The White Shadow Read online

  death comes to the show

  Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c’est le suicide.

  Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue,

  c’est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie.

  Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, « Un raisonnement absurde »

  Dark, quiet and cold. There’s only the buzz of insects, and a thin film of mist in the sky. Tomorrow will be a beautiful day. Tonight will be one more night you’ll spend lying quietly or sitting quietly or reclining quietly or sipping coffee quietly. You won’t read, won’t write, won’t listen to music. The bitter strong coffee will keep you wide-awake. You never can sleep at night. Maybe the woman who just left, the woman with whom you just slept, will come to see you in the morning. She’s pretty and neat and friendly and strong. She wears jeans and canvas shoes and a man’s shirt and her hair is cut short, but she’s a woman of great charm. Before she left, she invited you to make an offering to the monks. Before she left, the woman said Some morning when you’re free, how about going to the village with me to make an offering to the monks ? Sometimes she comes in the evening. She’s a lonely woman dressed businesslike like a man almost every time, but she’s lonely and cunningly hides loneliness in that cheeriness of hers. Sometimes the woman suggests the two of you go out and have dinner in town but you never go. Sometimes in the evening the woman helps with the cooking and keeps you company over dinner, but she’s never stayed the night. This woman must’ve slept with men before, but you’ve never asked. She must’ve slept with her lover many, many times, but you’ve never asked. She must’ve gone to see some other man in the morning to invite him to make an offering to the monks and help him with the cooking and keep him company over dinner and help with the washing-up and stay the night, but you’ve never asked. In any case, she’s a woman who’s got charm. She knows what such and such an expression on your face when you look at her means and you know what such and such an expression on her face when she looks at you means. She knows what such and such a sentence of yours means and you know what such and such a sentence of hers means, but you and she only slept together as all men and women are wont to sleep together under compelling circumstances. Three months – that was rather fast. But not so fast actually. With some women you’ve been faster than this and with some men she’s probably been faster than this too. You and she don’t talk about the future or about love. There’s no commitment, and just as well. She’s invited you to stay at her place: if you actually did, she’d fall right into hell. But before that your mother came to you in a dream. She told you Don’t do it. She expressed herself through silence. The woman comes often, almost every day, if not in the morning then in the evening. The woman sometimes asks you Are you afraid of ghosts? sometimes asks you How far has your writing gone? And you tell her that you are and that what you’ve done doesn’t amount to much. You wonder whether she’s pregnant, and if she is whether you’ll take her to get an abortion or run away from her. Seven days ago you went back to Phraek Narm Daeng. The woman watched you gather clothes and books into your shoulder bag without saying anything and drove you to the railway station and then she said I hope you won’t make yourself scarce forever, right? She must have thought you’d desert her for good. Deep down she must be worried. Gathering your things and running away: very bad, that. If she’s pregnant and you must take her to get an abortion or run away from her: very bad, that. Tomorrow morning if the woman comes and invites you to make an offering, maybe you’ll do it. Maybe you’ll want to cook the rice yourself and make simple dishes as alms to the monks, why not. You haven’t done so for ages, something like ten years. But if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. When you first came here, you meant to make offerings to monks, you meant to sleep soundly all night and get up before dawn – because of cockcrow, not because of an alarm-clock, mind you – and go out to give food to the monks, immaculate white rice sprinkled with jasmine petals you’d find somewhere, fragrant freshly cooked rice still steaming and redolent of jasmine as well. Fragrant! Fragrant! Fragrant! O so fragrant! Jasmine in its previous life must have been a Buddhist nun for sure and in the life before that a sarus crane and in the life before that a white swan and in the lives before those going backwards a mimusops, a tuberose, a gardenia and a mimusops again and before that a white lotus and a white virgin. At the end of its present existence, it’ll be reborn as a white fairy in heaven. Fragrant! Fragrant! Fragrant! O so fragrant! But if you don’t make an offering to the monks, it doesn’t matter. Going out for a stroll is just as well. Not far from here there’s a meadow. Every morning you go out for a stroll, your eyes dark red from lack of sleep. You