Never on Wednesdays

BY MACKINLEY HELM

The monsoons were over before I went to Bangkok last winter; I had reserved a riverside bedroom at the Oriental Hotel, and so I had expected to keep fairly cool during my prospective visit. Yet, once there I soon found myself sleeping badly. The nights were steamy. They seemed hotter than midday. At noon, I could be out on the river, eating chilled purple papaya under a canopy. Or I could spend two or three comfortable hours over an epicure’s luncheon in the air-cooled restaurant at the top of a tower that rose over my balcony. (Bangkok prawns are the best in the world, may my Dublin friends curse me.)

The steamy nights proved exhausting. After a couple of sleepless hours, I would turn off the air blower, a contraption contrived to give off more clatter than coolness, and sleep a few minutes in a moist bath of sweat. Then I would be up to turn the infernal machine on again, drink cold tea from a thermos, and turn over the pages of a book of Thailand history or thumb through an illustrated brochure about Angkor Wat in Cambodia until fatigue once more closed my eyes.

It was on such a night, my discomfort compounded by headache and vague apprehension, that I took up an unread copy of the Sunday magazine section of the Bangkok World. The leading article, on page three, was captioned as follows, in extrabold capitals: “DON’T BATHE TOO MUCH ON WEDNESDAY.”

It turned out that the newspaper story, by one Phongthep Mahapauraya, suggested a promising cure for my Bangkok insomnia. I began the next day to go in for massage, the “serious” massage that Phongthep commended, and likewise to consider his advice about bathing on Wednesday.

The elderly masseurs at the serious massage clinics in Bangkok, as opposed to the petite Thailand sirens who operate at the gaudy and widely publicized tourist parlors, have been taught by ancient Thailand tradition that the cure for many bodily ills is to be found in the manipulation of one or another of the ten major tendons and the 72,000 sinews which radiate in every direction from each human navel.

These gentlemen, said our author, know that if you eat too much coconut meat on Tuesday and are, in consequence, afflicted with pains in the thorax on Wednesday, you must have your flanks kneaded from the spine outward, in clockwise motion, with rhythmical pressures on the solar plexus. Nausea caused by overindulgence in roast pork and sweetmeats on Friday is cured by massage of the back and the chest. Hiccups give way to massage of the throat. Nervous tics and twitches diminish and disappear when the forehead and temples are kneaded. For insomnia, as Phongthep advised, the practitioner massages the shins, temples, and shoulders.

It became clear to me, in the course of my reading, that I was the victim of something more malignant than tropical heat waves and noisy air coolers, and since I had eaten no coconut on Tuesday or roast pork on Friday, I had to fall back on the supposition that I had bathed too much on Wednesday. That is the day of all days, said tradition, when the Thailand people are exposed to unfavorable and malevolent winds.

Unwilling to wait until the following Thursday to discover whether a more temperate habit of bathing on Wednesday would permit me to sleep, I visited the hotel barber on Monday — correctly supposing that in that ancient land a barber might still be filling the antique office of surgeon.

Although the barber proved to be a young man, I filled him in on my recent pathological history while he was cutting my hair. When he had finished his work with the shears, he went silently and spontaneously after my temples and shoulder muscles with his muscular fingers, explaining, when the treatment was finished, that though he was indeed young, he had served an apprenticeship in the old therapeutic tradition.

I now felt so good, so relaxed and expansive, that I ordered a facial, and when I came out of that process, the skin of my face tight and rosy, the barber dug his thumbs into four points on my shinbones. I called out in dismay, so sharp was the pain. The barber smiled. “I think,” said he, “that we have got at the seat of your trouble.” He advised me, however, to stay away from the swimming pool the next Wednesday.

I slept pretty well Monday night, dreaming fitfully but not wakefully of picturesque floating markets, golden Buddhas, barefoot monks, and the Princess Chumbhat’s lacquered pavilions. And if for a time I tossed about on my bed Tuesday night, it was only because I was trying to decide when to bathe — or not bathe — the next day.

Three showers a day are the rule in Bangkok, at least among foreigners unused to the heat: in the morning, early evening, and at bedtime. So before I went off to sleep, I tried to make calculations about which of the times of refreshment I could most easily bear to ignore. I could not quite decide to abandon the cold morning bath before my breakfast of ripe oranges and good Java coffee; nor could I quite accept abstinence from the cool delight of a dip in the blue pool by the river after a hot afternoon at the temple Wat Po, from whose frescoed walls the barber had promised me a pictorial course in the self-massage of the yogis. Nor did I relish the idea of dressing unbathed before dinner, in order to lie down, at a later hour, only momentarily gratified by the pleasant sensation of chill induced in hot climates by unheated bath water. So since I couldn’t bear to declare any one of these balms to the heated body to be superior to the others, I cried a plague on them all. I decided to renounce the use of all water on Wednesday.

I went to bed Wednesday at midnight and slept like a baby, slept until noon the next day. Some weeks later, after a series of these abstinent Wednesdays, I was saying goodbye to my friend the barber, whom I had continued to visit for consolation. I thanked him for all his kind offices to my temples and shins. “You have been a good patient,” he said. “You don’t bathe too much on Wednesday.”