It always seemed hotter in Tanyin than anywhere else in the Southern Delta; perhaps it was the absence of water, perhaps it was the sense of interminable ceremonies which made one sweat vicariously, sweat for the troops standing to attention through the long speeches in a language they didn’t understand, sweat for the Pope in his heavy chinoiserie robes. Only the female cardinals in their white silk trousers chatting to the priests in sun-helmets gave an impression of coolness under the glare: you couldn’t believe
it would ever be seven o’clock and cocktail-time on the roof of the Majestic, with a wind from Saigon river.
After the parade I interviewed the Pope’s deputy. I didn’t expect to get anything out of him and I was right: it was a convention on both sides. I asked him about General The. “A rash man,” he said and dismissed the subject. He began his set speech, forgetting that I had heard it two years before: it reminded me of my own gramophone records for newcomers: Caodaism was a religious synthesis. . . the best of all religions . . . missionaries had been despatched to Los Angeles ... the secrets of the Great Pyramid. He wore a long white soutane and he chain-smoked. There was something cunning and corrupt about him: the word love’ occurred often. I was certain he knew that all of us were there to laugh at his movement; our air of respect was as corrupt as his phoney hierarchy, but we were less cunning. Our hypocrisy gained us nothing-not even a reliable ally, while theirs had procured arms, supplies, even cash down.
“Thank you, your Eminence.” I got up to go. He came with me to the door, scattering cigarette-ash. “God’s blessing on your work,” he said unctuously. “Remember God loves the truth.” “Which truth?” I asked.
“In the Caodaist faith all truths are reconciled and truth is love.”
He had a large ring on his finger and, when he held out his hand I really think he expected me to kiss it, but I am not a diplomat.
Under the bleak vertical sunlight I saw Pyle: he was trying in vain to make his Buick start. Somehow, during the last two weeks, at the bar of the Continental, in the only good bookshop, in the rue Catinat, I had continually run into Pyle. The friendship which he had imposed from the beginning he now emphasised more than ever. His sad eyes would inquire mutely after Phuong, while his lips expressed with even more fervour the strength of his affection and of his admiration-God save the mark-for me.
A Caodaist commandant stood beside the car talking rapidly. He stopped when I came up. I recognised him-he had been one of The’s assistants before The took to the hills.
“Hullo, commandant,” I said, “how’s the General?” “Which general?” he asked with a shy grin. “Surely in the ‘Caodaist faith,” I said, “all generals are reconciled.”
“I can’t make this car move, Thomas,” Pyle said. “I will get a mechanic,” the commandant said, and left us. “I interrupted you.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” Pyle said. “He wanted to know how much a Buick cost. These people are so friendly when you treat them right. The French don’t seem to know how to handle them.” “The French don’t trust them.”
Pyle said solemnly, “A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.” It sounded like a Caodaist maxim. I began to feel the air of Tanyin was too ethical for me to breathe. “Have a drink,” Pyle said. “There’s nothing I’d like better.”
“I brought a thermos of lime-juice with me.” He leant over and busied himself with a basket in the back. “Any gin?”
“No, I’m awfully sorry. You know,” he said encouraging-ly, “lime-juice is very good for you in this climate. It contains-I’m not sure which vitamins.” He held out a cup to me and I drank. “Anyway, it’s wet,” I said.
“Like a sandwich? They’re really awfully good. A new sandwich-mixture called Vit-Health. My mother sent it from the States.” “No, thanks, I’m not hungry.” “It tastes rather like Russian salad-only sort of drier.”
“I don’t think I will.” “You don’t mind if I do?”
. “No, no, of course not.”
He took a large mouthful and it crunched and crackled. In the distance Buddha in white and pink stone rode away from his ancestral home and his valet-another statue- pursued him running. The female cardinals were drifting back to their house and the Eye of God watched us from above the Cathedral door.
“You know they are serving lunch here?” I said. “I thought I wouldn’t risk it. The meat-you have to be careful in this heat.”
“You are quite safe. They are vegetarian.” “I suppose it’s all right-but I like to know what I’m eating.” He took another munch at his Vit-Health. “Do you think they have any reliable mechanics?” “They know enough to turn your exhaust pipe into a mortar. I believe Buicks make the best mortars.”
The commandant returned and, saluting us smartly, said he had sent to the barracks for a mechanic. Pyle offered him a Vit-Health sandwich, which he refused politely. He said with a man-of-the-world air, “We have so many rules here about food.” (He spoke excellent English.) “So foolish. But you know what it. is in a religious capital. I expect it is the same thing in Rome—or Canterbury,” he added with a neat natty little bow to me. Then he was silent. They were both silent. I had a strong impression that my company was not wanted. I couldn’t resist the temptation to tease Pyle-it is, after all, the weapon of weakness and I was weak. I hadn’t youth, seriousness, integrity, a future. I said, “Perhaps after all I’ll have a sandwich.”
“Oh, of course,” Pyle said, “of course.” He paused before turning to the basket in the back.
“No, no,” I said. “I was only joking. You two want to be alone.”
“Nothing of the kind,” Pyle said. He was one of the most inefficient liars I have ever known-it was an art he had obviously never practised. He explained to the commandant, “Thomas here’s the best friend I have.” “I know Mr. Fowlair,” the commandant said. “I’ll see you before I go, Pyle.” And I walked away to the Cathedral. I could get some coolness there.
Saint Victor Hugo in the uniform of the French Academy with a halo round his tricorn hat pointed at some noble sentiment Sun Yat Sen was inscribing on a tablet, and then I was in the nave. There was nowhere to sit expect in the Papal chair, round which a plaster cobra coiled, the marble floor glittered like water and there was no glass in the windows-we make a cage for air with holes, I thought, and man makes a cage for his religion in much the same way-with doubts left open to the weather and creeds opening on innumerable interpretations. My wife had found her cage with holes and sometimes I envied her. There is a conflict between sun and air: I lived too much in the sun.
