Platform (11 page)

Sometimes, when they've had a bit to drink, the German senior citizens get together in groups and intone slow, infinitely sad songs, much to the amusement of the Thai waiters, who gather round them making appreciative little cries.

Falling in step behind three chaps in their fifties, vigorously trading shouts of'Ach' and 'Ja', I found myself, all of a sudden, in the street of hostess bars. Young girls in short skirts billed and cooed, competing with each other to try to convince me to go the Blue Nights, the Naughty Girl, the Classroom, the Marilyn, the Venus ... In the end I opted for the Naughty Girl. The place was still pretty empty: about ten or so Westerners, each sitting alone at their tables - young, twenty-five to thirty-year-olds, mostly English and American. On the dance floor, a dozen girls swayed gently to some sort of retro disco beat. Some of them wore white bikinis, others had taken their tops off and were wearing only G-strings. They were all about twenty, they all had golden brown skin, supple, exciting bodies. An elderly German was sitting in front of a Carlsberg at the table on my left: big belly, white beard, glasses, he looked a lot like a retired university professor. He stared at the bodies moving before his eyes, completely hypnotised; he was so still that for a moment I thought he was dead.

Several smoke machines started up, the music changed, replaced by something slow and Polynesian. The girls left the stage, to be replaced by a dozen others wearing garlands of flowers around their hips and busts. Slowly, they turned round, the garlands occasionally revealing a breast or the top of the buttocks. The old German still stared at the stage; at one point he took off his glasses to wipe them, his eyes were moist. He was in paradise.

Strictly speaking, the girls didn't solicit; but you could invite one of them to have a drink with you, talk a little and in due course pay the establishment a bar fee of five hundred baht to take the girl to your hotel, after negotiating a price. For a whole night, I think the price was about four or five thousand baht - about a month's salary for an unskilled Thai worker; but Phuket is an expensive resort. The elderly German signalled discreetly to one of the girls who was waiting, still wearing a white G-string, to go back on stage. She came over immediately, settled herself casually between his thighs. Her curved, youthful breasts were at the same level as the old man's face; he was roaring with pleasure. I heard her call him 'Papa'. I paid for my Tequila sour and left, a little embarrassed; I had the feeling I'd witnessed one of the old man's last pleasures. It was too moving, too intimate.

Just next to the bar, I found an open-air restaurant where I sat and had a plate of crabmeat and rice. At almost every table sat a couple, always a western man and a Thai woman. Most of the guys looked Californian, the way you imagine Californians to look, at any rate they were all wearing flip-flops. Actually, they could have been Australian - it's easy to get the two mixed up; whatever they were, they looked healthy, sporty, well-fed. They were the future. It was at that point, seeing all these young, immaculate Anglo-Saxons with their brilliant futures, that I realised just how important sex tourism would be to the future of the world. At the next table, two Thai women of about thirty, shapely, generously proportioned, were chatting excitedly. Two shaven-headed English men, who looked like post-modern convicts, sat opposite; they barely sipped their beers and said nothing. A little further along, a couple of German dykes in dungarees, rather chubby, with short red hair, had treated themselves to the company of a delightful adolescent girl with long black hair and an innocent face, wearing a colourful sarong. There were also a couple of lone Arabs of indeterminate nationality, their heads wrapped in the sort of tea-towel you see Yasser Arafat wearing when he's on television. In short, all the rich or moderately wealthy world was here, all answering 'present!' to the gentle and constant roll-call of Asian pussy. The strangest thing was that you had the impression, the minute you set eyes on each couple, of knowing whether things would work out or not. More often than not, the girls were bored, wore sulky or resigned expressions, glancing around at the other tables. But some of them, their eyes turned to their companions in an attitude of loving expectancy, hung on their partners' words, responded eagerly; in such cases you could imagine things would go further, that a friendship might develop, or perhaps a more lasting relationship: I knew that marriages were not rare, especially with Germans.

