Shaman of Bali

by John Greet

  ‘And he got accused of doping?’

  ‘Nah, man. Sure he fail the test. Look, I tell you, at that time we didn’t even know what steroids were. Nah, Geno was innocent, but his trainer, the guy I told you about, always giving him pills and shots, said they vitamins to stop dehydration, something like that. Just before the Olympics, man.’ Paolo snapped his fingers. ‘And it was all gone, man, all gone.’

  The terraces were nearly empty. We finished our drinks. Geno returned and tossed his head to Paolo, ‘We gotta go.’

  ‘Hey, Geno,’ I said, ‘before you go, I have to ask you something. I saw a woman walking along the beach with a couple of orangutans. Know who she is?’

  ‘All white?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That one’s as crazy as a mother fucker. What you want with her, man?’

  ‘Nothing, just curious.’

  ‘Janna, man, she called Janna. She a drunk, talk to nobody, and she been here longer than me. She a freak show,’ Geno made circular movements with his forefingers around his ears. ‘Okay, you curious? She over there at Omar’s, the end of the strip. Turn right, and she in there at the back. You curious, you go look. Paolo, man, let’s go.’

  I followed his directions and found Omar’s, a bar well off the main strip with few customers. I ordered a drink and turned to find myself looking directly at Janna. She sat at a table near the entrance with her orangutans chained on either side. They squatted on their haunches, their paws before them, remarkably passive. The only movement was their eyes, like smouldering red flames in the light of oil lamps, continually moving and looking for small prey, like insects or moths, then regarding them unworthy of further attention. From their muscular bodies, long black manes and fully developed cheek flaps, I guessed that they were mature male apes. From what I’d seen of orangutans, they always had comical facial expressions, a sort of Homer Simpson quality. Not so Janna’s beasts; they had sharp, tapered snouts with smaller mouths, sloping foreheads and deep-set eyes. They were not the normal rusty brown colour. Their coats were as black as a panther’s. I put their weight at over a hundred kilos each. As if it had read my thoughts, one ape turned to look at me. Its eyes centred on mine for a second before flicking away.

  On the table stood a half-empty bottle of arrack and a bowl of fruit. Janna poured herself a glass. She peeled two rambutans and handed one to each ape. As she raised her forehead, I saw her heavy white make-up, her white necklaces and bracelets and her white-gloved hands. I felt her perplexing allure, her luminous sensuality. She made me think of a rare orchid in need of sustenance. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to be near her. I couldn’t understand why I felt so fascinated with her. Her face had come to me at odd moments since the first time I’d seen her. Her beauty was undeniable, but there was something more. I left the bar with Geno’s words on my mind: ‘She talk to no one.’

  Part Two

  9

  Elisabeth and I drove our old Toyota Corolla into the carpark outside the office of my father’s lawyer. Grace had fallen asleep in her car seat. We had come directly from the funeral service for the reading of the will. I wound down the window, and the cool air woke Grace. Elisabeth brought her to her breast. She then put her free hand over mine.

  ‘You okay?’ she whispered.

  ‘We never talked. I never knew him, not really,’ I mumbled. She placed Grace on my lap. I held my daughter raised over my shoulder and rubbed her back. As I held her, and she cooed and smiled, the overpowering love I felt for her momentarily obliterated my grief.

  ‘Hey, Adam,’ Elisabeth said, raising a palm to my cheek. ‘He wasn’t an easy man to know.’

  We followed a secretary into the lawyer’s office. Simon Taylor had been at the funeral so we dispensed quickly with the condolences. He seated us together on a couch so Elisabeth could continue feeding.

  ‘As I’m sure you are aware,’ he began, ‘you are the only beneficiary Salvador Milano has, therefore the reading of his will is a simple matter. However, before we proceed, I must tell you that your father has given me a letter, quite recently actually. He asked me to give it to you in the event …’ He looked over the rim of his glasses towards me with practiced concern, ‘I could read it if you would prefer?’

  I agreed. Elisabeth had just passed me Grace, and her head nestled on my neck, her breath warm on my skin. Simon read the words in an emotionless monotone, and as he read I could hear echoes of my father’s gravelly tones.

