Bangkok Days Read online

  He said that you could argue it different ways. The absolute monarchy was ended in 1932 by a coup of army officers, one of the most prominent of whom had been a man called Luang Phibunsongkram. But the monarchy was impossible to extirpate. This was no England 1649, or France 1789. The army had been frustrated by what they saw as the nation's backwardness relative to the great powers of Europe. The striking Europeanization of the monarchs themselves was not the issue. They looked to Fascist Italy as a way out of inferiority, out of commercial and cultural subordination. Modernize, modernize. Outstrip the West. Internalize technological habits. It had had a curious effect upon them, he said. They were archaic and postmodern at the same time.

  Phibunsongkram became one of the least known but most successful dictators of the twentieth century. He took power first in 1938, was deposed in 1944, and then staged a remarkable political comeback in 1948, ruling until 1957, when he was deposed a second time after rigging dirty elections and mishandling a drought in the north. One could say that the whole period between 1932 and 1957 was dominated by the military and by Phibun, as he was known. It was he who imposed the name "Thailand," replacing the older and lovelier "Siam."

  Phibun was Thailand's Marshal Pétain. The country was occupied by the Japanese after suffering a brief invasion, but under his dictatorship she engineered a masterly surrender and compliance. The country was never a wartime Japanese colony in name; in practice, she was more like Vichy.

  Under Phibun, a program of cultural nationalism was undertaken between 1938 and 1944. The name of the country was changed, the Chinese were put in their place, and Thais for the first time were forced by law to wear Western dress. A bizarre system of personal regulation was set up, with citizens forbidden to board buses or to pay their taxes at government offices bareheaded. Twelve Cultural Mandates were passed, aimed at making Thais modern. The Western calendar was imposed, and Luang Wichit, the regime's chief propagandist, wrote that since the Chinese were comparable to the Jews of Germany, the same methods as Hitler's might be used against them.

  As the Japanese closed in, Phibun invaded Laos and Cambodia to recover provinces stolen from Siam by the French. As the calendar, the hat, and the clock were imposed, the government's slogan became "Thailand for the Thais!" just as the Thais became less Thai than ever. And just as Vichy gave birth to contemporary France, though few would like to admit it, so Phibun's Thailand gave rise to the nation around us now. Like all Western countries, it was forcibly wedded to the idea of progress, which was never defined or imagined except vaguely, as something that moves forward with such pitiless force that it can clothe itself with the adjective "inevitable."

  What did any of this have to do with the Pyathai? Nothing directly. But it did have something to do with the forgetting, with hasty burials. With amnesia and oblivion, or merely with carelessness.

  We followed the corridors until we came to a room filled with jolly portraits of King Bhumipol, the current incumbent on the Thai throne. By the doors there was a spacious patio like that of a colonial hotel, where the trees came close, spilling their humidity. It used to be a pleasure palace, a fin-de-siècle folly. There must have been costume parties, masked balls, ambassadorial receptions, flirtations of the upper class: but now the ceilings gaped with holes, were streaked with fungus. Daemkern was right. The city had little interest in its own past.

  An oily gloom washed across me as we pushed open a door where we were not supposed to go. It was a secretive little reception room with ten identical doors, and from the ceiling lamps trailed bizarre glass tassels like crystal jellyfish. We stepped inside and closed the door behind us. It was a hundred degrees inside. There was Rama VI again on a back wall, in his red silk suit, round-faced, melancholy and sympathetic, his hands folded in front of him, watching me with a birdy eye. A character out of Velázquez. So here was the man who had introduced the spoken Western play to Thailand, and did anyone go to spoken plays these days? Hardly anyone, I would imagine. And why had the utopian idea of Dusit Thani, the ideal city, not caught on? Because nobody wants to live inside a utopia? And because nobody trusts an eccentric king?

