‘Animal’ was what she said. All of her distress so long contained seemed to be exploding noiselessly in this word. With a touch of defiance and hostility, she went on in the same feeble and icy voice Of a damn beast from hell. And after that the tension of her body slackened. Those words whipped you full-force and aggressed you in a way you’d never have thought possible. You saw yourself in a dream dragging her once again up to the dirty, waterlogged blind alley, walk across the maze of hovels and decrepit houses, raise high your foot to access the wooden footbridge meandering at marshland’s stagnant water level, past gangs of hoodlums with bellicose poses and eyes looking for a fight with us, past clusters of housewives exchanging gossip in whispers while observing us with curiosity only to burst into snide remarks even before we’re out of earshot, and past the cavernous grocer’s shop of the local Chinaman crammed full of goods of all sorts. At the very end of the lane is the hired abortionist’s house and, in its operating room, you see her lying on a narrow wooden bed placed against the partition wall. On the table near the bed there are strange instruments which seem to be the harbingers of pain and death. There’s a basin whose galvanised iron peels off in knocked-about places revealing its black inner substance like blobs of ink. There are bistouries. There are elastic bands and what looks like pliers. There are strips of cloth to blindfold and tie up wrists and ankles. There’s a razor to shave hairs and you even see a box of sanitary towels to staunch blood. And there she lies. Actually, you had yet to set foot into a room where abortions were practised, but that image pulsated in your deranged imagination: the doctor looking like an executioner; she spread out wriggling under her ties in a paroxysm of pain, in a paroxysm of torment. Her muted shouts echo into your chest, into your skull. The unbearable pain in her groin runs through all the organs of your body. All the torments she’s suffering send shock waves in all the capillary vessels of your body. And all of this makes your heart erupt in cracks, blood trickles and finally bursts out and spreads everywhere. It was a scene you were imagining from what your chums had told you, which had given you cramps and nightmares. Whichever way situations in your dream developed or ended, the beginning was always the same. It always had to begin with you half-comatose on a narrow wooden bed, your body entirely paralysed and in a state close to death. But then Nartaya had to totally destroy that dream, even though in your imagination you were trying in all the ways you could to share her pain and make it your own. Indeed, sharing someone’s pain is impossible in a dream as in reality, but didn’t that mean you were well disposed towards her? You’d been putting up with her incessant inanities for a long time. You’d explained to her at great length what she had to do and why, but she wouldn’t listen and your stock of patience was running low. In the downstairs room of that old bungalow, under the murky light of the ceiling neon tube assailed by insects, the icy night of the cold season was getting abnormally agitated. There reigned a climate of tension, aggression and confusion. Nartaya gasped for breath loudly. She blew onto her chest through the collar of her blouse and took long gulps of water. In that room, a boy and a girl found themselves confronted with an apparently insoluble problem and finally found themselves confronted with each other. Love, tenderness and the sweetness of life, those things that should have been there, had gone up in smoke; resentment, hatred and the blind urge to hurt had surfaced instead. You’ll no doubt remember that scene all your life, and always with shame. It was a confrontation between two animals, really. When we can’t control a situation, it’s the situation that controls us; it bears in itself its own logic and its own conclusion. The only difference between Nartaya and you was that you were more of an animal. You hardly realised any longer where you were or what you were doing. You swore and said How hot it is in here! looked away and said further And you add to the heat. You too were thirsty, maybe because you’d just seen her drink, but when you stretched out your hand to take the water bottle and fill your glass, Nartaya swung at the glass and it fell from the table. You’d never thought she could act like that. It was throwing you a deliberate challenge. The glass broke on the cement floor and shattered into sharp, shiny splinters in a discordant explosion followed by silence. You turned away to look through the window, fleeing all the truths that were assailing you. A shooting star scratched the black-blue darkness before disappearing behind the mountain. Fireflies were glowing in the bushes. The following moment you stood up. You didn’t understand why you were acting like that. Your hand shot out and caught her by the hair, pulling hard until she pitched forward before you. How dare you insult me? you said and smacked her face with full force. How dare you insult me? you asked and smacked her face with full force once again. At that moment you were thinking you’d almost prevailed over all of the oppressions that were assaulting you, so you slapped her face yet again. Tension and confusion faded. You felt happy and out of the woods. I beg you, you said, the only thing I’m asking you to do is go and see the doctor with me – or else, you added in an imperious tone, I’ll kill you. When you let go of her hair, she let out a low moan, her chair collapsed, her body reeled and flopped to the floor. You looked at her. You were almost dying of pity for her but at the same time you almost burst out laughing out of extreme jubilation. Only the man who takes most after the animal has the power to dominate other men. Only the man who takes after the animal more than other men is able to control and change the world. That bullshit of virtue grownups are always talking about is something that stinks to high heaven. The world is not the place for it.
