Banlung, January 15, 2020

At the end of the sun-burned landscape – by a hundred leaden days without the shadow of a rain –, past the guard of the great white pylons, beyond the stands of rubber trees, just behind the pepper plantations, lies the town of Banlung, capital of Rotanah Kiri. Town of red-assed trucks, of red-assed scooters – from having ridden the roads of ferrous earth that radiate into the bush, link communities of diverse tongues and cults, go and get on familiar terms with the borders of Vietnam and Laos. Covered in paprika dust the scooterists, come from the back villages, enter the capital after miles of jolting roads, bristling like taste buds.

Capital so remote, perched at the northeastern tip of Cambodia: surely Banlung was going to be a shock, an end-of-the-world slap? No. Near ordinary town with its staking of gas stations, its little hum of engines, its density around the market, its lake ringed with restaurants and bars. Around 8 p.m. I go into one of these bars: the gilded youth is there drinking Singha imported from Thailand, listening to the same music as in Bangkok. There is no more remoteness, but there are the roads of red earth, the tracks that radiate from Banlung, or from Yak Loum as from a perfect hub. There are the iron trucks with a military air, the stacks of red bricks that seem to have been cut from the ground itself. There is the geography that remains, the mineral that resists. There is the sharp taste of the ground.

Outside the bars and the closed cabins, the terrestrial remains. The outside, its asperities, its rigours sown on the crust and the roads. So that unless everything is levelled, the protrusions of the ground mechanically erased, unless all the earths are poured into cement, there will remain still no doubt, even in an indifferent world, variable hues and reliefs, differences, from Bangkok to Banlung, capital of Rotanah Kiri.

At the western exit of the town, beside the Total Gas Station, there is a mound of turned earth, abandoned by a backhoe. I stop there. I bend down. I seize a handful of red, a handful of iron, a handful of spice that is the ground itself. It runs between my fingers like an ox’s blood. It is the road and the rays. The sun and the country. What remains. It is the pepper of the earth.