  INSURRECTION

  One night I got out at the Siam Skytrain station, where the "permanent demonstration" against the government was taking place. It was a party scene. Thousands of squatters were assembled under the Skytrain tracks across from the Paragon Mall, and as I exited the train with hundreds of students, pink balloons imprinted with the words Evil of Thailand closed in around me, along with red flags with an image of a mounted knight, a Thai Don Quixote, whose meaning escaped me. I went down to the street, between ad panels for Black Canyon Coffee and Pizza Hut. I sailed by a poster for a popular sorbet, a maid's strawberry face and the words Good Time Good Feeling. I bought a "Thaksin Devil" pin, stuck it in my shirt, and wandered through this doomed orgy. There's no point protesting globalism when you are sitting in its lap. Or perhaps that's all you can do.

  After listening to some hysterical speeches, I pushed through the mass to the commercial square beneath the Paragon Mall. I was not alone in the mall's glass atrium lobby, which is made bold by towering palms and waterfalls. Many participants in the demonstrations were also walking across the square to take a break inside the air-conditioned mall. On the ground floor, the Peninsula Café was full, the golf ball sets and teddy bears looking as if they might become animate at any moment, and there the exhausted demonstrators sat with tall iced coffees and green teas, exuding not the slightest hostility toward their surroundings. But why did I myself feel blind here, where the light was so dazzling, among the rocking horses, gemstones, garden furniture, and golfing slacks?

  In the basement mall metal water lilies rose from the ornamental ponds. There was a sound of water everywhere. On the ground floor stood a Pilates light aircraft for sale, around which a pensive Thai businessman was pacing as if considering buying it. What a way to spend one's evening—contemplating an aircraft purchase on the ground floor of a mall. A demonstration against globalization on one side of the square, a guy pondering a Pilates aircraft on the other. It seems to prove that demonstrations are a leftover of the nineteenth century.

  I went down to the Aquarium and wandered through glittering sea horses and baby sharks. Then upstairs again to a Lifestyle Gallery, where rows of cars were on sale. There were many "halls"—a Hall of Mirrors, a Hall of Fame. There was even a section named "World Class Brand Name" and a "Lifestyle and Leisure" floor. There were demonstrators here, too, taking a break: in Bang & Olufsen, the salesgirls stood stock-still, like funeral attendants awaiting their demise. The great galleries began to empty; on a wall, a garland of giant mock jewels and the golden word Bulgari began to fade as the lights were lowered a little and the tropical plants on either side of the ceremonial elevators took on a wilting sadness. I went to the floor where Thai antiques shops were arrayed, places like Exotique Thai and Bellitas, and sat on a bench in the Panyin Passage. Two women played a ranaat eek in the ghostly emptiness.

  •

  "Personally," Dennis said later that night when we met up, "I cannot see why anyone would demonstrate for or against something unless it were under a dictatorship. Only dictatorships are worried by demonstrations. Businessmen, mate, don't give a hoot about them. And democracies are run by businessmen and managers."

  "I don't mind being run by managers," I grumbled as we came out of Somboon's on Ratchada. "Not some of the time, anyway. You know what they say. Efficiency liberates."

  "When I was running the bank back in Perth, that was my motto. Now I think efficiency fucks you up."

  "Anyway, the demo was fun. The middle classes going beserk."

  "Mate, I can't think of anything worse than the middle classes going berserk. They are berserk all the time, aren't they?"

  It was time for one of our famous walks, and we set off into a toxic dusk. Down tough backstreets which intersected in a curvilinear way, to a large urban temple with blood- red gates and a turquoise wat which I had been visiting fo
r a few months.

  Surrounded by filthy canals and tin shacks, there was a long mural of Buddha sitting under his tree, as beautifully crude as something painted by children. I never knew what this temple was called, or why tattooed slum kids played soccer in its lovely vanilla courtyards. It was just there, and it was available. The surrounding neighborhood felt like an ancient village. The nearest street I could identify was Pracha Songkhro, and the neighborhood, as I perhaps wrongly understood it, was Huai Khwang.

  "I like it here," Dennis wheezed as he shuffled along, and I thought sadly that he looked indescribably shabby and old now, as if time had not only caught up with him but roughed him up in the process. "I sometimes come to Huai Khwang just to look at the youth. It feels like another city."

  He walked with his stick, leaning heavily on it and keeling leftward with each step. The handle was carved in the shape of a duck's head. He had recently been back to Perth to sell his house and now lived full-time in Bangkok. He wouldn't buy anything here, though, because he'd have no one to leave it to.

