Only a slight exaggeration. I had watched Monsieur Truffaut in the mornings as he crossed the great spaces of his Cinquième Arrondissement mansion flat in his paisley dressing gown, looking exactly like the undead. It was as if he’d left his mind in the grave during the night and did not catch up with the fact of being alive until after twelve o’clock, when he swallowed his collection of pills.
Nong reported that her bedtime duties were not heavy. He was one of those Frenchmen who had enjoyed a young female body next to him in bed all his life and saw no reason to give up the habit merely because his biology was failing.
It was hardly a strain to fit in with the old man’s rituals. Nong and I had the mornings to ourselves. The old man would spend the hour between 12 and 1 p.m. digesting his pills and the daily newspapers with increasing vigor as the drugs took hold, then we would march off to one of the world-class restaurants at which he was treated like the Roi-Soleil. Maxim’s, Lucas Carton, the restaurant at Fauchon, Le Robuchon; these shrines from the gospels of cuisine were everyday events for the bar girl and her son. With true Parisian discretion, the waiters neither nodded nor winked behind the old man’s back. They called Nong “Madame” in reverential tones, and I was “Monsieur.”
Truffaut’s afternoon vigor lasted long enough to give me an English lesson, interspersed with French, and here was revelation. To the old man the only reason for learning English was to win arguments with Englishmen and Americans, preferably without their noticing it. He taught the finer points of the language: the effective use of sarcasm, the acid two-word cap on a bore’s monologue, how to tell the other guy he was a jerk in a way that everyone except the jerk understood; it was the English of a fencing master, and I loved it.
He also taught pleasure. A lunch or dinner at a place like Lucas Carton was to be approached with reverence, as one would seduce a beautiful woman. The pleasure of food was more reliable than sex-a wink at Nong, ironic and self-mocking, which made her smile. “Paris is an old whore, but a five-star one.”
One took a stroll before the meal, then an aperitif at one of the pavement cafés. “Choose a place full of life, for god’s sake, full of intrigue and adultery. Then make your way slowly to the temple of pleasure.”
Everything about the old man told me what I was going to miss out on: urbanity, the cultivated conversation of the demimonde, that special sort of job which was an extension of one’s social contacts. Like the Colonel, whom I had not yet met, Truffaut was one of life’s golden ones, a member of a special tribe to which I knew even then I would never belong. There was something else about him, though, an authenticity to which Vikorn would never aspire. Every day after my English lesson Truffaut, in a state of rapture, read two pages from a book by someone called Marcel Proust. Nong noticed it too-the authenticity, not the Proust. I think she would have settled for twenty years younger, for they shared a passion for life cleansed of illusion. More than once I saw her reach out, but they both knew there just was not enough of him left. Oh yes, we could have been happy in Paris, and for several months we were.
The inevitable happened during our fifteenth week. In the middle of the night my mother felt obliged to call a number the old man had given her, and the emergency services arrived with oxygen and drips.
It was not a serious stroke, but it brought a small army of bequest-minded relatives, one of whom was delegated to tell Nong it was time for her to go. The old man had been persuaded to agree-he was hardly in a condition to argue-but true to his code, he insisted that mother and son return to Thailand in style on a first-class ticket on Air France, with whom he had family connections. An Air France official met Nong and me at the airport and during the flight we were treated as if we were Siamese celebrities, perhaps of a new generation of brown-skinned billionaire entrepreneurs. Nong groaned when we emerged into the muggy heat of Krung Thep and joined the taxi line. Going back to the bars was going to be especially tough after Paris.
I awake to a familiar ghost gnawing at my feet.
20
It is male, about nine feet tall with the round shape of a tic, tiny feet and legs. His mouth is the size of the eye of a needle, just as the tales stipulate. I have seen his kind too often to be truly frightened, but the echo of my childhood is infuriating to me, as if I’ve got nowhere in all these years. From downstairs there is the muffled boom of the club’s sound system, but we are all alone in a primeval space, this hungry ghost and I. He is the spirit of one who was greedy and selfish in his lifetime and must spend a thousand years with that tiny mouth which can never take in enough food for that huge body.
The hungry ghosts are the most common of our indigenous ghouls, of which there are many varieties, and I’m not entirely surprised to find him in a go-go club, for they feed on every kind of vice. We all believe in them, by the way, even those who would deny it to foreigners. To many people, especially in the country, the undead are a serious pest. One of their more disgusting tricks is to appear late at night on quiet lanes holding their heads under their arms, although the more common posture is a dead-eyed, flabby-lipped stare from the foot of the bed. They bring bad luck and the only repellent is a visit to the temple and some expensive exorcism by the monks. They can be a hazard to prostitution. Every bar has its own story of the girl who contracted to spend the night with a client, only to flee in the middle of it because the ignorant farang had chosen an old run-down hotel infested with these filthy spirits. Even Nong, above averagely robust in most respects, once woke, with her middle-aged customer snoring peacefully beside her, to see an apparition greedily licking at the used condom which the farang had been too lazy to dispose of. She too had dressed hurriedly and departed, vowing never to visit that particular hotel again. I deal with this one by reciting the Four Noble Truths to myself in Pali. I watch while he vanishes, and with him the dull gray space he inhabits. I stand up and open the door.
The music and roar of voices from the bar is suddenly deafening. The burning in my stomach is ferocious and the sourness in my mouth makes me nauseous. I grope my way down the stairs and enter the bar.
It is twenty minutes past midnight, just the hour when the great game reaches a climax. Shy men who have been saying no all night find their wills sapped by drink and the ceaseless attention of near-naked young women; all of a sudden the prospect of going back to the hotel alone is more appalling-and somehow more immoral, a crime against life, even-than congress with a prostitute. Skillfully, the girls build a dream world of fantasy in the Western mind, a world which is mysteriously difficult to let go of. And the girls, too, have their fantasies: of finding the farang who would support them for life, or, failing that, take them to the West and relieve them, for a year or two, of this living hand to mouth, not to mention the indignity of their trade. The bar is packed.
A gang of brutal-looking young men, their heads shaved like pink coconuts, ears pincushions of ironmongery, tattoos glowing at the edges of cutaway singlets, sit mesmerized around the bar, which is in near darkness. It is the paint act. The girls on the platform are naked except for streaks of luminescent paint asymmetrically applied the length of their bodies. Under the ultraviolet spots the effect is eerie: erotic pink and mauve shapes move sinuously to the music, a Thai pop song with the usual upbeat rhythm. Other men sit in padded booths surrounded by attentive girls and staring at the show. The floor is flooded, too, by Englishmen telling each other it is the cheapest bar in Pat Pong. As I pass a booth I hear: “I want to take you out, I’ll pay your bar fine.”