The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (37 page)

101

On the ride home Felipe asked, “Has she bought a house yet?”

“Not yet. But she says she’s looking.”

“It’s been over a month already since you gave her the money, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but the place she wanted, it wasn’t for sale . . .”

“Be careful, darling,” Felipe said. “Don’t let this drag out too long. Don’t let this situation get all Balinese on you.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not trying to interfere in your business, but I’ve lived in this country for five years and I know how things are. Stories can get complicated around here. Sometimes it’s hard to get to the truth of what’s actually happening.”

“What are you trying to say, Felipe?” I asked, and when he didn’t answer immediately, I quoted to him one of his own signature lines: “If you tell me slowly, I can understand quickly.”

“What I’m trying to say, Liz, is that your friends have raised an awful lot of money for this woman, and right now it’s all sitting in Wayan’s bank account. Make sure she actually buys a house with it.”

102

The end of July came, and my thirty-fifth birthday with it. Wayan threw a birthday party for me in her shop, quite unlike any I have ever experienced before. Wayan had dressed me in a traditional Balinese birthday suit—a bright purple sarong, a strapless bustier and a long length of golden fabric that she wrapped tightly around my torso, forming a sheath so snug I could barely take a breath or eat my own birthday cake. As she was mummifying me into this exquisite costume in her tiny, dark bedroom (crowded with the belongings of the three other little human beings who live there with her), she asked, not quite looking at me, but doing some fancy tucking and pinning of material around my ribs, “You have prospect to marrying Felipe?”

“No,” I said. “We have no prospects for marrying. I don’t want any more husbands, Wayan. And I don’t think Felipe wants any more wives. But I like being with him.”

“Handsome on the outside is easy to find, but handsome on the outside
and
handsome on the inside—this not easy. Felipe has this.”

I agreed.

She smiled. “And
who
bring this good man to you, Liz?
Who
prayed every day for this man?”

I kissed her. “Thank you, Wayan. You did a good job.”

We commenced to the birthday party. Wayan and the kids had decorated the whole place with balloons and palm fronds and handwritten signs with complex, run-on messages like, “Happy birthday to a nice and sweet heart, to you, our dearest sister, to our beloved Lady Elizabeth, Happy Birthday to you, always peace to you and Happy Birthday.” Wayan has a brother whose young children are gifted dancers in temple ceremonies, and so the nieces and nephews came and danced for me right there in the restaurant, staging a haunting, gorgeous performance usually offered only to priests. All the children were decked out in gold and massive headdresses, decorated in fierce drag queen makeup, with powerful stamping feet and graceful, feminine fingers.

Balinese parties as a whole are generally organized around the principle of people getting dressed up in their finest clothes, then sitting around and staring at each other. It’s a lot like magazine parties in New York, actually. (“My God, darling,” moaned Felipe, when I told him that Wayan was throwing me a Balinese birthday party, “it’s going to be so
boring . . .
”) It wasn’t boring, though—just quiet. And different. There was the whole dressing-up part, and then there was the whole dance performance part, and then there was the whole sitting around and staring at each other part, which wasn’t so bad. Everyone did look lovely. Wayan’s whole family had come, and they kept smiling and waving at me from four feet away, and I kept smiling at them and waving back at them.

I blew out the candles of the birthday cake along with Little Ketut, the smallest orphan, whose birthday, I had decided a few weeks ago, would also be on July 18 from now on, shared with my own, since she’d never had a birthday or a birthday party before. After we blew out the candles, Felipe presented Little Ketut with a Barbie doll, which she unwrapped in stunned wonder and then regarded as though it were a ticket for a rocket ship to Jupiter— something she never, ever in seven billion light-years could’ve imagined receiving.

Everything about this party was kind of funny. It was an oddball international and intergenerational mix of a handful of my friends, Wayan’s family and some of her Western clients and patients whom I’d never met before. My friend Yudhi brought me a six-pack of beer to wish me happy birthday, and also this cool young hipster screenwriter from L.A. named Adam came by. Felipe and I had met Adam in a bar the other night and had invited him. Adam and Yudhi passed their time at the party talking to a little boy named John, whose mother is a patient of Wayan’s, a German clothing designer married to an American who lives in Bali. Little John—who is seven years old and who is
kind of
American, he says, because of his American dad (even though he himself has never been there), but who speaks German with his mother and speaks Indonesian with Wayan’s children—was smitten with Adam because he’d found out that the guy was from California and could surf.

