“No. I know that. The purpose is to look like a gentleman.”
I laughed. Yamyong was not put off. “I have noticed that some men wear the two ends equal, and some wear the wide end longer than the narrow, or the narrow longer than the wide. And the neckties themselves, they are not all the same length, are they? Some even with both ends equal reach below the waist. What are the different meanings?”
“There is no meaning,” I said. “Absolutely none.”
He looked to Brooks for confirmation, but Brooks was trying out his Thai on Prasert and Vichai, and so he was silent and thoughtful for a moment. “I believe you, of course,” he said graciously. “But we all thought each way had a different significance attached.”
As we went out of the hotel, the doorman bowed respectfully. Until now he had never given a sign that he was aware of my existence. The wearers of the yellow robe carry weight in Thailand.
A few Sundays later I agreed to go with Brooks and our friends to Ayudhaya. The idea of a Sunday outing is so repellent to me that deciding to take part in this one was to a certain extent a compulsive act. Ayudhaya lies less than fifty miles up the Chao Phraya from Bangkok. For historians and art collectors it is more than just a provincial town; it is a period and a style—having been the Thai capital for more than four centuries. Very likely it still would be, had the Burmese not laid it waste in the eighteenth century.
Brooks came early to fetch me. Downstairs in the street stood the three bhikkus with their book bags and parasols. They hailed a cab, and without any previous price arrangements (the ordinary citizen tries to fix a sum beforehand) we got in and drove for twenty minutes or a half-hour, until we got to a bus terminal on the northern outskirts of the city.
It was a nice, old-fashioned, open bus. Every part of it rattled, and the air from the rice fields blew across us as we pieced together our bits of synthetic conversation. Brooks, in high spirits, kept calling across to me: “Look! Water buffaloes!” As we went further away from Bangkok there were more of the beasts, and his cries became more frequent. Yamyong, sitting next to me, whispered: “Professor Brooks is fond of buffaloes?” I laughed and said I didn’t think so.
“Then?”
I said that in America there were no buffaloes in the fields, and that was why Brooks was interested in seeing them. There were no temples in the landscape, either, I told him, and added, perhaps unwisely: “He looks at buffaloes. I look at temples.” This struck Yamyong as hilarious, and he made allusions to it now and then all during the day.
The road stretched ahead, straight as a line in geometry, across the verdant, level land. Paralleling it on its eastern side was a fairly wide canal, here and there choked with patches of enormous pink lotuses. In places the flowers were gone and only the pods remained, thick green disks with the circular seeds embedded in their flesh. At the first stop the bhikkus got out. They came aboard again with mangosteens and lotus pods and insisted on giving us large numbers of each. The huge seeds popped out of the fibrous lotus cakes as though from a punchboard; they tasted almost like green almonds. “Something new for you today, I think,” Yamyong said with a satisfied air.
Ayudhaya was hot, dusty, spread-out, its surrounding terrain strewn with ruins that scarcely showed through the vegetation. At some distance from the town there began a wide boulevard sparingly lined with important-looking buildings. It continued for a way and then came to an end as abrupt as its beginning. Growing up out of the scrub, and built of small russet-colored bricks, the ruined temples looked still unfinished rather than damaged by time. Repairs, done in smeared cement, veined their façades.
The bus’s last stop was still two or three miles from the center of Ayudhaya. We got down into the dust, and Brooks declared: “The first thing we must do is find food. They can’t eat anything solid, you know, after midday.”
“Not noon exactly,” Yamyong said. “Maybe one o’clock or a little later.”
“Even so, that doesn’t leave much time,” I told him. “It’s quarter to twelve now.”
But the bhikkus were not hungry. None of them had visited Ayudhaya before, and so they had compiled a list of things they most wanted to see. They spoke with a man who had a station wagon parked nearby, and we set off for a ruined stupa that lay some miles to the southwest. It had been built atop a high mound, which we climbed with some difficulty, so that Brooks could take pictures of us standing within a fissure in the decayed outer wall. The air stank of the bats that lived inside.
