I give her time to review the memory. When she fails to continue, I say, “So, I still don’t understand. You had everything you wanted, you scored the jackpot in your first week, he thought he’d bagged the most fantastic woman in the world. It doesn’t sound tragic. He was writing to you every day, telling you how much he adored you.” I raise my hands and shoulders.
She takes the wad of photos from her box and flips through them until she comes to the one with Bobby da Silva in a wheelchair. “That happened.”
Now she shows me the inside of the box where letters are neatly stacked. “See, this is before.” A pile of jagged envelopes where she had opened them. “And this is after”: perhaps as many as a hundred unopened envelopes.
“You didn’t open them?”
“I got sick of what he was saying. I couldn’t stand it.” She looks me in the eye. “You have to remember, I couldn’t read English. I was embarrassed to have someone else read me that junk.”
Now she is finally ready to deliver her punch line. “It was a different man with a different name. He told me I may as well keep calling him Jack, but in fact he had changed identity. I may have been a no-good bar girl with poor karma, but I was still a Buddhist. I couldn’t take all that hatred, that endless poisoning of his mind, all those promises to ‘get back at Charlie for me and Bobby.’ And the killing of the ‘gooks’ and the ‘slope-heads.’ ” She stares at me. “He didn’t seem to notice the Vietnamese were almost the same race as me. He had volunteered for Special Forces. When I say he was a different man, I mean totally different, unrecognizable. I had the instincts of a new mother. I didn’t want my child contaminated. I told him he wasn’t going to see you anymore. I told him I didn’t want you to inherit a murderer’s karma.”
It is a hot day here in the garden. A cold shiver shakes me to the bones. “But he visited you afterward-or not?”
She has straightened her back and is sitting cross-legged like an Isaan girl, her strong chin jutting, her eyes closed. “This is as much as I can take, Sonchai. I don’t want to talk about it anymore today. You have enough to go on for the moment.”
I see that she has made up her mind to say no more. But when I prepare to leave she starts talking again. It is strange behavior. She does not look at me and could have been complaining to the Bodhi tree.
“So, Roberto Eduardo Santos Tavares Melo da Silva lost his legs, this was tragic, a catastrophe, very, very hard to look at. But in war men lose limbs. Thai men don’t totally give up on who they are just because their best friend lost his legs. It’s because something happened that the white man couldn’t control. The gooks were winning-that’s what he couldn’t stand. The one thing that never occurred to any of them until it was too late, that they might actually lose the war.”
“What happened to da Silva?”
“Bobby? I’ll tell you what happened to Bobby. He borrowed money from his family to come back here to Bangkok, where he drank and whored himself to death-deliberately. But by then he and your father weren’t talking. See, even da Silva hated what your father turned into. He never wanted revenge, he only wanted his legs back, and when he couldn’t achieve that, he decided to go out with a bang. Lots of them.”
There is no point trying to press her for more information; when Mama Nong says no, it means just that. I will have to return for more answers when her mood has changed. I hardly need to point out, R, that the man she has just described bears no resemblance to the “prize buffalo” who would “tear the shed down” if deprived of sex. I seemed to have at least two natural fathers, according to Mum. But by the time I reach the end of the soi, my passion for more knowledge overcomes me. I buy an iced lemon tea at the 7-Eleven on the corner, down it, and walk slowly back.
She is waiting for me. I snuck around the side, using my key to the garden door, but she is not surprised when I appear before her, blocking her view of the pool where she sits cross-legged on her mat. She looks up to stare at me, sees something in my eyes that was not there before, and nods.
“You’re not leveling,” I say. “There’s something else. There has to be. Something direct and personal that made you ashamed. That made you not want to tell me the truth. That made you want to break with him totally. It must have been serious-this was the guy who took you to America, right?”
“Did you bring dope?”
“No.”
“What are you going to use for anesthetic?”
“Nothing.”
She raises her eyes, then gestures for me to sit with her. “Of course, you’ve guessed he came back?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. So he came back.”
She pauses for so long, staring at the Bodhi tree, a gnarled triumph of persistent life that hangs over the dead blue pool, that I have to say, “Yes?”
She grunts. “It is all so long ago.” She stares at the pool. “He’d changed, but so had I. The war was coming to an end. You were about eleven months old, growing fast. Obviously, only a year had passed, but that’s a long time in war and people change quickly when they see their loved ones shredded. He wrote to me, but I had stopped replying. A woman in the position I was in then is interested in hearing from the father of her child only if he has something practical to offer. Money would have been great, but even a reliable presence might have been helpful. I wasn’t interested in confessions of guilt and how bad he felt about leaving me and how he still had such strong feelings for me.” She checks my eyes.
“I thought you didn’t read those letters.”
She smiles. “Only one in ten. A girl gets curious, after all. And there was some small gratification that he felt so bad-that he was still thinking of me at all. Frankly, a Thai man in his position would not have stayed in touch.” She lights a Marlboro Red, inhales gratefully, exhales.
She swallows. “He came back after about a year and he was exactly the kind of man I had expected him to be on the first date. Oversexed, tough, willful, physically incredibly strong, wired, hyper-alert-a killer. We had the affair we should have had the first time round, but neither of us had known how. I’d been selling my body and he’d been hiring flesh in Vietnam-lots and lots of it. So we both knew everything there is to know about sex. I was still young, in my early twenties, he was only a year older, but you could say it was an affair made in hell. We simply went wild. Like all such things, it lasted maybe a month, then when we cooled down we didn’t like what we saw. We didn’t like each other and we certainly didn’t like the face in the mirror in the morning. The passion died like a damp firework and it was all over. At least as far as anything physical was concerned.”
“This is when he took you to America?”
“Yes. You wouldn’t remember, but your aunt Mimi looked after you for a month.”
“But how was he over there?”
She pauses and then nods. “Stressed, I suppose, although I was too young to look at it like that. He was angry as hell at the way vets were being treated.” She looks at me. “He kept getting into fights-except that other men could see what he was and were scared of him. At least five times I had to hold him back-beg him, even. I knew in my bones how easy it would have been for him to kill. I kept telling him I was a Buddhist, I didn’t believe in solving problems that way. It was one of the things that broke us up.” She gives me a shy look. “That and sex.”
“How so?”
“He was voracious. Even with my background I found it hard to cope. Three, four times a day, no letup. Amazing.”
She looks at me. It is as though she is challenging me to ask the last big dangerous question. I have no idea what that might be and stare back at her, puzzled. Then it hits me.
“There was another change in him, wasn’t there?”
She looks away at the Bodhi tree. “Yes. The wired psychopath who volunteered for Special Forces could not survive-I could see that. To tell the truth, I began to assume he would end up murdered or in jail. But something else happened. He volunteered for some super-secret military project he said had been officially closed down, but was still going strong in secret locations. He said I might read about it one day. I didn’t know what he was talking about. All I know is there was some kind of initiation-and he never contacted me again. I assumed he was dead. He is for me, anyway.”