by Nigel Barley
‘There are many people here,’ I commented.
‘Yes. It is the place for prostitutes.’
Unfortunately, he used the euphemism kupu-kupu malam, ‘night butterflies’, ‘moths’, so that it was some time before I realized the chief attraction was not the Lepidoptera.
Finest of all were the orang-utans (from the Indonesian for ‘forest people’). When their keeper went to see them, they leapt upon him with cries of joy, draped their great arms around him with an almost Indonesian need to hug and were carried off on his motorbike – one on the handlebars, another on the pillion.
We walked back through the market-place where one of the most successful lines was Lady Diana talcum powder, with the inevitable sheepdog fringe on the can.
‘There is,’ said one of the loungers, ‘another Englishman in town. At the university. He teaches English. You must go and see him.’
‘Well, I didn’t come to Indonesia to see Englishmen.’
‘Englishmen do not like each other? How strange.’
‘What is his name?’
‘Godfrey Butterfield MA.’
Godfrey Butterfield MA lived in a block of flats in a slightly seedy part of the city consisting of old Dutch houses, leprous with damp. With its white stucco and black shutters it seemed to have vaguely Tudor ambitions. Inside were dim lightbulbs, sisal carpeting, signs of economy. A creaking cage of a lift aspired to the fifth floor. Large doors led off a landing. Some stood open to allow air to circulate, but all had an outer door of steel bars as in a jail cell.
A young Chinese appeared, clad only in a sarong. It was the same pattern as my own.
‘Haro. I Markus. You come in. You sit down. Godfrey still resting. You like dlink?’ It almost seemed as if I was expected. He poured an enormous glass of something and tonic. Ah, not gin, rice-spirit. Further signs of economy. He bustled off to another room and there was the sound of voices. He reappeared and waved his hand like a compere introducing a performer.
Godfrey Butterfield MA was also clad in a sarong. A man in his sixties with sparse grey hair. Ridges of fat cascaded down his chest like terraces of rice-fields on a hillside. Women’s breasts wobbled as he walked. He seized the proffered glass of something and tonic, drained it and held it out for a refill.
‘Hallo,’ he said, without surprise. He had a smoker’s voice, hands heavily stained with nicotine. There was a rattle of kitchen equipment offstage. Godfrey deposited his bulk with the practised balance of a man shooting a bag of nutty slag down a manhole and adjusted his sarong modestly.
The sarong was the only modest part of him. He launched into an uninterrupted monologue concerning his many talents, the beneficial effects of the climate to which he attributed his staggeringly good physique, the advantages of right-wing politics. No reply seemed called for. The rattle in the kitchen transformed itself into another Chinese but this time trousered and in glasses.
‘Godfley. I think pleasure-cooker blow up in three minute.’ The pleasure-cooker must be another sign of economy.
‘Right,’ said Godfrey briskly, ‘so you know where you are, this,’ he indicated Markus, ‘is number one wife. This,’ he motioned towards the young man from the kitchen, ‘is number two wife. That’s how it is.’ He carefully scrutinized me for reaction and found none.
‘Let’s sit on the balcony.’
So there we were, then, Godfrey Butterfield MA, teacher of English, cast, like many an Oxbridge man before him, on this distant shoal by the wrack-tide of a life of drink and pederasty.
Godfrey Butterfield MA installed himself comfily and began a recitation of the central events of his life. It did not occur to him that there was any other possible subject of conversation. I could tell it was a performance smoothed by much repetition. While talking, he held binoculars up to his eyes and studied the scantily clad workmen who were building a tall block across the road. It seemed that he had a wife, seldom visited, in the south of England who was referred to as ‘the old bag’. He had come via the RAF in Singapore.
‘All gay in those days. Don’t know a single one who wasn’t.’
Having been seconded to the Dutch after the war, he had somehow never gone home.
‘There goes that man in the red shorts again.’ Indeed, a very dark man in red began guiding a hopper full of cement. He grinned and waved to Godfrey.
‘Corker!’
Reluctantly, he put away the binoculars and regarded me.
‘You,’ he said, ‘must be a teacher.’ It was not meant to be a Compliment. He went off and wrestled with the pleasure-cooker.
