by John Greet
‘That is what we pay in Tokyo,’ he said, justifying the expense. ‘These men are away from their wives, and they will visit prostitutes. It is a Japanese tradition.’
I knew there would be more trouble if these girls were allowed to stay at the hotel. That evening, I called in on Geno and Paolo for advice.
Geno roared with laughter, ‘I see them already. Dirty girls, Adam, too young, too cheap. That one with the wallet, she back in Java already. Trust me, I know. Forget about it.’
‘How can I get rid of them?’
‘You can’t,’ Geno shrugged. ‘Look man,’ he continued, ‘Paolo and I, we know a place in Legian with good girls, clean girls that don’t steal. A mamasan called Putu, she runs the place. She has all her girls checked up by a doctor every week. We can go there later and check it out. Bring Satchimoto, maybe make a deal. How much you say the Japanese they pay?’
‘I don’t think we’d be into making money off prostitution.’
‘No man, of course not,’ said Geno, his voice conciliatory, ‘but we are.’
Around midnight, Satchimoto, the Brazilian brothers and I visited Madam Putu’s brothel. Her compound sat tucked away in a coconut grove behind the Legian night markets. Geno informed me that you could always tell a newly arrived girl by the black rings around her lower legs. ‘It’s a watermark, from years of working in the rice paddies. Wears off after a year or so.’ I learned that most prostitutes working in Bali were Javanese girls, generally from the Banyuwangi region in southern Java, usually poor peasants or farm workers forced into the profession. One working girl in Bali could support her entire extended family in Java with her earnings.
Once inside, the brothers were surrounded by a group of girls. They sprang from couches in a pleading chorus of, ‘Pick me, Geno. Pick me, Paolo.’
The girls were beautiful. Their skin tones ranged from café au lait to dark brown, without the gaudy makeup and lipstick that bargirls wore. These girls could easily be mistaken for students from Jakarta or shop workers from the boutiques along Jalan Legian. They were mostly Grace’s age, and I was starting to have trouble with what we were about to do. I should have never involved Geno and Paolo.
A palette of warm colours, gold-framed mirrors and lace-covered windows decorated Madam Putu’s lounge room. Tube lighting wrapped with amber cellophane cast a soft glow around us, creating a womb-like interior. Posters advertising Indonesian movies and local pop stars hung on the walls, above couches and cushions. The sugary sound of an Indonesian love song eased out of the wall speakers. The girls returned to their lounge positions once they realised Geno and Paolo were here on other business.
We sat on stools before a wooden bar laden with backlit liquor bottles. Madame Putu took a seat beside us. Dressed in a baize sarong with a filigree blouse exposing her tight midriff, she was as beautiful as the girls, perhaps more. As we explained what had gone on at the Sandika, she gave us a knowing look. ‘I’ll try to find out who that thief was,’ she assured, pouring us drinks. As she moved, a blue star sapphire set in her taut belly button caught the light and shone like a firefly. Her neck, wrists and ankles carried a collection of gold chains, rings and bracelets; they were a subtle reminder to clients that this is not a cheap establishment.
On our way to her place, Geno had informed me that as a young girl Madame Putu had married an American and spent a decade in New York. With her divorce settlement, she had returned to Bali and opened this high-class brothel. Her fluent English had the slight twang of a Bronx accent, ‘Let me suggest something. We know Japanese men don’t like to come to us, so if you give me an idea of how many girls you will need, I’ll have them ready. You must provide safe transportation. I’m not going to subject my girls to these Javanese taxi drivers. I’ll promise you, there’ll be no stealing or disease. You must give me your word that you’ll look after my girls.’
I took my drink and walked away. What we were doing was necessary. It was how things worked here, but it bothered me nevertheless. I saw Grace’s face in every young girl in the room. My daughter was young and pretty, promiscuous in a naive kind of way. Tula would see that. I was worried about her. I was caught in a helpless situation, unable to protect my daughter from herself.
Back in the room, I heard the brother’s satisfied laughter as they negotiated prices for the girls, a flat rate along with a fee for the brothers. With the deal set, Satchimoto shook Madame Putu’s hand and she escorted us out.
