I went back to the hotel and sat down at the bar. I hadn’t seen much of Bangkok, but had a sense of a slow, endless traffic jam, concrete bridges between the buildings, fast food stands, markets. The deafening din of the tuk-tuks (cousins to the rickshaws of Delhi). It wasn’t the first city in Asia I’d visited.
It was about eleven in the morning.
I took out the file and switched on my laptop. Opening my e-mail, I found a message from the Consular Department with Manuel Manrique’s record as an attachment: it was clean! No legal proceedings, no run-ins with the police. Nothing. A poor rookie who’d tried it once and fallen in the attempt. That wasn’t so unusual. After all, he was only twenty-seven years old. And something else that I’d seen in the file: the only stamps in his passport were from this journey. He had never been outside Colombia before. The passport had only recently been issued.
It was hot and the gin was good. I carried on reading and the surprises started.
According to the Consular Department file, Manrique had graduated in philosophy and letters from the National University and was studying for his doctorate. A philosopher? Now that was unusual. With what I had, I went on the Internet and started searching. I asked for a bite to eat, ravioli or the kind of meat snacks I’d seen on the street. Something that could be eaten with one hand. Various things appeared: his graduate thesis on Gilles Deleuze and three articles in the faculty review: one on Spinoza, another on post-Fordism, and a third on Chomsky. Hell. He was an educated guy, what the hell was he doing in Thailand? Why was he on his way to Tokyo instead of returning to Colombia with the pills? Who on earth was this Manuel Manrique?
The snack was good, with an aromatic sauce and a touch of sesame in oil. I tried to open some of the articles but the portals of the philosophy reviews weren’t very modern. You could only consult the index, the rest was in grey. I looked for him on Facebook, but there were 1,086 profiles with the name Manuel Manrique. Philosophy, though? I immediately wrote to my philosopher friend Gustavo Chirolla.
Do you know someone named Manuel Manrique who studied philosophy at the National University? He’s twenty-seven now. He may have finished three or four years ago. I’ll tell you why later.
For a while I looked at the Chao Phraya, its brown waves, the canoes and sampans taking the tourists across, the oily reflections of the sun. The river moved at a thick crawl. The water wasn’t clear. Something painful seemed to flow in it.
Much to my surprise, Gustavo’s answer arrived immediately, what time was it in Colombia? barely midnight of the day before.
Gustavo said:
Yes, I knew a Manuel Manrique. He was a postgraduate student of mine at the National four years ago. A shy boy, rather quiet. Very intelligent. He was very interested in literature and films, and in the image. That’s why he was studying Deleuze. I remember talking to him about the poetics of Rimbaud, and about Godard and Bergman. I was struck by how thin he was. He looked like something out of a painting by El Greco or a sculpture by Giacometti. With a gleam in his eyes, as if he was on the verge of asking something urgent and sensitive, but which he never managed to ask. He finished his postgraduate studies and I never saw him again. Let me make some inquiries and see if I can find out anything else. Have you met him? Is he in India? Let me know.
I wrote back:
I haven’t seen him yet, but he’s in prison in Bangkok. Pills. Don’t tell anyone, this is confidential. I’m trying to find out who he is, because I have to deal with the case. Ask what circles he moved in, who he mixed with. We have to handle this with caution. I don’t know if his family has been informed.
All the best.
I kept searching. What the hell had a philosopher come to Thailand for? At first glance, I couldn’t believe he might be guilty. I remembered the prosecutor’s advice, that I should look at temples. Nothing could have been farther from the way I felt, but I decided to go out anyway. Better not to be seen spending too much time in the bar, this was a business trip, and I had to stay for a few days. It wasn’t at all unlikely that the prosecutor was investigating me, even spying on my movements at that very moment, obsessed as he was with protecting his country from undesirable elements. I went out.
It was hot on the street and I hailed a taxi.
“Bangkok Central,” I said.
I stopped near a commercial area and started walking aimlessly. Before long, I came to a hotel, and I went in and headed for the bar. The light was pleasant there. I ordered a gin and tonic and got down to business. Deleuze. University of Vincennes. It rang a bell.
Years earlier, when I was a correspondent for the newspaper El Tiempo in Paris, the French writer Daniel Pennac, in an interview, had told me that he had been a pupil of Deleuze at the University of Vincennes and that in his classes, where political and aesthetic issues were hotly debated, Deleueze had decreed the death of the novel. But Pennac had in his bag, well hidden, the recently published translation of The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa. If they had discovered him he would have been the laughingstock of the year, but he couldn’t wait to lock himself in the bathroom and carry on reading.
Later, still in Paris, it had fallen to me to write about the suicide of Deleuze. He had jumped from the balcony of his house onto Boulevard Neil. Another “nonfigurative” death, like that of the young girl the prosecutor had told me about. Deleuze was ill and the pain had become unbearable. If I remembered correctly, it was a respiratory illness, perhaps emphysema. I took out my laptop and searched my files. The article was there, dated November 1995. I reread it:
DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER
Paris
In despair thanks to a progressive respiratory infection, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze dragged himself to the window of his house in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris and threw himself out, bringing to an end seventy years of life and philosophy. The last journey of this nomad lasted barely a few seconds, crossing the air until he slammed into the sidewalk of Boulevard Neil and lay there in the cold, at eight in the evening. Passersby gathered around the body and minutes later an ambulance carried it to hospital, where he died. It is unlikely that those who tried desperately to save his life knew that in that bruised body lay one of the most unorthodox thinkers of the century, the great agitator of the University of Vincennes in the 1970s, author of such key works as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, the thinker whom Michel Foucault called “the only philosophical mind in France.”
He was born in Paris on January 18, 1925, and his life was spent in classrooms and cafés. He entered the Sorbonne in 1944 and from 1948 worked as a teacher in various places, a high school in Orléans, another in Amiens, until he obtained a professorship in Lyons in 1964, and finally arrived in Paris in 1968, at the University of Vincennes, where he left his mark on a whole generation that experienced May ’68 alongside him and remained in a state of permanent revolt. Those who were his pupils remember his classes as veritable explosives launched against morality and tradition. The young women who began the year in patent leather shoes and tartan skirts ended it converted into agitators for free love, raising their voices against the establishment and cohabiting with Palestinian guerrillas, refugees from Cyprus, rebels from Guatemala, Nigeria, or Pakistan. Deleuze was the great time bomb of Vincennes, and his classes, which ended in the neighboring bars, were aimed straight at the heart of Conservative morality. The two crucial encounters of his life took place in 1962 and 1968: the first with Michel Foucault and the second with Félix Guattari, his collaborator on much of his work.