Toraja

by Nigel Barley

  The road became abruptly worse, or rather the driver seemed to be aiming for the potholes rather than avoiding them. Bambang began to look green and retch, dabbing at his mouth in a matronly fashion. The driver appeared immensely pleased and puffed smoke aggressively. Most of it went in Bambang’s face. Johannis sat quietly, looking out of the window and clutching his groceries to protect them from damage.

  ‘How,’ I inquired politely, ‘are the eggs?’ Everyone screamed with laughter. I had unwittingly made my first dirty joke. It was explained that I had to ask about chicken’s eggs, otherwise I would be understood as asking how the male passengers’ genitals were holding up.

  After a while longer, we pulled up by a rough shed and drank coffee while the driver unloaded coconuts. There was a lengthy discussion about whether or not the correct coconuts were being removed. ‘See,’ said the owner, ‘I have written my name on them in biro.’ I thought of the cave in Londa, just outside town, where the skulls of the dead have been identified by writing their names on them in ballpoint. The trade in coconuts was a strange one. Some would ship them up the mountain, others ship them down. Possibly the same coconuts were going up and down in a weird antique-dealer’s economy.

  We sat on a rough wooden bench, looking on. Johannis seemed troubled. ‘The driver,’ he explained, ‘is trying to make Bambang ill. But, you see, Bambang goes on with his journey even though he suffers. Bambang is foolish but not a coward. It is the driver who is stupid.’

  Thoughts about the injustice of the world were interrupted by a large, smouldering log that flew low over our heads, followed by a demented cackling.

  A stick-like old woman lurched into view, toothless and dreadlocked. She wore a torn, filthy frock that had once been decorated with a heavy floral pattern. A thick layer of filth caked her face and arms and in her hand she waved another log menacingly. Johannis and I looked at each other. ‘Mad?’ I asked. ‘Mad, indeed,’ he replied. In wordless agreement we took to our heels and from inside the hut regarded her through the wire-covered window.

  She stood outside and sang a song in Japanese, applauded by the passengers. Then came a ditty apparently about American foreign policy during the Sukarno era. I felt I was being given a lesson in political history. Hard on the heels of this followed a song concerning the sexual mores of present-day Indonesian leaders that brought either giggles or growls of protest from the men and led the women to cover their noses in outraged modesty. As for myself, it showed the holes in my vocabulary.

  The driver shooed her away and she contented herself with writing rude words in the dust on the sides of the vehicle and begging for small coins that were nervously yielded up.

  The driver leant back and whispered in the tones of one delivering a great secret, ‘She is a schoolteacher driven mad by her learning.’ He paused. ‘Are you a schoolteacher?’ I thought of Godfrey Butterfield MA. He would have approved.

  ‘Something like that.’

  We set off again through a drizzle that hissed in the trees. Torajaland is one of those rare places where banana-trees flourish next to mountain pines. The road climbed again into the cloud. It felt intensely cold. Abruptly we came to a halt on a mournful plateau covered with scrubby grass. A goat, munching on it, regarded us with detachment. The engine was cut and the world was silent apart from the sound of running water and the scrunching of the goat. A young man climbed out and moved towards a distant house – not a noble structure of carved wood but a shack of haphazard appearance. Women came out and stood crying in desperate wailings that left them gasping for breath. Suddenly, the young man began to sob, his head falling on his chest and big, wet tears streaming down his cheeks. Other men climbed out and hugged each other, crying in the mist. ‘He cries because his friend is dead,’ explained the driver. It seemed that a ferry had capsized between Malaysia and Sumatra. Many of the sailors had been Torajan, for the area is such a tough place to make a living that it is one of the few landlocked mountain regions to produce seamen in large numbers. Many had been drowned. The driver and Bambang got out too and clung wetly together with the others in the rain. Embarrassed, I descended and stood to one side, not wishing to intrude on their grief, staring out over the sodden landscape as if engrossed in contemplation of the goat. An arm reached out, groped blindly at my shoulder and, seizing me by the elbow, pulled me into their world of fellow-feeling. I began to cry too.