Number one departed to a lecture at the university where he was a student. Number two, Nico, favoured me with an account of the many rich and beautiful people who had wanted to sleep with him and been refused, while Godfrey returned and threatened us with the contents of the cooker. Something had gone seriously wrong with the chicken. We ate it as a sort of savoury jam, while Godfrey explained the need for firm government and the benefits of a royal family.
‘The longer I live away from England,’ he explained, ‘the clearer all this becomes to me.’
There would be a tin of Lady Di talcum powder in the bathroom. It was time to make excuses and leave. Godfrey insisted on driving me back. Behind the building was parked an ancient but immaculate Morris Minor, incongruous amid the mysteries of the East. It exhaled a smell of waxed leatherette and Surbiton. As we entered, a young man turned the corner of the building. Godfrey leered outrageously and waggled elephantine buttocks in a gesture designed to be alluring. The young man executed a wide circle around us and looked back in a mixture of horror and disbelief.
‘Ah,’ said Godfrey Butterfield MA, ‘he was interested. You could see that.’
Sailor Ways
The ship of the state shipping line was a surprise. It was brand new and immaculate. The passengers were a very mixed bunch. Several puttypersons were immediately obvious, the young ones going steerage class, the older ones first class. It seemed proper for me to plump for the middle way, a six-to-a-cabin arrangement.
The steerage-class passengers dwelt in vast, vinyl-upholstered pits where they slept in cousinly entanglement or watched videos. Towering Inferno was the big favourite. Their food was the same as everyone else’s except that they were allowed to carry it off and enjoy it anywhere on the ship while we were penned in hot, musty dining-rooms where waiters waged war on those wearing plastic sandals. In our own culture, the tie draws the line between the formal and the casual. In Indonesia, the same distinction is made through footwear.
As we sat through the first of many meals of rice and fish, we were addressed in hushed tones by a waiter.
‘There’s been a knife fight. One Buginese got killed. Eat quickly. I have cewek waiting on the dock.’ We bent over our plates in masculine solidarity and gobbled away.
The steerage passengers were a volatile and emotional group. Mostly dark Javanese, they were carrying their entire lives in cardboard boxes and bound for a new life as immigrants in the forests of Irian Jaya. For almost all, two children had not been enough. They sat in gloomy groups watching their native Java, and everything that was familiar, disappear for ever. Old people wept. The young looked frightened but excited, ready for a new life, humming Western tunes, sporting T-shirts with Western slogans they could not understand. I wondered how they would fare in the isolation and boredom of farming settlements. A smiling girl wore a T-shirt which was stamped, ‘You’re beautiful when you’re angry. The rest of the time you look like a pig.’ She asked me to translate. I thought it best to leave out the bit about the pig. Such clothes were very fashionable, they agreed, but dangerous. Dangerous? Yes, there had been the case of a young man who discovered he was wearing a T-shirt supporting Israel. There were shocked gasps.
The various puttymen were swiftly adopted by Indonesians who gave them tea, pored ceaselessly over maps offering wildly inaccurate counsel and questioned them endlessly over the West. The crew devoted themselves to table-tennis and r
aces round the ship, giggling, in life-jackets. The passengers were requested to join in.
In the evening, a dance was organized. Most went to enormous lengths to look their best. Among the steerage passengers the cardboard boxes were torn open and plundered of their concealed finery, bright sashes and red shoes. On the upper decks, well-manicured administrators delved into their Gucci luggage for lightweight suits and Dior scarves. Then they all went to the ballroom and sat bolt upright on hard chairs listening to a group of young men singing in pop-pidgin. Everyone was silent and serious as at a classical recital. Children, ramrod-straight, scrubbed, hair gleaming, crossed their arms and behaved like little saints. The singer advanced to the microphone and began a sobbed and gasped version of an English song. It was clear that he did not understand a word of what he had internalized; indeed, he had merely learned certain English sounds that were mixed liberally with gibberish.
‘Oh baby. I smug plag pigbum ergle plak. Oh yeah.’