You were the one who’d banish it and you were looking at it going away, its face devastated with tears and looking distressed. It had nothing to do any longer in a world under the control of your villainy, except for composing the longest elegy ever written on the theme of exile. For your part, you’d content yourself with writing on a sky-wide panel in letters as big as mountains a simple, short and neat text in telegraphic style: MORALITY’S NO-GO AREA or MORALS-FREE ZONE, and you’d plant it above your world. After the events of that night, Nartaya was scared of you as a mouse of a cat. It could be said she’d fallen in your power entirely. Nevertheless she still hadn’t consented to go and see the quack doctor, but she tried to put off the visit by begging you to take her to the provincial hospital to abort in correct conditions at the hand of a more credible modern doctor. That was hopeless: you knew damn well that abortions were illegal and few doctors would dare to break the law, contrary to what can be witnessed these days. It was you yourself who suggested Tell the doctor you must abort because you were raped and you have to get on with your studies. She looked at you with dry eyes and admitted she was unable to lie without being found out. In any case, after much insistence, you managed to have her go to the provincial hospital. She went to see the doctor (a woman doctor from the obstetrics department) who listened calmly to her stuttered lies while staring at her with the compassionate look of someone who’s heard it all and finally told her there was no need to embroider to be pitied, they all say they’ve been raped, surely you don’t think I’m that gullible. And Nartaya was thrown out, pale with shame, and went back home. Finally she and you decided to go and see again the murderouslooking hired abortionist, with a side trip to the pawnshop. You pawned the watch Daen had offered you as a birthday present three years earlier. As for Nartaya, she pawned a necklace her mother had discreetly enjoined her to take, telling her she could always sell it if she ever had a pressing need of money. But even with your chums’ contribution it wasn’t enough. You had to borrow money from one of Daen’s friends. He looked at you as if he didn’t doubt your honesty. A study trip, you say? Travel broadens the mind, as is well known. And he talked to you about the archaeological and tourist sites he had visited when he was in high school. His candour put you to shame. Actually, you were telling yourself your little story didn’t wash and his alacrity worried you: he probably wasn’t fooled but was acting dumb, wasn’t letting on to better laugh at you later. In any case you’d just been introduced to the variou
s representatives of despair, that is, the pawnshop, indebtedness and dissimulation, which were to become your friends for life. The nearer the date, the more fear and tension seemed to grow. She and you had missed school for days on end, busy as you were going to hospital and pawnshop and borrowing money. The depressions and tensions of all sorts you underwent made you withdrawn, and you chain-smoked. Nartaya slept badly, hardly ate and cried or sobbed all the time. She must be in pain, aggressed even in her thoughts. She hardly spoke at all. She no longer did the washing. She no longer cooked. Her house, quite recently neat and orderly, was noticeably dirty and untidy. Dirty linen piled up in a plastic basket. Dirty dishes piled up in a basin smudged with dried scraps. On her bed, the crumpled sheet hadn’t been changed in days and the blanket was folded sloppily. Cockroaches were beginning to venture at the corners of the closet, of the bed and of the piles of magazines. And her writing desk, then! It was bestrewn with the corpses of insects that flirted with the lamp at night. A strange habit had come to her during that period: she had found somewhere a lump of plasticine she kept in her hand almost all the time, and she kneaded it ceaselessly as if it were her heart, pressed it and kneaded it compulsively even in bed until she fell asleep. San’s return only made things worse, even though he’d come back just to tell his sister to get herself ready to move to the new lodging that was at last ready. She and you had to control yourselves to the utmost to avoid giving rise to suspicion. It was lucky he only stayed over for two nights and was busy during the day with the responsibilities he’d been entrusted with and in late afternoon went to see his friends and relax at the officers’ club taking his time over drinks and dinner and a game of cards or billiards. From there he went into town or else cast anchor at some friend’s or other. He came back very late, sloshed to the gills. He still greeted you gaily and didn’t show himself surprised to see you drinking hot milk at his table on the night he came back. He complained about finding the house in a mess and asked Nartaya how come she left it in such a state. When she answered she didn’t feel quite well, he paused and then told her to go see the doctor at the medical unit and told you to take her there and you nodded wordlessly as you