Island of Demons (46 page)

“Colin and I are getting divorced,” she said coolly without preamble. Then, “Oh my!” She slumped and collapsed internally like a badly mixed soufflé. “I'm sorry, Rudi. I didn't want to make a scene. I guess I only really gave up all hope today.”

“Any particular reason?” Well, what about the fact that he was off the whole time, scandalously chasing dirty little boys up and down the hills of Sayan? Maybe that's where he was at this very moment. Or that she had just been lesbically tongue-lashed by Margaret?

She smiled weakly. “It's general,” she said vaguely. “He has grown, changed, developed different interests.”

“And you,” I asked, with more emphasis than I had intended. “Have you developed different interests?”

She turned and looked at me and smiled sadly again. “I have never been unfaithful to Colin with any other man.” Ah no. I had not asked that. Anyway, she was lying through her teeth, telling the strict truth to hide it, as I had once with my mother – “No woman, mother,” I had said.

“Does that mean you will be leaving Bali?”

“Not necessarily. At least not for long.” A desperate look came on her face. “I have this book I am writing on trance. Margaret says it's good. I must finish that. The whole thing with Colin can be handled by efficient divorce lawyers. Margaret has been most helpful in that area.” Little did we know then that poor Jane would shortly break down in acute schizophrenia and spend much of the rest of her life in and out of clinics in what they cruelly termed, in those days, ‘the lithium trance'. Tears welled up in her eyes and Walter was there, on cue, the good plain uncle, without pantuns or dynamite, wiping them away with a broad swipe of the thumb, as though she were a little girl. Only he could have done that and made it the right thing.

“I know my playing is pretty good stuff,” he smiled, “but I didn't expect to move this audience to tears. You should have come to the Little Harmonie, Jane. We could have used you with all the flinty hearts there.” Margaret, seeing the tears, fluttered over and I moved away, back to Greg. This evening was becoming a curious minuet.

“Schismogenesis,” he said, as if in a tutorial, and sucking his empty pipe to look wise. Did he never actually light the damned thing? “This hostility between Margaret and Beryl. There is a small disagreement between A and B that becomes progressively amplified over time, feeding on itself and driving the parties intractably asunder. I call the process schismogenesis. Where we worked before in New Guinea, you found it everywhere – basis of the feud – but there is none of it in Bali. Did you know that if two chaps just can't get along, they have a sort of ritual to declare them incompatible. Then they can avoid all the normal social contacts – don't have to say hello – not a dicky bird – and it caps the whole thing. Even the music and dance. It never gets anywhere. Every time it approaches a climax or a resolution, it just backs off and calms down again. You know Margaret calls Beryl ‘Rangda'? Well, in the Balinese version, Ragda and Barong engage each other but, in the end it's just a draw. They both back off. Margaret's idea of a proper response to a slight is rather different.” He laughed. “In an ideal world, she'd really like to kill her adversary in single combat, then burn down his house, slit his children's throats and rape his wife. Of course, nowadays she can only do that in the academic press but ideally a book should have, not an appendix, but a spleen. For Margaret, conflict is a
sine qua non
of life.”

“What is this?” asked Walter suddenly there. “
Sine qua non
? I always though it should mean ‘an impoverished Chinaman'.”

Greg laughed. “And your own car, Walter, with its dodgy radiator, would be an
auto da fe
.”

“Yes, yes.” The drink was getting to us. We had been drinking steadily – now unsteadily – all evening. Walter dispensed more, sacerdotally, from the bowl on the piano. “And a
volte-face
would be the expression on your face when you got an electric shock.”

Greg was warming up. “A
cul de sac
would be a hessian anus.” He rubbed his rump, dog-like against the edge of the keyboard, gasping pantomime relief. We had the giggles, like schoolboys being naughty behind the bicycle sheds. Walter was bent double, gasping and grabbing at the …

“
Piano nobile
,” I suggested daringly, “would be ‘grand piano'.”

“
Casus belli
,” Greg thrust out his stomach in a grotesque paunch
or, feu de joie
, now clutching his groin, rolling his eyes in simulated pain and intoning roundly, “an inflammatory venereal disease.”

