The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  The following year, Chareeya was in love again – briefly – with Chanon, a university student who had been incorrectly educated to believe that love and sex were two separate things. Chanon was polite, serious and honest; a young man who chose to study history because he believed it would unlock the mysteries of the universe and not because he didn’t know what else to study, as was the case with most of his friends enrolled in that major. He also loved cinema, music, philosophy, and was into difficult books by Nietzsche, Plato, Kant, Liao Fan and too many others for Chareeya to remember.

  It was evening when he walked into her life. He stood at the counter and awkwardly flipped through a book he was holding in his hands: Do you have… Brahms’s Symphony No.3 Poco Allegretto? / We have the whole piece, not just the third movement. She led him to the racks and ran her fingers along the CD covers. Sorry, we’re sold out, she said while glancing at the book he was holding. It was French. Aimez-vous Brahms? she asked. Does it mention this symphony? Chanon handed her the book: Yes. Chareeya flipped through it earnestly: Have you heard the piece before? / No, I haven’t / His magnum opus – very beautiful. He wrote it for the only woman he loved – Clara, Schumann’s widowed wife. I have a performance by Karajan that I can put on a disc for you in the meantime, until our new supply arrives. The book looks interesting – is it difficult? Chareeya spoke without looking up at him.

  Chanon didn’t know Karajan, but the record store girl steeped in a repertoire of classical music who could also read French fascinated him. No, it’s not difficult. I’ve almost finished it – I’ll lend it to you tomorrow when you give me the CD, okay? Chareeya looked up at him, a smile lit up her face. The following night, Chanon found his life force drained from his body as he stood smothered by the melody of Brahms’s sweetly tragic symphony and watched – through the thousand raindrops that covered the glass storefront – people chasing love in the rain on the footpath outside. When he turned around, he saw Chareeya standing nearby, her fingertips lightly touching the rain-splattered glass, her eyes closed. He, too, closed his eyes and drank in the music. From the moment he opened his eyes again, Chanon would never be able to free himself from the desire to have Chareeya just like that; her eyes closed, listening to music beside him.

  He returned the following night and ended up spending that year’s monsoon season in Chareeya’s room. There, he listened to music and read and stole glances at her as she thumbed through a dictionary while reading that novel by Françoise Sagan. Chanon never touched her in all those months they were seeing each other, only to be roundly defeated by desire when loneliness ambushed him one night. But, despite that, the young man utterly failed to find a connection between his love and the repetitive cycles of world history, or between his feelings and Nietzsche’s fabled saying, “God is dead”, and the weight of guilt stopped him from seeing Chareeya ever again.

  The following year, Chanon received a scholarship to study in the United States. There, he would complete a PhD, become a philosophy professor, and experience several episodes of emotional longing and physical love. Twenty years after the night he first heard Brahms’s symphony, he would return to Thailand to scour CD shops with the hope that one of them would lead him to Chareeya, her eyes still closed behind a glass storefront covered in a thousand raindrops reflecting the upside-down world. Not only did he not find Chareeya, he could hardly find any CD shops, condemned as they were to their graves by data migration.

  Chareeya, meanwhile, cried every day – for Thana, for Chanon, and for the woeful longing in Father’s yellowed love letters, then again for Thana, in an endless cycle, without ever allowing herself to love anyone else. The closest she came was when she went to work as a part-time receptionist in a restaurant where she met a chef called Andre, who could bake cakes so majestic they looked like sculptures and who took her to watch films at the Alliance Française every Wednesday night during that cool season. For the rest of the night they would lean against each other under the sprawling branches of a giant frangipani tree and he would brush up her French by telling her stories of his childhood.

