The Quiet American

  And because we never used our information except when it became news, and never passed any reports to the French intelligence, he had the trust and the friendship of several Vietminh agents hidden in Saigon-Cholon. The fact that he was an Asiatic, in spite of his name, unquestionably helped.

  I was fond of Dominguez. Where other men carry their pride like a skin-disease on the surface, sensitive to the least touch, his pride was deeply hidden, and reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human being. All that you encountered in daily contact with him was gentleness and humility and an absolute love of truth: you would have had to be married to him to discover the pride. Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride—in my profession a reporter’s pride, the desire to file a better story than the other man’s, and it was Dominguez who helped me not to care—to withstand all those telegrams from home asking why I had not covered so and so’s story or the report of someone else which I knew to be untrue.

  Now that he was ill I realized how much I owed him—why, he would even see that my car was full of petrol, and yet never once, with a phrase or a look, had he encroached on my private life. I believe he was a Roman Catholic, but I had no evidence for it beyond his name and the place of his origin—for all I knew from his conversation, he might have worshipped Krishna or gone on annual pilgrimages, pricked by a wire frame, to the Batu Caves. Now his illness came like a mercy, reprieving me from the treadmill of private anxiety. It was I now who had to attend the wearisome Press Conferences and hobble to my table at the Continental for a gossip with my colleagues; but I was less capable than Dominguez of telling truth from falsehood, and so I formed the habit of calling in on him in the evenings to discuss what I had heard. Sometimes one of his Indian friends was there, sitting beside the narrow iron bed in the lodgings Dominguez shared in one of the meaner streets off the Boulevard Galliéni. He would sit up straight in his bed with his feet tucked under him so that you had less the impression of visiting a sick man than of being received by a rajah or a priest. Sometimes when his fever was bad his face ran with sweat, but he never lost the clarity of his thought. It was as though his illness were happening to another person’s body. His landlady kept a jug of fresh lime by his side, but I never saw him take a drink—perhaps that would have been to admit that it was his own thirst, and his own body which suffered.

  Of all the days that I visited him I remember one in particular. I had given up asking him how he was for fear that the question sounded like a reproach, and it was always he who inquired with great anxiety about my health and apologized for the stairs I had to climb. Then he said, ‘I would like you to meet a friend of mine. He has a story you should listen to.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have his name written down because I know you find it difficult to remember Chinese names. We must not use it, of course. He has a warehouse on the Quai Mytho for junk metal.’

  ‘Important?’

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘Can you give me an idea?’

  ‘I would rather you heard from him. There is something strange, but I don’t understand it.’ The sweat was pouring down his face, but he just let it run as though the drops were alive and sacred—there was that much of the Hindu in him, he would never have endangered the life of a fly. He said, ‘How much do you know of your friend Pyle?’

  ‘Not very much. Our tracks cross, that’s all. I haven’t seen him since Tanyin.’

  ‘What job does he do?’

  ‘Economic Mission, but that covers a multitude of sins. I think he’s interested in home-industries—I suppose with an American business tie-up. I don’t like the way they keep the French fighting and cut out their business at the same time.’

  ‘I heard him talking the other day at a party the Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen. They had put him on to brief them.’

  ‘God help Congress,’ I said, ‘he hasn’t been in the country six months.’

  ‘He was talking about the old colonial powers—England and France, and how you two couldn’t expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That was where America came in now with clean hands.’

  ‘Hawaii, Puerto Rico,’ I said, ‘New Mexico.’

  ‘Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Vietminh and he said a Third Force could do it. There was always a Third Force to be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism—national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.’

  ‘It’s all in York Harding,’ I said. ‘He had read it before he came out here. He talked about it his first week and he’s learned nothing.’

  ‘He may have found his leader,’ Dominguez said.

  ‘Would it matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what he does. But go and talk to my friend on the Quai Mytho.’