That really set us off. And then Greg looked across the room and stiffened, straightened up, dropped his hand from his crotch, suddenly sober. Margaret and Jane were kissing with a tenderness and appetite, feeding on each other's lips, that belied any further pretence at mere compassion.

“
Noli me tangere
, Margaret,” he said with an edge of American bitterness in his voice, “or, as they say in Rome, ‘hands off my tangerines'.”

Walter was in an expansive mood, driven to draw generalisations from the experiences of the day – in other words drunk. “You know, Bonnetchen,” he stage-whispered in my ear. “I never guessed Margaret was a lesbian. It just shows how prejudiced one can be. I thought she wore those ghastly clothes because she was a Christian.”

13

I may as well come clean about it. Further dissimulation would be otiose. I had not, of late, visited the
lapangan kota
. Partly, this was a financial matter. It was suddenly as if the world had seen enough of Balinese dancers and bare breasts and my paintings trailed in the art dealers' of Amsterdam. Since the museum shop had been closed and I had had Neuhaus kicked off its administrative board, Walter's shop at the
akvarioom
was closed to me, giving no direct outlet to the local tourist trade. I was not about to hawk my canvases from door to door in the hotels as Balinese did. There was also – I confess with shame – the fact that I was getting free, at home, what I might have paid for in the public domain. Putu, the palace servant who looked after me, had recently assumed new duties. Walter's description of him as “ugly” was wide of the mark. In his mid-thirties, he had always had a chunky quality, it is true, and with a dark, flat face and curly hair that Balinese themselves look down on as the mark of unrefinement. You might say that he had been created to play the role of one of Hanuman's monkey soldiers in the
kecak
, with a great, toothy grin and big ears. But it is surely the place of the artist to find beauty where others are incapable of seeing it. I could detail the soft, blue-black flue on his forearms, the delicate curl of his hair behind his ears, but these would be simply secondary justifications for a gentle passion that I would never reveal to Walter. Quite simply, his plain, hard and efficient body pleased me like the old, unfussy, Dutch country furniture I remembered from childhood. Since Putu already took care of my food, laundry and domestic cleaning, our newly physical closeness seemed – if you will permit the expression – a natural extension that he took easily in his stride. All Balinese know what a terrible thing it is to sleep alone and the fact that we had developed our sleeping to “an exchange of strokings” was unremarkable. Even strangers sleeping in the hamlet's shelter huddled together, meshing their concavities and convexities. It was a physical solace that came with no extravagant declarations and hot avowals, no agonies of identity or conscience, shrugged on almost without comment. It was a thing of the greatest possible comfort.

Beryl had left in an advanced state of literary gestation, half the book written, the rest promised, a publisher already found. Her departure was marked by an extended party with
gamelan
– Putu at the font in a new sarong, playing the cymbal-like
cengceng
– and dancers. The highpoint was an extraordinary performance, by Beryl, of a choreographically correct Moroccan bellydance that she had mastered during her researches there, Walter smacking the drums into vigorous north African tempo as Beryl gyrated her stomach as a sort of absent space, with the boys and the
gamelan
players watching agape. Afterwards, she had to be carried to her room, prostrate, and slowly revived with spoonfuls of warm goat's milk so that she might witness the anthropological tableau staged in the garden by the boys, under Walter's direction.

A sheet is suddenly dropped – ooh la la! – to reveal Resem, Oleg and Alit beneath a banner bearing the legend “Anthropology in Bali”. Resem is straining astride a ceramic toilet of European manufacture, bent forward, his fine teeth set in agony, and suffering Alit's fingerwagging rebuke. Alit grips a pipe between his own teeth, some of which have been coloured down in black, and wrestles with a camera tripod, adjusted to comic collapse at every turn. Frowning Oleg holds a watch and scribbles copious notes then thrusts his hand under Resem's sarong and it re-emerges, suddenly revealed as gripping a tape-measure. He makes an astonished, then arch face and holds up a length of some thirty centimeters to the audience, rolling his eyes in envy and flapping his scorched hands. Notes are written, photographs are taken of Resem, of the toilet, up Resem's skirt, of the contents of the bowl, of Oleg's scorched hands, of the tripod. Alit has a conversation in High Balinese down the toilet bowl, cupping his ear to hear its response. Oleg and Alit shake hands in mutual congratulation, raise their arms, like triumphant prizefighters, over their heads. They are fine fellows and march off arrogantly with their haul of knowledge tucked under their arms. Resem collapses back on the toilet and a loud fart is heard from offstage.