* * *
I lay awake, unable to sleep. I stared at the book I was reading but couldn’t concentrate on the words. I rose and walked out to the balcony. The pounding of the surf couldn’t compete with the sounds emitting from the hotel. Beds squeaked and groaned, and squeals of laughter silenced the chirping of crickets and croaking of tree frogs. I paced the bare floor of my room, feeling like a pimp. When I finally fell into fitful sleep, I dreamed of Grace.
She wore a skimpy bikini and was pole dancing in a strip club. The seedy dump was deserted. Overflowing ashtrays and empty glasses covered glass-topped tables. Blue and red lights flickered on and off. Tula sat in a chair with the leopard cat at his feet, watching Grace dance. From the doorway I yelled, ‘She’s only a child … She’s …’ My mouth moved but no sound came. I reached up and touched my face. It was numb. Tula smiled and spat at the leopard cat, which lunged towards Grace and sunk its teeth into her leg, pulling her towards Tula.
I fell out of the bed onto the hard-tiled floor. I ran to the far end of the balcony and looked down at the leopard cat. It stared up at me, its demonic eyes glowing in the moonlight.
* * *
The Bali Blue diving tours became the Sandika’s main source of revenue. Every week a new group of divers arrived at the hotel, determined to spend as much money as they could. Not only did Geno and Paolo work as dive monitors during the day, but also spent most evenings showing the divers around Kuta’s bars and clubs. Satchimoto and the Brazilian brothers had a good working relationship and spent a lot of time together.
I’d helped Ketut carry a comatose Japanese fisherman to his bed late one night. As I was returning to my room, I stopped on the rear balcony. A full moon illuminated the grounds of the Bali Haj Hotel. I liked the simplicity of it. Bas’s hotel had a modern feel but with a hint of tradition, in contrast to Anak’s overgrown wilderness. Both hotels had their own unique flavour yet oddly complimented each other. If the two hotels would join forces, we could … I dismissed the thought immediately.
* * *
‘Just one time more?’ asked Satchimoto as he stood in my doorway, his board shorts pulled high. I thought I’d made it clear to him that I wouldn’t be coming on anymore midnight excursions to Madame Putu’s. But from Satchimoto’s pleas, I gathered that he and our Japanese clients were going to the brothel for another reason tonight.
‘Why do you want me to come?’
‘To make a fair price,’ he said matter-of-factly.
‘Fair price for what?’
‘For snakes,’ he said, and shot off a burst of machine-gun laughter. This sounded like something the Brazilian brothers should do – then I remembered that Geno had gone to Japan, on invitation by one of our divers, and Paolo was away in Brazil. Later that evening I followed Satchimoto’s Land Rover on my motorbike to Madame Putu’s.
‘Why haven’t you been to see me?’ She came towards me with her hands outstretched as I dismounted my motorbike. She wore flat sandals with gold straps, and her fawn-coloured satin pants fitted her as tight as a tattoo, revealing her small perfectly proportioned figure. An emerald had replaced the blue sapphire on her belly button and matched her burgundy top. Putu’s strong face with flat cheek-planes and a small, curved sensuous mouth was hard not to like. Her dark eyes held a mischievous sparkle. She smelled of sweet vanilla and sandalwood.
‘Come now, everything is ready,’ she said as she pulled me by the arm and escorted our group from the minibus to the entranceway and on to a room behind her compound.
A table with a
green Formica top stood in the centre of the room. There were plastic buckets placed underneath it. A machete lay on the table. A single overhead fluorescent bulb gave off a stark light, and the room smelled like a butcher’s shop. Our nervous fishermen sat on the only furniture, a set of badly matched chairs. Satchimoto, Madame Putu and I remained standing.
‘So, we are nine men? Ten, perhaps?’ she asked with amusement as she glanced my way.
‘Count me out,’ I said.
‘Okay, I can do it for a hundred dollars per man, no less,’ she said, her face giving away nothing. ‘And don’t try to bargain,’ she added, raising a commanding index finger. I had no idea about the price of snakes but I knew a thousand dollars was a large amount of money in Indonesia. ‘Two-fifty for the group,’ I said, pulling a random number out of the air and keeping my eyes on her.