  Adam, if you are reading this, then the doctors were right. They’d told me to stop working, drinking, smoking and just about everything else. I ignored their advice: what is a man supposed to do, stop living? I had a business to run. Before you read my will, I want to say a few words. I know how hard it was for you to grow up without a mother. There were so many things that I could change if I could. I saw the sadness in you. But then Elisabeth and bambino came into our lives, and for the first time I see you happy, and that made me a happy man too. I know you don’t want to be in that kitchen, but, Adam, I ask you to give it a go. Things might change. You’ve got what it takes. It is in your blood. I ask you to consider this.

  And one more thing, I loved you as best as I could, and I’m proud of you, son.

  Your father, Salvador Milano.

  Grace began to cry – a cry that turned into a bellowing, blue-faced howl. We walked her up and down the hallway but to no avail. Simon looked on sympathetically while his secretary came in, making funny faces and shaking a rattle, which only made Grace scream even louder. We left the office, went downstairs and walked her around in the carpark until she had cried herself into an exhausted sleep. We then returned to the office for the reading of the will. It was pretty much as I had expected: we inherited the business, but there was more.

  ‘Read that last bit again, Simon. I’m sure I heard it wrong.’

  ‘Six hundred thousand,’ he stated flatly. ‘Non-taxable and to be held in this trust account and paid out to you in full on your twenty-first birthday, on the precise condition that at that time, you still own and run Milano’s restaurant.’

  ‘How is that possible? I thought we were just getting by.’

  ‘Adam, your father was a very frugal man. I’m not at liberty to discuss his affairs until after probate, but I can say this: he started your trust fund over ten years ago and saved every cent of this amount for its intended purpose.’

  ‘What happens if I don’t want to do this? If I sell the restaurant, for instance.’

  ‘Of course you are free to do that, but I must inform you that under the terms of the will, if this should happen, the trust fund, the entire six hundred thousand, will be donated to the Salvation Army.’ Simon again looked over the top of his glasses. ‘You know how fond your father was of the Salvation Army’s brass band.’

  * * *

  As we drove back to the restaurant to get ready for the evening shift, I could feel Elisabeth’s eyes on me. ‘Well,’ she asked, unable to hide her excitement.

  ‘We’re selling,’ I said quietly as I turned the car onto the waterfront road. An ocean of dazzling blue lay before us. On the breakwater, waves crashed against barnacle-encrusted rocks, and below us, the mud flats of Orakei Bay reached out to meet the oncoming waves. I glanced at Elisabeth. Her eyes were on the road ahead.

  The service at Milano’s that night was hectic. Condolences from customers flooded in from the floor; the staff worked extra hard. I was now their new boss, and I felt the subtle shift in their attitude. As I stood before the stove, juggling the skillets, flicking herbs and spices, flaming wine with metal pans scraping and hissing, my father’s words came to me: ‘Proud of you, son … I saw you happy … in your blood.’ Was it true? Could I really do this?

  That night, in our tiny room above the grocery store, Elisabeth and I made love. She then moved to the side of the bed and wrapped a sheet around her waist. Her breasts were swollen with milk, her skin glowing in the light of a single bulb.

  ‘We are eighteen years old,
Adam,’ she said. ‘We own a good business, and if we stick it out, we will be rich by the time we’re twenty-one. We are so lucky. Do you know what this means?’ I didn’t answer. My father had planned it well; there was no way out. Elisabeth bent down and kissed my forehead.

  ‘I knew you’d understand,’ she said as she brought Grace to her breast.

  * * *

  Elisabeth took over the front of house while I ran the kitchen. We worked seventy-hour weeks and hardly saw each other outside of work. When we arrived home in the early hours, we were too exhausted to make love. Milano’s was unrelenting; the more successful we made it, the more it demanded of us. In a short time we had changed the restaurant from a family business to a substantial enterprise with a large roster of employees. We extended the dining room to double the amount of tables. We catered to weddings and functions.

