The White Shadow

by Saneh Sangsuk

  Chinese foundation organised a tomb-cleaning ceremony, a grand, well-organised and long-planned ceremony. Lots of voluntary gravediggers dug up old tomb after old tomb, even in those places defying commonsense about any body being buried there, under the instruction of mediums whom you couldn’t remember which divinity or saint inhabited them. It is during such funerals, conceived obviously more for the quick than for the dead, that all unclaimed bodies are incinerated in the correct manner. You only remember that it was an occasion of popular merriment that lasted fifteen days and fifteen nights. A refectory was set up to dish out free macrobiotic food. There were films and Chinese opera and banquets every night. Those weren’t funerals where city dwellers snivel all the time but rather true celebrations. You still lived in the orchard house with your father and mother. You went on with your studies until the end of secondary school. You slowly recovered from those events that were like threatening clouds obscuring your life. When you entered university, you made several male friends. Sometimes you felt like having a boyfriend to forget him. You were no goddess, you said, shaking your head so that your hair swung sideways. You were an ordinary young woman with flesh and blood, an ordinary individual. You raked your fingers through my hair two or three times and spoke in a dreamy tone of voice. But it isn’t fair to you, you said. I have become scared of men. Do you hate me much? you asked. No, not at all, I answered at once but in a rushed way and without conviction. That I later ditched you without hesitation as one takes a wisp of straw off one’s mop of hair and that I threw myself into Itthee Phoowadon’s arms, it wasn’t because I hated you. Has someone told you that Khampan Seenuea was furious? He threw beer at my face and wouldn’t talk to me for a year, and my other friends distanced themselves from me also. And has anyone told you that old Chaweing, the caretaker posted at the university main gate, blind drunk one evening broke into my room and clobbered me with his truncheon, so much so that my arms were black and blue for days on end? Even that old caretaker felt it wasn’t right to have ditched you. But by then I really couldn’t care less. I went to Samet Island with Itthee. I blithely launched myself into a new sexual adventure. You were just a woman I had stopped by for a while and I left you once I had reduced you to a pulp. I had never taken the time to think things through. I hadn’t grown up enough yet. I had had no time to review my acts of all sorts. I had had no time to examine myself. Abjection gave me wings. I knew that sin tasted sweet, as I had never sampled its bitter taste in earnest. At that age, I was a romantic barbarian, a foul beast that from time to time raised its head to look at the horizon, a form of powerful and perfect vital force indifferent to any moral illusion whatsoever. Consciously or not, I’ve spent my life making of my life a desert. My Sahara is empty and vast and grows with every passing moment, with no oasis in sight. I roam and wander through it. I shake and shiver, chilled in the Sahara of my life. My loneliness is the loneliness that has dwelt in the chest of man since prehistoric times. But from now on I can no longer leave. Fifty minutes past midnight already. Let me rest a while. Let me drink a cup of coffee. After that, maybe we’ll talk of Itthee Phoowadon’s death. What do you think? Maybe we’ll talk of Daen Chartiya-wan’s readymade fate. What do you think? And of the destruction of Phraek Narm Daeng. What do you think? Dawn is still a long way off. I must struggle and make for a happiness that would suit me. Or maybe we won’t talk about anything any longer. Maybe I’ll do something easy and straightforward: gather the remains of my memories and throw them in the flush toilet of oblivion. Dawn is still a long way off. Maybe tomorrow morning I’ll leave this place for good with the strength of a sinner that will never abate, to carve myself a new domain in a land of barbarians, to be a pirate, to be a slave runner, to be the Judas Iscariot of the twenty-first century, to be the Ivan the Terrible of the twenty-first century, to be a merciless destroyer of civilisation. Goodbye, Kangsadarn Sakarwarat. May ladyism be destroyed and all evil men unite.

  Chevalier des Arts & des Lettres Saneh Sangsuk, born 1957, is a living paradox: in conti-nental Europe where his works have been translated into seven languages, he is hailed as the Thai writer par excellence; yet, at home, Daen-aran Saengthong (his pen name) raises twice as many jeers as cheers - his writings and personality, grounded in a thorough knowledge of Western and Eastern literatures and fired by a nonconformist turn of mind, offend local sensibilities, especially so The White Shadow, which was struck off the pre-selection list of the SEA Write Award in 1994, sold less than a thousand copies on the local market then (a huge loss for him, as it was self-published) but was reprinted recently. Since then, our literary knight has been surviving in Phetchaburi, south of Bangkok. with no computer, no phone, no TV, but books from floor to ceiling in his rented room, writing in longhand (his niece types out his prose) and occasionally being treated to lunch at the market by his friends after he helps them sweep the floor. As he is also a first-class translator from the English, his translation work may bring him enough to live on but it leaves him with little time to get on with his own writings. His 2001 bestselling novella, Venom, can be read in full on thaifiction.com, along with the first chapter of Une Histoire vieille comme la pluie (Jao Karrakeit), published by Éditions du Seuil in 2004.

  1 Angkarn Kanlaya-naphong and Jang Sae Tang are two famous contemporary Thai poets.

  2 Tart and very spicy soup that is purported to be the quintessence of Thai cooking

  3 The arid area at the heart of the Northeast

  4 Pheit kanya: Venus’s diamond or September diamond; pha kan yeit: let’s all go fuck

  5 Thai Marxist thinker killed in the jungle at 36 in 1966

  6 The Bangkok Bank, the top commercial bank in Thailand

  7 Names of, respectively: the three main pro-independence Muslim leaders; the then Thai minister of the interior; the main pro-independence organisation; the most turbulent district in the South; and the head of the Sino-Malaysian communist party active until the end of the 1980s in the border area of Thailand and Malaysia

  8 Two of the better contemporary Thai writers, born in the 1920s

  9 A southern sweet made out of flour in the shape of pastel-coloured filaments topped over with coconut cream