The Quiet American

  ‘That sampan,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that sampan too.’ He watched me as I stretched out for my second pipe. ‘I envy you your means of escape.’

  ‘You don’t know what I’m escaping from. It’s not from the war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m not involved.’

  ‘You will all be. One day.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘You are still limping.’

  ‘They had the right to shoot at me, but they weren’t even doing that. They were knocking down a tower. One should always avoid demolition squads. Even in Piccadilly.’

  ‘One day something will happen. You will take a side.’

  ‘No, I’m going back to England.’

  ‘That photograph you showed me once . . .’

  ‘Oh, I’ve torn that one up. She left me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s the way things happen. One leaves people oneself and then the tide turns. It almost makes me believe in justice.’

  ‘I do. The first time I dropped napalm I thought, this is the village where I was born. That is where M. Dubois, my father’s old friend, lives. The baker—I was very fond of the baker when I was a child—is running away down there in the flames I’ve thrown. The men of Vichy did not bomb their own country. I felt worse than them.’

  ‘But you still go on.’

  ‘Those are moods. They come only with the napalm. The rest of the time I think that I am defending Europe. And you know, those others—they do some monstrous things also. When they were driven out of Hanoi in 1946 they left terrible relics among their own people—people they thought had helped us. There was one girl in the mortuary—they had not only cut off her breasts, they had mutilated her lover and stuffed his . . .’

  ‘That’s why I won’t be involved.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love—they have always been compared.’ He looked sadly across the dormitory to where the métisse sprawled in her great temporary peace. He said, ‘I would not have it otherwise. There is a girl who was involved by her parents—what is her future when this port falls? France is only half her home . . .’

  ‘Will it fall?’

  ‘You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night. You know we lose one class of St Cyr every year. We were nearly beaten in ’50. De Lattre has given us two years of grace—that’s all. But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.’ His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. ‘You would not understand the nonsense, Fowler. You are not one of us.’

  ‘There are other things in one’s life which make nonsense of the years.’

  He put his hand on my knee with an odd protective gesture as though he were the older man. ‘Take her home,’ he said. ‘That is better than a pipe.’

  ‘How do you know she would come?’

  ‘I have slept with her myself, and Lieutenant Perrin. Five hundred piastres.’

  ‘Expensive.’

  ‘I expect she would go for three hundred, but under the circumstances one does not care to bargain.’

  But his advice did not prove sound. A man’s body is limited in the acts which it can perform and mine was frozen by memory. What my hand touched that night might be more beautiful than I was used to, but we are not trapped only by beauty. She used the same perfume, and suddenly at the moment of entry the ghost of what I’d lost proved more powerful than the body stretched at my disposal. I moved away and lay on my back and desire drained out of me.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, and lied, ‘I don’t know what is the matter with me.’

  She said with great sweetness and misunderstanding, ‘Don’t worry. It often happens that way. It is the opium.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the opium.’ And I wished to heaven that it had been.

  2

  I

  It was strange, this first return to Saigon with nobody to welcome me. At the airport I wished there were somewhere else to which I could direct my taxi than the rue Catinat. I thought to myself: ‘Is the pain a little less than when I went away?’ and tried to persuade myself that it was so. When I reached the landing I saw that the door was open, and I became breathless with an unreasonable hope. I walked very slowly towards the door. Until I reached the door hope would remain alive. I heard a chair creak, and when I came to the door I could see a pair of shoes, but they were not a woman’s shoes. I went quickly in, and it was Pyle who lifted his awkward weight from the chair Phuong used to use.

  He said, ‘Hullo, Thomas.’

  ‘Hullo, Pyle. How did you get in?’

  ‘I met Dominguez. He was bringing your mail. I asked him to let me stay.’

  ‘Has Phuong forgotten something?’

  ‘Oh no, but Joe told me you’d been to the Legation. I thought it would be easier to talk here.’

  ‘What about?’

  He gave a lost gesture, like a boy put up to speak at some school function who cannot find the grown-up words. ‘You’ve been away?’

  ‘Yes. And you?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been travelling around.’

  ‘Still playing with plastics?’

  He grinned unhappily. He said, ‘Your letters are over there.’

  I could see at a glance there was nothing which could interest me now: there was one from my office in London and several that looked like bills, and one from my bank. I said, ‘How’s Phuong?’

  His face lit up automatically like one of those electric toys which respond to a particular sound. ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ he said, and then clamped his lips together as though he’d gone too far.

  ‘Sit down, Pyle,’ I said. ‘Excuse me while I look at this. It’s from my office.’

  I opened it. How inopportunely the unexpected can occur. The editor wrote that he had considered my last letter and that in view of the confused situation in Indo-China, following the death of General de Lattre and the retreat from Hoa Binh, he was in agreement with my suggestion. He had appointed a temporary foreign editor and would like me to stay on in Indo-China for at least another year. ‘We shall keep the chair warm for you,’ he reassured me with complete incomprehension. He believed I cared about the job, and the paper.

