Sailors on the Inward Sea (33 page)

A
DALANG,
F
ORD, IS
an entertainer, the medium for stories familiar to his audience since childhood. He combines the skills of a puppeteer, ventriloquist, singer, comedian, rabble-rouser. He is a priest who mediates between the present and the past, this world and the world of the gods, keeper of mysteries and revelations, a man held in the highest regard by Indonesians, revered alike by peasants and politicians,
betjak
drivers and shipping magnates. He is, above all, an artist. Some are more gifted than others, more dexterous with their hands, blessed with more musical and dramatic voices, with the mysterious power of presence the audience can feel though he is shielded by the
Wayang
screen. Hamoto, the
dalang
I saw last night, is one of the latter, supremely so, a man who has an almost mythic status and commands the largest crowds, much like a great violinist does in European concert halls.

When I learned that he would be in Batavia a few weeks ago I marked the date on my calendar. Nothing short of a typhoon that made landfall would keep me from seeing him. After a long nap yesterday I went down to the street at twilight and hailed a
betjak.
At that time of day Batavia's streets are awash with these vehicles contending for space with buses, cars, throngs of pedestrians, each of which claims the right of way. It was slow going, heading west along Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan toward Pasar Semen, where the traffic thinned out. In the
kampong
some distance out of the city the driver stopped at a station where other
betjaks
were discharging passengers. The cars of the affluent were parked in a line that disappeared in the
darkness. In this city of stratas where place is rigidly observed, the
Wayang
is the great leveler, drawing the powerful down to the disenfranchised, raising the disenfranchised to the height of the powerful, reminding everyone of their common blood and heritage.

A white face draws stares, then smiles of approval, greetings in Bahasa. I walked with a group along a path paralleling a canal where women were drawing water in pails and bottles and strange, amphora-shaped vessels destined for their floorless huts whose windows glowed weakly with the light of coconut-oil lamps. Men hunkered down on their shanks watched us pass, their clove-scented cigarettes glowing in the narrow walkways, no doubt welcoming the distraction of visitors from the outside world, grateful that Hamoto had chosen their
kampong
over other locations in the city. A constant stream of chatter from the group added to the carnival atmosphere.

I was excited, Ford, quite thrilled at the prospect of seeing Hamoto, but also feeling let down over the approaching end of this writing, which has occupied me for nearly two years to the exclusion of everything else. The sensation was akin to the
tristesse
that follows lovemaking when we face the loss of passion and heat, knowing we must return to the prison of the self we have briefly escaped. I think it was made worse by my sense that something was missing though I had no idea what it might be. The fact of the matter was that I had had my say, for better or worse. The memoir would now pass out of my hands into yours and you would judge how well or poorly I had done. I was close enough to the clearing to see the white screen of the
Wayang
and the dark outline of the platform where people had gathered. For some reason I remembered telling you quite early in these pages about the resemblance I had noted between writers and puppet masters. I suppose it was only natural for the idea to come back since I was thinking of you and Conrad. In any case, I wondered how the comparison would sit with you,
whether it would seem as obvious as it did to me, and decided that you would be pleased. Looking back on that moment this morning, I can't help seeing it as prophetic, as if I had somehow intuited what I was going to see later and was moving toward it through that memory.

At one of the stalls that had been set up behind the clearing I bought a
satay
and a cold drink from a man in a short-sleeved shirt and sarong. As I worked my way through the crowd, people looked at me curiously, smiling, as is always the case when a foreigner shows an interest in this art of the magic lantern. I found a place to sit between two families just as Hamoto mounted the platform and took his place behind the lantern. He was small even for an Indonesian, a leathery old man naked to the waist with skin the color of tobacco, long white hair kept out of his eyes with a tight-fitting cap, an unprepossessing chap who seemed quite unaware of the people watching him. He attended to the filigreed
ringgits,
whose handles he dipped in a bowl of purifying water, shaking off the excess before he laid them out in the order of their appearance, dozens of puppets overlapping like the feathers of a bird's wing, their location so exact in his mind that he could pick them up without having to look. When he finished he lit the lantern. The screen turned white. He inserted the handle of a
ringgit
into a block and struck two wooden chocks together to announce that the show was beginning.