look for the couple of forktails. You want to hear the song of the couple of forktails. There’s the couple of forktails. There’s another couple of forktails in the deserted orchard. Sounds like a primer for toddlers of yore. But when you were a toddler you didn’t learn from this book. You read it later when you were more grown up. What you learned was a b c. What you learned was The wind whooshes over the stormy sea, with a black-and-white picture of coconut trees flattened by gusts. What you learned was The owl rolled the bowl into a hole while the mole stored the gold, or something to that effect. For those two forktails, you put some rice on a banana leaf and placed it in the old spirit house which is so out of kilter it might collapse any day. You tried to get them used to you, you whistled in imitation. When you heard them sing you smiled quietly the smile of someone spaced out. Spaced out to where? You don’t know. Count your blessings you’re alone and certain no-one can see you. Nevertheless you’d better begin to be a little on your guard. And then the forktails come every day, along with other birds – starlings, bulbuls, fantails, pigeons and a few other pretty species whose names you don’t know. But all are wild and none will let you get close. They only peck about and sing. They don’t sing to thank you: they sing almost as if to warn of danger. They hop about and sway their necks and won’t let you come close. Even the pigeons won’t let you come close. You merely stand at a distance, spying on them from behind a copse. If they don’t let you come close, maybe it’s because you try to talk to them every day. You talk to them cautiously, deliberately, like someone trying to show his pure intentions in front of a phalanx of suspicious eyes. You silently beg them to understand you and you talk to them with a voice that resounds in your chest, Birds, I mean well. Birds, I’m not going to play tricks on you. Birds, I only want to talk to you. Birds! Birds! Birds! I’m not trying to deceive you by inviting you to the Red Cross fair… And you can’t think of what to say next. There are masses of birds here. If you could stand back and look at yourself, you’d see yourself like a scarecrow at first light trying to get in touch with birds. Every morning you go out for a walk in the orchard, across the brook and into the fields. Every morning the scarecrow strolls about aimlessly, gazing into space and feeling adrift in its happiness. Why adrift? You know not. It seems that the dawn is waiting for the scarecrow.

  The dawn preens its hues to welcome the scarecrow. The dawn whispers See there, those snake gourds in full bloom; see there, those ivy gourds in full bloom; see there, those blue peas in full bloom; see there, those pumpkins in full bloom. The dawn says See there, the sun. The dawn says See there, the dew that speckles the leaves with light. The lonely scarecrow drifting far from humankind observes everything like a sleepwalker, sad and lonely amid late winter fog, sighs noiselessly, sighs at the sight of a nest of caterpillars, at the sight of clumsy paddyfield crabs that dribble slime the colour of soap bubbles, at the sight of a few stars still lingering in the sky, at the sight of the beauty and serenity of the world. The deep red sun casts its first rays above the jungle fleece. You’re happy and tell yourself that such an intense happiness is going to toughen your mind so that even the most devastating sorrow won’t rock or roil it and you’ll never again feel the bitterness that blackens your chest. You go on walking aimlessly. On some days you hear a temple bell ring out; some relig
ious ceremony must be on. At times you surprise yourself muttering bits of prayers you still remember. At times you think about some songs or some poems or some young women. At times you think about nothing at all. At times you pick up juicy young rice stalks to eat them. You chew on their sweetness and spit out the fibres. You look and you see. You hear and you stop to listen. Ah, that’s the mowing of a cow in the village. Ah, that’s an age-old rain tree with its widespread, thick, shady foliage and a festoon of rust-red primeval mushrooms round its trunk. Ah, that’s a cobweb sprinkled with dewdrops. Ah, that’s a fantail. At times you only see and you know what’s going on. At times you only hear and you know what’s going on. At times you gather tapering shoots of swamp morning glory that grow by ricefield dykes or shoots of ivy gourds and of ipil-ipil by the fences to make your first meal of the next day. At times you look for shoots in the bamboo groves. Sometimes you find a climbing perch flapping frantically in a drying puddle by a dyke and you grab it and go and release it in the brook. The fish writhes in your clasped hand, a little life writhes in your clasped hand, your hand is soiled with mud, the fish is soiled with mud, but life isn’t soiled by mud. Nothing can soil real life, even if it’s the life of a murderer or of a prostitute. Life is pure. To destroy life is to destroy purity. Sometimes as you stroll by a snake springs up and rears its head