Bangkok Days Page 15

  "He is inspecting me!" he now said to the Thais with ineffectual urgency in his dodgy English.

  "Mr. who?"

  "I don't know. He's Swiss."

  "The manager is in Bangkok, sir. But you have your passes."

  "But—" Lionel exploded, "but—"

  "All water treatments are free," they replied, closing the discussion. "This way, please."

  "Do you realize who I am—the Swiss tourist market—thousands of readers. Well, hundreds anyway—"

  It rained hard on the gabled roofs, and in my room I gorged on the small chocolates and snacks presented at bedside in a miniature basket. From time to time a low boom wafted across the toy-town paths and gardens from the sea, and it was not a comforting sound. The fan cooled the bed on which I lay, and yet somehow I could not relax. I was Hansel with no Gretel, trapped in the magic cottage. I had come, in truth, just to get a free buffet. Foolish, I knew. A weekend with two madmen. In the future I would choose both my friends and my weekends more wisely.

  •

  A little later, I went for a swim in the spa pool, which was placed a few feet from the beach behind a long wall staked with flowering trees. The latter had now all been stripped of petals, and they vibrated in their grim nudity as the sea winds mocked them. The pool was ordinarily strewn with rose petals, but these had now been blown into a heap in one corner; the tables had been blown over, the chairs tossed to and fro. A waiter struggled to weight down a tablecloth with four ashtrays. As napkins flew through the air he leaped up to catch them, as if these balletic movements were part of his sad duties. As the rain finally eased, and a greasy light shot through the heavens, I paddled about in the petals. It was ironic that, while I often thought of myself as trying to escape the West and its follies, I usually ended up in a swimming pool reserved almost exclusively for my own race. Soon, however, it was dinnertime.

  The restaurant was on the second floor, an Ayurvedic buffet with cumin-sprinkled boiled eggs thrown in to appease the frustrated carnivores. The idea behind the spa was to control one's intake of calories to a bare minimum determined on the day of one's arrival by the in-house nutritionist. Fortunately, the guy had fled to Bangkok and the buffet therefore seemed morally aimless. The waiters lit a candle for us; the windows rattled and whined. Lionel and McGinnis, against all odds, had dressed in jackets and ties, paradoxically appropriate in this spare, high-minded decor, and we broke open a bottle of Evian while speaking in whispers, as one often does in a totally empty space.

  "Evian?" McGinnis gasped.

  "Well, it will improve your liver, at least. It's a spa. It's supposed to be healthy."

  "Holy Buddha. Evian. Do you see, Miss Lalant? And you have to pay for it."

  "Drinks are not included."

  "There are no drinks. Evian is not a drink, sir. Can we get a health martini?"

  As we sat there, pieces of detritus sailed past the windows, and one of these was a garden chair. The chef came out and laughed, but not with any jollity. The sea was playing up; a few waves had hit the wall. Lionel flinched and his eyes darted up at me. There was something tense and difficult between us that had not yet been defused, and for a moment his eyes were not blue at all but a savage violet, like poisonous flowers whose color warns off birds. He stared straight into me and I could not for the life of me recognize who was looking at me. He called over to the idling staff. "Martinis?"

  They shook their heads in the gloom.

  Mercifully, management had come to some kind of conclusion and music started up on the sound system. It was the Green Music from the Skytrain, all flutes and gamelans and yogurt pots, the music of inner peace and growing grass and liquid spirulina. The sound, I always thought, of cows strenuously thinking. Now it made us feel like cows thinking, which I suppose was the idea. Lionel gripped his fork until his knuckles went white, and he was so perfectly still that I began to feel an accumulating, serious alarm. And what was it all about? I kept thinking as quickly and nimbly as I could. This rage, rising closer and closer to the surface, like blood from an underwater duel, a cloud of redness and sorrow and filth. In response to these events, McGinnis, keeping his cool, took out his mechanical tree frog, placed it on the table, and activated the spring, whereupon it began to chatter away. Lionel gave a start.

  "What is that?"

  "It's my mademoiselle magnet. Sooner or later, a beautiful woman always appears and asks me what it is."

  "What is it, then?"

