A first excerpt from The Season of Breath. In chapter 3, Michael, his partner Chu and his friend Gabriel from Liège spend a few days in Pattaya. Among the “two extraordinary days” of their stay is the day of the tigers.
Tiger Park is on the edge of Pattaya, out toward Jomtien, along the big Sukhumvit highway. From the road, you’d never guess. You go in beneath a curtain of aerial roots hanging from a wall of foliage, with TIGER PARK spelled out in the middle in orange and green letters, like the entrance to a cartoon jungle. Gabriel and I posed in front of it, side by side, each with a bag slung across his chest, him in a white T-shirt and flip-flops, me in an Argentina jersey and Crocs. Two explorers. Livingstone and Stanley, Liège edition, kitted out for the swimming pool. Chu took the picture, laughing. She was wearing her Argentina jersey too. That day it was two against one, and Gabriel pointed it out all day long.
The visit begins with a safari on a little electric train, protected by bars and windows, that winds through the park’s forest for a quarter of an hour. For me, it was perfect: a sit-down safari. The tigers live their tiger lives there, which is to say they sleep. Two big males were napping on the paving stones, between fallen tree trunks, pressed against each other like an old married couple who no longer speak but wouldn’t leave each other for anything in the world. Another was lying in a turquoise pool at the foot of a fake-rock waterfall, water up to his neck, eyes half-closed, like a retiree in his Sunday bath. A fourth had sat down in the middle of the path, bolt upright, paws together, and he looked the train in the eye as it went by, car by car, like a conductor checking tickets. Nobody dared show him theirs. Behind the trees you could see the balconies of an apartment building, with laundry drying. Even the jungle, in Pattaya, has neighbors. I wondered what it’s like to drink your morning coffee with a view of tigers. You probably stop seeing them in the end. That’s what happens to everything extraordinary, when you see it every day.
Then come the encounters. You go into the enclosure in small groups, for about ten minutes, and a keeper explains the rules before opening the gate: move slowly, speak softly, touch the tiger from behind, on the back or the flank, never the head, never the paws. Each keeper holds a long stick, the way a shepherd holds his crook, and that gave me pause: between a two-hundred-kilo animal and me, there was a twenty-year-old kid and a stick.
The first tiger was enormous. He was stretched out full length on a wooden table, front paws dangling over the edge, tail softly thumping against a table leg, and he was sleeping like a cat after dinner. Gabriel went first. He reached out his hand, fingertips first, with the face of a man calculating his odds and not liking the answer. The tiger half-opened one eye. Gabriel pulled his hand back. The keeper laughed. Gabriel tried again, and this time he stroked him for real, looking at me as if to say: if I die, tell them I was brave.
Me, I hesitated. I was afraid he’d sense that I was the weakest of the herd: animals know these things. So Chu took my hand, and we went around behind him, both of us in our Argentina jerseys, and I laid my hand flat on his back. He was warm, much warmer than I’d have thought, and under my palm his flank rose and fell, slowly, deeply, like a tide. I left my hand there for the whole photo, and a little longer. I didn’t think about his teeth or his claws. I thought about his lungs. A huge animal breathing without thinking about it, all the way, right to the bottom, never counting. I envied him, I think. He didn’t open an eye. I concluded that he thought I was in great shape.
Then there were the little ones, in a cool room out of the sun. Chu lay down on the floor, barefoot, head propped on her hand, beside a sleeping young tiger, and stroked his flank the way you pat an old dog on the couch on a Sunday. The tiger sighed. So did Chu. They seemed to get along nicely. Gabriel knelt down, and a keeper handed him a bottle of milk. The baby tiger threw himself at it, eyes shut, ears back, one paw resting on Gabriel’s leg so he wouldn’t leave, and suckled with the sound of a pump. Gabriel didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even dare breathe. Gabriel, who has never managed a soup in his life, was feeding a tiger. I told him that if things ever stopped working out in Belgium, he had a new career all lined up. He didn’t answer. He was watching the little one drink, with a face I’d never seen on him before.
On the way out, all he said was:
“We’ll tell this one at the bar, and nobody will believe us.”
That’s partly why I’m writing this book. With the photos.
Read on
This excerpt comes from chapter 3, “Pratumnak,” of The Season of Breath, the true story of a man from Liège who goes to live a season in Thailand with an illness no one can see. The book is available in English.
