The Quiet American (14 page)
“If I go against my deepest conviction and say ‘Yes’, would it even be good for you! You say you are being recalled to England and I can realise how you will hate that and do anything to make it easier. I can see you marrying after a drink too many. The first time we really tried-you as well as me-and we failed. One doesn’t try so hard the second time. You say it will be the end of life to lose this girl. Once you used exactly that phrase to me-I could show you the letter, I have it still-and I suppose you wrote in the same way to Anne. You say that we’ve always tried to tell the truth to each other, but, Thomas, your truth is always so temporary. What’s the good of arguing with you, or trying to make you see reason? Ifs easier to act as my faith tells me to act-as you think unreasonably-and simply to write: I don’t believe in divorce: my religion forbids it, and so the answer, Thomas, is no-no.”
There was another half page, which I didn’t read, before “Affectionately, Helen”. I think it contained news of the weather and an old aunt of mine I loved.
I had no cause for complaint, and I had expected this reply. There was a lot of truth in it. I only wished that she had not thought aloud at quite such length, when the thoughts hurt her as well as me. “She says ‘No’?”
I said with hardly any hesitation, “She hasn’t made up her mind. There’s still hope.”
Phuong laughed. “You say ‘hope” with such a long face.” She lay at my feet like a dog on a crusader’s tomb, preparing the opium, and I wondered what I should say to Pyle. When I had smoked four pipes I felt more ready for the future and I told her the hope was a good one-my wife was consulting a lawyer. Any day now I would get the telegram of release.
“It would not matter so much. You could make a settlement)” she said, and I could hear her sister’s voice speaking through her mouth.
“I have no savings,” I said. “I can’t outbid Pyle.” “Don’t worry. Something may happen. There are always ways,” she said. “My sister says you could take out a life-insurance,” and I thought how realistic it was of her not to minimise the importance of money and not to make any great and binding declarations of love. I wondered how Pyle over the years would stand that hard core, for Pyle was a romantic; hut then of course in his case there would be a good settlement, the hardness might soften like an unused muscle when the need for it vanished. The rich had it both ways.
That evening, before the shops had closed in the rue Catinat, Phuong bought three more silk scarves. She sat on the bed and displayed them to me, exclaiming at the bright colours, filling avoid with her singing voice, and then folding them carefully she laid them with a dozen others in her drawer: it was as though she were laying the foundation of a modest settlement. And I laid the crazy foundation of mine, writing a letter that very night to Pyle with the unreliable clarity and foresight of opium. This was what I wrote -I found it again the other day tucked into York Harding’s Role of the West. He must have been reading the book when my letter arrived. Perhaps he had used it as a bookmark and then not gone on reading.
“Bear Pyle,” I wrote, and was tempted for the only time to write, “Dear Alden,” for, after all, this was a bread-and-butter letter of some importance and it differed little from other bread-and-butter letters in containing a falsehood: “Dear Pyle, I have been meaning to write from the hospital to say thank you for the other night. You certainly saved me from an uncomfortable end. I’m moving about now with the help of a stick-I broke apparently in just the right place and age hasn’t yet reached my bones and made them brittle. We must have a party together some time to celebrate.” (My pen stuck on that word, and then, like an ant meeting an obstacle, went round it by another route.) “I’ve got something else to celebrate and I know you will be glad of this, too, for you’ve always said that Phuong’s interests were what we both wanted. I found a letter from my wife waiting when I got back, and she’s more or less agreed to divorce me. So you don’t need to worry any more about Phuong”-it was a cruel phrase, but I didn’t realise the cruelty until I read the letter over and then it was too late to alter. If I were going to scratch that out, I had better tear the whole letter up.
“Which scarf do you like best?” Phuong asked. “I love the yellow.”
“Yes. The yellow. Go down to the hotel and post this letter for me.”
She looked at the address. “I could take it to the Legation. It would save a stamp.” “I would rather you posted it.”
Then I lay back and in the relaxation of the opium I thought, ‘At ‘least she won’t leave me now before I go, and perhaps, somehow, tomorrow, after a few more pipes, I shall think of a way to remain.’
Ordinary life goes on-that has saved many a man’s reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impossible to be frightened all the time, so under the bombardment of routine jobs, of chance encounters, of impersonal anxieties, one lost for hours together the personal fear. The thoughts of the coming April, of leaving Indo-China, of the hazy future without Phuong, were affected by the day’s telegrams, the bulletins of the Vietnam Press, and by the illness of my assistant, an Indian called Dominguez (his family had come from Goa by way of Bombay) who had attended in my place the less important Press Conferences, kept a sensitive ear open to the tones of gossip and rumour, and took my messages to the cable-offices and the censorship. With the help of Indian traders, particularly in the north, in Haiphong, Nam Dinh and Hanoi, he ran his own personal intelligence service for my benefit, and I think he knew more accurately than the French High Command the location of Vietminh battalions within the Tonkin delta.
And because we never used our information except when it became news, and never passed any reports to the French Intelligence, he had the trust and the friendship of several Vietminh agents hidden in Saigon-Cholon. The fact that he was an Asiatic, in spite of his name, unquestionably helped.