  "I'll tell you later. You're not a beautiful woman."

  "No," Lionel snapped, "but if you remember, I am a reliable source of them."

  "And where is Fon?" I asked.

  "Asleep. She sleeps all the time."

  There was such wretchedness in Lionel's statement that we fell silent. Men can come to a standstill in this way before your very eyes. Fascinating. Are we all the same in this regard? Was it because (I was feeling a tad pessimistic that evening) all our cherished relationships fail to pan out as we anticipate? But it could also have been because the scene around us was so unusually dispiriting. I imagine that Chiva Som is usually an optimistic sort of place, because it is surely optimistic to get people to eat alfalfa for a week and make them lose weight. The kickboxing classes, the thalassotherapy, the Greco-Roman water suites, the nutritionists—and people flew all the way to Bangkok for this. The empty resort looked so obviously like an outpost of Western values imposed upon a native background. At the gates, guards. Around the walls, more guards. From whom, then, were we being protected? For Lionel the answer was obvious: the Muslims.

  I confess that the exaggerations which inevitably flow when this line of thought is opened up always fatigue me. But it was difficult to deny that something peculiar was happening in this part of Southeast Asia. The government was reeling, the military was waiting in the wings to take over—as it eventually did—and the war in the south was precipitating everything, transforming the state from within. And the Bangkok authorities were losing control of this dirty war against an Islamic insurgency in their southernmost provinces on the Malaysian border. Buddhist monks were being beheaded; drive-by shootings, even of Muslims by their own radicals, were so common they were no longer news. Bombings, ambushes, soldiers killed, thousands of casualties: no society can remain unchanged by such things happening inside it. Perhaps the Thailand we knew was on borrowed time.

  "Everything has changed this year," Lionel said, lowering his mouth so that the staff wouldn't hear, though who knows if they might not have agreed with all of it. He grew icily animated. "Buddhists and Muslims have lived together for generations, but now we are seeing an ethnic cleansing of Buddhists in the South. The villages are separating, the two communities are coming unstuck, dividing into wounded, mistrustful camps, Muslims in one village, Buddhists in another. The symbiosis has come apart. It's not the fault of the majority of Muslims, they didn't want this any more than the Buddhists did. But it's the Muslim radicals who have finally made it happen. All good liberals blame the Thai government, they blame Thaksin for his mishandling of the war, the excesses, the army's brutality—and they have a point. But ultimately they are kidding themselves. The army will take over in Thailand very soon, and their head is actually a Muslim, and they will depose Thaksin and offer conciliation to the jihadists. But at that point, there will be a huge escalation of violence. The Muslim insurrection—because that's what it is—will have created a military junta in Bangkok and a widening war of atrocity in the south. Make no mistake, they are not seeking respect from anyone, as many have claimed. You don't go around beheading people to get respect. They want secession. I have noticed, everywhere I go, that sizable populations of Muslims will never agree to live under the rule of non-Muslims. Pattani here is going to be just like Mindaloa in the Philippines, Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo, you name it. There'll be bombs in Bangkok soon enough. And look what they did to Bali—they destroyed its economy."

  "Well, well," McGinnis sighed, "how absolutely charming."

  "They
are going to offer them Sharia law in the South. And they will reject the offer in favor of more violence."

  "I needn't remind you that Sharia law will close down all the tourism in the South. Our little paradise is going to shrink."

  "What," said McGinnis, aghast, "if they put a bomb in the Eden Club?"

  "My theory is that we thought we would be escaping to a secure, stable, pleasure-giving, pleasure-loving, lotus-eating asylum, and instead we have found ourselves stranded on the fault line between two hostile worlds who will be struggling over the basic things. Thailand is a secular democracy being hacked at by a theocratic movement which loathes everything it stands for—and which, I am bound to add, are the very things we have moved here to embrace. Naturally, they will kill us without even thinking twice. Nobody will much care, because they will reason, as cowards always do, that we are perverts and the religious nutters had a point. But perverts on Monday, little old ladies on Tuesday, I say."