ready to strike. What kind of snake it is you know not. It’s angry and you’re scared. You utter words of apology even though you’re still scared and awkward in the dumbness of your fright – sorry, sorry – and you slowly back out. Maybe it’s a poisonous snake, that’s what you always think and it gives a thrilling flavour to your fear. A poisonous snake… the life of a poisonous snake… It probably doesn’t want to have anything to do with you either. There are snakes all over, mostly pit vipers. When a pit viper bites you, you gradually go to sleep, gradually feel pleasantly drowsy and in great pain and gradually die pleasantly and in great pain. But there aren’t pit vipers only, but also bronzebacks and iridescent earth snakes and kukri snakes and cobras, or so the locals say, and you have to be careful wherever you go at night. The fields here aren’t large. Some have been turned into longan orchards, into rows of tobacco or sweet tamarind plants or into irrigated plots on which garlic is grown. Sometimes as you walk back to the house, the woman is waiting for you. She’s brought you white roses. Fragrant, fragrant roses, fragrant woman. Such a sweet, strong fragrance. Red roses are more beautiful than white roses but don’t smell as sweet. There are other women more beautiful than this woman but they don’t smell as sweet. The woman makes coffee or prepares simple dishes and asks about this and about that, asks about the past, asks about the future. Sometimes she tells you something and sometimes she softly laughs. The woman laughs. The laugh comes from her life as a woman. You sit there quietly, drinking coffee quietly, and looking up outside see flowers in bloom, butterflies flying gaily by the porch and you hear the forktails sing. There is warm sunlight flowing in through the window and the chatter and giggles of the woman, a young female hardly past her teens. The cold season, the season of love, the season when flowers are in bloom and women are pretty. She puts the house in order, arranges flowers in a vase and sometimes sings old love songs from bygone days, and late on this winter morning the sunlight is mild, the sky turns increasingly sky blue as the mist creeps away and the wind starts blowing and there are birdsongs in the deserted orchard and swarms of butterflies and dragonflies fly hither and thither, but you only sit dazed amid this flurry of colours and sounds as if you were just emerging from a dream. Sometimes the woman doesn’t quite want to go back; she says it’s her day off and she feels lonely. She asks you to go for a stroll and sometimes you do but sometimes don’t. She likes to read and sometimes she reads out to you. She reads The Song of Solomon, she reads Hojoki, she reads The Little Prince, she reads Gitanjali, she reads A portrait of the artist as a young man. She reads slowly as if reading to herself. The air is clean and brisk, the world quiet when birdsong stops to leave spaces for silence, brisk and clean, but you have no energy. There are masses of birds here. Birds are full of energy, unlike you. You merely look at them apathetically. Bless them. Sometimes a bird lands on the windowsill or on your writing desk, stretches its neck out to look around with curiosity, hops once, hops again, then stands firm and undertakes to wilfully preen its feathers and you stare at it without moving and smile at it absentmindedly. Sometimes a bird comes to peck at the ripe seeds of the ivy gourd that grows wild outside on a wall of the room. Ripe ivy gourd seeds are red, red as red can be, a kind of red man is probably unable to synthesise, red as the lips of a lass. You’re fascinated by colours, the colours of ripe fruit, of flowers, of leaves, the colours of the brook and the fields and the mountain. Look at the colour of a ripe papaya when you slit it in two. It’s ready to eat and you’re hungry and you’re going to cut it open with a finely sharpened knife and it’s going to give away its secret little by little. At first you eat it with your eyes as you would a drawing – eat it or drink it with your eyes, as you like – and then you eat it for real, perfumed, sweet and melting in the mouth. You take pleasure savouring it and you’d like to advise God to learn how to savour it too and you’d like to advise the devil likewise and you wonder whether the Eskimos know what it means to eat a ripe papaya. You’d like them to eat some, and custard apple too and mangosteen too and langsat too. One day a papaya tree rises out of the ground, grows, blooms and bears fruit. It doesn’t ask anything from you, not even to put its seeds back into the ground, even though there is life in those seeds. It’s amazing to think that life inhabits those little black seeds. And life is a marvellous and secretive thing. There’s life in the bird that comes and pecks at the ripe seeds of the ivy gourd growing on the wall outside and takes them in its beak to a pomegranate tree in the orchard where its mate or fledgling, I know not which, is waiting. It stands feeding its mate or fledgling, I know not which, and watches as it eats, then flies back to peck at the ripe