Dragon Apparent, page 20
The sky above all these villages was full of grotesque and meaningful kites. Like miniature balloon-barrages they hung there, as if designed to frustrate the surprise attacks of fabulous aerial monsters.
* * *
The zone of French occupation in Cochin-China is shapeless and unpredictable. There is a small squid-like body which thrusts out groping tentacles into a vast no-man’s land of canal-patterned paddy-fields and swamps. On a larger scale the country is hugely segmented by the mouths of the Mekong which leave great, ragged tongues of land projecting into the sea. The enemy is everywhere; in full strength and with complete organisation in one of the great, estuarial peninsulas, and split into skirmishing groups in the next. Defence towers garrisoned by Bao-Dai troops control the main roads, but only in daylight hours. Traffic is withdrawn before sundown and only starts again at eight in the morning.
During the night hours, the defence towers, too, go out of business and their defenders lie low, while the Viet-Minh patrols pass by on their way to collect tolls or impose retribution, conducting their activities even in the suburbs of Saigon. There are supposed to be live-and-let-live arrangements, and sometimes, perhaps when these break down, the Viet-Minh arrive in force and lay siege to a few towers, which may or may not be prepared to hold out to the last bullet. In this pacified zone you can sleep in the towns at night, so long as you do not go out after dark, but you cannot stay in the villages some of which it is better to keep away from even in daytime. The enemy includes the regular army of the Viet-Minh, tough and brilliant in guerilla tactics, but lightly armed; innumerable partisans who follow respectable occupations in the daytime, but turn into guerillas at night; and, as well, all that farrago of dubious allies, including the religious armies, who accepted French arms in order to live by near-banditry, but who are ready and willing to administer a stab in the back and will go over to the other side as soon as the moment seems right. As for friends – they are probably few, since the logic of modern warfare involves the destruction of the guilty and the innocent, and friends along with enemies. On the anniversary of the signing – a year before – of the agreement with Bao-Dai for Vietnamese ‘independence’, the French declared a holiday and blundering on in a quite un-Gallic but wholly Teuton fashion, ordered spontaneous demonstrations of joy. The police would see to it, newspapers warned, that flags were hung out. Can it have been the influence of German occupation? Or is it the circumstances and not the race that make the Nazi. To be fair to them, the French themselves, reading this in their papers, were either amused or horrified. The day came, the celebrations were ignored, the streets were empty, no flags flew. And the police did nothing about it.
* * *
It was at the house of one of the remaining allies, a high official of the Bao-Dai government, that the banquet was given on the last night of my Cochin-China interlude. There had been no warning of this glittering occasion. I was caught in a state of total unpreparedness, my change of clothing when I made an inspection, being nearly as grimed with yellow dust as those I wore. And now to my alarm I found myself seated at the right hand of the Vietnamese provincial Governor, facing the décolletée lady of the Colonel and a row of senior officers and officials in gleaming sharkskin. But the French are a genial people, little troubled by starchiness and the rigours of social self-defence. Besides that, the nature of the banquet was in itself an all-out, frontal attack on the citadels of dignity. Formal deportment is shattered and devastated by the manipulation of Vietnamese food, and although some people might have been merely embarrassed, the French headquarters’ staff at Mytho and their womenfolk were prepared to treat the thing as a gastronomic romp. Undoubtedly in placing bowls and chopsticks before his guests, the Chef de Province knew his types.