  Elisabeth thrived in her role. Her transformation from waitress to maître’d was quick and effective, and she soon evolved into an excellent hostess and a good businesswoman. Milano’s received positive reviews in the local press. Our restaurant became noted for its authentic Italian cuisine. We were booked out for months in advance, and we made more money than we could spend.

  Three years passed by in a whirl of frantic expansion and activity. In the meantime, Grace was growing into a beautiful young child, wise beyond her years. When the inheritance money came in we bought a house. A Remuera villa with a sea view. Elisabeth began extensive renovations. The interior was gutted and given a modern minimalist make-over, with stainless steel, black-leather couches and stark lines. I thought it made the house cold and unwelcoming, but said nothing to her.

  Elisabeth suggested that because our working hours often clashed, we should have separate rooms. I reluctantly agreed. If I could point out a turning point in our relationship, if I could remember when it was that we began to drift apart, it was then.

  10

  When Anak asked me to become the manager of the Sandika, I felt uneasy with the proposition. The binding contract with its dire consequences that had been my father’s will came back to me. Of course I needed money and the wage Anak offered, which included a percentage of any future profits; it would allow me to send something to Tula. I’d often looked at the Sandika and seen its potential for growth. I walked about the beach, thinking over it, but then swung around, my heels digging into the sand as I headed back to the Sandika. I’d decided to take up the offer.

  With the cockfight money in hand, the building of our lady-grass roof began. Of course we had to remove the barbed-wire fence and build a new pathway of coral sand leading up to Bas’s hotel.

  The first of the Bali Haj guests wandered in cautiously, as if entering a strange new land; they peered through our tropical wilderness to discover hidden shrines and temples, fruit bats hanging in dark recesses and exotic flowers and fruits dangling from vines.

  The tourists were quick to discover our coffee shop with its view of Kuta reef. They came for breakfast, returned for lunch and at sunset wandered down the pathway to drink our cocktails. Our traditional Balinese food and flavours appealed to them, and they stayed on. We hired a gamelan orchestra. Musicians played nightly together with barong and kecak dancers. We attracted more guests from the Bali Haj Hotel and added tables and chairs to cope with their numbers. Wayan hired extra kitchen staff, and I ordered a stock of ingredients for our cocktails.

  Anak’s loss at the cockfight became the Sandika’s gain. I wondered how Bas felt about that. As the new manager, my mind went into overdrive thinking of the financial possibilities of a joint venture between the two hotels. Then Mahmood’s cold black eyes came to my mind, followed by Anak’s chilling, hateful gaze.

  The Sandika owned an outrigger canoe with an outboard motor. About twenty-feet long, the boat was painted red and blue, and adapted from the traditional Balinese fishing canoes – Adze marks were visible through the paint on the hull, which had been carved out of a solid piece of teak. The outrigger gave it stability and such a shallow draft that the fishermen could go out fishing or diving, and then make it back into the lagoon in front of the hotel by surfing over the reef.

  I often watched our boat speed down the glassy face of a large wave, with Jimmy the Fish at its helm. Sometimes we lent our boat to him in return for a portion of his catch. He handled it with the skill and expertise borne of a lifetime spent diving and fishing.

  Jimmy the Fish was Balinese, but with ginger hair and the most extraordinary yellow eyes. I did a double take the first time I saw him: his eyes had dazzling specks of gold flecked in a luminous base of yellow, with just a tinge of bright red. Jimmy knew his eyes had an unsettling effect on people, and so he wore shades most of the time. On account of his unusual colouring and his association with the sea, he was excluded from his banjar and even his own family. And so, he lived the life of an exile, in a hut behind the sand dunes at the far end of the beach. He’d grown up an outcast, a fishing hermit. Beauty is revered in Bali: hair is oiled black, eyebrows darkened and plucked, skin massaged with coconut cream and kept out of the sun. To the Balinese, the best thing you could be is alus, refined. Ginger hair and yellow eyes were not alus. Far from it, they were colours associated with the underworld.

  As Anak had told me when I first arrived, the Balinese regarded the sea with a sense of dread. They believed demons dwelled beneath the waters to seek chaos and destruction. Hence fishermen are treated with suspicion. And so Jimmy the Fish had two demons to battle: his people’s aesthetics and their superstitions.

