The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  They talked until it was light and Pran asked Chareeya to play Opus 47, and fell asleep listening to Schumann’s longing. When he woke up, Chareeya had made him hot chicken soup, which he ate in the midst of bright sunlight and blossoming flowers. Then Chareeya took him to see the garden still dripping with last night’s rain. Aunt Srimala, she pointed at a strange fiery red flower. In Spanish its name means desire – Carmen called it her lucky flower / Which Carmen? Pran didn’t follow. Carmen of the opera. Pran smiled, lifting the red flower to sniff. It doesn’t have a scent, Pran. She ran inside and returned with a box, into which she proceeded to stuff Madame Yeesoonsri and Miss Pheep, telling him to take it back to his room so he could smell their lingering fragrance when he woke up again that evening. Pran had told her he’d rented a room not far from where she lived, but he didn’t have the courage to tell her that it was actually so close he could already smell her flowers.

  He didn’t have the courage to tell her that every night after he went back to the small room, which she could glimpse from afar, he would read, listen to music, tinker with a jigsaw puzzle of the Andromeda Galaxy, or do nothing but stare at the ceiling in silence until the first light crept into the room and illuminated the faint outline of everything. Then he would get up and sit by the window to look at her garden slowly emerging in the morning light, the garden surrounded by dusty old buildings, like an oasis in the desert.

  And every day, in moments that could barely be differentiated, he would watch as she came out of the house, tousled, half-awake, cup of coffee in hand, to sit on the wrought-iron chair, the cat having scurried ahead through her legs to wait for his mistress. Then he would smile at her, Hi Charee… Sometimes he heard her reply in his head – Hi Pran – though he knew she neither heard him nor was even aware of him watching as she picked up the cat to cuddle and whisper something in its ear, rubbing her nose against its wet nostrils, before it touched her cheek with its paw, just sometimes, which would make her laugh, close her eyes and tighten her embrace until it meowed and then she would release it back to the ground as it stretched and sniffed the air, rubbing its body against the trees or pouncing on some unfortunate creature crossing its path, and leaving Chareeya to sit in languor and listen to the wind rustling the foliage, thinking or dreaming about something; a movie she had just seen, a poem, or a melody.

  In those instances, though he never told her, Pran saw her in a way he had never seen her before or would ever see her since. He saw her through the soundless movements as in a silent film, through the luminous angles of sunshine that shifted by tiny degrees with every passing day, through the opening petals and withering buds, through the seasons hidden in each of the leaves and the fragrant perfume, through dewdrops from the old days and the tranquil mornings that ended when she finished her coffee and walked barefoot to greet each of her plants until she disappeared into their midst. That was when Pran would get up, stretch and go to sleep. See you Charee.

  Are you still sleepy? You only had a brief nap / No, but it’s almost noon, do you have to go to work? / In the afternoon… I don’t have much to do, just check the books. I have an assistant to look after the store / Are you making enough? / It’s enough, I still have my cut from the rent and I work as a guide for French tourists sometimes, an easy job for easy money – I can always take them to Suthat temple. She smiles, Do you remember? We used to go there when we were children. Suddenly Pran felt the way people do when they realise they have lost something dear to them, a cold snap froze his heart when he remembered that he had once known happy days, happy days that were long past.

  Let’s go home, Pran. I miss Lika, and I miss the river. The limpid, slow-flowing river, the wild cane grass in wintry radiance, the transparent mist hanging above the water’s surface, the raft of hyacinth and the pungent scent of its flowers, the smoke from an unseen fire mingling with the twilight aroma of the river – an aroma unlike any other he’d ever known. As if air bubbles were escaping his body, the memory of the river returned like a breath he had forgotten to take. Never before had Pran realised that he could miss the river this much.

