Dragon Apparent, page 16
As soon as the buffalo had been attached, a group of pupils, carrying gongs and dressed in sombre, handsome blankets, appeared. With a slow, mournful beating of the gongs they began to circle about the buffalo which, more alarmed than ever at these sinister preliminaries, made panic-stricken efforts to break free. Four more pupils joined the death procession. They carried a huge drum supported on a framework of poles, which had been borrowed from a local chief. This drum, I learned, was valued at fifteen buffaloes and there had been a great deal of fussy admonition on the chief’s part before he could be persuaded to let it go. A few minutes later, the chief himself, who had been worrying about his property, turned up, and, wearing a military medal on the breast of a new, white sports-shirt, took his stand in the front row of the audience to make sure that there was no culpable negligence. When beaten, the drum gave out a most important sound, a muffled growling, agreed by those present to be irresistible to the spirits, however aloof.
What followed was a most distressing spectacle. Two of the fathers stood out. Carrying coupe-coupes (the Moï weapon which is half knife and half axe), they approached the animal from behind. They succeeded after several false attempts, when the heavy knife struck home with a hideous chopping sound, in hamstringing first one leg, causing the animal to hop about on a single back leg in a frantic effort to avoid the blows, and then the second leg, when it collapsed on its hocks, its rear legs bent uselessly under it. This frightful disablement failed to prevent it from shuffling with desperate energy round the post, while, like minor bullfighters that have fulfilled the role assigned to them, the men with the coupe-coupes retired, and two others, armed with lances, stepped forward. The subsequent tragedy was long drawn-out and incomparably bloodier than a bullfight, when until the last moments of its life the bull is majestic and incalculable. About this grotesquely shuffling bulk there was squalor and humiliation in which we were all involved. No particular technique, it seemed, was demanded of the killers, and they had a good half-hour in which to pursue their prey with desultory proddings and stabbings. Finally, with a frightful shuddering groan – the first sound that it had uttered – the animal expired, was immediately dragged away and thrown on a brushwood fire, where it was left to scorch superficially for about fifteen minutes. No attempt has ever been made to reform or modify cruel sacrifices of this kind, and this is the end which awaits every buffalo in the Moï country. One is told by the French that it is part of their policy to respect the religious customs of the natives. In such matters as this there is much official susceptibility where the natives’ freedom of action is concerned.
In the early afternoon we came back. There were thirty-seven jars of alcohol lined up with a number of bamboo tubes protruding from each, and every Moï in Pleiku, including all the pupils, was exceedingly tight. Politely, following the Resident’s example, we took our place for a few seconds before each jar, rejected the baskets of chopped, raw meat, and nibbled with slight nausea at skewers with titbits grilled à la kebab. This token participation was obligatory, otherwise the Resident risked having the heads of the families declare the ceremony null and void and refuse to allow the children to attend school. After a few minutes we arose to go, but the Jarai schoolmaster spotted our intention and came reeling towards us to beg the Resident to wait a moment. There was a surprise arranged for us and, raising his arm, he shouted a command. The thirty-seven pupils rose unsteadily from their jars and, leaning upon each other for support, formed a swaying line. There while we faced them rather sheepishly across the blood-splashed earth and beneath the buffalo skull, now scraped clean and shining and impaled on a spruce ritual post, they burst into Auld Lang Syne, rendered to the words, ‘Faut-il nous quitter sans espoir – sans espoir de retour?’ They wanted to show us that their school years had not been spent for nothing.
* * *
The remainder of the day was spent in an official visit to the Vietnamese community of Pleiku. To guard against any fifth column activities on behalf of the Viet-Minh, all the Vietnamese in the district had been concentrated in the single village of Phu-Tho, which was guarded by a French fort. The purpose of the Resident’s visit was to offer official congratulations on the eve of the feast of Têt, the Chinese and Vietnamese New Year; originally celebrated with the abandonment of all endeavour for the first three months of the year – a period which it has now been found convenient to reduce to a week.
