Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  “We’ve had all kinds of things here,” the prosecutor said. “Let me confess something to you.”

  He took me over to the window and pointed to the center of the city.

  “Do you think I like knowing that most of those who come to my country don’t do so because of its heritage or its history, but to sleep with our women? Oh, sure, they visit the Reclining Buddha and they go to Phuket and the temples of Ayutthaya, but first things first. They take an interest in the country only after they’ve had their way with one of our women, a woman who might be from my own family, anyway, I’m sorry if I strike you as crude or impolite, you’re a diplomat and I’m not, I’m only an officer of the law, but how would you feel if your country, known for its drugs, turned into a whorehouse? wouldn’t you try, in every way possible, to at least make sure the law was enforced? The law, the law,” he said, his mind wandering a little, “is the only thing still keeping us from going crazy.”

  Before sitting down he looked me straight in the eyes and said:

  “Let me tell you a joke. An Australian joke. To Australians, Thailand is a paradise, and I’m not surprised: young women, parties, casinos. They buy fake branded goods, they dirty our beaches, they live like kings, and they pay almost nothing. An Australian dies and goes to heaven. There, God says to him: you’ve been good, you’re entitled to have one wish granted. The man thinks it over for a while and says, I’d like to go back to Thailand! So God, being understanding, lets him go back to Thailand, only transformed into a Thai, ha ha, do you get it? The Australians laugh a lot at that.”

  The prosecutor took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Not a single muscle in my face had moved in response to his joke, and he appreciated that.

  “This whole situation, I’ll tell you right now, doesn’t help to make us especially understanding toward strangers, at least not me. Bangkwang Prison may seem to you somewhat … harsh, yes, that’s the word. There isn’t a prison in the world that isn’t, is there? Violence is the midwife of history. This kind of history, at least. They call Bangkwang the Bangkok Hilton. Even I’m shocked by it, but I never forget that its ‘guests’ aren’t there because they talked at a religious retreat or drove through a red light. Yesterday I lifted the body of a young woman who jumped from the fourteenth floor of a tower in Bangkok Central. Her body, if you don’t me saying this, looked quite horrible lying there on the asphalt surface of a parking lot, like a piece of nonfigurative art. She was nineteen years old and her stomach was stuffed full of pills. Those guys are murderers, shall I describe to you how her parents looked? I don’t have to, see for yourself.”

  He held out the local paper and there they were, a couple my age, both with expressions of horror on their faces.

  Then he said:

  “Now then, let me show you your compatriot’s case.”

  He opened a copy of the same folder I had and read out the facts:

  Manuel Manrique, 27 years old, Colombian, passport number 96670209, visa number 31F77754WZ, entered Thailand by plane, coming from Dubai, on Emirates flight 1957, on … 22nd, checked in at the Regency Inn Hotel, a three-star establishment, room 301, Suan Plu Soi 6, Sathorn Road, Thungmahamek, Silom, Bangkok. He was arrested there on … 24th in possession of a bag containing four hundred ecstasy pills made in Burma.

  The accused had been planning to leave the country on … 24th for Tokyo on Japan Airlines flight 2108. His contacts in the country are unknown, as is the way in which he obtained the drugs. Given the weight of evidence the prosecutor is asking for the death penalty or thirty years’ imprisonment if he pleads guilty.

  I was surprised that he had planned to go to Tokyo, and I said to the prosecutor, why Tokyo?

  “I don’t know,” he said, “and frankly, I don’t care. There are Mafias and drug addicts there too, and countrymen of mine and yours who live off that, and get up to all the dirty business they can. The Japanese are strange at first sight and you may think for a while that they’re different, but deep down they consume the same shit as everybody else. They just have more money, that’s all.”

  “And where was he going after Tokyo?” I wanted to know.

  “I don’t know, look in the attached documents, I think there’s a photocopy of the airline ticket.”

  I leafed through and saw a copy of his passport. He had a visa to enter Japan. The ticket was a return ticket. His return flight to Colombia was from Bangkok via Dubai and São Paulo to Bogotá. Strange.

  “When can I see him?”

