The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  Not only did he keep fine-tuning the dramatic details of his daredevil assignments, Natee also played at being an emotional soul with unresolvable baggage, or sometimes a pensive introvert like the hero of a Japanese movie, or sometimes a complex, overly sensitive character like an arthouse filmmaker. One day he told her they were so different from each other, like oil and water, that there was no way their love could last. The next day he told her she was a hindrance, holding him back from becoming the intrepid correspondent he had always wanted to be. Then the day after that it was him who was dragging her down since he had no means of taking care of her like a good man should. Leave me, Charee, you’re too good for someone like me. But out of the blue he switched again and become a jealous lover, imagining her unfaithful tendencies in great detail even though Chareeya never saw any other men.

  Then he would disappear for days, weeks, sometimes months, and return a wretch; gaunt and weak from insomnia and starvation – poisoned by love. And that was who he really was, Natee wasn’t acting. He believed with genuine conviction that he really was a war correspondent, that he had just been taking a stroll, that he had contracted a meningococcal disease, that he was an over-sensitive soul, and that he couldn’t eat or sleep because he had been pummelled into near madness by a poisonous love.

  The afternoon breeze brought with it a faint scent of nang yaem flowers, heralding a fine day. Natee had just reappeared after an absence of almost one month. The rekindling of love was soothing. They talked and came to an understanding, a promise that things would be different. Then, Natee opened a small book and read her a story about a lonely ten-year-old girl who tried to find herself a friend by writing a letter, putting it in a bottle, and floating it out to sea. The bottle circled the country three times and was picked up six years later by a boy of thirteen, who wrote back accepting the girl’s offer of friendship. By then, however, the girl was sixteen and had outgrown the feelings she had in the past, and she was still too young to pay attention to a boy who was younger than her.

  She didn’t reply to him and forgot all about it. She grew up, got a boyfriend, got married, got divorced, and lived alone for much of her life. Then, when she was past middle age, she found a new love, the best man she had ever known. When she was arranging their belongings on the day he moved in with her, she found the letter she had written and cast adrift into the world decades ago. It was impossible to believe that the man she now loved was that boy who once wrote back, the boy she had rejected and erased from her memory. He, too, had forgotten the cruel girl who had spurned him and, yet, he had managed to find her again.

  Touched by the tale, just as she had been by the stories of miracles told by Uncle Thanit, Chareeya was moved by the wonders of love and faith that had guided the two lovers through the labyrinth of time and the subterfuges of life and brought them together. Chareeya was still in Natee’s embrace when he closed the book and told her in a calm voice that he had another woman.

  This wasn’t another episode in Natee’s life that existed only his imagination. He had been taking Pimpaka out to dinners and movies even before he had met Chareeya. And he had kept seeing her during those absences when he told Chareeya he was risking his life in a conflict zone, or when he was sick with an imaginary meningococcal disease, or when he disappeared to relish the taste of longing, or when he calculated the balance sheet of love to decide if she loved him more than he loved her. For every second that his relationship with Chareeya was rocked by time and familiarity, his feelings towards Pimpaka grew more intense. He wasn’t the kind of man who juggled several women at once but, unwittingly, Natee’s behavior was being indulged by his deep hunger to find scaffolding for the true worth of his love – something that could withstand the corrosion caused by familiarity, something painful and yet reaffirming.

  There was a sentimental brevity to the moment that exploded into dust when Chareeya went ballistic: she became hysterical, refused to eat, threw things at the walls, got depressed, didn’t go to sleep at night or in the day, and devised sixty-two ways to kill herself. She imagined running straight into a wall and collapsing backwards as he watched, or shouting until there was no sound left in her body. In the first week, she broke up with Natee eight hundred times. In the following week, four hundred. And since then, she did it fifty times a week even though she knew she couldn’t live without him.

