Love and Death in Bali

by Vicki Baum

  Love and Death in Bali is the book I have extracted from these papers after trying to discard what was redundant or too involved. It is concerned with a historical event which is known in the story of the colonization of Bali as “Puputan,” that is, roughly, “The End.” Nevertheless, it is not in the strict sense a historical novel, but rather a free rendering of actual occurrences.

  Names and characters have been altered and the order of events is sometimes arbitrary. For example, the burning of widows at Tabanan took place three years and not three months before the dispatch of the punitive expedition. The Dutch officials of that time are nearly all still living and were, as I know, good friends of Fabius, who spoke of them with the greatest esteem. Men like Liefrinck and Schwarz are renowned for their knowledge of Bali and they love the island dearly. The officials in Fabius’s book have not only been given other names but are fictitious characters, who have no connexion with the real persons they represent. When I went through his manuscript I came upon many liberties of this kind, which I have no doubt were intentional. So I left them as they were. Clearly it was his aim to present the truth from the inside, even at the cost, when he thought it necessary, of sacrificing outward accuracy.

  Similarly, I have taken the liberty of ending the story with the conquest of Badung. Fabius’s interminable manuscript goes on to the final colonization of other districts as well, where very much the same events occurred as in Badung. The Lord of Tabanan committed suicide with his son when he was taken prisoner and in Klungkung there was the same wholesale recourse to self-inflicted death—a puputan—as at Badung. Moreover, it seems to me that in Fabius’s eyes the simple and, in the deeper sense, pacifist existence of the peasant Pak was perhaps of more importance than the collisions in Bali between the vigorous Realpolitik of Holland and a heroic and medieval pride of arms.

  Since then the Dutch have carried out an achievement in colonization that reflects the highest credit on them. Scarcely anywhere in the world are natives free to live their own lives under white rule so happily and with so little interference and change as in Bali; and I would like to believe with Doctor Fabius that the self-sacrifice of so many Balinese at that time had a deep significance, since it impressed upon the Dutch the need of ruling this proud and gentle island people as considerately as they have, and so kept Bali the paradise it is today.

  The introductory chapter, put together from diary notes of Doctor Fabius, is concerned with the present day. The tale itself embraces the years from 1904 to 1906. For help and encouragement in sifting and examining the mass of material my thanks are due to: The Resident of Bali and Lombok, Mynheer van Haaze-Winckelman, Mrs. Katharane Mershon of Sanur, Herr Walter Spies of Oeboed, and many other of my Bali friends.

  Bali has become the fashion. When I came back from the island, where in many places life and customs have remained unaltered for thousands of years, I found an irruption of Bali bars and Bali bathing costumes and Bali songs. I need not say that Doctor Fabius’s book has nothing to do with this Bali—if only because this Bali does not exist.

  Vicki Baum

  Introduction

  When I got home from the little Government hospital, where I had spent the whole morning attending to various cases of fever, severe bamboo cuts and tropical ulcers, I found a bicycle leaning against the wall at my gate. I hurried across the courtyard, for I was curious to know who my visitor was. My Dutch friends like to make fun of me because my place is built in the native style—a house of whitewashed daub with a portico, surrounded by a number of smaller buildings or balés. Balés are raised platforms with roofs of alang-alang grass resting on posts. Many balés have one or even two mud walls and they can be sheltered from sun or rain by matting. Life is cheerful and pleasant in these balés and only the house itself has real walls. The whole plot is surrounded by a wall above which palms and fruit trees grow as high as a forest.

  On the steps of the open portico sat Ida Bagus Putuh and a step higher squatted the sculptor, Tamor. They were from the village of Taman Sari, near the coast and several hours distant from the foothills where I lived. Both clasped their hands and raised them to their shoulders in greeting. Ida Bagus did it with punctilious ceremony, but Tamor, who had modern ideas, did it with a laugh, showing his white, evenly filed teeth, as though he did not take the ceremony quite seriously. Tamor was a good-looking and talented fellow, who sometimes carved figures of quite astonishing beauty. He was fond of wearing brightly colored sarongs and beautiful head-dresses, which he wound round his small Egyptian skull with an air all his own. He had a red hibiscus flower stuck behind his ear and was smoking a maize-leaf cigarette which had a sweet smell of spice and cloves. His fine torso was hidden by a dirty, cheap Japanese shirt, for that was the height of fashion with the younger generation. “Greetings, Tuan,” he said cheerfully. Beside him was a coconut-fibre bag, in which, I knew well, he had a new carving to show me. “Greetings, Tuan,” Ida Bagus Putuh said also. “Greetings, friends,” I said, and looked at them both.