  "I'll be forgotten as soon as I die. Here you just melt away and it's like you never existed. This just encourages you to live in the present as much as you can. No worries."

  The sky has a neon tinge here, soft and elastic. The clotheslines draped all over the tenements look like Buddhist prayer flags fluttering around a stone outcrop in Tibet. They are real slum streets, chattering and gossipy, filled with little plant pots, smoked out with incense and furious woks.

  Dennis shook and flipped like a dried leaf, grinning at his own ridiculous frailty. He wore a crumpled straw hat, made in China of course, and its cheapo satin band had crumpled as well, like something worn in a bedroom night in and night out. He was crablike in his movements, probing surfaces with stick and foot, and sometimes hand, as if he were inching his way along a rock face upside down, defying the laws of gravity. All the while his eyes popped and slithered left and right as if considerable dangers lurked around every corner. I found myself helping him along, and as I did so, quiet tears came into my eyes and I had to subdue them because there was nothing that pithy Dennis hated more than a masculine tear, especially one being shed at his expense. Instead, he played Old Man, lifting his stick to point out curious details in the streets. A woman beating her husband with a newspaper on a distant balcony; two cats copulating by the side of a half-buried canal traversed by planks. A woman with a portable grill and bundles of eggs thrown over her shoulder.

  "Water, water," he murmured, "the whole place is made of water, built on water. Like life. Life is nearly all water, not stone."

  That night I was in Ratchada because Dennis had invited me to one of his card games which were held sometimes at the Swissotel. For years he had been excessively secretive about the card games he reputedly played with a circle of farang and Thai old-timers, one of whom was a retired Thai colonel of some notoriety whose name, like Beelzebub's, could not be uttered lest lightning strike you. People like McGinnis thought that Dennis made most of his "spare cash" playing in these poker games, because of course bank managers are good with figures and are rumored to make excellent card players. They can hold their own with anyone. I, on the other hand, was probably the shittiest card player in Asia. I could be beat by anyone, and to boot I was, as always, broke. No matter, said Dennis. He'd stump me the money to play a few hands. And, he added, I had to see the Swissotel, it was the most vulgar hotel on earth, outside of Malaysia. It was so vulgar it made your head spin; it made you sweat on a cold day. It was so vulgar there was nowhere else to play the Wednesday-night game.

  "And you?" he asked as we painfully made our way back to Ratchada and looked, through all-submersing traffic, for the butch outline of the Swissotel. "Are you in love yet? Married? Seeking?"

  "I am waiting in the wings."

  "You have that about you, mate: a waiter in wings. You'd better step out soon. No one gets any younger."

  "One doesn't necessarily get older, either."

  "Ha, a man after my own heart."

  •

  The Swissotel Concorde is a remarkable place. So vulgar that almost as soon as you enter it you begin to feel intoxicated, assaulted by fairies, carried away by some mysterious force of which only the purveyors of extreme vulgarity are the custodians. At the door stood a footman in a tall white top hat and white gloves. For a second, he could have been mistaken for a giant rabbit.

  Inside, you are in a business hotel exhibiting a certain restraint. There's a fairly normal lobby with fairly normal-looking suits. Look up, however, and you see that you are under a vast cupola copied with some license—but almost exactly—from the Sistine Chapel. Adam, God, outstretched hands, the ignition point of evolution: it's all there. All right, that's not so bad. You've seen worse. But there is something about the scale of the thing. It's the monumental black columns that surround it and the chandelier from hell that drops down from the middle of it. Your eyes bulge and ache. You know this is European bad taste, not the Asian variety. This is the sort of thing the Mitteleuropean entrepreneur class would love to build in Europe if they could get the permits and the space. Dennis looked up, squinted, and laughed.

  "It bears all the hallmarks of our old friend Helix. He's still around, you know. And this is exactly the kind of mierda he likes to paint."