  The prosecutor stroked his beard, looked at his watch, and said: “Let me make a suggestion: go back to your hotel and sleep for a while, you look tired. Oh, these night flights … I don’t suppose you’ll find the heat and humidity too excessive, coming from Delhi. Nobody can explain how human beings with spines and brains ever thought to build a city in that place, with those temperatures. As I said, you should rest. Then treat yourself to a copious lunch and try our traditional cuisine. In the afternoon, cross the river and have a look at the temples. Go to an English bookstore, buy something, have a stroll around, then go back to your hotel at the end of the afternoon. Have a light dinner and go to sleep. I’ll come and pick you up at seven in the morning to take you to Bangkwang.”

  I went back to the hotel and sat down at the bar. I hadn’t seen much of Bangkok, but had a sense of a slow, endless traffic jam, concrete bridges between the buildings, fast food stands, markets. The deafening din of the tuk-tuks (cousins to the rickshaws of Delhi). It wasn’t the first city in Asia I’d visited.

  It was about eleven in the morning.

  I took out the file and switched on my laptop. Opening my e-mail, I found a message from the Consular Department with Manuel Manrique’s record as an attachment: it was clean! No legal proceedings, no run-ins with the police. Nothing. A poor rookie who’d tried it once and fallen in the attempt. That wasn’t so unusual. After all, he was only twenty-seven years old. And something else that I’d seen in the file: the only stamps in his passport were from this journey. He had never been outside Colombia before. The passport had only recently been issued.

  It was hot and the gin was good. I carried on reading and the surprises started.

  According to the Consular Department file, Manrique had graduated in philosophy and letters from the National University and was studying for his doctorate. A philosopher? Now that was unusual. With what I had, I went on the Internet and started searching. I asked for a bite to eat, ravioli or the kind of meat snacks I’d seen on the street. Something that could be eaten with one hand. Various things appeared: his graduate thesis on Gilles Deleuze and three articles in the faculty review: one on Spinoza, another on post-Fordism, and a third on Chomsky. Hell. He was an educated guy, what the hell was he doing in Thailand? Why was he on his way to Tokyo instead of returning to Colombia with the pills? Who on earth was this Manuel Manrique?

  The snack was good, with an aromatic sauce and a touch of sesame in oil. I tried to open some of the articles but the portals of the philosophy reviews weren’t very modern. You could only consult the index, the rest was in grey. I looked for him on Facebook, but there were 1,086 profiles with the name Manuel Manrique. Philosophy, though? I immediately wrote to my philosopher friend Gustavo Chirolla.

  Do you know someone named Manuel Manrique who studied philosophy at the National University? He’s twenty-seven now. He may have finished three or four years ago. I’ll tell you why later.

  For a while I looked at the Chao Phraya, its brown waves, the canoes and sampans taking the tourists across, the oily reflections of the sun. The river moved at a thick crawl. The water wasn’t clear. Something painful seemed to flow in it.

  Much to my surprise, Gustavo’s answer arrived immediately, what time was it in Colombia? barely midnight of the day before.

  Gustavo said:

  Yes, I knew a Manuel Manrique. He was a postgraduate student of mine at the National four years ago. A shy boy, rather quiet. Very intelligent. He was very interested in literature an
d films, and in the image. That’s why he was studying Deleuze. I remember talking to him about the poetics of Rimbaud, and about Godard and Bergman. I was struck by how thin he was. He looked like something out of a painting by El Greco or a sculpture by Giacometti. With a gleam in his eyes, as if he was on the verge of asking something urgent and sensitive, but which he never managed to ask. He finished his postgraduate studies and I never saw him again. Let me make some inquiries and see if I can find out anything else. Have you met him? Is he in India? Let me know.

  I wrote back:

  I haven’t seen him yet, but he’s in prison in Bangkok. Pills. Don’t tell anyone, this is confidential. I’m trying to find out who he is, because I have to deal with the case. Ask what circles he moved in, who he mixed with. We have to handle this with caution. I don’t know if his family has been informed.

  All the best.