  He asked us if we knew Rumi. Then he quoted something magnificent from that poet:

  If you pretend to be Hallaj

  And with that fake burning

  Set fire to your friends,

  Don't think that you're a lover.

  You're crazy and numb,

  You're drinking our blood,

  And you have no experience

  Of the nearness.

  A crisis later erupted in Islamabad, in Pakistan, when Islamic radicals kidnapped six Chinese businessmen from an upscale massage parlor. The Pakistani army had been forced to surround a mosque, Waco-style, and declare internal war on the group, who clearly had no experience of the nearness. How long, then, before something similar happened in the Land of Smiles?

  "I am not a pervert," McGinnis intoned.

  •

  The next morning I got up early and went up to the outdoor buffet overlooking the rose-petal pool. The skies had darkened even farther. Far out at sea a cloud seemed to be melting downward into the horizon in the shape of a tornado. The staff were watching it with expressions of exasperated incredulity. The end of the world, in all likelihood. It was certainly a dour idea that we were on the front line of the War on Pleasure which would shortly be unleashed upon us. Would we be its unwilling martyrs? But we were certainly here to experience the nearness. I smiled and ordered a Continental No-Fat Breakfast with soy croissants and sugarless qumquat jam.

  There were racks of newspapers from around the world which clearly no one ever read, the Corriere della Sera oddly mixed up with the trash Brit tabloids. I picked out yesterday's Sun and had a peep at the page 3 tits before flicking through the usual tales of horror and miscreance from around the world. There was a picture of a stray dog picked up in an estuary in the French island of Réunion with a double-barbed fish hook pushed through its nose. The noble fishermen of that island paradise used stray dogs as live bait for shark fishing, but sometimes the animals escaped from the predators and swam to shore with the hooks through their muzzles. So there's a heartwarming tale about human nature as it really is. The Sun called for the fishermen to be executed in public. A reasonable response. I dug into my organic grapefruit.

  The manager appeared, a controlled European guy in a severe black suit, a typical European manager's suit with a hangman's tie. He must have been sweating like a pig in that humidity but was at pains not to show it, though anxious beads burst upon his tight, tanned brow. The only guest, eating a grapefruit—he swept up to inspect.

  "It's a full-scale hurricane," he sighed. "We are going to close the windows soon with metal storm shutters. We will give you a refunded discount, of course."

  "That really isn't necessary," I drawled. Unable to help myself, I put on a Somerset Maugham accent. "Though it's awfully kind of you. I thought there were never storms in November."

  "Never. It's a freak."

  "Thanks for the kindness anyway."

  "It is our pleasure. Excellent grapefruit, no? They are from an organic microfarm in Switzerland."

  "A micro—?"

  But I stopped; he might just try and explain it.

  "A hurricane," I muttered instead. "What a drag."

  "What if we all died?" he laughed. A Swiss laugh.

  "We have to die sometime. Where better than here?"

  "Ah, monsieur, you are a philosophe."

  I showed him the mutilated dog. "No, monsieur, these are philosophes."

  "Quel misère," he sighed.

  "Organic dog meat. It might be an idea."

  Ignoring this, he fingered his tie and bent down a little.

  "Monsieur, are you traveling with two other men and a girl?" I said that I was. "Ah. I was just wondering."

  "Why?"

  "Well, it is just that they are asleep in the water suites. They have been there all night. I don't know how it could have happened."

  "How disgusting. Shall I wake them up?"

  "No, no. The staff are seeing to it. I thought perhaps you had had a celebration last night."

  "Just a bit of rum," I thought. "With a spliff."

  His back, as he walked away, glistened with a kind of colonial unhappiness. Suit and tie to keep the natives respectful, and all that. Very soon, the metal shutters began to crank down.

  Perversely, I took my coffee outside and sat in the maelstrom quite happily. It was unbearably hot, so the violent winds were not as intimidating as they might have been. The beach looked magnificent and raw, the Hyatt resort next door thrown into hilarious crisis by the battering of its eighty-year-old nut trees. A dog suddenly ran across the beach helter-skelter, its tongue hanging out with joy. Screw the humans, it was thinking—they'll soon be reduced to beggary, like me.

