Chronicle & Humour: Bernard, the Tigers, and the Cambodia You Don’t Pet
Ever since he became, without knowing it, the global face of ethical elephant tourism, Bernard has held a new conviction: he has a gift. Two and a half million people can’t be wrong.
He doesn’t put it like that, of course. Bernard never boasts; he informs. “Me and animals, we understand each other,” he lets drop between two Angkors, to anyone who’ll listen and especially to anyone who won’t. Sophea has heard the line forty times. Sophea nods. It’s cheaper than answering.
The legend built itself, the way Bernard’s legends do — out of a misunderstanding and a photo. Ever since, he feels anointed. He looks at the neighbourhood dogs with the benevolence of a guru. He talks to the geckos. One evening he even tried to establish spiritual contact with a buffalo, which ignored him with a wholly bovine dignity.
It was his niece, on the phone, who let it slip. At Phnom Tamao, she said, there are tigers. Real ones. Rescued, cared for, housed. Bernard heard tigers and stopped listening to the rest, which nonetheless contained important words like “fence,” “distance” and “absolutely not.”
The next day he announced the expedition to Sophea the way others announce a summit attempt. “I’m going to talk to them. The tigers. Calm them down.” Sophea, who is fond of him, tried the one argument meant to stop a man like him: “It’s far. You have to walk.” Bernard hesitated. Then the gift won out over the lower back — which, for Bernard, had never once happened before.
Phnom Tamao is not what he pictured. In his head there was a clearing, a tiger, him, and a moment. In reality there is a wildlife rescue centre, serious enclosures, double fences, signs everywhere, and highly competent people who spend their lives repairing what others have broken.
At the entrance, a young ranger, Dara, recites the rules with the placidity of someone who has said them ten thousand times to ten thousand Bernards. You don’t feed them. You don’t touch. You don’t put your hand out. Above all, you don’t put your hand out.
“Yes, yes,” says Bernard, with the air of a man skimming a medicine leaflet. Then, magnanimous: “But you see, me, with animals…” Dara looks at him. Dara doesn’t know. Dara doesn’t want to know. Dara has two hundred kilos of tiger to watch and no slot in the schedule for gifts.
It starts badly. At the first bend, the gibbons. Perched, gleeful, they greet Bernard’s arrival with a run of whoops that, in every language of the forest, clearly mean something mocking. Bernard looks up, offended. “Are they taking the mickey?” “They do that to everyone,” says Dara — which, for a man convinced he’s special, is almost worse.
Then comes the macaque. It ambles down, settles at a polite distance, and studies Bernard with the attention of a pickpocket eyeing a sleeping tourist. Bernard, moved, sees in it a communion of souls. “See,” he whispers to Dara, “he senses it.” The macaque did indeed sense something: it sensed the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. With one surgical motion it lifted it, sprang back up into the tree, and set about examining the contents with a connoisseur’s contempt. The only living creature in all of Phnom Tamao to have come near Bernard had just robbed him.
But a gift does not give up. It wants the tigers.
There he is. A male, enormous, survivor of who knows what horror, stretched out in the shade with the indolence of creatures that have nothing left to prove to anyone. Bernard steps up to the double fence. He lowers his voice. He brings out his guru tone, the one that had worked so well on the lying-down elephant. “Easy, big fella. We know each other, you and I.”
The tiger opens one eye. Then the other. It rises — unhurried, with that economy of movement peculiar to those who could kill but choose, for now, to abstain. It crosses the enclosure. It comes right up to the mesh. And it looks at Bernard.
It is not Aakma’s gaze. Aakma sized him up with tenderness. The tiger sizes him up with appetite — or worse, with nothing: a mineral, total indifference in which Bernard is neither a friend, nor an enemy, nor a man, nor even a bearer of gifts, but a quantity of meat momentarily out of reach.
The tiger yawns. It’s supposed to be a yawn. But a tiger’s yawn is thirty centimetres of open jaw, two rows of arguments against the whole idea of having come closer, and a silence that drops over Bernard all at once like a wet blanket. For the first time in eight years — for the first time in far longer, perhaps — Bernard has nothing to say.
He takes a step back. A tiny step. The step of a man whose gift has just handed in its apron.
“Right,” he manages at last, in a voice he means to sound detached and which fails to be. “He’s tired, that one. We won’t bother him.” And he turns on his heel with the elegant haste of a gentleman who has just remembered an appointment.
At the bar that evening, nobody needs to ask how it went, because Bernard, against all habit, says nothing. He drinks. He smokes the cigarettes Sophea had to give him back, the macaque having kept his. And when a customer innocently brings up his famous talent with animals, Bernard waves a hand through the air.
“Elephants, yes,” he says. “Elephants are good people.” He pauses. “Tigers are overrated.”
And he orders another beer, in a country that, decidedly, will not be stroked one way or the other.
Comments