It began to occur to me that Thailand as a place of exile sometimes fosters a taste for self-invention which is not unrelated to her cosmology. Where the Blue God reigns, you could say, all is magical and relative. For who is Vishnu exactly, and how can a king incarnate something so vast? Memoirs seem petty commercial affairs when put next to the wheeling galaxies that make up Vishnu's cosmic body. The Blue God, too, takes on multiple disguises, changes form like supercharged putty. In the scenes with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he is at one moment the sweet and handsome charioteer Krishna, at the next the nearest thing in literature to a vision of nuclear holocaust. "I am become Death," he says mildly, "the destroyer of worlds." He encourages a view of reality that is undependable, plastic, ever-shifting, mysterious. He needs no fact-checkers.
W. S. Bristowe's Louis and the King of Siam (1976), meanwhile, is an engaging read, and in its unswerving dedication to scientific fact it is almost on a par with his critical work of 1939, The Comity of Spiders.
MOVEABLE FEASTING
By the naval dockyards the winter heat was not yet oppressive, the streets still had a brisk cleanliness which they lose in the rainy season. Trok Matoom is opposite the naval dockyards, and I came here to eat bael fruit boiled in syrup. There are alleys in Bangkok—sometimes called trok—where a single foodstuff is made. A single boiled fruit in this case, for which the whole alley is named—bael is matoom. There is another alley nearby called Trok Khao Mao, which produces shredded rice mixed with rain-tree leaves.
It is like medieval London, specific products and services concentrated in a single street. Bael in hand, I wandered from Wang Lang pier down Amarin Boulevard to the Mon canal, wincing in the traffic, the syrup dripping over my fingers, walking all the way back to the intersection with Phran Nok.
I made this walk every day, because it was at hand, easy to do, and because I could do it without getting lost, without fumbling for maps. I paused on the bridge over the Mon canal, where the Mon people were once gatekeepers, and wondered at the moldering sluice gates and hydraulic apparatus, covered with potted plants, which never seemed to be put to work: the inertia of all that machinery seemed so symptomatic of a city that stirred itself to efficiency only when it felt like it. The Wat Khreuwan temple bordering the canal sends a slender white cremation chimney into the water's reflections, and sometimes it puffs with cremated ash.
Here, in Bangkok Yai, the dying city lies in its bed, like an old man on his side smoking a pipe. Amarin means "angel" in Thai, and this boulevard of angels is wide, raffish, laid-back, at least at night. Rare for Bangkok, one can walk without too much physical effort, stopping under the trees. You pass the same things every night. The hole in the wall filled with waving girls (no sign, no light, just the girls); Wang Doem, the side street that arches down to Wat Arun, lined with cream-colored wooden houses with carefully painted shutters. From Wang Doem, little sois named after the temple run across the Ban Mo canal; children's playgrounds sit underneath the overpasses. There are plants everywhere. Through cracks in the corrugated iron you see old ladies in metal chairs watching soaps on tiny black-and-white televisions.
If I had not discovered the world of Amarin, I would never have stayed in Bangkok. There are places that are incapable of prettifying their pasts for an ulterior motive, that cannot preserve anything consciously. In Paris, with all its immaculate restorations, I would feel guilty and exposed: not perfect enough. In Bangkok, one can decay freely.
Night after night I mapped out the meanderings of the little-known Ban Mo canal that pops up all along Amarin, weaving its own way through canal slums, spanned by cement girders. As Wang Doem curves around the naval base next to Wat Arun, it passes the Ban Mo again, and here there are gardens ten feet square perched precariously over her water and assembled by old couples with nothing better to do.
Gradually, however, I pushed farther on, toward the Yai canal and its larger bridge. On the far side of this bridge you come to the Patthanakison Music School and Museum, which sits by the road, announced by a humble sign: an incision between the slum houses leads you there. This tunnel leads to the walls of the school, and then to Wat Kalayanimit; you can walk all around its circumference until you are suddenly wandering down avenues of weeds between the buildings, past weathered, bell-shaped chedis. The place is half ruined, though it was built by Rama III in the early nineteenth century. Its blackened, elegant spires are surrounded these days by wooden scaffolds which sustain an army of restorers. Slowly, the antique ceramics are coming back to life and Kalayanimit's headless sculptures might one day re-acquire their missing appendages. You are close to the river again, and the candy-pink tower of the old Portuguese Santa Cruz Church. At night these river temples are filled with dogs that follow you at a distance like wolf packs, and at the temple's pier there are slippery men who ask you where you are going. Suddenly you are back to the glare of the present century.
