Fanny dans ma chambre

Fanny steps out of the bathroom into our spacious triple room full of beds. Completely damp, with a towel wrapped around her hair high in a twist. Her turban of navy blue bath linen floats in an embroidery of sailing ships that are about to enter a Thai port.

With her hair updo she is even taller, even taller, morbleu, a heavenly delicacy! The silk bodice clings to her moist young skin.
This is it Lai Thai Guest House at the Tapae Gate, Chiang Mai – Rose of the North. Ground floor, room number 514, far back in the garden. A maze to get to.
The room is big like a ballroom. Three double beds, but there's no other way. That's because it's the only room left in Chiang Mai on a Friday night at ten at night, the last one in all of the old city. At the train station, a young blond foreigner has joined me, asks if she can ride to the center with me.
I arrived in Chiang Mai on the Special Express sleeper train from Bangkok. Rice fields, paddy fields; a little past half way, the locomotive pulls coughing and crouching into the mountains of the north. The sun fights its setting on a slope behind a strong overgrowth of teak trees. Tappelings gushes purple blood from the underbelly of heaven.
The Railway Station is oppressively busy, streams of travelers blinded by old-fashioned neon lights. In two directions, people are in each other's way.
After fifteen hours on the road I feel lethargic, find a tuktuk. The blonde girl does not leave my side. The drivers in front of the station fall over me like an uncontrollable mob, push, shout, flem, impress, get in my way, second me, try to snatch my suitcase.
The endlessly friendly songtaew driver, who runs a transport business with his wife, drives stranded travelers around, drags suitcases, gets in and out, runs back and forth, drags luggage from one side of his seat to the other, the all day long in this heat – that driver has already been to several hotels with us, fully booked again and again, he will have little left of his two hundred baht. He meanders with us through the city in a zigzag fashion. Time is running out.
His wife, a chubby Thai from the north, has an infectious laugh. She shares it with people.
They are a touching couple, especially when I think of all the divorced women of Thailand. I firmly believe that they will never let each other down. The oak and the linden, Philemon and Baucis in Thai. Occurring opposite each other as in an old English upper class movie.
When Lai Thai there is one six-bed room left. When a bunch of Spanish backpackers kick my heels at the counter, it's no longer about thinking. So I decide to choose this room in this hotel and Fanny agrees to everything. Thus she links her fate to mine. Where would she find another room?
From now on I stand at her disposition.
It is already past eleven and subdued dark. I walk in the gardens of the guesthouse. Leave Fanny alone with the shower for a while. The air is lukewarm like a distracted gesture of the hand. Crickets flap their wings. Spiders wiggle and prepare for the hunt. Paradise corners have been arranged all over the expanse of the pleasure garden, with trellises and green leafy tropical plants in giant pots, and I walk around the arbors between the round masonry ponds with tiny teeming guppies in LSD colours. Diafane chimeras. Dragons the size of a pinkie nail.
There is an indescribable atmosphere in this dark light. White marble garden ornaments glow like imaginary phantoms, like evil diseases, like poisoned ailments.
More than once I get lost in this labyrinth, can hardly get to my expensive suite, have lost the damn room number. I carefully place myself on a stone bench with cupids. The night vibrates in elusive frequencies. It is a multiplicity of resistant voices like flowers. An enchanting Marian song from the Middle Ages. The waves of color they radiate around. I feel like dreaming about lingering nights with a loved one. I try my best not to think about anything. You don't have to do anything with your thoughts if you don't want to. Fanny must have finished the shower now.
Fanny has been a basic backpacker for almost a year now. She insists on paying for my breakfast and my coffee in the morning. Touching. Bet she comes from a middle class family. She is now used to sleeping in corners, on sofas, on chairs, on the hard floor, at two feet, on nothing. She has trained herself in the big hollow-sounding, brightly lit, glare, draughty spaces of airports, train stations, bus stations, bus shelters, waiting areas. She has trained herself to sleep in the open air. She is hardened in insecurities, tells me about it and it is quite intense.
Fanny is a tall, stocky, attractive blonde twenty-one-year-old Swiss who speaks French. She compliments me on my pronunciation of French. I compliment her for who she is. She is playful and young.
Yes, that's how it goes when young girls want to go out into the world. Fanny has made a promise she won't deny: not coming home from wandering the world for a year. It's a destination. Does she want to prove something to her daddy?
I say: 'Tu es courageuse.' She smiles like that.
For a moment I withdraw with a notebook behind the old massive American fridge in the middle of the wall, it makes noises like an old B-17 Flying Fortress.
Now Fanny comes peeping around the corner of the door asking for her mouth and lovely eyes. She puts her head forward and looks at me with her gaze. Where are you, in a moment, she wants to say. But she looks me jokingly and slyly in the eye: "Tu vas bien?"
The fridge hums, growls and snorts as if it wants to thwart our conversation.
Fanny is tall, almost as tall as me, she has small beads of sweat on her upper lip. Charming. Like the grass of an alpine meadow, she has everything in green, ie a short silk directoire and a vest of the same. I smell the spicy herbs of rocky mountainsides. Or maybe it's just imagination. Her body has printed all the lines in her nightwear.
"Ca va?" she asks again. 'Non,' I say, 'Pas d'inspiration!' When I see her, an unknown story actually begins to emerge. I can't hide it.
I'm huddled behind the roaring refrigerator, the humming fan of the air conditioner at my neck, but Fanny is already there with me. She jumps over the mattresses in somersaults, it is as if she is weightlessly whizzing through the air over the beds, lands on the first bed. A round dance.
I try to look as innocent as possible and especially not at her breasts.
Then she goes on her knees to show me completely woman, the slit of her breasts, she caresses my scrotum as if by chance, tells her story very excited. Panties are missing. Swiss excitement, not the pouty tone French women display when they feel wronged.
She has heavy, full, swollen breasts that are all the way out, her nipples showing off strongly in the fabric. They hang very nicely. I'm not normal anymore. Here in Thailand you will not find full or plump breasts; nor do they hang, they weigh at most something. Her hips give me full hands.
Fanny's hips. I have them in front of me, grab them tight, plant my fingertips and nails in her loins. She turns her white round buttocks towards me, her vagina is tender full of flesh, shadowed by hairs. My saliva wets her.
I experience her words and her innocent erotic challenge and get smiles around my mouth. Sometimes I feel that little cracklings live with her and with me. And I do feel a miniscule need to hug her, to comfort her, to take her in my arms, because I have now found out that her entire enterprise to scour the world for one year is in the doldrums.
Outside, the street fills with the noise of roaming gangs of dogs, their coats faded and ash-colored. The hordes mark their territory, barking, hooting, howling penetratingly to maintain their place in the pack.