“What’s your favorite animal, mister?” asked John, and Adam replied, “Pelicans.”

“What’s a pelican?” the little boy asked, and Yudhi jumped in and said, “Dude, you don’t know what a pelican is? Dude, you gotta go home and ask your dad about that. Pelicans
rock
, dude.”

Then John, the kind-of-American boy, turned to say something in Indonesian to little Tutti (probably to ask her what a pelican was) as Tutti sat in Felipe’s lap trying to read my birthday cards, while Felipe was speaking beautiful French to a retired gentleman from Paris who comes to Wayan for kidney treatments. Meanwhile, Wayan had turned on the radio and Kenny Rogers was singing “Coward of the County,” while three Japanese girls wandered randomly into the shop to see if they could get medicinal massages. As I tried to talk the Japanese girls into eating some of my birthday cake, the two orphans—Big Ketut and Little Ketut—were decorating my hair with the giant spangled barrettes they’d saved up all their money to buy me as a gift. Wayan’s nieces and nephews, the child temple dancers, the children of rice farmers, sat very still, tentatively staring at the floor, dressed in gold like miniature deities; they imbued the room with a strange and otherworldly godliness. Outside, the roosters started crowing, even though it was not yet evening, not yet dusk. My traditional Balinese clothing was squeezing me like an ardent hug, and I was feeling like this was definitely the strangest— but maybe the happiest—birthday party I’d ever experienced in my whole life.

103

Still, Wayan needs to buy a house, and I’m getting worried that it’s not happening. I don’t understand why it’s not happening, but it absolutely needs to happen. Felipe and I have stepped in now. We found a realtor who could take us around and show us properties, but Wayan hasn’t liked anything we’ve shown her. I keep telling her, “Wayan, it’s important that we buy
something.
I’m leaving here in September, and I need to let my friends know before I leave that their money actually went into a home for you. And you need to get a roof over your head before you get evicted.”

“Not so simple to buy land in Bali,” she keeps telling me. “Not like to walk into a bar and buy a beer. Can take long time.”

“We don’t have a long time, Wayan.”

She just shrugs, and I remember again about the Balinese concept of “rubber time,” meaning that time is a very relative and bouncy idea. “Four weeks” doesn’t really mean to Wayan what it means to me. One day to Wayan isn’t necessarily composed of twenty-four hours, either; sometimes it’s longer, sometimes it’s shorter, depending upon the spiritual and emotional nature of that day. As with my medicine man and his mysterious age, sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.

Meanwhile, it also turns out that I have completely underestimated how expensive it is to buy property in Bali. Because everything is so cheap here, you would assume that land is also undervalued, but that’s a mistaken assumption. To buy land in Bali—especially in Ubud—can get almost as expensive as buying land in Westchester County, in Tokyo, or on Rodeo Drive. Which is completely illogical because once you own the property you can’t make back your money on it in any traditionally logical way. You may pay approximately $25,000 for an
aro
of land (an
aro
is a land measurement roughly translating into English as: “Slightly bigger than the parking spot for an SUV”), and then you can build a little shop there where you will sell one batik sarong a day to one tourist a day for the rest of your life, for a profit of about seventy-five cents a hit. It’s senseless.

But the Balinese value their land with a passion that extends beyond the reaches of economic sense. Since land ownership is traditionally the only wealth that Balinese recognize as legitimate, property is valued in the same way as the Masai value cattle or as my five-year-old niece values lip gloss: namely, that you cannot have enough of it, that once you have claimed it you must never let it go, and that all of it in the world should rightfully belong to you.

