From Here to Eternity

by Caitlin Doughty

  I WOKE REFRESHED after fourteen comatose hours in our hotel in the city of Rantepao. We went to meet our guide, Agus—pronounced “Ah Goose”—in the lobby. He was compact and fit, handsome. Agus had been taking Dutch and German tourists on deep jungle and rafting treks for twenty-five years, but in recent years had developed a special death-focused relationship with Paul. Agus told us that the ma’nene’ (the ritual we had come to see) wouldn’t happen until tomorrow (“on Toraja time”). Today’s adventure would be an appetizer to the ma’nene’: a Torajan funeral.

  We wound down endless dirt roads in Agus’s SUV, through the emerald green hills. For several miles we were caught behind a moped with a hairy black pig tied down with neon green rope behind the driver. I scooted forward in my seat. Was the pig dead? As if on cue, the pig’s hooves went into swimming motion.

  Agus caught me looking. “Pigs are harder to carry on a bike than a person. They squirm.”

  The pig was heading to the same Torajan funeral we were. One of us would not be coming back.

  YOU COULD HEAR the funeral before you saw it: drums and cymbals crashing. We entered the swirl of people following behind the corpse. The body was being transferred in a replica of a traditional Torajan house. These houses, known as tongkonan, resemble no residence you’ve ever seen, standing high on stilts with a roof that swoops up to two points in the sky. This corpse, inside his mini-house, was carried atop the shoulders of thirty-five young men.

  The crowd jostled into a central courtyard as the corpse made its way around the periphery. It was slow going—the house was heavier than expected and the men had to stop every thirty seconds or so and set it down.

  In the center of the courtyard stood a buffalo, robust and serious in its demeanor. The buffalo’s presence implied a vague threat of what was to come. Staked to the ground by a short rope, it looked like the lamb left out for the hungry T-Rex in Jurassic Park. As Chekhov said about the theater, if you reveal a gun on stage in Act I, it better go off by the final act.

  Tourists (at least, the ones I could tell were tourists because of their white skin and Western European accents) were corralled in the far back corner of the courtyard. This is the primary tension of Toraja’s death tourism industry: how to get tourists close, but not too close. Our exile in Section J seemed more than fair to me, and I plunked myself down to observe as Paul set up his camera for photographs. Today he wore an outfit better suited to the humid weather: denim overalls, a sheriff’s badge, polka-dot socks, and a cowboy hat.

  There were some tourists who did not get the hint. One couple perched themselves in folding chairs alongside the dead man’s family in the VIP section. The locals were too polite to ask them to leave. An older German woman with crudely dyed blond hair walked directly into the center of the courtyard, through the unfolding festivities, taking photographs with her iPad thrust into local children’s faces and chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. I wanted to yank her out with a vaudeville cane.

  Tourism in Tana Toraja is a recent development, almost unheard of before the 1970s. The Indonesian government had concentrated on developing tourism (to great success) on other islands like Bali and Java, but Tana Toraja had something those other places didn’t: impressive, ritualistic death. They no longer wanted to be viewed by the rest of Indonesia as a place of “headhunters and black magic,” but as participants in a high culture tradition.

  The corpse made its way into the courtyard. The men carrying the house thrust it up and down, chanting and grunting. They went at it until they exhausted themselves and had to set the whole house down, then took a deep breath and did it again. It was hypnotic to watch the surging effort, especially compared to the staid pace of a standard pallbearers’ procession in the West.

  The corpse was (is, if you’re Torajan) that of a man named Rovinus Lintin. He was important to the village, a government worker and farmer. Behind me stood a five-foot-high color poster of Rovinus’s face. The image showed a man in his late sixties in a sharp blue suit and a pencil-thin John Waters mustache.

  Children in elaborate beaded costumes ran through the courtyard, dodging the men carrying squealing pigs tied to bamboo stakes. The men were taking the pigs to a hidden back area. The door of the main house was closed off by a hanging tapestry featuring a full roster of Disney princesses; Belle, Ariel, and Aurora watched the pigs pass to the slaughter. I wondered if moped-pig from earlier in the day was among them.