When we got back to the bus stop, the subject of food arose once again, but the excursion had put the bhikkus into such a state of excitement that they could not bear to allot time for anything but looking. We went to the museum. It was quiet; there were Khmer heads and documents inscribed in Pali. The day had begun to be painful. I told myself I had known beforehand that it would.
Then we went to a temple. I was impressed, not so much by the gigantic Buddha which all but filled the interior, as by the fact that not far from the entrance a man sat on the floor playing a ranad (pronounced lanat). Although I was familiar with the sound of it from listening to recordings of Siamese music, I had never before seen the instrument. There was a graduated series of wooden blocks strung together, the whole slung like a hammock over a boat-shaped resonating stand. The tones hurried after one another like drops of water falling very fast. After the painful heat outside, everything in the temple suddenly seemed a symbol of the concept of coolness—the stone floor under my bare feet, the breeze that moved through the shadowy interior, the bamboo fortune sticks being rattled in their long box by those praying at the altar, and the succession of insubstantial, glassy sounds that came from the ranad. I thought: If only I could get something to eat, I wouldn’t mind the heat so much.
We got into the center of Ayudhaya a little after three o’clock. It was hot and noisy; the bhikkus had no idea of where to look for a restaurant, and the prospect of asking did not appeal to them. The five of us walked aimlessly. I had come to the conclusion that neither Prasert nor Vichai understood spoken English, and I addressed myself earnestly to Yamyong. “We’ve got to eat.” He stared at me with severity. “We are searching,” he told me.
Eventually we found a Chinese restaurant on a corner of the principal street. There was a table full of boisterous Thais drinking mekong (categorized as whiskey, but with the taste of cheap rum) and another table occupied by an entire Chinese family. These people were doing some serious eating, their faces buried in their rice bowls. It cheered me to see them: I was faint, and had half expected to be told that there was no hot food available.
The large menu in English which was brought us must have been typed several decades ago and wiped with a damp rag once a week ever since. Under the heading SPECIALITIES were some dishes that caught my eye, and as I went through the list I began to laugh. Then I read it aloud to Brooks.
“Fried Sharks Fins and Bean Sprout
Chicken Chins Stuffed with Shrimp
Fried Rice Birds
Shrimps Balls and Green Marrow
Pigs Lights with Pickles
Braked Rice Bird in Port Wine
Fish Head and Bean Curd”
Although it was natural for our friends not to join in the laughter, I felt that their silence was not merely failure to respond; it was heavy, positive.
A moment later three Pepsi-Cola bottles were brought and placed on the table. “What are you going to have?” Brooks asked Yamyong.
“Nothing, thank you,” he said lightly. “This will be enough for us today.”
“But this is terrible! You mean no one is going to eat anything?”
“You and your friend will eat your food,” said Yamyong. (He might as well have said “fodder.”) Then he, Prasert, and Vichai stood up, and carrying their Pepsi-Cola bottles with them, went to sit at a table on the other side of the room. Now and then Yamyong smiled sternly across at us.
“I wish they’d stop watching us,” Brooks said under his breath.
?
??They were the ones who kept putting it off,” I reminded him. But I felt guilty, and I was annoyed at finding myself placed in the position of the self-indulgent unbeliever. It was almost as bad as eating in front of Moslems during Ramadan.
We finished our meal and set out immediately, following Yamyong’s decision to visit a certain temple he wanted to see. The taxi drive led us through a region of thorny scrub. Here and there, in the shade of spreading flat-topped trees, were great round pits, full of dark water and crowded with buffaloes; only their wet snouts and horns were visible. Brooks was already crying: “Buffaloes! Hundreds of them!” He asked the taxi driver to stop so that he could photograph the animals.
