machine. It picked me up at the edge of ancient Laos, remote and still virginal, and in a few hours brought me back to the vulgar modernity of Bangkok – dirty, chaotic, stinking, where the water is polluted and the air lead-poisoned, where one person in five has no proper home, one in sixty, including newborns, is HIV positive, one woman in thirty works as a prostitute, and someone commits suicide every hour.
They call it ‘the City of Angels’, and perhaps it was once. The houses were built on piles, the streets were canals and the people went about by boat. The few streets on terra firma were lined with tall trees whose branches made tunnels of cool shade over the little traffic there was. The gilded spires of the pagodas soared above the houses and the palaces, even that of the king, who at the beginning of the century had called in an Italian architect to build him a throne hall.
Bangkok has never been a beautiful city, but it used to have charm; it was exotic. Sometimes the tropical heat was suffocating, but often a light breeze wafted in from the sea and up the Chao Paya River to blow unobstructed over the houses.
Among the flesh-and-blood human beings involved in the countless wheeler-dealings of a city that has long been known for its luxurious vices and its unsolved mysteries lived many other beings: invisible ones, born of the imagination, of the people’s love and fear. Like the other peoples of the region, the Thais call these beings phii, spirits.
To propitiate the phii and keep them quiet so they would not bother ordinary mortals, shrines were erected in their honour in every corner of the city, in every street, in front of every house. The people were assiduous in leaving them food, little wooden elephants, plaster figurines of dancing girls, a glass of alcohol, cakes, sweet-scented garlands of jasmine.
Whenever they laid the foundations of a new house or dug a well, they immediately built a little altar to the Earth Spirit to apologize for the disturbance caused, and begged its protection in times to come. These apologies and prayers were regularly renewed with fresh offerings. If the felling of a tree proved unavoidable, its phii ceremoniously received a request for the use of a saw against it.
The phii of the plot of land where the old Erawan Hotel was built was so happy with the way it had been treated that it took to performing miracles, and today its temple is still one of the most frequented and most popular in Bangkok. One of its specialities is to aid the conception of male offspring, and thousands of sterile women have come to it with all sorts of offerings; some dance around it semi-nude at night.
In the course of the past ten years Bangkok has been overwhelmed by the craving for modernity, and gigantic building works have turned the entire city upside down: the canals have been covered over and transformed into asphalted roads; magnificent century-old trees have been felled; entire streets of old houses have been swept away by bulldozers, and dozens of skyscrapers, with their deep-set steel and cement foundations, have been erected in their place. The earth has been opened, turned over, drilled, pulverized, and although here and there someone has taken the trouble to apologize to the phii, the disturbance has been so tremendous that many of them are very angry. The city is now swarming with these invisible presences, which take their revenge by driving people mad and causing frightful disasters. At least, that is what the old residents of Bangkok believe.
In September 1990, barely a week after we had arrived in Bangkok, a tanker full of liquid gas overturned right in the middle of the city, not far from where we lived. A cloud of death enveloped dozens of cars and houses, a spark set off an explosion, and more than a hundred people were burnt to a cinder.
A few months later, in the early afternoon, we heard a deafening roar and saw a dense, black cloud rise sky-high in the port district. A chemical depot had exploded, killing dozens of people. It is still not known what chemical products were involved, but since then more than two thousand people who found themselves in that pestilent cloud have suffered from inexplicable skin diseases and difficulty in breathing. Many children have been born deformed.
Disasters came one after another. One of the most dramatic was a fire in a doll factory where 190 girl workers were burned alive. To prevent the possibility of theft the management had padlocked every exit, and the girls were trapped.
Bangkok now lives under a malign spell, a city bewitched by the evil eye. People say it is too built up, that from the weight of all the skyscrapers it is sinking several inches every year, and will soon be swallowed up by the sea. Already it is hotter, because the cool coastal breeze of past years is blocked by new buildings. And there is a water shortage. But what is it that most worries the politicians and the leader writers of the local papers? That the poor have nothing to drink? No. Rather that the ‘massage parlours’ – as brothels in Thailand are coyly termed – lack sufficient water to wash the private parts of their numerous customers.
For every disaster there is an immediate, obvious, rational explanation: gas explodes because the safety regulations are not observed; factories are firetraps because instead of paying for proper fireproofing the bosses prefer to pay bribes to the officials who are supposed to check that the laws are obeyed. And yet it is the phii explanation that rings truest, because it sums up the essence of what is happening not only in Bangkok but in many other parts of the world: nature is taking revenge on those who fail to respect her, and who, out of pure greed, destroy every kind of harmony.
In Bangkok, we moved into the most beautiful and enchanted house we have ever lived in, an oasis of old Siam amid the horror of so much cement. Yet it had no altar in which to house the spirit of the place.
‘Here the spirit is very much alive, and you really must feed it every day,’ we were told by the American writer Bill Warren, the previous tenant. The ‘spirit’ was an enormous meat-eating turtle, almost three feet across, that lived in the pond on which the house is built.
I was happy: the house was on water, as the Hong Kong fortune-teller had recommended, and the turtle, for one like me who has lived so long among the Chinese, is the symbolic quintessence of a positive force. Legend has it that a turtle can live for centuries, which is why the Chinese have always erected steles bearing imperial edicts on the backs of great stone or marble turtles. And in the Chinese tradition the turtle has another great merit: it is the symbol of the cosmos. The lower part of the shell is a square, the earth; the upper part is a sphere, the heavens. The turtle has always been used in divination because, enclosing this totality, it holds the key to time and space, and thus can understand the past and read the future.
Our turtle was another victim of progress. It had lived for heaven knows how many years in the city’s canal system; then, when the canals were cemented over, and the water that formerly ran past and under the house became a stagnant pond, it remained there, trapped.
On our arrival the turtle decided to hide, and even though we rebaptized the place ‘Turtle House’ in its honour, it continued to make itself scarce. We knew it was around somewhere, because now and then one of our ducklings would disappear, but it did not seem to feel at ease with us. Similarly the people who worked at Turtle House; they began complaining of one ailment after another: the gardener coughed non-stop, the cook could not stand on her feet, and my secretary had a constant headache. Some of their relatives had road accidents; two died. Clearly our arrival had thrown the order of things out of kilter, and we had to find a way to restore harmony.
Some Thai friends suggested that Angela and I should present ourselves to the Emerald Buddha, the phii of all the phii of Bangkok, and announce to him that we had arrived in Thailand and would like to stay there for a few years; others advised us to have Turtle House exorcized to rid it of all possible negative influences.
We did not think twice: one morning we went to Wat Prakeo, the big temple on the river in front of the Royal Palace, to prostrate ourselves before the famous statue of Buddha; and on 9 April, Angela’s birthday, we had nine monks come to the house. In their
