Bangkok Days Page 16

  She picked her teeth skeptically.

  "You are not married either," she retorted. "That's why you come Thai girl. We know, we know." And then a smile as brilliant as candy.

  "Lionel will never marry you," I wanted to warn her. "He's an incorrigible libertine." But, then again, I didn't know. Libertines are lonely creatures, and they too slip the ring eventually. Fon, moreover, was patient.

  •

  After lunch, I went to the water suites. Behind a large indoor pool there are corridors of water with pebbles underfoot, along which guests in towels can venture. There are recesses, fountains, dim-lit steam rooms, all the atmosphere of a Roman bath, but no sign of my companions. The day went to waste, and that is the point of a spa: to waste time. The water suites were perhaps the least interesting thing in Hua Hin, and yet here was where the Westerners with the most money spent much of their time. Clearly, people enjoy their own sterility.

  At five, said companions appeared, smoking cigars which an anguished attendant immediately rushed to extinguish. There was a tussle as the damp stubs were thrown about in confusion like toxic waste.

  "A Cuesta-Rey for nothing!" I heard McGinnis shout.

  Health experts appeared in white coats, crying foul. So in the first mellow hour of evening, we took a tuk tuk into town to escape the stifling morality of the spa. Downtown Hua Hin was a small, simple place with a boisterous night market, plenty of hookers, and some mouth-searing food. There was a tiny beach sandwiched between buildings. Small restaurants bubbled away on the wooden decks.

  Eventually we got a table and the women brought over sheaves of lemongrass, dark-red sauces in glass bottles, wedges of lemon and mint, dainty saucers of tangy naam phrik plaa. A wave hit the window full square and there was a bout of merry screaming—or not quite so merry. We ordered the carp and a sea bass and Singha beers. McGinnis and Lionel were in high spirits, and Fon watched them both with a glass-eyed curiosity which was easily persuaded to turn to laughter. If you can't make a Thai laugh you're a dead fish.

  Without warning, I felt an intense love for the three outcasts, who were not so much swimming their way through life as drowning with a show of bravado. The signs of bravado were moving: Lionel's dyed and probably implanted hair, a shockingly crude camel color now with weird-looking roots showing through; the disgusting pommade in McGinnis's hair which cast an aromatic spell around him, a smell of decayed vegetables and a sweetshop in hundred-degree heat; his eye that moved and gleamed like a mackerel; the hopeless earnestness of Fon's hair, which didn't move even in that wind. She now lit up like a Christmas light, like a female Santa made of hot glass, and all her striving and ruthlessness came into her face, and her bumptious, delicious animality rose as she drank and lost control. She told Lionel to go fuck himself and went through a bottle of rice whiskey, at the bottom of which lurked a small embalmed scorpion. It was a present from McGinnis, who called it "scorpion vodka." The drinkers of Southeast Asia are fond of placing snakes and venomous insects inside bottles of rice wine and whiskey, and the scorpion whiskeys have a distinctive peaty aftertaste that mitigates the cheap astringency of the drink itself.

  "As a matter of fact," McGinnis said, tilting the bottle at me, "they leach the venom out of them first. What is left is pure thrill."

  The custom among hard drinkers is to empty the bottle and then eat the soggy disarmed Heterometrus spinifer. For men weaned on "express trains" and fried waterbugs, it is hardly an insurmountable ordeal.

  "I had a banana-flavored scorpion liqueur once," Lionel observed mildly. "I threw up for a day and a night, but I ate the fucker. It tasted like a banana crêpe."

  "We had it together," the girl said. "You say Thai disgusting people, drink that stuff with claw. I say, cheer, and we drink this scorpi vodka."

  McGinnis leaned to my ear.

  "They can't drink, you know. Listen to her disintegrating English. Delightful to listen to."

  "I don't remember you drinking the banana one, darling. Are you sure?"

  "Banana scorpion and ice-blue melon."

  "Well, cheers," McGinnis cried, and tipped the Heterometrus sideways so that its two claws rolled against the glass bottle as if it was waving at us. "Last one to finish eats the bestiole!"