  I went home to leave a note for Phuong in the rue Catinat and then drove down past the port as the sun set. The tables and chairs were out on the quai beside the steamers and the grey naval boats, and the little portable kitchens burned and bubbled. In the Boulevard de la Somme the hairdressers were busy under the trees and the fortune-tellers squatted against the walls with their soiled packs of cards. In Cholon you were in a different city where work seemed to be just beginning rather than petering out with the daylight. It was like driving into a pantomime set: the long vertical Chinese signs and the bright lights and the crowd of extras led you into the wings, where everything was suddenly so much darker and quieter. One such wing took me down again to the quai and a huddle of sampans, where the warehouses yawned in the shadow and no one was about.

  I found the place with difficulty and almost by accident, the godown gates were open, and I could see the strange Picasso shapes of the junk-pile by the light of an old lamp: bedsteads, bathtubs, ashcans, the bonnets of cars, stripes of old colour where the light hit. I walked down a narrow track carved in the iron quarry and called out for Mr Chou, but there was no reply. At the end of the godown a stair led up to what I supposed might be Mr Chou’s house—I had apparently been directed to the back door, and I supposed that Dominguez had his reasons. Even the staircase was lined with junk, pieces of scrap-iron which might come in useful one day in this jackdaw’s nest of a house. There was one big room on the landing and a whole family sat and lay about in it with the effect of a camp which might be struck at any moment. Small tea-cups stood about everywhere and there were lots of cardboard boxes full of unidentifiable objects and fibre suitcases ready strapped; there was an old lady sitting on a big bed, two boys and two girls, a baby crawling on the floor, three middle-aged women in old brown peasant-trousers and jackets, and two old men in a corner in blue silk mandarin coats playing mah jongg. They paid no attention to my coming; they played rapidly, identifying each piece by touch, and the noise was like shingle turning on a beach after a wave withdraws. No one paid any more attention than they did; only a cat leapt on to a cardboard box and a lean dog sniffed at me and withdrew.

  ‘Monsieur Chou?’ I asked, and two of the women shook their heads, and still no one regarded me, except that one of the women rinsed out a cup and poured tea from a pot which had been resting warm in its silk-lined box. I sat down on the end of the bed next the old lady and a girl brought me the cup: it was as though I had been absorbed into the community with the cat and the dog—perhaps they had turned up the first time as fortuitously as I had. The baby crawled across the floor and pulled at my laces and no one reproved it: one didn’t in the East reprove children. Three commercial calendars were hanging on the walls, each with a girl in gay Chinese costume with bright pink cheeks. There was a big mirror mysteriously lettered Café de la Paix—perhaps it had got caught up accidentally in the junk: I felt caught up in it myself.

  I drank slowly the green bitter tea, shifting the handleless cup from palm to palm as the heat scorched my fingers, and I wondered how long I ought to stay. I tried t
he family once in French, asking when they expected Monsieur Chou to return, but no one replied: they had probably not understood. When my cup was empty they refilled it and continued their own occupations: a woman ironing, a girl sewing, the two boys at their lessons, the old lady looking at her feet, the tiny crippled feet of old China—and the dog watching the cat, which stayed on the cardboard boxes.

  I began to realize how hard Dominguez worked for his lean living.

  A Chinese of extreme emaciation came into the room. He seemed to take up no room at all: he was like the piece of greaseproof paper that divides the biscuits in a tin. The only thickness he had was in his striped flannel pyjamas. ‘Monsieur Chou?’ I asked.

  He looked at me with the indifferent gaze of a smoker: the sunken cheeks, the baby wrists, the arms of a small girl—many years and many pipes had been needed to whittle him down to these dimensions. I said, ‘My friend, Monsieur Dominguez, said that you had something to show me. You are Monsieur Chou?’

  Oh yes, he said, he was Monsieur Chou and waved me courteously back to my seat. I could tell that the object of my coming had been lost somewhere within the smoky corridors of his skull. I would have a cup of tea? He was much honoured by my visit. Another cup was rinsed on to the floor and put like a live coal into my hands—the ordeal by tea. I commented on the size of his family.