I was fond of Dominguez: where other men carry their pride like a skin-disease on the surface, sensitive to the least touch, his pride was deeply hidden and reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human being. All that you encountered in daily contact with him was gentleness and humility and an absolute love of truth: you would have had to he married to him to discover the pride. Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride-in my profession a reporter’s pride, the desire to file a better story than the other man’s, and it was Dominguez who helped me not to care-to withstand all those telegrams from home asking why I had not covered so and so’s story or the report of someone else which I knew to be untrue. Now that he was ill I realised how much I owed him, why, he would even see that my car was full of petrol, and yet never once, with a phrase or a look, had he encroached on my private life. I believed he was a Roman Catholic, but I had no evidence for it beyond his name and the place of his origin-for all I knew from his conversation, he might have worshipped Krishna or gone on annual pilgrimages, pricked by a wire frame, to the Batu Caves. Now his illness came like a mercy, reprieving me from the treadmill of private anxiety. It was I now who had to attend the wearisome Press Conferences and hobble to my table at the Continental for a gossip with my colleagues; but I was less capable than Dominguez of telling truth from falsehood, and so I formed the habit of calling in on him in the evenings to discuss what I had heard. Sometimes one of his Indian friends was there, sitting beside the narrow iron bed in the lodgings Dominguez shared in one of the meaner streets off the Boulevard Gallieni. He would sit up straight in his bed with his feet tucked under him so that you had less the impression of visiting a sick man than of being received by a rajah or a priest. Sometimes when his fever was bad his face ran with sweat, but he never lost the clarity of his thoughts. It was as though his illness were happening to another person’s body. His landlady kept a jug of fresh lime by his side, but I never saw him take a drink-perhaps that would have been to admit that it was his own thirst, and his own body which suffered.
Of all the days just then that I visited him one I remember in particular. I had given up asking him how he was for fear that the question sounded like a reproach, and it was always he who inquired with great anxiety about my health and apologised for the stairs I had to climb. Then he said, “I would like you to meet a friend of mine. He has a story you should listen to.” “Yes?”
“I have his name written down because I know you find it difficult to remember Chinese names. We must not use it, of course. He has a warehouse on the Quai Mytho for junk metal.” “Important?” “It might be.” “Can you give me an idea?”
“I would rather you heard from him. There is something strange, but I don’t understand it.” The sweat was pouring down his face, but he just let it run as though the drops were alive and sacred-there was that much of the Hindu in him, he would never have endangered the life of a fly. He said, “How much do you know of your friend Pyle?”
“Not very much. Our tracks cross, that’s all. I haven’t seen him since Tanyin.” “What job does he do?”
“Economic Mission, but that covers a multitude of sins. I think he’s interested in home-industries-I suppose with an American business tie-up. I don’t like the way they keep the French fighting and cut out their business at the same time.”
“I heard him talking the other day at a party the Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen. They had put him on to brief them.”
“God help Congress,” I said, “he hasn’t been in the country six months.”
“He was talking about the old colonial powers-England and France, and how you two couldn’t expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That was where America came in now with clean hands.”
“Honolulu, Puerto Rico” I said, “New Mexico.” “Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Vietminh and he said a Third Force could -do it. There was always a Third Force lo be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism-national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.”
“It’s all in York Harding,” I said. “He had read it before he came out here. He talked about it his first week and he’s learned nothing.”
“He may have found his leader,” Dominguez said. “Would it matter?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he does. But go and talk to my friend on the Quai Mytho.”
I went home to leave a note for Phuong in the rue Catinat and then drove down past the port as the sun set. The tables and chairs were out on the quai beside the steamers and the grey naval boats, and the little portable kitchens burned and bubbled. In the Boulevard de la Somme the hairdressers were busy under the trees and the fortune-tellers squatted against the walls with their soiled packs of cards. In Cholon you were in a different city where work seemed to be just beginning rather than petering out with the daylight. It was like driving into a pantomime set: the long vertical Chinese signs and the bright lights and the crowd of extras led you into the wings, where everything was suddenly so much darker and quieter. One such wing took me down again to the quai and a huddle of sampans, where the warehouses yawned in the shadow and no one was about.
I found the place with difficulty and almost by accident, the godown gates were open, and I could see the strange Picasso shapes of the junk-pile by the light of an old lamp: bedsteads, bathtubs, ashcans, the bonnets of cars, stripes of old colour where the light hit. I walked down a narrow track carved in the iron quarry and called out for Mr. Chou, but there was no reply. At the end of the godown a stair led up to what I supposed might be Mr. Chou’s house—I had apparently been directed to the back door, and I supposed that Dominguez had his reasons. Even the staircase was lined with junk, pieces of scrap-iron which might come in useful one day in this jackdaw’s nest of a house. There was one big room on the landing and a whole family sat and lay about in it with the effect of a camp which might be struck at any moment: small tea-cups stood about everywhere and there were lots of cardboard boxes full of unidentifiable objects and fibre suitcases ready strapped: there was an old lady sitting on a big bed, two boys and two girls, a baby crawling on the floor, three middle-aged women in old brown peasant-trousers and jackets, and two old men in a corner in blue silk mandarin coats playing mah jongg -they paid no attention to my coming: they played rapidly, identifying each piece by touch, and the noise was like shingle turning on a beach after a wave withdraws. No one paid any more attention than they did: only a cat leapt on to a cardboard box and a lean dog sniffed at me and withdrew.
“M. ‘Chou?” I asked, and two of the women shook their heads, and still no one regarded me, except that one of the women rinsed out a cup and poured tea from a pot which had been resting warm. in its silk-lined box. I sat down on the end of the bed next the old lady and a girl brought me the cup: it was as though I had been absorbed into the community with the cat and the dog-perhaps they had turned up the first time as fortuitously as I had. The baby crawled across the floor and pulled at my laces and no one reproved it: one didn’t in the East reprove children. Three commercial calendars were hanging on the walls, each with a girl in gay Chinese costume with bright pink cheeks. There was a big mirror mysteriously lettered Cafe de la Paix- perhaps It had got caught up accidentally in the junk: I felt caught up in it myself.