  Fon: "Me, me! You pussy farang. Only Thai woman can eat."

  She tossed off a glass, then another.

  "She's not an alcoholic," Lionel explained mildly. "She just gets these drinking fits. She's like an express train that can't stop."

  When Thais drink, all hell often breaks loose. When Thai women drink, there is an extraordinary unraveling which happens in the blink of an eye. The façade of riab roi, of respectable demeanor, suddenly cracks and gives way, and a torrent of buried passion often comes cascading out through portals that were hitherto unimagined. They collapse, dance on tables, cry, whirl about like tops, and fall asleep quickly. The sexuality that plays subtly across their sober surface, so devastating because it is so understated and reserved, so aware of itself at the deepest level—aware, that is, of the ultimate consequences—is now broken up into confessions, scenes, and slippages.

  Fon upended the empty bottle and out came the scorpion. She cut it up with a fork while Lionel looked on with a great bead of sweat between his eyebrows.

  "Now, now, chérie. That's really not necessary."

  But she was on a roll and soon the legs, the thorax, and, finally, the claws were going down her gullet.

  "It's really quite magnificent," McGinnis was moved to comment. "Voilà la femme thai." His glance to Lionel was eloquent: You want to marry this scorpion-quaffing warrior?

  "You'll be up all night," Lionel sighed.

  "Make me horny, yes."

  For the scorpion, like the cobra, when added to these "wines" is reputed to be an aphrodisiac.

  I was feeling horny myself after a half-shot of the brew. Would Lionel chivalrously offer a four-way orgy, or a three-way at least? It didn't seem likely. And so my attention drifted out to sea, where buoys and little shrimp boats tossed about in the winds. Someone had told me that this coastline was once devoted to the profitable cultivation of walnuts (I have no idea if that is true) but that the nut farmers had long ago discovered that it was more profitable to work at the Hilton and the Hyatt than it was to prune nut trees. So the nut groves had withered and the coast had turned inexorably into a tourist installation.

  •

  On Monday morning our driver emerged from the dawn in his gray buttoned gloves (where had he been all weekend?) and wai'ed, as did the Chiva Som staff who saw us off. They apologized for the atrocious weather, as if weather could be apologized for.

  "Well, let's get back to where we belong," Lionel said to the driver when we were in the car, the rain drumming on the roof.

  And soon we were among the rice paddies again, and the cranky windmills turning clockwise, dripping lethargic water. We said nothing all the way back to Bangkok. The land became more definite as we sped farther from Hua Hin, which seemed to be suffering from a local downpour, and we could see the farms laid out against the lines of rice, and the children swimming in rancid puddles as the buffalo looked on, lost no doubt in their very boring vegetarian dreams.

  THE PYATHAI

  The house appeared to be empty when I got back, and the gardener informed me that Kitty had gone to her country house to supervise a new batch of sick dogs from the rural monasteries there. At night, the garden lamps were left off as Kitty's fear of the dark was not in play, and under the influence of the last of the epiglottitis drugs I had several mystical episodes during which I saw Kitty's aunt and uncle walking across the lawns in the early hours with their teapot and pruning shears. "Mysticism," wrote Max Nordau, "is the expression of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness of the higher cerebral centers." Hear, hear, Max, but I saw them all the same. It occurred to me that hallucinations are not difficult to create in the system of someone taking drug cocktails, b
ut all the same, I was surprised at how clear and definite the old couple looked as they inspected the mango trees they had planted themselves during the Second World War. It was now that I realized that although the main house was all new, the plot itself might have belonged to the family for a century, and the warehouses behind my garden could easily have been from the 1940s. It was a period that no one ever talked about, in contrast to Anglo-American culture, where the forties are talked about incessantly. It had never occurred to me to ask why. Why this haste to cover up even the recent past?

