Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  André adored his half-brother, and as he was only 4 years old, he did not understand that they were the seeds of different men and the same woman. All André knew was that Gurmukh knew how to solve problems, how to slip into the cinema without paying (and smuggle in at least three others as well), that he knew a river where a hippo lived and although no one ever actually saw the beast it did not dampen the pack’s enthusiasm for regular hunting expeditions with sticks and pebbles. Most of all, André appreciated Gurmukh’s confidence, his control of any situation, his lack of fear. Gurmukh did not look upon parents and adults as fearsome towers of authority, rather as equals, sometimes subequals to manipulate.

  He was also a clown, a gifted one who made the children laugh. After a clandestine evening at the cinema, Gurmukh assembled his half-brothers and sisters in the cave, ordered them to close their eyes, then burst forth in baggy pants, oversized shoes, derby, walking cane, and a mustache drawn with charcoal. “Charlot!” screamed the youngsters as Gurmukh waddled and minced about a makeshift stage, as André shined a stolen flashlight on the star. He loved their applause, and he loved the name, so much that he directed everyone to call him Chariot. Thus when a priest at the French school in Senegal pointed out to Song that her son had never been formally baptized, she agreed to the rite, and to a new Christian name. In 1959, when her son was fifteen years old, his name was entered into the records of the church as Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj—although to her patriotic thinking the name “Charles” was more of an homage to De Gaulle than to The Little Tramp.

  Despite his obvious brightness and talent, Chariot made mediocre grades at school. His report cards contained testimonial to the boy’s potential. “Has extraordinary abilities,” wrote one teacher, “but he is lazy, stubborn, and accepts no discipline.” Another teacher admired his capacity for language—by the age of twelve, Chariot could already speak French, Vietnamese, English, and a little Hindu from his real father. “This boy learns so quickly that it is a scandal how poorly he behaves in class,” the teacher cautioned.

  Outside the family, Chariot’s best friend was the son of a Wolof tribesman who lived in a nearby native village. The boy, Sarak, was the son of a minor chief, his mother being one of six wives. Between Chariot and Sarak was the bond of mutual insecurity, since neither was certain what his place in the family structure was or would be. Whatever, Chariot used the African boy as a deputy.

  Once Sarak was caught redhanded stealing canned goods from a Dakar market. The manager questioned the boy, who quickly broke down and tearfully confessed that he was but the agent of Chariot and was doing as ordered. Dismissing Sarak with a scolding, the store manager rushed to Chariot’s home, waking Song from her afternoon nap. Her son was a thief, raged the manager. Where was he? Song was not surprised by the accusation, and she went in search of Chariot. “There are so many rooms in this house,” she muttered, “so many places to hide.” Together they searched the huge villa, finally reaching the basement, where a large packing crate caught the grocer’s eye. “With your permission?” he said, picking up a crowbar. Song nodded, nervously.

  The boards of the crate were pulled away, revealing three layers, like a cake. On the bottom layer was Sarak, the chief’s son, trembling and tearful. The center layer contained a stash of canned goods and articles stolen from many stores. And on the top, regally grinning, proud, was Chariot.

  “Did you take these things?” demanded Song after the grocer had left with his goods and accepted a small bribe. “No, Mama,” answered Chariot.

  “But the black boy said he was only doing what you told him,” she pressed.

  Chariot nodded. “There are always fools who will do what I tell them to,” he said, with a strength to his adolescent voice that Song would never forget.

  Song grew weary of Chariot’s larcenies and pranks. A mild discipline was announced. Each afternoon following school, Chariot was expected to sit beside his mother’s bed, fan her to sleep, and remain there in utter silence for the duration of her three-hour nap. At first Chariot was secretly delighted with the punishment, reporting faithfully, drawing the drapes to make the room dark, preparing a cold lemonade, fanning his mother tenderly, crooning to her, sometimes stroking her arm with a feathery touch until she fell asleep.

