The Quiet American

I drew in the smoke and she began to prepare my second pipe. I asked her again, “Was your sister really not at home, Phuong?” 

“I told you-she was out.” It was absurd to subject her to this passion for truth, an Occidental passion, like the passion for alcohol. Because of the whisky I had drunk with Pyle, the effect of the opium was lessened. I said, “I lied to you, Phuong. I have been ordered home."

“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 emphasized more than ever. His sad eyes would inquire with fervour 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 recognized him-he had been one of Thé’s assistants before Thé 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.” 

And

Saint Victor Hugo in the uniform of the French Academy with the 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 except 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's 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. 

And

“Where did you meet her?” 

“She was dancing at the Grand Monde.” 

“Dancing,” he exclaimed, as though the idea were painful. 

“It’s a perfectly respectable profession,” I said. “Don’t worry.” 

“You have such an awful lot of experience, Thomas.” 

“T have an awful lot of years. When you reach my age .. .” 

“I’ve never had a girl,” he said, “not properly. Not what you'd call a real experience.” 

“A lot of energy with your people seems to go into whistling.” 

“T’ve never told anybody else.” 

“You’re young. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” 

“Have you had a lot of women, Fowler?” 

“I don’t know what a lot means. Not more than four women have had any importance to me-or me to them. The other forty-odd-one wonders why one does it. A notion of hygiene, of one’s social obligations, both mistaken.” 

“You think they are mistaken?” 

“I wish I could have those nights back. I’m still in love, Pyle, and I’m a wasting asset. Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we lok around and see who is wanted too.” 

And

“I couldn’t have faced Phuong,” he said, and the name lay there like a banker’s bid. I took it up. 

“So it was for her,” I said. What made my jealousy more absurd and humiliating was that it had to be expressed in the lowest of whispers-it had no tone, and jealousy likes histrionics. “You think these heroics will get her. How wrong you are. If I were dead you could have had her.” 

“I didn’t mean that,” Pyle said. “When you are in love you want to play the game, that’s all.” That’s true, I thought, but not as he innocently means it. To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsifed and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour-the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered. 

And

“That there's no such thing as gratitude in Politics,” 

“At least they won't hate us like they hate the French ; “Are vou sure? Sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.” 

“You talk like a European, Thomas. These people aren't complicated.” 

“Is that what you’ve learned in a few months? You'll be calling them childlike next.” 

“Well-in a way.” 

“Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” But what good was it to talk to him? There was an unreality in both our arguments. I was becoming a leader-wnter before my time. I got up and went to the bookshelf.