  I kept searching. What the hell had a philosopher come to Thailand for? At first glance, I couldn’t believe he might be guilty. I remembered the prosecutor’s advice, that I should look at temples. Nothing could have been farther from the way I felt, but I decided to go out anyway. Better not to be seen spending too much time in the bar, this was a business trip, and I had to stay for a few days. It wasn’t at all unlikely that the prosecutor was investigating me, even spying on my movements at that very moment, obsessed as he was with protecting his country from undesirable elements. I went out.

  It was hot on the street and I hailed a taxi.

  “Bangkok Central,” I said.

  I stopped near a commercial area and started walking aimlessly. Before long, I came to a hotel, and I went in and headed for the bar. The light was pleasant there. I ordered a gin and tonic and got down to business. Deleuze. University of Vincennes. It rang a bell.

  Years earlier, when I was a correspondent for the newspaper El Tiempo in Paris, the French writer Daniel Pennac, in an interview, had told me that he had been a pupil of Deleuze at the University of Vincennes and that in his classes, where political and aesthetic issues were hotly debated, Deleueze had decreed the death of the novel. But Pennac had in his bag, well hidden, the recently published translation of The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa. If they had discovered him he would have been the laughingstock of the year, but he couldn’t wait to lock himself in the bathroom and carry on reading.

  Later, still in Paris, it had fallen to me to write about the suicide of Deleuze. He had jumped from the balcony of his house onto Boulevard Neil. Another “nonfigurative” death, like that of the young girl the prosecutor had told me about. Deleuze was ill and the pain had become unbearable. If I remembered correctly, it was a respiratory illness, perhaps emphysema. I took out my laptop and searched my files. The article was there, dated November 1995. I reread it:

  DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER

  Paris

  In despair thanks to a progressive respiratory infection, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze dragged himself to the window of his house in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris and threw himself out, bringing to an end seventy years of life and philosophy. The last journey of this nomad lasted barely a few seconds, crossing the air until he slammed into the sidewalk of Boulevard Neil and lay there in the cold, at eight in the evening. Passersby gathered around the body and minutes later an ambulance carried it to hospital, where he died. It is unlikely that those who tried desperately to save his life knew that in that bruised body lay one of the most unorthodox thinkers of the century, the great agitator of the University of Vincennes in the 1970s, author of such key works as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, the thinker whom Michel Foucault called “the only philosophical mind in France.”

  He was born in Paris on January 18, 1925, and his life was spent in classrooms and cafés. He entered the Sorbonne in 1944 and from 1948 worked as a teacher in various places, a high school in Orléans, another in Amiens, until he obtained a professorship in Lyons in 1964, and finally arrived in Paris in 1968, at the University of Vincennes, where he left his mark on a whole generation that experienced May ’68 alongside him and remained in a state of permanent revolt. Those who were his pupils remember his classes as veritable explosives launched against morality and tradition. The young women who began the year in patent leather shoes and tartan skirts ended it converted into agitators for free love, raising their voices against the establishment and cohabiting with Palestinian guerrillas, refugees from Cyprus, rebels from Guatemala, Nigeria, or Pakistan. Deleuze was the great time bomb of Vincennes, and his classes, which ended in the neighboring bars, were aimed straight at the heart of Conservative morality. The two crucial encounters of his life took place in 1962 and 1968: the first with Michel Foucault and the second with Félix Guattari, his collaborator on much of his work.

  His work began in 1953 with Empiricism and Subjectivity, where he sketched his theory of the “multiple,” and continued in 1962 with Nietzsche and Philosophy, Kant’s Critical Philosophy in 1963, and Proust and Signs in 1964. One of the characteristics of Deleuze is his rereading of classic philosophers, so that he wrote about Bergson, Bacon, Spinoza, and Leibniz, but also about Kafka, Melville, and other writers (Essays Critical and Clinical). Deleuze’s vision is neither conformist nor explanatory: it is a flashlight that shows us something previously unseen, that tries to clarify a moment. It is difficult to grasp the work of Deleuze as a totality, since it encompasses cinema, literature, history, science, music, daily life, politics … Everything.

  After the death of Michel Foucault from AIDS in 1984, that of Louis Althusser in 1990 after being confined to a psychiatric hospital for strangling his wife, and the suicide of the situationist Guy Debord, the death of Gilles Deleuze brings the Parisian school of philosophy to a tragic end, establishing a macabre statistic. The ideas nevertheless remain, resting on this definitive assertion by Michel Foucault: “One day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian.”