  I have no idea how long we stood sobbing in the rain. It may have been for ten minutes, possibly much longer. When we returned to the bus, we were all somehow shriven and chastened, more like brothers are supposed to be but never quite are. The driver now avoided the potholes and blew no more cigarette smoke in Bambang’s eyes. The conversation turned to the harsh life of the seafarer, how he returns from a long voyage and is stripped of his earnings by rapacious relatives. Slowly, we began to laugh again.

  Emerging on the summit of a hill, we saw the town of Pangala’ stretched out below us. It would take another half-hour of twisting and turning down the slope before we would reach it. It was another wooden shanty town, awash with schoolchildren. ‘When I came down the mountain to go to school here,’ said Johannis, ‘I used to have to carry a sack of rice twelve kilometres so I would have enough to eat. I was strong then. After so many years in town, I am weak.’

  We disembarked into another coffee shop as yet another rain squall swept down upon us. Once again people came from the kitchen to look at this strange man – strange not because I was white but because I had asked for coffee without sugar. On the wall was a condom displayed in a glass case like a trophy – part of the family-planning campaign. We learnt, however, that we were in luck. There was a cement truck going up the road to Johannis’s village, carrying material for the new middle school. We would be able to buy a lift.

  Bambang wandered away but many of the other passengers transferred to the truck – including the coconuts. Ropes had been strung the length of the back and we insinuated ourselves into them or draped ourselves over them after the fashion of a flop-house.

  ‘The road is a little difficult,’ confessed Johannis. Indeed a different fare was charged for going up the mountain and for coming back down. It had clearly not been repaired for years and deep pools lowered expectantly at the most inconvenient places. The principal difficulty lay in the tyres of the truck, which were so completely bald that they could grip nothing at all. Where a normal truck would have sailed through mud, ours stopped and slithered helplessly. Where a normal truck would have chugged up inclines, ours simply churned great holes in the road to the smell of burning rubber.

  Whenever we became bogged down, the procedure was the same. At first, we would sit tight and pretend not to notice the difficulty. ‘Turun! Dorong!’ would shout the driver. ‘Get down and push!’ We would clamber down and mill around. Some would watch while others pushed. Then, when almost enough were pushing to get us out, the rest would join in – at which point half the original pushers would stop. Getting a truck out of mud is something everyone has a theory about.

  ‘Planks!’ said one man firmly. ‘What we need is planks.’

  ‘But don’t you think if the tyres were …?’

  ‘No. Planks.’

  Some believed firmly that the thing to do was to shovel mud from in front of the truck and throw it behind the rear wheels. Most of it ended up being sprayed over the pushers. Some would push grass and leaves under the wheels, whence they would be studiously removed by those of a different conviction. Yet others set their faith in rocks. Nothing but rocks would do and they dug them from the road and pushed them under the spinning tyres with naked feet at horrendous risk. One old man dismantled the ropes with painful care and began to pull from the front in a lone, heroic gesture. Johannis sat down and smoked a cigarette while joking with the girls. When it seemed that all hope was past, a man sauntered by with a huge buffalo led by a tiny boy. The little boy calmly hitched it to the front of the truck and it pulled us out with contemptuous ease. A voice came from behi
nd. ‘It would have been easier with planks.’

  ‘I thought Torajans didn’t use buffaloes for physical labour,’ I said to Johannis.

  ‘That,’ he declared, ‘is a slave buffalo. Look at the colour.’

  Anthropologists are raised on books about the Nuer, a Sudanese people who seem obsessed with cattle and their beauty. They have developed a rich vocabulary of colour and pattern to describe their beasts. This was my first lesson in a similar Torajan obsession, a seemingly endless series of terms to describe buffalo size and colour and pattern and horn-shape. It would later be the same when I worked with carvers – an infinite string of discriminations between patterns that I would have classed as the same.

