Island of Demons

Introduction

Between the two world wars, the island of Bali in the Dutch East Indies was a unique place of special power in the Western imagination. Only recently colonised, in a great effusion of blood that shocked even the Western democracies, it had become the jewel in the colonial crown of Southeast Asia. The Dutch had appointed themselves guardians of a rich and ancient culture distinguished by lavish ceremonial and spectacle, where beautiful women went bare breasted and handsome men were allegedly available for those of more unconventional tastes. Bali was an obvious site for Western fantasies about Paradise and underwent an influx of foreign visitors. Some were artists, musicians, dancers and writers, attracted by the staggering aesthetic experience that was centred on complex and exotic Hindu rites. Others were scientists, keen to capture the secret of this tantalising and enigmatic culture so that Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their time, came here and sought to record and interpret what they saw, as they forged the tools of the burgeoning new discipline they served.

Foremost amongst all these expatriates was a charismatic German, Walter Spies, who chose to live in the upland town of Ubud and formed such close links with the Balinese that all subsequent foreigners depended on him as a means of gaining access to the islanders and their world. He was all things: a painter, a musician, an ethnographer, a linguist and a dancer. To his house, flocked the rich and famous of the age: Charlie Chaplin, Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias, Noel Coward, Vicki Baum, Leopold Stokowski, Barbara Hutton and many others whose names, prominent at the time, have now been forgotten. His house by the river at Campuhan, shone like a beacon of enlightenment, scholarship and intercultural understanding for some twenty years.

But such an oasis belongs only in the imagination and cannot endure in the real world, for the foreigners not only brought the idea of Paradise but also their demons with them. Small-minded Dutch colonial administration, personal tragedy, the darker drives of the human soul and the deepening shadow cast by the outside world in a planet headed for another world war – all conspired to bring him down and lay waste Walter Spies's project, so that he too is now largely forgotten outside Indonesia. Changing ideas have naturally also led to a re-evaluation of his life but – oddly perhaps – least on Bali. There, the school of painting that he founded still flourishes, the musical arts that he supported have continued to transform and grow and he is remembered with genuine affection by both the new Balinese intelligentsia and the children of the ordinary peasants who were his friends.

This is a work of fiction not of history. I have not hesitated to tamper with chronology where the narrative demands it. Thus, the reader should not be shocked to hear that I am fully aware that Rudolf Bonnet could not have encountered Ni Polok on the beach in Sanur as the wife of Le Mayeur in 1929–30, though I have described that meeting. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria happened
after
the Paris Exposition of 1931 not
before
as I depict it. The records of the trial of Spies remain inaccessible so the version presented here is invented. Also, it took place in Surabaya, not Denpasar, and Margaret Mead was not actually present but authorial economy dictates the change of venue and personnel. The names of many Balinese associated with Spies have been deliberately changed (though the most prominent have not) so that the decision to invoke that association remains with them.

It is also not a work of autobiography. I am not Rudolf Bonnet or Walter Spies – least of all am I Margaret Mead. Although I have done some small ethnographic fieldwork on Bali, I am not a Balinese expert and do not speak Balinese – as Spies was and did – and I have had to depend on the generosity of knowing others, Western and Balinese, who have been as liberal with their knowledge and friendship as Spies himself was with visiting researchers. Deformations are not necessarily mistakes but mistakes remain, as always, my own.

Canggu, Bali

1

“There are no ghosts in Bali,” I said and did my grand-old-man-of-the-arts face, ravaged by its burden of knowledge. In my later years it has served me well and stares out at the world imperiously from a dozen book covers bearing my name and cataloguing my works. I took off my glasses to show my profile. “A famous anthropologist told me that, so it must be true. On cremation, classically, the souls of the dead soar away as doves released at the high point of the ceremony and come back to this earth as the morning dew. Nowadays, for reasons of economy, they may substitute chickens which, I know, debases the image. The Balinese imagination animates trees and rocks and so forth, and creates witches, naturally,
leyak-leyak
, that often appear as blue flames dancing across the fields in the dark. When I first came here, the bicycle was a novelty that had somehow got into the Balinese brain and so witches assumed the shape of riderless bicycles pedaling themselves furiously through the streets at night, tinkling their bells. The other odd thing about these infernal machines was that their tyres inflated and deflated themselves rhythmically like panting dogs …”

“Yeah. Like, I've already read Covarrubias, Powell and those other old guys, Mr Bonnet. That wasn't the sort of ghost I meant.”

My interviewer pronounced it “bonn-ay” to rhyme with “Chardonnay”.

“It is properly pronounced ‘bonette' almost like the American term for a lady's hat but with an equal stress on the second syllable. Quite simple. People tend to get it wrong. Doubtless, they are associating me with Mon-ay or Man-ay. A sort of compliment then.”

I smiled with old, yellow teeth to show that I modestly accepted that compliment. My interviewer yawned and pandiculated, luxuriantly, displaying blinding American dentition but pencilled no notes, instead stretched long, golden – surely Californian – legs, flecked with hairs of still-lighter hue, and smoothed back thick, honey-blond curls. A memory, as of a forgotten language, tickled at my brain. For most of my life, I had been tuned to a different idiom – dark Asian hair, dusky brown skin, almond eyes. These eyes were blue and very bored.

“Miguel,” I pronounced irritably, “was not always reliable. He wrote the first, definitive work on Balinese culture but he lumped together too much. The Balinese only have culture so that they can argue about what exactly it is. What they do and say in one village is quite unlike what they do and say in the next. Of course, in those days we were pioneers. Knowledge has progressed since then.”

