Sightseeing

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

• Éditeur: Atlantic Books
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786498700
• Sujet: Letteratura
• Sous-sujet: Letteratura generale

'This debut show more than mere promise: it is a fine achievement in its own right.' -- Guardian One of the most widely talked about debuts of 2 005, Sightseeing is a masterful storytelling by an award-winning young author. In poignant, tough, heart-catching episodes, Rattawut Lapcharoensap takes his readers beneath the surface of Thailand to a place that is dynamic and corrupt, full of pride and passion and fear. In these inter-generational stories of luck and loss, mother and son, Thai and tourist, healthy and sick are bound together. Sightseeing introduces its readers to the young boy and his brother speeding on a moped to the Cafe Lovely, a brothel in Bankok; Priscilla the Cambodian, a girl whose mouth is stuffed with the family fortune; a woman approaching blindness who barters for a last pair of sunglasses; and a pig called Clint Eastwood. Sightseeing reveals, slowly and powerfully that no place is too far away from home when it comes to pain, anger, love or hurt. It explores through confident and unforgettable storytelling what it means to be a son, a brother, a parent, a lover, a Thai - and a disenfranchised resident of the global village.

DON’T LET ME DIE IN THIS PLACE

My son Jack says I’m being difficult. It’s dinnertime. It’s hot as hell. The mongrel children are kicking each other under the table, yapping and giggling senselessly. The wife’s coming at me with spoonfuls of cold, clumpy porridge. Each time the spoon hovers close to my face my foreign daughter-in-law opens her mouth like she’s instructing me by example. I hate it when she does this. It’s demeaning. I know how to eat, thank you very much. And while I’ve learned to accept with dignity the fact that I can’t really feed myself anymore—and while, hell, I’ve even learned to live with wearing a bib during meals—every time my son’s wife opens her mouth like that it’s almost enough to set my dead right arm to shaking.

“Jack, please tell her to stop,” I say, the spoon so close I could lick it, the wife with her lips parted stupidly again. “Tell her I hate it when she opens her mouth like that.” But my son just gapes at me, sighs, and says, “Don’t be difficult, Father,” like I’m some child misbehaving in a department store.

The wife looks at me, looks at Jack, shoves the spoon back into the porridge bowl. She gets up from the table. The mongrels quiet down for the first time all evening. “Enough,” the wife says in English to my son, throwing up her hands. “I no do this no more, okay? He eat by himself now, Jack.” Jack sighs again, calls after the wife by her name. He says, “Tida—,” but she’s already halfway out of the kitchen, muttering to herself in Thai like some crazy.

Jack blinks at me, frowning. “Nice,” he says, getting up to follow her. “Mission accomplished, Father.”

“What? What the hell did I do now?”

But my son just throws down his napkin and goes to fetch his Thai wife. Soon it’s just the mongrels and me staring at each other. A mosquito buzzes in my ear. I reach out with my good left hand to swat it. I miss. The only thing I manage to kill in that ear is the hearing. I watch the girl say something to the little boy in Thai. The boy looks at me wide-eyed. “Stop,” I tell them, though neither of my grandchildren speak much English. “You shouldn’t stare. It’s rude.”

To my surprise they seem to understand because they start looking at their half-empty plates like they’ve suddenly cultivated an interest in china. So I sit for a while and look at my foreign grandchildren trying not to look at me. I try to get my hearing back, pick at the assaulted eardrum with my good left hand. I glance over at the bowl of porridge, and suddenly I’m hungrier than I’ve been in a very long time.

* * *

Jack’s washing my back with a coarse sponge. Given the evening’s events, my son’s scrubbing me quite hard tonight. I’m rocking from the brash, rough motion. I feel a little bad about things—the wife never came back to dinner—so I try to keep quiet. But there’s only so much passive-aggressive scrubbing a man can take from his only son.

“Dammit, Jack,” I finally say. “Clean me. Don’t skin me.”

He stops. He comes around and starts wiping down my torso. He doesn’t look me in the eye. Jack hates to look when I bathe. He’s embarrassed by my nakedness. If there’s anybody who should be embarrassed it’s probably me. He’s not the one who can’t bathe himself.

“What’s it going to take, Father?” he says now, directly at my navel, the sponge cold and prickly against the folds of my stomach. “What’s it going to take for you to be happy here?” He squeezes the sponge over my shoulders. Water dribbles down my chest. I wipe at it with my good left hand. “Good question, Jack,” I say. “You always ask good questions.”

He laughs. It’s not a good laugh. It’s a grunting, impatient sound.

