The headmaster burst into his house unexpectedly, propelled by anger and looking obviously determined to sort it out with him once and for all. He seemed surprised to find you there, but he didn’t greet you or ask you anything or even tell you to leave. He merely returned your bow cursorily as he had a more important problem to sort out right away and, without a preamble, as if what he was about to say had often been mentioned, exclaimed, as a polite reprimand, as an eviction fraught with sympathy and understanding, as a final notice full of loving kindness, You have no right to stay here any longer! The start of the new school year was only days away and, given that he had decided to resign as of last month, he had no right any longer to live in this accommodation provided with the job. He was seated on one of the front steps, looking totally distraught. With a desperate and stubborn look that contrasted with the one he showed you, he told the headmaster to allow him some more time. To tell the truth, he had nowhere to go. To tell the truth, he didn’t know whom to turn to. To tell the truth, he had yet to make any plans for the future. Of course, he was going to gather his belongings and move out of this teacher’s lodging house, but could it be done after he had received his severance pay? Actually, he didn’t want to resign from his civil servant post, but it was necessary for him to do so for personal reasons. He was compelled to do it, assailed by problems on all sides. Besides, that his resignation application had been approved at all levels with disconcerting ease had astounded him. The headmaster breathed heavily as he listened to him. He told him it was right of him to have handed over his resignation. If he hadn’t done so he would’ve been expelled: he drank, he kept absenting himself without reason and without authorisation all year round, he failed in all his duties, he was covered in debts. When he had handed over his resignation, the headmaster had thought it was the best solution. Before that, he as headmaster had tried to protect him constantly, had tried to help him directly and indirectly, had tried to be both patient and forgiving, therefore he should sympathise in return. The order to move from this dwelling was a matter of regulation; it was nothing personal. And if he didn’t move out within three days, the headmaster would ask the police to apprehend him for trespassing on state property. He placed his hands on his head and remained like that, stooped, his shoulders hunched, eyes to the ground, trying again to explain with many repetitions that, when he decided to hand over his resignation, he did it in a fit of temper, impulsively, on the spur of the moment. He had done it to harm himself, from resentment, to escape from various pressures due to his personal problems as well as to problems at work and even problems with his fellow teachers. To tell the truth, it was the circumstances that had compelled him to write his letter of resignation. He hadn’t written it voluntarily. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that when he wrote his letter of resignation he was in full possession of his faculties. His voice shook, dejected and despairing. It
seemed that he wanted to express what he was resentful about rather than seriously face the problem at hand. What he wanted was understanding, understanding and encouragement. Finally, he said bluntly, as if to seek advice, would it be a problem if he sought reintegration in the civil service and was it possible in the short term? That’s when the headmaster got really mad. Totally unable to control himself, he copiously insulted him and, while cursing, pounded on him, grabbed him and dragged him down the steps and with a stentorian voice enjoined him to start gathering his belongings right away. You stood witnessing the whole scene in a weird panic that made you feel you were paralysed. You made a tremendous effort to control yourself to prevent yourself from screaming. The glare of the truth was so cruel you wondered how you could stand it. He had resigned on such and such a day. His resignation had been registered at that level on such and such a day, at that other level on such and such day and had been accepted on such and such a day. He had well and truly resigned. And the day his resignation had been accepted at the highest level was the day on which he decided to rape you. In the drift and flux of his heart, at the very bottom of his hopeless hell, he had dragged you down with him. He had hidden the truth from you. He no longer had the right to stay in that dwelling but he stubbornly and shamelessly stayed in it although he had been given notice on several occasions to move out of the place, not because he didn’t know where to go or else, if that was the case, it wasn’t the main reason. If he bore with staying there or if he had chosen to stay, it was because he wanted to seek sexual happiness from you. And you, with full knowledge of the facts or not, you had placed yourself at the service of his sexual satisfaction like a moronic whore. You, a young woman of seventeen whose father and mother and friends thought you behaved in complete innocence and purity whereas in fact you behaved like a moronic whore. From the day you were raped you knew how foolish you were, but it was on the day you learned he had resigned that you realised you were much more stupid than you thought. Once back home, you cried out of hysterical resentment, and all you could do to pay him back in kind was to stop the violin course for good and desperately seek a way to forget him. But your disgust with yourself could only increase, as the whirlwind of rumours of all kinds concerning him compelled you to know that he was still