The Quiet American (19 page)

“You know what I mean. I wouldn’t want to leave her behind there with any stigma. . .” “Would you leave her behind?”

“I guess so. My mother’s a wonderful woman-she’d take her around, introduce her, you know, kind of fit her in. She’d help her to get a home ready for me.”

I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Phuong or not- she had looked forward so to the skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, but she had so little idea of all they would involve. Professor and Mrs. Pyle, the women’s lunch clubs; would they teach her Canasta? I thought of her that first night in the Grand Monde, in her white dress, moving so exquisitely on her eighteen-year-old feet, and I thought of her a month ago, bargaining over meat at the butcher’s stores in the Boulevard de la Somme., Would she like those bright clean little New England grocery stores where even the celery was wrapped in cellophane? Perhaps she would. I couldn’t tell. Strangely I found myself saying as Pyle might have done a month ago, “Go easy with her, Pyle. Don’t force things. She can be hurt like you or me.” “Of course, of course, Thomas.”

“She looks so small and breakable and unlike our women, but don’t think of her as... as an ornament.”

“It’s funny, Thomas, how differently things work out. I’d been dreading this talk. I thought you’d be tough.”

“I’ve had time to think, up in the north. There was a woman there ... perhaps I saw what you saw at that whorehouse. It’s a good thing she went away with you. I might one day have left her behind with someone like Granger. A bit of tail.” “And we can remain friends, Thomas?” “Yes, of course. Only I’d rather not see Phuong. There’s quite enough of her around here as it is. I must find another flat-when I’ve got time.”

He unwound his legs and stood up. “I’m so glad, Thomas. I can’t tell you how; glad I am. I’ve said it before, I know, but I do really wish it hadn’t been you.”

“I’m glad it’s you, Pyle.” The interview had not been the way I had foreseen: under the superficial angry schemes, at some deeper level, the genuine plan of action must have been formed. Ail the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favour, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism. Oh, I was right about the facts, but wasn’t he right too to be young and mistaken, and wasn’t he perhaps a better man for a girl to spend her life with?

We shook hands perfunctorily, but some half-formulated fear made me follow him out to the head of the stairs and call after him. Perhaps there is a prophet as well as a judge in those interior courts where our true decisions are made. “Pyle, don’t trust too much to York Harding.”

“York!” He stared up at me from the first landing. “We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we’ve learned a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play with matches. This Third Force-it comes out of a book, that’s all. General The’s only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy.”

It was as if he had been staring at me through a letter-box to see who was there and now, letting the flap fall, had shut out the unwelcome intruder. His eyes were out of sight. “I don’t know what you mean, Thomas.”

“Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke, even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you can’t trust men like The. They aren’t going to save the East from Communism. We know their kind.” “We?” “The old colonialists.” “I thought you took no sides.”

“I don’t Pyle, but if someone has got to make a mess of things in your outfit, leave it to Joe. Go home with Phuong. Forget the Third Force.”

“Of course I always value your advice, Thomas,” he said formally. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.” “I suppose so.”

The weeks moved on, but somehow I hadn’t yet found myself a new flat. It wasn’t that I hadn’t time. The annual crisis of the war had passed again: the hot wet crachin had settled on the north: the French were out of Hoa Binh, the rice-campaign was over in Tonkin and the opium-campaign in Laos. Dominguez could cover easily all that was needed in the south. At last I did drag myself to see one apartment in a so-called modern building (Paris Exhibition I934?) up at the other end of the rue Catinat beyond the Continental Hotel. It was the Saigon pied-a-terre of a rubber planter who was going home. He wanted to sell it lock, stock and barrel I have always wondered what the barrels contain: as for the stock) there were a large number of engravings from the Paris Salon between I880 and I900. Their highest common factor was a big-bosomed woman with an extraordinary hair-do and gauzy draperies which somehow always exposed the great cleft buttocks and hid the field of battle. In the bathroom the planter had been rather more daring with his reproductions of Rops.

“You like art?” I asked and he smirked back at me like a fellow conspirator. He was fat with a little black moustache and insufficient hair.

“My best pictures are in Paris,” he said. There was an extraordinary tall ash-tray in the living-room made like a naked woman with a bowl in her hair) and there were china ornaments of naked girls embracing tigers, and one very odd one of a girl stripped to the waist riding a bicycle. In the bedroom facing his enormous bed was a great glazed oil painting of two girls sleeping together. I asked him the price of his apartment without his collection, but he would not agree to separate the two. “You are not a collector?” he asked. “Well, no.”

“I have some books also” he said, “which I would throw in, though I intended to take these back to France.” He unlocked a glass-fronted bookcase and showed me his library-there were expensive illustrated editions of Aphrodite and Nona, there was La Garfonne and even several Paul de Kocks. I was tempted to ask him whether he would sell himself with his collection: he went with them: he was period too. He said, “If you live alone in the tropics a collection is company.”

I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

“I don’t think my paper would allow me to buy an art-collection.”

He said, “It would not, of course, appear on the receipt.” I was glad Pyle had not seen him: the man might have lent his own features to Pyle’s imaginary “old colonialist” who was repulsive enough without him. When I came out it was nearly half past eleven and I went down as far as the Pavilion for a glass of iced beer. The Pavilion was a coffee centre for European and American women and I was confident that I would not see Phuong there. Indeed I knew exactly where she would be at this time of day-she was not a girl to break her habits, and so, coming from the planter’s apartment, I had crossed the road to avoid the milk-bar where at this time of day she had her chocolate malt. Two young American girls sat at the next table, neat and clean in the heat, scooping up ice-cream. They each had a bag slung on the left shoulder and the bags were identical, with brass eagle badges. Their legs were identical too, long and slender, and their noses, just a shade tilted, and they were eating their ice-cream with concentration as though they were making an experiment in the college laboratory. I wondered whether they were Pyle’s colleagues: they were charming, and I wanted to send them home, too. They finished their ices and one looked at her watch. “We’d better be going,” she said, “to be on the safe side.” I wondered idly what appointment they had.