On deck, a full moon was illuminating a seascape of classic beauty. In the bath-warm distance, gallant little fishing vessels bobbed and bucked in glassy isolation as on a corny lacquer tray. Flying fish dived in and out of the spray in our wake, flashing their fins in the moonlight.
I leant on the rail, feeling vaguely poetic. It was a scene for a Noel Coward sentimental encounter, a prelude to shipboard romance. From around a bulkhead appeared an aged puttyman, smoking a George Burns cigar. We looked at each other in mutual embarrassment. He indicated a splodge of light in the sky with the wet butt of the cigar.
‘Uranus,’ he growled in a whisky voice, ‘or maybe Pluto. I not sure.’ The accent was heavy Italian. A green glow lay low on the horizon.
‘Venus?’ I essayed.
‘Venus? Si, is possible.’ The drone of an aeroplane became audible. Venus began flashing and moved off rapidly towards Java.
‘Which way are we heading?’
‘We go north … or maybe south-east. I was in the Italian airforce but I forget.’
A door opened and the pop-singer’s voice blew across the ship
‘Oh girl. Ee chiliwzdid tagko dud. Oh yeah.’
At sea, the world rises early. A mosque had been established at the rear of the vessel. Many of the faithful, the sophisticates of a world religion, had compasses set into their prayer-mats. More reliable than the Italian airforce, they showed clearly that we were headed due east like all those magic carpets. Infidels such as myself found ourselves stranded at the top of the ship since there was no way back that would not involve wading through the worshippers. Land was close – the territory of true ethnography as opposed to this no man’s land of East and West. The first island appeared on one side, houses on stilts clustered away from the seaward side. It looked like heaven but it could be hell to live there. High-prowed Buginese sailing vessels converged like moths around a flame.
A tangle of cranes and derricks were etched against the horizon. Flying fish reappeared about the prow. No, not flying fish – something else. Used condoms, a tribute to the burgeoning Indonesian rubber industry, two children enough. We sloshed towards the harbour. As we entered, a dead dog washed out to meet us, nested on a bed of curled condoms.
Delay, obfuscation. Army officers from the first-class cabins were bowed and scraped about by soldiers carting their chattels and respecting their wives. The emigrants lurked darkly aboard, crouched behind fortified positions of cardboard boxes. Finally stairways clanged against the sides. We had reached Sulawesi.
On the ship, I had found a pulp travel-magazine containing two articles of ethnographic import. The first dealt with an area of Africa where I had previously done field-work. It transformed the local people into a mere fashion accessory, an amusing example of certain extreme forms of self-ornamentation. The second was concerned with Sulawesi and the Toraja. It dealt with the ‘explorations’ of an intrepid lady reporter. She described herself as ‘plunging’ into the Toraja area, ‘fighting her way’ across country and ‘pitting herself’ against the mountains. From the route described, it was quite clear that she had confined her endeavours to the tarmac roads and probably travelled by bus. This troubled me since I had noticed in myself a tendency to think in the same terms. The West sees it as the duty of the East to be savage but also mysterious. A little brutality is also found to be titillating but should not be of the crude African sort – rather something of exquisite complexity. The lady journalist had met these requirements by including an otherwise totally irrelevant section on Japanese war-crimes in the area. The occupation forces had, it seemed, not merely brutalized the inhabitants but introduced flower-arranging as well. It all looked a little desperate.
* * *
The city of Ujung Pandang was clearly not ethnographic territory as such. It was hot, dusty, only marginally cooler than Surabaya.
The best spot in town was obviously the waterfront, where people gathered to sit on the harbour wall and watch the sunset as food stalls were set up on the landward side. Small children came to bathe in the filthy water, wading out some quarter of a mile before it shelved away steeply. Inside an expensive tourist hotel, a sanitized version of the food stalls had been set up at ten times the price. Foreigners could be seen gazing wistfully at the children who seemed to be having all the fun, screaming with joy as they jumped off the piles that supported the hotel over the water. Their favourite sport was taunting a pot-bellied security guard out on to the piles and then leaping joyfully into the sea, leaving him swaying in terror and unable to turn round.