Vietnamese cooking, like most aspects of Vietnamese culture, has been strongly influenced by the Chinese. By comparison it is provincial, lacking the range and the formidable ingenuity of the Pekinese and Cantonese cuisines. But there are a few specialities which have been evolved with a great deal of dietetic insight. The best known of these is Chà Gió, with which we were served as an entrée. Chà Gió consists fundamentally of very small, highly spiced meat-rolls, which are transferred easily enough with chopsticks from the dish to one’s plate. But this is nothing more than a preliminary operation, and many dexterous manipulations follow. Two or three kinds of vegetable leaves are provided as salad, plus minute spring onions. A leaf of each kind is picked up and – this is not so easy – placed in superimposition on one’s plate and garnished with an onion, ready to receive the meat roll in the middle. And now comes the operation calling for natural skill, or years of practice, since the leaves must be wrapped neatly round the narrow cylinder of mincemeat. The Chà-Gió, now fully prepared, is lifted with the chopsticks and dowsed in the saucer of nuóc-mâm at the side of one’s plate, from which, according to Mr Houghton-Broderick, an odour resembling that of tiger’s urine arises. The total operation takes the non-expert several minutes and involves as many contretemps as one would expect. On this occasion, the Europeans soon gave up the struggle, throwing dignity to the winds, and dabbled happily with their fingers. A spirit of comradeship was noticeable, a democratic kinship born in an atmosphere of common endeavour, frustration and ridicule.
When travelling I make a sincere effort to throw overboard all prejudices concerning food. Consequently after a brief period of struggle I had already come to terms with nuóc-mâm, about which almost every writer on Indo-China since the first Jesuit has grumbled so consistently. I felt indeed that I had taken the first steps towards connoisseurship, and it was in this spirit that I congratulated the Governor on his supply which was the colour of pale honey, thickish and of obvious excellence. Nuóc-mâm is produced by the fermentation of juices exuded by layers of fish subjected to pressure between layers of salt. The best result as in viniculture is produced by the first drawing-off, before artificial pressure is applied, and there are three or more subsequent pressings with consequent deteriorations in quality. First crus are allowed to mature like brandy, improving steadily with age. The Governor told me that he thought his stock, which he had inherited, was over a hundred years old. All the fierce ammoniacal exhalations were long since spent, and what remained was not more than a whiff of mellow corruption. Taking a grain of cooked rice, he deposited it on the golden surface, where it remained supported by the tension – an infallible test of quality, he said.
After the Chà Gió came a flux of delicacies, designed undoubtedly to provoke curiosity and admiration and to provide the excuse for enormously prolonged dalliance at the table, rather than to appease gross appetites. The Vietnamese picked judiciously at the breasts of lacquered pigeons, the sliced coxcombs and the tiny diaphanous fish, while the Europeans ate with barbarian forthrightness, finding their chopsticks useful to illustrate with fine flourishes – since shoptalk had crept in – the feints, the encirclements, the annihilation. The Governor had been presented with a remarkable lighter, an unwieldy engine, which commanded admiration by producing flame in some quite unexpected way. How this was done, I have forgotten, but I know that it was not by friction on a flint. Throughout the meal he could hardly bear to put this away and fiddled continually with it between the courses, while his guests stuffed themselves with the rare meats he hardly touched. For me there was an allegory in this scene.
The night of the return to Saigon I went with Vietnamese friends for the second time to the Vietnamese theatre. The first visit had been an appalling fiasco, although cruelly funny in its way; a pathetic attempt at a Wild Western musical, inspired perhaps by reports of Oklahoma. It was acted by fragile, slant-eyed beauties in chaps, wearing ten-gallon hats and toting six-shooters; their cheeks heavily incarnadined in representation of occidental plethora. The cowboys had coloured their top lips and chins bright blue to suggest a strong Western growth of beard. Provided with guitars which they were unable to play, they shrilled a strident Oriental version of hillbilly airs, which someone in the orchestra accompanied on some Vietnamese stringed instrument, punctuating the lines with a vigorous clashing of cymbals.
This second experience was a great improvement. It was a traditional play describing the tragic courtship by a Chinese Ambassador of an unattached medieval Empress of Vietnam. The costumery was the most gorgeous and obviously expensive I have ever seen. There was none of the dreamy symbolism of Cambodia and Laos in this performance. The acting was literal and never relapsed into ballet. When, for instance, the Ambassador and his rival the Chief Mandarin fought a duel, the fight was meant to be a real one; a dazzling display of traditional swordsmanship, and not a set pas de deux with each performer releasing symbolical thunderbolts. The culminating point was reached when, with a mighty cut, the Ambassador’s arm was hacked off. Much blood flowed, some of which the Ambassador staunched with his handkerchief which he tenderly presented to the Empress. Afterwards, holding his severed right arm in his left hand, the Ambassador acted an energetic death-scene, lasting half an hour, finally expiring, still upright, in the arms of his followers. The dramatic high spots of the scene were accentuated by an orchestral supernumerary on a special perch who beat a cymbal.