  He looked round with faint surprise as though he had never seen it in that light before. ‘My mother,’ he said, ‘my wife, my sister, my uncle, my brother, my children, my aunt’s children.’ The baby had rolled away from my feet and lay on its back kicking and crowing. I wondered to whom it belonged. No one seemed young enough—or old enough—to have produced that.

  I said, ‘Monsieur Dominguez told me it was important.’

  ‘Ah, Monsieur Dominguez. I hope Monsieur Dominguez is well?’

  ‘He has had a fever.’

  ‘It is an unhealthy time of year.’ I wasn’t convinced that he even remembered who Dominguez was. He began to cough, and under his pyjama jacket, which had lost two buttons, the tight skin twanged like a native drum.

  ‘You should see a doctor yourself,’ I said. A newcomer joined us—I hadn’t heard him enter. He was a young man neatly dressed in European clothes. He said in English, ‘Mr Chou has only one lung.’

  ‘I am very sorry . . .’

  ‘He smokes one hundred and fifty pipes every day.’

  ‘That sounds a lot.’

  ‘The doctor says it will do him no good, but Mr Chou feels much happier when he smokes.’

  I made an understanding grunt.

  ‘If I may introduce myself, I am Mr Chou’s manager.’

  ‘My name is Fowler. Mr Dominguez sent me. He said that Mr Chou had something to tell me.’

  ‘Mr Chou’s memory is very much impaired. Will you have a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thank you, I have had three cups already.’ It sounded like a question and an answer in a phrase-book.

  Mr Chou’s manager took the cup out of my hand and held it out to one of the girls, who after spilling the dregs on the floor again refilled it.

  ‘That is not strong enough,’ he said, and took it and tasted it himself, carefully rinsed it and refilled it from a second teapot. ‘That is better?’ he asked.

  ‘Much better.’

  Mr Chou cleared his throat, but it was only for an immense expectoration into a tin spittoon decorated with pink blooms. The baby rolled up and down among the tea-dregs and the cat leapt from a cardboard box on to a suitcase.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if you talked to me,’ the young man said. ‘My name is Mr Heng.’

  ‘If you would tell me . . .’

  ‘We will go down to the warehouse,’ Mr Heng said. ‘It is quieter there.’

  I put out my hand to Mr Chou, who allowed it to rest between his palms with a look of bewilderment, then gazed around the crowded room as though he were trying to fit me in. The sound of the turning shingle receded as we went down the stairs. Mr Heng said, ‘Be careful. The last step is missing,’ and he flashed a torch to guide me.

  We were back among the bedsteads and the bathtubs and Mr Heng led the way down a side aisle. When he had gone about twenty paces he stopped and shone his light on to a small iron drum. He said, ‘Do you see that?’

  ‘What about it?’

  He turned it over and showed the trade mark: ‘Diolacton.’

  ‘It still means nothing to me.’

  He said, ‘I had two of those drums here. They were picked up with other junk at the garage of Mr Phan-Van-Muoi. You know him?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘His wife is a relation of General Thé.’

  ‘I still don’t quite see . . . ?’

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ Mr Heng asked, stooping and lifting a long concave object like a stick of celery which glistened chromium in the light of his torch.

  ‘It might be a bath-fixture.’

  ‘It is a mould,’ Mr Heng said. He was obviously a man who took a tiresome pleasure in giving instruction. He paused for me to show my ignorance again. ‘You understand what I mean by a mould?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, but I still don’t follow . . .’

  ‘This mould was made in U.S.A. Diolacton is an American trade name. You begin to understand?’

  ‘Frankly, no.’

  ‘There is a flaw in the mould. That was why it was thrown away. But it should not have been thrown away with the junk—nor the drum either. That was a mistake. Mr Muoi’s manager came here personally. I could not find the mould, but I let him have back the other drum. I said it was all I had, and he told me he needed them for storing chemicals. Of course, he did not ask for the mould—that would have given too much away—but he had a good search. Mr Muoi himself called later at the American Legation and asked for Mr Pyle.’