‘Sometimes,’ said a man next to me, ‘there are sharks. It is the ships you see. The rubbish attracts them.’ He settled to watch in anticipation of a gory cabaret and run through the fixed litany of questions I had come to expect. Where was I from? How long would I stay? English women, was it true they were cold though they slept with anyone? I fought back with my own list. What was his work? Where was he from?
‘I,’ he announced proudly, ‘am Buginese. Look at my nose.’ He turned his head sideways so that I would have the benefit of his profile. ‘We Buginese have fine long noses like Europeans.’ He rose. ‘Ah, I believe I see a shark … No it is just a shadow.’ A pity. There would be no floorshow.
‘Will you eat a coconut?’ Delighted. He whistled expertly and gestured with his fingers. There was a padding noise and a small boy appeared out of the darkness clutching coconuts by their tufts like trophy heads. He plonked them down together with two spoons and a cleaver and vanished again. My companion dealt the nuts a couple of blows of judicious violence, rather like a Japanese occupier not engaged in flower-arranging. The milk was fresh and slightly tart but rapidly cloying to a sticky mustiness. My long-nosed friend dug out slivers of meat with the cleaver, smooth and slippery like raw fish. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘go out there to the island. It is a good place.’ He nodded with his proud nose. When we had finished with the nuts, I returned the cleaver to the stall-holder. The nuts had already been paid for but it seemed proper to give him a hundred rupiahs for the use of the cleaver. His entire body became a machine for expressing joy. It is nice to be able to make someone’s day for seven pence.
The motives of anthropologists, like those of others, do not stand close scrutiny. Field-work offers many satisfactions to the ethnographer. One is that he ceases to belong to the impoverished part of the population and becomes, in relative terms, a man of wealth – the sort of man who can blow seven pence in a gesture of sheer altruism. There is great pleasure in being able to bring a smile to other people’s faces, a joy that is all the greater through being done with someone else’s money, and very cheaply. All the Protestant virtues are simultaneously satisfied. Left-wing anthropologists are especially prone to the seductions of being able to behave like local gentry and dispense benefaction. It provides an immediate and entirely false feeling that you have got close to the people.
‘Now,’ said my friend, ‘we will go to my house where there is a meeting to practise your language. You will give us a talk on “First
impressions of Indonesia”. Try to keep it down to an hour.’
‘An hour?’
‘Yes. We have founded a group called the English Club. We meet for one hour most days. You will be able to meet my friends.’
I met his friends, and his cousins and his mother. I met a whole class of small boys in Muslim hats who were taken away from the Koran to talk to me in English. I answered questions about the royal family, traffic lights and the etiquette of eating asparagus, and gave a quick analysis of the shipbuilding industry. At the end of the evening, I fled back to the hotel.
‘You will come again tomorrow?’
‘I will see. I might leave for Toraja tomorrow.’
The next day was to be spent in making contacts and general preparation before ‘plunging’. Unfortunately, it was a national holiday, the fortieth anniversary of the Indonesian declaration of independence. Almost everything was shut. The streets were filled with crocodiles of neat children being marched off to patriotic events. They raised little fists in the air, faces stern with nationalist fervour, and shouted, Merdeka, ‘Freedom’. Then they collapsed in helpless giggles, reproved by a teacher who could not avoid smiling herself. Men wandered round town rather vaguely setting up flags, clutching aluminium poles like disoriented javelin-throwers. The highlight was a cycle-past, dominated by a bicycle transformed with silver foil into a torch of freedom. Unfortunately, there was a strong side-wind from the sea so that it wobbled all over the road and collided with a giant goldfish carried by eight little girls in an effort to promote fish as a source of protein. A man from the Ministry of Agriculture processed around town on a truck spraying water in the faces of the populace, while schoolboys dressed as stalks of rice danced to demonstrate their vigorous growth under the effects of insecticide. A sort of renegade exhibit existed in the form of a motorbike patiently converted into a giant snail. While its message was far from clear, it would suddenly appear from the most unexpected directions at high speed, swerve through the other floats and fall over. It was all terribly good-natured and showed that enviable Indonesian ability to find pleasure in the most unlikely places.