“You will have buffaloes at the temple,” said Yamyong. He was right; there was a muddy pit filled with them only a few hundred feet from the building. Brooks went and took his pictures while the bhikkus paid their routine visit to the shrine. I wandered into a courtyard where there was a long row of stone Buddhas. It is the custom of temple-goers to plaster little squares of gold leaf onto the religious statues in the wats. When thousands of them have been stuck onto the same surface, tiny scraps of the gold come unstuck. Then they tremble in the breeze, and the figure shimmers with a small, vibrant life of its own. I stood in the courtyard watching this quivering along the arms and torsos of the Buddhas, and I was reminded of the motion of the bô-tree’s leaves. When I mentioned it to Yamyong in the taxi, I think he failed to understand, for he replied: “The bô-tree is a very great tree for Buddhists.”
Brooks sat beside me on the bus going back to Bangkok. We spoke only now and then. After so many hours of resisting the heat, it was relaxing to sit and feel the relatively cool air that blew in from the rice fields. The driver of the bus was not a believer in cause and effect. He passed trucks with oncoming traffic in full view. I felt better with my eyes shut, and I might even have dozed off, had there not been in the back of the bus a man, obviously not in control, who was intent on making as much noise as possible. He began to shout, scream, and howl almost as soon as we had left Ayudhaya, and he did this consistently throughout the journey. Brooks and I laughed about it, conjecturing whether he was crazy or only drunk. The aisle was too crowded for me to be able to see him from where I sat. Occasionally I glanced at the other passengers. It was as though they were entirely unaware of the commotion behind them. As we drew closer to the city, the screams became louder and almost constant.
“God, why don’t they throw him off?” Brooks was beginning to be annoyed.
“They don’t even hear him,” I said bitterly. People who can tolerate noise inspire me with envy and rage. Finally I leaned over and said to Yamyong: “That poor man back there! It’s incredible!”
“Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “He’s very busy.” This set me thinking what a civilized and tolerant people they were, and I marvelled at the sophistication of the word “busy” to describe what was going on in the back of the bus.
Finally we were in a taxi driving across Bangkok. I would be dropped at my hotel and Brooks would take the three bhikkus on to their wat. In my head I was still hearing the heartrending cries. What had the repeated word patterns meant?
I had not been able to give an acceptable answer to Yamyong in his bewilderment about the significance of the necktie, but perhaps he could satisfy my curiosity here.
“That man in the back of the bus, you know?”
Yamyong nodded. “He was working very hard, poor fellow. Sunday is a bad day.”
I disregarded the nonsense. “What was he saying?”
“Oh, he was saying: ‘Go into second gear,’ or ‘We are coming to a bridge,’ or ‘Be careful, people in the road.’ Whatever he saw.”
Since neither Brooks nor I appeared to have understood, he went on. “All the buses must have a driver’s assistant. He watches the road and tells the driver how to drive. It is hard work because he must shout loud enough for the driver to hear him.”
“But why doesn’t he sit up in front with the driver?”
“No, no. There must be one in front and one in the back. That way two men are responsible for the bus.”
It was an unconvincing explanation for the grueling sounds we had heard, but to show him that I believed him I said: “Aha! I see.”
The taxi drew up in front of the hotel and I got out. When I said good-by to Yamyong, he replied, I think with an shade of aggrievement: “Good-by. You have left your lotus pods on the bus.”
(1977)
Allal
HE WAS BORN in the hotel where his mother worked. The hotel had only three dark rooms which gave on a courtyard behind the bar. Beyond was another smaller patio with many doors. This was where the servants lived, and where Allal spent his childhood.
The Greek who owned the hotel had sent Allal’s mother away. He was indignant because she, a girl of fourteen, had dared to give birth while she was working for him. She would not say who the father was, and it angered him to reflect that he himself had not taken advantage of the situation while he had had the chance. He gave the girl three months’ wages and told her to go home to Marrakech. Since the cook and his wife liked the girl and offered to let her live with them for a while, he agreed that she might stay on until the baby was big enough to travel. She remained in the back patio for a few months with the cook and his wife, and then one day she disappeared, leaving the baby behind. No one heard of her again.