  These Torajan funerals are not casual B.Y.O.B(uffalo) events. Each pig and sacrificial animal had been brought by a different family, and carefully recorded. There is a system of debts that keeps people coming to funerals for years. As Agus said, “You bring a pig to my mother’s funeral now, I will bring one for you someday.” Torajan and American death culture share this particular trait of overexpenditure; no one wants to be perceived as disrespecting the dead.

  All of these rituals might seem complicated, but Agus claimed they have actually become far less so. His parents were born into the animistic Aluk religion, but his father converted to Catholicism at age sixteen. Agus gave his theory: “There are 7,777 rituals in Aluk. People left because it got too complicated.” Catholicism hardly seems the place to go for fewer complicated rituals, but there you go.

  The crowd went silent as the priest came over the loudspeaker and began his sermon. I didn’t understand the words, but he punctuated his speech with salutes to the deceased, booming “RO-vinus LIN-TOOOOOOON!” at top volume. For twenty minutes he spoke, and when he started to lose the crowd with the repetitive phrasing he screamed into the microphone, like a death metal rocker, “COOOOOEEEEE!” Let me tell you, if you’re sitting next to a speaker and don’t see a “COOOOOEEEEE!” coming, it can be devastating. Agus translated the expression as something akin to “listen up!” In recent years the narration at Torajan funerals (as well as choreography and costume choices) has taken cues from television variety shows.

  Rovinus had died—as Western medicine would define the term—at the end of May, three months earlier. But according to Torajan tradition, Rovinus remained living. He might have stopped breathing, but his physical state was more like a high fever, an illness. This illness would last until the first animal, a buffalo or a pig, was sacrificed. After the sacrifice, ma’karu’dusan (“to exhale the last breath”), Rovinus could at last die alongside the animal.

  During his two years of fieldwork in Toraja, anthropologist Dimitri Tsintjilonis developed a close friendship with a local woman named Ne’ Layuk, who referred to Dimitri as one of her children. He came back to Toraja nine years later, excited to surprise Ne’ Layuk with his joyous return, only to discover she had died two weeks prior to his arrival. Dimitri went to visit her corpse and was led into the back room by a family member, who announced to Ne’ Layuk that Dimitri was “back.”

  Looking at her face, I crouched down by her side and whispered my greetings. Although one side of her face seemed to be slightly crumbling, she looked serene and composed . . . she was only “asleep” (mamma’) and she “knew” (natandai) I was there. More than that, she could hear and see me; in fact, she was not “dead” (mate); she was only ill (“hot”) and “could feel everything” (nasa’dingan apa-apa).

  In Toraja, during the period of time between death and the funeral, the body is kept in the home. That might not sound particularly shocking, until I tell you that period can last from several months to several years. During that time, the family cares for and mummifies the body, bringing the corpse food, changing its clothes, and speaking to the body.

  The first time Paul ever visited Toraja, he asked Agus if it was unusual for a family to keep a dead relative in the home. Agus laughed at the question. “When I was a child, we had my grandfather in the home for seven years. My brother and I, we slept with him in the same bed. In the morning we put his clothes on and stood him against the wall. At night he came back to bed.”

  Paul describes death in Toraja, as he’s witnessed it, not as a “hard border,” an impenetrable wall be
tween the living and the dead, but a border that can be transgressed. According to their animistic belief system, there is also no barrier between the human and nonhuman aspects of the natural world: animals, mountains, and even the dead. Speaking to your grandfather’s corpse is a way to build a connection to the person’s spirit.

  The priest had gone silent, his last “COOOOOEEEEE!” fading mercifully from the loudspeaker. Paul sidled up beside me and whispered, “After they sacrifice the buffalo, maybe one of the tourists should be next.”

  As if on cue, two men walked toward the buffalo. One threaded a blue rope through its metal nostril ring. The man was gentle with the buffalo, scratching its chin. The buffalo seemed not to notice it had become the center of attention. The second man squatted down to tie the buffalo’s front hooves to wooden stakes in the ground.

