Bangkok Days Page 2

  Woodlands Inn was on Charung Soi 32, with 300-baht-an-hour rooms and an Indian restaurant full of cow-eyed crooks. It smelled of condoms and ghee. And who, I wondered, ran the Dr. Manoj Clinic and the Memon Clinic next to it, all those dingy abortion clinics assembled inside the same courtyard as the Woodlands? Who used this corner of a city of ten million, darting in and out of its cubicles? The Indians were all playing backgammon. There was no Cambodian brandy.

  "But I had it last time!" the Englishman shouted.

  "It is not existing. Royal Stag Indian whiskey we are having."

  They began to play some sad Calcutta music, and the old men sang along, their eyes croony and wet. It was a mood. We sat outside on a bench, surrounded by the hollow music of cicadas hanging from the telephone cables, and McGinnis said, "Those cables. Have you noticed that every street has these masses of tangled cables? It's because the telephone company never replaces or takes down cables that have ceased functioning. They simply add new ones, ad nauseam. Eventually the cables will take over the city. I think of them as a life-form, possibly predatory."

  At the corner of Charung Krung, the cables were bunched into ancient clusters that were beginning to droop downward to head level, like an infestation of metal wisteria. The city's infuriating topography isn't a rational system at all, it isn't European, it isn't anything one can seize. Near Soi 32—soi is the Thai word for a small street—Chinese jewelers and antiquarians sweltered below the cables, Yoo Lim and Thong Thai, and after them came landmarks that my eye had learned to pick out after seeing them a couple of times: the slim neoclassical building housing the Express Light company with its sooted Corinthian capitals, a bright sign for A.A. Philatelic. But it was all flattened in the eye.

  McGinnis got up. His immense size caused the Indians to fall silent. The heat made his face glisten and his hair stuck up in greasy tufts. His Gulati suit was now wrinkled and he said he wanted to show me something beautiful, "something beautiful," as he said, "in an ugly city."

  MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

  As we entered the Muslim neighborhood around the Haroun Mosque, McGinnis told me about the air-conditioning business, which was technically intricate and, like all things intricate for a good reason, fascinating. Refrigeration itself seemed so much more convincing than writing articles for a living. It had a point: it improved people's lives, even though it damaged the ozone layer. It made the world colder, which is never a bad thing.

  So when he asked what I was doing, I said, "I'm treading water." Tactfully, he let it go at that because it is understood among the full-time lammers that Bangkok is an asylum for those who have lapsed into dilettantism, as one might lapse into a temporary period of mental instability. The great projects, the ambitious flights of the mind—all trashed. They might revive, but not now.

  This idleness enters the movements of the body. One loses electrical fire and nervosity. Even the hands and feet become languid. So we talked instead about sex, in empty Muslim alleys where there was none. Hadn't Buddhist Bangkok quietly accepted its role as the provider of sexual services to the rest of the planet? In a global economy it was inevitable that some place would. But what did that tell you about the rest of the world?

  Men can talk for hours about sex, but they don't know what it is exactly they are discussing. It is a lacuna, not a real subject. They edge their way around a slipping vacuum, because they are investigating not sex but women, and women are sometimes a lacuna in their minds where there should be something solid. But when they are in Bangkok, they converse about it with greater intensity, because their own women are no longer present, nor even at the edges of their field of vision. They are in a place where they can behave like gay men, where their masculinity is condensed, intensified.

  We inspected the mosque and McGinnis knew all its history, from the time of its founding by an Indonesian immigrant in 1928. It was partially colored like a chocolate egg, and so light in construction that its wood could have been mistaken for paper. Lean and tattered, McGinnis seemed so perfectly adapted to this context that one had to wonder how much of his time he spent nosing around these dead-end streets, history books in hand. There are men like the walking books in Fahrenheit 451 who are content to pass their lives slowly filling up with knowledge which can never be used, and it is the very filling up that gives them a sense of life's pointless sweetness.

  "It may be," he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing them with the German-made Brillen-Putztücher wipes he carried with him at all times, "that this is the one building in Bangkok that lasts a thousand years, because nobody will bother with it."

