Chapitre 1
I
I was born in a village in Isan, in the northeast of Thailand, one of those regions where the earth keeps a characteristic red color, where the heat stays sticky for six months of the year, and where money, most of the time, only passes through without ever really settling. The roads, strictly speaking, were not really roads: they were more like simple dirt tracks. When the monsoon arrived each year, they turned into thick mud, sometimes rising as far as the calves. The buffalo sank into it regularly, and the motorbikes were not spared either. We often ended up walking barefoot, simply because the flip-flops disappeared into that clinging mud.
All around the village the rice paddies stretched as far as the eye could see. They were green at the beginning of the season, then gradually golden, before becoming bare and cracked again under the implacable sun. The water stood there for a long time, and the mosquitoes multiplied accordingly. When evening came, you could hear everyone scratching in the darkness. In the morning, we invariably woke with earth still stuck to our ankles.
Our house, like most of those in the village, was built of wood and rested on stilts. Underneath, tools, sacks of rice, and sometimes an old motorbike that stubbornly refused to start were stored in a jumble. The hens laid their eggs there. The dogs slept there too, out of the sun. When it rained really hard, the roof invariably began to leak: we then had to move the basins to catch the water, and we fell asleep listening to the regular sound of the drops falling. We all slept together, in the same room. The mixed smell of rice, sweat and woodsmoke never disappeared completely; it had worked its way into the boards, into the mats, and even into our hair.
My father’s name was Somchai.
He was a true rice-paddy man, with broad shoulders, a nape burned by the sun, and hands deeply split by work. He spoke little, and when he did, it was generally to give an order or to complain about something. He never asked for anything: he contented himself with stating. “Go fetch the water.” “Carry that.” “Stop hanging around.” His voice was dry, like the March sun. He worked as soon as there was work available, bending his back for hours on end in the heat. He came home each evening covered in red earth, his feet whitened by the dried mud, still carrying on him the stubborn smell of fertilizer. On the days when work was lacking, on the other hand, he drank. Not systematically, but often enough for the smell of alcohol to end up forming an integral part of the atmosphere of the house, on the same footing as that of the rice or the woodsmoke.
He was not mean all the time — simply most of the time. When he had drunk too much, his voice changed register appreciably: it became heavier, more threatening, closer too. We knew then, all of us, that it was better to make no sound, to carefully avoid meeting his gaze, and above all not to leave a plate lying within reach of his anger. He could, in those moments, send a kick into a bucket, send a mat flying with a sudden gesture, or seize an arm with far too much force. It was not always directed against one person in particular, besides: it was directed rather against everything around him that seemed to him too slow, too fragile, or simply too alive.
My mother, for her part, was named Malee.
She rose systematically before sunrise. First you heard her moving about: the wood of the stairs creaking under her steps, water being poured, the fire being lit patiently. Then you saw her leave, loaded with two baskets of vegetables, in the direction of the district market. She spoke little, saving her words with the same rigor with which she saved everything else — including her smiles, including her sentences. Her body carried the visible marks of a woman who had too long carried loads that were too heavy: the slightly bowed shoulders, the hands grown hard with the years, the nape bent forward, as if the weight of the world always fell on the same side.
She never tried to interpose herself between my father and us by raising her voice. She proceeded quite otherwise, by small discreet gestures. She pushed a dish forward to divert attention. She skillfully changed the subject of conversation. She sent us outside, just before my father’s voice began to turn dangerous. At night, when he came home too drunk, she placed herself systematically on the side of the youngest children. She covered us with the sheets. She whispered simply: “Sleep.” A single word, but one that was amply enough to reassure us.
She always reserved a share for me, for me as for the others. Not necessarily more than what my brothers and sisters received, but just enough for me to feel that she had thought of it. A piece of fish slightly less bony than the others. The bottom of the pot, which she willingly let me mop up. When I had a fever, it was systematically she who came to my bedside, never him. She then laid her palm on my forehead, stayed motionless like that for a few seconds, then left without saying another word. It was, in her discreet manner, her own way of making me understand that I truly existed in her eyes.
I had five brothers and sisters: one brother and one sister older than me, and three others younger. I was neither the family’s favorite, nor the most hated either. I simply occupied a middle position, that of the child one saw without really looking at her closely.
My eldest sister was named Dao. She was four years older than me, and she was incontestably the most serious of us. She helped our mother with absolutely everything: the daily cooking, the laundry to wash, watching the youngest, the water that had to be carried up, the rice that had to be watched on the fire. She already expressed herself like an accomplished adult, though she was only thirteen. It was not from a desire to give herself importance, but because she had understood very early, no doubt earlier than all of us, that one should not wait for real help from anyone — and least of all from the men of the house.