always did. San was telling himself merely that you had a crush on his sister as often happens with teenagers and he goddamn seemed to think it was funny. He hadn’t a clue there might be something between the two of you that went far beyond propriety. You had the impression you were a murderer, not because you were about to destroy the little living being in Nartaya’s belly but because you had to try to behave normally even though you’d committed a major crime. Can you picture yourself again with Nartaya, she and you pitiful in the deep shadow of disaster? The days of bright cheerfulness had gone as if they’d never been. Every moment was loaded with maddening anxiety. Struggling stupidly and alarming yourselves, you were projected towards darkness amid the threatening clamour of reality, which followed you to avenge itself of you and her. Nartaya’s health was getting worse from day to day. No need to wonder about the weight of her torments. She had much more to bear with than you did. The more the meeting date drew near, the more she vomited. Your understanding at the time was that vomiting happened in the late stage of pregnancy, not after a mere three months, so you thought that if she vomited, it must be out of nervousness or else it was yet another way for her to get you to give in by running up with her or even killing her, anything so long as she wouldn’t have to abort. The least noise startled her – a passerby’s greeting, a night bird’s cry as sharp as a ghost’s shriek on a mountain top, the mewing of a stray cat, the call of a gecko in a tree hollow, the fluttering of a bat at one time or other of the night, even her own shadow. She was going mad with fear. She kept watching your left hand, followed its movements, as it was that hand that had smacked her in the face compulsively, an introduction to violence as she’d never known before and never thought she’d have to know. She was afraid to be submitted to further abuse; fear stupefied her. But when the day of the appointment finally came, she neither cried nor said anything nor even showed the least hesitation or opposed the least resistance. She accepted her fate without demur, like a beast of burden. Even if your memory fails you one day, you’ll never forget that Sunday of the end of January. Clinging to your arm she went into that slum jungle like a convict led to the stake, just as had happened in your dream and for real some time before that. The hired abortionist was already waiting for us. He greeted us with a repulsively servile smile, took our money, after which he had Nartaya enter the operating room and called his wife over to come and help him. In the room where abortions were carried out, there must’ve been nothing but a small narrow bed which must’ve had at the very least a blindfold for the eyes and strips of cloth to tie up wrists and ankles with. Nartaya turned round and looked at you as if to signify this was your very last meeting and it was there she was to discover the true story of violence, not merely its introduction – a true story which would start, proceed and end by itself in a masterly flow, a story which would improve and expand like weeds of evil, invulnerable, fast-growing, free and impetuous out of impatient arrogance. You were asked to wait outside in the company of the two kids who were having lunch while watching the Sunday TV games of chance whose winner would be awarded a Bangkok – Zurich return ticket. In that house where flies were everywhere and especially in the kids’ dishes, as if to vouch this truly was the Lord of the Flies’ den, it was an interminable wait of repulsion and fright whose nagging rhythm pulsated ceaselessly under your skull and your brain ached from tension. You were in pain and scared and had spasms in your guts as much as anyone in such a case. The doctor’s black dirty hands (did he put on gloves, at least, to practise his curetting?), the oddly shaped surgery tools (if he had any really or was he merely using a knife and pounding and squeezing and cutting through the flesh to bring out the damn clot?) came back roaming about in your thoughts. Inert soulless metal… soiled soulless hands… Sneering, scolding, yelling arrogant threats, such was the victory of soullessness for ever and ever so that time seemed to be paralysed! You couldn’t keep still, smoked, paced up and down. Not a shout, not a sound of struggle or of weeping, not the least noise on her part. Strips of cloth around wrists and ankles by way of an anaesthetic for fuck’s sake! And it lasted and it lasted to the point that you were almost berserk when the door of that bloody operating room slowly opened at long last. Nartaya took one step forward. That arsehole of a quack supported her, looking pleased as one who’s finally got over his own hassles. He smiled at you and said Everything’s fine. You didn’t pay attention to him, busy as you were observing Nartaya, holding your breath. She stood there, both her hands clutching the doorjamb, her face pale as a sheet. Before you could do anything, her body started to shake and sway as if she was going to collapse, and as she wore a jeans skirt that