Hold the Enlightenment (21 page)

We couldn’t see Tungurahua from the checkpoint, but we could hear it. There was a faint rumbling, like the one at Pinchincha, and
it sounded, once again, like a jet plane not so very far away. The avalanches continued for over thirty seconds. And then, in the sudden silence, there came the sound of honking horns and shouting, happy voices. The convoy of buses was moving slowly down the road. People were hanging out of the windows and sitting on the top of the buses, all of them waving little white flags and shouting, “Long live Baños.”

Military vehicles led the convoy and patrolled along the sides. Sergeant Aedo talked Rob and me onto one of the buses and we were off to Baños, amid a crowd of happy, singing people. I sat next to Daniel, twenty-four, a tourist guide specializing in climbing and rafting. “Our city,” he said, “waits for us.”

There was a large banner hanging down behind the driver of the bus that said, “I live and shall always live in Baños.” The bus’s public address system was playing a cassette of songs about Baños. The songs said, “Baños is the paradise of the mountains,” and “In Baños life is beautiful,” and “I live and shall always live in Baños.”

People sang along with the songs and waved their small white flags, most of which were emblazoned with words that echoed the songs, though some seemed to refer to this or that little bit of corruption: “Of the 10,000 American dollars, not 1,000 has arrived.”

We emerged from a canyon, and I could see Baños far below, spread out on a flat bench of land just above a river. Across that river, rising abruptly, were the steep slopes of Tungurahua. It was spitting out a steady stream of black ash that combined with the clouds in the sky, and the clouds hung over the pretty city of Baños, black and heavy bellied.

Ominously, I could also see the crater, and it was tipped off in one direction, like the one on Pinchincha. Except that on Tungurahua, the crater tipped in the direction of Baños, which was basically situated at the foot of the mountain. All the drainages led directly down into the town. In a major eruption, pyroclastic flows would hit Baños in minutes. The lava would follow.

We stopped at a bridge as several soldiers uncoiled the razor wire strung across the span and continued on into the abandoned city. There was some graceful colonial architecture, and almost
none of the buildings was over three stories high. Flowers grew wild everywhere, and parrots shrieked in the trees. It was a place, as the song said, where the jungle met the mountains, and one of the loveliest little towns I’d ever seen.

So it was more than strange to see such a place with no one on the streets, no one in the houses, no one anywhere. All the businesses along the empty streets—the Baños pharmacy, the travel agencies, the restaurants, the hotels—all of them were locked and shuttered. Black, ash-filled clouds hung over the ghost town of Baños.

The buses parked in front of the great Basilica of Baños, an imposing gray building entirely constructed of stones from the nearby mountains. People stood in the square in front of the church, laughing and singing and embracing one another, as lines of soldiers stood across every side street in an attempt to funnel people into the Basilica to hear the Mass.

Inside, a stern, gaunt-looking man stood at a lectern just under the altar and sang. He had an emotional, soaring voice, and his song opened up the floodgates so that most of the people standing in the pews wept openly. Behind him, a phalanx of women were placing flowers on the altar. A statue of the Virgin, holding the baby Jesus, was carried in on a pallet and placed high to the left of the altar.

All along the side walls of the Basilica, there were large oil paintings, all about ten feet wide by six high. I studied one of them, while an elderly priest chanted a prayer to the Virgin. The painting showed Tungurahua erupting, spitting fire, with clouds of smoke and ash above. The river was pink with the reflection of the fire in the sky. Below, there were two or three huts, and what appeared to be a church. Several men—farmers as well as businessmen in suits—were carrying a statue of the Virgin and the baby Jesus out of the church. In the distance, people were running for their lives along a dirt path. The runners were depicted comically, with their legs spread too far apart, their arms stretched out in front of them, and their hats flying off their heads as in a cartoon.

Underneath, there was a great deal of writing, painted by hand.
It said that the people of Baños had always protected the Virgin during eruptions of Tungurahua. It said that in the year 1797, on February 4, Tungurahua erupted violently but Baños was spared major damage, while towns farther from the mountain were all but destroyed. There were other, even more miraculous events depicted. Baños had never been utterly destroyed by an eruption of Tungurahua. Baños always protected the Virgin.

