Island of Demons (23 page)

***

Rosa and Miguel had first established themselves at the Bali Hotel, Campuhan being too far out for their cosmopolitan tastes. In those days, the groups of musicians and dancers who performed for tourists were chosen from the best traditional artistes and no one saw any harm in it. With the decline of aristocratic subsidies to such groups, it seemed natural that tourists were to be the new sponsors of art and support traditional values. We had not yet seen the prostitution and debasement that too much easy money, uncoupled from good taste, can bring. The leader of the Bali Hotel group was Gusti Alit Oka from Belaluan, one of the foremost musicians and woodworkers of his day. He was in the habit of introducing himself as “an aristocrat by birth, a carpenter by trade and a musician by choice”. From the regular Friday-night performances, Rosa, Miguel and Oka had become firm friends. It so happened that he had a building to let, a rudimentary garage, and they had bought a dilapidated Chevrolet. In an odd sort of logic, they ended up borrowing some cheap furniture and living in the garage in Belaluan, with the Chevy parked out front, and from there, in his company, they executed Walteresque sorties to the ceremonies, musical performances and monuments that attracted them. It was no surprise they were here, holding hands, as we drove up at Krobokan, turning all heads with our multiple detonations. Walter dug in the back for notepad and camera and we joined a milling mass of people around what I recognised as the Pura Dalem, the temple of the dead. Somewhere, a
gamelan
orchestra was playing.

“You are very beautiful,” an old man was saying to Rosa flirtatiously. “You could be Balinese. Even you,” addressing Miguel, rapidly darkening under the Balinese sun, “could easily pass for one of us.” I saw Walter pout. Blond and blue-eyed,
he
would never be Balinese even after all his years of effort and study to acculturate. The beautiful are unused to such slights. The rest of us hardly notice them. I thought of Manet's
The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian
, the aristocratic imperialist shot by the natives he tried so hard to identify with and the body stuffed by a local embalmer. Since there was no indigenous demand for glass eyes of the piercing blue shade of Maximilian's, they substituted brown. He had finally been made to look like a local.

Walter waved and mouthed a cursory hallo. “Excuse me, I must do some ‘hallo darlings'.” A term, no doubt, from the backstage of the theatre. He moved off and could be seen crouching and
sembahing
to various groups of old men, getting his head modestly down below theirs, lots of nodding, touching of shoulders.

The Covarrubiases were loaded up with full fieldwork kit, cameras slung around their necks, pockets bristling with pencils, pads clutched in their hands, both for sketching and the taking of notes. Rosa was dressed, as though for horse-riding, in khaki slacks and boots, Miguel in open-necked shirt and trousers that matched hers. Behind them lurked Oka. We greeted.

“Welcome, Mr Bonnet. I hear good things about your teaching our painters in Western techniques.”

“What's this?” Rosa asked sharply.

“Some classes in perspective, shadow, Western media, that sort of thing,” I said modestly, “for the lads in Ubud.”

She flashed the whites of her eyes contemptuously as in the dance movement the Balinese call
nyegut
. “But our role here should be merely that of humble amanuenses of the Balinese, to record without changing.”

She was beginning to irritate me.

“Then all we would need to do is just teach the Balinese to write – which by the way they already know how to do.”

She took out a cigarette. Miguel lit it for her and then sat down and began to draw with firm, bold strokes. “A change in the way that oral cultures record themselves can have terrible consequences for the peasants and the value attributed to indigenous forms.”

I pointed to the camera she was bouncing off firm breasts. “That, for example …”

“My pictures are purely for our own record, not to be allowed to pollute the spring from which we drink. Traditional artists should remain anonymous and part of the collectivity.”

“But that's nonsense,” I cried. “Everyone here knows who is the best carver or dancer or painter around. They become famous and people recognise their work.” Miguel looked up.

“The important thing,” he pronounced, “is that they work collectively, for goals defined jointly and in agreed ways. All the rest can change without disrupting the social order and introducing the false god of Western individualism. We learned that in Mexico during the Revolution.”

I decided to change the subject lest I be instructed on Mexico during the Revolution. “Whom is this cremation for?”