didn’t reach her knees, you saw blood running down the inside of her thighs and when she took another step forward, a blob of blood splashed on the floor, a dark red star like the sun will be on the last dusk of the world. She thrust her exhausted body into your embrace and hugged you strongly. Her heart pounded so much you could feel it. She could find no other shelter any longer than that of an apparently contrite wild beast. You cast a glance into the stinking room, saw but a dull night-blue, almost black curtain and a cuspidor on the floor full of cotton red with blood and you had to look away with a wry face. The terrible experience you had with a man made you fearful of men for life and was such you probably never found happiness or rest even in death. It must have remained stuck into your chest like an irremovable torture stake. Your body on that cramped bed unable to move, a forbidden shout stuck in your throat, eyes closed to see nothing but darkness – all of that meant you only had vague memories of everything else. The cruelty you suffered manifested itself imperiously. It must’ve won top billing in your memory and turned other experiences into meaningless extras and in the nights and days of torment that never seemed to come to an end you had nothing and no-one to rely on except me, a human-shaped
wild beast, a wild beast you were unable to dismiss from your life and at whose mercy you found yourself absolutely. You demanded its love. You wanted it by your side. You were one of the most desperate persons I’ve ever known. Forgive me. Meanwhile, I walked in darkness towards darkness. Forgive me for dragging you into darkness too before leaving you to dangle in it… The hired abortionist with a murderer’s looks certified that within seven to nine days Nartaya would be fine again, then he handed over a medicine explaining it was a very powerful antiseptic and he added you had to take care of her, the patient mustn’t be exposed to physical or mental shocks, heavy work was out of the question, and you were forbidden to ‘bother’ her for at least a fortnight, and in conclusion he told you alone (as she was in no condition to register anything any longer) there was nothing to worry about. You could only curse yourself later on when you realised that all these assurances were wilfully deceptive. Nartaya often had to miss school because of lower abdomen pains and bleeding, light at first, which she withstood with commendable courage. San came back to see her as often as he could escape from his obligations. He talked to you about his sister’s illness without knowing exactly what the matter was, but in any case he didn’t have the leisure to take her to have a thorough checkup, so that he left her in your care. Because we’re like members of the same family, aren’t we? he said and stared straight at you with his characteristic frank and sincere look for you to know he really meant it. And when the conversation came to Daen, you felt all the more agitated and made wishes for San to go back to his post in the jungle as soon as possible. About one month later, San and Nartaya moved out to go and live in their newly built house, rather far from there. When she knew she was really going to move, amorous yearning, which she hadn’t shown in a long time, reappeared, more intense than ever. She beseeched you to come and see her every day and sleep with her every night and you were crazy enough to do so, going back only past midnight. Besides, you made love with her almost every night because it made you pleasantly tired and helped you find sleep instead of having to struggle against the insomnia that was beginning to torture you without your knowing exactly what caused it. You made love with her almost every night while plagued by your old dreads: that San came back unexpectedly and that she fell pregnant again. What a fucking bastard you were! As for Nartaya, physically weak though she was, she played ball admirably and even went the extra mile, as it was no doubt the only way for her to be pleasantly tired and find sleep similarly. Nature has given human beings an excess of erotic points compared to the one brain. You drained your blind libidinal moods through the suction of her secret bog. You tried the ancestral method of birth control, i.e. withdrew your gun before you shot, but to your considerable surprise she wouldn’t let you. From a bashful young girl she was becoming a daring young woman. From the prudish wait for a hug, there she was starting to take the initiative. From the any old how, she was experimenting as if she meant to become an expert. From sexual reserve, she was being granted a voracious carnal appetite as if she knew no happiness but by making love, as if she knew she’d die young and had little time left to spend in this world, as if she wanted to kill herself by making love, as if only making love could negate her pain. Finally, after some two weeks of that circus, you called it quits. You held her in contempt. She left you cold. You never went to see her again except when you couldn’t stand it. You spent nights at friends’ houses. You studied listlessly. You