  I got up and clambered over the wall down to a long sand ditch filled with water. A uniformed guard tried politely to stop me, then saluted awkwardly. A guest is a guest. I dropped onto the hard sand and walked up toward the mutilated pistachio trees of the Hyatt. I then ducked into the Hyatt gardens, where the winds had wrought havoc. Their well-heeled guests had obviously all fled back to the capital, leaving the place in the hands of its bewildered staff. In the Polynesian Grill, a chef in a preposterous toque stood flipping burgers with a raging sea as backdrop. I sat by the window and got a Mai Tai. My 9:30 a.m. Mai Tai.

  As I was sitting there I saw a familiar figure walking onto the beach from Chiva Som. Fon came over to the Hyatt wall nonchalantly, looked over and saw me, and walked in. She came to my table and sat down, handling her own body with expertise. She looked suavely groomed, as if she had spent far too much time on it, and the wind appeared not to have ruffled any of the thousand invisible feathers that held her image in place. The eyes sparkled; the hands were white as some delicate pork fat. She looked swiftly around, and it was always as if she was doing a visual sweep for attractive men. The pupils inside those eyes sharpened like pencil points, sheer black acidic lead. She had the unmistakable look of a woman looking for a missing husband, lover, or gold mine. But I have never held that against anyone, and to accuse women of gold-digging is surely to miss the point in the context of an arrangement where the man is several times richer than the woman, through no one's fault. And the men, just as invariably, wearily accept the terms of the arrangement. Money is just money. But sexual companionship is priceless. Lionel was the source of her Californian jewelry.

  "So there you are," she said at once, swinging slightly wet hair. "At least you're not drunk like those two. Oh, they bad men. Make me want cry. Old, silly men. You nice young man, you not marry and here you are."

  "Yes, here I am."

  She made for a smooth coquette.

  "We have little time. You want go in Hyatt?"

  "I think Lionel might be a little hurt." Now I was curious. "Do you love him, Fon? No, really."

  But she knew it was a sentimental question. Perhaps love is a rare lightning that strikes only one in ten of the population. Her foot touched mine under the table and she looked mock-hurt. Why not make an extra bit on the side while the French bastard was aslee
p in the water suites?

  "I love Lio," she said slowly. "He's bad bad man, but he is kind as well."

  "But don't you want a family, children?"

  "With Lio?"

  "With whoever."

  It's a cruel question at the best of times. Fon was the daughter of a shrimp fisherman in Phang Nga. Eight children, no money from the shrimp business, and the prospect only of marriage to another shrimp fisherman followed by a life of respectable drudgery. She must have looked at her mother and decided not to go that route. It's a classic story.

  For a hundred years and more the world's fast-developing cities have been filled with ambitious, fearful, gutsy young girls striking out with the odds stacked against them in search of an escape from what their backgrounds have prepared for them.

  In Bangkok they were already almost half the workforce across the board. If you got your teeth done there, as I did, you quickly noticed that in dentistry they were predominant. The same was apparently true in biotechnology and countless service sectors. Sukhumvit Road at eight in the morning is not filled with bar girls, it's filled with streams of women in business suits on their way to work. NGOs have long pretended that a tenth of the female population is engaged in sex work, but the obvious falsity of this has recently been exposed. Instead, the relation of sex work to normal work has been stranger. As Thailand has become richer, the sex business has actually expanded, in contrast to the usual experience of industrializing countries, such as Japan. Thai sociologists scratch their heads over it. They theorize that in a society with a pliable sense of sexual morality, sex can easily be seen as just another economic weapon to get ahead. The trade fills with part-timers who use it, for example, to save up enough to make a down payment on an apartment.

  She had met Lionel at some foamy nightclub like Q Bar, seen at once the advantages he offered, and then latched on to him like a remora fish. It was mutual predation. What did Fon want? Not a foreign john, but a foreign husband who would take her away. Such stories are legion in the bar-girl world. The grapevines of gossip hum like telephone cables at peak time, and no upwardly mobile girl is going to turn a deaf ear to them when she knows her chances are small in number and have to be exploited to the maximum. And there are her fears, of old age, of poverty. But these are everyone's fears.