Miguel flicked open a smaller notepad and read out a name that meant nothing to me. “Royal house of Klungkung, related to kings of Gelgel,” he explained with a shrug. Rosa leapt in.

“But, of course, the really important thing is that it allows two hundred and fifty poor peasants to free the souls
of their
dead and finally liberate them by attaching them to the burning of feudal aristocrats. Their corpses become,” Rosa said with relish, “beasts of burden for the poor.”

Miguel smiled and held up his drawing. It showed an emaciated Balinese artist siting crosslegged before an easel, loinclothed and bare chested, with sticking-out ears and tufted hair. In his hand he held a paintbrush and his head was rammed through the hole in a Western painter's pallette – actually only big enough to take his neck – to his evident distress. Holding the pallette, was a snarling caricature of me, immediately recognisable, though prefiguring Heinrich Himmler in its skinny body, wire-rimmed glasses and dead eyes. The whole thing seemed to have been done in a dozen damning slashes of the pencil. Fortunately, at this moment, Walter reappeared and appraised.

“Yes,” he smiled. “Very nice. I like the way you have decomposed him into triangles and squares like the Cubists. Stylish. But, like all portraitists, you have flattered the sitter.” Covered by the drawing, he whispered, “Take your revenge by taking their picture.” He pushed the Leica into my hands.

“What? How? I wonder,” I smirked, “if I might take your picture. This is after all your honeymoon and you have taken so many pictures of others.” I dropped the front of the case.

“Perhaps,” said Miguel, “it would be better sitting down.” He looked around vainly for somewhere to sit.

“No, no,” said Walter. “Like that is fine, you two together, the festival as background.” I was used to the apparatus and swiftly set aperture, speed, focus – click. Miguel looked annoyed.

“And now,” Walter smiled, “we must take a quick walk round to see where we are.” He seized me by the arm and led me away.

“What was that,” I whispered, “about the photograph?”

Walter paused at a stall and bought two glasses of
tuak
, palm wine, pushed one across to me.

“Try this. Totally pure, from the sap of the coconut palm. It's been filtered through the entire length of a treetrunk.” We sipped soapy, skimmed milk with a taste of mould. “I noticed, in all the pictures they showed me, that Miguel is always shown sitting down. Now, he has a nice face,” he explained, swallowing, “but the most enormous arse, childbearing hips, female from the waist down – very un-Balinese.” Ah, so that was it. “As a caricaturist he's obviously aware of it. In fact, he's very touchy about it so he always likes to be photographed sitting down, which lessens the impact.” He laughed. “And remember,” he quoted solemnly, “men seldom make passes at boys with fat arses.” Wait. No. That can't be right. It would be years before Dorothy Parker would not say that. Instead, “And now, this is your first cremation. Let me give you the tour.”

This event had been planned for years and represented the spending of tens of thousands of dollars by a people who normally calculated in fractions of a cent, the economies of years blown away in a few heady hours. The Dutch administration had tried in vain to legislate against such un-Calvinistic excess, the Balinese simply side-stepped the regulations, exchanging goods and service amongst themselves, pointing out that no money had actually changed hands. Excess was what it was all about.

“When you die,” explained Walter, “you normally get buried unless you're a Brahmana, when you get burned straight away. When the time is right, the families, go to the graveyard and dig up the bones again and they're put in those towers there.” I turned in astonishment. Swaying towards us, in a cloud of dust, was the Manhattan skyline in motion, uncountable towers of bamboo and wood, covered in cloth, coloured ornaments, tinsel, dangling fragments of mirrors flashing in the sun, roofs like Chinese pagodas, images of fanged monsters. Each was carried on the shoulders of dozens of straining men, not content to simply bear such a weight but running, turning twisting, this way and that, laughing and shouting, with marching
gamelans
delivering bursts of music like machine-gun fire. “It confuses the spirits,” said Walter. High up were what I already recognised as
pedanda
priests hanging on for dear life, sprinkling holy water or making the arcane gestures known as
mudras
but that was the only dignified element in the proceedings. Baskets of rotten offerings were carted to the cemetery by the women, pursued by packs of hungry dogs. As bodies were unloaded, there were fights and attempts to carry them off, jostling, shouting. Breughel would have been at home. “The whole affair,” said Walter, without irony, “is governed by the strictest regulations down to the smallest details.” The decayed offerings, the sweat of the men and incense, the smell of trampled grass, the clinging stench of human decay combined into a miasma I shall never forget. “The old bodies are fine – just bone – as are fresh ones, but a lot here are at that awkward intermediate stage.”