As the
gamelan
players struck up a melody on the xylophone, gongs, and drums, two young women danced in front of the screen, their costumes bright as peacock feathers, glistening with gold-colored threads, their long fingernails carving space for their bodies in the air. When they finished, Hamoto's hands came alive. Two puppets gyrated in the space between the lantern and the screen. Talking in high-pitched voices, they rose and fell like dragonflies
vying for position, their movements as synchronized with the music as the steps of ballerinas. Hamoto gazed through the flame at the characters; vision, fire, puppets, screen were inseparable, annealed by the ancient story. This was his power, I realized, this ability to abandon the everyday work and enter the life of the shadows of a mythic kingdom. No
dalang
I had ever seen had broken free so completely. I was deeply moved, Ford, and as I gave myself up to the old battle between light and dark the
kampong
began to fade away along with the people arrayed on either side of me. In the breezeless night the flame was absolutely still and gradually I became aware of another flame inside it that I recognized as the
Nellie,
burning. The smoke of cooking fires drifting across the clearing, the smoke of coconut oil lamps, the clove-scented smoke of
kreteks
glowing in the dark now smelled of teak, canvas, hemp, the
Nellie
's bones and sinews. She looked exactly as she did when I watched from the dinghy except that now Conrad stood on her deck. He wore the same black suit, the same cap, the same monocle was fitted in his eye. Hamoto brought more puppets into his story. His voice changed half a dozen times. He was singing plaintively. Now over his voice I heard Conrad's and realized that he was reciting, his voice a chorus of all the voices he had brought to life. As each word escaped his lips, it burst into flame and its sound and meaning turned to sparks flying away into the night, over Java, over the archipelago, destined for the great seas and the four corners of the earth.

And then I realized that what had eluded me all these years and in all these pages had passed before my eyes in that fading vision. Marlow and I were simply part of Conrad's fire and he had ridden us just as his words now and hereafter would ride the air. I had my ending. I could almost feel Fox-Bourne's watch slip through my fingers and disappear in the wake of the
Brigadier,
tumble through the fathoms past the eyes of curious fish to the ocean's floor, where it would
tell the time of his plunge until it rusted and the crystal came loose and the numbers flaked away to nothingness.

Satisfied, I crossed my legs and hunched forward, settling in to watch Hamoto's shadows cast their spell through the long hours of the monsoon night.

Batavia, Java

1930

WHILE JOSEPH CONRAD
and Ford Madox Ford appear as fictional characters in this novel, I have tried to interweave the real and the imagined, most obviously in having my narrator tell the story of Conrad and Marlow to Ford, who was uniquely situated to appreciate its ironies and sympathize with the creative dilemma I have imagined for Conrad. I have relied on the historical record to reconstruct Conrad's disastrous journey to Poland at the beginning of World War I as well as his day at sea aboard the minesweeper
Brigadier,
which was made possible through the intervention of Lord Northcliffe. All the incidents that occur on the ship and at Lowestoft are imagined. The
Nellie,
of course, is Conrad's invention, the great stage of
Heart of Darkness.
I like to think he would be pleased that she was passed on to Jack Malone.

LAWRENCE THORNTON
is the author of five previous novels:
Imagining Argentina, Under the Gypsy Moon, Ghost Woman, Naming the Spirits,
and
Tales from the Blue Archives.
Thornton has won numerous literary awards and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in California.

ALSO BY LAWRENCE THORNTON

Tales from the Blue Archives

Naming the Spirits

Ghost Woman

Under the Gypsy Moon

Imagining Argentina

Unbodied Hope: Narcissism and the Modern Novel

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Lawrence Thornton All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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BOOK DESIGN BY PAUL DIPPOLITO

ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT SWAIN CHARLES

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thornton, Lawrence, 1937– Sailors on the inward sea : a novel / Lawrence Thornton.

p.   cm.

1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924—Fiction. 2. Authorship—Collaboration—Fiction. 3. Fiction—Authorship—Fiction. 4. Personal (Literature)—Fiction. 5. Male friendship—Fiction. 6. Seafaring life—Fiction. 7. Novelists—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3570.H6678S25 2004

813'.54—dc22

2004043340

ISBN 978-1-4165-6836-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0465-1 (eBook)