This afternoon, I decided to take my book and read in the park (you HAVE to read “Everything Is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer, it’s brilliant). I’d barely stepped foot in the park when I was approached by a teenage girl, looking to practise her English. We chatted for about 45 minutes, as she spilled her heart about how she has no friends because everyone else just wants to have fun, and how all Westeners are bad people because they wear shirts with no sleeves (or something like that). She was earnest but a little odd.
Then I made my excuses and went to sit on a bench next to the lake with my book and my jackfruit. I’d only been reading for a couple of minutes when I was distracted by a commotion on the other side of the lake. An old lady was shouting, SCREAMING, at a middle-aged lady, who wasn’t taking it well. This attracted the attention of the many joggers, couples and schoolchildren in the park, who all gathered round to watch the spectacle. I thought the old lady had finished when she marched off across the street, leaving the middle-aged lady cowering and wailing on the edge of the lake. But the old lady returned bearing a red plastic stool, and proceeded to beat the wailing lady over the head with the stool. The wailing intensified. At this point,a few passer-bys courageously decided to intervene by saying “Hey! Hey!” and then doing nothing more. The angry lady grew tired of the stool, and went to replace it across the street. On her return, she brought with her a little girl, who joined in the the yelling, and hit the wailing lady a bit more for good measure. Then the two aggressors grabbed the cowering heap by the wrists and dragged her across the street, out of my view. I would LOVE to know what she’d done to deserve all that, and whether she did deserve it. A few minutes after everything had died down, two policeman turned up on a motorbike. I think they were disappointed to have missed it.
Excitement over, I went back to my book. I managed a couple of pages before an old lady with no teeth and a conical hat came and sat next to me. Her English was excellent, but she told me how her dreams of being an English teacher had been scuppered in ‘74 by a bitch classmate who was cheating on her husband with their American teacher, in order to make herself more powerful, and ensured that this old lady Blanche couldn’t finish the class or move onto the next level. Everything was going well for the bitch, until the American found a younger and more beautiful barmaid girlfriend and didn’t want the bitch anymore. The bitch threw a tantrum outside the American’s house, and somehow managed to get him fired and sent back to America. Blanche was never able to get her diploma, and so couldn’t teach English. There was tuberculosis involved in this story as well, but I’m not sure where.
Then Blanche (this isn’t a Vietnamese name, but was given to her by French nuns when she was little) told me sadly that she was still a spinster, and that no one wanted to be her husband. She told me her best hope was finding a handsome widower (divorcees are no-go because they have ex-wives). She said there had been a handsome French widower who was interested in her, but then he got a 24 year old girlfriend, who ultimately assassinated him by stabbing him five times in the chest, because he slept with her but didn’t want to marry her. The 24 year old was sentenced to death, which Blanche reckoned was for the best, because if she’d gone to prison, she would’ve probably committed suicide anyway.
As I write this, I realise that Blanche sounds like a deluded old bat, but I swear that she was awesome, and that at the time I believed every word of what she told me. As soon as she sat down next to me, the sky went from sunny to overcast, and started thundering. It occurred to me that Blanche might be a witch, like a cool powerful witch not an evil one though. I also thought this because she had red ants crawling on her face and didn’t even care.
All of a sudden, Blanche told me that I had to go back because it was going to rain. She left, and within 10 seconds, it started spitting. It’s only five minutes walk back to my hotel, but it quickly turned into sheets of pouring rain, and I was drenched. After a pathetic attempt to keep my hair dry using my book, I embraced Mother Nature, and meandered slowly home, as everyone else sheltered in coffee shops or under ponchos.