The attitude of the Resident towards his Vietnamese minority was one of uneasy tolerance. I had now, in unbroken succession, met four French administrators who were all highly intelligent, broad-minded and well-intentioned. They recognised evil, and as far as they could without risking their positions, they fought it where they saw it. At least one of them, although he would not openly admit it, was a fervent anti-colonialist. Yet none of them could ever find a good word for the Vietnamese. They conceded that there was a special charm in the way of living of the Laotians and the Cambodians. The Moïs, of course, were children, lazy and improvident but delightful. But the Vietnamese – well, you never knew where you were with them, they suffered from an inferiority complex, concealed their true thoughts or feelings, were cruel and had no religion to speak about, were ‘not like us’. It is unsafe to discuss the Vietnamese in a French audience, because a reproving voice will always be raised to tell you to wait until you have lived thirty years in the country before you talk of fathoming this muddy psychological pool. The most intelligent Frenchman seems to be influenced subconsciously in this matter by the sheer dead-weight of prejudice of his uncritical compatriots. I am reminded of the British interpretation of the Chinese character as portrayed in the popular magazines of the period following the Boxer rebellion, when for a generation the Chinese supplied us with villains of fiction who were obnoxious in a two-faced and totally un-English way.
To me this suggests that the French like the Laotians and the rest of them because they do not fear them. They can relax their defences in the comfortable knowledge that these are harmless and declining peoples, and with this their good qualities become, rather nostalgically, apparent. They are like the Spanish conquerors of the West Indies who delayed official recognition that the Caribs had souls until their extermination was almost complete, or like the Americans who are sentimental about their vanishing Indians, forgetting the massacres of the last century when the only ‘good injun’ was a dead one. The Vietnamese are a subject people who refuse to go into a graceful decline. There are seventeen millions of these ‘bad injuns’ and nothing is too bad for them.
The manner of my friends, therefore, when we were received by the notables of Phu-Tho, was courteous but not genial. It seemed that we had arrived a little sooner than expected because a dignitary, meeting us with clasped hands and low bows at the flower-decorated arch of entry, begged us to wait until the official drum was fetched. This arrived a few minutes later, carried on poles by a scampering group of notables, who gravely lined up before us and, hoisting their pennants, conducted us with slow and solemn pomp to the pagoda.
There is more poetry in a Vietnamese village but less art than in a Moï one. Under magic compulsion the Moïs carve the objects dedicated to the spirits with designs which have come to have a secondary, artistic value. There is little of this kind of art about poor Vietnamese villages. Unlike the Moï who is non-specialised and self-sufficient, the Vietnamese belongs to a money society and is a market for manufactured products, most of them shoddy; although he may have one or two good pieces of pre-war Chinese porcelain about the house. He does not object to living in a hovel provided that it contains a vase of flowers, and the essence of the perfect household represented by the bright and blossom-decked niche dedicated to the ancestral spirits. The Vietnamese is fortunate in that his household lares do not suffer from the fussy obsession for order of their Moï counterparts.
The pagoda of Phu-Tho, then, was nothing more than a wooden shack, with a corrugated-iron roof – the most valuable part of its construction – which would have disgraced any Moï village. For all that, it was gay with jonquils, narcissus and chrysanthemums, coaxed into choice and grotesque shapes by the devoted cunning of these serene-faced patriarchs. One wall of the pagoda could be opened up completely, and before this opening we sat on a row of chairs, while joss-sticks were lighted and gongs reverently thumped. An official presented us with a rectangle of vermilion paper apiece, excellently painted with Chinese ideograms for conventional New Year’s greetings. Mine read ‘five felicities under the same door’. These Chinese New Year’s greetings are much prized throughout Indo-China, particularly in remote districts of Cambodia and Laos where there are no Chinese. Here the meanings of the ideograms are unknown and the consequent element of mystery enhances their magic virtues. One sees them pasted on most door posts in some villages, where they are carefully preserved the year round.
