them. Nobody even tried to show them one of the many children who even today are born deformed because of the chemicals released there by the Americans a quarter of a century ago.
The wife of the photographer of Phonsovane held one of these in her arms – a three-year-old child with a large square head and stubby hands with the fingers all stuck together. ‘Karma,’ she said, Buddhistically attributing the horror of that child to some sin committed in his previous life.
To go from Xianhuang to Pakse’ in southern Laos I had to take another plane: the usual bouncing Chinese-made Y-21 with a pilot, a co-pilot, seventeen seats and a baggage compartment where the only toilet was. When I boarded the plane it was crammed full of mysterious floppy blue plastic sacks: they were in the aisle, on the empty seats, stacked to the ceiling in the baggage-toilet, piled against the emergency exit. I tried to lift one: very heavy. They were full of meat – pork and beef. In Vientiane meat costs twice as much as in the Plain of Jars, and thus it was that the pilots supplemented their meagre socialist wages. I remembered how, a few weeks earlier, in an airfield in the north, a Russian Antonov, just back from an engine overhaul, had been unable to take off and had caught fire. All the passengers had saved themselves by climbing out in time.
I wondered how anyone could get out of this plane, as every escape route was blocked by those heaps of flaccid bundles. I disliked the thought that if disaster struck, my flesh would be mixed with the meat in the sacks and nobody would be able to tell who had been who. But then I thought with relief of the Americans. I had heard that in the labs in Hawaii where they send what they find in their search for the MIAs, the Americans can determine whether a bone fragment belonged to one of their soldiers or not.
The sky grew dense and grey, and we threaded through heavy rainclouds and flashes of lightning among the steep, dark green mountains. The landscape had an extraordinary primitive beauty, but I could not enjoy it. Between one bounce and another I vowed that if this plane ever landed in Savannaket, where it was due for a stop-over, I would get off and continue my journey by boat. And so I did.
The Mekong was flat and undramatic, its opaque surface broken now and then by great bubbles of mud. We glided slowly between the two banks that summed up the contradiction I would have liked to resolve: on the left the Laotian shore with villages shaded by coconut palms, dinghies moored below rough bamboo ladders, oil lamps gleaming softly in the silence of evening; on the right, the Thai shore with neon lights, canned music and the distant rumble of motors. On one side the past, from which everyone wants to tear the Laotians away, on the other the future towards which all and sundry believe they must rush headlong. On which shore lies happiness?
On 31 December I was in the forest of Bolovens, on a high plateau three thousand feet above sea level, with the Mekong to the west, the Annamite range to the east, and the Khmer plain to the south. This was the most heavily bombed region in the history of the world, because it was the assembly point for all the supplies coming from Hanoi along the Ho Chi Minh Trail before they were redirected, either towards Cambodia in the direction of Saigon or towards central Vietnam. Not one building has remained standing from the colonial period, not one pagoda, not one village. Everything was demolished in the relentless earthquake of American bombs. Nature itself has been obliterated: the forest has become a scrubland, and even today you seldom hear a bird’s call. Only here and there on the fertile red earth have some Japanese and Thai companies begun to revive the famous coffee plantations.
I stayed in a wooden hut built over a waterfall. The roar of the water was deafening, and I spent New Year’s Eve pleasantly awake, imagining the strange 1993 that had reached its birth-hour. An omelette of red ants’ eggs seemed perfectly suited to marking the occasion. By the time the hands of my watch casually swung past midnight, the decision not to fly had turned into an obvious one. With that slow, ancient descent by boat along the Mekong my days had already acquired a new rhythm. And yet I felt as if I were doing something bold, almost illicit. After a lifetime of sensible decisions, I now allowed myself a choice based on the most irrational of considerations. The limitation I was imposing on myself made no sense at all.
On the morning of 1 January 1993, to give my decision a symbolic flourish, I took my first steps of the new year on the back of an elephant. The route to Pakse’ crossed a valley which long ago had been the crater of a volcano. The grass was tall and very green, punctuated here and there by brilliant silvery plumes of the lulan that barely stirred in the wind.
The elephant basket was shaky and uncomfortable, but its height gave me a perfect opportunity to enjoy the world from a different perspective.
CHAPTER FOUR The Body-Snatchers of Bangkok
The car waiting for me in Takeck, on the Thai frontier post opposite Pakse’, was like a time machine. It picked me up at the edge of ancient Laos, remote and still virginal, and in a few hours brought me back to the vulgar modernity of Bangkok – dirty, chaotic, stinking, where the water is polluted and the air lead-poisoned, where one person in five has no proper home, one in sixty, including newborns, is HIV positive, one woman in thirty works as a prostitute, and someone commits suicide every hour.
They call it ‘the City of Angels’, and perhaps it was once. The houses were built on piles, the streets were canals and the people went about by boat. The few streets on terra firma were lined with tall trees whose branches made tunnels of cool shade over the little traffic there was. The gilded spires of the pagodas soared above the houses and the palaces, even that of the king, who at the beginning of the century had called in an Italian architect to build him a throne hall.
Bangkok has never been a beautiful city, but it used to have charm; it was exotic. Sometimes the tropical heat was suffocating, but often a light breeze wafted in from the sea and up the Chao Paya River to blow unobstructed over the houses.
Among the flesh-and-blood human beings involved in the countless wheeler-dealings of a city that has long been known for its luxurious vices and its unsolved mysteries lived many other beings: invisible ones, born of the imagination, of the people’s love and fear. Like the other peoples of the region, the Thais call these beings phii, spirits.
To propitiate the phii and keep them quiet so they would not bother ordinary mortals, shrines were erected in their honour in every corner of the city, in every street, in front of every house. The people were assiduous in leaving them food, little wooden elephants, plaster figurines of dancing girls, a glass of alcohol, cakes, sweet-scented garlands of jasmine.
Whenever they laid the foundations of a new house or dug a well, they immediately built a little altar to the Earth Spirit to apologize for the disturbance caused, and begged its protection in times to come. These apologies and prayers were regularly renewed with fresh offerings. If the felling of a tree proved unavoidable, its phii ceremoniously received a request for the use of a saw against it.
The phii of the plot of land where the old Erawan Hotel was built was so happy with the way it had been treated that it took to performing miracles, and today its temple is still one of the most frequented and most popular in Bangkok. One of its specialities is to aid the conception of male offspring, and thousands of sterile women have come to it with all sorts of offerings; some dance around it semi-nude at night.
In the course of the past ten years Bangkok has been overwhelmed by the craving for modernity, and gigantic building works have turned the entire city upside down: the canals have been covered over and transformed into asphalted roads; magnificent century-old trees have been felled; entire streets of old houses have been swept away by bulldozers, and dozens of skyscrapers, with their deep-set steel and cement foundations, have been erected in their place. The earth has been opened, turned over, drilled, pulverized, and although here and there someone has taken the trouble to apologize to the phii, the disturbance has been so tremendous that many of them are very angry. The city is now swarming with these invisible presences, which take their revenge by driving people mad and causing frightful disasters. At least, that is what the old residents of Bangkok believe.
In September 1990, barely a week after we had arrived in Bangkok, a tanker