“Talk soon. Take care of yourself!”
“You too, Sumalee. Is everything alright?”
She turned without answering and looked for a seat. I watched her bus go with a strange feeling. A mixture of euphoria from the kiss and confusion given her attitude afterwards. I was not sure what to expect. She did not reject the kiss, even reciprocated, but something stopped her after, she did not look at me and had seemed lost in thoughts, I would say almost afflicted. Still, she said we will talk. How was I supposed to interpret this? Maybe she did not want to kiss me because she didn’t feel the same as me, but was not able to say no, maybe the kiss reminded her of a past lover ... Maybe in her culture was wrong to kiss so soon. I had no idea.
I had to find out, I needed to know. Now I could only think about how she would be the next time we will see each other: the cheerful and always smiling Sumalee or the dejected one that just said goodbye to me.
I couldn’t wait to know the answer.
Thailand 14
I was sitting on the patio watching the Muay Thai training. I was thinking about how the worst of the prison was boredom. So many hours alone with nothing to do, no one to talk to, not even to share a thought, when I was approached by a large, bald and disturbed face man who sometimes I saw hanging around. He had a long scar, badly healed, all the way from the left eye to the middle of the head. He did not relate much to the rest of the prisoners and no one seemed to want to get too close to him. He looked like being quite sick in the head. He stood in front of me swinging from side to side and stared at me without blinking. I didn’t know what to make of it. Was he going to hit me, or he just enjoyed staring at me? In any case it was scary. After a few seconds of tension, he turned to me with a strong Australian accent.
“What did you do to them?”
“What?”
“Yes, what did you do to those damn yellows that they treat you this way?” he asked again nodding to the group of stalkers chatting to the other end of the yard.
“Nothing, as far as I know … I have not done anything to anyone in jail. As they are not brothers of the bitch that got me in here ...”
“Yeah, it is strange then that they pursue you the way they do, right?”
“Exactly my thoughts. What can I do?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“It's not that I mind you chatting with me, in fact I really appreciate it, but aren’t you afraid that they will come after you for talking to me? Nobody wants to come anywhere close to me because of that.”
“After me? I don't think so. Since I came here, I played the part of a dangerous madman capable of anything, and since then, nobody messes with me. And this for many years.”
“How did you manage that?” I asked, but really it should have not been difficult to impersonate a dangerous madman. I believed it. I could have used a strategy like that.
“The first day when a fucking yellow skin stood before me thuggish, I screamed like a madman and I pounced on him, hitting, biting, pulling hair ... As if a demon possessed me. I almost killed him. In fact, in that fight I got this scar when his friends came to defend him. But he was worse, I assure you.” He said it with sadistic eyes and half a smile. “I spent a while in isolation, but when I came out between my not very friendly face and the fame generated by the fight no one has dared to cross my path. Occasionally I do something stupid or scare someone so that they don’t forget that I am capable of anything and that's it. If they see me with you, they will think it's an eccentricity over the farang crackpot. By the way, my name is James,” he said, extending his hand.
“David, delighted,” I replied giving my hand in turn. “What's that farang?”
“It's what the stupid locals call us westerners. I don’t know if it means foreigner, white or demon; but I don’t care either. And another thing, don’t get me wrong, just because I’m talking to you it doesn’t mean that I’ll help you when they attack you. It’s one thing that I like to mess with them a little and quite another to risk it with the chinos for you, I don’t give a shit about you.”
It was clear that my new friend did not hold great esteem for the Thai, not to say he seemed pretty racist, but it's not that I had much choice. He was the first person who dared to relate to me since I got in. Under normal circumstances I would have turned around after telling him what I thought of racists, but I wasn’t in a normal situation. In fact, I was right in the opposite of normal. And I didn’t completely disagree that there were some Thai people who deserved to die. At least some.
We talked banalities for a while. He made fun a bit of the prisoners who were training, screaming at them as if it was the final of the world championship fight and he had staked all his money on the result of the combat. Some stopped to see who was screaming like that at them, but when they saw it was him, they minded their own business. I didn’t want any attention, so I put my head between my legs so that they don’t recognize me.
He also spent a few minutes cursing about the number of blacks in the prison. He told me that almost all of them were Nigerians and all were in for drug related issues. There was a lot of drug trafficking with Nigeria. Although, their leader was not Nigerian, that's for sure, though no one seemed to know his origin. He was a man also black, big and strong, with a curious crescent shaped scar on the face and which all seemed to fear. Even James. Apparently, he was an African mercenary, a child of war forced to fight and kill from a very young age and who didn’t mess around. He seemed very quiet, but when needed, he was very violent and did not seem to be afraid of anything or anyone. There were many rumours about him, though no one knew whether they were true or false: that he had was forced to kill his brother when he was forced to enrol in an armed group at eleven. Two years later he killed the boss that ordered him to kill his brother and he was named leader. That he was a hired murderer, that he had been slaving in the Congo war, that he ate the heart of his victims, that he had raped hundreds of men and women, including children, that he enjoyed killing with his bare arms, that once he burned alive a whole town just because they would not tell him where a person who he was searching for was, that he had trafficked with all kinds of illegal products ... So many atrocities ... and looking at him none seemed impossible. He was really scary. Very. Fortunately, he was completely ignoring me.
When James got tired of cursing everyone, he got up and left as he had come, without saying anything. I saw him walk away, feeling partly relieved to have been able to talk to someone after so long.
At this point this was satisfying enough.
Singapore 7
When I got home Josele and Damaso jumped on me with questions about the date. We sat in the living room and told them what we did, where we went and, above all, what happened in the end on the beach. The two stopped to think about it for a moment. Josele was the first to speak.
“Sure, it's a paranoia of yours. She only wanted to take things slower.”
“I don’t know, Josele. You were not there. It was something else. It seemed that we would continue kissing and then something crossed her mind and she pulled back. I'm sure of what she wanted, but I cannot imagine what made her stop. Maybe she has some kind of disease that can infect, I don’t know what to think.”
“Don’t be silly. Sure is something much simpler than that. Things tend to be simpler than we think, it is us who complicate them. Sure, it's what you say about the customs in her country or something like that.”
“I'm with Josele,” said Damaso. “Ask her out this