Phnom Penh, January 7, 2020
In the dirty and damp night of the city that lives, of the city that wades of the city that laughs – and even if it is trafficked and even if it is sold, Phnom Penh gives itself more nobly, perhaps, than money gives itself –, amid the quarters that invite the dollars, that oil the passage for every appetite, for every desire for every fantasy, at the counter of a dive open onto the street I knock back draft mugs at seventy-five cents.
Old men sit on the tasteless furniture, encircle the barmaid, her coolers, her potions, close the quadrature of this bar on Street 51. Women smoke off to the side, waiting; others are already at the flanks of customers. Now young, now ageless – not so old no doubt, but so marked. There’s one very thin, skin ashen with tobacco, who makes eyes at me from the other side of the counter – her smiles turn to grimaces, she sticks out her tongue and takes another dry puff. The men have various faces, fat belly or stiff line, tufts of hair strayed on the head, nose swollen by alcohol or by age.
An old man turns up whose head is stuck, chin bolted to the chest – by I don’t know what infirmity. Which doesn’t keep him from having fun: he goes from one table to another, stretches long smiles, amuses himself casting bulging eyes at his bar buddies.
Another person arrives, of uncertain sex. Cap turned backward, voice of an Adam’s apple, male manners, big breasts pushing under the t-shirt.
A very young woman comes back from the toilets. Face still soft, smooth hair, she wears a bazaar t-shirt that says: “We should all be feminists”. She sits down beside a dry man in his sixties, a guy with a drawn face, too serious, marked by a stiff life or bad thoughts – the kind who hasn’t laughed since the last century. Soon they leave the bar together, the young one and the dry one, ill-matched couple, for a trick in a hotel nearby. Silky skin rubbed against roughness, against the smell of cigarette and the breath from the bottom of the barrel.
A child stays a long time beside me. She wants to sell me a rose and it makes me sad. A dwarf limps across the bar holding his hand up to the sky to beg for alms. A girl in her twenties comes to work me. Her name is Seangly: sexy jean shorts, white espadrilles and fake boyish hair. She bites into an apple, orders a banana shake, pulls my ears, won’t stop chattering. She talks about her ex, her wounds, relationships (always and only relationships: it’s her whole life). At seventeen “I sold my original” – that’s what she calls her virginity: my original – for 1,500 dollars to a man of 35. And then “I became taxi girl” – that’s how she names her trade as a prostitute: taxi girl. If she hadn’t sold her original, she could have married someone, she dreams, letting out a little cry in the shape of a sigh.
She talks, she talks, Seangly, from the inside toward the outside, as those talk who have taken too much. Around us, the women smoke their cigarettes, the old men lap their bland beer. In a hotel room nearby, the rough man comes in the young woman. Along the sidewalk, the tuk-tuks wait without moving like cockroaches in the dark. Under their carapace bodies are three little padded paws.