Dao had inherited our mother’s gestures, but sharper still. She cut short any useless discussion. She put things away methodically behind her. She perceived our father’s anger even before the others noticed it. When he began to raise his voice in a worrying way, it was often she who took the twins by the hand to lead them quickly under the house, or behind it, near the water jars. She never tried to argue with him directly. She contented herself with putting out of harm’s way everything that risked being broken.
Just after her came Preecha, my elder brother.
He was incontestably my father’s favorite boy. Tall and solid, he already possessed, at sixteen, broad shoulders, the same nape burned by the sun, the same calloused hands. He sometimes worked alongside our father in the rice paddies, with a characteristic mixture of irritation and contempt: irritation at the earth that was hard to work, at the crushing heat, at his back that ended up hurting him; contempt for everything that seemed to him insufficiently hard or virile. He walked heavily. He set his tools down with a useless brutality. He rarely laughed, and when he did, it was almost always at someone else’s expense.
He did not particularly like what seemed to him too fragile. And I was, myself, precisely that.
Preecha expressed himself exactly like the other men of the village: shortly, coarsely, directly. “Move.” “You’re useless.” “You walk like a hen.” At the very beginning, it was not yet truly a matter of hatred toward me. It was rather a form of imitation, pure and simple. He reproduced our father’s attitudes faithfully, exactly as one reproduces a gesture learned at harvest: because that is how, in this region, boys end up becoming accomplished men. He jostled me systematically as he passed on the narrow stairs. He stole my usual place near the common dish. He threw the ball with far too much force in my direction, not really to play with me, but rather to observe whether I would draw back under the shock.
And I drew back, invariably.
Then came my turn, me, Niran.
Then Nok, my younger sister, two years my junior. She was lively, mocking, always laughing a little too loudly for propriety. Where Dao tended to close in on herself, Nok, on the contrary, opened easily to others. She talked a great deal, sometimes too much. She frequently repeated what ought to have been left unsaid, and was scolded accordingly. And yet it was she, among all my brothers and sisters, the only one who still really continued to play with me when I was still little. We often argued over trifles. She pulled my hair without gentleness. I took her things in retaliation. But she never rejected me for all that. She accepted without difficulty that I preferred to stay in the shade rather than run under the burning sun with the other children.
Nok placed herself between Preecha and me in her own particular way: by speech rather than by gestures. A sentence launched with perfect timing. A burst of laughter deliberately too loud. “Leave her alone, she isn’t going to steal your muscles.” My brother then grunted with displeasure. It sometimes happened that he pushed her too, with no more gentleness. She came back all the same, never letting herself be discouraged. When evening came, she settled herself systematically near my mat to sleep. She then told me all sorts of nonsense, solely to cover the other worrying noises of the house. It was a form of protection that was, all in all, fairly light, almost childish in its simplicity. But in a house like ours, that kind of gesture really counted a great deal.
The last two of the siblings were twins, named Bot and Bua. They were six years younger than me. At that still tender age, they remained noisy and clinging children, always hanging on our mother’s skirts. I sometimes carried them on my hip when she was too tired to do it herself. I still remember today their weight on my hip, their smell mixed of milk and dust. Bot already showed a harder character than his brother. Bua fell asleep willingly against me without ever asking for anything explicitly. Dao took charge of their daily washing. Nok always managed to make them burst out laughing. As for our father, he granted them very little attention, except when one of the two started shouting too close to him.
At the village school, I was considered a perfectly average pupil. I was certainly not stupid, but I felt no particular desire to make myself noticed by my classmates. The boys usually played football with a half-deflated ball, barefoot, their shins already covered in old marks. They shoved one another without gentleness. They shouted without restraint. They already imitated, in their childish way, the behavior of the adult men of the village. The girls, for their part, generally stayed grouped together, near the school building, in the protective shade of the trees. I never really knew where to situate myself precisely in that established order. Too discreet to be accepted among the loudest boys. Not sufficiently in my place among the girls either.
I still remember very distinctly the so particular smell of our classroom: a mixture of dust, chalk and the sweat of packed children. Of the ceiling fan that always turned too slowly to really cool the atmosphere. Of the schoolmaster who sometimes fell asleep in the afternoon, his head tilted slightly to one side, while outside the cicadas covered all the other ambient sounds with their shrill song.
That was my world then. Narrow. Noisy. Poor. Rural down to its smallest fibers. And already, although no one expressed it clearly out loud, I knew confusedly that I was not quite in my right place in this world that was nevertheless mine.
