Bangkok / Morning
This morning, woke up at 4 o'clock. Standing in the night, I dutifully ate twenty prunes looking out the window. Gradually, the cries of animals in the park opposite the guesthouse woke up. As in the jungle, wild, open Bangkok. The gray light appeared.
The freshness of the dawn does not exist. The interior of the body liquid, contained only by the skin like a big bag informs. The heat from the outside pressure on the neck, face, skin. From inside, the food pushes the organs to the edges. In reality, it is also outside in - stomach, intestines, lungs, as many bags and tubes - I'm crossing through it. Be a tunnel, a passage. Travel the world in me.
I went back to bed when waking life.
Late afternoon, I jump on a bus, any one, to go anywhere. Full of schoolgirls in uniform. I am a giant in this world of dolls. The bus runs very fast and tackles curves as right angles. I had already noticed that a few years ago: in Bangkok, we do not laugh with transport. I finally sat down next to a very young girl smiled. Reaches the controller - with the hand that strange metal box full of parts it shakes up and down like a rain stick and produces tickets. I must say I go.
- I do not know where I go.
The woman does not even just trying to understand me and returns me to the girl sitting next to me for interpretation:
- Know where you are going.
- I do not know, I would just across town.
- No, no.
- Yes! Give me a ticket to the terminus. Tell him to give me a ticket to the terminus.
- No, no. To see the city, you gotta get there. It's here.
She pushes me gently from my seat. I turned to the lady with the tickets that hides the iron box in his back and shows me the door. I head no. The whole bus laughed. We stop. GIRL
- You gotta get off now.
- No, no.
But I'm already on the sidewalk, in the swirl of traffic.
I walk in his ear, trying to spread the sound of cars in the maze of neighborhoods. I sink into the streets of smaller and smaller. Walking there, somewhere in the world. A city
tangled, dark wood through the centuries. A city so precarious soft always renewed, tinkered with the needs and resources. A shared space also impossible to map in memory, where what appears to be random with respect abroad is perfectly organized according to the logic of use.
Twice men stationed as lookouts, want to intimidate me to prevent me from accessing secret alleys between the houses on the water, beside the Chao Phraya River. They get in the way of passage, the manly, arms crossed and eyes narrowed to look bad, and say that going further is useless:
- It's a stalemate.
I do not think so. It can not be a deadlock in such a city. Both times, I shall call Charli to the rescue.
- Charli Come with me, together, of course you're going.
And I insist in spite of fear, pushing my body to make a stubborn way.
- Help me Charlie, if the man in me, I pass.
Both times, the guard departs. Both times it is not a deadlock. A profuse
life unfolds. The interior of houses, doors wide open, is not cut from the outside that covered by sheets from one roof to another, is also an interior shared by the entire neighborhood. People in rest, sprawled on mats on the floor on the cement of the driveway, in hammocks on a beam ... At this hour, any flat surface and the shadow requisitioned for a nap. Emptiness in the heat. Some groups of women cook soups in the aisles sounds dull knife on wood, large woks smells of spices, sweet laughter, which, instead of awakening the sleepers, the lull. Very small children zigzag fours, resistant to sleep. I do not make noise, I do not ask, I slide. It does not concern me. A shadow crosses daily. This city
common patina disappears galloping growth. Hectare after hectare, inexorably, it is buried under concrete. Neighborhoods disintegrated, as if the towers fell from the sky fifty stories. Crushed, shacks made of precious wood, patiently held together with small courtyards, garden tips, home to the spirits, winding paths along the canals. Blown dust, like an explosion: life.
Destroy and build a leak seems rampant if we do not here when this is perhaps part of a cycle. Does it grow in three centuries on the ruins of skyscrapers mushroom in a new wooden shacks?
On the Chao Phraya River passing tourists - couples, two by two in the boat, disoriented by the noise of engines, speed, address the drivers to walk, they do not forget as long to shoot. The man behind him before a military arm of the digital camera and passes the other around the shoulders of his companion. They reconcile their heads, freeze a smile with white teeth, and click. In the background, their friends will see in the photo the worn face and sweating of the gondolier - converted fisherman - who grimaces in the sun, and finally did not look as happy as originally thought, blinded we were by the folklore of the colorful boat at the bow of necklaces adorned with fresh flowers. We
from country to Christian scruples, braced on principles emptied of their meaning, come here to buy the freshness of a place in the world where social order is so different from ours that we do not see it. And the low value given to the individual, his work, his very body, is our pleasure. Cons almost nothing can get any service for poor people. And near Kaossan Road, hundreds of white men over forty years invariably fat, alone and bored, are escorted by whores who often have no more than fifteen years. They buy their services for several days, sometimes weeks, and make their little women. They invite to the restaurant, walk with them, pay their clothes. The girls are right, but docile frowning. Their sex is an entry for more money from the West in shorts and sunscreen that comes irrigate Thailand.
Evening /
Who Kaossan Road, returning from travel, telling his friends has caused great anguish in his observation of the quality (or lack thereof) its feces?
Displacement is a transformation of the body. How do I know how long it takes for adaptation? In my first trip to Laos, he had to wait ten days for my digestive tract starts his work and, over time, the terrifying fantasies of bowel obstruction were increasingly difficult to curb. This time, I had decided before the start not to venture off the beaten path before my body has adapted to heat, the six hour time difference, the food ... I was going to pass
lot of time doing nothing, waiting to be quite there. But by noon, I began to unload with the remains of my delicious French meal before yesterday in the toilets of Bangkok. Seller
Business:
- One hundred fifty baht.
I sneered.
He laughs too.
- It's expensive for a bag stolen that I'm going to steal my turn!
Negotiation. His colleagues support him: he will not drop below 80.
- At 50, I'll take it.
He turns away. I no longer exist. Good. I walk a hundred yards. Too bad! In addition I have had the small banana any rambling gray to replace mine that rubs off on the skin and dollars with perspiration.
I retraced my steps.
- Fifty baht + my bag there. OK?
He looks at the bag.
- With all that's in it?
We laugh. Bargain. I transfer my stuff from one bag to another on the stall. He watches with curiosity as I leave objects. But all is well packaged, unidentifiable: recorder, headphones, microphone, camera, travelers,
dollars ... Later I go home I spotted these seamstresses. For twenty baht, they fix me Bananas, in the silence of their female tiny workshop.
I look at the white pass. My antipathy for travelers is proportional to the size of their luggage. A kind of pity, too, for all this flesh Western female adult and unconsciously, exhibited by the shorts and tank tops mini. A group of French
tired returned to the guesthouse. Like a gang, they all wear the same T-shirt: "I'm for hire. "On the body of a pack of white men, the phrase has something of a slap.
Two New Zealanders spend drunk. I ask them a cigarette. One look at the book:
- Beginning of the newspaper, beginning the journey!
I laugh at his unexpected insight.
is a good time to go to bed.
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