Moreover—as I discover throughout the month of August, during my Narnia-like voyage into the intricacies of Indonesian real estate—it’s almost impossible to find out when land is actually for sale around here. Balinese who are selling land typically don’t like other people to know that their land is up for sale. Now, you would think it might be advantageous to advertise this fact, but the Balinese don’t see it that way. If you’re a Balinese farmer and you’re selling your land, it means you are desperate for cash, and this is humiliating. Also, if your neighbors and family find out that you actually sold some land, then they’ll assume you came into some money, and everyone will be asking if they can borrow that money. So land becomes available for sale only by . . . rumor. And all these land deals are executed under strange veils of secrecy and deception. The Western expatriates around here—hearing that I’m trying to buy land for Wayan—start gathering around me, offering cautionary tales based on their own nightmarish experiences. They warn me that you can never really be certain what’s going on when it comes to real estate around here. The land you are “buying” may not actually “belong” to the person who is “selling” it. The guy who showed you the property might not even be the owner, but only the disgruntled nephew of the owner, trying to get one over on his uncle because of some old family dispute. Don’t expect that the boundaries of your property will ever be clear. The land you buy for your dream house may later be declared “too close to a temple” to allow a building permit (and it’s difficult, in this small country with an estimated 20,000 temples, to find any land that is not too close to a temple).

Also you must take into consideration that you’re quite probably living on the slopes of a volcano and you might be straddling a fault line, as well. And not just a geological fault line, either. As idyllic as Bali seems, the wise keep in mind that this is, in fact, Indonesia— the largest Islamic nation on earth, unstable at its core, corrupt from the highest ministers of justice all the way down to the guy who pumps gas into your car (and who only pretends to fill it all the way up). Some kind of revolution will always be possible here at any moment, and all your assets may be reclaimed by the victors. Probably at gunpoint.

Negotiating all this dodgy business is not something I have any qualifications whatsoever to be doing. I mean—I went through a divorce proceeding in New York State and everything, but this is another page of Kafka altogether. Meanwhile, $18,000 of money donated by me, my family and my dearest friends is sitting in Wayan’s bank account, converted into Indonesia rupiah—a currency that has a history of crashing without notice and turning to vapor. And Wayan is supposed to get evicted from her shop in September, which is around the time I leave the country. Which is in about three weeks.

But it’s turning out to be almost impossible for Wayan to find a piece of land she deems appropriate for a home. Setting aside all the practical considerations, she has to examine the
taksu
—the spirit—of each place. As a healer, Wayan’s sense of
taksu
, even by Balinese standards, is supremely acute. I found one place that I thought was perfect, but Wayan said it was possessed by angry demons. The next piece of land was rejected because it was too close to a river, which, as everyone knows, is where ghosts live. (The night after she saw that place, Wayan says, she dreamt of a beautiful woman in torn clothes, weeping, and that did it—we could not buy this land.) Then we found a lovely little shop near town, with a backyard and everything, but it was located on a corner, and only somebody who wants to go bankrupt and die young would ever live in a house located on a corner. As everyone knows.

“Don’t even try talking her out of it,” Felipe advised me. “Trust me, darling. Don’t get between the Balinese and their
taksu.
”

Then last week Felipe found a place that seemed to fit the criteria exactly—a small, pretty piece of land, close to central Ubud, on a quiet road, next to a rice field, plenty of space for a garden and well within our budget. When I asked Wayan, “Should we buy it?” she replied, “Don’t know yet, Liz. Not too fast, for making decisions like this. I need talk to a priest first.”

She explained that she would need to consult a priest in order to find an auspicious day upon which to purchase the land, if she does decide to buy it at all. Because nothing significant can be done in Bali before an auspicious day is chosen. But she can’t even ask the priests for the auspicious date upon which to buy the land until she decides if she really wants to live there. Which is a commitment she refuses to make until she’s had an auspicious dream. Aware of my dwindling days here, I asked Wayan, like a good New Yorker, “How soon can you arrange to have an auspicious dream?”

Wayan replied, like a good Balinese, “Cannot be rushed, this.” Although, she mused, it might help if she could go to one of the major temples in Bali with an offering, and pray to the gods to bring her an auspicious dream . . .

“OK,” I said. “Tomorrow Felipe can drive you to the major temple and you can make an offering and ask the gods to please send you an auspicious dream.”

Wayan would love to, she said. It’s a great idea. Only one problem. She’s not permitted to enter any temples for this entire week.

Because she is . . . menstruating.