Myself, I didn't much feel like striking up a conversation with some girl in a bar; in general these conversations, overly focused on the character and price of sexual services to come, were a disappointment. I preferred massage parlours, where you begin with sex, sometimes an intimacy develops, sometimes not. In certain cases you think about extending your stay at the hotel and that's when you find out that the girl isn't always keen: sometimes she's divorced, she has children w need to be looked after; it's sad, but it's good. As I finish my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlour by accident, dragged there by his mates after a boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his country - North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They continue to see each other regularly, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must return to finish his final year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she avidly wanks and sucks paunchy, moustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), fat, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell; but the Chinese mafia don't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organisation opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (mention the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. In the penultimate scene, Sirien gives an honest account of the extent of her sexual experience. All the cocks she has sucked as a humble massage parlour employee, she has sucked in the anticipation, in the hope of sucking Bob's cock, into which all the others were subsumed — well, I'd have to work on the dialogue. Cross-fade between the two rivers (the Chao Phraya, the Delaware). Closing credits. For the European market, I already had a trailer in mind, sort of: 'If you liked The Music Room, you'll love The Massage Room . It was all a bit vague, but first I would need backers. After I paid, I got up and walked a hundred and fifty metres, dodging a variety of propositions, and found myself in front of the Pussy Paradise. I pushed the door and went in. Three metres in front of me I spotted Robert and Lionel, sitting with a couple of Irish coffees. At the back, behind a glass screen, about fifty girls sat on terraced benches, each wearing a numbered tag. A waiter quickly approached me. Turning his head, Lionel saw me and looked shamefaced. Robert also turned and with a slow wave motioned to me to join them. Lionel was biting his lip, he didn't know what to do with himself. The waiter took my order. 'I'm right wing . . .' Robert said, for no apparent reason; 'but watch your step . . .' He wagged his index finger as though warning me. Since the start of the trip, I'd noticed, he had assumed I was a leftie, and had been waiting for a favourable opportunity to have a conversation with me; I had no intention of playing that little game. I lit a cigarette; he looked me up and down gravely. 'Happiness is a delicate thing,' he announced in a sententious voice, 'It is difficult to find within ourselves, and impossible to find elsewhere.' After a few seconds, he added confidently, 'Chamfort'. Lionel looked at him admiringly; he seemed to be completely under his spell. I thought his quotation was debatable: if you reversed the words 'difficult' and 'impossible' we'd probably have been a little closer to the truth; but I had no desire to pursue the conversation, it seemed to me imperative for us to get back to a normal tourist situation. On top of everything, I was starting to feel a surge of desire for number 47, a slim little Thai girl, a bit skinny maybe, but with full lips and a gentle appearance; she was wearing a red miniskirt and black stockings. Aware that my attention had wandered, Robert turned to Lionel. 'I believe in truth,' he said in a low voice, 'I believe in truth and in the importance of proof Listening distractedly, I was surprised to discover that he had a degree in maths and that in his youth he had written a number of promising papers on Lie groups. I reacted excitedly to this news: there were, in other words, certain areas of human intelligence in which he had been the first clearly to see the truth, to discover absolute, demonstrable certainties. 'Yes . . .' he agreed almost apologetically, 'Of course, it was all proved again in more general terms.' After that he had been a teacher, mostly teaching candidates for the Grandes Ecoles; he had derived little pleasure from spending his mature years coaching a bunch of young arseholes obsessed with getting into the Ecole Polytechnique, or the Ecole Centrale - and even then, only the most talented of them. 'In any case,' he added, 'I didn't have the makings of a creative mathematician. It is a gift given to very few.' Towards the end of the seventies, he sat on a government committee on the reform of maths teaching - a load off bullshit, by his own admission. Now, at fifty-three, having taken retirement three years earlier, he devoted himself to sex tourism. He had been married three times. 'I'm racist . . .' he said cheerfully. 'I've become racist . . . One of the first effects of travel,' he added,, 'is to reinforce or create racial prejudice; because how do you imagine other people before you meet them? You imagine they are just like you, it goes without saying; it's only little by little that you realise that the reality is somewhat different. When he can, a Westerner works; he often finds his work frustrating or boring, but he pretends to find it interesting: this much is obvious. At the age of fifty, weary of teaching, of maths, of everything, I decided to see the world. I had just been divorced for the third time; as far as sex was concerned, I wasn't expecting much. My first trip was to Thailand; immediately after that I left for Madagascar. Since then, I haven't fucked a white woman, I've never even felt the desire to do so. Believe me,' he added placing a firm hand on Lionel's forearm, 'you won't find a white woman with a soft, submissive, supple, muscular pussy any more; that's all gone now.' Number 47 noticed that I was staring at her; she smiled at me and crossed her legs high up, revealing a pair of red suspenders. Robert continued to expound his theory. 'At the time when the white man thought himself superior, racism wasn't dangerous. For colonials, missionaries and lay teachers in the nineteenth century, the Negro was a big animal, none too clever, a sort of slightly more evolved monkey. At worst, they considered him a useful beast of burden, capable of performing complex tasks; at best a frustrated soul, coarse, but, through education, capable of elevating himself to God - or at least western reason. In both cases, they saw in him a 'lesser brother', and one does not feel hatred for an inferior - at most a sort of cordial contempt. This benevolent, almost humanist racism has completely vanished. The moment the white man began to consider blacks as equals, it was obvious that sooner or later they would come to consider them to be superior. The notion of equality has no basis in human society,' he went on, lifting his index finger again. For a moment, I thought he was going to cite sources - La Rochefoucauld or I don't know whom — but in the end, he didn't. Lionel furrowed his brow. 'Once white men believed themselves to be inferior,' Robert went on, anxious that he be clearly understood, 'the stage was set for a different type of racism, based on masochism: historically, it is in circumstances like these that violence, inter-racial wars and massacres break out. For example, all anti-Semites agree that the Jews have a certain superiority: if you read anti-Semitic literature, you're stuck by the fact that the Jew is considered to be more intelligent, more cunning, that he is credited with having singular financial talents - and, moreover, greater communal solidarity. Result: six million dead.'

