The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth Read online

  The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

  The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

  A novel by

  Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  Translated by Kong Rithdee

  First published and distributed in 2018 by River Books

  396 Maharaj Road, Tatien, Bangkok 10200

  Tel. 66 2 622-1900, 224-6686

  Fax. 66 2 225-3861

  E-mail: [email protected]

  www.riverbooksbk.com

  Copyright collective work © River Books, 2018

  Copyright text © Kong Rithdee and River Books

  Copyright eBooks © River Books, 2019

  except where otherwise indicated.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Design: Ruetairat Nanta

  Cover and Interior Illustrations: Nakrob Moonmanas

  To those lost in conflict

  Contents

  Translator's Note

  The Girl in the Fish Tank

  Valley of the Fuchsia Storks

  The Goldfish that Sang

  The Cocoon of Misery

  Fighting Fish in a Bottle of Glue

  The Emerald Spider

  Four Orphans and the Tree of Dreams

  The Universe on the Wall

  Starlight River

  The Colony of Ants and the Laughing Crow

  The Mollusk Without a Shell

  The Amethyst Tear

  The Lightning Storm

  The Dancer in the Drizzle

  The Boy of the Night

  Shadow Play

  The Metropolis of Mice

  The Colour Blind Painter

  The Eye of the Storm

  The Twins from the Land of Tears

  Baby Seeds

  The Shipwrecked Heart

  Black Flames

  Cats Don’t Cry

  The Birds have Fled the Blackened Tree

  The Adopted Piglet and the Man who Murdered his Own Shadow

  Swansong

  Play List

  Botanical List

  Translator’s Note

  T here are several Thai texts that pose great challenges to translators, and Veeraporn Nitiprapha’s The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth is certainly one of them. Partly – and this is from my non-academic understanding – the difficulty is rooted in the fundamental structure and extreme pliability of the Thai language, which loom over any translator’s attempt to transform a work into the more rigid, grammar-governed English. And partly, in this specific effort, it’s because Veeraporn is a prose stylist who entertains her readers (and there are a huge number of them here in Thailand) with free-flowing lyricism and lexical ornamentations. She disassembles words and clauses and then reconstructs them – a near-inimitable trick in the English language – and she deploys a range of devices from irony to digression, symbolism to fabulism, rhapsodic dramatisation to cinematic scene-sketching.

  The translation required some untangling of phrasal and idiomatic constructions; those elegant, luscious and addictive passages in punctuation-free Thai that had to be ironed out. In general, I accompanied Veeraporn and her characters as they galloped to their acidic sunset by listening to their voices, their heartbeats, and by being fully aware of the author’s aesthetic choices and preoccupations (my excellent editor, Sarah Rooney, made sure of that too). We also have the writer’s – and her character Chareeya’s – horticultural obsession, which results in a teeming catalogue of plant names, mundane or exotic, tropical or temperate. While it’s simple enough to find the common names of these species, I was constantly aware of textural nuances. Hence, names of local plants have been transliterated from the Thai language unless they have English names in common usage; their less common English names can be found in the Botanical List on page 206.

  This is a book suffused with colours, sounds and smells, and while we can interpret words, it’s harder to capture those sensory signals deeply inspired by geography and culture. Likewise, the setting of the house by the river in Nakhon Chai Si, a short drive from Bangkok, immediately conjures up a scene of tranquility, fruit orchards and vintage charm. Such cultural familiarity – which appears in other details of the book – is sometimes a gap that can’t be easily bridged despite the linguistic fidelity of this translator.

  The hardest part, however, was to detect the subterranean quivers that course through this sad and beautiful book. The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, in the author’s own words, is a melodrama of shipwrecked romance. To this translator, it’s a razor blade dripping with honey, or a sugar-coated poison pill – dangerous and irresistible. Set loosely over the 1980s and ‘90s, with mention of a political incident in 2010 as a temporal marker – in fact, time is slippery and indeterminate here – the story can be read either as a nod to old-fashioned Thai romance novels, or as a sophisticated, literary upgrade of the soap opera genre that most Thais grew up reading or watching on television, or as a bitter commentary on the myths, smokescreens and delusions that seem to have disoriented Thailand and brought heartache over the past many years. In Veeraporn’s preface to the Thai publication, she made an allusion to the political malaise, historical and contemporary, as one of the motives for her writing.

  The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the S.E.A. Write Award, Southeast Asia’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2015. Before and especially after that, it has grown in popularity among literature fans and younger readers alike, an unusual feat in a country where fiction is hardly ever on the bestseller list. So it’s a pleasure for me and the publisher to introduce this translation to wider, non-Thai audiences.

  I would like to thank those who have made this translation possible: M.R. Narisa Chakrabongse, Phrae Chittiphalangsri, Pornpisuth Osathanond, Kaona Pongpipat, Chris Baker, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Sarah Rooney and Veeraporn Nitiprapha. I’m grateful for your help, patience and trust.

