Khung Thep, the city of angels

by Simeone Andrulli

It is not easy understanding a city: boundless suburbs, monuments, people coming and going. Our mind always searches a spatial and temporal setting. Perhaps in planned cities where traffic flows smoothly, night falls peacefully, day comes back serene, it is easier having a mental dimension.

Bangkok no, Bangkok is different.
Bangkok is chaotic but not neurotic.
Bangkok is a relatively recent city but has a very ancient history.
Bangkok doesn't sleep, is always on the go.
Bangkok certainly is not clean but is charming.

Behind the light of the night, thousands of prostitutes give romance illusion to western tourists in search of the exotic Orient. He will go away, maybe will write to her; she will end up between somebody else's arms.

The exasperating traffic that brings to paralysis entire city sectors when it rains, is soon put aside. A smile, a returned greeting and everything is forgotten. Like un unstoppable magmatic fluid the city advances, swallows, re-elaborates. Every day is the same and different. Words are repetitive, moments identical, but the sand grains keep falling down into the hourglass lower side.

Who are you Bangkok?
Perhaps a widow concealing behind the black mourning veils a beautiful body? Or a child who has lost his mother and happily finds her again? Or that old man looking with ancient tiredness at the incessant chaos of cars?

"Where you go?" are the only English words the tuk-tuk driver maybe knows. No, I am wrong, he proposes something else: "massage?" and with winking smile he shows photos by eloquent meaning.
Thousand eyes turn on; waken up from the torpor of the wait, the love nymphs by gaudy colors and painted pretty faces, try to capture the attention of the imprudent visitor. A glass separates the two worlds, the two future lovers. The choices is made, the number extracted. She comes out, they meet, he pays and together they disappear behind the innumerable rooms.

Joy of sex, sin of love.

How many men have found their lost virility among Bangkok's sheets? Maybe they are the angels, those nymphs by sinuous body and beautiful face where letting yourself be taken by oblivion ecstasy.
Khung Thep, Bangkok, the city of angels.
No, only women, simple women (sometimes men) who run away, flee a centuries-old misery that selling their bodies, hope to elude.
Forgetting Bangkok now is more difficult. The sweet caresses and soft lies whispered among tender kisses and eternal love promises, lead to a vertigo of unknown pleasure.
Forty, fifty, maybe sixty years old! Who cares if you feel again young, attractive, even beloved?!?
Lies, elegant sweet lies. But until you learn the truth, why not believing in them?

The dawn lights wake up the city that doesn't sleep. Bangkok like New York. Slowly commuters crowd the streets to go to the workplace. The bus conductor, winning the precarious balance goes up and down to collect the ticket fares while the rhythmically scanned metallic sound of his box blends with the speaker music. The temperature rises fast: it's hot, terribly hot. It's only 9 o'clock but 30 §C have been passed long ago. In a deadly hug, along the city asphalt ribbons, cars are almost motionless. A burning sun penetrates the exhaust fume clouds. The air-condition is all opened. Locked up in their own metallic boxes, the city of angels inhabitants deceive that one day, along Bangkok streets will circulate just one car: their own.

From the top of a car a man leans out:
Charming and cruel city
Nothing will impede me to cry out your name!
Nothing!

A breeze takes to the distance the words which breaks up on the mirrors covering the immense cement pyramids erected to dominate the city. They are not castles and among the tower battlements there are not imperial courts. No, there are not pageboys and kings. Elegant, holding suitcases, parked their own steed, the modern man of 2000 sets out with secure and determined pace for his office. It's them: the Knights of Bangkok! Under the jacket they hide their own weapon; not a pistol... a simple portable telephone, symbol of prestige and personal success.

In the 60's with the slogan 'a car for everyone' the Beetle Bug in Germany, the Fiat 500 and 600 in Italy, the Citroen 2CV and Renault4 in France represented the middle class rise class. In Bangkok this emblem doesn't exist: Mercedes, BMW, the most expensive one please. You don't enter a car dealer to save. What is money? Not having is a grave sin, as almost grave as not spending it. And being outrageously rich is not that bad.
The pawnshop are just behind the corner and the jewelry is there, just 100 meter farther. The intense yellow necklaces and bracelets reflect the sunray. Sign of wealth, sign of victory! But if everybody wins who loses?

Tomorrow doesn't exist and if existed it would have been erased from the planning mind that Bangkok doesn't have, never had and will never have. Bangkok is changing, has changed according to those who live there for long time. Not only traffic has increased exponentially: gigantic commercial centers, big buildings challenging monsoon clouds, expressways giving the 200 km/h inebriation to hurried drivers. A modern city: modern, vibrant, energetic.
If Superman's cradle had fallen down on the Chaya Phya riverbanks we might have not had the superhero of many Westerners' teenage. Perhaps he would have died of the almost radioactive energy unleashed in Bangkok air.
I don't know whether a Kriptum planet fragment landed here but it is not a solid fragment that must be sought, on Bangkok a piece of sky fell, a sky that must be looked for in people glances made of black eyes and long, black hair of silk.

Silk of Orient!