  It so happened that my follow-up examinations and checkups were assigned to a doctor at the Mongkutklao Hospital, a man named Daemkern, and for a few weeks we became quite friendly, as doctor and patient sometimes do. Neither Thais nor foreigners take much interest in the secluded and accidentally preserved fragments of the last hundred years, which lie scattered about the metropolis. A train station here, a library there. It is as if a great event called "modernity" occurred like a natural disaster of some kind, severing the present from the past, which could be located, for the sake of argument, prior to 1965 or so. Few are the men or women who are haunted by this fact, but Daemkern was one of them, and this was an ample platform upon which to construct many conversations. Like most educated Thais, his English was as good as mine. He was boyishly curious about why I was spending so much time in Bangkok when it was obvious I didn't have a job there and I didn't need to be there. When I explained to him that I was on the lam, he laughed as if he understood this to mean that I was running away from my wife—like taking a yacht and secretly going round the world on it with a stash of caviar and Viagra. My fuller explanations made little sense to him, and he would nod and nod and look at his nails. There was a picture on his wall of a ten-year-old daughter in a smock standing next to a plastic marlin suspended from a chain. There was an amber paperweight with a wasp entombed inside. His wife, he said, had bought it at the Tucson Gem Show.

  "There is a palace hidden on the hospital grounds," he said during the first visit. "It's a short walk from here. If you like, since you seem to be curious about such things, I could take you around. I have a lunch break. Perhaps next time. It's called the Pyathai. It's not open to the public, so I'll have to take you around."

  He took my pulse and blood pressure and observed that I seemed abnormally anxious in some way.

  "Or is that the way you usually are?"

  •

  The King Mongkutklao Hospital stands on a wide street called Ratchawithi, and the hospital itself is something of a mini-city spread over many grimy acres. For forty minutes I would sit in a traffic jam in which I was able to learn the Thai word for this phenomenon from every driver whose dashboard reeked with little Buddhas, some of which lit up and emitted electronic laughs. Rot-din gern. "Traffic too much."

  Ratchawithi boils with traffic, its sidewalks are broken, its trees reduced to shreds. Pedestrians scramble across its lanes with a kind of acrobatic panic. I would arrive sweating and stifled.

  On my second visit, Daemkern asked me what I thought of the hospital. It is tricky, however, to both entertain an opinion about a hospital in someone else's country and to express it to the face of someone who spends half his life in it. Daemkern was about fifty-five, stocky, and pockmarked, and his was one of those male physiques which are actually improved by such a blemish. It made him look like a swarthy tough. If he had whipped out a switchblade as he examined my throat I wouldn't have been surprised. He had a silver cigarette case with a kanji character on the lid. I've never trusted a doctor who doesn't smoke.

  The Pyathai lies on its own grounds to one side of the main hospital. From the road there appears a gate of stained Corinthian columns, a cluster of red gothic spires, and a balustraded bridge of some kind. The roofs could have been copied from the skyline of Dijon, but on a smaller scale. It is not announced by any obvious sign, but as part of a working hospital I suppose it wouldn't be.

  It was hot now, one in the afternoon, the sun strong and unremitting. Daemkern put on his shades and walked with the gait of a golfer. We strolled past an old howitzer and a gray pavilion with painted eaves, vaguely Ottoman in feel. Behind this stood a fountain sculpture of a large swan being grappled by two boys. It looked as if the swan was being throttled by one of them, while the other blew a trumpet. Daemkern let out a pert laugh. Victorian frippery of the sort that elites all over the world indulged in a hundred years ago: the style of an insecure Asian monarchy in an age of other people's empires. And there one senses the unease. The era when Siam was at the mercy of Europeans—not their gunboats but their awful taste.

  To the right rose the main building, a former royal palace built by King Rama V in the 1890s and once a great hotel. To the left stood a separate pavilion, now a teahouse. On the steps of the hospital a few nurses sat smoking cigarettes. There were patients, too, people in wheelchairs sipping sodas, a child with a bandaged eye staring at the foreigner making his way to the palace, a man with burnished skin the color and texture of a primate's fingers.