  Johannis, tiring of abstract lexicography, embarked on a much more relevant topic. Should the driver not give us a reduction for the great distance we had actually walked while putatively riding in his truck? Should he not, indeed, be paying us since it was only thanks to our labour as pushers that he was able to deliver his cement at all? The driver, to give him credit, saw the force of Johannis’s argument. So strongly, indeed, did he appreciate it as a threat to his continued livelihood that I soon found myself ejected from the truck and condemned to walk into the village along with Johannis. ‘That man,’ declared Johannis, ‘is an enemy of my family. He is of slave descent.’

  ‘I thought it was only in the southern kingdoms that they had all those social classes, gold class, bronze class, iron class and so on.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Johannis huffily, ‘but we know a slave for a slave even if we’re not supposed to use the word any more.’

  Be that as it might, this was the first time I had ever made enemies before even arriving in a field-work location. I began to wonder if Johannis was not too clever by half to be a field assistant – for I suddenly realized that this was what he had become.

  Johannis’s house was a modern structure, based on the Buginese bungalows of the coast. Built on stilts to mitigate the torrid heat of those areas, it was clear that it would prove bitterly cold at night. We paused to be barked at by a dog, remove our shoes and climb a ladder to the front door, where I cracked my head on the lintel to the considerable pleasure of onlookers. For a Westerner, life in Indonesia is a series of blows to the head. The whole country is built on the assumption that you are not more that five foot six tall. The only time I really hated Indonesians was after a particularly hard crack on the head. As the mist of pain cleared, you would open your eyes to see a group of ecstatically happy brown faces laughing at you. Someone would usually explain that you had hit your head because you were too tall.

  Johannis’s mother had clearly been a beautiful woman in her youth, with delicate features and a natural grace that shone through the torn clothes and careworn face. It was immediately obvious that she was also a deeply pious woman. The house was adorned with an odd mixture of religious symbols. On one wall were the obligatory photographs of the President and his deputy, flanked by the Space Shuttle and the Last Supper – a version clearly after Leonardo but with all the disciples endowed with huge staring blue eyes, like lunatics. Then came a vaguely biblical image involving sheep and children. Last year’s calendar showed Muslim pin-ups of ladies swathed in loose folds of cloth against a background of mosques and sacred texts. This year’s offered semi-naked Chinese whose attractions were largely blanked out by a censoriously placed mirror.

  Only later did anyone bother to introduce Johannis’s father, a worn, shrivelled man who wore the embittered look of one used to being publicly discounted as of no significance. Johannis and his mother embarked on a long account of his doings, his sins of omission and commission. It seemed that he drank, idled, did not go to church. We exchanged glances of mute sympathy.

  From the kitchen came clattering noises and puffs of wood-smoke. Various hunched relatives scuttled in and out in the crouched posture of respect before a guest. We were served sickly-sweet coffee in glasses, while the mother switched to Indonesian to detail her many woes – her poverty, her bad leg, her wastrel husband, her feckless sons, the shortage of onions in the village. Torajans who have not been school-taught find it difficult to pronounce the ‘ch’ sound and some of the consonantal clusters of Indonesian, so that kecil, ‘small’, comes out ketil, and pergí, ‘go’, comes out piggi. It gives their speech a strange, Shirley Temple-like quality of lisping coyness. She concluded, ‘We are old. We have no hope. The boys have all left to go to the city. We pray for a good death, if God opens the way.’ It was a depressing sort of welcome and Johannis was already turning grumpy in the classic way of an ambitious youth ashamed of his parents.

  Various other people drifted in – a cousin, a half-brother. The men were fed a meal of rice and chilli and – absurdly – we were required to rest on mattresses that were unfurled in the middle of the room while the female activities of the house raged about us.

  Gradually, it became clear that the day was being classed as over, despite the fact that it was barely late afternoon. At nightfall, a glaring-eyed neighbour came to light the oil-lamp. – a complex, pressurized affair that no one in the house could master. He, too, joined us in the bed and more and more blankets were heaped over us against the penetrating chill. A strange mould made them glow in the dark. Finally, the mat was taken off the floor and added as well. It was with some pride that I revealed my hot-water bottle. You have to be a real Old Hand to take one of those to the tropics. It was an instant success. Feet probed inexpertly for it.