  But one afternoon Song awoke to find a police inspector looming over her bed, demanding to know the whereabouts of her oldest son. Right here, murmured Song, searching for consciousness and looking about the room. Chariot was gone. Later she would learn that in recent days Chariot had grown weary of attending his mother and had waited until she fell asleep, then slipped out and enjoyed two hours of freedom before returning in time for the awakening at dusk. On this afternoon, Chariot had climbed out the second-story window, slid down a thick vine, found his pal Sarak, and went in search of a cooling swim. They chose a reservoir and Chariot was annoyed because the water level was low. The policeman informed Song that her son had broken into the maintenance station, twirled flood locks, and brought on a substantial flood. When the torrents of water rushed into the reservoir, Sarak had almost drowned.

  Chariot denied everything, but he was sentenced by Song and the French lieutenant to more severe discipline. New locks were put on his door that opened only from the outside, and bars installed on the window. Occasionally Song tied him to the bedposts with rope. But Chariot bore his punishment stoically, even managing to escape like Houdini from the ropes and locks to tend to important matters, and this made him all the more heroic in the eyes of the other children. They all believed Chariot possessed exceptional powers.

  One very dark night, when Chariot and André, his adoring half-brother, were returning home from the cinema, their route took them past a kiosk where candies and fruit were sold. It was closed, boarded up tight for the night. Chariot told André to stand lookout while he broke in. Hiding behind a nearby tree, André watched as Chariot filled a sack with candy. In mid-theft, André heard a whistling man approaching and, as the figure neared, realized that it was the kiosk’s owner. Chariot heard him, too, and he froze, his body half in, half out of the kiosk window. The owner walked directly past his place of business, eyed it casually, and continued on, not noticing that a thief was dangling out of his window.

  Later, walking home, happily stuffing candies into their mouths, André told Chariot that he had been terrified when the owner suddenly appeared. “I thought he was going to catch you,” said the younger boy. Chariot shook his head vigorously, as if the notion was unthinkable and foolish. “I can make myself invisible,” he said, “when I want to.” André believed him. And when he told the others, they did, too. André always believed Chariot—and would in later years—even when both became adults, when the resemblance between them was almost that of identical twins, even when Chariot almost destroyed his half-brother’s life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In Paris, Charles de Gaulle presided over the dismantling of France’s colonial empire. Sometimes it was accomplished only in the wake of blood, tragedy, and humiliation—the epitaph of Dienbienphu. Then again, France withdrew elsewhere with a reasonable diplomatic grace, as she demonstrated in leaving her territories in West Africa, realizing that these new black nations would retain ties both in language and commerce. By the thousands, French soldiers, teachers, and civil servants returned home to Europe.

  When Alphonse Darreau heard the news, it mattered little one way or another. His condition had deteriorated, and he cared little where he lived. Transferred to Marseilles on limited duty, he would remain on the military payroll for some time, although most of his waking hours were spent in search of a civilian doctor who could assuage the pains that continued to pound within his head. He became a tragic figure, jumping from hospital to clinic, a sheath of tattered medical documents in his trembling hands, trying somehow to find peace. He moved his family from the great villa in Dakar to a small and cramped yellow house in a working class district of Marseilles where Song tried to cheer the drab rooms by pinning up bright fabric
s on the walls and sewing satin pillows of crimson and peacock blue.

  If Chariot had been troublesome in Dakar, he was to become a family disaster in France. Nearing sixteen, he had severe psychological problems that went unnoticed or untreated by his parents. He was still a bed-wetter, a plea for attention that was still interpreted by Song as disobedience and childishness. He lied so frequently that it was more or less family policy not to believe anything he said. He either seemed to hate his mother or else to put her into a figurative closet of which only he had the key. When a woman friend would knock at the door of the little yellow house to visit with Song, or when some male friend would arrive to escort her to the poker games she loved, Chariot was there to threaten the visitors. “My mother is not home and besides she hates you,” he said, when in truth Song was in her bedroom squeezing into a brightly colored gown and screwing ruby earrings into her lobes. And when Song emerged dressed and ready to go out, Chariot would fall to his knees and squeeze his mother’s legs and beg her not to leave, just as he had done as a tiny child in Saigon.