  I was expecting—I’m not sure—another chant, a gathering of family members? But it took only seconds for the man to lift the buffalo’s chin by the rope, pull a machete from his belt, and slice directly into its throat. The buffalo reared back into the air, its powerful muscles and horns on display. It attempted to flee, but the rope kept it in place. There was a vivid red gash on its throat, but no blood was falling. The first cut was not deep enough.

  Several more men rushed forward, grabbing at the rope strung through the buffalo’s nose, but the buffalo wasn’t having it. It bucked and thrashed, exposing its severed windpipe to the crowd. It was not easy to watch. The man pulled out a machete from his belt, giving the neck a second chop. This time the buffalo’s throat pulsed electric red blood.

  The buffalo jerked back with enough force to break itself free from the wooden stake. It stumbled to the right and barreled into the crowd. There was chaos, screaming. The footage from my small video camera went into Cloverfield mode, heavy breathing and sweeping shots of the ground. The crowd surged around me and I sliced my hand on the edge of a concrete pillar.

  I was sure someone (probably me) would fall victim to the buffalo’s revenge, but the celebrants caught it and dragged it back to the center, where at last it fell still, its blood pouring into a pool of red foam around its throat. The crowd’s keening noises and nervous laughter bloomed into a complex polyphony. The danger had brought the funeral to life.

  AGUS WAS ON a heated phone call.

  “What’s the deal?” I asked Paul.

  “We need to bring a pig.”

  “Where are we going to get a pig?”

  “Agus is finding one. It’s rude to show up without a pig.”

  The SUV was already full. There was me, Paul, Agus, the driver, and Atto, a fifteen-year-old boy catching a ride to the distant village. There was no room for a pig.

  Agus hung up the phone and announced, “Tomorrow my friend will bring the pig on his moped.”

  Atto was texting furiously the whole ride, as you would expect from a teenager trapped in a car with adults. During the ma’nene’, the graves of his uncle and his great-grandfather would be opened. Both men had died before Atto was born, so he’d only ever met them as corpses.

  The village had no central square, but was a series of isolated hamlets. The majority of its people were rice farmers, including our hosts. They lived in seven tongkonan (the sweeping Torajan homes on stilts) situated around a communal courtyard. Plump roosters crowed. Skinny dogs chased the roosters and laughing children chased the dogs. Women were beating the recently harvested rice with tall bamboo poles in a mesmerizing, repetitive motion.

  People trickled in to the village to begin cleaning the ten or so house-graves that stood in a cluster. Heavy padlocks on the grave doors were a new development; it’s not that the neighbors didn’t trust one another, but a few years prior a mummy had been stolen from the village and taken to Rantepao for sale to a collector. The villagers were tipped off as to who had taken it, and went to Rantepao to steal it back.

  A group of men gathered to discuss the logistics of house-grave ventilation. A villager named John Hans Tappi had been placed in one of the graves two years earlier. You could see his dark wood coffin propped up in the corner, through the open door. Tappi’s son feared the air inside had been too wet, too humid. “I hope my father is still okay, still mummified, and has not gone rotten.”

  This would be an important ma’nene’ for John Hans Tappi. His son felt that when John died two years before, his family had not been able to do enough for him financially. They could not afford to sacrifice a buffalo in his honor and the slight had haunted the son ever since. He believed that by not slaughtering the buffalo, “my father was not carried to the second life.” That would change this week; the buffalo was already selected and waiting in a nearby field.

  Two house-graves over, a woman pulled open the door and sprayed an industrial-sized can of lemon air freshener inside.

  Up the road a family had slaughtered a pig and were awaiting the arrival of a Protestant priest to bless their new grave, which would hold six family members. They asked if we wanted to join them for dinner.

  Chunks of the pig’s flesh were cubed and placed in bamboo tubes to be cooked over the fire. The pig had been butchered right next to the fire where it now roasted. Pools of pig blood stagnated as we ate, and several lazy flies buzzed around us. The severed hooves hung from a nearby bamboo scaffolding. A small dog dashed in and made off with a piece of the pig’s offal, still dripping blood and fluid. “Ey!” the fire-tender yelled after the beast, but left the dog alone to enjoy his prize.