  From there, her reaction was scaled down to sporadic moaning and occasional tantrums. Then she became completely quiet as if she had come to terms with the inevitable and concentrated her mind on putting the sixty-two suicide methods she had conceived of down on paper: these ranged from the classic trick, favoured by ancient Chinese dynasties, of swallowing opium; to the simple technique of hanging yourself from a doorknob and waiting for someone to open the door; to a no-brainer like starting to run and then to just keep running until you dropped dead; to an elaborate performance such as burying your head in the sand like an ostrich, or like all those people who are afraid of life. Chareeya stared at the piece of paper with the austere devotion of a worshipper performing rites. But the saddest part was, not only was Chareeya devoid of courage, she was, in fact, frightened – mortally afraid that she might accidentally kill herself using one of these methods.

  When she took a break from these miserable activities, Chareeya cried in every possible manner. She cried audibly, inaudibly, in the privacy of her chest, loudly or softly depending on her energy that day, in public toilets, on buses, in crowded restaurants, and on the street. If she didn’t have to go anywhere, she would stay in and cry at home, listening to sad music and sobbing against the peony-patterned cushion, or she would water the flowers with her profusion of tears until they radiated a heartbreaking aroma that floated out onto the street and caused babies to cry in their mothers’ arms.

  Time soon solidified the lovers’ tragic romance into destiny. Natee continued to waver, unstable, neither staying nor leaving. And yet he was warm and affectionate, returning cheerful and sunny after his frequent disappearances, only to disappear again in tears and sorrow. Chareeya was fixated with this disastrous rollercoaster, grief-stricken and crying non-stop until a line of grey shadow etched itself across her left eye like a fissure. It didn’t cause her any physical pain but it made that eye seem lonelier than the other, and it had the effect of discouraging the faint-hearted from looking straight at her. It also polluted her vision so that every image she saw had a grey crack slashed across it; through Chareeya’s eyes, the entire world was about to break into pieces.

  XVII

  The Metropolis of Mice

  O f all the women living along the riverbank, Chalika was hands-down the most beautiful. Not only had she inherited her mother’s beauty and faith in love, but she also glowed with the magical aura of a literary heroine, complete with fortitude, virtue and patience. Still, she lived a quiet, uneventful life and spent her days making sweets, reading novels, daydreaming and crying for men who didn’t exist in real life.

  The day she learned that the military cadet, who was no longer a military cadet as she had always thought but now a military colonel, had gotten married, Chalika cried her eyes out and confessed her love to him eighty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty times; each time shedding one tear, each teardrop representing each hour since she had fallen in love with him when she was thirteen. Despite the magnitude of the drama, Chalika wasn’t crying for any living, flesh-and-blood man, but for an illusory image of a man put together from a thousand images stored inside her head from romance novels, which had fed into her melancholic desire for someone about whom she knew nothing – not his name, his preferred colour, his hobbies, or his favourite curry.

  She cried for herself: for the loss of a love she had never actually known, for the lonesome wandering in her own fantasy, and for the interminable wait for the hand of destiny. She was so obsessed with her own melancholy that she didn’t register the presence of the municipal clerk who had been watching her secretly from the corner of the street sinc
e they were in primary school, and who had by now become a hopeless drunkard, drowning himself in whisky so that he could forget her and be able to sleep at night. She didn’t notice the shy teacher who came to buy sweets from her every day and who left her shop with tears in his eyes. She didn’t notice the car accidents that kept happening in front of her shop, or the bank employee who slipped and fell on the footpath and broke his arm, or the engineer whose mind wandered off while he was bicycling and who overshot a curve and landed in a ditch, or the western tourist who became a howling madman, prompting the locals to take him for sprinklings of holy water five times a day for ten days straight, or the postman who was fired because his heart kept skipping a beat and he kept delivering letters to the wrong addresses. Chalika didn’t realise that all those men shared the same fate of having laid eyes on the beautiful woman who had blossomed from the inspiration of a million romance novels – the woman who couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to stop sighing her sighs of regret.