alive and still present in this world. When the classes resumed and the children found out that he was no longer a teacher, they let out a stream of criticisms. Several teachers who were close to their pupils said more or less the same thing, which was that they had been very upset to have to teach in the same school as him, as his bad reputation rebounded on them, but now that he was gone they felt better, all the more so as the prestige of teachers was at its lowest, and one particular teacher who had a way with words (the teacher of Thai classical literature, whom the children knew ambitioned to become a writer) confided to the pupils musingly that now that the school was rid of him, hadn’t they noticed that even the school buildings, which had looked morose for the past ten years, were now all smiles and sang songs to one another, the national flag on its pole fluttered more gaily, the grass in the yard was glad to increase its rate of growth by several percents which it could be stated without fear of getting it wrong was unprecedented, and in the trees the flowers budded in bunches all around the school, not because of the abundant rains of the end of May but due to his departure. Hardly anyone remembered his good points, all the more so when the new music teacher who, fresh from the conservatory and thus wildly enthusiastic, set to work seriously and undertook to lead the school band with energy and authority, to train new musicians to replace those that had finished their studies, to enlist novice singers for folk songs as well as for Thai and western variety tunes by prodding those that were gifted to come forward. Furthermore, he was training two pupils of junior high to be valid presenters. Furthermore, he did something unheard of in the history of the school band, which was to form a team of comics thanks to four little scamps and gags he thought up himself. In the afternoon of the day of homage to the teachers, once all ceremonies had ended, the refurbished band under the leadership of the new music teacher had the opportunity to show its mettle and it was a complete success, especially the background dancers in multicoloured skirts of raffia strings tied at the waist like Hawaiian girls dressed to play hula hoop, who had been chosen among the effeminate boys and who wiggled around frantically. And what was even more exciting was the magician in black suit and top hat, a man able to make a dove out of a cotton ball and turn a nylon piece of string into a snake and put an egg in his mouth and force two out of his ears, and when he took one egg out of his mouth and took it out again out of each ear with much precaution, he flung it onto the stage floor and instead of breaking it bounced like a ping-pong ball he snatched and shifted from one hand to the other between two bounds. The existence of the dancers and of the magician had been kept secret by the music teacher and their presence on stage was a source of fun and astonishment for pupils and teachers alike. There were no longer old theatre tunes, there were no longer old Thai melodies that the violin played solo to perfection or any deep and limpid pure music, but instead the latest hits from the radio and fashionable TV shows. And even though it turned out later on that the dancers only knew how to dance that old routine and the magician had no other conjuring tricks in his repertoire and that the new music teacher was in fact a homosexual whose frequentation of some pubescent pupils was turning into a discreet scandal, no one it seemed compared him to the former music teacher, who was obviously very inferior to him and who, if permanent rumours were to be believed, had gone and rented a small cheap Chinese shophouse in the riverside slum behind the market and lived in idleness one day at a time. People generally understood that the main reason for his resignation was that he drank, which had made him unable to perform his duty and, although the ever-compassionate headmaster had forewarned him, warned him and forgiven him innumerable times, he hadn’t managed to reform himself. The clearest proof was that he kept drinking like a fish round the clock and was even drunker than one could remember having ever seen him. And even though everybody knew he had debts small and big here, there and everywhere which he had sworn to settle when he received his severance pay, once he did receive his severance pay after working really hard at getting it, supplicating and obsequiously flattering to the point of kneeling down before the concerned officials while explaining in great detail how much he needed the money, for instance while waiting for his severance pay he had had to sell all the musical instruments he owned and pawn all of his other belongings that could be pawned, so that all the relevant officials had taken pity on him and done everything they could to speed up the process exceptionally, well, there he went using that money to invite to feast on his mats every single friend, mate, chum and acquaintance – gamblers, hoodlums and sundry other dregs of humankind – which clearly showed that he had, in his own words, irreversibly proclaimed his freedom vis-à-vis respectable society, which was nothing but overambitious, slippery and devoid of taste. He had been seen taking his mates and pals to the fanciest restaurants of the province, drinking French brandy and smoking American cigarettes. He had been seen taking those fellows to Bangkok to do the rounds of chic nightclubs on Ratchadamnern Avenue, sojourn in pricey hotels, visit all the pleasure spots he had frequented in his youth and again with his wife, offering princely awards to songstresses and waitresses, and even mustering his underlings to go and gamble in the Pratunam dens, which were under cosy police protection. In less than three weeks he had become as destitute as before. His mates began to desert him. During that period, at one point he got a foothold again in reality, took his daughter with him and disappeared from town for four or five nights in order to (as he would reveal later) try to find his wife. To tell the truth, maybe he only wanted to run away from his creditors, who all harassed him down to a man. Except for those creditors, nobody was expecting him to return. There were only curses behind his back, and as if he knew that one and all said they wished they had met him for the las
