Toraja

by Nigel Barley

  ‘Yes, all right.’ He walked away whistling a sickly pop-song and kicking the tray as he went. He returned with a beer that he opened with an exaggerated flick of the wrist so that the top was propelled into the air to be caught deftly on the way down. The bottle was plopped down and he slid on to the rice-barn.

  ‘You got a smoke boss?’ I produced a cigarette.

  ‘Where are you from? My name’s Johannis.’ We started on the usual litany of questions and answers. Another waiter emerged yawning and scratching as though from a ten years’ sleep and sat down on the barn. Soon the cook joined us.

  ‘The boss is away today,’ they announced and eyed the beer. Soon we were all playing cards – a game rather like dominoes – and sharing the beer. A child entered on a ramshackle bicycle, was swiftly plucked off it and sat on a lap.

  ‘My cousin,’ explained the cook. A fat man – a neighbour – shuffled in to read the newspaper. He was the driver of a very wealthy Christian lady who had made Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land fashionable. He speculated lavishly on her private life.

  ‘Let’s get some palm-wine,’ said a figure at the back. It was the boss’s son, clearly throwing in his lot with the reprobates. Soon foaming bamboo tubes of the brew were standing around. Johannis fussily insisted on transferring the contents to an enamel teapot before pouring it into glasses.

  I received an impromptu introduction to the various kinds of wine. We tried highland and lowland, the sort with red tree bark, fresh and day-old. It was an excellent frothy brew. It is perhaps the strongest argument yet advanced for the existence of a benevolent deity that you can prod a palm-tree with a knife and extract a wholesome and heady brew, palm-wine, as sap. The sugar of the sap is fermented by natural yeasts. The older the brew, the less sugar, the more alcohol. Unless tampered with, it is extremely pure, having been filtered through the entire length of the tree-trunk. Its only disadvantage is a strong laxative effect.

  ‘You like?’ I liked and was rewarded with slaps and hugs. The conversation took a more philosophical turn. Indonesian television finds Britain a source of much cheap copy so people tend to have views on the country. Mrs Thatcher was discussed at length and found to be good because strong. In Indonesian politics strength is good in itself regardless of the ends to which it is put. Also, she was beautiful. Curiously, even here the British royal family was a focus of attention. The recent marriage of Prince Andrew had been much appreciated though enthusiasm had outstripped comprehension. It was widely believed that the male character involved was Prince Charles who had taken a second wife and must therefore have converted to Islam. But now the devil seemed to have us all firmly by the neck.

  ‘Let’s go cock-fighting. Puttymen like cock-fighting?’

  ‘In the old days,’ explained Johannis, ‘this was more than just an entertainment. If you had a problem with someone and needed to decide the quarrel between you, you could use the fighting cocks.’

  We were led behind some houses and across a yard. The cook seemed to be having difficulty walking. Ducking under some washing, we came out in a large cleared space containing some fifty men and boys all looking about furtively. Someone came up and remonstrated with Johannis.

  ‘They were not happy to have a tourist here. It is illegal. But I explained you were a friend. Anyway, that man is a policeman.’

  People broke up into little knots and conversation intensified. Money was waved around. Someone began to shout and collect cash in a straw hat. Two huge, glossy cockerels were whipped out from under sarongs and preened relentlessly. Vicious steel spurs were attached to their dew-claws and the owners prodded and poked the birds at each other to excite their hostility. These seemed, however, to be particularly pacific beasts, far less aggressive than Torajan horses. They cooed at each other and rubbed necks adoringly. It does not take much anthropological or even popular Freudian flair to see an association between the virility of the cock and that of its owner. Torajans clearly made the same association. Sniggering broke out and the owners began to blush, their faces turning a deeper brown. Johannis slung an arm around my neck and giggled, holding his little finger out and drooping it suggestively. One of the owners broke into a heavy sweat and began to slap the black bird. Suddenly, it squawked and shot into the air. There was a brief, inconclusive flurry of feathers as if both birds were trying to get into the air but were too heavily laden. Blood seeped through the chest feathers of its opponent and it slumped over. The black bird stamped exultantly on the corpse of its defeated rival. It lay inert and broken like a limp bundle of rags. An object of pride had become an embarrassment. Squabbling now broke out among the men, shouting and waving of fists. The man with the straw hat plumped it back on his head, money and all, and stood rock-like and grim, his arms folded across his chest.