She looked at the ground and then at me indignantly. ‘How can you insult me like this? After all that I’ve done for you … I look after your clients. I send you my best girls. Vipers are hard to come by. The snake man spends all his time in the forest hunting them.’ She turned to leave. ‘I’m sorry. You’re wasting my time,’ she said.
Satchimoto looked askance at me. I’d discovered that the Japanese hated to bargain. It was not part of their culture. They found it demeaning to haggle over money and usually paid the asking price – one of the reasons why they were so well liked in Bali. I knew Madame Putu and her girls made a lot of money from our Japanese clients, and I sometimes wondered if the success of the Bali Blue diving tours had more to do with these girls than the diving. I realised that we couldn’t afford losing our divers. They were important to our business. One accident or bad experience, and word gets around.
Madame Putu’s eyes were fixed on me. ‘Alright, seven hundred,’ she said. ‘And not a dollar less. These vipers are a good size and as I said the snake man has gone to a lot of trouble to get them here. Please understand this.’
‘Three-fifty,’ I said. Was I pushing my luck?
‘You humiliate me. I have my girls to look after. I am not a rich woman,’ said the Madame.
‘Four.’
‘Five.’
‘Deal,’ I said, offering her my hand. Madame Putu took it in both of hers. The warmth returned to her face, and she squeezed my arm. I knew she was satisfied with the price. Satchimoto looked pleased too.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘let me take you to Joko.’
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. The snake man entered. He stood before us holding a gunnysack that writhed and twisted. Smiling, he placed the sack on the table. At least I took it to be a smile; it was hard to tell for his face was so covered in scar tissue that the only recognisable features were his eyes and teeth. He had no hair apart from an odd dreadlocked tail that hung from behind his bald head. As he moved, he dragged his right leg. Two black holes served as a nose. His puckered mottled skin made tiny craters and valleys on his face. The skin on his head was thin and translucent, stretched over a fleshless skull. Beneath it, I could see the outline of his cranium. His temple veins pulsed blue. I realised he wasn’t smiling. He had no lips. I stepped back and looked away, but the fascinated Japanese pulled out their cameras. The snake man turned away and let out a groan.
‘He doesn’t like photographs. You can film the snakes, but not him,’ said Putu as she arranged shot glasses on the table and filled them with rice wine.
Our clients were here to drink snake blood, a well-known aphrodisiac and a time-honoured tradition in Asia. The blood of the viper is rumoured to be more powerful than Viagra and infuses men with vitality, energy and health, and most importantly to the Japanese, gave an enduring erection. The blood was to be drunk instantly, as soon as the snake was killed, or it would have less effect. Prostitutes had been arranged for the men. After they’d drunk their share of blood, Satchimoto would escort them back to the Sandika. With the negotiation done, I was ready to leave. As I walked out of the room, I felt Putu behind me.
‘Please stay.’ She took my arm.
I stopped. Her grip was firm. Although I wanted to leave, Putu’s business was a necessary part of our business at the hotel. I didn’t want to offend her.
‘Tell me about the snake man,’ I said as I sat on a lounge chair.
Putu perched on the arm of the chair, her hand resting on my shoulder, and she unravelled the snake man’s past to me. A blue viper, the most poisonous of snakes, crawled into his car one night and wrapped itself around the driver’s pedals. This happened before Joko had anything to do with snakes and was just a young coffee farmer. He was bitten as soon as he entered the car. He tried to drive himself to the local hospital, but the snake’s venom took effect quickly and he lost consciousness on the way. The car crashed into a wall and burst into flames. When the fire died down, the local villagers pulled his body from the burning wreckage and placed him in a barrel of iced water then rushed him to the hospital. Thanks to this, he didn’t die. His whole body was burned though, and his right leg paralysed by the bite. The doctors told Joko’s family that there was no hope. He was very close to death when his family brought in a local balian who went into a trance to ask the gods if there was a cure. Snake blood, the gods told him. If Joko drank the blood of vipers, he would survive. This he did. The blood of two vipers per day were fed to him for a long time, and his skin gradually grew scar tissue and he could move around. He never returned to his village. He became friends with the old snake man who’d brought him the vipers. They lived together in the forests of southern Java, where Joko learned how to hunt vipers.