  I sat down opposite Pyle and re-read the letter which had come too late. For a moment I had felt elation as on the instant of waking before one remembers.

  ‘Bad news?’ Pyle asked.

  ‘No.’ I told myself that it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway: a reprieve for one year couldn’t stand up against a marriage settlement.

  ‘Are you married yet?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He blushed—he had a great facility in blushing. ‘As a matter of fact I’m hoping to get special leave. Then we could get married at home—properly.’

  ‘Is it more proper when it happens at home?’

  ‘Well, I thought—it’s difficult to say these things to you, you are so darned cynical, Thomas, but it’s a mark of respect. My father and mother would be there—she’d kind of enter the family. It’s important in view of the past.’

  ‘The past?’

  ‘You know what I mean. I wouldn’t want to leave her behind there with any stigma . . .’

  ‘Would you leave her behind?’

  ‘I guess so. My mother’s a wonderful woman—she’d take her around, introduce her, you know, kind of fit her in. She’d help her to get a home ready for me.’

  I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Phuong or not—she had looked forward so to the skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, but she had so little idea of all they would involve, Professor and Mrs Pyle, the women’s lunch clubs; would they teach her C
anasta? I thought of her that first night in the Grand Monde, in her white dress, moving so exquisitely on her eighteen-year-old feet, and I thought of her a month ago, bargaining over meat at the butchers’ stores in the Boulevard de la Somme. Would she like those bright clean little New England grocery stores where even the celery was wrapped in cellophane? Perhaps she would. I couldn’t tell. Strangely I found myself saying as Pyle might have done a month ago, ‘Go easy with her, Pyle. Don’t force things. She can be hurt like you or me.’

  ‘Of course, of course, Thomas.’

  ‘She looks so small and breakable and unlike our women, but don’t think of her as—as an ornament.’

  ‘It’s funny, Thomas, how differently things work out. I’d been dreading this talk. I thought you’d be tough.’

  ‘I’ve had time to think, up in the north. There was a woman there . . . Perhaps I saw what you saw at that whorehouse. It’s a good thing she went away with you. I might one day have left her behind with someone like Granger. A piece of tail.’

  ‘And we can remain friends, Thomas?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Only I’d rather not see Phuong. There’s quite enough of her around here as it is. I must find another flat—when I’ve got time.’

  He unwound his legs and stood up. ‘I’m so glad, Thomas. I can’t tell you how glad I am. I’ve said it before, I know, but I do really wish it hadn’t been you.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s you, Pyle.’ The interview had not been the way I had foreseen: under the superficial angry schemes, at some deeper level, the genuine plan of action must have been formed. All the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favour, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism. Oh, I was right about the facts, but wasn’t he right too to be young and mistaken, and wasn’t he perhaps a better man for a girl to spend her life with?

  We shook hands perfunctorily, but some half-formulated fear made me follow him out to the head of the stairs and call after him. Perhaps there is a prophet as well as a judge in those interior courts where our true decisions are made. ‘Pyle, don’t trust too much in York Harding.’

  ‘York!’ He stared up at me from the first landing.

  ‘We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we’ve learnt a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play with matches. This Third Force—it comes out of a book, that’s all. General Thé’s only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy.’

  It was as if he had been staring at me through a letter-box to see who was there and now, letting the flap fall, had shut out the unwelcome intruder. His eyes were out of sight. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Thomas.’

  ‘Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke, even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you can’t trust men like Thé. They aren’t going to save the East from Communism. We know their kind.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The old colonialists.’

  ‘I thought you took no sides.’

  ‘I don’t, Pyle, but if someone has got to make a mess of things in your outfit, leave it to Joe. Go home with Phuong. Forget the Third Force.’

  ‘Of course I always value your advice, Thomas,’ he said formally. ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  II

  The weeks moved on, but somehow I hadn’t yet found myself a new flat. It wasn’t that I hadn’t time. The annual crisis of the war had passed again: the hot wet crachin had settled on the north: the French were out of Hoa Binh, the rice-campaign was over in Tonkin and the opium-campaign in Laos. Dominguez could cover easily all that was needed in the south. At last I did drag myself to see one apartment in a so-called modern building (Paris Exhibition 1934?) up at the other end of the rue Catinat beyond the Continental Hotel. It was the Saigon pied-à-terre of a rubber planter who was going home. He wanted to sell it lock, stock and barrel. I have always wondered what the barrels contain: as for the stock, there were a large number of engravings from the Paris Salon between 1880 and 1900. Their highest common factor was a big-bosomed woman with an extraordinary hair-do and gauzy draperies which somehow always exposed the great cleft buttocks and hid the field of battle. In the bathroom the planter had been rather more daring with his reproductions of Rops.