  Chareeya could have fallen in love with him, got married and become a mother of four. She could have owned a small café in a small hamlet camouflaged by the grapevines of southern Burgundy. She could have spent her later years in the warmth of her twenty-two sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, and died at seventy-eight in Andre’s embrace still as sweet and tender as his chiffon cakes. She could have had all that but, instead: she inherited an old, yellow, Mediterranean-style house large enough for her garden after Andre left Bangkok broken-hearted; adopted a tabby cat found, nearly dead, at a bus stop and called him “Uncle”; learned three-hundred-and-twenty-four recipes; planted two-thousand-six-hundred-and-ten trees; listened to three-hundred-and-sixty pieces of the world’s most beautiful music; wandered aimlessly in her dreamless existence; and would have met Pran again, if Natee hadn’t come into her life…

  The circumstances of their meeting was the kind of serendipity only found in movies. What time is it? Natee asked a woman who was crossing his path, only to find that Chareeya had her eyes closed and was going to walk right past him, small earphones having blocked out any sound from the outside world. Natee was beside himself as he followed her through the mass of humanity that would never know what kind of sounds it wanted to hear, for half the length of the street, until she reached her store. He watched her from a distance and then finally approached her. He introduced himself, fell in love, and from that moment on loved her in a way no one had ever loved her before.

  It was a torrent of love from a man whose only purpose in life was to love. Natee was extremely attentive and affectionate, and he even spoke in heartfelt and sugar-coated sentences that seemed to come straight out of American movie scripts. You make me want to be a better man. Or, My life is nothing without the hope of seeing the reflection of the sun in your eyes. He used simple unpretentious but unforgettable phrases like, We were born for each other. Or, I never felt about anybody else the way I feel about you, Charee.

  More than that, he was caring and eager to please, and never once did he forget to bring her a small gift each time they met: a flower, sweets in an adorable box, and stories – little inspirational tales that he jotted down in a notebook after hearing them or reading about them in newspapers, so that he could read them aloud to her page by page.

  A story about a sweet-natured man who had been born into the wrong body but who refused to surrender to his fate. He had been a cabaret dancer and had worked hard to save up for a sex-change operation to turn himself into a beautiful woman so that he could live life in the body that should have been his from the start; and, yet, she ended up being cheated for much of that life – conned and robbed by a series of real men with fake hearts before she finally found true love in a woman who hawked sweets outside the cabaret, and who became her true companion in times of pain and suffering.

  A story about a man who grew up facing the world alone until, one day, he won the lottery jackpot. The next morning, he awoke to find himself mobbed by family and relatives he never even knew existed. They overran his house and celebrated, then took turns telling him the sad stories of their lives; tearful tales of unbearable misery followed by requests for loans. The tens of millions the man had won from the jackpot were gone within a few months, and so were the friends and relatives who disappeared as quickly as they had come. The poor man went back to living a hand-to-mouth existence, and yet he prayed that he would win the lottery once more, not because he wanted money and a lavish lifestyle but because he wanted his real and phony relatives to come visit him again, to make the house bustle with life again, even though he knew in his heart that none of those people were his real family.

  And a short story about a mollusk that woke up to find its shell had gone missing while it was asleep. It spent the rest of its life creeping along, naked, in the cold loneliness of a beach shining with a million white shells, smuggling itself into each of those empty abodes, one
by one, without ever being able to find a shell that fit quite like the battered old shell it had lost – not a single one.

  XII

  The Amethyst Tear

  F rom a distance, Pran saw Chareeya talking to a female friend, but looking more carefully he realised it was actually a middle-aged man. They were sitting outside the house in a beam of sunlight. She looked animated and was chuckling, but a few minutes later he saw the man get up hurriedly and leave, his steps as swift as those of a young man. Only then did Pran realise that the man wasn’t middle-aged, but in his thirties. Chareeya followed close behind him and they stood arguing at the door behind the pheep tree that was shedding its flowers into the wind. The man started walking again. Chareeya grabbed his arm to stop him. He stopped, his face tilted slightly in a mixture of pride and pain, before shaking off her grip and continuing on his way. Chareeya meekly wiped her tears with the back of her hand and returned to the house.

  She didn’t come to Bleeding Heart with her gang that Friday. Something troubled Pran but he didn’t know quite what it was; something akin to worry, close to waiting, and reminiscent of loneliness. He didn’t dare ask her three friends, and they didn’t approach him to offer any information. Chareeya didn’t show up the following Friday either, and this time the three Witches were also absent. He still watched her from his window every morning, and she was still there at her usual spot, sipping coffee, petting Uncle the cat, but she was also sadder. Something was troubling her, too; something in the gusts of wind, in the tea-coloured sunlight, Pran wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe the sadness was coming from him.