Beryl was immensely pleased by the piece. “Reminiscent of dear Aristophanes.” It had not been thought necessary to invite Margaret – which meant that we lost the pleasure of Greg – but Jane was there, looking initially haggard and somewhat lost but actually laughing at the sketch and seeming not at all to feel the need to show partisanship with Margaret and her feud. As the party staggered towards its end and the musicians shouldered their instruments back into the storage room, we sat in the garden – her on a chair, myself on the chill toilet rim abandoned by Resem – under stars that seemed, that night, mysteriously golden, as if upgraded for the evening, side by side, a final Baboon's Arse gripped in our hands. Above us, as we talked, a hornbill that habitually slept in one of the trees honked disapproval like a disturbed householder.

“Does Walter not like the idea of female researchers?”

I chuckled. “Quite the contrary, he always says he heartily approves of women in academe – after all it's scarcely a job for a grown man.” There was a pause – not quite long enough – before I asked, “How are things with Mc – Colin?”

“Oh my! He's very sad. I worry about him. He needs looking after.” In the distance, faint sounds of singing lingered on the wind. It could be our players, companionably stupefied with Walter's
arak
and roast pig, continuing their revels. I could visualise Oleg executing a witty version of Beryl's bellydance before an appreciative audience. But it was a full moon and there would be temple ceremonies and music all over the island and, anyway, Balinese always sang while walking at night to scare away witches. “We all need looking after.” She slid her hand onto my knee. At first, I thought it was a misplaced sexual overture, then realised she was working according to Balinese rules of contact. I was a child. She was a grandmother. “Poor Rudi. You aren't very happy either are you? I sometimes think there is something wrong with our whole generation.”

“Me? There's nothing wrong with me.”

She looked sadly into the water like a diviner. “I mean … the way things are between you and Walter.”

I was astonished. “Me and Walter? But we are good friends.”

She squeezed the knee. “Yes dear. Of course you are. In other cultures, sex is organised rather better. I'm sure you know of the American Indian
berdaches
, men who assume a female role in society and are often the most highly prized and honoured wives, or – amongst other peoples – have important spiritual powers. And here in Asia, amongst some peoples of Java, inverts are allocated major positions in society and their relationships are recognised …”

“Look,” I said. “What is it you're trying to say?” Fireflies pulsed among the trees like cats' eyes staring at us in the dark.

“You shouldn't be sad about Walter, Rudi. Walter is a wonderful person, a unique person but, as he sails serenely through life, he doesn't always realise what waves he's making that can swamp other, shallower lives. Let me pass on to you something that Margaret said to me that you might find helpful. She said that her trouble in life was that people with whom she had passionate friendships, always ruined things by treating her like bread – to be enjoyed plainly in everyday life on a daily basis – instead of like wine – to be tasted as something heady and unusual on special occasions only. Walter, too, is like wine, not bread. Once you accept that, there is no need for you to be sad. And the fact that you and your kind have no honoured place, that your love is not recognised, is not a fact of nature, merely of our own rather odd culture.”

“But … but …” I sputtered, dithered. How dare this woman whose own private life was in such disarray, whose own sexual proclivities … should thus presume … should condescend … It is hard to be on one's high horse when astride a white toilet bowl in the middle of what I must now learn to call Indonesia.

“I do not love Walter,” I protested testily. “We are merely friends.” She ignored me, filtered me out. She had been professionally trained after all and I was not saying what she wanted to hear.

“I think we have something to learn from the Balinese,” she lectured the river, “their lack of emotional engagement that allows them to bear things unbearable for us, their passivity …”