  Putuh, who knew that I was somewhat old-fashioned, was dressed in the old Balinese style, and was as smart as though he were paying a visit to a raja. He was naked to the waist, with long, beautiful muscles beneath his light brown skin. He wore a gold-threaded saput round his waist and hips girding his hand-woven silk kain. He had even stuck his kris in his girdle behind his back and its beautifully made wooden hilt projected above his shoulder. Putuh, too, wore a flower; it was in his head-dress above the middle of his forehead, but it was not an hibiscus flower but a yellow champak blossom. Its stronger, sweeter and more aromatic perfume pervaded the whole portico—the perfume of Bali—and it was already beginning to fade. Ida Bagus Putuh had a quid of sirih, betel, lime and tobacco, in his mouth, which was not so becoming, and at intervals he skilfully spat a jet of red liquid clear of the steps right into the courtyard.

  “How long have my friends been here?” I asked out of politeness. “We have only just come,” was the reply, and this, too, was merely a polite formula. The two of them might very well have been sitting on the steps for five hours, squatting and smoking contemplatively with the inexhaustible patience of their race.

  Ida Bagus is the title of those who belong to the highest caste of Brahmans. I had a suspicion that Putuh, though not half my age, was quite as old-fashioned in his way of thinking. In earlier days his family played a great part in his village and far beyond it. It produced many great priests or pedandas up to the time when the great disaster overtook Putuh’s father. Now they were poor and lived quietly in Taman Sari and Putuh labored in the rice-fields like any sudra. But he had a dignity beyond his years, and, as I have said, he was of a conservative turn of mind and kept to the fine manners of the older generation. The Balinese in general have very little idea how old they are. Their mothers, after six or seven years, get the dates mixed up (and no wonder with the complicated Balinese Calendar) and then they give up counting. But certain events, of which more will be said later, occurred when Putuh was two; and since these events became a landmark in Dutch colonial history it was a simple matter to reckon Putuh’s age. He was thirty-two years old at this time according to our reckoning and nearly twice as old if the days of the year are reckoned as two hundred and ten according to the Balinese Calendar.

  Although Putuh was a modest man, and Tamor’s intimate friend, he had taken care to sit a step higher, as was due to his caste.

  I sent for coffee and lit my pipe, which never failed to excite astonishment and amused admiration in the Balinese. Both men now stared at me with open mouths. These people are adepts at registering wonder: their upper lips, arched in any case, curve right upwards, their nostrils dilate and their elongated eyes, which look sad even when they are laughing, take on a fascinated expression. “Mbe!” they say, full of amazement. “Mbe!”

  Conversation began to flag, as it was meant to do. We circled round the object of their visit in many an elaborate phrase. As for Tamor, it was clear from the start that he had carved somethin
g which he wanted me to buy; but whether Putuh had accompanied him merely out of a liking for me was not so easy to discover. He sat and chewed, keeping his mouth open and smiling all the while—a rather complicated exercise—and now and again an anxious and intent look came into his eyes.

  Tamor announced that he had brought Putuh with him on the back of his bicycle, and Putuh added to this that he had really intended coming by the motor-bus but fortunately Tamor, too, was going to my house on business of his own. The Government had made good roads by which the few cars of the Dutch officials and the native rulers could travel in all directions, as well as an occasional, fully loaded, rackety prehistoric bus. The natives, however, love their Japanese bicycles, and even women may be seen on them in their bright-colored kains with little packages precariously balanced on their heads.

  “What has my friend got in his bag?” I asked Tamor at last, when I thought that full honor had been done to preludes and politenesses.