Our visit to the pagoda was in deference to a principle no different from that followed in Moï villages. We were being presented to the tutelary spirit. The pagoda of a tutelary spirit is to be found in every Vietnamese village, and sometimes there are two or more. In the past the ancient cult has been modified by the system of Confucius and by Buddhism, but now the driving force in the two great philosophies has faltered and waned, and the cult still survives. The tutelary spirit was once some outstanding village personality, or even its founder, for whom, in return for services rendered, has been created a sort of spiritual baronetcy. In Phu-Tho there was nothing particularly colourful related of the character of this semi-divine distinguished citizen, but at another village I visited he had been a thief of quite extraordinary prowess. For the annual feast some meritorious person was granted the privilege of representing him in a ceremony which consisted in the representative’s breaking into the pagoda at night and carrying off the sacred tablets. He was then chased, caught, pelted with mud and refuse by the indignant villagers, and received a ritual beating to which every tax-paying male was allowed to contribute his blow. Having recovered from this treatment, he became the guest of honour at the subsequent feast.
It was inevitable that the presentation of the pagoda should be followed by the Vietnamese equivalent of the alcohol jar. Unfortunately the civilities of the morning had provoked in the case of each of us a severe attack of the kind of indigestion that follows an excess of rice-alcohol. We were alarmed then, when, cramped with heartburn, we were led into the Spanish-type patio of the chef du conseil’s house, and observed a table laden with bottles of sweet, heavy, French aperitifs. We took our seats at the table eyeing the bottles dully, while the notables filed slowly in, and stood in a circle facing us, round the walls. They were dressed in black coats and turbans and white trousers. There was a moment of confusion when it was realised that someone had usurped the Resident’s chair of honour, distinguished by a towel that had been hung over the back, but this was soon put right, and the chef du conseil standing forward, with head bent slightly and clasped hands, delivered a fairly long speech of welcome in Vietnamese. As soon as this was over the notables advanced implacably with cakes of rice, honey and nuts, stamped into the shapes appropriate to the season, others arriving with cups of tea, while yet others resolutely uncorked the bottles – chosen I was certain for their colour, as they were all red – and poured out a white bakelite mugful of Cap Corse, Suze or Campari – whichever happened to be nearest. Our attendants then took a respectful pace back to allow us to drink. There was a moment of hesitation while the notables looked on anxiously, then the Resident, abstemious by nature, but conscientious in his duties raised his glass. Murmurs of approval came from the onlookers and now, to our consternation, we saw that bottles of champagne were being uncorked. But the notables were all smiles and highly delighted with the miniature explosions of the popping corks, reminding them, no doubt, of celebratory firecrackers, and therefore highly suitable to the occasion. For the champagne the white bakelite mugs were removed and replaced in the interests of colour-harmony with pale blue ones.
At last, although from a glance at a side-table it was clear that more colour-combinations of liquors and mugs had been intended, the Resident seized an opportunity to rise. The ceremonial drum was rushed into position, the banners elevated and off we went, at a rapid if unsteady shuffle. But it was not back to the Resident’s Citroen that we were led. Instead the procession stopped before another house, a replica of the first, with the Spanish patio, the towel-draped chair, the felicitous cakes, the encircling notables and a startling vision of a liquor called Eau de Violette in lemon-coloured containers. This, we found, was the house of the religious head of the community, who was, if anything, more important than the mayor, and we should have been taken there first but for the fact that our host had been caught unprepared by our premature arrival.
