Dragon Apparent, page 3
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It was all very entertaining to a stranger completely fresh from the West, but from the experiences of these few hours I had learned one disturbing thing. This was that as a European I had been invisible. My eyes never met those of a Vietnamese. There was no curious staring, no gesture or half-smile of recognition. I was ignored even by the children. The Vietnamese people, described by early travellers as gay, sociable and showing a lively curiosity where strangers were concerned, have now withdrawn into themselves. They are too civilised to spit at the sight of a white man, as the Indians of Central America do sometimes, but they are utterly indifferent. It is as if a general agreement has been reached among them that this is the best way of dealing with an intolerable presence. Even the rickshaw coolie, given, to be on the safe side, double his normal fee, takes the money in grim silence and immediately looks away. It is most uncomfortable to feel oneself an object of this universal detestation, a mere foreign-devil in fact.
CHAPTER 2
The Universal Religion
THE FIRST IMPORTANT TASK of the visitor to Saigon on a journalistic or literary mission is to present his credentials at the Office of Information and Propaganda. The reason for this is that only through the sponsorship of this office will he be able to move about the country, as tourist accommodation rarely exists in the hinterland and, in any case, a circulation permit is required before any journey can be made.
On the second day after my arrival I therefore presented myself at the office in question and was received by the director, Monsieur de la Fournière. I was prepared for a certain amount of official discouragement of a project which involved travelling over as much as I could of a country where a war was in progress. At best I hoped for permission to visit one or two of the larger towns, travelling possibly by plane. At worst I feared that I might be told quite flatly that I could not leave Saigon. I was therefore amazed to find this interview going entirely contrary to my expectations. The consistent contrariness of travel is one of its fascinations, but usually it is the other way round. The difficulties and frustrations turn out to be worse than one had feared.
The director was young, expansive and enthusiastic. I had hardly begun to outline my hopes before he took over. Far from being surprised that anyone should want to travel about the country at such a time, he seemed to find the idea both reasonable and praiseworthy. Taking up a firm stance before a wall map, he began to demolish distances and dangers with bold, sweeping gestures and in rapid, idiomatic English. The outlines of the journey were sketched in, in a few firm strokes.
‘Laos first, I suggest,’ said the director. ‘An earthly paradise. Can’t imagine it, if you haven’t been there. I say, first, because you want to get there before the rains wash the place away. Probably be just in time. Otherwise you might find yourself stranded.’
‘Mean travelling by plane,’ I suggested.
‘No,’ the director said. ‘Planes can’t take off. More likely to find yourself cut off until they rebuilt the bridges at the end of the year. That is, unless you could get to the Mekong. That’s why it’s better to go now. No point in taking unnecessary chances.’
The director drew a short, firm line on the map with his pencil. ‘First stage – Dalat. Centre of the elephant-hunting country. Go and see the Emperor. Might get him to take you on a trip. Better to go by convoy though. You’re sure to find it more interesting than by air. Attacks getting infrequent these days. Anyway, nothing venture, nothing have.’
I agreed, enchanted with the breathtaking novelty of this attitude in an official. The director plunged on confidently through half-explored jungles towards the central plateaux. ‘You aren’t looking for a luxury tour I suppose? That is, you don’t mind pigging it with soldiers occasionally?’
We hovered over Kontum. ‘Malarial,’ the director said. ‘Rather nasty type too. Nothing to worry about though, if you keep moving. Normal hazards, that is … The Viet-Minh? – Well naturally you’ll inform yourself on the spot. No sense in putting your head into the lion’s mouth.’
We now turned our faces to the west. The director thought that it wasn’t advisable to go further north, as some of the tribes hadn’t made an official submission, and, in any case, the country wasn’t accurately mapped. Of course, one might jolly one of the local administrators into getting up a little expedition on the side. He hesitated, evidently toying wistfully with the prospect, before putting it, reluctantly, from his mind and turning a Balboan eye to survey the few hundred miles of jungle and swamps separating us from the border of Siam.