  “It is nothing,” he said modestly. “Only a bad carving.” “May I see it?” I asked.

  He slowly opened the fibre bag, unwrapped a carving from a piece of rag and put it down on the step near Putuh’s naked brown feet. It was a simple and vigorous piece of work—a doe and a stag in the moment of coming together. An arrow had pierced the male in the flank and both their necks were arched back in a way that expressed anguish and the pangs of death. I looked at the two beasts with emotion. Suddenly I was aware that I had once seen something like it many, many years before. Then I remembered. It was Tamor’s uncle who had tried to carve them—in defiance of the style of his day. The memory came back with a rush as I felt the smooth finely worked satinwood in my hands.

  “Has my friend ever seen a carving like this before?” I asked. Tamor smiled in surprise. “No, Tuan,” he replied.—”I must therefore beg forgiveness.”

  I had fallen in love with the piece on the spot and knew that I should have to have it. But first there were many ceremonies to be gone through. I praised the carving, while Tamor maintained that it was bad and worthless, unworthy to stand in my house and that he was a wretched beginner and bungler. Joy and pride in his work shone meanwhile in his honest eyes, in which there was the innocence of an animal. I asked him the price and he assured me that he would take whatever I chose to give and that he would be happy to be allowed to offer me the piece as a present. I knew that Tamor was a good salesman and that, like all Balinese, he loved nothing better than earning money to gamble away at cock fights. He was merely counting on the fact that I would offer more than he would venture to ask—and so it proved.

  The deal concluded, Tamor knotted the money in the folds of his silk girdle; but still Putuh had said not a word about the motive of his visit and it would have been impolite to ask him straight out. Perhaps he had been unable to pay his taxes and wanted to ask me for a loan, but in that case he would have come by himself and secretly, not with Tamor. The conversation dribbled on. The rainy season would soon be here. The heat had been bad for some days on end, particularly when you had the sawahs (the rice-fields) to plough. There had been a corpse-burning at Sanur, the next village to Taman Sari, nothing to speak of, only simple folk who shared the cost among them, about thirty bodies in all. There were a lot of squirrels among the coco palms and they had had to get together and frighten them off for a night or two with torches and clappers. The Lord of Badung had taken a girl of Taman Sari as wife, a Gusti from the lower nobility of the Wesjas. At next full moon there was to be a three-days’ temple feast at Kesiman. The rice-fields did not yield as much as they did in the old days. The rainy season would soon be here and then there would be an end of the heat.

  After we had canvassed all these little village topics, the conversation completely dried up. The Balinese think nothing of squatting through an hour or two in silence, and the gods only know what goes on meanwhile behind their placid foreheads. But I was still smelling of the iodoform and carbolic of the hospital and was eager for my bath. I begged to be excused. That was really only a joke, for properly speaking it was for my visitors to beg leave to go. They clasped their hands and raised them to their left shoulders and I withdrew to my little bath-house.

  I had my bath and drank my home-made arrack. My servants brought me my meal to another balé—cooked rice and roast sucking-pig bought in the market, vegetables colored yellow with kunjit and flavored with various strong spices—papayas and pisang. After that I lit my pipe and lay in a bamboo chair to read the latest magazines. As Bali has a direct air-line with Holland, we are only ten days behind the rest of the world with our news. Sometimes it almost puts my brain in a spin when I think of our little island, so ancient, so unique, so like paradise in spite of every innovation, so unspoilt, being linked up so closely with the rest of the world by aeroplanes and large steamers and tourist agencies.

  I read myself into a doze and did not wake up until my little monkey, Joggi, jumped on to my shoulder and began gently searching through my hair. The sun meantime had moved across the sky and the palms and bread-fruit trees in my garden threw long shadows. My cook’s mother was crossing the courtyard with a palm-leaf basket containing offerings. I watched her—a lean figure with shrunken breasts—as she busied herself at my house altar and did those reverences to the gods which I, as a white man, did not know how to do. Now my house was assured of divine protection. The air had grown cool and the doves cooed in the cages suspended from the eaves.

