Island of Demons (32 page)

Charlie went to bed with his whole being atingle, the entire orchestra shuffling off up the road in single file, silhouetted against the moon, hands on each others' shoulders and waddling in imitation of his famous pigeon-toed walk. Penguins really but, of course, Balinese have not heard about penguins, which makes the gesture neither better nor worse. Perhaps, in years to come, another new dance will come out of it. We never really know what seed we sow or when.

***

“This is
not
,” Walter said primly, “a hotel.” He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the new rooms being constructed. Plumpe's money and the cash from Charlie's painting had sparked an expansive phase.

“Right,” I said. “There are guests and they pay to stay here and eat here but it's not a hotel.”

Walter wagged his finger triumphantly. “It has no fixed tariff. Hotels charge so much per night, so much per cup of coffee, so much per glass of beer. There is a written bill with taxes. Here we are not like that. I prefer it if people pay what they best think. It is more a voluntary donation. Some people,” he pointed out, “like the Countess and yourself, pay nothing at all. The McPhees are not being charged.” They had returned out of the blue, unexpectedly resolved to settle and commissioned Walter to build them a Campuhan-style compound a few miles up the road in Sayan, no expense spared. It was an amazing site, standing on a bold ridge and looking down over the river some 150 terraced meters below, with neatly rising ranges of mountains behind and they visited it almost daily on the horses that otherwise kicked their hooves against the walls of the new stable out back. Walter was in his element, spending someone else's money lavishly on bringing his own ideas to fruition. The rooms were to be scattered at various levels over the site, with all sorts of artful features. There would be a dance studio and a minstrels' gallery, God knew what else. After Charlie's bullring story there might be one of those too. Oh they were paying all right.

“Oh my,” declared Jane. “Poor Colin is sooo frustrated. When he asks about the house, they say it is the wrong time for cutting grass for the roof, and there will be no cement for the floor till the end of the year when the sailing ships head back from Borneo with the monsoon, and the bamboo has to dry for nine months before you can use it and you can't do this because the wood has to be used the same way up as it grows and you can't do that because everything has to be an odd number. He was so pleased yesterday when he found they'd got this big room up and watertight and then they said no that was only the house for the workmen to live in once they got started on ours. They can't even break the soil till one of those priests has checked the calendar and found the right time and then there have to be the right offerings.” She stuck her fingers in her hair, both sides, and pulled it out into dog's ears. “Aaargh! Colin's no help. He's spending days interviewing the staff. We have twelve so far in matching sarongs. They look so cute! And we have three secretaries alone, including Made Tantra. But I have no idea what all those boys are going to be doing.”

At night McPhee took over Walter's kitchen. In Paris, he had been seized by a sudden passion for cooking and taken
cordon bleu
instruction so that he and Walter now embarked on a sustained zoological culinary quest, exploring the flora and fauna with their teeth. They filleted, diced, marinated, puréed and steamed and porcupine fricassée, hornbill goulash, anteater casserole all graced our table. The number of animals about the place had crept slowly beyond that which was tolerable. This campaign reduced them to a more reasonable substratum population defined by its inedibility.

“The offerings have been made. The ground has been broken. Tomorrow we start building!” McPhee over his flying fox and mushroom pie.

Walter made his crooked face. “It needs more chilli. Some zing extra. Tomorrow? Er, I don't think so. It's only a few days till
galungan
when the ancestors come back for a visit. Everything stops for
galungan
, Colin.”

“Does it last all day?”

Walter choked. “All week, two weeks really. Then in ten days you have the next holiday of
kuningan
. We shan't see much of the boys for a bit, I'm afraid, they'll all expect to go home. It's no good fretting. Even if you threatened to fire them, they would still rather go home. That's why the Dutch prefer regular Javanese domestics. So just smile, wish them a good time and maybe give them a little extra for the journey. You, after all, have red hair, like a Balinese demon. If you want to be a good demon, you have to try harder or all sorts of stories will get out about you.”

In preparation for the visit of our ancestors, the kitchen was re-equipped with new utensils and baskets and we all dressed in our best. Walter alone disdained Balinese costume, not out of pride but rather humility.

“You see how terrible Westerners look in such dress, like Balinese in shirts and shorts. Our proportions are all wrong.” I had thought I looked rather nice.