  ‘You like art?’ I asked and he smirked back at me like a fellow conspirator. He was fat with a little black moustache and insufficient hair.

  ‘My best pictures are in Paris,’ he said.

  There was an extraordinary tall ash-tray in the living-room made like a naked woman with a bowl in her hair, and there were china ornaments of naked girls embracing tigers, and one very odd one of a girl stripped to the waist riding a bicycle. In the bedroom facing his enormous bed was a great glazed oil painting of two girls sleeping together. I asked him the price of his apartment without his collection, but he would not agree to separate the two.

  ‘You are not a collector?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘I have some books also,’ he said, ‘which I would throw in, though I intended to take these back to France.’ He unlocked a glass-fronted bookcase and showed me his library—there were expensive illustrated editions of Aphrodite and Nana, there was La Garçonne, and even several Paul de Kocks. I was tempted to ask him whether he would sell himself with his collection: he went with them: he was period too. He said, ‘If you live alone in the tropics a collection is company.’

  I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

  ‘I don’t think my paper would allow me to buy an art collection.’

  He said, ‘It would not, of course, appear on the receipt.’

  I was glad Pyle had not seen him: the man might have lent his features to Pyle’s imaginary ‘old colonialist,’ who was repulsive enough without him. When I came out it was nearly half past eleven and I went down as far as the Pavillon for a glass of iced beer. The Pavilion was a coffee centre for European and American women and I was confident that I would not see Phuong there. Indeed I knew exactly where she would be at this time of day—she was not a girl to break her habits, and so, coming from the planter’s apartment, I had crossed the road to avoid the milk-bar where at this time of day she had her chocolate malt. Two young American girls sat at the next table, neat and clean in the heat, scooping up ice-cream. They each had a bag slung on the left shoulder and the bags were identical, with brass eagle badges. Their legs were identical too, long and slender, and their noses, just a shade tilted, and they were eating their ice-cream with concentration as though they were making an experiment in the college laboratory. I wondered whether they were Pyle’s colleagues: they were charming, and I wanted to send them home, too. They finished their ices and one looked at her watch. ‘We’d better be going,’ she said, ‘to be on the safe side.’ I wondered idly what appointment they had.

  ‘Warren said we mustn’t stay later than eleven twenty-five.’

  ‘It’s past that now.’

  ‘It would be exciting to stay. I don’t know what it’s all about, do you?’

  ‘Not exactly, but Warren said better not.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a demonstration?’

  ‘I’ve seen so many demonstrations,’ the other said wearily, like a tourist glutted with churches. She rose and laid on their table the money for the ices. Before going she looked around the café, and the mirrors caught her profile at every freckled angle. There was only myself left and a dowdy middle-aged Frenchwoman who was carefully and uselessly making up her face. Those two hardly needed make-up, the quick dash of lipstick, a comb through the hair. For a moment her glance had rested on me—it was not like a woman’s glance, but a man’s, very straightforward, speculating on some course of action. Then she turned quickly to her companion. ‘We’d better be off.’ I watched them idly as they went out side by side into the sun-splintered street. It was impossible t
o conceive either of them a prey to untidy passion: they did not belong to rumpled sheets and the sweat of sex. Did they take deodorants to bed with them? I found myself for a moment envying them their sterilized world, so different from this world that I inhabited—which suddenly inexplicably broke in pieces. Two of the mirrors on the wall flew at me and collapsed half-way. The dowdy Frenchwoman was on her knees in a wreckage of chairs and tables. Her compact lay open and unhurt in my lap and oddly enough I sat exactly where I had sat before, although my table had joined the wreckage around the Frenchwoman. A curious garden-sound filled the café: the regular drip of a fountain, and looking at the bar I saw rows of smashed bottles which let out their contents in a multi-coloured stream—the red of porto, the orange of cointreau, the green of chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis, across the floor of the café. The Frenchwoman sat up and calmly looked around for her compact. I gave it her and she thanked me formally, sitting on the floor. I realized that I didn’t hear her very well. The explosion had been so close that my ear-drums had still to recover from the pressure.

  I thought rather petulantly, ‘Another joke with plastics: what does Mr Heng expect me to write now?’ but when I got into the Place Garnier, I realized by the heavy clouds of smoke that this was no joke. The smoke came from the cars burning in the car-park in front of the national theatre, bits of cars were scattered over the square, and a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens. People were crowding in from the rue Catinat, from the Boulevard Bonnard. The sirens of police-cars, the bells of the ambulances and fire-engines came at one remove to my shocked ear-drums. For one moment I had forgotten that Phuong must have been in the milk-bar on the other side of the square. The smoke lay between. I couldn’t see through.

  I stepped out into the square and a policeman stopped me. They had formed a cordon round the edge to prevent the crowd increasing, and already the stretchers were beginning to emerge. I implored the policeman in front of me, ‘Let me across. I have a friend . . .’