  Maybe it was down to the romance novels. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the irresistible sex appeal of Nual the nanny, who became the cook and later Chalika’s helper at the dessert shop. Nual was also the mother of five children who shared three fathers – a mathematical riddle and parentage conundrum – and her touch had made Chalika’s thong yod and foi thong* ( Made from egg yolks and sugar, thong yod (literally, “golden drops”) and foi thong (“golden threads”) are auspicious Thai desserts.) sweeter than anyone else’s and her kanom chan the most delicious in the world, as wonderful as those made by the late Grandma Nu who had passed down the recipe directly to the young woman herself.

  Nakhon Chai Si by then had become a fully-fledged tourist town crawling with restless day-trippers from Bangkok. They came and bought everything and ate everything, as if cursed by an indefatigable hunger; even the children, who were usually always hungry, wondered why city people had such voracious appetites. As a result, Chalika’s business prospered and her pastries sold out quicker and quicker; first by five p.m., and then by three p.m., and sometimes a client reserved everything she made and she had to close her shop at ten a.m.. But she never considered increasing production and continued to make the same amount of sweets because she wanted to have free time to read her novels in that dreary house whose members had scattered in different directions.

  Uncle Thanit had become a stranger, his presence waning into shadow with each passing second as his fabric-hunting trips lengthened to months, or almost an entire year, and his sojourns at home became shorter and shorter until they lasted mere days. His fascination with antique textiles was something incomprehensible to most people, except to those who had the chance to marvel at them up close when they were illuminated by angled light – the only kind of light humankind had known before the invention of the light bulb moved the source of illumination to a spot above our heads, creating a wan, lifeless, pallid light that crushes and flattens everything beneath it, including humans.

  A phantasmal shaft of afternoon sunshine pouring into a crepuscular room or the nocturnal flickering of candlelight was enough to flesh out the singular depth of each coloured thread in a piece of fabric: a mass of pink camouflaged amongst red threads rising up and spreading its brilliance; rustic orange glowing over an ebony-tree blackness, like the colours of the horizon at twilight; gold threads spiralling elegantly, catching fire and erupting in flames. This was how Uncle Thanit had first encountered textiles in the antique shop that day.

  What cast a spell on him more powerfully than anything, however, was not the multi-dimensional majesty drawn out by the primordial angled light, but the complex melodies made by a million gossamer threads that wound around one another like a colossal symphony. And even more riveting than that was the story behind each piece of cloth, some just a few decades old and others woven before civilisation began.

  Fabric with a tortuously baroque pattern that could be unspooled to reveal a spell, fabric dyed in curdled mud from a sacred riverbed where the water had dried up millennia ago, fabric woven to the chanting of ancient hymns, fabric so densely threaded that even a teardrop from a newborn baby could not seep through, fabric that the devil himself dare not look at, fabric that had been wrapped around a human arriving from the freezing cold into this world of solitude, and fabric that was wrapped around that person on their journey to the empire of souls.

  Fabric woven by a mother who encoded within the threads a secret treasure map that only her favourite daughter could be taught to decode, fabric that could cover a woman’s head thereby propelling her into the lost half of a man’s soul, fabric that could transform an ordinary man into a celestial warrior if he draped it over his shoulders, and fabric that could bless every speck of dust in this faithless world and turn it into a vast holy realm – by just touching it to their foreheads all men, princely or lowborn, would appear before god as equals.

  As the river kept changing its colour and fish continued to float like leaves, and as the pesticide-free vegetable garden could no longer fend off toxins, Uncle Thanit dedicated himself to the business of antique textiles. Without realising when it had happened or how, he found himself trapped in a sinuous quest and lurched endlessly from luminous cities to villages not recorded on any maps, from the Salween River to the Suriname, from a path drenched in blood in a time before Temüjin became the Great Khan to the ruins of a throne hall that had once been the domain of the Queen of Sheba.

  He was lost for months in a nameless valley in Patagonia, and another time walked around in circles, dazed by the enchanting fragrance of an incense market secretly buried under Isfahan. He travelled for a year with a salt caravan of the Azure Warriors of the Sahara, into the desert where he drank water from the well of the Pink Gypsies of Thar – water that tasted like tears and that only made him thirstier with every drop.