  Even Johannis was impressed. ‘I expect when you go home you will leave this behind.’

  Night fell and we all lay awake telling stories, bright-eyed and excited like little boys on a camping trip. Someone told of a Buginese magician he had seen in Ujung Pandang. ‘He set up a spear and put a melon on top. It fell down. It was split. Then he took this little boy, five or six he must have been, and balanced him on the spear on his navel and spun him round. We all covered our faces expecting blood. But he was unhurt.’

  ‘Wah!’

  ‘That is nothing,’ said Johannis. ‘I know these Chinese girls, two sisters. You write anything on a piece of paper, tear it up, put it in a matchbox. They hold it under their armpits like this (he squashed his arms against his body) and they can tell you what you wrote.’

  ‘Wah!’

  Their eyes turned in silent interrogation to me. Here was an exotic foreigner, one who had seen the wonders of the world. Who knew what I would come up with?

  ‘Once,’ I said, ‘I met a man in Africa who could control the rain.’

  ‘Yawn! Yes we have that too.’ They sounded bored.

  ‘I once lived with people who cut off human heads and collected them.’

  ‘Oh, we used to do that. What of it?’

  ‘Once I went hunting lions with only a spear.’

  ‘I expect it’s the same as we do with the dwarf buffalo that lives in the forest except buffalo would be even more dangerous.’

  They were already turning on their sides to sleep. It was time for the big one. I reached in my back pocket and drew out a plastic credit card.

  ‘This’, I said, ‘is like money.’ They sat up and examined it in the flickering light, sliding the rays over the holographic image embedded in it. It was solemnly passed from one to another.

  ‘In my country, in the towns, there are machines in the walls. You can put these in and type a number and the machine will give you money.’

  ‘Wah! Wah! Wah!’

  They carefully passed it back and we all settled to sleep. I dreamt of spears and Chinese wizards. I don’t know what they dreamt of.

  An anthropologist is probably the worst of guests imaginable. I would not have one in the house. He comes unrequested, settles in uninvited and plagues his hosts with foolish questions to the point of distraction. Initially he will have little idea what it is that he is looking for. How, after all, do you capture the essence of an alien way of life? Anthropologists do not even agree among themselves what sort of quarry they are hunting – w
hether it is to be found in people’s heads, in the concrete facts of external reality, in both or in neither. Others would view most of anthropological ‘knowledge’ as a fiction created somewhere between the observer and the observed and dependent on the unequal relations of power between the two. The almost inevitable response is to get on with it and analyse precisely what it was you did later.

  In my own case, it was easy to decide where to start. Johannis announced that we were to set off that very morning to a ma’nene’ festival. We should be accompanied by his grandfather on the walk there some five or six kilometres away. Indeed, there in the kitchen sat a sedate old gentleman chewing on a lump of boiled manioc, carrying a spear with its blade sheathed. He laughed companionably at the mere sight of me and offered a chew on the manioc that he then slid into his pocket to finish later.

  The whole village seemed to be in motion. Children leaned out of the houses to stare. They could not get their tongues around Belanda, ‘Dutchman’, so they called out Bandala, ‘box’, instead. From the houses issued a stream of people most of whom were wearing black, the colour of death. The two classes of Torajan festivals were segregated here too, those of the west and ‘descending smoke’ – the festivals of death – and those of the east and ‘rising smoke’ – the festivals of life. Torajan ritual seems totally lopsided, to emphasize death rather than life. This, however, may well be due to the influence of missionaries who have suppressed the relatively licentious rites of fertility, leaving those of death as incongruous as a beached whale. Different forms of Christianity have reached different compromises with the old way. Some churches insist that their devotees must absent themselves from certain parts of the death festivals and not eat buffalo of sacrifice. Others require the faithful to offer buffalo to the church. Some concentrate on the grave images, a Christian must not have one and that is that. Others permit an image as long as it is regarded as a mere memorial.