  •

  We rolled a joint and smoked it with the deliberation of two old men sharing a bottle of wine. I noticed for the first time the fine white scars on McGinnis's cheeks, like the tracks of skates on fresh ice. A childhood disease, a brush with a crocodile or a filariasis worm, a sign from the beyond? It made his square, military head look morbidly dashing, as if they were saber wounds. He had done two years at Sandhurst, after all. He had fencer's hands.

  "I have wondered," he drawled, "if we could invent a new word for cock? I have considered Sí Señora, already much used in Latin America. Or Roger the Dodger."

  "Then cunt would be Sí Señor?"

  "Precisely. But I like 'cunt.' 'Cunt' is a lovely word. A noble word."

  It goes back to John Wilmot, he said, and even further, to the Domesday Book, where it wasn't mentioned, to Edward the Confessor, and maybe even to the Venerable Bede.

  "The Venerable Bede said 'cunt'?"

  "He would have said cynt. That's the Anglo-Saxon. In Chaucer it's pronounced queynte. A word that also meant cunning. The word 'cunt,' in fact, is unfairly vilified. A man who genuinely loves women doesn't trawl the streets at night thinking, 'I wish I could get some vagina tonight.' Not at all, he thinks, I want some cunt. I can't understand why a woman would be with someone who uses the word "vagina" in his internal monologues. It just means 'receptacle' in Latin. The Vagina Monologues? I'd rather have The Cunt Dialogues. 'Cunt' comes from the Indo-European root ku, a word associated with both femininity and knowledge."

  "By the way," he added, "have you noticed that whenever you type 'cunt' into a Microsoft Word document it underlines it in red as an unknown word? That's underground power."

  We came to windows through which we could see whole families on their bellies gathered around three-inch TV sets, among saucers of cardamom and piles of comics, the thresholds lined with cloth slippers. The houses were yellow and turquoise behind metal screens, with steeply angled gardens packed with fruit trees and shielded by graceful wooden doors painted fir-green and red. Such places are rare in Bangkok, remains of an old city that few can now remember and which are now being plowed under in a prolonged fit of amnesia. In them one's conversation with the past resumes so that one falls silent even in company and walks like a street cat, guided by the night retina.

  Along one side of this neighborhood and close to the water stands a square Italian villa decorated with weed trees, decayed into a living ruin: the old Customs House known as Khong Phasi, now the Bang Rak fire station. Within a lunette carved from the façade is a woman's face, turned to one side, smiling like someone waving goodbye from a train window. She is carefully individuated, a face out of the past and delicately set as a blancmange.

  From the firehouse an alley called Trok Rong Phasi ran back to the French Embassy, and the shadows of summery trees lay across it. We turned and drank in this fermenting ruin, constructed by an exiled Italian engineer in 1892 as a memory of the ruined street corners of Genoa, which he must have missed.

  "That's what I wanted to show you," McGinnis said, nodding at the lunette and the woman's head. "He was clearly inspired by a Della Robbia in Florence, wouldn't you say?"

  I went frequently to Trok Rong Phasi by myself after that, learning the way its alleys intersected, and finding that they formed a beautiful pattern like a torn spiderweb. On occasion I got an ice cream and paused by the massive gates
of the French Embassy with its twin lamps, looking up at the sweep of a nineteenth-century terrace where women in baking crinolines must once have taken the river air.

  SI OUEY

  In the waterside café, a group of Scandinavian girls had gathered under the parasols, pink as crayfish in that dust- tinged light. They talked so loudly we could hear the gaps between their sentences. On the part of the property that faced the water, an Australian renter named Dennis was seated in front of an easel, picking at a watercolor. I had never seen him before so openly revealed in the sun, an elderly man with skin as white as fine library dust, with a fop of dyed blond hair falling between his eyes, as it must have all his life. I remember thinking, "Women must have loved that fop of hair," and wondering who he really was. A retiree, the others said, who liked the Thai girls. Wife dead, keeps to himself. When I went over to have a look at his watercolor, he didn't say "G'day, mate," but "Good afternoon," and I saw that his painting was an exact replica of the far side of the river. He put on a pair of incredibly frail spectacles and finally dipped his brush into a pot of water. I could hear him thinking in the gloom, "Another useful day completed in the great annals of aimlessness."

