Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

“Don’t go thinking this is Midnight Express , right?” the prosecutor said in fairly refined English.

He was a short man. His face seemed to occupy half his bodily mass, and had no doubt seen better days (the marks of his acne were even more pronounced than mine). An employee in a white uniform brought in a tray with tea and biscuits. Everyone was smiling. It was the land of smiles, even if, in his case, the smile concealed a certain nervousness.

“We’ve had all kinds of things here,” the prosecutor said. “Let me confess something to you.”

He took me over to the window and pointed to the center of the city.

“Do you think I like knowing that most of those who come to my country don’t do so because of its heritage or its history, but to sleep with our women? Oh, sure, they visit the Reclining Buddha and they go to Phuket and the temples of Ayutthaya, but first things first. They take an interest in the country only after they’ve had their way with one of our women, a woman who might be from my own family, anyway, I’m sorry if I strike you as crude or impolite, you’re a diplomat and I’m not, I’m only an officer of the law, but how would you feel if your country, known for its drugs, turned into a whorehouse? wouldn’t you try, in every way possible, to at least make sure the law was enforced? The law, the law,” he said, his mind wandering a little, “is the only thing still keeping us from going crazy.”

Before sitting down he looked me straight in the eyes and said:

“Let me tell you a joke. An Australian joke. To Australians, Thailand is a paradise, and I’m not surprised: young women, parties, casinos. They buy fake branded goods, they dirty our beaches, they live like kings, and they pay almost nothing. An Australian dies and goes to heaven. There, God says to him: you’ve been good, you’re entitled to have one wish granted. The man thinks it over for a while and says, I’d like to go back to Thailand! So God, being understanding, lets him go back to Thailand, only transformed into a Thai, ha ha, do you get it? The Australians laugh a lot at that.”

The prosecutor took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Not a single muscle in my face had moved in response to his joke, and he appreciated that.

“This whole situation, I’ll tell you right now, doesn’t help to make us especially understanding toward strangers, at least not me. Bangkwang Prison may seem to you somewhat… harsh, yes, that’s the word. There isn’t a prison in the world that isn’t, is there? Violence is the midwife of history. This kind of history, at least. They call Bangkwang the Bangkok Hilton. Even I’m shocked by it, but I never forget that its ‘guests’ aren’t there because they talked at a religious retreat or drove through a red light. Yesterday I lifted the body of a young woman who jumped from the fourteenth floor of a tower in Bangkok Central. Her body, if you don’t me saying this, looked quite horrible lying there on the asphalt surface of a parking lot, like a piece of nonfigurative art. She was nineteen years old and her stomach was stuffed full of pills. Those guys are murderers, shall I describe to you how her parents looked? I don’t have to, see for yourself.”

He held out the local paper and there they were, a couple my age, both with expressions of horror on their faces.

Then he said:

“Now then, let me show you your compatriot’s case.”

He opened a copy of the same folder I had and read out the facts:

Manuel Manrique, 27 years old, Colombian, passport number 96670209, visa number 31F77754WZ, entered Thailand by plane, coming from Dubai, on Emirates flight 1957, on… 22nd, checked in at the Regency Inn Hotel, a three-star establishment, room 301, Suan Plu Soi 6, Sathorn Road, Thungmahamek, Silom, Bangkok. He was arrested there on… 24th in possession of a bag containing four hundred ecstasy pills made in Burma.

The accused had been planning to leave the country on… 24th for Tokyo on Japan Airlines flight 2108. His contacts in the country are unknown, as is the way in which he obtained the drugs. Given the weight of evidence the prosecutor is asking for the death penalty or thirty years’ imprisonment if he pleads guilty.

I was surprised that he had planned to go to Tokyo, and I said to the prosecutor, why Tokyo?

“I don’t know,” he said, “and frankly, I don’t care. There are Mafias and drug addicts there too, and countrymen of mine and yours who live off that, and get up to all the dirty business they can. The Japanese are strange at first sight and you may think for a while that they’re different, but deep down they consume the same shit as everybody else. They just have more money, that’s all.”

“And where was he going after Tokyo?” I wanted to know.

“I don’t know, look in the attached documents, I think there’s a photocopy of the airline ticket.”

I leafed through and saw a copy of his passport. He had a visa to enter Japan. The ticket was a return ticket. His return flight to Colombia was from Bangkok via Dubai and São Paulo to Bogotá. Strange.

“When can I see him?”

The prosecutor stroked his beard, looked at his watch, and said: “Let me make a suggestion: go back to your hotel and sleep for a while, you look tired. Oh, these night flights… I don’t suppose you’ll find the heat and humidity too excessive, coming from Delhi. Nobody can explain how human beings with spines and brains ever thought to build a city in that place, with those temperatures. As I said, you should rest. Then treat yourself to a copious lunch and try our traditional cuisine. In the afternoon, cross the river and have a look at the temples. Go to an English bookstore, buy something, have a stroll around, then go back to your hotel at the end of the afternoon. Have a light dinner and go to sleep. I’ll come and pick you up at seven in the morning to take you to Bangkwang.”

I went back to the hotel and sat down at the bar. I hadn’t seen much of Bangkok, but had a sense of a slow, endless traffic jam, concrete bridges between the buildings, fast food stands, markets. The deafening din of the tuk-tuks (cousins to the rickshaws of Delhi). It wasn’t the first city in Asia I’d visited.

It was about eleven in the morning.

I took out the file and switched on my laptop. Opening my e-mail, I found a message from the Consular Department with Manuel Manrique’s record as an attachment: it was clean! No legal proceedings, no run-ins with the police. Nothing. A poor rookie who’d tried it once and fallen in the attempt. That wasn’t so unusual. After all, he was only twenty-seven years old. And something else that I’d seen in the file: the only stamps in his passport were from this journey. He had never been outside Colombia before. The passport had only recently been issued.

It was hot and the gin was good. I carried on reading and the surprises started.

According to the Consular Department file, Manrique had graduated in philosophy and letters from the National University and was studying for his doctorate. A philosopher? Now that was unusual. With what I had, I went on the Internet and started searching. I asked for a bite to eat, ravioli or the kind of meat snacks I’d seen on the street. Something that could be eaten with one hand. Various things appeared: his graduate thesis on Gilles Deleuze and three articles in the faculty review: one on Spinoza, another on post-Fordism, and a third on Chomsky. Hell. He was an educated guy, what the hell was he doing in Thailand? Why was he on his way to Tokyo instead of returning to Colombia with the pills? Who on earth was this Manuel Manrique?

The snack was good, with an aromatic sauce and a touch of sesame in oil. I tried to open some of the articles but the portals of the philosophy reviews weren’t very modern. You could only consult the index, the rest was in grey. I looked for him on Facebook, but there were 1,086 profiles with the name Manuel Manrique. Philosophy, though? I immediately wrote to my philosopher friend Gustavo Chirolla.