  Kong Rithdee

  Bangkok, Thailand

  September 2018

  I

  The Girl in the Fish Tank

  C halika, who was old enough to have a shadow of memory, could recall the time when the house was filled with sounds. Shards of sound, barely audible, humming ceaselessly from the nooks and crannies: murmurs, lamentations, garbled whispers, sighing, bawling, howling, weeping. The sobbing in the dark. Footsteps echoing through the night. The whistling of wind spiralling out of water. It’s hard to tell if those sounds were really sounds or if they were merely signals, imprisoned and ricocheting around the house for years from the day Chareeya was born and Mother caught Father having an affair.

  A bright ray of sunlight blasted down from a moody sky as Mother’s friend arrived at the house and the voyage of tears began. Well, she started, trailing off to a near-whisper. People are talking. A nod. The teacher goes there every afternoon. She had buck teeth and large round eyes that darted left and right, giving her the look of a panicked mouse. She’s a dancer, they say, a traditional dancer, she teaches at the school. Mother pictured slender arms sweeping languidly through the air: Are you sure it’s Teacher Tos? / My brother Tim saw him, too – he wouldn’t get that wrong. His friend lives around there and said they’ve been seeing each other for nearly a year. The slender arms kept moving inside Mother’s head. It’s not wise to leave such a thing unattended for too long.

  With one hand on her swollen belly and the other resting on the door, Mother found herself standing awkwardly in front of that house. It’s the blueish house, the panicked mouse had gest
ured. Domestic dispute, leave me out of it. Tilting chin, rolling eyes, the mouse had slipped away. Mother prayed it was all a misunderstanding but, before she could knock, the door swung open and Mother closed her eyes as a gust of wind struck her face without warning; when she opened them, she saw her husband.

  He didn’t look in the least surprised. It was as if he had been waiting for her, as if he had expected the eventuality of the day his wife would arrive at this very door. The faint aroma of distant rain was mixed with something else, a floral fragrance maybe, though she couldn’t place which kind of flower. Over his shoulder she saw a woman inside the room. Mother didn’t cry or scream; rather, she couldn’t take her eyes off the woman’s arm, the part just above her hand, which rested on a table. The woman wasn’t as attractive as Mother had imagined but she looked modern – unlike what a traditional dancer was supposed to look like – in jeans and a blue-and-orange striped top, hair falling down her back, eyes tinged with sadness. A wind-chime jingled somewhere. It wasn’t yet raining when Father stepped outside, closed the door without looking behind him, and took Mother home.

  Only when they reached the house did the downpour commence. Only when they reached the house did Mother acknowledge the incontrovertible existence of that woman. She recalled the small pockets of time when her husband hadn’t been there; those mornings when he had looked at himself in the mirror with forlorn eyes, and those evenings when he had gone out walking and stopped to gaze at the river with an air of melancholy.

  Only when they reached the house did Mother begin to cry. She wept and shielded her eyes with both hands and cursed the stars that had conspired with the lovers’ union. She cursed the swollen belly that had driven him to seek new love. But above all she cursed Chareeya, asleep in her womb, and, using all her willpower, Mother denounced the tyranny of fate: with one massive contraction Chareeya was born in the middle of the night, born while still asleep with her thumb stuck in her mouth.

  She had spent scarcely seven months in her mother’s womb and the doctor fought hard to keep her alive in this drab and dry world, storing her in a rectangular glass box – an astonishing invention that mimicked the womb and shielded her from death and motherly embrace. For months the baby girl lay there watching the room spin, the girl in the fish tank kept alive by canisters of air brought in from another world, fed by tubes and narrowly escaping death induced by those lonely moments. She grew up to be a healthy girl and no one ever suspected she had contracted the malady of loneliness – undetectable by any hypermodern medical equipment, an incurable disease that would condemn her to solitude for the rest of her life.

  Not only that, Chareeya also ached for the presence of the fish tank. Its power to isolate notwithstanding, it had protected her from a death that had pursued her from her Mother’s heart. The desire to find herself a new tank was persistent.

  As a little girl, Chareeya collected all sorts of creatures she found on the road and surrounded herself with them, like someone in a bunker: dogs, cats, ants, birds, squirrels, lizards, turtles. There was the tree frog that leapt from the pocket of her school uniform and disappeared forever into the garden, the soft jelly that transformed into a blue butterfly and fluttered away when she opened its box one morning, and the cicadas that rubbed their wings to produce annoying shrieks that went on all night long.

  Chareeya didn’t just take good care of her pets, she counted them as family and addressed them with respectable honorifics: Brother Yuyee, Auntie Meow, Uncle Foon, Aunt Tarn and Sister Tawarn, another tree frog that fled the fish bowl and returned to the banana grove near the house. Once, when she went with Chalika to pick butterfly-pea flowers for making sweet purple sticky rice, Chareeya was so overcome by her desire to collect stray creatures that she wanted to bring home a boy who was sitting by himself under the flame tree outside her school. She wanted to keep him, too, as her brother.

