The Quiet American (16 page)

“Love’s a Western word,” I said. “We use it for sentimental reasons or to cover up an obsession with one woman. These people don’t suffer from obsessions. You’re going to be hurt, Pyle, if you aren’t careful.” “I’d have beaten you up if it wasn’t for that leg.’ “You should be grateful to me-and Phuong’s sister, of course. You can go ahead without scruples now-and you are very scrupulous in some ways, aren’t you, when it doesn’t come to plastics.” “Plastics?”

“I hope to God you know what you are doing there. Oh, I know your motives are good, they always are.” He looked puzzled and suspicious. “I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. And that applies to your country too, Pyle.” “I want to give her a decent life. This place-smells.” “We keep the smell down with joss sticks. I suppose you’ll offer her a deep freeze and a car for herself and the newest television set and . . .” “And children,” he said.

“Bright young American citizens ready to testify.” “And what will you give her? You weren’t going to take her home.”

“No, I’m not that cruel. Unless I can afford her a return ticket.”

“You’ll just keep her as a comfortable lay until you leave.”

“She’s a human being, Pyle. She’s capable of deciding.” “On faked evidence. And a child at that.” “She’s no child. She’s tougher than you’ll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn’t take scratches? That’s Phuong. She can survive a, dozen of us. She’ll get old, that’s all. She’ll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she’ll never suffer like we do from thoughts, obsessions-she won’t scratch, she’ll only decay.”

But even while I made my speech and watched her turn the page (a family group with Princess Anne), I knew I was inventing a character just as much as Pyle was. One never knows another human being; for all I could tell, she was as scared as the rest of us: she didn’t have the gift of expression, that was all. And I remembered that first tormenting year when I had tried so passionately to understand her, when I had begged her to tell me what she thought and had scared her with my unreasoning anger at her silences. Even my desire had been a weapon, as though when one plunged one’s sword towards the victim’s womb) she would lose control and speak.

“You’ve said enough,” I told Pyle. “You know all there is to know. Please go.” “Phuong” he called.

“Monsieur Pyle?” she inquired, looking up from the scrutiny of Windsor Castle, and her formality was comic and reassuring at that moment. “He’s cheated you.” “Je ne comprends pas.”’

“Oh, go away” I said. “Go to your Third Force and York Harding and the Role of Democracy. Go away and play with plastics.”

Later I had to admit that he had carried out my instructions to the letter.

It was nearly a fortnight after Pyle’s death before I saw Vigot again. I was going up the Boulevard Charner when his voice called to me from Le Club. It was the restaurant most favoured in those days by members of the Surete, who, as a kind of defiant gesture to those who hated them, would lunch and drink on the ground-floor while the general public fed upstairs out of the reach of a partisan with a hand-grenade. I joined him and he ordered me a vermouth cassis. “Play for it?”

“If you like” and I took out my dice for the ritual game of Quatre Vingt-et-un. How those figures and the sight of dice bring back to mind the war-years in Indo-China. Anywhere in the world when I see two men dicing I am back in the streets of Hanoi or Saigon or among the blasted buildings of Phat Diem, I see the parachutists, protected like caterpillars by their strange markings, patrolling by the canals, I hear the sound of the mortars closing in, and perhaps I see a dead child.

“Sans Vaseline,” Vigot said, throwing a four-two-one. He pushed the last match towards me. The sexual jargon of the game was common to all the Surete; perhaps it had been invented by Vigot and taken up by his junior officers, who hadn’t however taken up Pascal. “Sous-Lieutenant.” Every game you lost raised you a rank-you played till one or other became a captain or a commandant. He won the second game as well and while he counted out the matches, he said, “We’ve found Pyle’s dog.” “Yes?”

“I suppose it had refused to leave the body. Anyway they cut its throat. It was in the mud fifty yards away. Perhaps it dragged itself that far.” “Are you still interested?”

“The American Minister keeps bothering us. We don’t have the same trouble, thank God, when a Frenchman is killed. But then those cases don’t have rarity value.”

We played for the division of matches and then the real game started. It was uncanny how quickly Vigot threw a four-two-one. He reduced his matches to three and I threw the lowest score possible. “Nanette,” Vigot said, pushing me over two matches. When he had got rid of his last match he said, “Capitaine,” and I called the waiter for drinks. “Does anybody ever beat you?” I asked. “Not often. Do you want your revenge?” “Another time. What a gambler you could be, Vigot. Do you play any other game of chance?”

He smiled miserably, and for some reason I thought of that blond wife of his who was said to betray him with his junior officers.

“Oh well,” he said, “there’s always the biggest of all.” “The biggest?”

“Let us weigh the gain and loss,’ he quoted, ‘in wagering that God is, let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.’ “I quoted Pascal back at him-it was the only passage

I remembered. “ ‘Both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault. They are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.’ “

“Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked.’ You don’t follow your own principles) Fowlair. You’re engage, like the rest of us.” “Not in religion.”

“I wasn’t talking about religion. As a matter of fact,” he said, “I was thinking about Pyle’s dog.” “Oh”

“Do you remember what you said to me-about finding clues on its paws, analysing the dirt and so on?” “And you said you weren’t Maigret or Lecoq.” “I’ve not done so badly after all,” he said. “Pyle usually took the dog with him when he went out) didn’t he?” “I suppose so.”