seeds of the ivy gourd again and then flies back once more and this time eats the seeds itself. It doesn’t dare to take its mate or fledgling, I know not which, to eat by the wall no doubt because it distrusts human beings. You see the birds as you hear verses from The Song of Salomon and yet feel weak and lethargic. Sometimes the woman sleeps, on your bed of course. The woman sleeps, the book opened flat on her bosom. Tomorrow morning the weather will be fine and maybe the woman will come back to see you. She’s a daring and straightforward woman. Is she really a beautiful soul inhabited by noble and pure thoughts? Even the bitterest of women taste sweet. But your own soul is becoming impotent. You sneeze and this sneeze rattles your nerves. It’s been ninety-six or ninety-seven days that you’ve done nothing at all, that you’ve practically no contact with anyone apart from one woman. You’re stuck here, alone in too much silence, to the point of almost suffocating. That’s what prompted you to seek out some young woman’s bosom to fondle and slobber over without knowing what you were doing. Your perpetual pilgrimage, that was good, though – being a pilgrim of the twentieth century, sleeping here, sleeping there just as you pleased, calling only on those that were truly pleased to welcome you. But then you decided to settle down here with the idea of writing a novel – a most firm commitment during the first week, but which began to fray thereafter. Thinking about death all day long has made you very tense and fed the neurosis that threatens you. It has filled your cranium with demented bleakness, has deprived you of the will to live and, in order to revert that, you’d have to show great courage. Nonetheless, you know perfectly well that to kill oneself is a silly joke, but if you want to kill yourself, then go ahead right now and get it over with. You have a fairly good knowledge of sleeping drugs. You know perfectly well which dosage suits you best. Are you hungry? You haven’t eaten for hours. Here, eating is a dead-boring routine – canned fish, canned meat, canned vegetables, packaged soup, packaged precooked noodles, packaged broth powder, jam in jars, bottled seasoning – but if you really want to kill yourself, don’t eat anyt
hing, because it’d be a waste and makes a corpse look awful. You look awful enough as it is. Die slowly, die quietly, die smoothly and die easy. If you’re up to it, dive in and let yourself go slowly but surely down to bottomless and sublime bleakness. No, don’t dream of a civilised death or of a courteous death, that’s a dream beyond reach. You’re feeling cold. You cough hoarsely. The cough makes you a little more conscious. Listen to your coughing. Your coughing comes straight out of your lungs. How about a little sleeping pill? As smooth as walking over velvet, hey! But as soon as you’re asleep, your sleep is a tormented ramble of dreams, and when you wake up you’ll have a headache, you’ll feel as if your skull had swollen to the size of the very planet, you’ll be groggy, gloomy and horrified as if you were in a world of demons strewn with the corpses of books, pure music and the delirium of the past (grogginess, the condition of the urban animal) and you’ll feel you aren’t really awake but merely dreaming you’re awake. You’re no longer able to work hard. Since Itthee’s death you’re no longer able to work hard. You’re too weak to work well. Since Itthee’s death you haven’t stopped deteriorating, going to rack and ruin from the inside. But you still keep pretending to play the part of a comforter when someone haggard with despondence comes to see you. You’re particularly good at it with young women, whom you comfort half-heartedly. If it’s a man that comes to see you, you yawn, you pretend to be bored, you claim you’re very busy, but with young women you play the part of the man in perfect mental health always in the mood for jokes. And the more charming the young woman, the more brilliant your performance. In your loneliness, you dream only of her white naked body and before you decide to sleep with her, there’s a little encore to your show, which is that you horse around furiously with your conscience, grapple and tussle furiously with all your anaemic and feeble virtues, and each time you win unilaterally. That’s the most deadly boring part of your performance. To others, you show yourself Olympian, but deep down your neurosis is progressing. Your symptoms are getting worse and worse. You should try to chain yourself once again, or else you’ll end up chasing someone knife in hand to bump him off in broad daylight. Are you sure your madness is gone forever? You’re a mental case and yet you’ve chosen to treat yourself and shopped around for neurology books. You read them but understood nothing, yet you persevered in your reading. Arokaya phornma lappa: the absence of illness is a supreme godsend – that’s what the Buddha taught. When people are unable to cure themselves, that’s when physicians of all kinds puff up – that’s what Plato taught. You don’t like it when someone puffs up before you. You can’t stand it when someone