  Can we take him home, Lika? / No / Why not…? / Because his mother would miss him and she would cry. Basked in an indigo twilight that concealed all other heavenly colours except for the orange burst of the flame tree flowers falling like a swarm of jellyfish Chareeya had once seen in a documentary, that boy, who was about her age, sat with his head bowed and glanced sideways at the two girls with shrill hostility. His mother won’t come, Lika, it’s already dark / She’ll come, Charee / But I want a brother / No / His mother won’t cry / No, let’s go, Charee. Chalika half-dragged her younger sister away but after a few steps Chareeya turned back to look at the flame tree. Amidst the shimmering orange dots of that ephemeral evening, she thought the boy was being swallowed by the indigo light as he smiled at her, the most tender smile she had ever seen. Chareeya smiled back. His mother won’t cry, Lika. The sky is already dark. And, then, in an instant, she forgot all about the boy.

  As Chareeya grew up she found it harder to stand the pain of seeing her zoological family succumb to their short lifespans. To remedy that, she established a new family with the trees in the garden because they lived longer. She gave her chlorophyllous clan euphonic names: Majestic Auntie Saiyut; Dreamy Sister Lamduan; All-Embracing Auntie Huu-Kwang. Pushing it further, she bestowed them with honorifics: Miss Pu-Rahong or Dame Kannikar. She honoured them with names inspired by heroines in radio dramas. Or, in the case of the Mon rose, she liked to call it by its vintage name Yeesoon like Grandma Jerd from next door did, so it became Yeesoonsri, which was in turn inspired by those verses from Khun Chang Khun Phaen* – “Oh Lamduan, I lament having to hurry away. Kaet, Kaew, Pikul and Yeesoonsri, I’ll miss the scent of your falling flowers. Dear Jampi, till I see you, how many years?”

  How odd then that Chareeya called her sister Chalika “Lika”, a bastardised pronunciation of Rita, an American TV character. Just Lika, with neither title nor honorific; no “Sister Lika” or any respectful suffixes. Chalika, meanwhile, called her younger sister “Charee”, a bastardised form of the TV series Charlie’s Angels, and that name spawned a catalogue of oddball puns: Taree’s Angels, Roti Angels, Charitable Angels. There were other nonsensical angels but, in the end, she settled on Charee – Charee who was no longer an angel to her elder sister.

  And so silence conquered the house without anyone noticing. There was a fine mist on that banal morning as Father was having breakfast and Chalika was trying to tie her shoelaces for the first time, a task that seemed to puzzle her. Chareeya, too young for school, squatted next to her sister, her face tipped back slightly, elbows out, fists on her chest, imagining herself as a sparrow. This was when Mother calmly told Father that she was going to kill herself. And the two kids are coming with me.

  Sunlight bounced off water in the glass that Nual the nanny was handing to Chalika and the sharp gleam pierced Father’s eyes so suddenly that he ducked. For a while, he remained still with his head down and, when he looked up again, the blaze that had blurred his vision was gone. He squinted against the sun to look at the house; seeing past his wife who had got up to go to the kitchen, past the furniture sulking in the dim light, past his own tears as he blinked away the shadows in the corners of the room, and past the dissolving mist…

  There, Chalika was pulling her sister up from being a sparrow. They were silhouetted against the hazy background of a pomelo tree. Chareeya was upset, stomping her feet, craning her neck and crowing like a rooster while wiping away tears with the back of her balled-up hand. But everything was silent. There was no sound of Chareeya crying or of Chalika running away. No sound of the large crow that usually cawed at that hour. No sound of leaves rustling. Not even the sound of the ceaseless breeze off the river.

  In that moment, Father recalled the sobbing that had disappeared from the night. He remembered all the other sounds that had left the house and blanketed it in total silence, and he suddenly realised the certitude hidden in Mother’s threat; it came at him like a smooth round stone from the riverbed and he unconditionally cut all ties with the other woman. Yet, long after that, silence continued to rule the house.

  Father quit his teac
hing job. He stayed indoors and never left the house, as if he’d also quit the entire world. Once in a while he would go down to the orchards, just to make a show of his existence. Father knew nothing about farming. That didn’t matter because the labourers had been working there since Mother’s parents were still alive, and they knew how to take care of the soil on the banks of the Nakhon Chai Si River. In any case, Father had no interest in doing anything anymore. His heart kept beating pangs of hurt that he could hardly bear.

  Mother, in turn, started taking care of the man she loved with the same force she had used to win him back. Slowly the gloom lifted and the light shone, so brightly that no one would have noticed the house had once borne the wet scars of tears. Mother would wake up while everyone was still dreaming, write down a daily to-do list, and delegate it to Aunt Phong the cook, Nual the nanny and Niang the maidservant. During the day, she would patrol the house to check on progress. She managed Father’s business, telling him which phone calls to answer, which letters to read and who had written them, what he should and shouldn’t do.

  When she had time, she rummaged through old photographs, picking out the ones with Father and herself, and framing them to hang on the wall. Once she had exhausted the stock of old pictures, she asked Uncle Poj, son of Grandma Jerd next door, to take some more. She changed into her Sunday best, even though it wasn’t Sunday, and she smiled and posed next to Father by the door, the stairs, the car, or the riverbank with the backdrop of the big lampu tree. She accepted every party invitation so that she could hurriedly make new dresses and rush out to a hair salon. Sometimes, in the mornings, she would call a hairdresser to the house to fix her up, just so that she could take more pictures to frame and hang on the wall.