On the river stands the exquisite Chinese temple of Kuan an Keng, set back from the water by a stone courtyard shaded by trees, its surfaces covered with decayed frescoes of storks and cranes etched in delicate blues and blacks and ruined, as a notice tells us, "by rain and bats." Some of the frescoes are three-dimensional, with scenes of merchant street life; finely sculpted little robed bodies lean out of the walls, most of them decapitated, or the faces carefully gouged out, as if those heads had once depicted real people and therefore possessed talismanic value which made them worth stealing or defacing. They are the last traces of the Hokkien merchants who built the temple 170 years ago. But the Simasathien family, who now own and maintain the Keng, have not restored them, and this is better in a way: the temple has a wounded beauty which would be lost with improvements.
Behind it, the atmosphere of merry ruin continues along Soi Kudejeen 7. Houses and their yards overflowing with wildflowers, piles of marine debris, waves crashing under the houses, spirit houses in whorls of trash. And people living here, seemingly unconcerned, lithe and slightly furtive like crabs clinging to rocks that will eventually be atomized.
•
If a city is divided into night and day, as Bangkok is, you should stick to night. I noticed that my feet were changing shape as I walked for miles in open sandals, acclimatizing to tropical labors, and that my cock, my Roger the Dodger, was responding not to the presence of thousands of streetwalkers (since here there were none) but to the alien quality of a cuisine which the insipid Thai restaurants of home had not prepared me for.
I turned onto Phran Nok. The end of day, the best time of the twenty-four-hour cycle, the lush, quivering beginning of night. The hour of smoke from woks. I wanted strange foods. Not just gold-skinned eggs and oolong tea, and banana leaves, but things that would break me open, take me to the further side of a taboo.
At the corner of Phran Nok, in the first minutes of night, I noticed the mobile restaurants which are such a feature of the metropolis, small motorbikes fitted out with trays lit from above by bare lightbulbs. Sometimes they whiz by you at high speed, a snack bar on two wheels, mounds of boiled shrimp and wontons. The operators are little old men with tattoos, the genies of night food. On the market street that leads down to the river, where a riot of cheap clothing competes with thousands of pale-green lottery tickets, they would arrive with their wares all lit up with waxy yellow light. Farangs rarely approach them, either because you have to speak Thai or because anything you could point at looks like a cautionary tale in the making. The shrimp and wontons are all right; but there are mobile snack bars specializing in insects, a staple food of Thai construction workers. They are like natural history museums on wheels. What they offer requires an entire lexicon—a body of scholarship—to decipher.
Insects are eaten almost everywhere. In Indonesia they even make a snack out of curried dragonflies called "sky prawn." But worms and insects have been canceled, by biblical decree, from the diet of Caucasians.
At Phran Nok I waited for the bikes to stop. It is like approaching a hooker for the first time. Th
e old men are insect pimps. They look you steadily in the eye as you come up, then remove an aerosol from under the contraption. It is filled with "special sauce." You peruse the wares as the Thais look on, and you realize that the trays are mostly filled with giant waterbugs and fried worms called rot duan, or "express trains." These worms feed on bamboo and have a slightly sweet, peanuty taste. But there are also silkworm cocoons, grasshoppers, and cicadas fried in coconut oil. The vendor takes a pink paper napkin (they are indigenous to the country) and wraps a giant water beetle, Cybister tripunctatus. He holds it out like an ice-cream cone. He then approaches with the aerosol and gives it a burst of special sauce.
Your first waterbug: what a relief. It isn't really necessary, it's just that one doesn't want to be a square to oneself. And food is what changes our perspective on things without the mind even being involved. Bite into a waterbug and all exoticism is shattered.