  We went into the pavilion tearoom through cool teak doors, the vaults in Art Deco style. The teahouse was octagonal in shape; a group of old ladies sat around one table with pots of Earl Grey. The dark wood and herringbone parquet were suddenly soothing and Daemkern and I sat as if exhausted, the sweat cooling on our faces. The Deco ceilings loomed above window casements with all their original brass locks: there were gold lamps with frosted shades, paneling with tropical fruit carved in miniature. Vases of fabric flowers had vertiginous little bird's nests loopily popping out. In one corner, very incongruous, stood an ice cream freezer straight out of a British seaside town. Through the stained-glass windows came the green heat of the park, the coo of pigeons.

  Daemkern glanced over at the biddies and ordered Earl Grey for us, too. His mood was chipper—but when was it not?

  "Rama VI lived here, too, you know, and I daresay he was our most curious king. Nineteen ten to nineteen twenty-five. A curious period in Asia. This palace is where he tried to create a utopian model society called Dusit Thani, with its own newspapers and currency. It was sort of mad, naturally, but I have always had a soft spot for him. He was whimsical and literary. He introduced the spoken Western play into Thailand—did you know that? Though of course nobody today has any interest in spoken literary plays. Or in him, for that matter."

  "It's a shame."

  "We are not a very history-minded people. Or we haven't been up to now. At least they have restored this pavilion."

  "They have done it rather well."

  "I confess it's my favorite tearoom. My wife and I come here sometimes to have a quiet talk."

  "It's strange," I said. "But it feels like a time warp. One doesn't feel that in the big temples, the palaces the tourists go to, even though they are much older. Those places somehow never feel old. Wat Po doesn't feel old to me. It feels like something that was built yesterday."

  "I have felt the same thing. It's strange indeed, isn't it?"

  I said, "Perhaps the reason you don't make such a fuss over the past is simply because in reality it doesn't exist. It's an idea, nothing more. And ideas are soap bubbles. Of course, you could say that architecture isn't a soap bubble."

  "It's funny. I go to the morgue twice a week and I see all these dead bodies. Are people like soap bubbles, too?"

  "It depends if one is a doctor or not."

  "Or a Buddhist. Everything transient and all that."

  This relatively recent room felt ancient precisely because it was largely forgotten. Buildings are the great mysteries of our lives.

  "My grandfather," Daemkern went on, "used to say the loveliest palace in Bangkok was the Wang Burapha. I always wanted to see it, but for some unknown reason it was demolished just after the war and replaced by the Grand and King's Cinema. When you look at photographs of it, you are amazed by its size and complexity. A building of such grandness and solidity—destroyed in a single week. And replaced by what? A cinema!"

 
•

  We wandered over to the main building. A canal stood by some blue wooden pavilions, and we went up an empty staircase next to the Army Corps Medical Museum. The second floor looked more like a hospital, voices sweeping down immense galleries of dimmed frescoes, with paper chandeliers hanging in hot shade.

  In mold-tinted air, breathing comes a little harder. The windows were gaping holes without glass; echoes rolled down the galleries, around which vestiges of paint still clung to the upper parts of the walls: forests slowly receded into oblivion. Their palms and vines offered a vision of unplanted abundance, a Thai Garden of Eden. The forest, which seems to exist always in the Thai subconscious.

  We strolled through those galleries which formed a maze, with rectangular detours and corners of grandiosity. The fire extinguishers had probably not been used since before my birth. One passageway was a covered bridge leading to more of the palace. It seemed to me that this upper part of the building had not been used much since the mid-century, not even as a luxury hotel, that something had brought its social functionality to a halt.

  "I don't know the exact history of it," he admitted. "I don't even know why they stopped using it as a hotel. It just seemed old-fashioned at some point. It must have been that."

  "I am curious. Do you ever think about the war period? I never hear it mentioned. There are scores of big-budget historical movies about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, blockbusters like Sukhothai, which Thais seem to love, and yet nothing about the Second World War. Is the sixteenth century really more interesting to the mass market than the last war?"

  "Less shameful, is the answer to that. The Second World War was an awkward period for Thailand."