“It was too valuable to let it stray by itself?” “It wouldn’t be very safe. They eat chows, don’t they, in this country?” He began to put dice in his pocket. “My dice, Vigot.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I was thinking. . .” “Why did you say I was engaged?” “When did you last see Pyle’s dog. Fowlair?” “God knows. I don’t keep an engagement-book for dogs.”

“When are you due to go home?”

“I don’t know exactly.” I never like giving information to the police. It saves them trouble.

“I’d like-tonight-to drop in and see you. At ten? If you will be alone.” “I’ll send Phuong to the cinema.” “Things all right with you again-with her?” “Yes.”

“Strange. I got the impression that you are-well- unhappy.”

“Surely there are plenty of possible reasons for that, Vigot.” I added bluntly, “You should know.” “Me?”

“You’re not a very happy man yourself.” “Oh, I’ve nothing to complain about. ‘A ruined house is not miserable.’” “What’s that?”

“Pascal again. It’s an argument for being proud of misery. ‘A tree is not miserable.” “What made you into a policemen, Vigot?” “There were a number of factors. The need to earn a living, a curiosity about people, and-yes, even that. A love of Gaboriau.”

“Perhaps you ought to have been a priest.” “I didn’t read the right authors for that-in those days.” “You still suspect me, don’t you, of being concerned?” He rose and drank what was left of his vermouth cassis. “I’d like to talk to you, that’s all.”

I thought after he had turned and gone that he had looked at me with compassion, as he might have looked at some prisoner for whose capture he was responsible undergoing his sentence for life.

I had been punished. It was as though Pyle, when he left my flat, had sentenced me, to so many weeks of uncertainty. Every time that I returned home it was with the expectation of disaster. Sometimes Phuong would not be there, and I found it impossible to settle to any work till she returned, for I always wondered whether she would ever return. I would ask her where she had been (trying to keep anxiety or suspicion out of my voice) and sometimes she would reply the market or the shops and produce her piece of evidence (even her readiness to confirm her story seemed at that period unnatural), and sometimes it was the cinema, and the stub of her ticket was there to prove it, and sometimes it was her sister’s-that was where I believed she met Pyle. I made love to her in those days savagely as though I hated her, but what I hated was the future. Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night. She didn’t change; she cooked for me, she made my pipes, she gently and sweetly laid out her body for my pleasure (but it was no longer a pleasure), and just as in those early days I wanted her mind, now I wanted to read her thoughts, but they were hidden away in a language I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to question her. I didn’t want to make her lie (as long as no lie was spoken openly I could pretend that we were the same to each other as we had always been), but suddenly my anxiety would speak for me; and I said, “When did you last see Pyle?”

She hesitated-or was it that she was really thinking back? “When he came here,” she said.

I began-almost unconsciously-to run down everything that was American. My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics, the beastliness of American children. It was as though she were being taken away from me by a nation rather than by a man. Nothing that America could do was right. I became a bore on the subject of America, even with my French friends who were ready enough to share my antipathies. It was as if I had been betrayed, but one is not betrayed by an enemy.

It was just at that time that the incident occurred of the bicycle-bombs. Coming back from the Imperial Bar to an empty flat (was she at the cinema or with her sister?)

I found that a note had been pushed under the door. it was from Dominguez. He apologised for being still sick and asked me to be outside the big store at the corner of the Boulevard Charner around ten-thirty the next morning. He was writing at the request of Mr. Chou, but I suspected that Mr. Heng was the more likely to require my presence.

The whole affair, as it turned out, was not worth more than a paragraph, and a humorous paragraph at that. It bore no relation to the sad and heavy war in the north, those canals in Phat Diem choked with the grey days-old bodies, the pounding of the mortars, the white glare of napalm. I had been waiting for about a quarter of an hour by a stall of flowers when a truck-load of police drove up with a grinding of brakes and a squeal of rubber from the direction of the Surete Headquarters in the rue Catinat: the men disembarked and ran for the store, as though they were charging a mob, but there was no mob-only a zareba of bicycles. Every large building in Saigon is fenced in by them-no university city in the West contains so many bicycle-owners. Before I had time to adjust my camera the comic and inexplicable action had been accomplished. The police had forced their way among the bicycles and emerged with three which they carried over their heads into the boulevard and dropped into the decorative fountain. Before I could intercept a single policeman they were back in their truck and driving hard down the Boulevard Bonnard.

“Operation Bicyclette,” a voice said. It was Mr. Heng. “What is it?” I asked, “A practice? For what?” “Wait a while longer,” Mr. Heng said. A few idlers began to approach the fountain, where one wheel stuck up like a buoy as though to warn shipping away from the wrecks below: a policeman crossed the road shouting and waving his hands.

“Let’s have a look.” I said.

“Better not,” Mr. Heng said, and examined his watch. The hands stood at four minutes past eleven. “You’re fast” I said.

“It always gains.” And at that moment the fountain exploded over the pavement. A bit of decorative coping struck a window and the glass fell like the water in a bright shower. Nobody was hurt. We shook the water and glass from our clothes. A bicycle wheel hummed like a top in the road, staggered and collapsed. “It must be just eleven,” Mr. Heng said.

“What on earth . . .?”

“I thought you would be interested,” Mr. Heng said. “I hope you were interested.” “Come and have a drink?”