  ‘They want their money back,’ explained Johannis.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That man shoved a broken chilli up his bird’s bum.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  The policeman emerged from the crowd and began a pantomime of moderation, fluttering fingers raised in supplication as though beating down flames.

  ‘Now he wants the money,’ said Johannis delightedly. ‘Can you imagine anyone trusting a policeman with money?’

  The victor seized washing from the line and began to gesticulate dramatically with a tablecloth.

  ‘He wants the leg of the dead chicken. It’s his right.’

  The owner of the defeated chicken grabbed its corpse by a leg and brandished it in his opponent’s face.

  ‘Now he wants to be paid for his chicken.’

  A woman emerged and began shouting louder than them all.

  ‘What does she want? Did she have a bet?’

  ‘No. It’s her tablecloth.’

  Rantepao offers little to those in search of nightlife. Most houses are clapped up and firmly shuttered by eight o’clock. The market contains the odd late reveller buying soap or cooking oil. Occasionally, the cinema offers attractions such as Wallowing in Mud, a very mildly erotic story of ‘night butterflies’. Apart from this, there is only the crossroads as a focus of nocturnal activity. Here, people come and sit blankly, wrapped in their cloaks, and gaze at the empty streets. Trishaw drivers doze in their seats and banter with each other, all buses having ceased their raucous clamour for passengers at nightfall – about six o’clock.

  One or two street lamps cast a feeble pall and illuminate piles of vegetable rubbish left over from the day’s trading. Dogs root in them with a desperate optimism. Groups of schoolchildren cluster under the lights like moths – no not like moths – boys in one group, girls in another, eyeing each other with the excitement that comes from mutual ignorance.

  As I passed later that evening, a lone figure in the flimsy shirt of a high-school student detached itself from a group and hailed me.

  ‘Hallo, boss. Where you go?’

  ‘Johannis! Why are you in a school uniform?’ It was always hard to place the ages of Indonesians. Surely he was too old to be still at school?

  He waved a book at me. Introduction to Biology. There’s no electricity at my house and they complain if I burn paraffin just to read, so we have to come here and study under the street lamps.’ A wave of post-imperial guilt struck me. I thought of my own world of bedside lamps, scholarships and libraries.

  ‘You are still at school?’

  He sighed. ‘I should be married but, yes, I am still at school. I have to keep stopping my studies to go back and work in the rice-fields. Or I work at hotels to get the money for school fees. It takes so long. One more year and I can finish. Then I can look for a job.’

  ‘What sort of job?’ He looked at me as if I were mad.

  ‘Any job. My parents are getting too old to work in the fields. We sons must help.’

  ‘Do you work tomorrow?’

  ‘No. Tomorrow I go to a funeral.’ He seemed visibly cheered at the prospect. ‘Hey, why don’t you come too?’

  ‘A funeral? Wouldn
’t people mind?’

  He laughed. ‘No. The more visitors, the more honour. We go together. I don’t want to go to the hotel. I might see the boss. You come here tomorrow at eight. We find a truck together. It’s polite to wear something black.’

  I was wakened by the sound of cockerels. My sins were coming home to roost. A muffled yelling and slamming of doors suggested that the boss had returned and that our debauch of the previous day had not gone undetected. An atmosphere of sultry guilt, of walking on eggs, hung over the establishment. I slid out without breakfast.

  Johannis was wearing a black T-shirt with the legend, ‘Born to be a Winner’ and a pair of jeans labelled ‘Bing Crosby’. The only black shirt I had was one from the Thai family-planning campaign, showing condoms in the poses of the three wise monkeys. Johannis assured me it would do fine. The government was pushing family planning. They would think I was a big Bapak from a ministry.