  But, then, just a few minutes before his heart had been completely wrecked, on a quiet Sunday, she called the bar. Sounding as if nothing had happened: Are you free tomorrow at noon? / Monday’s my laundry day, I’m free after that / Come over, I’ll cook something tasty for you / Such as…? Pran raised his brows and smiled to himself. Allure Curry / What? / Allure Curry / Is that real food? / Yes, a vintage recipe. He thought of the pink lipstick mark on the plastic cup and the dry heat of Chilean wine surged in his chest. Sounds delicious / It is. Come. Late morning is fine.

  Even before Pran reached the house the smell hit him – the perfumed, alluring top notes, just as the name promised. Chareeya had set a table in the garden, dishes and cutlery at the ready, food lined up with a bouquet of flowers in a glass in the middle, which reminded Pran of the time when he used to pick wild flowers along the road for the girls to arrange on the dinner table at the house by the river. Only when he was about to start eating did he realise the exotic flamboyance of this lunch.

  There was Allure Curry with succulent meat and basil, Middle-Eastern saffron rice, a Greek-style grilled vegetable salad decked with sundried tomatoes and goat cheese, and some kind of fish, pan-fried with cumin and dill. Cha Ca, you’ve never had it before I’m sure, it’s Vietnamese. The meal was rounded off with the seductively named subcontinental dessert kulab jamun* ( Seductively named because, in the Thai pronunciation, the word kulab means rose.) – goat milk condensed and fried into lovely brown balls, dunked in rose-tinted syrup made from flowers in the garden, and so brain-numbingly sweet that when Pran took his first bite he had to force himself not to squeeze his eyes shut like he’d seen people do in TV adverts.

  When the extravagant lunch in the garden was over and the sun caught up with them, Pran carried himself inside and flopped down on the peony-patterned cushion, so full he could hardly move. Chareeya left him with Philip Glass’s desolate Violin Concerto and disappeared into the kitchen. Clanking noises, and Pran only hoped that there was no more food emerging from there; please, no more fried rice with sweet basil topped with eggs, raad naa noodles* ( Raad naa is a dish of rice noodles stir-fried in a thick gravy made from tapioca or corn starch.) or endless procession of dishes going on through eternity. Living by himself had made him skinny. Pran didn’t just eat very little, he ate irregularly because when he was feeling too lazy he didn’t make any attempt to find food. Chareeya’s international lunch was tantamount to what he usually put into his mouth over three days combined, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten anything that tasted like real food.

  What amazed and confounded him was Chareeya’s endeavour in having mastered this disparate repertoire of various culinary origins, as well as her dedication to the art of cooking. But then it struck him that Chareeya’s dedications had always bordered on the obsessive: she had spent years ambushing him in the house; she had watched the river for months on end, hoping to catch a glimpse of a mythical bug that had been extinct since the sixth reign* ( The reign of the sixth king of the Chakri dynasty, King Vajiravudh, lasted from 1910 until 1925.); she had stalked a lost earthworm for days without finding anything; she had conjured up this garden, so wonderful that he could hardly believe one woman could have pulled it off; and there was that time when she had followed love with such doggedness.

  The violin screeched and Pran no longer wanted to think about anything sad. He got up and looked out at the garden gauzy in sunshine. Seeing the garden up close in the afternoon hours was different from when he looked at it through the window of his room each morning. It was full-bodied, teeming, lush with life, rambunctious with colour and activity. There were millipedes trudging here and there, light and shadow chasing each other in a strange waltz, fruit flies buzzing like a boiling fog, a parade of ants, leaves trembling in the wind.