wove relationships with other girls with a daring that amazed even you. You learned that her studies were getting worse and worse. You learned that she often missed class. When you went to see her, she gave you the cold shoulder. She cried and told you she didn’t care for you one way or the other. When you got close, she struck you. When you took her in your arms, she struggled. When you kissed her, she bit you as if to challenge you to hurt her again. Sometimes she merely squeezed her plasticine and refused to look you in the eye. Her mood shifts puzzled you. When you told her you were leaving, she merely nodded, but at night she banged on your door and cried as if she didn’t care about anything, as if she couldn’t care less if someone saw or heard her, as if she didn’t care whether Daen was back for the night or not. In her hand there was the plasticine. Her breath smelled of alcohol (of which her brother kept a permanent stock at home). Your heart shrank with pity. You’d have liked to love her as much as could be done but you were too fearful to dare admit it, as you feared you might be made to regret it later on. You met her less and less often. When you thought about her, you saw her walking slowly, with difficulty, at once gaunt and deformed, delirious and staggering. You tried to escape from her and it seemed she was fully aware of it. Besides, she seemed to be fighting against herself to prevent herself from coming to see you again, but many a time when you woke up in the morning you found her sitting on your bed crying and she told you her dream of the night before: she dreamed again and again that the child she used to have in her belly kept coming back to see her and protested, lamented, supplicated and went as far as to proffer threats. She spoke a mile a minute and her words were incoherent and confused. What you remember most clearly is that she told you the baby in question was sticky with blood all over, was of an undetermined sex and its mouth was wide open in a display of fangs and full of blood foam. In the quietness of dawn, what she told you, her looks as she did, the doleful tone in which she did weighed oppressively on your heart, so you walked away, pretending you needed to pee or saying you were going to buy pa-thongko22. She stirred, remained seated and silent and finally left. Later you’d learn that almost all women who go through an abortion have this kind of dream. But Nartaya nonetheless kept harassing you like a vindictive soul. At the close of the hot season term, she simply refused to go back to her parents’. She told you with despair in her voice that what she truly wanted was to stay near you forever but she’d die before long because if she didn’t die a natural death she’d kill herself. You were hurt. You were scared. You studied as if your life depended on it. And then, it turned out that heaven sided with the wild beast: you passed the entrance exam to university that year by the skin of your teeth. For you, the mere fact of having the opportunity to go to university was a colossal piece of luck, first because it contributed to dispel your worries regarding your relationship with Nartaya, as you now had a reason to get away from her; second, it was a guarantee in your studies, which had been haphazard up until then; third, it meant a freer life which would give you the opportunity to do what you wanted, which was to say goodbye to high school, which to you was an abominable straightjacket. You had the excessively optimistic dream that university was going to guarantee your future. You thought back on your past with fear as you recollected the not so nice events that had taken place, the brawls, the drugs and a hoodlum behaviour that could have sent you to an institution for young offenders. You were vaguely aware that enough was enough. It had to end and you had to change your ways. Some of your friends had died in gang wars and some had died brutally because of their friskiness on bikes and some were walking ghosts because of the white powder and some had gone the way of hired killers and some spent their time counting the days in a top-notch jail of the realm: that should be enough to serve you as a lesson, shouldn’t it? But this kind of thought went through your mind like the shadow of a thin cloud in the hot season and came to naught in the ordinary course of daily life. You packed up your clothes, sorted out your documents. You found yourself stuck with farewell parties your hoodlum pals lined up for you, dead drunk or half dead on booze and hash in the golden days and nights of the end of May, dreaming of a new term in a new institution of learning, new friends, new women and a new life in Bangkok, the town where all of a male’s wishes were fulfilled. Almost every night you went back to Nartaya. Those nights were but frantic fornications which you told yourself were farewell fornications, as before long you’d be rid of Nartaya’s body and possibly would never see it again. She willingly accepted those couplings with daring and boundless imagination. From her point of