  There were a couple of stories explaining Jimmy’s colouring. His mother, a beautiful, young high-born Balinese, had a difficult first pregnancy. So painful was her condition that she drove her husband and family to despair. When she had been eight months pregnant, her pain had become unbearable, and she waded out into the lagoon, hoping the cool sea would give her relief. It didn’t. With one huge contraction, the baby was born. The husband heard her agonised screams and rushed into the sea. He saved his unconscious wife from drowning, but the baby boy required no help. The umbilical cord kept him afloat, and he was found drifting belly up in the calm waters, gurgling contentedly.

  As was customary, when the baby was twelve days old, the family contacted a spirit medium to determine which ancestor had been reincarnated in the form of the new-born. The medium went into a trance and became distressed. It took him several moments to compose himself in order to reveal the mystery: reincarnation had been interfered with by a sea demon, in the form of a yellow fish known to inhabit babies and devour their entrails. The medium announced that the baby’s birth was not premature: the demon had hauled the baby out of his mother’s womb while she was in the lagoon. The sudden appearance of the husband had caused it to flee, leaving the reincarnation incomplete and the new-born stained with the demon’s colours, giving him the yellow eyes and ginger hair. The medium suggested that the family return to the lagoon with the baby and a balian, a high priest who could communicate with demons.

  ‘Let the demon return to the child and retrieve his colours,’ said the medium. ‘Only then can this child live a normal life.’

  But the baby’s mother didn’t accept the medium’s findings and refused to follow his instructions. Forty-two days after the birth, the baby’s naming ceremony fell due. But it was boycotted by the banjar priest, the medium and the family’s community, and thereby was considered invalid. At two hundred and ten days, Balinese children have their odalan: in this ritual, the child’s head is shaved and he is officially welcomed into the community. This ceremony is of paramount importance in a child’s life, but it was denied to the boy on account of the priest’s unwillingness to officiate it.

  As the child grew, his hair and eye colouring became more pronounced, brighter. Other children pointed and threw stones at him, taunting him with calls of ‘anak leyak, anak leyak!’ (demon child!). Parents shielded infants as he walked past. At an early age, the boy came to realise he would never have the things other children were given
easily: love, friends and family. He would always be considered a freak, a demon, an ugly and unwanted thing.

  The boy found grudging acceptance amongst the fishermen of Kuta Beach. They were also outcasts – the Balinese notion of the sea haunted their existence, like it did the boy’s. They took pity on the yellow-eyed child and allowed him to live amidst them.

  The boy quickly became an expert diver and fisherman. He developed an uncanny sense of the nature and habits of fish and of the movement of tides. The youngster could effortlessly find the hiding places of the best crayfish and could predict which way a tuna would turn in a chase. The fishermen realised his gift and consulted him for advice. Some said he could read the minds of fish; others said this was because he was part-fish. The boy was a seven-year-old then.

  Years later, surfers noticed a fin, a snorkel and a head of ginger hair diving in the most dangerous areas of the Kuta reef. One curious board-rider paddled over to ask the boy his name.

  ‘Idi,’ the diver replied. The board rider thought he said, ‘Jimmy.’ And so the yellow-eyed boy became Jimmy the Fish.

  The other account for Jimmy’s colouring was much shorter: a ginger-haired American surfer had boarded with Jimmy’s family some eight months before his birth.

  * * *

  Whatever myth created Jimmy, I wasn’t bothered about it. I was particularly fond of him. I was touched by how he endured his solitary existence. His hut stood not far from the Sandika, and he often passed by on his way to the reef and back, carrying a spear gun and gunnysack. After a cursory chat about the weather, we’d sit together on the sea wall in silence. Our relationship didn’t require many words. He was a young man, his tanned body honed and sculpted from years of diving. His ginger hair was salt-stained, sun bleached and tied back in a ponytail. He wore a pair of Ray-Ban sunnies with a faded-green lucre back strap. The corner of Jimmy’s lip was always turned up and seemed faintly mocking, as if he understood something other people didn’t.