  It took him a long while to realise that these plants not only grew above, under and next to one another, they also grew in one another. The pheep tree in front of the house had a blue fern, the colour of an Andaman pearl, growing out of its trunk after the rains, while the tabaek tree mysteriously sprouted purple orchids. When Chareeya had taken him to see the flower named Desire, he had smelled frangipani despite there being no frangipani tree in the garden. He also registered the gentle aroma of pomelo flowers that he had once smelled in a different garden and that often drifted into his room in the middle of the night.

  His thoughts involuntarily wandered to the room starlight didn’t reach. Uncle Jang’s windowless room on the second floor of his building was small and dark, having been partitioned from a large bedroom at the front. I asked my family to let me stay here when I was a young man. By the time they died and there were spare rooms, I couldn’t be bothered to move, he said, smiling. Uncle Jang was in his seventies, a man who chose his words with care and whose eyes sparkled like those of a child. He spent an entire evening telling Pran stories from the past: about war, patriotism, Shanghai illuminated by a million lights, his years as a student in China, the Communist Party takeover, and love. In that dimly lit room the old man told Pran about the love that had held him captive for over half a century.

  When the revolution took place, my mother sent me a letter telling me to come home because she was dying. I arrived to find her in her good health; I was her only son and she had just been afraid I would get stuck in China. When I saw she was alright, I wanted to return so that I could marry the woman I loved and bring her back with me. But China was in turmoil and my mother forbade me from leaving. While I waited, my friend sent me a letter telling me that her father had given her to another man because he was worried his daughter wouldn’t have anyone to look after her. I told my mother that this was my woman and that I wanted her back. This time, my mother definitely didn’t want me to go and wreck someone’s home by stealing his wife. She wouldn’t budge. I was a young man, hot-headed and implacable. I was furious that my mother lied to me about being sick and dying, I blamed her for losing the woman I loved. I gave her an ultimatum – if she refused to let me go to China, I would never work again in my life. If I couldn’t have the woman I loved, I would become the most worthless man on earth.

  And so Uncle Jang became a worthless man, just as he had promised he would. China became a hermit nation, closing its doors and dashing any hopes he had of returning for his lost love. From then on, he never worked to support himself. He lived a spartan existence in his win
dowless room, relying on his siblings and keeping only a single personal possession: a photograph of a young girl with a ponytail and Chinese eyes, tucked beneath a glass plate on his writing desk, next to a poem he had written to her a quarter of a century ago. I still talk to her every day. I console her, telling her everything is all right. We have more than one life. We’ll meet again in the next life. We’ll try again.

  So much for trying not to think about something sad, Pran thought to himself. He turned and saw the woman with the bangs by Modigliani watching him forlornly from the wall. Pran smiled faintly at her. His gazed lower to a makeup tray with a turquoise ring next to it, along with those amethyst teardrops, a few cosmetics, a velvet red rose, a rusty blue tin box and a single tissue, folded in half, with a pale lychee-coloured lipstick mark stamped in the middle. He picked it up with a trembling hand and put it in his pocket. He would spend hours that night, and many other nights in his lonely life, gazing at the ever-fading kiss mark in dim light, feeling waves of heat and tenderness rising endlessly inside him.

  She returned to the bar with her friends the following Friday. At the beginning of the long night, they were laughing and enjoying the party but, when the hour of shipwrecked hearts approached, Chareeya shed her first tear in her favourite corner, the teardrop falling at a perfect angle so as to cast a reflection like lightning into Pran’s eyeline. He botched the bass line. He stammered when he should have been singing as he saw more teardrops fall. He felt as if he was standing on a river bank with the sun blazing above him.

  Late that night, the Witches allowed him to take her home. As they walked, she dropped her tears like breadcrumbs in that fairytale – the one about the two children abandoned by their parents in a forest who marked their path in the hope of finding their way home, a home that no longer wanted them. The city was sleeping and the night was so quiet that he could hear starlight scraping her skin. The trees in the garden drooped in a state of gloom. The scent of pheep, usually so refreshing, was tainted by the acidic perfume of frangipani. On top of that was the phantom aroma of ratree, which hadn’t been planted in the garden, floating in from some unknown place. The robin that usually sang at two a.m. was quiet. There wasn’t even the hint of a breeze.