comes to show you he knows your nervous system better than you do. Let him keep it to himself, his expertise in the nervous system! Let him keep it to himself, his expertise in the nervous system of the others! No way can he claim to be an expert of your nervous system. You saw yourself tied to a bed in a psychiatric ward, yelling and shaking your head in denial of all experts of the nervous system. You had to flee far away at all costs because you were absolutely convinced you knew all of your organs perfectly. You were convinced that if someone shoved a kidney in your face, you’d be able to tell at a glance whether it was yours or not. Yes sir, this is my kidney. And Yes sir, I’m positive this is my spleen. And That’s right, sir, this is my brain. No way could I ever confuse it with someone else’s. It wasn’t long before you began to rave episodically. You began to have a good time with absurd humour. You began to ask yourself, supposing a sleeping pill makes you sleep for three hours, how many pills would you need to wake up in the year 1999. You thought out of the blue that if you met a woman called Oy (sugar cane), you’d introduce yourself, poker-faced, And I’m Chang (elephant). You began to make lousy plays on words, punchy quips and jokey quibbles. You started to select your ten favourite dirty jokes. You laughed a lot over a gag that came to you just like that, which was that the more your memory decreases, the more your forgetfulness increases. You sang the love song of Crocodile Dundee which says If I give you my heart I’ll be heartless and you’ll always be between two hearts… You laughed deliriously for a while but soon the era of the vacant stare and of drifting resumed. You did your utmost to flee Bangkok. You claimed Bangkok was a city without butterflies. So you went on a quest for loans from friends. Be generous to children, women, old people and artists. You went to Samut Sakon and rented a room in a block of flats. Your neighbours were high school students, technical college students, petty health officials. The block of flats was pretty good, quiet, and close to the river. Your room was spacious and clean – all you needed to start writing a novel. But you couldn’t stay there for long. Your neighbours, all of them teenagers that had little time for school, were always gathering to smoke grass and listen to the radio at full blast, listen to tapes at full blast – Mega Stars 1 and Mega Stars 2, Eighteen Carats and Nopphakao and Kheereeboon and Rainbow and Sixth Sense and Forever night and day. You told yourself it wasn’t too bad but you turned pale in the face. One night they protested when you put on Paganini. It wasn’t that you enjoy him that much or that you wanted to be known as someone with refined taste. It was quite simply that you’d been told pure music helped relieve mental stress. So you endeavoured not to pay attention to the protests and pretended nothing was happening. On the following night, while you were enraptured in Chopin on Chulalongkorn Radio, someone threw a soiled tampon through the window of your room. It brushed past your head and fell on the bed. Bastards! Besides, the night was beautiful. There was soft moonlight and stars all over the sky. You were sitting at your desk by the wide-open window and you’d switched off the light. Moonlight coming through the window allowed you to see dimly the objects on your desk – lamp, flower-vase, lighter, cigarette pack, pen, coffee mug, manuscript – and the pure and fruited sound of the piano suffused the room like a perfume with a magic spell. But then, totally unexpectedly, that soiled sanitary towel thrown by an anonymous hand flew in and hardly missed your head. What you did was jump to close the window on the security of your shell. A long while later you got fearfully daring enough to switch on the lamp and throw the used tampon in the dustbin. What are you ? Kotex or Jip Joy, mm? you softly asked the sanitary towel. You felt a sanitary towel is of the female gender and you’re always gentle with women; that’s why you asked so politely. Actually, I tend to think it somehow serves you right, but when I hear such a question, I can’t help looking at you in wonder. You control yourself real well. While I was about to offer some compliment, you vouched in your distress you’d move out the next day, and you gathered your belongings into your shoulder bag, and you really did move out. A buffalo resigns itself to its fate as a buffalo. A trashy poet resigns himself to his fate as a trashy poet. You went back to the room at 41 Soi Thantawan, the room you used to rent with Itthee, the room that had become the graveyard of hopes and dreams of all kinds, the room that breathed vengeance and the most deviant delirium, the room that seemed still haunted by Itthee’s spectre. You were unable to stand the ill-omened atmosphere of the place. You were unable to stand the crushing weight of the past. You resumed your toing and froing from one friend to another. Your friends saddened you and you saddened your friends but these were two different kinds of sadness. Khampan Seenuea