“Dying would be good,” I say finally. “Dying would make me pretty happy.”

“Father—”

“I bet it would probably make you all a lot happier too.”

“Christ.”

“Well, maybe not you, Jack, but certainly that wife of yours,” I say. “She’d probably throw a party. That woman hates me. I know she does. Why, Jack? Why does she hate me? I’m just an old man, you know. I’m very fragile.”

“She doesn’t hate you, Father.”

“Of course she does,” I say. “Just look at tonight. All I did was put in an honest request and she makes a scene. I swear, Jack, that woman’s trying to give me another goddamn stroke. She’ll kill me with her hate one of these days.”

“You’re incredible,” Jack says, shaking his head. He mutters something else under his breath, soaps my thighs, wipes at my legs with the sponge. He’s working fast now, like he can’t wait to get the whole thing over with, scrubbing in that rough, unpleasant way again. I stare at the top of his head for a while. It’s all depressing me to no end. I feel like furniture. So I look at the shower walls, search for pictures in the mildew like they’re clouds in the sky. I make out a herd of wild horses galloping across the linoleum. This turns out to be a bad idea because it makes me think of Macklin Johnson back home—that poor, beautiful man—and how we used to sit around and rent old Spaghetti Westerns to pass the time, and suddenly something hot and awful blooms in my chest and my eyes start to well up involuntarily.

“Jesus,” Jack says. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna cry now.”

What can a grown man say to such a thing? My son wipes down my face. He’s helping me into my clothes. He’s carrying me to the electric wheelchair, his arms like tight ropes around my shoulders and legs. I’m still thinking of Mac. I’m still steeling myself against tears. “Jack,” I say, swallowing hard. My son straps me in, positions the lame arm across my lap. “C’mon now,” he says, smiling at me for the first time all evening. “Buck up, old man. Things will get better. Nobody hates you here.”

“Jack,” I say again. “I want to go home. Don’t let me die in this place.”

“You’re not going to die, Father,” my son says. “You’re going to be happy.”

I’m trying to get some sleep, still thinking of old Mac, when the wife peers into my room and scares me so bad I nearly crap my pajamas. She stands in the doorway, her small silhouette dark and ominous, and says in a meek voice, “Mister Perry sleeping?” and I say, “No, woman. Mister Perry’s pole-vaulting. Mister Perry’s running a goddamn marathon. What else do you think Mister Perry’s doing?”

She stands there silently, cocks her head curiously to one side.

“What do you want from me?” I ask after a while.

“I no want nothing.” Her voice is a little louder now. “I just want to say sorry to you. I no mean to make you upset.”

“Who said I was upset?”

“Jack tell me you cry.”

“That’s a lie,” I say.

“No lie.” She’s shaking her head. “Jack say you crying like baby in the shower.”

“That’s ridiculous. I think I would know if I was crying or not, woman.”

She’s silent for a moment. She shoves her hands into her pockets like she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Well,” she says. “I’m sorry for tonight.”

“Apology accepted then.”

“But in the future,” she adds sternly, “if you desire to say something to me you just say it to me, okay? Don’t say to Jack. I speak English. Not so good, but I understand what you say.”

“Sure,” I say. “You speak English.”

She stands there a while longer like she’s waiting for me to apologize as well. But I don’t have anything to apologize about. I wasn’t the one infantilizing a helpless old man during dinner. So I say, “Turn up the fan, Tida. I’m melting in here.” For a second, I think she might make another scene, but instead she walks over to the fan and kicks it up a notch. It turns on its axle like some creature shaking its head slowly from side to side.

“Thanks,” I say, the fan’s cool breeze tickling my face. “That’s better.”

She walks across the room, stands over the bed, looks down at me for a while. I think she might strangle me, but instead she just pulls the sheets up under my chin.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Tomorrow will be better, Mister Perry.”

“I doubt it,” I say, closing my eyes. “But let’s hope so.”

When I open my eyes again the wife’s gone. The hallway light is off. It’s quiet in the house and I’m staring in the dark thinking about the last time I saw Macklin Johnson.

We had tickets for an Orioles game. The tickets were his going-away present for me. He was coming over to pick me up. Things already weren’t going so good for the two of us by then. I’d had my little episode and Mac was starting to get confused. His memory was starting to deteriorate. We’d been seeing each other less and less, what with Mac’s forgetfulness and me sitting at home lamenting my condition, trying to figure out the fancy wheelchair, doing my damnedest not to get into high-speed collisions with the furniture.

So I was happy that Mac got the Orioles tickets. It was a nice gesture. It seemed a way to say good-bye. But I was not so happy about having to remind him every other day about why he’d gotten them.