  An hour or two had gone by when I returned to the other house. It still smelt of champak flowers and Putuh still sat on the step chewing sirih. Tamor appeared to have gone. I went to the gate and looked for the bicycle. It had gone. I was sure now that Putuh wanted to borrow money of me. If you did not pay your taxes within two years, your fields were taken from you and put up for auction. I put my hand on his shoulder to reassure him. “Had my friend something to tell me?” I asked. He took his sirih out of his mouth and put it down on the step.

  “I ought not to burden the Tuan with my trivial affairs,” he said politely. “But I know that the tuan has a good medicine for sickness and I hoped that the tuan would give me medicine for my sick child.”

  “Which of your children is sick?” I asked, forgetting to address him with the formality beseeming his caste. Perhaps he took it for the familiarity permitted among equals, for his face brightened.

  “It is Raka, Tuan,” he said. “He has the heat sickness.”

  “Why didn’t you bring him with you?” I asked severely. “You know that anyone who is sick can come to me in the sick-house.”

  Putuh looked at me with brimming eyes. His smile took a deeper meaning. It was the saddest smile imaginable.

  “The child is very weak, Tuan,” he said. “He would have died on the way. His soul is no longer with him.”

  Putuh had three wives, one of whom had left him. Of these three wives five children had been born. Raka was his eldest son. I knew Raka well. He was a slender little fellow, six years old, and a wonderful dancer. The Guild of Dancing of his village paid a celebrated teacher in Badung to give Raka lessons in dancing. They were proud of this child in Taman Sari and they hoped he would become a great dancer and be an honor to his Guild. And now Raka had malaria and was delirious; his soul had left him, and his father had been seven hours at least in coming to me and telling me about it.

  “You are Raka’s father,” I said sternly. “Why did you not come to me before? Will you people never learn that you must go for the doctor while there is still time?”

  Putuh let his head fall with an expressiveness peculiar to the Balinese. “Raka’s mother is a stupid woman,” he said. “She has no more sense than a buffalo cow. She sent for the balian and he gave the child medicine. It is good medicine, but the child wishes to go to his fathers.”

  The hopeless fatalism of this put me in a rage. I rushed for my bag, and seizing Putuh by the arm I dragged him to my car, heaping reproaches on him all the while. I could scarcely refrain from calling the village doctor, the witc
h-doctor, the balian, a stupid old buffalo. The native doctors can cure many ailments with their exorcisms and herb lore, but in the case of many others they are powerless. For malaria they decoct a brew from a bark which contains quinine, but not enough quinine to be efficacious. Many balians came to me in secret for quinine pills, which they then reduced to powder and mixed with their brew. But the doctor of course was not so clever a conjurer as that. As we rattled along in my battered Ford it occurred to me that Raka might very well have died meanwhile and that the soul of this child who was to have been a great dancer might by now be astray in the darkness of the unknown. I could hear myself upbraiding Putuh on and on without restraint and at the top of my voice as we went noisily over the bridge which spans the abrupt gorge at the end of my village. Putuh listened to me quietly and when I had done he began to smile once more.

  “What the gods will must come to pass,” was all he said.

  Raka was not to me just an ordinary patient. I had seen the child dance the kebjar at a temple festival a short time before. What intentness in his small face, what ancient wisdom in his eyes! On that occasion the thought came to me for the first time that he must, as the Balinese believe, have already lived many lives. I suddenly felt that I could realize what ancestor was born again in the little Raka, and who it was who had once more been made manifest in order to return to the island once more and to live again—to live a new life with the same sweetness and bitterness as the old, but with fewer mistakes and aberrations and one step nearer perfection, and that Balinese heaven whence there is no longer the necessity to be born again. For moments together during that dance it seemed to me that the little figure in the golden robe was not the child Raka, but the older Raka, his forefather, the radiant, glamorous Raka of other days—the man whom everyone loved, who had erred and been punished and who had been purified by his own efforts, so that he came back to earth not as a worm or a scorpion, but as a child and a grandson and a dancer as he himself had been. I loved little Raka as I had loved the other in earlier days; and the old car went far too slowly to suit my impatience.