I walked the long empty nave-this was not the Indo-China I loved. The dragons with lion-like heads climbed the pulpit: on the roof Christ exposed his bleeding heart. Buddha sat, as Buddha always sits, with his lap empty: Confucius’s beard hung meagrely down like a waterfall in the dry season. This was play-acting: the great globe above the altar was ambition: the basket with the movable lid in which the Pope worked his prophecies was trickery.
If this Cathedral had existed for five centuries instead of “two decades, would it have gathered a kind of convincingness with the scratches of feet and the erosion of weather? Would somebody who was convincible like my wife find here a faith she couldn’t find in human beings? And if I had really wanted faith would I have found it in her Norman church? But I had never desired faith. The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable. The Pope worked his prophecies with a pencil in a movable lid and the people believed. In any vision somewhere you could find the planchette. I had no visions or miracles in my repertoire of memory. I turned my memories over at random like pictures in an album: a fox I had seen by the light of an enemy flare over Orpington stealing along beside a fowl run, out of his russet place in the marginal country: the body of a bayoneted Malay which a Gurkha patrol had brought at the back of a lorry into a mining camp in Pahang, and the Chinese coolies stood by and giggled with nerves, while a brother Malay put a cushion under the dead head: a pigeon on a mantelpiece, poised for flight in a hotel bedroom: my wife’s face at a window when I came home to say goodbye for the last time. My thoughts had begun and ended with her. She must have received my letter more than a week ago, and the cable I did not expect had not come. But they say if a jury remains out for long enough there is hope for the prisoner. In another week, if no letter arrived, could I begin to hope? All round me I could hear the cars of the soldiers and the diplomats rowing iip: the party was over for another year. The stampede back to Saigon was beginning, and curfew called. I went out to look for Pyle.
He was standing in a patch of shade with the commandant, and no one was doing anything to his car. The conversation seemed to be over, whatever it had been about, and they stood silently there, constrained by mutual politeness. I joined them.
“Well,” I said, “I think I’ll be off. You’d better be leaving too if you want to be in before curfew.” “The mechanic hasn’t turned up.”
“He will come soon,” the commandant said. “He was in the parade.”
“You could spend the night,” I said. “There’s a special Mass-you’ll find it quite an experience. It lasts three hours.” “I ought to get back.”
“You won’t get back unless you start now.” I added unwillingly, “I’ll give you a lift if you like and the commandant can have your car sent in to Saigon tomorrow.”
“You need not bother about curfew in Caodaist territory,” the commandant said smugly. “But beyond . . . Certainly I will have your car sent tomorrow.”
“Exhaust intact;” I said, and he smiled brightly, neatly, efficiently, a military abbreviation of a smile.
The procession of cars was well ahead of us by the time we started. I put on speed to try to overtake it, but we had passed out of the Caodaist zone into the zone of the Hoa-Haos with not even a dust cloud ahead of us. The world was flat and empty in the evening.
It was not the kind of country one associates with ambush, but men .could conceal themselves neck-deep in the drowned fields within a few yards of the road.
Pyle cleared his throat and it was the signal for an approaching intimacy. “I hope Phuong’s well,” he said.
“I’ve never known her ill.” One watch-tower sank behind, another appeared, like weights on a balance.
“I saw her sister out shopping yesterday.” “And I suppose she asked you to look in,” I said. “As a matter of fact she did.” “She doesn’t give up hope easily.” “Hope?”
“Of marrying you to Phuong.” “She told me you are going away.” “These rumours get about.”
Pyle said, “You’d play straight with me, Thomas, wouldn’t you?” “Straight?”
“I’ve applied for a transfer,” he said. “I wouldn’t want her to be left without either of us.” “I thought you were going to see your time out.” He said without self-pity, “I found I couldn’t stand it.” “When are you leaving?”
“I don’t know. They thought something could be ar-in six months.”
“You can stand six months?” “I’ve got to.”
“What reason did you give?”
“I told the Economic Attaché-you met him.-Joe-more or less the facts.” “I suppose he thinks I’m a bastard not to let you walk off with my girl.”
“Oh no, he rather sided with you.” The car was spluttering and heaving-it had been spluttering for a minute, I think, before I noticed it, for I had been examining Pyle’s innocent question: ‘Are you playing straight?’ It belonged to a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the u as it’s spelt on old tombstones, and you meant what your father meant by the same words. I said, “We’ve run out.”
“Gas?”
“There was plenty. I crammed it full before I started. Those bastards in Tanyin have syphoned it out. I ought to have noticed. It’s like them to leave us enough to get out of their zone.” “What shall we do?”
“We can just make the next watch-tower. Let’s hope they have a little.”
But we were out of luck. The car reached within thirty yards of the tower and gave up. We walked to the foot of the tower and I called up in French to the guards that we were friends that we were coming up. I had no wish to be shot by a Vietnamese sentry. There was no reply: nobody looked out. I said to Pyle, “Have you a gun?” “I never carry one.” “Nor do I.”
The last colours of sunset, green and gold like the rice, were dripping over the edge of the flat world: against the grey neutral sky the watch-tower looked as black as print. It must be nearly the hour of curfew. I shouted again and nobody answered.
“Do you know how many towers we passed since the last fort?” “I wasn’t noticing.”
“Nor was I.” It was probably at least six kilometres to the next fort-an hour’s walk. I called a third time, and silence repeated itself like an answer.