  But they didn’t return to the house by the river, even after they had made the pledge before the fiery red flower called Desire. Instead, a couple days later, Pran and Chareeya visited Suthat temple to lie down in the sparsely frequented prayer hall and watch the whale crash onto the European junk. This time, the elusive deer, Marica, appeared in full splendour but the novice monks who had tried to appease the ravenous ghouls now roamed about freely, climbing the masts of the Chinese junks, riding on the back of the fire-breathing naga as it crossed the Great Ocean, mocking the pose of the reclining Buddha next to the monkeys smoking a bong, and even playing hide-and-seek behind the Great Bodhi Tree where the Lord Buddha attained enlightenment.

  And, though they didn’t catch sight of Jatayu fluttering across the hall, they still heard the thunderous roar of Singhakunchorn, only to discover that the noise actually came from an old monk who looked like Yoda from Star Wars and who, having mistaken them for foreign tourists tried to shoo them away: Go, you! No sleep in temple, shoo! No sleep in temple! Chareeya and Pran scrambled up and it dawned on them that the old days were indeed long gone and that they were no longer children.

  The announcement of the lottery results had just been made and the city, which moments before had been wrapped in the silence of anticipation, returned to its usual energetic bustle. Chareeya led Pran against the flow of a crowd with huge amounts of adrenaline surging through its veins and they made their way to Khao San Road to buy a dry Chilean wine from a store hidden in a rundown alley. With a smile on her face, Chareeya marched forward and ignored Pran, who trailed behind and allowed himself to be lost, twice, by the distant memory of the most beautiful woman in the world.

  Evening came and burnished the sky when Chareeya and Pran arrived at a small pier. Long abandoned, it was a rare peaceful spot in the busy river traffic of the Chao Phraya. Do you remember the Kreutzer Sonata? / Whose? / Beethoven’s. Pran vaguely recalled a violin wrenching drama from its very first notes. It was a popular piece of music – how could you forget it? Chareeya protested and continued: Eighty years later, Tolstoy heard it and it moved him so much that he wrote a story called “The Kreutzer Sonata”, like the music. She paused for a moment.

  A man became jealous of his wife, a pianist, after seeing her play the Kreutzer Sonata with another violinist. The husband ended up killing her. Pran let out a sigh – he wasn’t a man of emotional depth, but death always got to him. It was a story about a game, the game of love. And about music… How shall I put it? Music so heart-rending that it can inspire any kind of action. Pran nodded. He remembered Uncle Thanit’s story about Beethoven’s painful romance and the letter the composer addressed to the “Immortal Beloved”, and that tumultuous music rang in his head.

  The river traffic became calmer and flickers of light appeared along the banks. Chareeya handed Pran a white plastic cup. At that moment, as he looked down at the sad, slim fingers wound around the cup, his eyes caught a trace of lychee-coloured lipstick stamped on the cup’s rim and he closed his eyes without knowing why. He felt like bubbles were bursting inside his body.

  Thirty years later Janáček read the novel and was inspired to compose a string quartet. He called it “Kreutzer Sonata”, like the book / Janáček? / Leoš Janáček, a Czech, early 20th century – we have his vinyl records at the river house, you must’ve heard some of them. Pran took the cup, seeing light reflected in her eyes. Think about it, the agony had passed down from Beethoven to Tolstoy, from Tolstoy to Janáček – one hundred and twenty years between them / Right, now I want to hear it. Kreutzer, right? Chareeya nodded. So beautiful, both Janáček’s and Beethoven’s. I’ll play them for you. You’ll like them. She turned and smiled, so bright and cheerful, just as he’d always remembered her.

  Pran strained to recall the melody of the composition so iconic that it would have been impossible for him to have missed hearing it in the liv
ing room of that house. But as much as he tried, all that came to him was the first note: the raspy, dramatic sawing of a violin. Don’t you think music is like a diary? It records feelings that might have been lost in time. The river wind ruffled her hair. Schumann’s Opus 47… A love letter.

  As if by reflex he looked down at the trace of lipstick on the cup. The love letter Schumann wrote to his forbidden lover. Well, when he fell in love with Clara she was just nine years old. She turned and smiled again. Pran raised his eyebrows slightly, surprised, as the shadow of a frizzy haired girl running through vegetable patches flashed through his mind and disappeared. And Clara’s father, who was Schumann’s teacher, wanted his daughter to become a pianist so he stopped them from seeing each other. The pier bobbed gently with the currents. Back then a composer would publish his scores, like we have records today, and during the ten years they were forbidden from seeing each other Schumann wrote songs and published them. Clara read them at the store, like reading love letters – the notes were the alphabet.