  In December 1959, Chariot was escorted home one afternoon by two Marseilles policemen who told Song the familiar news that the boy was trouble. He had been caught standing outside a department store and trying to sell Christmas cards, with a novel technique. If an elderly customer ignored him, or walked away without showing interest in his wares, the boy produced a gleaming knife which he held menacingly in his hands while continuing with his patter.

  Song drew in her breath. Had anyone been hurt?

  The policemen shook their heads. But people had been frightened by the knife. Song turned with anger to Chariot and glared at him. In response, the boy placed an imaginary knife to his throat and asked—silently—if Song wished his sacrifice.

  “Enough!” cried Alphonse Darreau, rising from his sickbed and declaring that the boy he had adopted was impossible and dangerous to the welfare of his own blooded offspring. Husband and wife quarreled deep into the nights, arguing whether to throw the boy out, or ask the state to put him in an institution, or send him back to the East. At church, Song asked her priest for counsel and he recommended that Chariot be placed in a strict Catholic boarding school where young men were trained to be farmers. Tuition was inexpensive, hardly more than what it would cost to feed and clothe a boy at home. It sounded fine to Darreau, as long as Chariot vacated his premises immediately.

  When Song told her firstborn child that he was being sent away to Catholic boarding school, Chariot listened without expression, then ran out of the house. He was absent for three days, brought home finally by a flic who said the skinny fifteen-year-old had been caught hiding near the docks, apparently planning to sneak aboard a freighter.

  Song shouted at her son. What was he trying to accomplish?

  “I want to live with my real father,” answered Chariot defiantly. “He loves me. I am sure of that.”

  Song locked the boy in his room until he could be sent away. She also informed him the truth of the matter: Sobhraj the Tailor had not inquired about his son in almost five years. Sobhraj the Tailor had not sent a single franc to put bread in his son’s mouth. Sobhraj the Tailor had more children than he could count. What made Chariot think the matter of love was relevant?

  That night, the other children heard Chariot weeping and called out one word over and over again: Papa.

  From the day he went away to the agriculture school, Chariot was known as Charles, and he so instructed his family and friends. It was as if his expulsion to the country was a rite of passage to manhood and he wished no reminders of the adolescent life in Dakar.

  He tried to escape three times from the priests, the first only days after he arrived. Charles had managed to run only as far as the nearest village when one of the priests stopped him. The second came when he fell from a tree and injured his leg. The doctor at the school infirmary telephoned Song in Marseilles to report the minor hurt, only to discover that she and the French officer had gone to Saigon on a family visit. When Charles was told the news that his mother had returned to the Orient, he wailed and screamed, believing that he had been abandoned. Before the leg was fully mended, Charles hobbled out of the clinic and disappeared. The priest-doctor of the school sent Song a telegram which she received upon her return to Marseilles: “CHARLES RAN AWAY FRIDAY NIGHT. SEARCH IN PROGRESS.” A letter of amplification was also waiting:

  Chère Madame:

  After we questioned his comrades at school, we learned that Charles had been talking for some time about going to Saigon to find his real father. He had been disciplined in the past few days and that probably hurried his decision. He told a friend it was his intention to find a ship and embark at the end of Easter vacation. The port authorities there have his description. I think Charles will be found soon—as I have checked and there will not be a boat leaving for Vietnam in several weeks.

  A few nights later, in April 1960, just after his sixteenth birthday, Charles was unmasked trying to slip aboard a freighter while wearing the clothes of a merchant seaman. Only his slight stature betrayed him, for he almost convinced the arresting port officer that he was a child of the sea who had put out on ships for a decade.