  Torajan funerals are inherently jolly occasions, at least in the later stages, for grief is long behind them. The body may well have been kept for several years while resources are mobilized and people summoned from abroad. Migration abroad has long been a response to the harshness of life in the mountains. But Torajans always come back – especially for festivals such as this.

  It was only a small event by local standards. Some funerals cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are visited by ambassadors and cabinet ministers. This was a local affair. It would be family, friends, neighbours. The truck dropped us off at the end of the tarmac road. There was a walk of several miles up slippery tracks whose churned-up surface was a testament to the popularity of the event. I struggled and slid in my shoes. Johannis grinned and slid off his flip-flops, gripping the earth with splayed, horny toes.

  We fell in with a group of other people labouring up the hill with burdens that I knew I could never manage, long bamboo tubes of palm-wine overflowing gently with froth, two men with pigs, converted with rattan loops into handbags that they tucked under their arms. Six men laboured under the burden of a huge sow whose belly dragged along the ground, so that it squealed and struggled. All were laughing and shouting.

  ‘They will get to eat meat,’ explained Johannis. ‘In Toraja, it’s rare to eat meat. Often, we have to make do with rice and chilli.’ I thought of those mournful meals on the road from Mamasa.

  From afar, came the sound of a gong and an abrupt and incongruous cheer. Rounding a corner, we gained a broad view across the valley to the festival site. Immediately the whole convoy came to a halt. A large two-storeyed barn had been erected, looking rather like a film set. It overshadowed the traditional houses, gleaming with modern gloss paint in the sunlight. Long cloths fluttered from poles, snaking out over a crowd that seethed and boiled around the house stilts. Wood-smoke hung heavy in the air. Across from the houses were the rice-barns, weighed down under the throngs of visitors.

  ‘Wah!’ Johannis pointed in excitement. ‘A bullfight’

  It was not what we think of as a bullfight, a heavily armed man against domesticated cattle. It was two enormous water buffaloes pitted against each other, huffing and puffing like Sumo wrestlers. Their owners had led their ponderous charges on leads attached to rings through their noses. Their horns were adorned with red streamers. As with the cockerels, the secret was to push and prod them at each other until they lost their tempers, locked horns and fought. The owners had to dodge out of the way without looking as if they were doing more than stepping casually to one side. There came a mighty crash as the heads smashed into each other, horn on horn and bone on bone. The crowd roared. The horns shoved and twisted. The larger of the two suddenly broke and fled like a distressed matron, scattering a chaff of little boys before it. To their delight its owner, decked in all his finery, fell headlong in the mud and the charging buffalo was turned by an urchin who threw clods of dirt at it. The man picked himself up and looked into his beast’s eyes in reproach.

  ‘You see,’ said Johannis puffing out his chest, ‘one is big but the little one is brave and tough. Just like you and me!’ He slapped me on the back and laughed.

  We had arrived in good time. Raddled, hung-over faces bleared at us from every doorway. Children wandered forlornly between the structures carrying food. Hawking, throat-and nostril-clearing noises came from all directions. Children waved and called, ‘Hallo mister!’

  Johannis asked directions and we were pointed to one of the houses. After much interrogation from above, a wrinkled little old man descended the steep ladder. To come downstairs elegantly in a long skirt is apparently an exercise set for débutantes. This man was a master of the art. He raised his black sarong with one hand and came down face-forward, somehow gripping the ladder with his heels. I produced a pack of cigarettes from my bag and they vanished inside the folds of his attire. ‘Number fifteen!’ he said. All the buildings were numbered.

  The occupants of number fifteen were a cheery bunch, vaguely related to Johannis. They had already begun drinking palm-wine and the woven walls had absorbed the agreeable smell of clove cigarettes and marks of previous roistering. They fell into a long conversation in the course of which Johannis became increasingly quiet and began to blush. As he became quieter, the others laughed more and more. A group of old ladies in the corner muttered and hid their noses. Johannis refused to say what the conversation was about.

  His friends, however, were eager to translate and increase his discomfiture.

  ‘It is a matter of bamboo,’ they explained, nudging each other. Bamboo?