•
My initiation into maeng-da—insects—was the first step in a disengagement from the habits of a lifetime, the system of taste that holds a human being together from childhood on, though it didn't mean that from then on I would be eating "express trains" every afternoon after my walk along Thanon Amun Arun Amarin. It was just that the Cybister tripunctatus nativized me physically. Eating it disrupted the normal flow of reactions and then made my solitary walks more loose, more improvisational. Some weeks I went searching for a single thing, like the pink soup made from fermented tofu and preserved squid called yen ta foh, or else the so-called sour ants.
Sour ants, their eggs like packets of pus that burst on the back of the tongue. Farlo, living as he did in rural Cambodia half the year, was an especially able amateur of such things. He knew where to find a country specialty like red ant soup in the city, and I had the impression that when times were hard and tourists nowhere to be found in the bars of Battambang, he and his young Khmer wife lived on ant soup for days on end. Because he seemed to be a connoisseur of moveable feasts, I sometimes took him with me on the afternoon trek to the naval dockyards, Farlo in his battle fatigues and his military beret, rolling from side to side like an apple in water, his eyes wide and staring and slightly frightened. He was in Bangkok to recruit tourists for his lodge, and employed ingenious methods to do this. Not only did he charm all the travel agents along the tourist axes with his tales of life in the pristine Cardamom Mountains, but he went to hotel bars and struck up conservations with random strangers who looked as if they might be suitable material for Paradise Lodge. It netted him about twelve tourists a year, barely enough to live on but sufficient to stave off outright starvation. His wife and baby awaited him back in Samlok.
We walked all over the districts called Taling Chan, Bang Philat, and the larger area of Bangkok Noi, which contains Wang Lang. We followed Amarin down to the Mon canal, eating all the way like grazing wildebeest, with sticky hands that couldn't be cleaned.
"It's fine being lost, isn't it?" said the British soldier who always knew where he was (and if he didn't, he took out a military compass).
The Nang Kwak dolls in all the shops—the Beckoning Lady—with a hand raised to draw you in, and the feline equivalent, the Japanese maneki-neko with its similarly raised right paw; the Indian tailors with their black-clothed dummies equipped with startling white eyes, the tailor himself peering through the window with a turban glittering with pins; the miles of terse metal shutters, the high curbs of broken stones colored like laterite, the men sewing outside on ancient Flying Man machines, pedaling furiously, and the high-tech coffee shops bathed in toothpaste-blue neon which are always stacked with magazines and mysterious instructional booklets written in Thai but with English titles like Sex Code for You.
•
When we stopped for tea, Farlo told me all about the war in Angola. It sounded fantastical, Homeric. Had such things happened such a short time ago? For some men, war was a moveable feast as well.
"The war in Rhodesia was even worse. All that suffering for nothing. After that, there was nae going back to England for me. I had a piece of shrapnel in me head."
"How did the shrapnel turn you into an exile?"
"I was already exiled. The military life is exile. Have you seen how many servicemen there are in Bangkok? We're a whole tribe, a whole lost tribe."
He had a former wife back in England, two grown-up sons. What could they make of his living in a self-made lodge in the Cardamom Mountains, making conservation efforts on behalf of the rare Cardamom tiger, having neighborly tea times with the old Khmer Rouge leaders?
"They're just glad I'm no longer an alcoholic."
His hand shook, just like Dennis's. It seemed that so many expats' hands shook here. A hospital ward for mentally shattered people . . .
"I have dreams about roads in Angola almost every night. Just roads. Roads where things happened. An artillery barrage. An ambush. I was never afraid then. But now it's a different matter."
It was difficult to know how much of what he said was true—not the statements themselves, but the motives behind them. The British make up the largest contingent of foreign visitors to Thailand, and probably the largest contingent of farang permanent residents. I wouldn't be surprised (Lawrence Durrell: "English life is really like an autopsy"). Farlo was always pestering me to come and visit him in Samlok, as if to verify that he had made a success of his life. But the restless drive which had turned him into a mercenary in the first place hadn't been assuaged. He roamed Bangkok like a hungry rat, not knowing quite what he was looking for. Ant soup, mot som, a sunset by a bridge, a girl for the night: you couldn't pin down what he wanted. Westerners choose Bangkok as a place to live precisely because they can never understand it, for even the Thai script, that variation of written Sanskrit, is impossible to master. It's this ignorance which comforts the farang. However conversant in Thai culture, he will never get close to the bottom of it.