“Mary, Queen of heaven,” chanted the priest.

“Queen,” chanted the people.

“Mary, Queen of the earth.”

“Queen.”

“Mary, Queen of all the saints.”

“Queen.”

Presently, several men—some probably farmers, some probably businessmen—lifted up the statue of the Virgin and led the congregation out into the streets. The procession moved over the cobbled streets and through the locked and shuttered city.

People walked shoulder to shoulder, well over two thousand of them, and they filled the street from sidewalk to sidewalk for a distance of over two blocks. In some of the buildings, behind the taped-over windows, we saw starving cats. People who’d brought sandwiches tried to shove pieces of bread under the doors, or through cracks in windows broken by booming eruptions. The cats mewled piteously and some people were infuriated—with the owners of the animals or the evacuation order or both—and the mood on the street began slowly to turn sour.

I stood on a grassy hill to take a few notes, and a man who looked remarkably like the actor Charles Bronson asked me if I was a journalist. I admitted that I was, and he said I should tell the world that the politicians of Ecuador didn’t care about the people. They were thieves. “If corruption was a sport,” he said, “the politicians of this country would be world champions.” There was no danger from Tungurahua, he said. All the stories in the paper, the evacuation of Baños: it was all just a way to shift the public spotlight off corruption.

“You don’t think there is any danger?”

“None at all,” the man said. In fact, he had some clothes and food in the day pack he carried and he was going to elude the police and the military. He’d stay in Baños.

“Are there others who are going to stay?”

“Many, I think,” the man said.

In the distance, the procession was approaching the police line, and it appeared that the men carrying the Virgin were not going to stop. The police, not ready to use riot batons on Virgin-carrying citizens, retreated up one block, then another. As the police moved their lines, several dozen people broke out of the crowd and ran up a wooded hillside, easily outdistancing the pursuing police, who carried large plastic riot shields.

The clouds, heavy with suspended particles of ash, hung low over the city. Slender shafts of light fell on the square as the Virgin was brought back to the Basilica. It had turned cold and windy. In the empty side streets, behind the military and police lines, the wind picked up piles of black ash and sent them spinning about in shadowy whirlwinds. The ash stung my eyes, and I tasted the grit on my tongue.

Police moved down the back streets behind straining dogs. People were moving reluctantly toward the buses, pursued by the dogs in a kind of bitter slow motion. I felt a drop of rain, and then several. Finally the sky opened up and the rain fell hard, rattling the leaves of the trees lining the square.

The people of Baños, some of them crying again, began boarding their buses. They were ready to face armed soldiers and vicious attack dogs, but they didn’t seem to want to get wet. Once again, I sat next to Daniel, the guide. He looked out into the rain and said: “Our city cries for us.”

I
recall strolling through a Balinese temple with my younger brother, Nyoman Wirata. An important religious ceremony was about to begin, and it was likely that several of the men would fall into trances. We expected to see some socially acceptable and highly controlled violence later as priests and handlers, using blessed water, attempted to wake the men from their religious ecstasy. I had noticed that it was usually the village headman who got bloodied in the end-trance rumpus, and was working on an idea about trancing behavior.

“Older brother,” Nyoman said. I was fifteen years older, and Nyoman had begun calling me “older brother,”
beli
, some weeks previous. “
Beli
, look. There is your wife.”

I turned to see a Western woman, improperly dressed for the ceremony. She was, in fact, wearing short shorts, revealing a sunburned pair of thighs. In contrast to the lithe and graceful Balinese women all about, the woman, an American, I feared, strode about as if stomping large, poisonous spiders with every step. The concept of respect was alien to her.

She stood in front of one of the altars and was examining the offerings: two ten-foot-high pyramids of brightly colored fruit placed on either side of a pig’s head. There were a dozen sticks protruding from the head, and strung between the sticks was delicate white lace, like the finest embroidery. The lace was made of pig fat.