  Once, he trekked with a Bedouin sage searching the skies for the lost constellation over Rub’al Khali, then he walked on an opium cloud with Mujahidin in the honeycomb caves, untouched by sunlight, in the maze of the Great Hindu Kush. With a tribal chief in Shandong, he munched on the still-beating heart of a cow believed to have already been extinct for centuries. In Bethlehem, he dodged a hail of bullets in a messy holy war destined to last through eternity. He played football with an undiscovered tribe in Amazonia and witnessed the magical moment when the Shroud of Spirituality was unfurled over Shangri-la.

  The sniffing out of clues became the pursuit of treasure and a peripatetic wind blew Uncle Thanit into a cycle of unfathomable solitude. He no longer had time in the afternoons to caress his prized collection of fabrics or to admire their dazzle in the flickering candlelight – a performance of light and colour that slipped back into the past – because he spent all his time, day and night, on his endless journey. He carried a small notebook in which he jotted down stories and legends almost forgotten by the world, and a small abacus that could calculate price but not value. He went in search of fabric to sell so that he could fund his next trip to search for more fabric to sell so that he could fund his next trip, ad infinitum.

  Besides, every time he came home he had changed, bit by bit at first, then more and more until he had become someone else and was no longer the uncle the children used to know. A mesh of beard covered his face, he walked around the house in exotic costumes, alternating between a Sikkim-style vest, a Burmese sarong, a Middle-Eastern robe with a hem that grazed the floor, or tapered pantaloons like those worn by the genie rubbed out of Aladdin’s lamp. He wore peculiar hats, even inside the house: a Japanese soldier’s cap, a Mexican sombrero, the festooned cylindrical fez of Sufi dervishes, a wide-brimmed hat jingling with ornaments like those worn by Spanish court officials, a Tibetan felt hat.

  Not to mention the accessories bedecking various parts of his body: a dragon-headed Celtic ring, bronze Khmer earrings, a Sumatran bracelet shaped like two snakes coiling around his wrist to eat their own tails, a bright blue eye-shaped locket from Turkey, the latticework on a Tuareg breastplate that resemb
led extraterrestrial hieroglyphics, a protective Mayan tattoo to ward off the golden scorpion, a hairpin from Xishuangbanna, a shrunken human head from Peru, a boar fang, a tiger claw, a moose antler, and so on.

  And it went further than that. Everyone found it impossible to understand Uncle Thanit’s speech because he would mix the vocabulary of nine different languages in a single sentence. He sometimes spoke to Chalika in a heavenly dialect understood exclusively by Zoroastrian priests which, at any rate, hadn’t been used for three thousand and six hundred years. He also went around greeting the neighbours with unusual phrases: ohaiyo, salam, namaste, aslamualaikum, ciao, ni hao, bonjour… Only once in a while did it occur to him that all he wanted to say was just sawasdee* ( Sawasdee is the common phrase of greeting in the Thai language.).

  Constantly traversing time zones also inflicted permanent damage to his biological clock. Uncle Thanit’s sleep patterns were utterly chaotic. He went to sleep at eight in the morning and six in the evening. Sometimes he wouldn’t sleep a wink for nine days. Other times he slept like a bear, not moving an inch for twenty-seven days straight. But the worst was his newly acquired habit of not taking a shower, possibly picked up from the desert warriors, as he filled the house with the pungent odour of months-old spices, rotten fruits and animal stink – a stench so suffocating that Chalika placed trays of charcoal in the corners of the house to absorb the smell, and had to keep them there for weeks after Uncle Thanit had left on a new quest.

  It wasn’t only Uncle Thanit who had become something of a missing person; Chareeya, too, had grown distant. Chalika hardly ever received any updates from her sister, and on the rare occasions when she did return home, she spoke in dark innuendoes that rattled her sister’s conscience: If I die, will you cry? Or: If there’s really a next life, I want to be born as your sister again, Lika. Or: Which method of suicide do you think is the most foolproof? These remarks unearthed old forebodings that had been stashed away in Chalika’s mind, and she didn’t dare inquire further. Instead, she sat there keeping watch over the telephone, fearfully awaiting news that something bad might have happened to Chareeya.