  That explained why it was so poignant and bittersweet, its warmth laced with melancholia. Did they live together in the end? / Yes, when Clara turned twenty and didn’t need her parents’ consent, she married Schumann. They lived together for a few years before he was sent to a mental asylum and died there. Pran couldn’t suppress a sigh. They say in his last days, Schumann went into a frenzy of composing. When he ran out of paper he tore down a curtain and scribbled on it until he had covered its entire surface. No one kept that music. It must be very special, don’t you think?

  Pran didn’t reply. The bubbles continued to burst inside his body as Schumann’s Opus 47 wafted through his heart. This time it brought an overwhelming sadness as he turned the cup in his hands, deliberately, until the lipstick mark was facing him and, when he bent down and pressed his lips to the faded pink mark, he hardly knew what he was doing. He felt a longing so deep he didn’t know he had it in him; it flooded over him, enveloping him tenderly and yet feverishly, and there was an ache somewhere deep inside his body as his lips closed around the rim of the cup and the clear liquid left a trail of heat from his mouth to his heart, which was still beating. Pran had to close his eyes again without understanding why.

  When he opened them, he saw Chareeya staring absent-mindedly at the river. The lights were reflected in the water like stars and formed a backdrop for her hair, which was tussled and tangled by the wind, and appeared to be floating out onto the water. Pran looked at her profile without saying anything, and then he was reminded of another woman.

  She was plain-looking, ordinary to a fault. Every morning, when he was still in college he saw her at the bus stop gazing up at the sky. He never thought to say hello, or to follow her onto the bus, because it never occurred to him to find out who she was, what she did, where she lived, where she came from, or where she was going. He was content to watch her, just like that; her back straight, one hand lightly touching the strap of the bag slung across her chest like someone taking an oath, her face slightly tilted as she looked up at the pale sky of the city where dreams are broken.

  He had wanted her to be there every morning so that he could watch her; nothing more, nothing less. And then she had vanished. He had waited, but she never returned. And Pran had no longer wanted to go to college or look up at the pale morning sky. He had felt like there was a rock weighing him down inside, but soon the rock disappeared, too, leaving only a hole where it had been; a hole inside a hole, inside a hole.

  The Chilean wine kept him in a dreamy lull all night. When he was playing on stage, he felt the groovy sway of the pier that, a few hours earlier, had been rocking him gently by the Chao Phraya, bobbing playfully to the rhythm of the wind and waves against the shimmering, starry river. He felt it in the song of sorrow he played, in the irregular heartbeat of that moment in which he had swallowed the unintentional remnant of her kiss.

  Flicking some bass notes from his fingers, he watched his own heart sink into a void as he thought back to Schumann’s love letter and the empty abyss inside him; the abyss within the abyss, dug out from the core of his heart.

  X

  The Colony of Ants and the Laughing Crow

  W hen he woke up that morning, Natee thought he smelled the distant scent of rain. Even when he sat down on the balcony with a cup of coffee, he still assumed it had been raining all night. It was only when he looked at the tin-coloured sky and the dry, smoggy city below that he remembered the monsoon was still a few months away. Yet, for quite some time afterwards, he couldn’t locate the source of the mournful feeling that rose in him along with the illusory scent of rain.

  Natee knew longing coloured by sadness and fear but he couldn’t recall the last time he had felt it. He couldn’t remember his other lives and could only remember the life he had now: waking up every day at six in the morning, making coffee and sitting down to look at a city he had never loved, seeing all those lives he would never know, then getting dressed and walking half a block to the video store he owned, and staying there until nightfall. In a way, he was happy. He had a wife, a job, a house, a simple life and no worries. When he wanted to feel something that would confirm his existence, he watched a movie; something he had already seen so that he could laugh at a joke he had already laughed at, cry at a scene that had already made him cry, or feel moved in a way that he rarely felt moved these days.