‘We want to get to the Mekong River somehow or other. Probably find a soldier or professional hunter going somewhere, in a Jeep. What we call a moyen de fortune … Paksí, now, that’s an idea.’ With a wave of the hand the director vanquished the many bands of vulgar pirates, as the French call them, which infest that area. ‘… or if not Paksí, Savannakhet?’ Soaring above the degrees of latitude separating these alternatives, the director whisked us back to our crossroads in Central Annam and set us off in another direction, clearing with an intrepid finger a track subsequently described as digéri by the jungle. ‘Once you get to Mekong …’ the director shrugged his shoulders. The adventure was practically at an end, for only a thousand miles or so in a pirogue had to be covered before reaching Saigon again. ‘… unless you happen to hit on a moyen de fortune going north to Vientiane. Then, of course, if you felt like it, and the opportunity came along, you could get across country to Xien Khouang in the Meo country … perhaps from there up towards the frontier of Burma or of Yunnan.’
It was evident that the director was loth to return from these exciting prospects to the drab dependabilities of Saigon, where the moyen de fortune had no place.
Moyen de fortune. The phrase was beginning to touch the imagination. It was one that rang continually in my ears from that time on. It became the keynote of my journeyings.
It was the duty of a subordinate, a Monsieur Ferry, to clothe the director’s flights of creative fancy with the sober trappings of organisation. Ferry’s first glance at the suggested itinerary produced a pursing of the lips. As for the terra incognita to the north and west, he couldn’t say. No doubt the director knew what he was talking about. It was his job to see that I got to Dalat, where a Madame Schneider would take charge of me and pass me on to a Monsieur Doustin at Ban Méthuot. After that – well – it would all depend upon the direction I chose, and, of course, local conditions.
Monsieur Doustin, a very knowledgeable man would see to all that. Ferry presented me with the three maps of the country, physical, ethnographical and geological, that are given to all official visitors and journalists. These were followed by a collection of publications; special numbers of French magazines devoted to Indo-China and government papers on the contemporary economic and political situation. It was a highly intelligent and efficient method of presenting the French point of view, and I was mildly surprised to find that such a breadth of interests was taken for granted in the visitor.
Above all it was reassuring to gather that any aspects of this journey that might have savoured of the conducted tour looked like disappearing as soon as one was a reasonable distance from Saigon, to be replaced by the fickle and planless dispositions of fortune.
Ferry went with me to the office of the bus company that ran the service to Dalat. He was disappointed to find from the seating plan that all the best places had been sold. The choice seats were those that flanked the interior aisle, because, if the convoy happened to be attacked, you were protected in this position, to some slight measure, by the bodies of those who sat between you and the windows. I had a corner seat at the front of the bus, which afforded an excellent field of vision, accompanied, of course, with the maximum vulnerability on two sides.
Since I would have a few spare days in Saigon, Ferry had an attractive suggestion to put forward. On the following day, M. Pignon, the High Commissioner and foremost French personality in Indo-China, was to pay an official visit to the Pope of the Cao-Daïst religion, at his seat at Tay-Ninh, some fifty miles away. For this occasion, a strong military escort would be provided, and as it was a great opportunity to escape the boredom of life, hemmed-in in Saigon, anyone who could possibly do so would get themselves invited. For a journalist, it was only a matter of applying.
From Ferry’s description, Cao-Daïsm sounded extraordinary enough to merit investigation. There was a cathedral, he said, that looked like a fantasy from the brain of Disney, and all the faiths of the Orient had been ransacked to create the pompous ritual, which had been grafted on an organisation copied from the Roman Catholic Church. What was more to the point at the present time, was that the Cao-Daïsts had a formidable private army with which they controlled a portion of Cochin-China. The French tolerated them because they were anti-Viet-Minh, and therefore helped, in their way, to split up the nationalist front. There were also militant Buddhist and Catholic minorities among the Vietnamese, all of whom scrapped with each other as well as the Viet-Minh, but these lacked the florid exuberance – and the power – of the Cao Daïsts. Ferry thought that it might help in extracting the maximum benefit from the experience, if I spent a few hours reading the subject up. He, therefore, presented me, on behalf of his office, with a work entitled Histoire et Philosophie du Cao-Daïsme (Bouddhisme rénové, spiritisme Vietnamien, religion nouvelle en Eurasie), by a certain Gabriel Gobron, whose description as European representative of the faith, sounded, to my mind, a faintly commercial note. Gobron was also described as having ‘quitted his fleshly envelope of suffering in 1941’.