The townspeople had decked the streets with artfully pendant
penjors
, long bendy bamboo poles with frilly decorations on the ends, that converted every passage into a triumphal arch. Each region, sometimes each hamlet, had its own style and there was fierce competition to be more beautiful, more elaborate than one's neighbours. The focus of Walter's interest were the
lamaks
, geometric representations of a mysterious female figure – das Ewig-Weibliche, according to both Walter and Goethe – made by pinning together contrasting green and yellow leaves of the sugar palm. The result is a beautiful fluttery creation half a meter wide but eight or nine meters long, hung from the coconut palms, or altars or rice-granaries. Their evanescent beauty is doomed to wither in a single day and be thrown away. Walter had been drawing them for years, had hundreds of designs tucked away, but somehow always recognised a new variation. There was talk of publishing a book of them. “This,” he remarked, rapidly sketching on gripped pad, “is the reason why I have doubts about the museum plan. Balinese art is not supposed to be eternal like Western art, but falling apart, included in the natural cycle of things. Yet, I suppose, I sketch butterflies and dragonflies for natural history museums, that may live but a few short days and that is much the same.” He shrugged.

At the cross roads was a
Barong
, the masked mythical creature that is the sworn enemy of Rangda, the witch, and most closely resembles the Chinese dragon, though the Balinese lack of literalness allows it to come indifferently in several incarnations as a lion or a pig. It was frisking and capering happily, clapping its wooden jaws to the marching
gamelan
that accompanied it. The two men inside seemed to communicate by some means that allowed synchronised footwork at front and rear. The temples had all been cleaned and decorated, were heavy with incense and flowers, offerings and fruit and feasts and festivals were on offer all over the island, Walter's presence ensuring we were welcome everywhere. In Gelgel we witnessed ancient plays whose end was marked by men going into fierce trance and turning their
krises
on their own bare – but mystically protected – flesh as they tore at live chickens with their teeth in the clouds of stamped-up dust. In the cool, jungle
pura
of Batukau, ancient royal temple of the kingdom of Tabunan, we watched serene offerings made to the gentle spirit of the lake beneath the fanned tree-ferns and afterwards a stately and disdainful
baris
executed with long spears. It was here that I realised that henceforth,
baris
dancers will always seem, to me, to be imitating Charlie.

At the time of
kuningan
, we made a pilgrimage to the watery temple of Tampaksiring, where Soekarno would later build his sacrilegious bungalow of a Ruhr industrialist above the gushing spring. Here had been shot the scenes of male and female nude bathing so scandalously cut into the end of Walter's film and I have no doubt that Soekarno, always a dirty-minded man, was, in due course, spryly active at the window with his binoculars. On his own, I know, Walter would have been in there with the water worshippers but Jane's presence made him oddly abashed. Later, the local
Barong
came snorting down the hill and cast bathers into a trance by the power of its presence and Jane annoyed the dazed victims by her pedantic questioning that – both intrusive and remote – recalled that of the therapist. “And just what word would you use for that? Uhhuh. And when you say that word how does it make you feel? Really? Oh my.” Scribbling, scribbling. She was always scribbling.

***

I was hot and unhappy and regretted bitterly coming along on what was only conceivably a treat for a simple-minded anthropologist. The branches were cleared to the height of the heads of the Balinese, which was about my shoulder, so that they kept slapping back and hitting me in the face. The bees were driving me crazy settling around my eyes to drink up the sweat. I should have stayed at home and worked up one of a series of sketches I was doing on bare-breasted women of the market. The village was a good fifteen minutes' walk – Walter-walk not that of a human being – from the motor road where we had left Jane's Chevvy. There were at least a dozen places where she could see her kris-dancing and go through her questions on trance and possession but no, it had to be Pagutan. I knew, of course, exactly why it had to be Pagutan – because of Rawa. About thirty, skin light and smooth, tall for a Balinese, staggeringly handsome with his black hair unfashionably long, magnificent chest and thighs – a firm favourite of Walter's – Rawa. Of course, Rawa was the local ladies' man, a great climber over compound walls after dark, father it was alleged, of half the beautiful children in the village, his own foaming sperm hosing away that of skinny, weakling, ugly rivals. “Waste of a good man,” Walter had stated, headshaking. The thought of seeing Rawa, alone, kept my feet moving through the evanescent dusk. He was, I realised with sudden sad insight, what Luigi would have grown to be. And then we came out onto the space before the temple and there he was, muscular arms folded over bare chest, a sarong of virginal white, short even for a Balinese sarong, matching immaculately tied headcloth. I cleaned my sweaty glasses. He was dressed to act as a priest this evening then but, even so, Rawa liked the ladies to see what they did not need to go on missing. His smile of welcome glowed equally white through the gloom. He shook hands. He liked shaking hands, and now that he had mastered the gesture, he did it every fifteen minutes or so.