  "Have you met that Spaniard?" he said as we sat on the pier, looking at the Nordics. "A terrible painter."

  "I'm avoiding him for the moment."

  "They say he did a mural in Bumrungrad Hospital. In the Italian restaurant there. I went in there one day when I was having a checkup and had a look."

  "And?"

  "It's called the Portofino. It's fine dining for the invalids. I went into the bar and got myself a martini just to look at his work. I'm curious, I'm a painter too, as you can see. Not a pro, but I like it all the same."

  He was a bit like my grandfather, a man whom I had adored. An amateur scholar of sorts. He got up and said, "Come and have a beer with me on the terrace."

  From there, we looked down at the Primrose.

  "Cheap and comfy at least," he said sadly. "Cheap and comfy for the masses, dear."

  He was reedy and awkward, tensile, with big popping hand veins, and he wore a woodcutter shirt day after day. Retired bank manager. He came here half the year. He spent the other half in Perth.

  "Horrible place, Perth. Bangkok's where you find your youth again."

  I said that I hadn't found mine.

  "You're not sixty yet. Come back when you're sixty."

  "I won't be coming here when I'm sixty."

  "There are worse places in which to be sixty."

  He added that what Bangkok offered to the aging human was a culture of complete physicality. It was tactile, humans pressing against each other in healing heat: the massage, the bath, the foot therapy, the handjob, you name it. The physical isolation and sterility of Western life, its physical boredom, was unimaginable.

  "There's a reason we're so neurotic and violent and unhappy. Especially as we get on a bit, no one ever touches us."

  I thought of him returning from work every evening to a neat suburban house in Perth, until the day his wife died and everything came unstuck. Twenty years of not being touched? That was the way it had been, but one couldn't say it. The forlorn rags of growing old, or a last beautiful disgrace in the Land of Smiles. He had taken the arduous leap into the latter. But I wanted to know about the mural in Bumrungrad Hospital.

  "I got myself a martini at the bar. The mural is behind all the bottles. They have some damn good aged scotches there. It's a Thai hospital after all. Then there was this mad painting. I think it showed Christ turning up at a drinking party of Alexander the Great. I could see the Greeks in their tunics anyway, and there was the Savior, looking bloody liquored up. And there was Saint Peter, I think, swigging from a bottle of Gordon's. It was all very strange. But I knew it was good for that Spaniard to have painted. He did a frightful caca for the Shangri-La Hotel over there. I know that for a fact. What they call an absterraction."

  And he pointed at the Shangri-La, far downriver.

  "Did you ask the Spaniard himself?"

  "One doesn't talk to Spaniards, mate. They're all crackers. I've been wondering, in fact, where all these Latins have come from. You seem like a nice young man. I wouldn't talk to the rest of them, if I were you. They seem like a bunch of skunks to me. I wouldn't touch them with a shitty stick. Especially that McGinnis. He's got the air of a right little schnauzer."

  He used the word literally.

  "Do you paint in Perth?" I asked.

  "Crocs, the beach, sunsets. You name it, I paint it."

  We admired the breadth and pugnacity of the river. Its waves crashed noisily against the pier. A river with waves. It was our kind of river, a real bitch of a river.

  A water taxi drew up and a nubile girl in a black two-piece suit jumped off. Dennis got to his feet at once and began waving.

  "Over'ere, Porntit!"

  She looked up and I felt a stab of jealousy.

  Dennis sat down again.

  "Mate, you got to love a country where Porntit is a real name."

  In fact, the name is Porntip.

  •

  Through my windows poured all the noise of Wang Lang. Blindfolded, you would think it was a waterfall, a cataract striking beds of smooth stones. At the corner, blind wikipo musicians played kuen pipes and an old woman cried out her guts into a microphone. A few luuk thung country songs, the bittersweet music of Thailand's rural misery.

