From Bangkok to Nakhon Pathom, July 22, 2019

At the Bang Sue halt the cranes trace their silhouettes, pivot above great arcs of steel – future high-speed station by the Chinese hand, great anthill from which bodies escape, helmeted workers who sit along the old tracks to smoke and eat, drink a coffee.

The car lurches off in the jolts of the iron, windows lowered in the clammy air of the afternoon. I share a bench with two guys: a student going to see a friend in Nakhon Pathom and a man who intrigues me with his look and his manners.

Outside the city shreds itself, the greenery begins to gain: fluorescent fields, ponds of soft green, banana trees that grow like weeds. Strong women carry heavy baskets along the aisle, shout the words of things to drink and to eat.

The student asks for ice cubes: he wraps them in a washcloth and cools his forehead and the nape of his neck. The man doesn’t seem to be hot. He is used to the leaden sun since he works on the railway. He’s off to Cha-am to repair the tracks, untwist the iron and straighten the wood. He has nervous snickers, jerks of the knee, ripped jeans, a shirt open on a complicated pendant: elephant in fake ivory backed with a little case enclosing a Buddha statuette. He was a monk, he tells me, for fourteen years – on his balding forehead are Buddhist tattoos. He was married too, for eleven years, he says, before putting on the orange habit – his whole adult life summed up, with its ruptures, its crises, its sharp turns: twenty-five years shared between the temple and the hearth.

From his shirt pocket he takes out a little vial, sends himself a drop of turquoise liquid: what elixir, and for what drunkenness? The guy snickers again, resumes his jerks, turns toward the window, says words in a hurried Thai, hard to catch.

He is of middle age and has at least two lives already. His crow’s feet tell perhaps of happiness, or perhaps of fever.