  ‘You seem to have quite an Intelligence Service,’ I said. I still couldn’t imagine what it was all about.

  ‘I asked Mr Chou to get in touch with Mr Dominguez.’

  ‘You mean you’ve established a kind of connection between Pyle and the General.’ I said. ‘A very slender one. It’s not news anyway. Everybody here goes in for Intelligence.’

  Mr Heng beat his heel against the black iron drum and the sound reverberated among the bedsteads. He said, ‘Mr Fowler, you are English. You are neutral. You have been fair to all of us. You can sympathize if some of us feel strongly on whatever side.’

  I said, ‘If you are hinting that you are a Communist, or a Vietminh, don’t worry. I’m not shocked. I have no politics.’

  ‘If anything unpleasant happens here in Saigon, it will be blamed on us. My Committee would like you to take a fair view. That is why I have shown you this and this.’

  ‘What is Diolacton?’ I said. ‘It sounds like condensed milk.’

  ‘It has something in common with milk.’ Mr Heng shone his torch inside the drum. A little white powder lay like dust on the bottom. ‘It is one of the American plastics,’ he said.

  ‘I heard a rumour that Pyle was importing plastics for toys.’ I picked up the mould and looked at it. I tried in my mind to divine its shape. This was not how the object itself would look: this was the image in a mirror, reversed.

  ‘Not for toys,’ Mr Heng said.

  ‘It is like parts of a rod.’

  ‘The shape is unusual.’

  ‘I can’t see what it could be for.’

  Mr Heng turned away. ‘I only want you to remember what you have seen,’ he said, walking back in the shadows of the junk-pile. ‘Perhaps one day you will have a reason for writing about it. But you must not say you saw the drum here.’

  ‘Nor the mould?’ I asked.

  ‘Particularly not the mould.’

  III

  It is not easy the first time to meet again one who has saved as they put it—one’s life. I had not seen Pyle while I was in the Legion Hospital, and his absence and silence, easily accountable (for he was more sensitive to embarrassment than I), somet
imes worried me unreasonably, so that at night before my sleeping drug had soothed me I would imagine him going up my stairs, knocking at my door, sleeping in my bed. I had been unjust to him in that, and so I had added a sense of guilt to my other more formal obligation. And then I suppose there was also the guilt of my letter. (What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed in their palaeolithic world.)

  Should I invite my saviour to dinner, I sometimes wondered, or should I suggest a meeting for a drink in the bar of the Continental? It was an unusual social problem, perhaps depending on the value one attributed to one’s life. A meal and a bottle of wine or a double whisky?—it had worried me for some days until the problem was solved by Pyle himself, who came and shouted at me through my closed door. I was sleeping through the hot afternoon, exhausted by the morning’s effort to use my leg, and I hadn’t heard his knock.

  ‘Thomas, Thomas.’ The call dropped into a dream I was having of walking down a long empty road looking for a turning which never came. The road unwound like a tape-machine with a uniformity that would never have altered if the voice hadn’t broken in—first of all like a voice crying in pain from a tower and then suddenly a voice speaking to me personally, ‘Thomas, Thomas.’

  Under my breath I said, ‘Go away, Pyle. Don’t come near me. I don’t want to be saved.’

  ‘Thomas.’ He was hitting at my door, but I lay possum as though I were back in the rice-field and he was an enemy. Suddenly I realized that the knocking had stopped, someone was speaking in a low voice outside and someone was replying. Whispers are dangerous. I couldn’t tell who the speakers were. I got carefully off the bed and with the help of my stick reached the door of the other room. Perhaps I had moved too hurriedly and they had heard me, because a silence grew outside. Silence like a plant put out tendrils: it seemed to grow under the door and spread its leaves in the room where I stood. It was a silence I didn’t like, and I tore it apart by flinging the door open. Phuong stood in the passage and Pyle had his hands on her shoulders: from their attitude they might have parted from a kiss.