* * *
Next day the awaited news had come from Stung Treng, and it was discouraging. Cambodian bandits, displaced as I learned later by operations against them in Central Cambodia, had arrived in the area. It was a good spot for bandits, removed as far as possible from the centres of authority and yet populated by many prosperous fishing villages along the Sré-Pok and Sé-San rivers; tributaries of the Mekong, between which the road to Stung Treng ran. The Resident said that he had business with the chief of the Jarai village of Ču-Ty, which was a good way along my road. This man was also chief of a secteur of villages and his jurisdiction ran as far as Bo-Kheo, being in this direction, at the native level, coextensive with that of the Resident himself. The Resident said we should be able to get up-to-date information from him of the situation on the borders of Cambodia and Laos.
Accordingly we set out in the Resident’s lorry, accompanied by a schools inspector from Pleiku who wanted to visit the school at Ču-Ty and an entirely Europeanised Jarai interpreter, who wore handsome French clothes and the latest fashion in plastic belts and wrist-straps. This young man, who was in his early twenties, was the first successfully Westernised Moï I had seen. He looked like a minor French film star and was indistinguishable from a Southern European, except, perhaps, that he smiled more. The Resident happened to mention that he was a young man of exceptional intelligence, adding that it was a further testimony to the inherent mental capabilities of primitive peoples, that he knew of another Jarai boy who had left his village for the first time when nine years old and had just been commissioned in the army after having passed out of the officers’ school with the highest marks of his class.
It was clear that the road westwards to Ču-Ty was regarded as of strategic value, because Jarai labourers were hard at work clearing the forest to a depth of about a hundred yards on each side. The vast bonfires they had started gave rise to a strange phenomenon. Millions of winged insects fleeing the conflagration were being chased by certainly thousands of birds; offering a wonderful opportunity for a naturalist interested in the ornithology and the insect-life of South-East Asia. Some of the birds were trim and tight-looking; flycatchers, perhaps, successfully engaged in a normal routine. Others, managing with difficulty their spectacular plumage, extracted less profit from the holocaust. Sometimes, absorbed in the chase, birds came floundering into the lorry and disgorged a half-swallowed butterfly before taking off. There were other predators, too, that benefited. The elegant hawks of the plateau of Kontum had gathered to feast upon those whose caution had been dulled by excess.
* * *
The village of Ču-Ty was built imposingly on a hilltop, and its chief awaited us at the head of the steps leading to the veranda of his long-house. He was a huge, grinning villain; a Jarai Henry the Eighth, whose name, Prak, meant money. He possessed five elephants, three wives, several rice-fields and a jeep, given to him by the planter of Pleiku, who was reported to pay him ten piastres for each man supplied to the plantations, in addition to the half-piastre paid by the government. Prak was one of those energetic, scheming rascals, who could have been in other times a king among his people, but had sold himself for a trifling sum.
There were none of the elaborate Moï courtesies forthcoming where Prak was concerned. He had learned Western forthrightness in such matters, and awaited us on his veranda, dressed in a single-breasted jacket, while a servitor stood at his elbow with a quart of brandy and a breakfast cup to serve it in. Prak was not the man, either, to worry about ritual offerings of eggs and rice or tobacco leaves. He made a sign and a member of his retinue picked up a piece of wood, dropped from the veranda and fell upon a passing piglet. There was a light-seeming but practised blow, the pig fell shuddering and the man set fire to a nearby pile of brushwood and threw the corpse in the flames. The whole thing was done in perhaps two minutes. The sow wandered up and sniffed nostalgically at the gout of blood left by her offspring on the scene of the tragedy. We went into the long-house whilst Prak snapped out a few orders, sending his minions scurrying in all directions to line up alcohol jars and fetch water.
While the sacrifice was in preparation we strolled over with the inspector to visit the school. It seemed very large for the size of the village. There were about thirty children in a classroom, decorated with their own drawings of jeeps and man-faced tigers. As we entered the room the children stood and began to sing what was perhaps the school song, consisting of a repetition of the words, ‘Bonjour Monsieur, merci Monsieur’. The inspector praised the Jarai master for the attendance and the master told him that when any child failed to attend regularly Prak sent for the father and beat him.