“So we’re going to a baseball game,” he’d said the week before our date.

“Yeah,” I replied. “You bought the damn tickets, Mac.”

“Oh. So why are we going?”

“Because I’m leaving, remember? I’m going to go live with Jack and his wife.”

“You’re leaving? Where the hell you going, Perry? You can’t even get to your front porch these days.”

“Thailand. Bangkok.”

“That’s a damn shame. I’ll miss you.”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell’s Jack doing over there anyway? He get drafted?”

“Beats me. He’s working in textiles, I think.”

“Perry, you know I fucking hate baseball. It’s a stupid game. Never understood what the big deal was.”

So, naturally, I had my doubts about whether Mac would show up on the appointed day. But he did. He was right on time. He rolled up in his old Volkswagen, got out of the van, and it was a beautiful thing to watch him walk up my front steps in one of his old pinstriped suits. He and Patricia—the black nurse who came by every morning—helped me into the van. “Be careful,” Patricia said before we left. “Don’t get into trouble. You drive real slow, you hear, Mister Johnson?”

As we got on the highway toward Baltimore it seemed like everything might actually be all right. Mac seemed lucid. He was making sense. He nattered on about his own live-in and how much he liked her, how much better she was than the last one, how she was real beautiful and tall, like an African princess, and how irritated she’d gotten that morning when he said she looked like Nefertiti.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “A man can’t even compliment a beautiful woman these days.” Mac’d always had a thing for black women. He’d married two, the last one, Carmen—a real elegant lady with a wonderful smile—having died two years before from cancer in the head. “I didn’t say she looked like Aunt Jemima, you know,” Mac continued. “I’d understand if she got mad about that. All I said was Nefertiti and, wow, slap me silly and call me an asshole.”

I nodded along, pulled the old ballcap snug over my head with my good left hand. But then I realized we’d passed up the exit to Camden Yards.

“Hey,” I said. “There’s Camden Yards, Mac.”

He looked over at me and smiled. That’s when I got real scared.

“We’re not going to Camden Yards, Perry,” he said, laughing. “You know I fucking hate baseball. Never understood what the big deal was.”

“Jesus, Macklin,” I said. “C’mon now. Don’t joke around.”

“What?” he said. “Aren’t we going to Hopkins? Aren’t we going to visit Carmen?”

“No, Mac. Carmen’s dead. We’re going to an Orioles game.”

“Oh,” he said, and now he looked not only confused, he also looked ashamed. “That’s why you’re wearing the ballcap.”

But Mac didn’t turn the car around. We kept on zipping along that highway. “I knew that, you know,” he said. “I knew that about Carmen. You didn’t have to remind me, Perry.”

“Take me home, Macklin.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “I just want to go home now.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Let’s just go rent some videos.”

It took us a while to get back to the house, me directing Mac the whole time thinking I was living my last hour on this earth. Patricia was still at the house cleaning. She came out and helped me get out of the van and into the wheelchair. She didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see us back so soon. She didn’t even ask about the game. I told Mac to come inside. While he sat in the living room, I called his son Tyrone out in Bethesda.

“Jesus,” Tyrone said. “You know he shouldn’t be driving, Mister Perry.”

“No, I didn’t, son,” I said. “I really thought he was all right.”

Tyrone arrived by train a few hours later. When I said good-bye to Mac, he suddenly became lucid again. He bent down and hugged me real hard.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m real sorry about today, Perry. But you come back soon, okay? I’ll make it up to you. The world ain’t seen the last of us yet.”

He climbed into the Volkswagen with his son and that was the last I ever saw of my friend. That’s the last I’ll probably ever see of him. Because I’m lying here now six weeks later in this bed, in this hot, godforsaken, mosquito-infested country, thousands of miles away from ever seeing another Orioles game, with two grandchildren I can barely talk to, a daughter-in-law who mocks my paralysis during mealtimes, and a son who seems indifferent to my plight, all of them sleeping soundly in this house, dreaming their nice little dreams, and I’m so pissed off I’m making a fist in the dark with my good left hand.

Alice would know what to do with the mongrel grandchildren. But Alice isn’t here. Alice is long gone. She never even met these kids sitting across from me now playing a game of gin rummy to help their grandfather pass the time. She never had to deal with the little girl being cute, cheating, spying at my hand through the reflection on my bifocals. Alice never got to slap the girl lightly on the head and say, “Hey. Stop that. Don’t set a bad example for your little brother. We aren’t a cheating people.” She never got to see the girl stare at her uncomprehendingly and then lay down her final tr...