Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

Except for the temples, I’d followed the prosecutor’s advice. My budget forbade me from buying any of this, or even sniffing it. But what a pleasure. I left old Graham Greene happily enough, and went down to look for a last drink before going back to the hotel.

Do you want to know, O mortal, what my most unmentionable desires are? Friend: those are precisely the ones you will never know, that’s why they are unmentionable, but I can tell you others, simple things, did you know that there are cities in this vast world through which, some days, I’d like to wander? I’m dying to do that! To be part of the crowd, even if only for a few hours or minutes, to lose myself in the streets and subway stations, attend their help centers, look for relief in their help lines for lonely people.

What are these cities?

I will talk to you about one among the many in my nocturnal constellation, because there are stars that shine with greater intensity. Let’s see, let’s see, what is that beautiful, coppery, not-quite-golden light on the right-hand side of my map? What’s the name of that star washed up close to the sea, at the beginning of a wide arm, like a baby’s inert limb?

It’s Bangkok.

The Asian capital of smiles. The capital of foot massage and other kinds, like the “body to body” (which may include a “happy ending,” just imagine), multiple relaxation, anti-depression, and anti-jet-lag massages. There are 36,874 registered massage parlors. The body is connected by nerve endings to the soles of the feet and from there you can control and remedy deficiencies and boost energy. A strange machine, the body! You can help it to be happy.

Bangkok resembles that old TV series, Fantasy Island: “Its possibilities are limited only by the imagination.” And so you ask yourself: imagine? imagine? But… What do you imagine? How do you imagine that place of pleasure and also of pain?

Bangkok is one of the most polluted cities in the world. Pedestrians breathe through masks that are sold at the cash registers of supermarkets. Some afternoons, the sky seems to be closer to our heads. The alleyways of Sampeng are difficult to walk down without a mask. Everything is on open display and the air is the same: fried crickets eaten with salt, monkeys’ brains floating in jars, stomachs of dried fish boiled in water (good for gastritis), sharks’ fins. Men drink snake’s blood to combat impotence (divine impotence, mother of drunk poets!). In Chatuchak Market live cobras sleep in baskets. Their blood can cost three dollars. If it’s a queen cobra it can reach a hundred, and if it’s an albino as much as five thousand. C’est plus cher, mon vieux! Once you’ve chosen your snake, the vendor takes it out of the basket, slashes its jugular with a knife, and collects the liquid in a glass. He mixes it with a spoonful of honey and a small glass of whiskey. The customer drinks it in one go.

Bangkok, in the Thai language — a tonal language with 48 vowel sounds and 41 consonants — means City of the Island, but it has a second name: City of the Angels (Krung Thep). Its traffic jams are famous throughout South-east Asia. In addition, it’s too hot and the waters of the Chao Phraya aren’t sufficient to cool it down. On the contrary: its dark color resembles that of stagnant lagoons and many of the canals that divide up the city are filled with black water. Is it conscience? Beneath every living city is a city of the dead, a necropolis, and in it its unconscious, its tormented opium dreams. No city can be realistic and maybe for that reason Bangkok moves in dreams. The proliferation of canals gives it another nickname: the Venice of the Orient. Here we need music, maybe something by Haydn.

Bangkok, the unique. Buddhism recommends a veiled indifference toward history, but the Thais are proud of never having been colonized. Neither the kingdom of Siam, with its former capital Ayutthaya, nor present-day Thailand ever fell into French, English, or Dutch hands. Unlike its neighbors. Laos, Cambodia, and the two Vietnams formed French Indochina. Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore were English. Maybe they smile because they feel proud, and it may be that all this is true (even though it sounds somewhat forced to me).

And now comes something marvelous, incredible! One of the strangest discoveries of humanity! A case that kept the eyes and attention of science focused on my beautiful kingdom of Thailand! By one of its lakes, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English doctor found a child with two heads. After careful observation he discovered that it wasn’t one, but two, two children with a single body. From them, that strange genetic anomaly took its name: Siamese twins.

With their oval eyes, dark skin, and low stature, the Thais are, in fact, very smiley. “Welcome to the land of smiles,” you read at the airport. The king is considered a god and his subjects lie down on the ground before him (they don’t kneel). The Royal Palace of Sanam Luang, with its brightly colored pagodas and stupas, is beautiful, as is the imposing 150-foot-long, gold-plated Reclining Buddha. He’s a smiling Buddha. Strange to see millions of people worshiping someone who smiles.

Bangkok, capital of paid sex in all its forms, even the most despicable or circus-like. Sex in all its cruelty and misery. The district of Patpong is the brothel of the European middle classes. Here, a modest waiter from Berlin or Madrid becomes The Mambo King! For very little (coming from his paradise of the euro) he can buy himself a wife-lover-masseuse-slave who knows the Kama Sutra back to front, who can cook and agrees to play the game, who kisses him on the mouth and says, darling, I’ve missed you, will you take me with you next time? The fiction of love (but isn’t love always a fiction? Oh, Mr. Ambrossía, don’t read this). The European male looks for sexual tourism in Thailand, Oriental punctiliousness, while the European woman goes to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Jamaica (some to Colombia), where she finds the anthropomorphic intensity of the black man without having to go to Africa, which is less amusing than the Caribbean and has malaria.

But attention, future customers! The Thai sex industry involves twenty-five percent of the women between fifteen and forty, and there are boys too. It’s the paradise of novices and virgins, but can lead to unpleasant surprises: gonorrhea, hepatitis, herpes, AIDS. Many of the young girls (even virgins) are heroin addicts. They inject themselves in the knuckles or in the groin so that the marks can’t be seen.

Smokers of heroin are called moo , which means pig, because when they smoke it they grunt. Those who use syringes are pei , in other words, ducks, “because they live in stagnant water.” The white man is farang , a word that has traveled through several continents, all in the southern part of the world, and which basically, in its origin, means “Frenchman,” and by extension “European” or even “Western Christian” ( al-Faranj in Arabic, farangi in Farsi and Urdu and even in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia).

An old Thai chronicle gives the following description of the farang : “They are excessively tall, hairy, and dirty. They educate their children for a long time and devote their lives to accumulating wealth. Their women are tall, sturdy, and very beautiful. They do not grow rice.”

My passion for walls continued and one day, I don’t know as a result of what, I summoned up the courage to tell Juana. We went to the sewer and she stood there for a while in silence, a few paces ahead of me, facing the images. My islands and volcanoes glittered; my igneous snakes, my red crocodiles and dinosaurs, everything that I felt in my stomach and in my soul. She gazed at them in silence and I left her quietly meditating, not daring to breathe in order not to disturb her. After a while I put my hand on her arm and she turned.