“Eeeyew,” the woman said loudly, “gross!” Damn: an American.

“That is not my wife, little brother,” I said to Nyoman. “That is your wife.”

“No, big brother. I will marry Ketut in six months. You do not have a wife. Go talk to your wife. Be
Sangyang bebec
and she will love you.”

“I can’t do the entranced duck in a temple, Nyoman.”

“In Bali, it is proper to laugh,” Nyoman said, and he nudged me toward the woman, giggling.

I was staying in Nyoman’s family compound, in the mountain town of Ubud, and my back window looked out on a green rice paddy. During the days, Nyoman drove me to various ceremonies in a car I had rented. Many of the remote villages we visited did not have electricity or running water.

In the Hindu-Agama religious ceremonies we sought out and witnessed, a man, self-selected, breathes the smoke of scented wood, then falls into a rapturous ecstasy, during which time he becomes, for instance, a pig. It is called “going
Sangyang
.” The supernaturally controlled pig crawls about on all fours, grunts convincingly, eats garbage, and rolls in the mud in front of the entire village. Sometimes, an entranced man will become a monkey and climb trees with startling, simian strength.
Sangyang Djarum
is the most spectacular of the trancing ceremonies, and the one most often performed for tourists. A man riding a tree branch, as a child will ride a hobby horse, runs through a rather large fire, barefoot. The fire is scattered and systematically stomped out.

In the most violent of the ceremonies, entranced men fight with sticks or swords, and yet no one is injured. At the conclusion of the event, a gang of village men, directed by a priest, or
permangku
, sprinkle blessed water on the foreheads of those who have gone
Sangyang
. As the men swim up out of the trance, they seem almost stunned, and there is a dazed, drunken expression in their eyes. They sometimes swing fists or throw elbows. Often, half a dozen men have to subdue a particularly fractious trancer. The man is tackled and held on the ground until he fully emerges from the trance. And it is almost always the headman who steps away from the pile with a bloody nose.

My theory was that trance is a socially acceptable way to channel violent and antisocial behavior in a culture that frowns on argument and aggression; a culture that values harmony and smooth interpersonal relationships.

“Why,” I had asked Nyoman early on, “doesn’t anyone become
bebec
, a duck, when they go
Sangyang
?” There are lots of ducks in the terraced green rice paddies of Bali.

“I think,
beli
, no one knows how to be a duck.”

“Where I live, every child knows.”

“Show me, older brother.”

I began talking like Donald Duck and worked myself up into a fine hysterical quacking fury. Nyoman literally fell on the ground laughing. Thereafter, I found myself obliged to be
Sangyang bebec
pretty much every place we went. Every new person had to meet the entranced duck. I was quacking myself hoarse.

The amazing thing was, no matter how many times I did
Sangyang bebec
, it never stopped being funny.

My last night in Bali, during that trip, I took Nyoman and his intended bride, Ketut, to a fancy new restaurant in Ubud.

“Beli,”
Nyoman said, “you should stay here in Bali. You should marry someone here.”

“Younger brother,” I said, “I hardly know how to talk to Balinese women.”

“It is easy. You must talk sweet. Tell them they are like flowers, like colorful little birds.”

Ketut covered her mouth in the polite Balinese manner but her eyes were bright with laughter. Nyoman and I giggled like schoolboys.

And so we parted. I promised to come back. Maybe marry a Balinese woman. That was eleven years ago.

I heard news of Nyoman periodically, because I recommended his services as driver and guide to any number of Bali-bound friends. The reports were always favorable. People liked Nyoman.

A business trip to the Far East gave me an excuse to hop a short flight to Bali. People said the island had changed, and that it was
now a place about tourism. The tourist dollars had bled all authenticity out of the culture, or so it was said.

My first day, I hired a car and drove from my beachfront hotel up into the mountains, where Nyoman lived, in Ubud.

Muka, my Balinese driver for the day, pointed out what was new: the double highway through Sanur, the luxury hotels, the shops where there had only been rice paddies before. Behind the shops, Muka said, there were still rice paddies. You just couldn’t see them from the road.