  I read it twice.

  I was surprised to realize how much I’d known about Deleuze at the time. I’d never been comfortable with abstract thought, and most likely I’d turned to Gustavo for help, but I can’t remember now. Nor can I explain how it was that it was published in the section Life Today, because the article isn’t exactly exciting from a journalistic point of view.

  It was time to get moving, so I went back out on the street. Night was falling.

  I walked aimlessly until I saw, on an upper floor, a sign that read “Bangkok Rare Books.” I went in without thinking. They had travel books from the beginning of the twentieth century and a literature section with editions of Graham Greene for $850. I passed my hand over the spines of The Power and the Glory, Heinemann, London, 1940, and The End of the Affair, Heinemann, London, 1951.

  Except for the temples, I’d followed the prosecutor’s advice. My budget forbade me from buying any of this, or even sniffing it. But what a pleasure. I left old Graham Greene happily enough, and went down to look for a last drink before going back to the hotel.

  7

  INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

  Do you want to know, O mortal, what my most unmentionable desires are? Friend: those are precisely the ones you will never know, that’s why they are unmentionable, but I can tell you others, simple things, did you know that there are cities in this vast world through which, some days, I’d like to wander? I’m dying to do that! To be part of the crowd, even if only for a few hours or minutes, to lose myself in the streets and subway stations, attend their help centers, look for relief in their help lines for lonely people.

  What are these cities?

  I will talk to you about one among the many in my nocturnal constellation, because there are stars that shine with greater intensity. Let’s see, let’s see, what is that beautiful, coppery, not-quite-golden light on the right-hand side of my map? What’s the name of that star washed up close to the sea, at the beginning of a wide arm, like a baby’s inert limb?

  It’s Bangkok.

  The Asian capital of smiles. The capital of foot massage and
other kinds, like the “body to body” (which may include a “happy ending,” just imagine), multiple relaxation, anti-depression, and anti-jet-lag massages. There are 36,874 registered massage parlors. The body is connected by nerve endings to the soles of the feet and from there you can control and remedy deficiencies and boost energy. A strange machine, the body! You can help it to be happy.

  Bangkok resembles that old TV series, Fantasy Island: “Its possibilities are limited only by the imagination.” And so you ask yourself: imagine? imagine? But … What do you imagine? How do you imagine that place of pleasure and also of pain?

  Bangkok is one of the most polluted cities in the world. Pedestrians breathe through masks that are sold at the cash registers of supermarkets. Some afternoons, the sky seems to be closer to our heads. The alleyways of Sampeng are difficult to walk down without a mask. Everything is on open display and the air is the same: fried crickets eaten with salt, monkeys’ brains floating in jars, stomachs of dried fish boiled in water (good for gastritis), sharks’ fins. Men drink snake’s blood to combat impotence (divine impotence, mother of drunk poets!). In Chatuchak Market live cobras sleep in baskets. Their blood can cost three dollars. If it’s a queen cobra it can reach a hundred, and if it’s an albino as much as five thousand. C’est plus cher, mon vieux! Once you’ve chosen your snake, the vendor takes it out of the basket, slashes its jugular with a knife, and collects the liquid in a glass. He mixes it with a spoonful of honey and a small glass of whiskey. The customer drinks it in one go.

  Bangkok, in the Thai language—a tonal language with 48 vowel sounds and 41 consonants—means City of the Island, but it has a second name: City of the Angels (Krung Thep). Its traffic jams are famous throughout Southeast Asia. In addition, it’s too hot and the waters of the Chao Phraya aren’t sufficient to cool it down. On the contrary: its dark color resembles that of stagnant lagoons and many of the canals that divide up the city are filled with black water. Is it conscience? Beneath every living city is a city of the dead, a necropolis, and in it its unconscious, its tormented opium dreams. No city can be realistic and maybe for that reason Bangkok moves in dreams. The proliferation of canals gives it another nickname: the Venice of the Orient. Here we need music, maybe something by Haydn.