  Subtending to this funeral parlor is an equally outsized dining room, which hosts one of the city's more cavernous buffets. Men in puffy toques stand around ready to explain the dubious contents of the metal containers around which a motley crowd of international types fuss like hesitant birds. The walls are fleshed out with long, detailed frescoes detailing many scenes from the life of ancient Greece. A view of mountains that suggest Delphi on a fine day, girls in flowing chitons, sandaled ephebes in greaves and garlands. A sound of fountains and a great pentagonal lamp with copper leaves sprouting from it. One of the most curious things about Bangkok is the way that Greco-Roman motifs are freely used to varnish buildings with an aura of power and respectability. The content of these motifs is not really known, but satai roman is so widely used by the rich, by developers, and by the aspirant middle classes that one has to conclude that they see something in Greece and Rome that they want to associate with. The entertainment palace next door to the Swissotel is called Caesar's.

  In one corner of this pseudo-palatial room sat the card cabal, five older men in light summer shirts eating from plates of pork satay. They were all farang except for a mottled old Thai with an eye patch. He was "Mr. S."

  What followed was odd, to say the least. A scene from Gombrowicz, the writer I found myself reading and rereading and devouring afresh in Bangkok—the supreme artist of exile. The seven of us seemed to know each other, and yet we did not know each other. I thought we would be playing for money, but in fact there was no money on the table at all. There were merely notepads and seven pens. The farangs were paunchy and mottled, too, men who had been here since the seventies. One of them was wearing a Marine Corps beret, class of '44, and another had laid a pair of crutches against the wall. They hurled little pellets of comradely sarcasm at the late arrival, and I saw now with some surprise that Dennis had a social life after all, that he was somewhat less lonely than I had assumed him to be.

  "You old lecher. Who's the lad?"

  "A younger lecher. A lad no more—but looks young for his age, wouldn't you say? Or he might be a hundred for all I know. I picked him up on the street years ago."

  "Siddown, then."

  The card game is a showdown, a theatrical confrontation which turns its participants into masks who act exactly according to a hidden nature.

  "How many numbers do you have?" Mr. S asked in excellent English.

  "Numbers?"

  "We trade numbers at this table, not money. Did Bob tell you?"

  "Bob?"

  Dennis winked at me. So here he was Bob.

  "Bob," the eye-patched one said. "Does he have a few numbers?"

  "Of course he does. He's a farang in
Bangkok, isn't he? How could he not have numbers? I wouldn't have asked him if he didn't."

  It was clear enough what they meant. Each player wrote down a telephone number on a sheet and tendered it as a kind of chip. I groaned inwardly, since apart from the fact that I had no numbers to offer, I saw little point in receiving them, either. Assuming that they were the numbers of night ladies. I played only in order to be close a little longer to Dennis, whom I loved in a way, and whom I always considered to be on the brink of an unnameable disaster from which he would have to be saved. I wrote down all sorts of numbers and "lost" them. They included the local electricity company's hot line, a friend who had moved back to Antwerp, and the press office of the Human Development Agency's Catholic outreach hospice in Klong Tuey. All the while, Dennis chattered away. He was making progress with his painting. He was writing a journal about Bangkok, which would be a unique record of the city at the beginning of the twenty-first century. No one would read it after his death, but no matter. He might donate it to Chulalongkorn University. A course for freshmen in 2050: Farangs in the Bangkok Fin-de-Siècle.

  "You're a bloody fool, Bob," someone said with laconic tone. "You should just stick to Q Bar."

  •

  We played till midnight. The men told their stories for the sake of a newcomer. One of them was a detective who chased down false insurance claims.

  "I am not the legendary Byron Bales," the guy said ruefully. "I am Mr. Cling. That's what they call me, Mr. Cling. A nickname is as good as a name in this place."

  Cling was about sixty, Canadian, with some sort of paramilitary background. For as Farlo had pointed out, the city was a magnet for ex-military types who couldn't reintegrate back into normal civvie life. It was a fine place for people who missed battlefields.

  "I had a guy last month who jumped off a yacht—his own yacht—off Costa Rica and was presumed drowned. He'd gone to amazing lengths. Left a wife, a kid, the lot. They held a funeral in Santa Barbara. He didn't have debts; he didn't have a motive at all. No mistress, nothing. He just wanted to disappear. Just for the hell of it. A midlife crisis. There comes a moment when you've just had enough and you jump. You might not even know why. Of course, most of them are after the insurance money."