Gabriel, My Friend from Liège: A Friendship on the Road

All it takes is one message: “We’re going on a trip with Chu. I’ll pick you up at the airport.” The reply comes straight back: Gabriel is taking his leave starting the next day. In The Season of Breath, Mr Schaka devotes a whole chapter to Gabriel, his friend from Liège, the one he has never needed to explain anything to. Two weeks in Thailand, plenty of giggling fits, and a friendship that gets along just fine without big words.

The friend from Liège lands in Bangkok

Gabriel comes out through the automatic doors at Suvarnabhumi after fourteen hours in the air, rumpled, head shaved, beard going gray, a beige cap screwed on his head and already in flip-flops. A big guy, “like a family wardrobe that’s always stood in the hallway.”

His first sentence is a joke: so this is where Belgians come to end their days? They both hear what’s underneath, and the narrator bursts out laughing. Only Gabriel could say it, and only he could laugh at it. Then his friend holds him in a long hug, and the narrator can feel him silently taking the measure of his shoulders, his back, his breathing.

Old Bangkok at human scale

For his first two days, the narrator has picked Banglamphu, the old neighborhood by the river, where nothing is allowed to rise above the spires of the Grand Palace. A low-rise Bangkok, with almost no stairs. The hotel has an elevator: he checked before booking.

Gabriel discovers everything with the zeal of a new convert:

• the bum gun hanging next to the toilet, which he eyes like a weapon before concluding that Belgium needs the same thing;
• fried rice for breakfast instead of croissants, of which he goes back for a second plate;
• the spoon, not the fork, which is only for pushing: by the third meal, he’s the one correcting his friend;
• the smoothies from the street carts, all tasted in menu order before he proclaims that the Holy Grail is iced fresh orange juice.

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Tuk-tuks and 4XL boxers

On his first tuk-tuk ride, Gabriel looks for the seatbelt, clings to the bar and yells, without knowing whether it’s fear or joy. On the second, he haggles twenty baht off the fare and, very proud of himself, leaves a fifty-baht tip. On the third, he settles in as if in an armchair and asks the driver to speed up. In three rides around town, the book notes, a cautious man from Liège has turned Thai.

At MBK Center, he needs clothes. A Bangkok XL is a Liège M. The saleswoman climbs onto a stool to hold the T-shirts against his chest, brings out the 3XLs and 4XLs from the back of the shop, then holds a pair of boxers up at arm’s length in front of him, right in the middle of the aisle, to judge the width. Gabriel turns red; she laughs so hard she has to sit down. In Thailand, that laughter has a name: sanuk, the pleasure of things being funny.

The elevator that waited politely

One night, coming back at two in the morning, the two friends get into the hotel elevator. The doors close. Nothing moves. Gabriel tries to pry the doors open, reads aloud the emergency instructions written entirely in Thai, then raises a finger toward the alarm… and stops. No button is lit. For five minutes, the elevator has been politely waiting for someone to tell it which floor. Gabriel presses five. They laugh all the way to the room. His conclusion: their whole friendship is right there, they can do anything except press the right button.

Pool, Connect 4 and Kaamelott

In Pattaya, in a little bar at the end of a street that opens onto the sea, every table has its own Connect 4 and the back of the room has a pool table with worn-out felt. Gabriel loses his first game in eleven moves, the second in nine, then lets out a “Sire, on en a gros !” that nobody understands. Then he studies the grid, and ends the evening holding his own against half the bar. The narrator, meanwhile, picks up a cue: no breath needed, just an eye and a hand. He wins nine games out of ten.

One evening, on a rooftop, a laughing fit over a Kaamelott line turns into a cough, the bad kind, the kind that won’t stop. Gabriel lays his hand flat on his friend’s back and waits. Then he asks for the number. Sixty-four. He remembers seventy-one, the year before, heard just once over the phone. After a long silence, he settles it: we’ve got two weeks, we’re not here to do math.

On the last morning, on the sidewalk, two men from Liège who don’t know how to say goodbye. Gabriel calls out through the car window, with all the seriousness of Perceval: “Faut pas respirer la compote.” (“Don’t breathe the applesauce.”) The narrator laughs, coughs, then laughs again.