  The farming school did not want to take Charles back, but as it was near the end of the school year, Song begged the fathers to keep him. The priests had her permission, assured Song, to do anything, including tying the boy up to forestall further disobedience. Years later Charles would tell of the time when they tried to turn him into a farmer: “Actually it wasn’t too bad … I was at the point of getting interested in books and ideas—but the priests made me spend too much time cleaning out the stables. I have often wondered what would have happened if I could have pursued what I was on the edge of doing—plunging into the library … But there is just so much horseshit a boy can shovel …”

  Before two months passed, Song received an urgent midnight call from the school. Charles was gone again. “I don’t care,” she found herself saying. “Let him run. My husband and I want to turn him loose.”

  This time Charles was reasonably successful in his flight. He made his way to Marseilles and stowed away in the hold of a ship bound for Djibouti, East Africa, not quite sure where that particular place was, but content that it was far from France and perhaps on the ocean highway to the East. His plan was to find another ship in Africa, one that would bear him secretly across the world to Saigon, where his real father would be waiting with welcoming, warming arms. In his pocket were but a handful of francs and no identification, but in his head was stubborn determination. Several nights out, just after the ship had passed through the Suez Canal, Charles was caught trying to steal the passport and papers from the trousers of a sleeping seaman. For the rest of the journey, Charles reposed in a makeshift brig, no one heeding his angry protests that if the captain would only cable his rich and doting father in Saigon, then money would be instantly sent to pay for the passage.

  When the ship arrived in Djibouti—the ancient trading center and camel market on the sloping east shoulder of Africa—the company’s business manager sent a telegram to Sobhraj the Tailor requesting 450 francs for the voyage from Marseilles to Africa, and seeking instructions on what to do with the youngster. No answer. Then the maritime company officials demanded that Charles reveal the name of his mother in France. Stubbornly he refused. Only when exasperation reached the point where the officials threatened to turn Charles over to the local African police with the suggestion that he be jailed for fraud did the boy bitterly spit out Song’s name and address.

  “What in the name of God do you want?” cried Song when she fetched her son from the freighter upon its return to France. “We have done everything we can for you, and you give us back disgrace.” Beside her, Alphonse Darreau was trembling with rage. “You give me more pain than the war,” he shouted. “I want you out—go away and leave us alone!”

  That night, Charles found his mother crying softly, mourning a life gone sour. She was almost forty, and
though her almond face retained most of its dark beauty, scant else was of comfort. True, she had traveled far from the rice paddies of Indochina, but now all that Song could enter on her ledger of assets were a husband, ill and grouchy, and seven babies that had grown in her womb and now overwhelmed her. In her private moments—how few they were!—she envied Charles. She, too, thought now and then of slipping onto a boat and returning to Vietnam, abandoning all responsibility, wondering if her village was ravaged by the continuing war, wanting nothing more than to sit beside her own mother and feel the caress of rough hands she could barely remember.

  Charles knelt beside his mother and touched her wet cheeks. “Do you love me, Mama?” he asked softly.

  “Yes,” she finally said, after a time, wondering why it took so long to bless this firstborn child, knowing the affirmation was not altogether true.

  “I love you, Mama,” he went on. “I will show you. You will see.”

  In her agony, Song formed one more plan. In Paris, among the Vietnamese refugee community, Song had friends, many of whom were in the restaurant business. She arranged for Charles to become a kitchen worker; a distant cousin had agreed to give him a room. Charles balked, but Song was unbending. Either the boy accept the discipline of hard work, else his family would forever wash their hands of him.

  Thus for a few months toward the end of 1960, Charles worked at first one restaurant, then another in Paris. He did not last long in any job, for he loathed the dreary protocol of a French kitchen, peeling and chopping vegetables, cleaning crusted sauces from dirty dishes, mopping floors, dodging the wrath of temperamental chefs. Then he was hired by La Coupole as a busboy, his duties principally being the daily polishing of the silver platter covers that kept the chef’s culinary creations hot. When Charles telephoned Song in Marseilles to tell her of the new job, she congratulated him, pointing out that La Coupole was a celebrated restaurant whose patrons were rich and famous.