Saigon, Vietnam. June 1963.
Everyone was sweating.
Malcolm had received the call the night before, the voice at the other end just told him to be there at that time because something big was going to happen. Something big, I thought when Malcolm went to my room to tell me about the call, meant that at least someone was going to die. We were in Vietnam after all. Less than a month before, soldiers had shot into a crowd of protestors and killed eight people, two of them were children.
Nothing could have prepared my eyes to what they saw.
I spent a night of broken sleep, tossing and turning, trying to find refuge from the sweat that stained every corner of my mattress. The days in Saigon were furnace-hot. The nights were even hotter. I had a dream and in the dream I saw dozens of dark hands wrapping white ones. From where I stood, the bundles of interlaced fingers looked like fleshy lotus flowers.
Malcolm and I arrived to the designated place before 8 am. It was a beautiful day of clear blue skies. We were the only foreign correspondents, at least the only ones in plain sight.
Malcolm combed his blond hair back with his fingers and brought a cigarette to his mouth. He was slightly taller than me, two or three inches at most, but that day, I don’t why, I felt like a dwarf standing next to a giant. What if it’s a bomb? He said.
If it’s a bomb, it will blow far from where we are. Why call the press to kill them? I said. They want this, whatever this is, to be shown to the world.
You are right, he said.
I was not sure I was. I thought of Le Lieu waiting for me back in New York. I thought of her red hair and her green eyes. I thought of her long white legs and the warm smell between them. I regretted I would never put my nose in there again if I were blown to pieces.
Look, said Wilde.
A saffron-colored wave was coming our way. At least two, perhaps three hundred buddhist monks and nuns, old and young, walked and chanted. I had heard that song before in Lumbini, not far from the pillar that is said to mark Emperor’s Ashoka visit to the Buddha’s birthplace, when I was covering for the French news a holy man’s funeral. The orange wave of monks and nuns formed a circle around the interjectional of Lê Văn Duyệt Street and Phan Đình Phùng Boulevard, a stone’s throw’s away from the ruined Presidential Palace. Phạm Phú Quốc and Nguyễn Văn Cử, the two pilots who had bombed the palace a year earlier, failed in their attempt to kill president Dinh Diem, but at least they sent the message. That both of them were still alive more than a year after the events escaped my comprehension. We were quickly surrounded by the orange masses. The air filled with the pungent scent of human sweat and incense barely covered by the fragrance of the bright yellow chrysanthemums that a trio of little nuns were handing out from a wicker basket.
The monks stopped their chant when one of them raised both his hands and shouted in Vietnamese, Here he comes. A turquoise blue Austin Cambridge, a dark blue stripe on each side, rolled slowly through the crowd and stopped in the void the sudden absence of men and women had just created. A beautiful machine driven by a bald man. This is it, said Malcolm as he took out his loaded old Petri from his bag and started shooting.
The young monk who had been driving the Austin turned off the engine, got off the car and walked in our direction. A child monk aged seven or eight who had been sitting back got off the car and skipped down to where we were. The boy produced some oranges from his robe and handed one to each of us. Malcolm put the orange in one of the pockets of his vest and kept taking pictures. The boy-monk showed me a smile of rotten teeth and started peeling an orange for himself.
What happened to you? The boy-monk asked me. The area around his thin lips shone with an orange glow.
What do you mean?
You are sad, he said.
I am not.
What happened?
My father died last week, I said. Cirrhosis of the liver. I couldn’t say goodbye to him.
He is a lucky man, he said still smiling. After a while he added, These aren’t real oranges, you know? You are not you. Your papa is not your father. Your mama is not your mother.
I don’t think I understand, I said.
And you are not the only one. But it is what it is and that is that. You want another orange?
Yes, please, I said.
Good man, he said handing me another imaginary orange. Now watch.
A third monk got off the car from the passenger seat and went to help the old man who was sitting back. The monks in the crowd were mostly silent and about half of them had their eyes closed. Most of the tonsured nuns were wailing. The old man sat cross-legged in the middle of the empty space on the sky-blue pillow his helper brought, held a mala of wooden beads in his right hands and started praying. The helper went back to the car, opened the hood, brought back a five-gallon yellow jerry can in his right hand and bathed the old man with the amber liquid. He then handed a matchbox to the old man.
Watch carefully, the boy-monk whispered.
A fat worm of black smoke rose to the clear skies. Flames were coming from a man. The potpourri of sweat, incense and flowers was quickly replaced by the smell of burning gasoline and roasted human flesh, which is not that different from the tang of roasted pig. The old man didn’t move or scream, he just kept murmuring his prayers as his blood bubbled and his skin and flesh burned. The body seemed to shrink and shrivel with every minute that passed. I thought and hoped it would quickly implode and disappear. I heard whistles and someone shouted, Police. I learned later that a handful of officers came to the scene but were swiftly outnumbered by the monks. Throngs of curious passersby attracted by the chaos, the smell and the smoke came to join the crowd. The driver-monk took a sip of what looked and smelled like the fermented milk of an animal from a metal pail, gave some of it to the orange-eating boy and passed it to the man standing to his left, a leper who had to hold the pail with his fingerless stumps. When the first group of firefighters pierced the orange wall all the way to the place where the human bonfire was taking place it was already too late.
After twelve long minutes the crimson flames were gone and all that remained were some of the roasted beads around the shrunken carcass. When the wind blew and the body toppled backwards I was sure it would shatter in a hundred pieces like a vase of porcelain. Malcolm shot one roll before the fire, seven while it lasted and two more when the driver monk went to check the dead old man, confirmed he was dead, put him into a small hand-made wooden coffin he had inside the trunk of the Austin with the help of three monks from the audience and drove away with the body, the boy-monk and the helper. Monks and nuns and passersby cried and prayed prostrated.
I wanted to scream and cry and vomit, all at the same time. My eyes could not believe what they had just seen. I turned my head to look at Wilde. With a knee on the floor, he was making sure the rolls of film were tightly closed and safely stored inside his bag. He raised his eyes to meet mine. He was smiling.