“Tuan Walter. Tuan Rudi.” His hot eyes rested on Jane. He had not had one of those yet. He swept forward and set his smiling face endearingly at an angle as does a puppy. “
Nyonya
.” The voice was husky and seared like the baking inland winds of the hot season. Walter slipped his arm around Rawa's consenting shoulders and they moved off to arrange the performance of the evening, the usual conflict between good Barong and evil Rangda. What interested Jane most, of course, were the points at which performers went into trance, either as performers or, at the end, when the men, having failed to kill Rangda, turned their daggers against themselves in
nguruk
. The advantages of doing it here were that Rawa was reliable as a middleman, the dancers excellent, they performed as agreed, on the dot, and they had even built a handy sort of grandstand so visitors could get the shots they wanted, for this was a regular spot for tourists to come. We knew, as Jane would not, that the men here were going into trance three times a week. Walter returned smiling. I could smell Rawa's aromatic sweat on him, like the scent of a tom cat. Walter himself never sweated.

The performance ran its course as at Gelgel. The Barong transformed from friendly pet to savage guard dog, dived and charged and swerved and cowered. Rangda was appropriately revealed in the smoke of detonating fireworks, waving her talons and stomping. Walter gave Jane a running commentary and Rawa, I noted, came and sat at Walter's feet, casually plucking hairs from his chin between two coins, then rested his beautiful head on Walter's knee, who lightly stroked his shoulders as you might run your hand down the glossy flank of a quivering stallion. Nothing in the least homoerotic there for a Balinese, though Walter seemed very much not to mind making the gesture. Rawa was an outsider, a
sentana
, a man who had come to live in his father-in-law's house. He never seemed to have a special friend like the other men but was aloof and lonely. Doubtless, his nocturnal ramblings were resented in many a household. Possibly this was why he was so welcoming to Westerners who gave him the approval he sought in vain at home. I looked back at the performance. The Barong was rushing at Rangda and they fought, the quadruped finally vanquished and rolling in the dust by the mother of witches. At this point, his supporters went into trance on cue, yelling and waving their daggers, she, spitting curses and raising a white cloth against them so that they were ensorcelled and turned their knives against themselves. They twisted and pirouetted, some wept and rolled on the ground, pressing their daggers against their invulnerable chests. Suddenly Rawa stiffened and leapt to his feet with an animal cry, rushed into the arena, snatched up a dropped dagger and slashed at his chest. He, too, had entered a trance. But wait. This was not the miracle expected. A red line appeared under his left breast, blood gushed, spurting with each beat of his heart, between surprised fingers. Attendants leapt forward, caught him as he collapsed, carried him off. “Oh my!” cried Jane, writing desperately. Walter was on his feet, round the back as they pressed staunching betel leaves and red acacia blossom into the wound. I followed shamefaced, laiety intruding on a clerical space. This was too good an opportunity for other villagers. As he lay there, stunned, on a rock, an old man, with a beautiful peaceful face, came and kicked Rawa very deliberately in the chest, re-opening the wound, shouting about uncleanness and women. Others, still in trance, were prey to other passions, rushed up and thrust their mouths at the gushing wound, sucking down his precious lifeblood, staggering away slurping and liplicking, gore clogging their moustaches, like so many sated Noseferatus. I was strangely stirred by the violence and bloodshed and, looking into the wound, saw there only prime red steak, fresh and tender, felt the flare of a bizarre cannibal appetite. Walter hesitated, shouted to a priest, “
To! To!
– Look! Look!” then, suddenly resolved, held the ravening vampires away himself with a raised bare arm, regardless of their daggers. “Don't just stand there Bonnetchen, support him!”