  ‘Yes. You see at festivals like this that last for several days, we have the chance to meet girls after dark – people from far away. Sometimes, if they are willing, they meet us apart. Johannis met a girl last time in the bamboo clump. But bamboo makes you itch – you know. You have to scratch your skin. The girl’s mother found marks on her daughter’s back and beat her.’ He clapped his hands. ‘It was wonderful! How she cried! But she was clever. She didn’t tell Johannis’s name. All she would say is that she had been there to smell the flowers.’ To smell the flowers?

  ‘Yes,’ said Johannis miserably. ‘My family name is Bunga, “flower”. To smell the flowers, to kiss Bunga – it is the same in our language.’ He looked lovelorn and suddenly very small.

  A little child appeared at the bottom of the ladder and beamed up at us. Johannis looked angry and swatted at him. In his hand, the waif held the genitals of a bull killed the day before. By inserting his fingers at strategic points, he was able to produce a sudden and alarming erection to be waved in the faces of guests.

  ‘Come,’ said Johannis determinedly. ‘We shall go and see the body.’

  It appeared that the deceased was female and had been kept in the house for nearly four years following her death, the juices of putrefaction being absorbed by copious wrappings. There was certainly no disagreeable odour emanating from the large bundle that contained the cadaver.

  ‘Nowadays they cheat,’ said Johannis, ‘with formalin from the hospital.’

  The body was stored in the front room of the house, the walls being swathed with rich cloths and patchwork quilts. The outer covering of the corpse was bright red, the same shade exactly as the child’s tricycle parked beside it. Johannis ignored the body.

  ‘That’s a fine tricycle,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pushed a switch and it began to emit a police siren and flash red and blue lights. ‘ Wah!’

  A man leant against the body, smoking. He got up from time to time and swatted at a gong. It was the sound we had heard from across the valley. ‘Not just anyone is allowed to do that you know,’ he said with the sense of power of a car-park attendant.

  It is hard to know what to do when being shown a body. Admiration seems inappropriate. Should one comment on the size of it? It seemed better to limit myself to vacuous questions of the royal-family-being-shown-industrial-wonder sort. How long? How exactly? Religion of deceased? Polite, slightly impressed concern seemed to be the emotion to display.

  A young man en
tered and reached behind the body, stretching until he was almost lying on top of it to pull forth a cache of cassettes stored there. He dumped them on the body and dug around again for a large black boogie-box. He inserted a Michael Jackson tape and danced off, buttocks gyrating to a blare of saxophones. Cassettes were left spilled along the corpse like a colourful offering. There was a notable absence of awe and piety in the presence of death.

  An insistent hammering noise came from the roof. I looked up. It was galvanized iron and rain was falling. In the old days, it would have been the soft patter on bamboo tiles.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they’re rich people here. The best part is that if you don’t have the traditional roof you don’t have to spend all that money on ceremonies – killing pigs and such. It leaves money for the children’s education.’ Clearly, it was a theme of Johannis’s life.

  From outside came a blaring, barking noise. The portholelike windows were flung open and below could be seen a portly Chinese figure in immaculate shorts, yelling through a portable loudspeaker. The most impressive thing about him was an enormous paunch that seemed more an optional bolt-on fitment than an integral part of his person. Only gradually did it become apparent that he was shouting in French and that behind him trudged twenty or so puttypersons all of whom were complaining loudly. At the rear there were three or four Indonesians who seemed to have nervous tics.

  ‘Wah!’ said Johannis with pleasure. ‘Tourists!’

  They entered the village like an invading army, pushing camera lenses into people’s faces, sitting on the rice-barns in their shoes without invitation. They gave nothing but declared loudly that they were not having fun, that they were bored. The Torajans looked at each other in consternation and arranged to give them coffee. Most rejected it. Then rice was offered.

  ‘We don’t eat rice!’ a red-faced woman shouted.

  Another was trying to buy one of the cloths, grabbing at the textiles on the house front. Through the interpreter it was explained that it was a borrowed heirloom and not for sale. She looked sour and stalked away.