Category: The Season of Breath: articles

A third excerpt from The Season of Breath. In chapter 8, Michael and Chu arrive on Koh Samui. First stop: a wooden bungalow on Lamai Beach, a hammock, a “well-mannered” sea, and airplanes to count.

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FOR THE first two days, we slept at Beer’s House, a small bungalow hotel set right on Lamai Beach, on the island’s east coast, about twenty minutes from the airport. Lamai is Samui’s second beach, quieter than Chaweng, its neighbor to the north, where people party until morning: a long curve of golden sand, coconut palms leaning toward the water, and at the far southern end, two famous rocks the Thais call Hin Ta and Hin Yai, Grandfather and Grandmother. I won’t describe their shape. Let’s just say that nature, that day, had a sense of humor very close to mine, and that tourists blush as they photograph them while the Thais laugh behind their backs. Legend has it they were an old married couple who set out by boat to ask for a bride for their son, were drowned by a storm, and were turned to stone by the sea so that they would be remembered. They’re still there, side by side, after centuries. I thought it was a lovely way to grow old together.

Our bungalow was twenty steps from the water. A little burgundy wooden house with a green tin roof and a porch of roughly hewn logs, like in the westerns, but with palm trees. Under the porch there was a black hammock strung between two posts, a plastic chair, a small table, and a coconut frond hanging in front of the door like a curtain. Chu declared the hammock Thai territory within the first minute. She settled into it with her phone and a towel over her legs, and gave her orders from there, like a queen from her throne. I didn’t argue. You don’t argue with an Isan queen in her hammock.

In front of the bungalow, as in front of almost every house, hotel and shop in the country, there was a spirit house. A little miniature house set on a pillar, gilded, with a temple roof, figurines and garlands of flowers. It shelters the spirits of the land, the ones who were there before us, so they won’t come and bother the living. Every morning, the lady from the front desk left offerings there: rice, fruit, a stick of incense and a glass of red soda, with a straw. Thai spirits like red soda. Chu told me so very seriously. I didn’t dare ask why. You don’t argue about the tastes of the dead.

Right next door was the terrace of a little beach bar: stone pillars, white plastic chairs, painted wooden tables, flags of every color snapping in the wind, and a metal railing above the sand. And beyond it, the sea. Not the gray, crowded sea of Pattaya. A pale green and blue sea, calm, clear at the edge, with little waves that came to die on the fine sand without making a fuss. A well-mannered sea.

And then there were the airplanes.

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The airport wasn’t far, to the north, on the other side of the hills, and roughly every hour a plane that had just taken off appeared over the sea in front of us and climbed, banking gently toward the mainland. First you heard the rumble, then you saw it emerge from the hills, small and shining, with the sun on its wings. The first time, I followed it with my eyes. The second time, I raised my hand. The third time, I started counting them.

For months now, I’ve been counting steps. On Lamai Beach, I counted airplanes. It’s far more restful. Airplanes, you don’t have to climb. You watch them go by from a distance, you wave, and they carry other people somewhere else. From her hammock, Chu pointed one out to me every time it came, the way you’d point out a shooting star to a child.

“Another one, Michael.”

“Another one. That one’s going back to Bangkok.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s dragging its feet.”

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A second excerpt from The Season of Breath. In chapter 7, it’s the last day in Bangkok before heading off to the islands. Chu suggests spending it “like tourists,” on the Chao Phraya boat, all the way to Wat Arun.

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IN THE AFTERNOON, we took the boat. It was Chu’s idea: one last day in Bangkok, “like tourists.” She has never been a tourist in her own city, and I stopped being one a long time ago. That day, we gave it a try.

At the Sathorn pier, under the Taksin Bridge, the water of the Chao Phraya is brown and thick, with clumps of water hyacinth drifting down toward the sea like little green rafts. The pier never stops moving. You don’t stand on it so much as negotiate with it.

The orange-flag boat came in backward, in a great churning of engine. A boy in a blue shirt jumped onto the pier with a rope; another pulled out a whistle and started blowing it without stopping. Here, you board the way you’d jump onto a moving train. Thais do it without thinking, still chatting on the phone. An old lady with two bags of groceries stepped aboard ahead of me, light as a bird.

Me, I hesitated. Half a second. Long enough to judge the distance between the pier and the deck of the boat, which kept rising and falling. Long enough to feel, in my chest, that I didn’t have the air to jump AND catch myself. The whistle kept whistling. Behind me, someone pushed, not unkindly.

Chu’s hand came to rest on my elbow. She didn’t pull. She just laid her hand there, the way you rest a hand on a piece of furniture you’re moving. And I jumped.

Once aboard, I sat down on the first bench and breathed through my mouth, slowly, watching the water, as the boat pulled away. My heart was pounding against my ribs. Nobody looked at me. The old lady with the groceries was already peeling a mandarin. The boy had put his whistle away. For everyone else, nothing had happened, and it’s true that almost nothing had.

At the back of the boat, a few seats were marked with a small sign: reserved for monks. A monk in a saffron robe sat down there, alone, and nobody sat beside him. Chu explained to me in a low voice that a woman must never touch a monk, or hand him anything directly, even on a packed boat. If she wants to give him something, she sets it down in front of him, or goes through a man. And with that she slipped away from him with a dancer’s grace, without seeming to, while the boat rolled.

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Chu sat down next to me. She was looking at the riverbank. Her hand was still on my elbow.

Then the river wind came, and with it, the air. An air that isn’t the city’s, an air that comes from far away, from the sea perhaps, smelling of water, diesel and the jasmine of an offering set on the bow. I took it in by the mouthful. On the river, I breathe better. I don’t know if that’s true, or if it’s because there are no steps to climb.

We got off at Tha Tien. We sat on a café terrace facing Wat Arun, on the other side of the water. The temple rose in the late-afternoon light, bristling with porcelain, its steps so steep you almost climb them on all fours. Tourists were scaling them, tiny, clutching the handrail.

“Do you want to go up?” Chu asked.

It was a joke of a question. I took it as a joke.

“I climbed it ten years ago. I remember the view.”

That’s not true. Ten years ago, I wasn’t in Thailand. But I could have climbed it ten years ago, and I remember very clearly the view I would have had.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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