rented a house in the fields of the Nonthaburi suburb and its yard was crammed full of cages for fighting cocks. He wore wide indigo-dyed trousers and a short-sleeved indigo-dyed shirt and if not absolutely necessary wore no shoes as he likes his naked flat feet to stay in contact with the ground as much as possible. His hair was going grey. His eyes were calm and unruffled. He only associated with cock fighting fans, raised fighting cocks by profession and betted on cockfights. You were afraid of disturbing his fighting cocks and his cockfight-minded friends, so you spent only two nights at his place and went to see Thanit Sukkaseim at his flat in the Rachadaphisek area. But his work as a journalist was keeping him busy full time. Besides, he had a new girlfriend and he probably wished to be alone with her, even though he kept repeating you could stay with hi
m for as long as you liked. So you turned to Marnit Seewa, who was by now a top-billing photographer. His house on Phathanakan Road was beginning to have the aura of the new generation that had made it in life, with all sorts of luxurious household appliances and an expensive car, but his wife had just given birth. Sanphat Phongkaseit was busy seeking a way to open a beer bar in Phuket. He had enough money to invest but he had to be cautious and you watched in wonder at the ease with which he used his pocket calculator. You chatted with him until late into the night and you watched in wonder as he slept with his pocket calculator still in his hand. Doam Wuthichai had become a true professional antique dealer, but the monthly instalments on his house and car were a real drain on his wallet. His daughter was to enter nursery school the next year and he had so many competitors in the antiques trade that he was rather disheartened. Feum Maya ran a team of motor-taxis in the Lam Sali area. He was thick as thieves with sinister-looking bike fiends. True, he was making money hand over fist, but he also had to grease the palms of the cops, who were the real local bosses. Jitti Phuaphisoot had made a name for himself in advertising, the kind of man that makes or breaks products such as Kwintex condoms (‘technology for love’) or Bai Pho toothpicks (‘sharp at both ends’) and he had little time for anyone. Somphong Thawee had opened a stall selling amulets in a shopping arcade and limited his passion strictly to amulets and he kept getting fatter and fatter little by little, slowly but surely. All of these mates you’d hung with from the time you were at university were all crazy about literature and only dreamed of writing, but now all of them had changed. There was only you who refused to change. All of them knew the famished-dog fate that was yours and the lot of them had come to your help untold numbers of times. They understood and sympathised, but they all had their own problems. All of them were ready to put you up, find you jobs and give you pocket money, but very few were ready to chat with you (at least that’s how you felt) and almost all of them couldn’t figure what you were talking about. Maybe because you’d taken too many barbiturates. Some of your friends had given you chapter and verse on that topic, but some merely looked at you without a word as if they disapproved. Something in the way they behaved showed they were now adults; they reasoned like adults and solved problems like adults. There was only you who refused to grow up, still reasoned like a child and solved problems the way a child does. In those days when we studied at university we met often at the cafeteria near the library and talked about Angkarn and Tagore and Jang Sae Tang and Joyce and Proust and Rimbaud and Ginsberg and Steinbeck as if they were gods1. Later we went our separate ways and the last time you saw him, Khampan Seenuea waxed eloquent on cock fighting, which according to him should be as popular as Thai boxing. With his calm and unruffled eyes and his hair laced with silver threads, the slow elocution that is peculiar to him made what he said fascinating. He talked to you about a capitalist who was going to invest for him to raise fighting cocks in a big way, because he already had several customers who came from Malaysia and Indonesia and opening a market for Thai fighting cocks in these two countries was theoretically possible. You merely listened without putting in a word. Thanit Sukkaseim spoke of sundry heroes of the capitalist era who had found fame and fortune as media moguls, of the restaurant where you find the best snakehead fish tom yam2, of his collection of rare stamps, of his latest paramour who, truth be told, is a Khmer princess… Marnit Seewa complained that these days women’s magazines are increasingly like nude mags. Doam Wutthichai spoke of old tables, old chairs, old books, old fans, old lunchboxes, old postcards, old film posters, and he said of himself that he was nothing these days but his daughter’s slave and he said that he knew all there was to know about the current doings of Marnee Maniwan, a blue movie star in the past. Feum Maya said he was utterly fed up with civilisation and had