“Warren said we mustn’t stay later than eleven-twenty-five” “It’s past that now.”

“It would be exciting to stay. I don’t know what it’s all about, do you?”

“Not exactly, but Warren said better not.” “Do you think it’s a demonstration?” “I’ve seen so many demonstrations,” the other said wearily, like a tourist glutted with churches. She rose and laid on their table the money for the ices. Before going she looked around the cafe, and the mirrors caught her profile at every freckled angle. There was only myself left and a dowdy middle-aged Frenchwoman who was carefully and uselessly making up her face. Those two hardly needed make-up, the quick dash of a lipstick, a comb through the hair. For a moment her glance had rested on me-it was not like a woman’s glance, but a man’s, very straightforward, speculating on some course of action. Then she turned quickly to her companion. “We’d better be off.” I watched them idly as they went out side by side into the sun-splintered street. It was impossible to conceive either of them a prey to untidy passion: they did not belong to rumpled sheets and the sweat of sex. Did they take deodorants to bed with them? I found myself for a moment envying them their sterilized world, so different from this world that I inhabited-which suddenly inexplicably broke in pieces. Two of the mirrors on the wall flew at me and collapsed half-way. The dowdy Frenchwoman was on her knees in a wreckage of chairs and tables. Her compact lay open and unhurt in my lap and oddly enough I sat exactly where I had sat before, although my table had joined the wreckage around the Frenchwoman. A curious garden-sound filled the cafe: the regular drip of a fountain, and looking at the bar I saw rows of smashed bottles which let out their contents in a multi-coloured stream-the red of porto; the orange of cointreau, the green of chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis. across the floor of the cafe. The Frenchwoman sat up and calmly looked around for her compact. I gave it her and she thanked me formally, sitting on the floor. I realised that I didn’t hear her very well. The explosion had been so close that my ear-drums had still to recover from the pressure.

I thought rather petulantly, ‘Another joke with plastics: what does Mr. Heng expect me to write now?’ but when I got into the Place Gamier, I realised by the heavy clouds of smoke that this was no joke. The smoke came from the cars burning in the car-park in front of the national theatre, bits of cars were scattered over the square, and a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens. People were crowding in from the rue Catinat, from the Boulevard Bonnard. The sirens of police-cars, the bells of the ambulances and fire-engines came at one remove to my shocked ear-drums. For one moment I had forgotten that Phuong must have been in the milkbar on the other side of the square. The smoke lay between. I couldn’t see through.

I stepped out into the square and a policeman stopped me. They had formed a cordon round the edge to prevent the crowd increasing, and already the stretchers were beginning to emerge. I implored the policeman in front of me, “Let me across. I have a friend. . .” “Stand back,” he said. “Everyone here has friends.” He stood on one side to let a priest through, and I tried to follow the priest, but he pulled me back. I said, “I am the Press,” and searched in vain for the wallet in which I had my card, but I couldn’t find it: had I come out that day without it? I said, “At least tell me what happened to the milkbar”: the smoke was clearing and I tried to see, but the crowd between was too great. He said something I didn’t catch. “What did you say?”

He repeated, “I don’t know. Stand back. You are blocking the stretchers.”

:’ Could I have dropped my wallet in the Pavilion? I turned to go back and there was Pyle. He exclaimed, ’Thomas.”

“Pyle,” I said, “for Christ’s sake, where’s your Legation pass? We’ve got to get across. Phuong’s in the milkbar.” “No, no,” he said.

“Pyle, she is. She always goes there. At eleven thirty. We’ve got to find her.” “She isn’t there, Thomas.” “How do you know? Where’s your card?” “I warned her not to go.”

I turned back to the policeman, meaning to throw him to one side and make a run for it across the square: he might shoot: I didn’t care-and then the word ‘warn’ reached my consciousness. I took Pyle by the arm. “Warn?” I said. “What do you mean ‘warn’?” “I told her to keep away this morning.” The pieces fell together in my mind. “And Warren?” I said. “Who’s Warren? He warned those girls too.” “I don’t understand.”

“There mustn’t be any American casualties, must there?” An ambulance forced its way up the rue Catinat into the square, and the policeman who had stopped me moved to one side to let it through. The policeman beside him was engaged in an argument. I pushed Pyle forward and ahead of me into the square before we could be stopped.

We were among a congregation of mourners. The police could prevent others entering the square; they were powerless to clear the square of the survivors and the first-comers. The doctors were too busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left to their owners, for one can own the dead as one owns a chair, A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat.

She was still and silent, and what struck me most in the square was the silence. It was like a church I had once visited during Mass-the only sounds came from those who served, except where here and there the Europeans wept and implored and fell silent again as though shamed by the modesty, patience and propriety of the East. The legless torso at the edge of the garden still twitched, like a chicken which has lost its head. From the man’s shirt, he had probably been a trishaw-driver.

Pyle said, “It’s awful.” He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, “What’s that?” “Blood,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?” He said, “I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.” I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time: he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers didn’t count.