Our house proved decidedly too small to accommodate us all properly. When evening came, we spread ourselves on mats laid directly on the floor. The oldest among us traditionally slept near the walls, while the youngest occupied the center of the common room. You then heard absolutely everything in the darkness: my father’s loud snoring, my mother’s discreet sighs, Dao’s furtive whispers when she believed, wrongly, that no one was listening to her, Nok’s barely swallowed laughter, or else the characteristic scrape of Preecha’s foot against the wooden floor.
There existed, strictly speaking, no form of true intimacy in that house. Neither in the gathered bodies, nor in anyone’s thoughts.
Outside, the whole village functioned according to the same tacit rules. The men traditionally gathered near the parked motorbikes, a beer in hand, the radio set far too loud for the peace of the neighborhood. They gave one another great slaps on the back. They spat on the ground without paying attention. They discussed endlessly the rice paddies, the accumulated debts, the women, and the sons who had imperatively to “become men” worthy of the name. My father belonged resolutely to that category of men. Preecha was patiently learning to become one in his turn. I, on the other hand, remained systematically in the background, listening to the dull sound of those low voices as one listens to a threatening storm approaching: instinctively calculating the distance that still separated me from the danger.
My brother was already openly mocking me at that time of my childhood. Not yet truly meanly at the very beginning — simply little assassin phrases, thrown with the same casualness with which one throws a clod of earth of no great consequence.
“Why do you walk like that?”
“Why do you watch the girls comb their hair?”
“You scared of the mud, or what?”
I never answered those repeated attacks. I contented myself with lowering my eyes and going to sit a little farther off, generally on the side of the gathered women. Not really to hide behind them, but simply because the atmosphere there was markedly less hostile than elsewhere.
Dao, for her part, said absolutely nothing in those delicate moments. She had no need to, besides. She contented herself with discreetly moving my plate, or sometimes her own. She then simply signaled to me with a movement of her chin: come sit here. Later, when Preecha insisted really too heavily, she interposed herself directly between the two of us, without ever needing to raise her voice.
“Leave it.”
A single word, exactly the same one our mother used in similar circumstances. In this particular family, protection never took the form of a long detailed explanation. It manifested itself rather by a body placed physically in the way, a little extra rice in the plate, or a sister who deliberately chose to stay awake longer than the others to watch over us.
Nok waited patiently for our father to have left the house before confiding to me:
“Don’t listen to him. He talks exactly like Papa. It doesn’t mean anything very important.”
It did, though, mean something significant. We both knew it perfectly, without needing to discuss it further. But she continued all the same to repeat it to me, as if to convince me better.
That, in the end, was my whole family. The men stood resolutely on the side of the earth to be worked and of customary roughness. The women stood rather on the side of everything that still managed to remain standing despite the difficulties. And I found myself exactly in the middle of those two worlds, already far too visible to really hope to disappear, but already too different as well for anyone to be willing to leave me quietly in peace.
In our village, things were never formulated that bluntly out loud. But everyone, without exception, knew the substance of them perfectly.
A son, traditionally, serves first of all to carry loads: a bent back in the family rice paddy, or later a regular wage brought back from a distant building site, in Bangkok or in the eastern provinces. He is sent away to work like that. He comes back punctually to the village for the Songkran festivals. He then sets a filled envelope down on the family mat. That, fundamentally, is what defines a good son in everyone’s eyes.
A daughter, if she turns out to be simply ordinary, generally contents herself with helping her mother day to day, before ending up married in her turn. But if she happens to be particularly pretty, other prospects then open for her. They are never named explicitly out loud. One contents oneself with discreetly observing the money that ends up coming back to the household, the house that can at last be properly repainted, the roof that one at last manages to replace. Dao had already taken that particular path. No one in the family had needed to explain it to her clearly.
And then there were, finally, all the others.
Those commonly designated by the term tut. The kathoey. Neither quite accomplished sons, nor quite daughters either. There was always at least one somewhere in the region: at the neighboring district school, at the local market, or else at the annual temple festival, where they were gladly put in charge of arranging the flowers, because the women of the village claimed they had a surer hand for that kind of delicate task. People laughed at them openly. Voices were sometimes dropped as they passed. And then, with time, people ended up growing completely used to it.
One never becomes kathoey all at once, brutally. One becomes it rather through a succession of small discreet betrayals of the body itself, and through the name that others end up imposing on you long before you even know how to wear it with dignity.
Some mothers in the village used to say: as long as she keeps sending money regularly, as long as she does not shame the family too openly, one prefers to close one’s eyes on the question.
I did not yet know, at that time of my childhood, that I already found myself inscribed in that particular category. I merely sensed it, in a diffuse way: I clearly did not have Preecha’s robust back, and I did not have the ready-made destiny of an ordinary girl either. I was, in a sense, an indefinable leftover. And in a house as poor as ours, one always ends up, sooner or later, finding a use for every leftover, however insignificant it may seem at first.