but one dream, that of going to live in Kula Rong Hai3, to import a camel bull and cow from the Near East to go into commercial breeding of dromedaries, and he also said he was happy these days and had finally made one of every Thai male’s ambitions come true: he now had his own mistress, given that previously he’d had the embarrassing experience of having to share one with others. Jitti Phuaphisoot suffered from atrocious bouts of migraine and he kept spitting profanity at all the customers at the agency where he worked and criticising the ads on TV one after the other, and he confided to you that he too was busy writing a text he intended to get published in the Marketing section of a business paper under the title ‘Shampoo: the war on your heads’. Sanphat Phongkaseit spoke of the number of tourists in Phuket, of why Thailand derives less income from tourism than Singapore and how Singapore is trying to destroy the beauty of Phuket by deceiving islanders into raising one pig per household that a Singapore investor will then purchase, at a good price actually. Somphong Thawee spoke of all manner of magic amulets with mellifluous names, of how the hell to go about losing weight once and for all, and of how at times he couldn’t help thinking about one of his exes, the one who always had a gun in her handbag because she had once been raped. None of them spoke of writing or dreamed of writing as in the bad old days. When you said you wanted to take a break in the country and write a novel, they all shut up and looked at you as if they’d seen a ghost from the past. There was sadness in their eyes. None of them protested but none of them encouraged you either. They all gave you money, some more, some less. You told them that as soon as you’d be in funds you’d hasten to reimburse them. They all had already kissed goodbye to such an eventuality but no-one said anything. That was taking place at the end of the rainy season and the beginning of the cold season. The tabebuia trees were beginning to put on pale mauve flowers. The mother-of-cocoa trees were beginning to shed their leaves to cover themselves entirely with buds. The swallows were beginning to fly away. The wind was beginning to reverse course and the sky was beginning to change colour. The gladioli and carnations sold in the markets were beginning to put on fuller shapes and more variegated hues. The children were beginning to wear motley sweaters over the shirts of their school uniforms. You worked out how much money you had and decided to flee Bangkok for Samet Island. Even at the time you were already starting to feel you were getting on a bit and you were scared of old age most of all. You were afraid old age would make you lose your memory. You were afraid old age would make you regress to childhood, that second childhood able to compel the old to whine for the moon or wet their beds. For all that, you kept indulging in what young men relish, a behaviour that can in no uncertain terms be qualified as mild debauchery. You went to wallow on seaside sand to write love poems. You slept in a fisherman’s hut with banana-leaf roofing but had the nerve to go and get drunk on beer in a resort for the well off. The money you’d taken pains to beg in order to write a novel melted like ice cream in the sun. After one month you went back to Bangkok, with inspiration galore and diminishing funds. Less than seven days later, your money was gone and your fire had gone out. Your writing which at first flowed freely had suddenly become befuddled before coming to a halt. You tried to start all over again, some ninety-seven or ninety-eight days ago, before realising that was a daft and blind way to proceed. But you were seeing red and you fought over problems in your work mulishly. The worst was that sometimes you wrote under the influence. You wrote and wrote and wrote while having absolutely no control over yourself. You were afraid of nothing, even if on those days when you were very drunk you couldn’t stay seated for more than one hour at a stretch. Keep lying down as you do now, that’s better. Your body needs to rest – your body and your mind. Your eyesight is getting poor and if you’re bright enough you aren’t going to strain it. But you mustn’t be scared of death or infirmity. Do you think the world cares whether you’re dead or alive? But, given that killing oneself is a silly joke and death but a dead-boring entertainment, I’m showing you a new way. Death is like a book you’ve read so often it has nothing to offer you any longer. The best is to stop reading it for some time; you can always start reading again later. What have years of me