One night Farlo took me out dancing to a club in Silom, and after a few hours he was there on the dance floor by himself, spinning around like a middle-aged top, arms akimbo, high on Ecstasy, his grizzled white stubble shining like frost in a strobe light. It is like Cavafy's Alexandria, which always seems suffocating—
You tell yourself: I'll be gone
To some other land, some other sea.
To a city lovelier far than this
Could ever have been or hoped to be—
Where every step now tightens the noose . . .
KRISHNA'S ARROW
The rains began, and around the Primrose puddles opened up. The maid waddled through them with guttural sighs, muttering the word hoi, a word from the slums which imitates the snort of an irritated water buffalo. "You're telling me!" You could hear drops hitting the seething river. In pockets, the city has a surprising quietness, an absolute tranquility. Heat steams the window glass, and through it the banana leaves dip down under the onslaught, with a swaying rhythm. And yet it's not the rainy reason, just a premature taste of it.
•
McGinnis knocked on the door. He wanted to play chess on the balcony and he had a water pipe with him, one of those tin models they sell for a few baht in Little Arabia on Sukhumvit Soi 3.
"It's raining cats and dogs," he argued. "You can't possibly work when it's raining animals."
He was in pajamas with Thai sandals, a paper hat on his head made out of the Bangkok Post. We set up a table, arranging the pipe, the coffee, French pastries from Black Canyon, plum jam, spring rolls. He paid for everything because I was down to 500 baht and it had to last.
"I'm getting a check," I said.
"Oh, you're getting a check?"
He glanced at the kitchen, where there was nothing except an occasional cockroach scurrying across the walls.
"I hear," he said, leaning forward, "that the other Britisher, Farlo, eats insects."
"It's impossible."
"He eats maeng-da. I guess he went savage out there in Cambodia."
McGinnis had those merry eyes that always shake one to
the core. As I tore through the pastries, he asked, "Did you eat yesterday?"
"I'm on a budget. The thing about insects is that they're cheap. A whole cup of 'express trains' for a handful of baht. What a bargain."
He went on: "It's a shame you're so broke. We could go slumming if you had a bit of cash. I could advance you, though."
"I don't pay for girls," I said coldly.
"Ah, I think you do, my friend. We are all jolly with Porntip from time to time. No need to blush, you look like an idiot. It's not clear in any man's mind, whatever he pretends, though of course I exclude the prigs, who are about half the male population. The Noble Ones, I call them. Too noble for us, eh? Yes, we're all fairly noble. Except when it comes to sleaze. I love sleaze. I do hate those people who give you a canty shudder when they utter the word 'sleaze.' As if they are so superior to it that it's unthinkable that it would even cross their minds. Except when they're asleep, of course. You know, those Salem women and those Germanic men in sandals with their rolling eyes. I mean, Christ, you'd think they'd have some imagination when it comes to our regrettable sex. I call them the Aphids. A man who has no taste whatsoever for sleaze is half dead, or maybe even totally dead, because he is tormented by the Aphids. Whereas we prefer at least to be tormented by our genuine demons. All we need is another word to replace 'whore,' 'hooker,' 'prostitute.' "
"In the States, they call them providers."
"Lovely. Actually I like it, very warm and cozy. But no. There's no glamour in that. Still, it's accurate enough."
He looked at me coolly, and I noticed for the first time that he had blue eyes with little fragments of goat around them. I suddenly didn't believe that he was from Newhaven at all. A gypsy of the highest order, a minor rake. But a rake who has thought out all his options with a dry eye. As if at a certain point he had asked himself how he was going to age, to decline, and what manner of disgrace he was going to opt for. What was the alternative?
Bangkok Days Page 4