  I got up at four, put on sandals, and wandered down to the ferry. The monks came off the boats in a swarm, reeking of God. Standing by this part of the river, you have the partial illusion of being in an old city; the embankments are filled with rotting warehouses in that economical Sino-Thai "row house" style known as hong taew. After a few days I noticed that Porntip arrived at the pier at the same time every day. She had a quick eye for farangs and she made it her business to catch mine as she came up the jetty, swinging a fake Fendi bag. This eye-play is at the core of the city's erotic juggling of East and West. She was not always with Dennis, and I sometimes caught her walking through the premises as if at a loose end, simply dressed in jeans and tank top, looking like one of the students from the universities, which is what she was. She would knock on doors, the rap echoing down the cement corridors, and there was something brittle and excessively polite about that knock. Presumably she didn't need to say anything. When it happened to me, she didn't bother opening a conversation, she stepped into the corridor of my unit smelling of pharmaceutically processed alpine flowers. She didn't mention money. She walked in, tossed off her shoes, and asked me if I had any orange juice. She was from the provincial town of Udon, and studied Chinese. Nothing about her revealed her methods of procuring supplemental income.

  There are 200,000 girls working in Thailand at this twilight game, though nothing close to the two million that NGOs once claimed. The majority are freelancers, or part-timers, slippery single-woman entrepreneurs who wheel and deal by themselves, barely noticed by the society around them. Many are migrants from the north, from places like the rice-growing plains of Issan, though Porntip was not one of those. She seemed familiar with the layout of the Primrose Apartments, and with the mental states of the men she did business with. She seemed amused by them. Big, simple children with a twist of guilt inside them. She once told me she could not believe how polite and apologetic they were. Did they think they were doing something wrong? If they did, what was it?

  She stayed all afternoon, and afterward we listened to CDs or played Scrabble. There seemed to be no schedule boxing her in, her time was malleable and extendable. When she left I had to pass the banknotes into her hand, a gesture which I had never made before—the damp notes sliding from palm to palm, suddenly weighty and acrimonious, and she caught my eye as if to say "See?" The internal barrier broken.

  There is a word in Thai, sanuk, which embodies the idea of enjoying life to the full as a duty. It is usually translated as "fun" or "pleasure," but it is really untranslatable. Porntip was a bearer of sanuk. She came ev
ery fourth day for a month, with a curious punctuality, as if she was coming upriver between classes. Sometimes she said she was avoiding Dennis and made me promise not to tell him. We made love on the wood floor, burning knees and elbows, crushed flat against the white paint of the walls. Once she made me cut off her ponytail with a pair of scissors and laughed for ten minutes. Other times, she was silent, concentrated, determined on something undisclosed. We are told ceaselessly that sex and love are two different things that merge only within monogamy, a tirade straight out of the Dark Ages. It is categorically untrue. With a quick, mysterious tropism one loves every woman one fucks. I loved Porntip, but it didn't have to be elaborated. Even the most disgusting misogynist sex tourist is secretly in love with the thing he tries so hard to defile. That love gnaws at him and you can see it in his furious, ruddy face. And Porntip was only doing this for a year, she said, before she graduated and moved on. She said once:

  "This part of the river is haunted. Have you ever heard of Si Ouey? He's buried right next door, in Thonburi. Rapist and murderer! He's in the hospital museum; you should go see him and say hello. Of course I'm not going with you! His ghost is still there. It's still walking about at night. You should be careful."

  •

  I go a single stop upriver to the Thonburi pier. It is so close to Wang Lang you can practically see it from the Primrose, but like Wang Lang very few foreigners stop there and there is a desultory, shabby quality to the place. Thonburi, on the left bank of the river, is where Bangkok began. This is where the early fort was built and where the court resided.

  I get off at the pier. It is a scrum of dogs and young soldiers prone on the benches which line the passageway to the street, a smell of burned grass. There is a large Victorian-style railway station here, where train operations have been suspended. A street leads up to Wat Suwannaram, where Thai royalty used to be cremated. Then there's a sign for the Siriaj Hospital. The Forensics and Parasitology Museums can be found on the second floor of the Anatomy Building in this nondescript hospital founded by King Rama V and named after his dead baby son.