Extreme despair at the Ambassador’s fate was registered by all the company, including the Empress, hurling themselves to the ground and then performing a kind of frantic gyration. This was the moment when the curtain should have been rung down, but unfortunately it stuck half way. The orchestra had worked up to a deafening finale, with the cymbals man lashing out as if fighting for his life and the human Catherine wheels whirling, with peacock feathers and brocaded panels flying in all directions. And then the cast had had enough. Leaping as one man to their feet, the Ambassador still clutching his arm, they caught at the edge of the curtain and pulled it down. It was an exciting performance in the zestful tradition, I thought, of an essentially Northern people, whose culture had remained completely uncontaminated in their long sojourn in the South.
CHAPTER 13
Into Cambodia
THE LAND ROVER bounded westwards over the road to Cambodia. It was the only road of any length in the country open to unescorted, daytime traffic, although it had been closed for a fortnight before the day we left, ‘owing to damage caused by the weather’. We plunged through a bland and smiling landscape, animated by doll-like Vietnamese figures, and mud-caked buffaloes that ambled across the road, lowering their heads as if to charge, when it was too late. Children dangled lines from bridges, while their elders, gathered in sociable groups, groped for fish, waist-deep in liquid mud. The kites, floating over the villages, were pale ideographs against a deeper sky. There were miles of deserted rubber plantations.
It was better, said the driver, not to stop between the towers, and his method was to accelerate to about 65 m.p.h. until a tower was about two hundred yards away. He would then relax speed until we were past, and about the same distance on the other side. This confidence in the towers seemed not altogether well founded. The papers had recently published an account of an attack by one of the garrisons on a car straggling behind a convoy in which the driver was shot dead and a lady passenger’s finger was almost bitten off in an attempt to rob her of a ring. We frequently found that ditches had been dug across the road by Viet-Minh sympathisers, and subsequently filled in with loose earth. A series of such semi-obstacles taken at full-throttle was a funfair sensation, even in the Land Rover. At one point we passed a newly burned-out car from which a tracery of smoke still arose.
* * *
Cambodia. It was a place-name always accompanied in my imagination by tinkling, percussive music. Although the Vietnamese had been encroaching for centuries upon Cambodian land, there were signs of a true physical frontier at the present border. We came to a wide river; on one side was Cochin-China – which had once been Cambodia too – with the neat, busy Vietnamese, the mosaic of rice-fields and the plantations. Across the river was the Cambodia of present times, and what, too, must have been some early frontier of the ancient Khmer state, since everything changed immediately. It was not only the people, but the flora and the fauna. A cultural Great Divide; a separation of continents. On one bank of the river were the ordinary forest trees, which, as amateurs of natural history, the Vietnamese would spare, if not compelled to clear them for rice-fields or plantations. The other bank bore sparse clumps of coconut palms – the first I had seen in my travels – and beyond them, a foretaste of the withered plains of India.
The bamboos and the underbrush had gone, and with them the dark-winged, purposeful butterflies of the Vietnamese forests. Here only trivial fritillaries fluttered over the white prairie grass. Great pied kingfishers as well as the large and small blue varieties encrusted the edges of yellow pools and ditches that served no economic purpose. There were no rice-fields. Cambodians lounged inertly about the rare villages that were no more than a few squalid African huts. In one village some women with dirty, handsome faces were pouring earth into some of the worst holes in this terrible road, while a group of bonzes stood by, watching them with saintly detachment. The trim pyjamas of the Vietnamese had given way to the dreary weeds of India; a drab, sarong-like skirt, pulled in the men’s case into the shape of breeches by bringing the waist-sash through the legs. There might be, in addition to this, a jacket of some dingy material and a rag wound round the head as a turban. It was curious to reflect that under the barrack-room discipline of their spirits, the aboriginal Moïs – when left alone – were the best-dressed and best-housed people in Indo-China. After them came the Vietnamese, in their brisk, workaday turnout – you never saw a ragged one – and their flower-decked shacks. And last of all were these descendants of the great Khmer civilisation, who quite clearly didn’t care in the slightest how they lived or dressed.