view, it seemed that making love helped her slide more smoothly towards death; it seemed to be an attempt to get rid of her will to live; it seemed to be resigning herself to her fate unconditionally. Those torrid nights didn’t only have the sweet smell of a young girl’s body but also the smell of plasticine and the faint smell of death. You scarpered from her place at dawn regularly, used to the danger that the glass ball of your fragile secret might shatter: for all you knew it was more dangerous than tiptoeing through mine-studded jungle. Twenty minutes or half an hour on average before the bugle rent the silence with Arise ye valiant soldier, the tiredness of the night seemed to be rinsed away by the brightness of the morning star which shone softly and solitary, by the gold and silver rays out of the east and by the calm of dawn crimped with forktails’ trills and blackbirds’ sleepy calls. On the deserted road you walked with a light heart like a lover of nature out for a stroll at daybreak, more unperturbed than a monk collecting his daily alms, your head bent, stopping to meditate on the ephemeral quality of dew at the tip of a blade of grass, on the downy, pink-veined mauve cymes of a sensitive plant or on pine needles, or sometimes raising your head to seek out some star in the brightening sky, your eyes misted over by deceitful, hollow and inept dreams. One day as you were walking past officers’ bungalows built at regular intervals on either side of the road and you’d almost reached the one you lived in, you heard a woman call you in a low voice as if she was afraid she might be overheard, even though the bungalows in the immediate vicinity were empty, the officers dwelling there being all bachelors sent on field operations who only came back once in a long while just like San and Daen. A woman’s voice… the whispered call of your name in the dim light of dawn… You got closer to the voice, feeling funny, as if pulled out of a still ongoing dream. That woman was young and oddly pretty. She was the wife of an officer whose official duties obliged him to entrust her with no one knew how vast and deep a solitude and forlornness. She was still childless and her husband was too smart to assign an orderly to her home. The closer you got the more your apprehension and curiosity grew. She must be aware of the secret between Nartaya and you. That was your Achilles’ heel. Let one person know and gossip would inevitably follow and your secret would be out in the open. You’d never known a circle as fond of atrocious and cruel gossip as the little world of military wives. Those women had oodles of spare time, so that they met at length. They didn’t devote their leisure to gossiping only but also playing cards morning, noon and night. You stopped in front of the flight of stairs while she stood on the top step, with the rather cramped veranda as background. There was a row of four or five pots of cacti with vivid red-orange flowers, oyster lilies, caladium and several kinds of palm trees, as well as a decorative creeper on openwork trellis, which gave the veranda freshness and beauty. The sky was getting brighter, the stars were fading, the rays of dawn insensibly firmed up. The white, ankle-length nightdress she wore and her long hair cascading over her shoulders gave her a fairy-tale elfin pallor but also the paleness of a succubus. Come here, she said, come closer, will you. When you went up the stairs and stood in front of her, she told you she knew about Nartaya and you, actually others too were in the know, but no one wanted to make a scene out of consideration for Daen and San, but that wasn’t what she was concerned with. She stopped speaking for a moment. You were only a step’s width away from her, so that you could smell her heady perfume to the point of almost forgetting who you were. You gazed at her as if under a spell and she was soundlessly talking to herself in utter delirium. She looked you up and down with a look whose meaning you couldn’t fathom. Let’s talk frankly, she went on. I’m old enough not to beat about the bush. But then she shut up for a moment. Can you help me… She didn’t say anything more and even before she finished her sentence (which she no doubt didn’t mean to finish) she took both your hands, then let go of one, as if she didn’t know how to begin, and deliberately came down one step and pressed herself up against you, loped her arms around your waist and started to utter your name in a husky voice while rolling her head from side to side on your shoulder. Her perfume seemed stronger and made you irresistibly think of the fragrance of flowers on a certain night. Nothing like a smell, it seems, to remind us of the past. Oh, you had perfectly well understood what she was after, but you pushed her back and in so doing you at once perceived you were superior to her. What you did the next moment you did with a feeling of superiority. You were no longer afraid and you said without hesitation that she completely misunderstood about your relationship with Nartaya. She must be sex-obsessed to the point of fancying everyone was like her. You knew very well what she wanted. You were sorry you couldn’t satisfy