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I returned to the hotel at about seven-thirty, switched on the enormous ceiling fan and went to open the window. The square below was brightly lit and the sky was still luminous with the aftermath of sunset. As I pushed open the window, there was a momentary, slight resistance, and a violent explosion thumped in my eardrums. Across the square an indolent wreath of smoke lifted from the café tables and dissolved. Two figures got up from a table, arms about one another’s shoulders and reeled away like drunkards who have decided to call it a night. Other patrons seemed to have dropped off to sleep with their heads on the tables, except for one, who stood up and went through a slow repertoire of calisthenics. A passer-by fell to his knees. Now, after several seconds, the evening strollers changed direction and from all quarters they began to move, without excitement, towards the café. I went down to see if there was anything to be done, but already the wounded were being tended in their cramped attitudes and the discipline of routine was taking charge. Waiters snatched the seemingly wine-stained cloths off the tables. A boy with a stiff broom and pail came out and began scrubbing at the spotted pavement. An officer, one hand bound up in a napkin, sat clicking imperiously for service with the fingers of the other. Within ten minutes every table was full again. This hand-grenade, one of eight reported to have been thrown that evening, caused fifteen casualties – a Saigon record to date. The mortar-fire in the suburbs did not start until after ten o’clock.
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Before going to sleep, I set myself to the task of extracting the doctrinal kernel in Gobron’s book from its formidable husk of metaphysical jargon. I learned that Cao-Daïsm was officially founded in 1926, originating among one of the many groups of Cochin-Chinese spiritualists. The favoured congregation were informed, through the agency of an instrument known in English as the planchette, or in French as la Corbeille-à-bec – a platform-like device carrying a pencil upon which the hand is rested – that they were in touch with Li-taï-Pé sometimes known as the Chinese Homer, who, in the Tang Dynasty, after ‘the burning of the books’, re-established Chinese literature.
Li-taï-Pé began by announcing that he was the bearer of a most important message to mankind from the Lord of the Universe. He explained that he, Li-taï-Pé, in his capacity of minister to the Supreme Spirit had at various epochs and in different parts of the globe founded Confucianism, The Cult of the Ancestors, Christianity, Taoism and Buddhism. (In later messages Islam was added to this list.) The establishment of these religions, the Sage said – each of which took into consideration the customs and psychology of the races for which they were separately designed – took place at a time when the peoples of the world had little contact with each other owing to the deficient means of transport. In these days things were very different. The whole world had been explored and communications had reached a stage when any part of the globe was only a few days removed from any other part. The time had clearly come, through his intervention, to bring about an intelligent reorganisation, a syncretism of all these only superficially diverse creeds in a harmonious and cosmopolitan whole. The divinely inspired amalgam was to be called after the name Cao-Daï, by which the Founder of the Universe had stated that he now wished to be known.
At this early period the objects of the religion, as summarised by Li-taï-Pé, were ‘to combat heresy, to sow among the peoples the love of good and the practice of virtue, to learn to love justice and resignation, to reveal to men the posthumous consequences of the acts by which they assassinate their souls’. It seems later to have been realised that the combating of heresy was an anomaly in a religion aiming at a fusion of existing doctrines, and it was abandoned.
A calendar of saints, while in the process of formation, is still meagre. It includes Victor Hugo, Allan Kerdec, Joan of Arc, de la Rochefoucauld, St Bernard, St John the Baptist and the Jade Emperor. These frequently communicate by spiritualistic means with the Cao-Daïst leaders, giving their rulings on such important matters of ritual as the offering of votive papers on ancestral altars. It would seem that in oriental spiritualism a curious prestige attaches to ‘guides’ of Western origin, paralleled, of course, by the Indian chiefs, the Buddhist monks and the Chinese sages, that play so prominent a part in equivalent practices in Europe.