Putu’s voice became a murmur as her fingers kneaded the tension spots in my back. I felt my muscles soften. We returned to the room as the first snake was about to be killed. The men had consumed the rice wine, a necessary prequel to drinking viper’s blood because it lines the stomach and allows the snake’s blood to be digested instantly. Holding the machete in one hand, Joko reached into his gunnysack. The vipers hissed as he pulled one out by the tail. He twirled the snake around in a slow lasso movement then landed it onto the table. The machete came down on the snake’s head with a dull thud, severing it. Joko held the bloody end of the writhing snake over a glass of rice wine and milked it. Intermittent spurts of snake blood, like a cut jugular, trickled into the glass, creating a murky blend of white and red liquid. Joko ran his hand up and down the snake’s body squeezing out the last drops. With the machete, he then deftly cut the snake open. Searching the intestines with scarred fingers, he found the snake’s heart encased in a blue-white membrane. He cut away the casing and freed it, a tiny, perfectly formed heart, still pulsating vigorously. This he flicked into a shot glass. He stirred the blood-wine and handed the glass and the shot to the first fisherman.
‘Drink the blood in one mouthful and swallow the heart while it still beats,’ Putu told him. I couldn’t look. My eyes dropped to the floor, and I saw something move. At first I thought it was a rat. I looked again, and there on the ground lay the snake’s severed head rolling and turning. I looked closer, repulsed by this hideous sight. Its reptilian eyes were searching, the black stubby snout snapping open and shut, its silver reedy tongue darting in and out.
‘Careful,’ said Putu, ‘they can still bite like that.’ She scooped the snake’s head into a plastic bucket.
Joko worked with intense concentration, producing a glass of viper’s blood and a beating heart per man. They applauded as each man swallowed, relishing the ritual. Blood-filled glasses were held up for the cameras. I noticed that the men became more animated, their conversation more lively after drinking the blood. Our session came to an end when Satchimoto gulped down the last glass. The other men applauded loudly with many hontos and bowing. The fishermen, herded by Satchimoto, then filed out of the room. I stayed. The snake man took the last remaining snake from his bag, killed it, milked it, and offered it to me – complete with a beating heart in a shot glass.
‘That is for you,’ said Putu. ‘It’s Joko’s way of saying tha
nk you, and he wants to offer you this viper for free.’
‘No, I couldn’t.’
‘You will insult him if you don’t.’
‘Can you thank him for the offer? It’s very generous but really … No.’
Joko held the two glasses closer, his scarred face pleading for me to accept them. I desperately wanted to decline, but the sincere look in his eyes made me reach for the glasses. I held them in my hands, looked straight ahead and tried to pluck up the courage to drink. I knew that if I looked down at that tiny throbbing heart, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Putu stood in front of me, her face taunting. I raised the first glass to my lips and gulped down the mixture of blood and wine. It didn’t taste too bad, just bland. It was the shot glass and its contents that caused me to gag. I could feel the snake’s heart beating all the way down my throat, on its slow journey to my stomach, where it seemed to pulsate endlessly.
The snake man left, and Putu guided me to the lounge. Her girls were with our clients, either in the rooms here or at the Sandika. She mixed a Long Island iced tea for me, replacing the vodka with arrack. As I sipped the drink, my stomach returned to normal. More so, I felt good, really good. I had a pleasant rushing sensation to my head. I looked at Putu as if I were seeing her for the first time. Her skin glowed in the soft light. Her lips were full and inviting, and her eyes held a sensuous allure. She undid her top-knot and let her hair fall. She removed her gold bracelets and necklaces one by one and placed them in her purse. She then took me by the arm. I didn’t resist; I no longer wanted to leave.
Her bedroom was covered in lush cushions and velvet covers, with an alluring scent of vanilla and sandalwood. She led me to an adjoining bathroom, built in the traditional Indonesian style. She undressed and ladled water over her honeyed brown skin. The spill of moonlight shining through the open roof turned the water droplets on her body into gleaming pearls; they ran down her waist and bounced off the astonishing curve of her hips. I couldn’t move, entranced by Putu’s naked body. I glanced at her vanity cabinet. There was a mother-of-pearl necklace spilling out of an intricately carved box. Hadn’t I bought a similar necklace for Grace’s sixteenth birthday?
