What a strange night! We come here, to
Ban Pako, to celebrate Marie-Do's birthday.
It is rare that we see the
country-side during the rainy season since we, like all other falang,
are like snow-birds – leaving the drowning ship of Indochina at
every monsoon for a summer of rich red wines and old stone cottages
in the Métropole. But this summer we are here and climbing the red
roads, now somewhat dry from the last rain . We were both subdued
and calmed by the radiant greens of the rice fields and the plastered
reds of the flooded paddies. Men and women worked in the fields,
storing up a mud dam wall here and re-planting stalks of fresh rice
into tiny individual pits there.
As they replanted the stalks, the rice
shoots - vibrant in their green (greeness? greenitude?
greenerosity?), seemed to be shouting out to shaking heaven above and
heavy inundated mud below, “I want to live! I want to live!”, and
live they will under expert hands.
Ban Pako at night, alone and empty, is
still Ban Pako and still resonates with the laughter and probings of
times we came here with friends (see
http://mair-hyman.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-jewel-in-crown.html).
Our cabin patio now with just the two of us and mortally top-heavy
glasses of Pernod rang out in silence and complicity. The rains were
holding up; seemingly held up in the overladen clouds by an invisible
hand with fingers tightened, clasped and secure.
Just before the rains came I developed
a fever and felt cold. A kind of cold, the kind of cold that cuts
through your body and chest and joints as if it were a block of sharp
ice, as though it were a powerful breath of air directly from the
tomb. Shivering, my teeth clanking, I ran to the car to get some
paracetamol and water reserves. One thousand milligrams of that stuff
and the sounds of the insects screeching in the leaves.
At last, I thought to myself, at last
I have contracted a tropical disease, the dreaded dengue fever. Not
as bad as malaria, but still ... I felt as though every strange
fruit, rice shoot and exotic insect had somehow incarnated themselves
into a ghostly presence come to haunt my every dream. In a way it was
a relief, it was the realization of an awkward and perverse ambition:
to be invaded and possessed by all that Indochina had to throw at me,
to live an experience as feverish and complicated, as full of detail
and complex as the overheated mass of a low-land jungle floor. In my
fever I was the crawling insect life; the mocking cricket calls; the
gnawing of the stubborn termites; the hideous joy of the monkeys; the
slithering snake dreams.
When the rains came and stayed they
were the muddy bottom and sickening treble notes of this vast
feverish colonial nightmare. The gravelly sounds of the low deep
ravines, of water, an incessant tic-tac of the pin-point drops; wood
flies and scarab beetles run, dash, fly and crawl to shelter. Black
ants scurry. Night moths the size of door handles get stuck in my
throat.
And all night long the sweats. The
activity of the soul. The pain and pleasure of becoming one and
indivisible with the red earth in this distant and strange land. In
the Lao alphabet there is not one letter that has a straight line.
Vowels are sometimes placed before the consonant, sometimes above it,
sometimes below it, sometimes after it. The whole thing is rounded,
untrappable. There are no hard corners to us to latch on to. And thus
my dreams were filled with the round and the evasive, the alluding,
the hinted at. My joints vibrated miserably.
Dengue Fever, or Breakbone Fever in
Lao is called khay luat aak- ໄຂ້ເລືອດອອກ,
the illness of blood going out. At present all of Vientiane is in the
grasp of a dengue epidemic. Mahasot Hospital is a beehive of
scurrying white-coated doctors, with nurses wheeling patients as dark
and thin and weak as rice-paper. In the French community the words
are whispered in dread, “une telle a la dengue!” “un tel a la
dengue!”. We massage lemon-grass extract into every visible pore of
our children's bodies, our ceiling fans turn at full speed, mosquito
nets are checked and re-checked for tears and trustworthiness.
We keep ourselves informed, cell
phones ring constantly. And here I am as the rain starts to fall in
huge gulps, shivering into the dark!
Whatever the
rhyme or reason, whatever the cause, the next morning I awoke with
the rain still battering the roof of our bungalow and my night-shirt
wet with sweat and I jumped from bed in a blossom of perfect health!
The angel of death, מלאך
מוות, had come, seen the bloody door-post and
passed on his way.
