Pecked to death by ducks (24 page)

Behind them, carved into the stone that formed the gate of the temple of death, there were two stone demons, a little like gargoyles, that guarded each side of the entrance. Above the gate was the face of a great bulging-eyed, fanged demon.

Suddenly, the little girls fell, as if in sleep. Two women in red arose and ministered to them. The other women sang again, asking the heavenly nymphs to enter, and the little girls rose. Their dance was ethereal, floating.

Finally, after about twenty minutes, the girls danced to the last kecak chorus and fell. They were gently shaken awake and were sprinkled with holy water. The little girls seemed to come out of their trance then. There was none of the bleary, drunken expression I saw on the sanghyang dancers at Jangu. The girls had danced the legong perfectly.

I do not know whether the girls at Bona were in an authentic trance state or not. Western psychologists who have studied trance have been testing Balinese dancers for five decades now. The best judgment they can make seems to be this: Some of the dancers are in a genuine state of trance, and some are not.

This accords well with the Balinese attitude toward trance. Since the trances are culturally conditioned—because they happen at certain prescribed times in the ceremony—some dancers are not quite ready when the ritual begins. Nevertheless, even those who do not fall into a trance are expected to dance. The depth of the trance, or the lack of it, is always a matter of lively speculation among Balinese spectators. In one of the more famous trance dances, a young man riding a stick horse runs through several burning piles of coconut husks. It is said that if a dancer is not in a state of trance, this can be an exceedingly painful exercise. Those men who have chosen to do the fire dance and who do not fall into a trance—who show evidence of pain—are an occasion of great merriment to the Balinese. There is much laughing.

There is, in Bali, a persistent belief in leyaks, or witches. They haunt the graveyards at night, where they dance ecstatically and hurl curses upon innocent Balinese. The head witch is named Rangda. She is both revered and feared in Balinese culture.

Rangda may change her form at will. In the classical Balinese witch play she first appears as a bitter old woman named Calon Arang. The play concerns a prince who spurns a beautiful young woman because she is the daughter of Calon Arang. The witch, in a fury, calls her leyaks to dance with her in the graveyard. Sickness infects the land. The king's magical adviser discovers the cause of the disease. There is a magical fight, and just as Calon Arang is about to be vanquished, she flees, only to reappear as Rangda, the witch goddess.

The actor playing Rangda wears a carved wooden mask that features protruding bloody teeth, bulging eyeballs, and fangs. The sewn sausagelike scarves around her neck represent human intestines, and the tongue—a long strip of red cloth with one or more

mirrors sewn in—represents flame. If the mask has been empowered—that is, blessed by a priest—the actor playing Rangda may fall into a trance.

This is where the tension builds, and even very young children know to move away from the stage to avoid injuries in the trances that may follow. Rangda defeats the king's adviser, and immediately the mythical beast known as the Barong makes its entrance.

The Barong is best thought of as a kind of dragon, part demon, whose mandate is to protect mankind. (The Barong is a large, furry beast with a bulging-eyed, fanged head and is usually played by two men, in the manner of a pantomime horse.) The play ends with another fight. Neither the Barong nor Rangda are finally defeated. The forces of good and evil, life and death, remain in balance.

Some witch plays may last seven or more hours and are replete with references to local gossip—which young girl was seen walking hand in hand with which boy. Vulgar jokes are spoken by clownish retainers of the nobles.

Other plays are magical and/or religious in nature. (Almost all temples on the island contain sacred Barong and Rangda masks.) In these plays the most perplexing spectacle occurs. For reasons not immediately apparent to Westerners, men in the crowd pretend to stab themselves with krisses.

At the Pura Pengerebongan, in Kesiman, the Odalan is a gigantic ceremony of offerings, music, cockfights, and an orgy of krissing. It is best described as grand pandemonium. Rangda and Barong masks from nearby temples were "invited" to the ceremony and empowered. At Pengerebongan, late in the afternoon, five men dressed in Rangda masks breathed scented smoke together. Suddenly, there was a terrific howling, and the Rangdas raised their taloned hands into the air.