Walter was snapping away happily, working hard to avoid getting steatopygious Miguel or Rosa in shot, though, apart from clothes – as he well knew – they might have passed for Balinese. The men were manhandling, in every sense, the human remains into the great sarcophagi of hollow tree trunks, shaped like bulls, lions, fish, sea-monsters. Strings of Chinese
kepengs
were flung on the body, water, silks, more water, the music swelled. Then came one of those unfortunate pauses that occur in the rites of men as if an actor had missed his cue. “No cause for alarm,” assured Walter. “They're starting the fire.” I had an image of priests offstage, groping embarrassed in their robes, turning on each other, cursing that they had all forgotten the matches. Walter read my mind. “It has to be kindled by the sun or friction, the only pure fire. Sometimes takes a while.” The crowds passed the time by shinning up the towers and plundering them, whooping, for trinkets and mirrors. Then, the flames were there, licking about the pyre, belching foul smoke, spreading to the other pyres, as if wildfire, and then the towers. The heat, added to that of the sun, was unbearable, beating at us from all sides. Sparks were flying high into the air, coming down on our clothes and hair. Somewhere, there were fireworks or maybe it was exploding bamboo. Soon, men were poking at the corpses with long poles as in a vision of Hell, laughing, cracking the resistant skulls and bad jokes I could not follow, calling out on the dead to burn faster. Everywhere was the crash of collapsing towers and coffins as their supports burned away and bamboo, smoking flesh and sizzling fat tipped into the eager flames. “Oh my God … I must … I have to …” I fled to the entrance, crouched against a tree, breathed in deeply the breeze from the sea. A terrible tremor like
rigor mortis
passed through my entire body and I collapsed, shaking. Then Walter was there with life-saving unholy water, talking and gesturing over one shoulder to Miguel. “… marvellous display of artistic exuberance … affirmation of life in the treatment of death … drink this Bonnetchen. I shall tell everyone you went into a holy trance,” as Rosa said in his other ear, “… rejection of crass materialism and declaration of human equality in the face of mortality …”

“… affirmation of social hierarchy and shared values …”

“… the revolutionary burning down of futile social distinct-ions …”

Miguel lit a cigarette, inhaled smoke, blew it out gratefully through his nostrils, tongued away tobacco scraps. “Actually,” he said – making me a friend for life – “it all reminded me most unpleasantly of a barbecue I once enjoyed in Texas.”

We sat and gathered strength, rested in the shade, watched as the fires died down and families gathered to begin poking around in the ashes for undigested scraps of their loved ones. At a certain point, little boys were given licence to start fishing in the cinders for red-hot
kepengs
that they then threw joyfully at each other without parental rebuke. The dogs munched on. Something for everyone. The sun edged down towards the horizon.

Miguel looked around in deep content. “I should like to write it all down, everything that we can discover about these wonderful people. I should like to understand. The problem for me, as someone who grew up in Mexico, where we have all sorts of crazy festivals for the dead, is not to try to explain why the Balinese do the same. It's to try to understand why people in the West don't.”

Walter perked up. “You mean
we
should be the focus of all those anthropologists, as the deviants in the world, not exotic peoples? I like that.” He chuckled. “I shall await a team from the faculty at Leiden. I'm sure they would find me fascinating.”

“What happens now, Walter?” I was still more interested in the Balinese than in us.

“The ashes are put in a coconut, wrapped in white cloth and ultimately taken to be cast in the sea, final dissolution of the flesh, then everybody bathes to wash away pollution.”

“And the soul of a dead person?” I asked.