Chiang Mai, October 24, 2019
In a club boxed into the night of Chiang Mai, amid the any-old urbanity, there where one knows neither engraved beauty, nor old wood nor new steel; there where it’s already enough that the walls hold, that the streets don’t open that the roofs don’t collapse: as to a belonging one comes back to grey, one comes back to dirty one comes back to black. The scooters line up in front of the grill’s terrace, skid a little on the greasy asphalt, wait in the unctions of lard; the bodies roll toward the resonating box, there where the DJ with a finger on the drum, discharges all the sounds of the new harmony.
The club is called Siaw1 and it means “friend” in the language of the North; behind the DJ a luminous inscription: Rao may ting gan2, we don’t throw each other away, we don’t leave each other: you and I are friends for the night. The bodies limber up along the rows of tables, before buckets of ice and bottles of Chang. One of the club’s walls is papered with posters: faces in black and white, portraits of shadows, famous faces and sometimes infamous. What is the ugly mug of Hitler doing alongside Che and the young Aung San Suu Kyi? One dances in oblivion, in the night of history: the twentieth century flattened under a roller coated with glue.
On the stage bands have taken over from the jockey. They make the arms rise and the lyrics known by heart. The tables are mirrors of wood that drink the sweats. The glasses clink, the drinkers chug their rations of Sangsom. At the next table a Thai woman is surprised to see a farang3: she gives me the thumb, smiles at me, tosses me friendly toasts. But her girlfriend – sharp cut and glasses, tomboy as they say here4 – doesn’t like it, she puts on sulky airs, wants to slit the farang’s throat. Behind my back dance saaw song5, second women who rub their buttocks against mine.
She said: we’ll be friends, siaw, big brother little sister6, she whose name is Miaw. She is drunk and sorrow, and so as not to give herself, and to give herself all the same, she rounds up the girls, places before me young uncertain ones who smile with embarrassment. I play the game, so do they. We dance, we drink, we start the merry-go-round again. And then the white neons annihilate this comedy. It’s already time to leave.
By scooter with Miaw we negotiate the soï7, then park in front of a carriage gate. We slip between the leaves of the door. Hidden little bar where the castaways of the night gather. At one table gays are laughing; at the bar two girls sip their liquids. We mingle with the girls, we mingle with the gays, the ice cubes melt in the beer. We swallow the brine grimacing.
What did she have to answer the phone for, Miaw? It’s her boyfriend, well her ex: the one who is leaving her, throwing her away for another: Rao may ting gan, between siaw one doesn’t throw away. Ah, the late night drunk dial! She collapses in sobs, hair in her beer, unable to stop. What to tell her, in the night, Miaw? Her name means meow. I stroke her hair to purr her.
She weeps at the break of day, in the mists, and her mewing finishes off the night.