The Rangdas seemed to be in a trance, and many stumbled as they were helped to the temple door. They would go outside and parade three times around the walls. In the procession there were dozens of men and women carrying high, arched curved flags,

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and other men carrying boxes of the sort seen at Pakse Bali. A large gamelan played so furiously that you could feel the beat of the drums in your chest.

As the Rangdas passed through the narrow path formed by thousands of spectators, various men, enraged by the very sight of the witches, took up swords, and, inexplicably, turned them on themselves. With arms extended before them, the men seemed to put the swords into their bellies. No skin was broken.

Eventually, after some minutes, helpers and guards disarmed the men in what turned out to be a typical end trance: the convulsive fight. The most entranced and violent of the men were carried up the steps of the temple. Their limbs were held by a dozen or more men, and the dancers were carried upside down, high above the helpers' heads. This was a violent and dangerous undertaking. Once inside the temple's inner courtyard, the dancers were sprinkled with holy water and brought out of the trance.

Later, after the gamelan had stopped playing and the Rangdas and Barongs were back in the temple, a small group of men stood before a raised platform and attempted to stab themselves. Priests in black or red or purple vestments sat on the platform and watched this scene of extraordinary violence with impassive, hooded eyes.

At the banjar of Penarukan, in the viilage of Krambitan, I was allowed to examine the ceremonial krisses. They were dull as butter knives—the Balinese keep their working knives very sharp— and were made of thin, inferior-grade metal. I thought they might have been fashioned from the leaf springs of old automobiles. They had been bent before—the rippling metal showed that clearly—and it would not take a great deal of strength to bend them again. I felt I couid do it easily over one knee.

This banjar is famous for its staged version of the Calon Arang play. The performance I saw took place at sundown, on black-sand volcanic beach. The air itself seemed to sigh with the setting of the sun.

The gamelan introduced the show, the prince met the witch's daughter in a forest: all in all, a typical Calon Arang. But when

the Rangda finally emerged, howling in rage, the terror was very real. Penarukan is a poor banjar—the costumes are threadbare— but the Rangda mask was among the more frightening of the hundred or so I had seen.

The witch swaggered toward the gamelan, waved a white flag, and the entire orchestra fell into a faint. At least one man lay with spittle dripping from the side of his mouth, and his eyes rolled in their sockets.

The Barong emerged, and there was another fight with the witch waving her deadly white cloth and the Barong snapping its jaws. Suddenly, the Barong fell, apparently lifeless, and various men, at least a dozen of them, took up krisses and charged Rangda in genuine fury.

Men ran fifty yards across the black beach, at top speed, and thrust their swords into the actor playing Rangda. The blades did not pierce flesh. Often the kris simply bent double. The men with the krisses, followers of the dragon, came at the witch from all sides, and she was driven back along the beach, but her magic prevented the swords from piercing her.

In one part of my mind I was able to see the play as an incredible display of athletic ability. Clearly, each time the witch sighted a man running toward him, he waited, braced, then stumbled backward several hurried steps, like a boxer "rolling with the punches." Rangda's retreat prevented the actor's death by blunting the force of the blow. Still, there were men coming from all directions, and a mistake would have been deadly.

Suddenly, Rangda's magic asserted itself and forced the men to turn the swords upon themselves. Incredibly, even though the men's arms were tightly flexed, the muscles quivering, no one drew blood.

Moving pictures, played in slow motion, show that, in the kris-sing ceremony, the muscles that extend the arm and the muscles that contract it are flexed in near equilibrium. The swords are placed against the belly at a slight angle, and some force is exerted inward so that often the thin swords are bent double.

Balinese are delighted to let polite outsiders examine the swords or film the krissing ceremonies. Their intent is not to de-

ceive. The play—the krissing ceremonies—are about balance in the spiritual world. If I want to explain it in terms of athletic achievement, no Balinese would argue with me. They would just assume I'd missed the point.