He smirked condescendingly. “The Western myth of progress? Yeah, right. Covarrubias. I said that I had
read
him, not
accepted
him.”

“Margaret Mead,” I said, “sat in that very chair and expressed her admiration of his work.”

Unwillingly, he was awed and looked down at the chair where he … where she … It was almost true, too. She
had
said that but, of course, the chairs had been bought long after. An artist never loses his touch for the significant object that brings a whole tableau to life.

I had agreed to this interview only out of a misplaced sense of duty to scholarship, an American student come thousands of miles to crouch at my feet, a thesis, one of the swarm of “researchers” descending like flies on the corpse of still-twitching Bali. God knows I had done little enough in my life for art and learning. It was clear that I was proving a disappointment. Irritation prickled at the back of my neck.

“What exactly was the title of your thesis?”

He yawned and stretched again. I had forgotten his name and glanced down at the card on the low table by my elbow. It told me – reminded me – that he was James Grits, a graduate student from an East Coast college I had never heard of. He was still stretching. He was a well-built boy. Under the shirt was definite rippling. His large, betrainered feet executed a sort of rapid, rhythmic tattoo to stamp out the final muscle contraction as the soft cotton of his shorts rode up the tanned skin of firm thighs to create a zone of transition fascinating to a painter's eye. Even at my age, having long laid down my brush once and for all, the artist's instinct dies hard. I inclined my head to imagine how I would grasp form and shadow of that dusky triangle in my habitual pale pastels, aware that my hands executed involuntary sketching motions. I almost missed the answer when it came.

“Colonial discourses of the exotic Other and the paratextual constitution of the aesthetic fallacy.”

“I see.” I did not, of course, see. This was yet another strange language. In my life I had had to wrestle with so many and now the world was playing me the extreme disservice of changing those that I thought to have mastered. I took a draught of iced hibiscus tea. My companion had ordered Coca-Cola brought by pattering Nyoman and left it untouched and warming in the sun. I remembered the days when Americans wept at the sight of Coca-Cola as a witness of a separate and distant world from which they were exiled and clutched at ice cubes like diamonds. Had he been Indonesian, I should have had to coax him into sipping before I could decently taste my own drink. Now, I swigged. There are some compensations for being a mannerless Westerner amongst other mannerless Westerners. I tweaked the folds of my
sarong
, a tasteful handpainted
batik
, tied in the Javanese not Balinese fashion and given to me by President Soekarno, that explored the muted shades of an old sepia photograph. There was a time when we – they, the Dutch – punished Westerners for wearing local dress.

“And how exactly may I help in this endeavour?”

“You know your English is kinda weird – like you swallowed a dictionary.”

“Perhaps the people I learned my English from were kinda weird. As to the dictionary, I once started compiling a Balinese–English dictionary. A lot of people did. Perhaps I learned more English than Balinese.”

“Right. Like I'm saying. It seems to me Bali is still full of ghosts, the ghosts of that clique of privileged Westerners who invented Bali as a site for Western fantasies of paradise, back in the Twenties and articulated the sexual metaphors of domination that underpin it. You're … like … the only one left.”

“Ah. You mean like the last of the dinosaurs.”

He giggled boyishly in a manner I found charming and then spoilt it by headshakingly returning to the shibboleths of his faith.

“There's that old misplaced evolutionism again.”

The communists had talked like that, back in the heady days of the Revolution; nothing but endless chains of judgemental notions and “isms”. The writers of the period – Idris, Toer and the others – were now unreadable because of their stilted dialogue. But people had really talked like that. I thought of Sobrat, McPhee's little friend, shot in the head during some ideological tiff in Indonesian abstract nouns. All those years of refining and schooling his body as a perfect instrument of classical dance to have it thrown contemptuously in a ditch just down the road from here. I gripped my glass of tea in a liver-spotted reptilian claw and tried hard not to slop it on the
batik
. To retain the beauty of its organic dyes, it had to be washed in a special herbal extract brought from Java. Nyoman had warned me the jar under the sink was running low.

“Some metaphors, Mr … er … become realer every day.” I swallowed hard, enjoying the iron chill on my throat.

“Exactly. That is why they have to be brought out into the light and subjected to critical review and DE-CON-struction.” He had an irritatingly etymologising stress pattern.

I looked round at the light as it fell on my garden. Like all painters – like Mon-ay – I had once been obsessed with light. In old age, I fled it. We were seated, as Margaret Mead had not been, on the elegant Balinese copies of eighteenth-century Dutch furniture that they handcarve a few miles away, as they sit, themselves more comfily, on the cool floor. Above us a shading canopy of purely Balinese CON-struction, serried ranks of razor grass thatch resting on polished coconut trunks and beams that met in a central boss of a raging Garuda bird, rich in fang and claw. My neighbour had done that, the peaceful little old farmer I talked to most evenings as he pottered around and watered his orchid pots and complained of his ungrateful family. Underfoot, we trod simple red Balinese tiles of baked earth. That one there was loose and tripped the unwary. Over the years, I had learned to step round it. With age, one learns to adapt oneself rather than try to change the world. During the construction, I had joked saucily with the women who baked the tiles, made them laugh, even drawn one of the younger ones, her youth already sunk and shrunken by hard labour but the red dust caricaturing rude good health in her cheeks. It had been exhibited recently at, I think, Surabaya.