I glanced at number 47 again: anticipation is exciting, something you'd like to prolong; but there's always the risk that the girl will go off with another customer. I signalled discreetly to the waiter. 'I am not a Jew!' exclaimed Robert, thinking I was about to object. I could, in fact, have made several objections: we were in Thailand, after all, and the yellow races have never been considered by the White man to be 'lesser brothers', but to be civilised peoples, members of different, complex, possibly dangerous civilisations; I could also have pointed out that we were here to fuck and that these discussions were wasting time; in fact, that was my primary objection. The waiter came over to our table; with a swift gesture, Robert motioned to him to bring another round of drinks. 'I need a girl,' I said in English, my voice shrill, 'girl forty-seven'. He leaned towards me, his face anxious, quizzical; a Chinese group had just sat down at the next table, they were making an appalling racket. 'The girl number four seven!' I shouted, enunciating each syllable. This time he understood, smiled broadly and went to the microphone where he uttered a few words. The girl got up, stepped down and walked towards a side door smoothing her hair. 'Racism,' Robert went on, giving me a quick glance, 'seems to be characterised first by an accumulation of hostility, a more aggressive sense of competition between males of different races; but the corollary is an increased desire for the females of the other race. What is really at stake in racial struggles,' Robert said simply, 'is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological: it is competition for the cunts of young women.' I sensed that it 'wouldn't be long before he moved on to Darwinism; at that moment, the waiter came back to our table accompanied by number 47. Robert looked up at her, considered for a moment. 'Good choice . . .' he concluded soberly, 'she has something of the slut about her.' The girl smiled shyly. I slipped a hand under her skirt and stroked her arse as though to protect her. She snuggled against me.