It is Rangda's magic that makes the dancers attempt to stab themselves. It is the Barong's magic that protects them. It wouldn't do to have Rangda defeated, even in a play. Balinese believe she exists and her wrath is deadly. On the other hand, it wouldn't do to have the Barong defeated and risk insulting mankind's protector. The play, with the violent krissing, was a study in spiritual balance.

When the Calon Arang was over, when the last man had been disarmed and brought out of his trance, a stage manager packed up the bent swords, along with the sacred Rangda and Barong masks. The gamelan musicians carried their instruments a mile over the black beach, toward the village. The play had reaffirmed the balance of the spiritual world, and had, I thought, guaranteed the social contract in a symbolic acting out of the amok scenario. The last streaks of color were dying in the sky. Soon it would be dark. People began walking faster. There is magic in the Balinese night, and no one wanted to be left alone. In the dark.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 2IO

And no trains at all to rattle overhead in a deafening clatter.

I glanced up at the corrugated tin roof. Someone flashed an arc light in my one window, flicked it off, then blasted me with it again, full power this time. Everything in the room went blue-white, the way things look under the light of a stroboscope. Then a bomb exploded outside, and the freight train kept running over the roof, and I divined that I was sleeping through a hailstorm.

It occurred to me that some time ago, perhaps yesterday, I left the town of Puno, on the shores of the lake. The boat to Taquile was a forty-foot-long gasoline-engine affair, and fifty people sat on benches, or on the floor, or on the bow, as we coughed and spluttered through a channel cut out of a sea of golden reeds. The water, in the shallow bay, was a soupy green, and ducks by the hundreds called back and forth from the sky to the reeds: "Are you feeding? We're feeding, are you feeding? We're feeding."

As the boat cleared the reeds, the water glittered cobalt blue under cloudless skies. Ahead, still fifteen miles away, I could see the bulk of Taquile Island. It seemed to sit directly in the middle of the lake, and the sun shone upon it like a benediction.

The island was little more than a spine of mountain, a ridge knifing out of the blue water. It rose eight hundred feet above the level of the lake. The highest area was north, and the land sloped down a series of rounded vertebrae to a low-lying beach in the south.

The vertical face of the land was terraced from top to bottom, and the each of the small, flat terraces was ringed with stone piled about three feet high. Snaking here and there through the terraces were pathways that were lined by waist-high stone walls. The whole island looked as if it had been sculpted for aesthetic effect. On some of the terraces, new crops shone bright green in the sun. Sheep grazed in other terraces where the stone walls supporting the land doubled as nifty corrals. The grass there was a darker green, and very short, so that the island seemed composed of bands of alternating color.

Most of the people on the boat were Indians, people of the Alti Piano. Before about 1300 they spoke a language called Aymara, and lived in separate medieval fiefdoms. About 1400 they were

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conquered and absorbed into the Inca Empire. A century later these same people were conquered again, this time by the Spanish.

Other Indian people, on nearby islands, spoke the old language, Aymara, but these people spoke Quecha, the language of the Incas. They considered themselves descendants of the great Indian Empire and dressed to set themselves apart from other peoples. The women wore dark shawls over their heads and red skirts, several of them at once, so that the uppermost skirt belled out in an exuberant and festive manner. The men, all of them, wore a kind of red or white wool Santa Claus hat, wool shirts, vests, dark woolen pants, and wide woven belts.

There were some visitors among the locals: myself, a Japanese couple, two young Englishmen, and a couple from Spain.

The boat docked at a stone pier. There was a flagstone path, set with long steps, that led to the village, eight hundred feet above. I began trudging up the hill, gasping in the thin air. Barefoot Indian women carrying gooseneck pots full of water walked by me effortlessly. All wished me a good morning, but when I tried to reply, I had nothing in my lungs to propel the words from my mouth.

The men carried fresh fruit, bottles of drinking water, cans of beans, automobile batteries, cases of beer, and great slabs of lumber up the hill. Everything was wrapped in heavy wool blankets, which the men tied over their shoulders and across their chests so the weight fell at their shoulder blades, like a backpack.

They were slender men, and few of them were over five and a half feet tall. They laughed and shouted to one another as they walked effortlessly and rapidly up the impossible slope.