But the Cambodians had one enormous advantage over the others. There were no plantations to be seen on this side of the river. So far, the Grendel of Colonial capitalism had been kept at bay. The Cambodians are practising Buddhists, and every man, including the King, must spend a year of his life as a mendicant novice in a Buddhist monastery. And the strength of this second of the world religions lies in the fact that it has produced a tradition, a permanent state of mind, which makes its followers neither adept as exploiters nor amenable to exploitation. The Cambodians, like the Burmese, the Laotians and others, no doubt, of the South-East Asiatic peoples, are, by their own design, poor, but supremely happy. In these rich and comparatively underpopulated countries there is no struggle for existence, and this provides the ideal atmosphere for the practice of the gentle faith in which their people have been reared.
The Vietnamese, whose Buddhism is diluted almost to the point of non-existence, has a competitive soul, is a respecter of work for its own sake, and strives to increase and multiply. As he will work hard for himself, he can be made to work hard for others, and is therefore the prey of the exploiter. There are a few uneasily conducted plantations in Cambodia, and while I was there, in fact, there was a serious revolt in one of them. But Cambodia has no surplus population and no proletariat. Every man can have as much land as he can cultivate. As far as I know no Cambodian has ever been shipped in the hulks to end his life toiling in some depopulated South Seas island.
* * *
Spurred on by thoughts of what the French call isolated acts of piracy we reached Phnom Penh, the capital, early the same afternoon. It is approached through unimposing suburbs: several miles of shacks among the trees, most of them reeling slightly on their supporting posts. There are a few pagodas, insubstantial looking and tawdry with gilt, which contrived to remind one of the Far-Eastern section of a colonial exhibition, and many graveyards of bonzes with tombs almost as showy as those of the cemeteries of Northern Italy. The dogs of India are here, one per house; an ugly yellow variety with a petulant expression, and sometimes in a state of utter decrepitude. Together with the pigs and occasional domestic monkeys they profit to the utmost, in their slow saunterings on the road, from the Buddhist aversion to taking life. Through the open doors one sees that the houses contain no furniture, in keeping with the Cambodian’s indifference to material possessions. The occupants wash, dress and, of course, eat in public, and half-naked families are to be observed squatting round devouring the splendid fish that can be had almost for the taking away, down by the river. Refuse is thrown out of a window or pushed through the floor, collecting in massive mounds for the benefit of the kitchen-midden excavators of the future. There is none of the well-bred aloofness of the Vietnamese about these people. The Cambodians stare at whatever interests them and will giggle at slight provocation.
The centre of Phnom Penh has, of course, been taken over by the Chinese, who have indulged in it to the limit their taste for neon signs, opened many cinemas, too many radio shops with loudspeakers blaring in the doorways, and a casino, which, started in 1949, is said already to have bankrupted half the Cambodians of the capital. However, they are supposed to be a local breed of Chinese, cheerful vulgarians raised in the country, and very much to be preferred to the arrogant immigrants from Hong Kong that lord it in Saigon.
* * *
The matter calling for first attention in Phnom Penh was that of the journey to Laos, which I still wanted to make overland, if this could be done from Cambodia. There was a road which followed the river Mekong, which in Saigon was thought to be impassable in places. In normal times one could ascend by the river itself, which, at the height of the rainy season, was navigable up to sixteen hundred miles from its mouth by one sort of craft or other. This was the end of the dry season when the water was at its lowest. Nor did anyone in Saigon know if boats still went up the river.