  Suddenly, and without warning, his heart was seized by a rush of unfamiliar pain so excruciating that his body twisted and he doubled over his lap. It was a while before the pain eased up, and then he realized that it was actually spreading through his body, like a crack travelling across his chest inch by inch and gradually splitting his back apart. Natee drew a deep breath. He tried to sit upright but the pain returned, though this time he couldn’t tell where it was located.

  Pim, he called his wife, but no sound came out of him. Natee remembered she had just told him she was going downstairs to give alms to the monks. The pain stabbed through him again, a wave more intense than the last, as if something was grinding his heart to a pulp. Never before had he known the true feeling of chest pain; no wonder he was shedding so many tears. He mustered all his remaining strength and called his wife Pimpaka again, but the sound he made was just a croak. He tried to draw another deep breath only to find that the pain was so dense there was no space left in his body for air.

  Smothered by agony, Natee struggled to sit up against the back of the chair and at that moment had an epiphany: he knew he was confronting the final moment of his life. With a trembling hand he brushed away the hair that had fallen over his forehead. He was going to make himself presentable in case Pimpaka returned so that she would find him at his usual spot, on the chair with a cup of coffee on the table, looking at the city as he did every morning, except that he would no longer be breathing. That would at least make his exit scene more impressive, much better than being found crumpled on the floor like a rag. Yes, the final moment: hadn’t this always been his favourite scene?

  Unlike Chalika and Pran, Natee had a solitary upbringing with parents who loved him and cared for him so much that they never let him out of their sight. When he was a child, his father would take him to the cinema he owned every Saturday and leave him with the projectionist while he went off to work. Natee would watch whatever movie was showing on the screen, over and over again throughout the entire day, until he could remember everything by heart; what the hero thought and said, when he said it, and how the leading lady responded.

  Back at home, Natee would act out the scenes in front of a large mirror in his bedroom. Eyes squinting, legs spread, knees bent, he drew a gun from his hip with two fingers: Bang! Bang! Blowing smoke from the tips of his fingernails, he switched instantaneously to play the bad guy, one hand over his heart and the other twisted at an angle, slumped, slowly leaning back and staggering, eyes rolling, and, finally, dying. Then he would jump up and play the hero again, grim faced as his two fingers pocketed the gun into an invisible holst
er, clicked his tongue and sashayed, nonchalantly, out of the frame of the mirror.

  Or, sometimes, he played a pensive, cooler-than-thou hero. His eyes would be blank, like a man with a tortured past, and he would suddenly leap up and fly through the air in accordance with the script in his head, wielding an invisible sword that sliced through empty space: Whoosh! He cut into the imaginary villain who let out a long cry, collapsed, and got up again. Another Whoosh! And the unwary hero had been stabbed in the back. He halted, lurched, and in full agony reached his hand around to yank the blade out of his flesh, then lurched again, wobbled, lost control, but, no, he couldn’t die until he had finished off the bad guys. Whoosh! Whoosh! He closed his eyes and saw a picture of the corpse-strewn, blood-splattered floor. Then, in slow-motion, he staggered and fell. With his face resting against the handle of his invisible sword, eyes rolling, he died a courageous death.

  As he moved into adolescence, Natee started playing the role of a star-crossed lover who wallowed in heartbreak but was still full of cocky charm as he was separated from the woman he loved. Sometimes he played a young man who had lost his lover to an incurable disease; he even played the dying woman himself by affecting a sentimental voice, tears streaming down his face as he confessed a secret, his whisper punctuated with dramatic pauses: I… I… I love… you. The actor gazed into his own eyes in the mirror as his character breathed her last breath.

  He especially relished playing the scene from the hit film Love Story in which a woman was about to die of a terminal disease, and which popularised the quote “love means never having to say you’re sorry” as the woman asked her lover to hold her for the last time before pushing him away so he wouldn’t have to witness her final moment. It was a scene of overwhelming emotion that had crushed all hearts in the whole world in a single instant because there is no pain more moving than the pain of love – none.