Fanny wants me to lie very close to her, slides against my body, clamps her knee around my legs and tucks her head under my armpit. Then she brings her warm white hand into my panties. My voice suddenly shakes and my legs release their tension. I caress her nipples. It looks like I'm dipping my fingertips into a brown Chinese lacquer and painting her areolas.
Cautiously I gain access to her, my hard flesh in her wet flesh, slide until I can go no deeper. She likes it, something of sounds that have nothing to do with words. The shape of her vulva, tight, round and swollen with the reddish-blue sheen of half plums and blades of reddish hair as soft as feather grass. The cramp of my fingers is etched into her flesh.
A moment ago she was at her wit's end. Outside on the terrace, she had booked a flight from Bangkok to Paris twice, by a stupid click of a button, but the internet in particular went down for a while. Now she's worried. Pay twice. I give her my phone so she can call Visa, hers is out of batteries.
So you see why two people have to meet. I know that for a moment I mean something more to her. She's brave, she's girl. She is tired of Asia, Thailand for a while. She doesn't want to be alone for a while, not on a trip. And above all: that it is difficult for her to stay away from home for a year, to stand on her own - she does not want to admit. She doesn't want to admit that she longs for the people who love her. Don't give in to yourself.
So I'm gonna love her for a while.
Less impediment to admit all those insecurities, all those doubts to a strange man…
That's why she's going to Paris, she says, and not Zurich. She doesn't want to be home yet. Gives himself some respite. She doesn't want to go off in front of her daddy. She's his strong girl. She wants a short standby, she says, to catch her breath. Maybe she will leave Paris for Hong Kong next month, stay in Asia, her friend will arrive in Singapore in two weeks. She can join them.
Then she has another companion de route.
She's the strong girl - Fanny. She's tough. She doesn't give up. Dad will be delighted. He is proud of her. You get all my energy, girl Fanny! The fan buzzes in my neck. I close my diary.
She lies beside me, asleep, my cum slowly leaking from her womb, she lies in a soundless sleep being away from the world.
She shows how she does it. How she sleeps outside. Her stretched endless legs, the white of two upper teeth, her breasts slumped to the side, her innocence blushing. The surrender to the peril. She is untouchable. She is holy.
Innocence is untouchable.
In the middle of the night she twists the sheet into a sausage. I wake up, lying naked. Her head is completely tucked into the folds. Her hair curls on her cheek. In a strange, intangible way, I love her.
It's like she's energy in space.
She does not move, she does not breathe, she does not dream, she does not stir. She's facing me. In fact, I don't see her. She is weightless as night. Ma petite Fanny délicieuse, sleep tight. I watch over you.
That's why I came to Chiang Mai.

Chiang Mai, February 2013 – Hasselt, May 2020 (third reworked version)

About this blogger

Alphonse Wijnants

I have been crisscrossing the Far East for years: mysterious Asia that inspires my Short Story Project, started in 2012.
I am bitten by the shattered individuality of the Short Story, 'In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister'. (Goethe).
It does not want to give the impression, like the prose, that life is something finished. Bangkok is my second home.
I have been writing poems for 59 years with location and inspiration Low Countries. Philologist Dutch & Swedish/Danish language and literature, teacher & director of secondary schools, copywriter agency MAW (In Other Words).
Today super active at rest. Rule of thumb: It's all about happiness - or how we compensate for it.

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