ditating on death brought you? You merely figured out that Death is the absence of life. Hmm! Let’s say that’s quite deep. Reading too many books, you end up feeling miserable, you know. Each time you must force yourself to read instead of reading for pleasure. Music is an art that can be enjoyed more lazily, but music only provides emotions, it doesn’t provide thoughts. It’s the very opposite of reflection. You’re craving pure music. You look like an animal craving salt. You want to savour something pure because your life is filth. You crave purity. Crave is not the right word – unquenchable thirst is more like it. Pure music helps improve your mental health only a little. You’ve listened to it so much the tapes have gone slack, you got fed up with the stereo radio set whose batteries went flat long ago. All of your tapes a woman gave you. Ditto for the radio cassette player. Ditto for the money in your pocket – Kangsadarn Sakarwarat, professional saint. But music helps improve your mental health only a little. Actually, at present there’s no music. There’s only the drizzle of silence. There’s only the drizzle of moonlight and the babbling of the brook and the rustling of the yellowish dead leaves. The sound of water lipping the banks is most distinctive. Listen. Concentrate and listen. Quench your thirst with these noises, like the last few drops out of the gourd of the traveller about to die of thirst in the desert. When was the first time man knew how to kill himself? From the anthropological evidence, who was the first man to kill himself? Did the Peking man, the Java man, the Cro-Magnon man, the Neanderthal man already know about suicide? What was it that prompted the first Homo sapiens to commit suicide? A sense of sin? A sense of guilt? Despair? Or a broken heart? Man knew how to kill himself once he had invented hope, right? Let’s see: try to utter the word ‘hope’ in Swedish. Or else man knew how to kill himself once he had invented honour, right? Honour, indeed! ‘Honour’ is such a magnificent word. Which dictionary in which tongue wouldn’t have such a word? Let’s see: try to utter the word ‘honour’ in Swahili. Hmm! Not bad. Well then, let’s see: try to utter the word ‘honour’ in Tibetan and in – in Yiddish, while we’re at it. Hmm! Magnificent indeed. Well now, relax. No, don’t think about writing. You once wrote The rusty nails of indecision pin me down for all eternity – let this be your last sentence. It’s a good sentence. But now you must decide to do something, which is get across the abyss once again. It sounds like a phrase out of a cheap book on morals, but you’ll have to make do with it for the time being. Talk with the dead or talk as if you were already dead: it’s necessary to do it. It’s part of the game to be played with death. How do you feel? They’re already here. They’ve come without making a noise. All around you now there are both the dead that are already dead and the dead that are still alive. All of them have come to take part in your funeral. They’ve been waiting for such a night for a very long time. And there, look, Death itself has come and sits in the shadows like an old vulture. Greet it with a few words. It’s a game you’ve never played seriously up until now. Maybe it’ll be a very tense game that will drag on and on into boredom or maybe it’ll be a funny and exciting game like the clash between Zhang Fei and Ma Chao in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, mysterious and magnificent as when you light a black candle to read a black poem in the black night, or else insipid and tedious like a verbal joust between Satan and a saint. Just before deciding to play, aren’t you wondering whether this game wasn’t conceived as a test for anyone postulating to the human condition? This entrance exam to the human condition is the same as a final exam. You’ve never prepared yourself for it and you’ve failed it year after year, and this time if you don’t pass you’ll be banished from the human condition or at the very least you’ll no longer be allowed to take the test again. Didn’t you get lost in a dream to think it’s a game everyone should play at least once in their lives, by any night of desolation or any day of abomination? One should play it seriously at least once in one’s life. Not for the others, of course, but for oneself. All in all, it’s like a show, a show where there is you and your self, you and the others, all those you’ve known in your life, both those that are already dead and those that are still alive, a show whose audience is Death, and as everybody knows Death is a finicky spectator and one hard to move. Death is watching your show for you, not for itself. At times it yawns; at times it sniggers in its silence at the naivety of your tricks. On several occasions, it ignores you and starts to noisily rustle the pages of a sports paper and sets about reading the sports news assiduously. Sometimes it goes to the toilet though actually it doesn’t need to pee and sometimes it goes out to smoke a cigarette, but no matter what, it’ll hold out until the end of the show. It’ll come to you, unless you go to it because it’s the last show. It doesn’t pay attention to what you display. The only thing of interest to it is to know if at the end of the show it’s you who’ll go to it or if it’ll have to come to you or if, better still, both you and it will meet each other halfway. And what is of utmost interest to it is to take you to its realm, you as the accused, it as the warden of the accused. Death is cool; it is a star. You aren’t cool; you’re just a bit player. Ah!