t time, or whether he wanted to ridicule those who spoke like that or make them suffer for the hell of it, he came back with his daughter and resumed haunting the town as he had done for ten years, as if he didn’t want to leave it until someone organised his departure. And to know that he kept roving through town drunk and on some nights went to sit and cry, laugh and snigger under the acacias around the schoolyard like someone unable to control himself made you restless and you couldn’t find sleep. Maybe he forgot himself when he was entirely under the influence of alcohol or said it deliberately to brag or even let it escape in his sleep that he had raped you, and how delicious that had been, and how consenting you had been since then, how complicit, and what he was going to do with you the next times because you had come under his power absolutely until his palace of felicity had crumbled because of the headmaster’s untimely intervention. How could you trust someone like him? You brushed your teeth compulsively several times a day to wipe out the dribble of his kisses. You bathed and soaped yourself compulsively, carefully, meticulously to wipe out the trace of his caresses. You cut your nails very short compulsively and you cut them every day, the nails of your fingers as well as the nails of your toes, and you washed your hair every time you took a shower to the point of becoming allergic to shampoo and you had to change shampoo brands so often your mother noticed it. You sought calm and solitude. You no longer went to the houseboat coffee shop or the riverside public park. You didn’t even want to go to the riverside market, even though going to that market morning and evening had been one of your pleasures up until then. You were absolutely miserable at the thought that his assurance that he was sterile might be nothing but a lie. It was only when your menses came normally the following month that your torment over that died down. Each day stretched slowly and each night was as long as time in hell. You heaved a long sigh of relief when you learned that he had again left town but this time he had gone away alone, leaving his daughter behind in the rented room to go after his wife whom he swore he loved to distraction, adding that he was ready to forgive her for everything and she alone could give him the strength once more to fight against the vital disaster that threatened him from all sides and blackmailed him and howled at him like a pack of wolves surrounding a prey. It was hard for you to understand what may tie up a man and a woman who often hit each other very hard and insult each other in the foulest terms, exposing themselves to public contempt, and then kiss and make up, are sweet to each other, have a child and help each other out earning a living as if all the preceding hard feelings were pure fabrications out of some deranged imagination, but who soon hit each other harder than ever, insult each other fouler than ever, as if the preceding tenderness and sweetness were pure fabrications out of some deranged imagination. And yet, most married couples bear with each other and remain together, so that it seems that those that split up represent true exceptions. That’s the way, isn’t it, which most couples choose. Divorce statistics these days, even though they seem high for people in general, are in fact so low they are worrying. You didn’t know. You weren’t sure. You only knew you were afraid of men, afraid of marriage and of married life. When he left town that last time, you felt a little better and you made wishes for him to find his wife. At the very least, meeting his wife would enable him to keep the secret about you. It was said he knew where to find her. She lived in a seaside town quite happily within her means, working as a waitress in a luxury restaurant and furthermore had got rid of the man she had run out with. And yet he, the former music teacher, returned without her. You found yourself sucked into the vortex of torment once again. You were gloomy and worried excessively every time you felt the eyes of this or that friend or this or that teacher dwell over you suspiciously or when a friend or a teacher or a female trader you patronised regularly or some friends of your father’s or some friends of your mother’s happened to talk about him. He had come back only to find himself drawn into the same rough and exceedingly unpleasant situation, as many of his ruthless creditors still hadn’t given up the hope of getting their money back and kept harassing him at any time and on any occasion, made their insistent demands every time they met him and, when those creditors lost all hopes, they would still condemn him publicly for everyone to know and to serve as an example to their other debtors. All of his secrets were being aired in the open. His inferiority gave rise to jeers; his weaknesses were denounced ceaselessly; almost every time it ended with dire admonitions delivered in a tone of moral superiority. He complained about his miseries of all kinds to beg for sympathy, but eventually withdrew into total silence.