  A woman offered me a bamboo leaf with a pile of warm pink rice on top. The bamboo tubes were pulled hot from the fire, the flesh still sizzling. Many of the pig chunks were pure fat. Halfway through the meal I held up the bamboo leaf and looked closer at the crisp, fatty skin and saw the hair follicles, still visible. This is the flesh of a dead animal, I realized, and was for the moment repulsed.

  For as much time as I had spent facing human mortality, I didn’t recognize a dead animal that didn’t come wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. French anthropologist Noëlie Vialles wrote of the food system in France, though this could be said of almost any country in the West: “slaughtering was required to be industrial, that is to say large-scale and anonymous; it must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invisible (ideally: non-existent). It must be as if it were not.”

  It must be as if it were not.

  An old woman, so old her eyes had clouded over with cataracts, picked at a small pile of rice and gazed out over the valley. She didn’t interact with anyone around her; maybe she no longer could. Agus poked me with a pork-stained finger and whispered, “This grave will be hers.” He was making fun of her, but also speaking a basic fact. This woman would soon go the way of her ancestors, and would move into this new yellow house, “the house without fire and smoke.”

  Later that night, our pig arrived on the moped. It promptly took up residence under one of the houses and chomped away on food scraps, unaware that Paul and I had brought it here to meet its demise.*

  That night we slept in the belly of the tongkonan house. It seemed enormous from the outside, so we were surprised to climb up the wooden ladder and discover a single, windowless room. Bedding was laid out on the floor, and we fell into a grateful sleep. It was only later in the night that we realized we were wrong about the lone room. Wooden latches in the wall opened into three other rooms. All night long people quietly crawled in and out of the walls around us.

  THE NEXT MORNING began with the sound of a plaintive gong tolling along the village road. This announced the official start of the ma’nene’.

  The first mummy I saw wore eighties’ style aviator sunglasses with yellow-tinted frames.

  “Damn,” I thought, “that guy looks like my middle school algebra teacher.”

  One young man stood the mummy up as another sliced into its navy blazer with a pair of scissors, cutting all the way down to his pants, revealing the torso and legs. Given that this gentleman had been dead eight years, he was remarkably well preserved, with no obvious
gashes or breaks in his flesh. Two coffins down, another fellow hadn’t been so lucky. His body was now entirely shriveled, nothing left but thin strips of dried skin over bone, held together by gold embroidered cloth.

  Wearing nothing but boxer shorts and the aviators, the mummy was placed on the ground, a pillow beneath his head. An eight-by-ten-inch framed portrait photo, taken during his life, sat propped next to his body. Alive, he had looked far less like my math teacher than he did today, eight years into mummification.

  A group of women fell to their knees beside the man and keened, wailing his name and stroking his cheeks. When their wails softened, the man’s son moved in with a set of paintbrushes—the kind you’d buy at the local hardware store. The son began to clean the corpse, brushing his father’s leathery skin with short, loving strokes. A cockroach scampered out from inside the boxer shorts. The son didn’t seem to mind, and carried on brushing. This was mourning as I had never seen it before.

  Ten minutes earlier, Agus had received a call that there were mummies being unwrapped at a hard-to-reach grave by the river. We sped in that direction, running along a narrow dirt path through a rice field. The path ended in a ditch of brown water. With no ford or bridge, we groaned and plowed through the thick mud. I slid down an embankment on my butt.

  When we arrived at the site, almost forty bodies had been removed from their house-grave and lined up in rows on the ground. Some were wrapped in brightly colored cloths, some were in slender wooden coffins, and some were wrapped in cartoon quilts and blankets—we’re talking Hello Kitty, SpongeBob Squarepants, and various Disney characters. The family moved from body to body, deciding whom to unwrap. Some were unknown; nobody remembered exactly who they were. And some were top priority—a beloved husband or daughter whom they missed and couldn’t wait to see again.