her. Why didn’t she go and find herself a conscript who’d service her? She amazed you, she really did. Was she so desperate? Why didn’t she think of those stripes her husband was so proud of? The more you spoke, the louder your voice and the more scathing your words. If Madam finds out one conscript isn’t enough, Madam can have several. Then with a toss of your chin you pointed at the barracks of the heavy artillery company whose dim mass was beginning to take shape. Unexpectedly, she slapped your face vigorously and pushed you away and you left without further ado. As you walked on, you raised your hand to your face to stroke the side that had just been hit and, oddly enough, you were exultant. You felt stupidly happy. It was a turbid and violent happiness. You laughed as if you were proud of yourself. You didn’t know who she was, where she came from or what her social background was. You’d never paid any attention to her. Maybe she was the well-educated daughter of a good family or maybe she was a high-class hooker, a cabaret singer or a young girl led astray who told herself that swapping partners was a form of adventure. You didn’t give a fig. You didn’t regret being crude with her. You now knew that at the very least you weren’t the only vicious creature on earth, there was her as well. You were no longer alone in vice. You knew very well it wasn’t because she had a crush on you but because you were the only young stallion available in the neighbourhood and, another truth, before repulsing her and cutting her to shreds verbally, you’d congratulated yourself of the godsend and had felt like taking advantage of it, but as you were afraid of not being up to par after your night-long performance with Nartaya, you’d changed your mind: you didn’t want her to turn sullen and mock you once your bodies commingled naked on the bed sheet. Later on, every time you’d mull over the singular power of lust, you’d always recall that episode, even though you never saw her again and you dragged her into mud in your mind by venturing that one of these days she’d end up a blue lady. Sometimes you’d recall this with regret, telling yourself you should’ve slept with her just to have an experience to relate in some hard-on-conducive magazine under the slice-of-life section that would expose everything down to the juiciest posture, and with a fee to boot. In early June you found yourself in Bangkok. You’d left the military camp and the Muslim town as you’d left Phraek Narm Daeng: thinking you’d never go back there again and, even worse, with the will to erase them from your memory. But you were to keep suffering for a long time, and even today, picturing to yourself Nartaya walking slowly alone in the shade of the pine trees along the road to catch the early morning school bus and to go back home walking slowly along the road in late afternoon and asking yourself if there was something unusual in her walk and if so how she managed for it not to be noticed and how long still before it was. Did she have a school friend to confide in or rely on or had she estranged herself from every one of them, haunted by the nightmare of the past and tormented by a dead-end future? Did she even have any heart for study? And what about the evenings after school? And what about the nights? She must be unable to find sleep, body and mind under torture. You yourself thrashed about, unable to go to sleep when you told yourself Nartaya at the end of her tether would make the blunder of revealing the secret you had so many times enjoined her never ever to reveal to anyone and least of all to San or Daen. And what if the secret was exposed all the same? Weren’t ther
e lots of people aware of your turpitudes with Nartaya as the young woman in heat had claimed? In the darkness of your rented room in Bangkok, you kept getting up and sitting down, sighing with worry in the evening silence, smoking so much you singed the corners of your mouth and your brain was running light or harking back to the same old story and you had the wild looks of a madman. Even in someone else’s presence you thought yourself alone and talked to yourself aloud. You called yourself all sorts of names to have been stupid enough to give Nartaya your address in Bangkok. Write to me, will you? Write to me at the faculty of… That’s what you’d told her before leaving her, whereas to tell the truth you certainly didn’t want to see her again or have her write to you. The worst of it was that you still weren’t able to prevent yourself from thinking about San. You’d seen him one more time after the publication of university entrance results. It was he who’d come to your place to congratulate you. He was always like that with you, of an open and trusting nature. And you had thought back to all those years during which he’d been your guardian, paying for the cost of your meals and the cost of your studies and signing your school reports while Daen wasted his life in Laos or Vietnam, but here you were paying him back with such abomination. How could I ever do this to him? you were asking yourself, at a loss and burning with shame.
The White Shadow Page 9