From the philosophical point of view, Cao-Daïsm seems to be encountering some difficulty in its efforts to reconcile such contradictory tenets as Original Sin and Redemption with the doctrine of the soul’s evolution through reincarnation. The prescribed rites are strongly oriental in character: regular prostrations before an altar, which must include ritual candlesticks, an incense burner, offerings of fruit and a painting showing an eye (the sign of the Cao-Daï) surrounded by clouds. Occidental converts are excused by the Pope from ritual prostrations, which ‘for the moment may be replaced by profound reverences’.
In Cochin-China it is a respected convention that all organised movements of persons shall start well before dawn. The intelligent intention behind this practice, which has been remarked upon by all travellers in the past, is to permit as much of the journey as possible to be covered in the coolest hours. What happens in practice, at least in these days, is that various members of the party cannot find transport to take them to the agreed place of assembly and have to be fetched; while others are not awakened by the hotel-boy, who may not have understood the arrangement, or may, on the other hand, be employing this means of passive resistance towards the hated European. In one way or another, the precious minutes of coolness are frittered away and it is dawn before one finally leaves Saigon. In this case further delays were introduced by the many security measures, the halts at roadblocks, the slow winding of the convoy round obstacles, the waiting for telephoned reports of conditions ahead from major defence-posts on the route. While we dawdled thus the sun bulged over the horizon, silhouetting with exaggerated picturesqueness a group of junks moored in some unsuspected canal. For a short time the effect of the heat was directional, as if an electric fire had been switched on in a cool room. But the air soon warmed up and within half an hour one might have been sitting in a London traffic block in a July day heat-wave.
The convoy was made up of about twenty civilian cars and was escorted by three armoured vehicles and several lorries carrying white-turbaned Algerians. The foreign visitors had been carefully separated. I rode in a Citroen and was in the charge of an English-speaking functionary, a Monsieur Beauvais, whose task it was, I gathered, to provide a running commentary of the trip, throwing in, occasionally, in accordance with the official line of the moment, a few words in praise of Cao-Daïsm. In this he was somewhat frustrated by a colleague sitting in the front seat, who, being unable to speak English and assuming that I did not understand French, contributed an explosion of disgust, salted with such expressions as merde and dégolasse, whenever he overheard a mention of the words Cao-Daï. However, even from the French point of view it did not really matter, as the official attitude was just then in the process of switching round once more. Beauvais, too, soon stopped worrying about his official job. What he was really interested in was English literature and in particular English civilisation as presented by John Galsworthy, which contrasted so nostalgically with the barbarous life of a government employee in Cochin-China.
As soon as the convoy was really under way it began to travel at high speed. Except where we were forced to slow down for roadblocks the Citroen was doing a steady sixty m.p.h. The deserted paddy-fields through which our road ran were the colour of putty and the sunshine reflected blearily from the muddy water. As we passed, congregations of egrets launched themselves into the air, rising straight up in a kind of leap, assisted with a few indolent wing-beats and then settling down uneasily in the same place again. There were distant villages, raised on hillocks above the water, and solitary villas – Mediterranean-looking, with their verandas and flaking stucco, except for the china lions in the garden, grinning at us absurdly, and the roof with its facetious dragon or sky-blue ceramic dolphins. Sometimes such houses had been burned out. There were no signs of human life. The populace had evidently received orders, as for the passage of the Son of Heaven, or of one of the Divine Emperors, to keep indoors. Sometimes, at what I suppose were considered danger points, lines of Vietnamese auxiliaries stood with their backs to the road, rifles at the ready. At short intervals we passed beneath the watchtowers; squat structures, made of small Roman-looking bricks, shaded with Provençal roofs, and surrounded with concentric palisades of sharpened bamboo staves. In theory, the whole length of the road can be swept by machine-gun fire from the towers, whose defenders are also supposed to patrol the surrounding area. These pigmy forts lent a rather pleasant accent, a faintly Tuscan flavour, to the flat monotony of the landscape.