As soon as Allal was old enough to carry things, they set him to work. It was not long before he could fetch a pail of water from the well behind the hotel. The cook and his wife were childless, so that he played alone.
When he was somewhat older he began to wander over the empty table-land outside. There was nothing else up here but the barracks, and they were enclosed by a high blind wall of red adobe. Everything else was below in the valley: the town, the gardens, and the river winding southward among the thousands of palm trees. He could sit on a point of rock far above and look down at the people walking in the alleys of the town. It was only later that he visited the place and saw what the inhabitants were like. Because he had been left behind by his mother they called him a son of sin, and laughed when they looked at him. It seemed to him that in this way they hoped to make him into a shadow, in order not to have to think of him as real and alive. He awaited with dread the time when he would have to go each morning to the town and work. For the moment he helped in the kitchen and served the officers from the barracks, along with the few motorists who passed through the region. He got small tips in the restaurant, and free food and lodging in a cell of the servants’ quarters, but the Greek gave him no wages. Eventually he reached an age when this situation seemed shameful, and he went of his own accord to the town below and began to work, along with other boys of his age, helping to make the mud bricks people used for building their houses.
Living in the town was much as he had imagined it would be. For two years he stayed in a room behind a blacksmith’s shop, leading a life without quarrels, and saving whatever money he did not have to spend to keep himself alive. Far from making any friends during this time, he formed a thorough hatred for the people of the town, who never allowed him to forget that he was a son of sin, and therefore not like others, but meskhot—damned. Then he found a small house, not much more than a hut, in the palm groves outside the town. The rent was low and no one lived nearby. He went to live there, where the only sound was the wind in the trees, and avoided the people of the town when he could.
One hot summer evening shortly after sunset he was walking under the arcades that faced the town’s main square. A few paces ahead of him an old man in a white turban was trying to shift a heavy sack from one shoulder to the other. Suddenly it fell to the ground, and Allal stared as two dark forms flowed out of it and disappeared into the shadows. The old man pounced upon the sack and fastened the top of it, at the same time beginning to shout: Look out for the snakes! Help me find my snakes!
Many people turned quickly around and walked back the wa
y they had come. Others stood at some distance, watching. A few called to the old man: Find your snakes fast and get them out of here! Why are they here? We don’t want snakes in this town!
Hopping up and down in his anxiety, the old man turned to Allal. Watch this for me a minute, my son. He pointed at the sack lying on the earth at his feet, and snatching up a basket he had been carrying, went swiftly around the corner into an alley. Allal stood where he was. No one passed by.
It was not long before the old man returned, panting with triumph. When the onlookers in the square saw him again, they began to call out, this time to Allal: Show that berrani the way out of the town! He has no right to carry those things in here. Out! Out!
Allal picked up the big sack and said to the old man: Come on.
They left the square and went through the alleys until they were at the edge of town. The old man looked up then, saw the palm trees black against the fading sky ahead, and turned to the boy beside him.
Come on, said Allal again, and he went to the left along the rough path that led to his house. The old man stood perplexed.
You can stay with me tonight, Allal told him.
And these? he said, pointing first at the sack and then at the basket. They have to be with me.
Allal grinned. They can come.
When they were sitting in the house Allal looked at the sack and the basket. I’m not like the rest of them here, he said.
It made him feel good to hear the words being spoken. He made a contemptuous gesture. Afraid to walk through the square because of a snake. You saw them.
The old man scratched his chin. Snakes are like people, he said. You have to get to know them. Then you can be their friends.
Allal hesitated before he asked: Do you ever let them out?
Always, the old man said with energy. It’s bad for them to be inside like this. They’ve got to be healthy when they get to Taroudant, or the man there won’t buy them.
He began a long story about his life as a hunter of snakes, explaining that each year he made a voyage to Taroudant to see a man who bought them for the Aissaoua snake-charmers in Marrakech. Allal made tea while he listened, and brought out a bowl of kif paste to eat with the tea. Later, when they were sitting comfortably in the midst of the pipesmoke, the old man chuckled. Allal turned to look at him.