“So you have questions. Where would you like to start?” I shrug. “The question you haven’t asked, which I expected you to ask-which you should have asked by now, Detective, is-?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t I cut his dick off when I had the chance?”
I splutter. The punishment to which she refers is less common than it used to be in Southeast Asia. Nong, though, in her younger years, was just the kind of Thai girl capable of exacting that kind of revenge from a man who did her wrong, the logic being that he would not repeat the error in this lifetime. “Okay,” I croak. “Why didn’t you?”
She stares out over her garden, sighs. “A child is born, the first thing you worry about is how to keep it alive, feed it, take care of it, live with it for the next fifteen years. You don’t worry about unimportant points of history.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“That it was just easier to let you believe the simple version-the version everyone else also believes. That way you wouldn’t grow up confused. All along Soi Cowboy there are women around my age who had leuk kreung kids with farang men who disappeared as soon as they fell pregnant. All those women were on the game at the time. It was just easier to let you see it that way.”
“I don’t follow.”
She nods. “Naturally. That’s the whole point. If you can’t follow now, after fifteen years as a cop, how would you have been able to follow at age seven, or ten, or even fourteen? And after that there was no point, you were off having sex and stealing cars and doing drugs-you’d lost interest in your personal history. Like all teens you were only interested in your personal present.”
“Will you just get on with it? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Think about it. I had only just started in that bar in Pat Pong. The mamasan was going to hold an auction for my virginity, as was the custom. She expected to make a fat profit, half of which she would share with me-or one of my uncles would have killed her. It was that kind of arrangement. Considering my good looks, she was going to ask one hundred thousand baht-there are always men with a virginity fetish willing to pay that kind of money, not all of them Japanese. Then your father walked in. Fresh-faced, tall, handsome to die for, weirdly innocent, on five days R amp;R from Vietnam. He’d never hired flesh, least of all taken part in an auction for a virgin. He wanted me, though, without actually realizing what wanting me might mean. Just like America had to save the world from communism, so he just had to stop the mamasan from selling me, and the only way he could do that was by buying me himself. I’d never seen a man in such a state. All I did was sit with him for an hour, holding his hand, wondering when he was going to take me upstairs to the cubicles, while his face went through all those weird moods: you know, when men have the hots and feel guilty? He kept eyeballing me and telling me very earnest things in English which I couldn’t understand. All I could think of was how big he was and if his dick was in proportion, it was really going to hurt and maybe I should send out for some painkillers and K-Y Jelly in advance.”
Her cigarette has gone out. She lights another and contemplates her garden.
“He certainly seduced himself, though. By the time he was through with the eyeballing he was sobbing his heart out. He found another girl to interpret and said he’d never set eyes on a woman so perfect in body, face, and soul. Buddha knows where he got the soul part from. I think he was blown away by my being a virgin-it hit him in some special place. He told the mamasan that if she would only hold off for a couple of days, he would find the money. He went into the big performance and the mamasan agreed to wait for him to come back with the dough: there weren’t any immediate offers for my body from other customers at that price. So a couple of days later he’s borrowed the money, most of it from Bobby da Silva, his best friend. Now he pays the mamasan, and everyone, including me, assumes he’s going to take me upstairs to the cubicles, but when the mamasan tells him he can have a room without charge for an hour considering what a good customer he’s just become, he gets upset all over again. You have to bear in mind, Thais at that time had very little exposure to Western thinking. We had no understanding of the kind of man who would hire a girl just to gawp at her, like an exotic pet. As you know, the fee would have given him the right to have me whenever he wanted for a month afterward, any way he liked.”
Nong takes a long sip of Mekong and stares out over her garden. It is one of her contradictions that this consummate businesswoman never thinks of redeveloping her land to build an apartment building on it and make a big fat profit. She loves simply owning it.
“Even today it’s kind of unreal to me, how he wouldn’t touch me without my permission. But now I understand he was acting honorably according to his culture. There were times when I wished he’d just get on and screw me, instead of that sickly self-restraint they use to make themselves feel virtuous.” She sighs. “But that’s the way it was. After a couple of days, I had to ask, ‘What are you going to do with me?’ I couldn’t very well go back to the bar, after he’d paid all that money. And he had to return to the war.” She takes a toke on the Marlboro Red. “Screw me? Bust my hymen? — oh, no, that would be exploitative. So he has me undress in front of him ten times a day. He loves to take pictures, but he’s especially creepy about nude photos. He lets me see how he tortures himself about me. I am the sex toy he daren’t have sex with. In his fantasies he exploits every inch of my young body-but no sin is ever committed, apart from masturbation. Perhaps he wanted to be able to say that he never had sex with a prostitute. He even tells me that if I like, I can remain a virgin until the day we get married.”
I pause over my Mekong. “Married?”
Nong calls her maid again to ask for that box. Maymay returns with a container like a portable safe or a large jewelry box made of steel with a small key in the lock. I have never seen it before. Now she digs out a pile of yellowing correspondence and some old faded photos. She hands me one.
My mother, still very young, is standing wearing a sarong between two men. Her hair-and demeanor-are in the way of old Thailand, for the devastation of the late twentieth century had not yet ruined our culture. She is projecting fierceness and courage as she stands between two young American soldiers on R amp;R-one of them towering over her-who could have been on a jaunt to Coney Island to judge from their dumb grins. Bobby da Silva is a smooth-faced handsome young man with Latin features.
And now I think I understand the message Nong is trying to convey to me: Imagine these three young people. Nothing they have done or suffered so far has really touched the innocence of their souls. If these two young men have killed, it must have been from a distance, under orders, with no real awareness of the darkness that is about to overwhelm them.
Now she chooses another photo from her collection and hands it to me. Two big male hands hold a newborn infant. There are signs that it was taken in a hospital, but the main point seems to be the date when I was born, which has been typed onto the picture in large characters at the top. Now she hands me another.
At first I do not understand the next photo. Unlike the previous two, it has been taken in haste, under battle conditions. With some effort I recognize the tall American in the first photo. His face is so distraught that even from this distance of nearly forty years I feel a pang that anyone of my blood should have suffered such a devastating blow. Now I can make out the scene a little better. There is plenty of smoke, but it is obvious that my father’s company has suffered a terrible defeat. Uniformed men are caught by the camera while they run to and from a helicopter whose tail can just be made out. And those two bloody objects in the foreground, with some of the cloth still clinging to them, are the legs of one Roberto Eduardo Santos Tavares Melo da Silva: there is a caption to that effect.