by Nigel Barley
All around, greetings were being exchanged and there was a good deal of giggling. Johannis’s grandfather kept himself aloof, his face marked with the gravitas of a butler at an orgy. ‘I do not speak much Indonesian,’ he explained, ‘but I want you to know that in this village I am the old religion. These people are now Christian but still they have to heed what I say. I have declared ma’nene’. Now there can be no cultivation of the fields or building of houses until I end it. Even Christians keep to that.’
I turned to Johannis. ‘You are Christian too?’
‘Yes, I am a Protestant like yourself but for us young people it is less important. We have …’ he groped for a word, ‘… wider thought than the people of Nenek’s generation.’
Nenek snorted. ‘When I was young, I was the same. When I wanted to start learning the religion, the old poetry, they all begged me not to. They said I would always be poor. They were right but there are more important things. He too will learn. He is not a stupid boy.’
On a hilltop stood a church, whitewashed with a spire after the Tyrolean fashion. Behind it stretched row after row of purple brooding hills with no sign of human habitation. Through a gap in the clouds, an Old Testament sky poured light down upon the roof. It looked like the loneliest church in the world. As we walked along, a stream of observations and interpretations poured from the old man with the ease of a sports commentator – history, myths, personal recollections. Many cultures have licensed pundits, their own indigenous anthropologists. They occasionally loom large in the literature of the subject, their names known to generations of students. I had never met one before but Nenek was clearly one of these. I had an assistant. My specialist informant had now appeared. Even though I was only here for a derisorily short time, it was impossible not to start work. With something akin to a groan, I pulled out a notebook and started writing it all down.
A considerable crowd had gathered at the base of a sheer cliff whose face was pocked with square openings. These were the tombs in which the bones of the dead were stored. Unlike other parts of Torajaland, there were no wooden figures, here to represent the dead, each tomb being simply sealed with a wooden panel carved with a buffalo head. In the past, Johannis maintained, there had been such images but now they had all disappeared. At the present festival, the bones of the newly dead were wrapped in fresh cloths and put back in the tombs. A man had been down to the city to buy the cloths specially. Surprisingly, they were of the most garish colours and livid with prints of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
I had hoped to slide in undetected, to creep quietly into a corner and assume the voyeuristic pose of the ethnographer. It was not to be. Nenek was a performer. This was his big event and he was going to make the most of it. We approached through dense undergrowth, invisible to the crowd. Slipping behind a rock just outside the circle of participants, Nenek produced a series of rustlings and gruntings, calling out testily to Johannis to help him. In a few minutes, he emerged transformed, dressed in a red striped outfit with short trousers and sleeves. I remembered one of the exercises from my Indonesian primer. ‘The caterpillar has changed to become a butterfly.’ Nenek beamed and wrestled with the fastening of his necklace, a weighty affair that looked like a string of gold-plated toilet rolls. On top, Johannis draped a chain of boar-tusks that contrived to poke Nenek in the ears. The old man adjusted gold bracelets in the form of snakes writhing up his arms and looked round distractedly for his spear.
Seizing me by the arm as just another prop, he leaped out into the stunned circle of villagers and launched into a lengthy speech, poking me from time to time with the spear to illustrate a point. Johannis rested one hand reassuringly on my shoulder and seemed unsure whether to be proud or ashamed of his aged relative.
‘He is explaining who you are, that you are a famous Dutch tourist, that you are here to honour us and the old ways.’ From time to time, his voice would rise and settle into a rhythm that, even to an outsider, was the mark of poetry. ‘That’s to minaa talk,’ whispered Johannis, ‘the language of the old way. I can’t translate it but – wah, it’s beautiful!’
Finally it was over and Nenek settled on a rock in the centre of the open ground, pointing and rebuking, dominating the efforts of others, grumpily cradling his spear in his arms.
Access to the tombs involves climbing notched bamboo poles some sixty or seventy feet above the ground while manhandling the corpse into the narrow tomb-opening. Several of the sailors from the bus seemed to be in charge of this and they hailed me like an old friend. Would I like to climb up? No? Then perhaps I would like to eat. They themselves, as Christians, were not really supposed to eat a buffalo that had been sacrificed at the tombs, but …
We settled to a meal in the shade of a large tree. ‘No rice,’ they explained, ‘because of death. We eat only manioc – and buffalo.’ The buffalo was tough and sinewy with a thick integument of fat and skin. Each section looked like a boiled slug. The sun was high and uncomfortably hot. A pleasant smell of wood-smoke, buffalo fat and warm humanity hung over the tombs, with the drowsy hum of flies feasting on the blood. Johannis had been deputed to haul a body ready to be replaced in the tomb and stood in the sun, grinning and brushing the heat out of his thick black hair.
Nenek began shouting again and a head appeared in the tomb-mouth and let down a rope to be tied to the corpse. The whole occasion was one of somewhat unseemly enjoyment. The rope was slung about the package of cloth and bones to the accompaniment of a great deal of knockabout humour. As it was hauled into the air, Johannis leapt astride it like a bronco buster and emitted a series of whoops that the other young men took up until Nenek shook with rage and the effort of remonstration.
A circle of men formed up beneath and began the slow death-chant, linking hands in an impassive anti-clockwise rotation. Children were called to join in, fathers and brothers gently guiding their steps into the ancient rhythms. At a signal from Nenek, women infiltrated the circle, men and women calling back and forth to each other in song – a song of death but one in which the ladies were not slow to show their fine profiles and flash perfect teeth. Nenek nodded in approval, his hand marking the pulses of the haunting melody. It hardly looked like a society split by religious change.
One of the sailors suggested that it would be polite to meet the organizer of the festival. I was led away to a group standing around a cauldron of steaming water.
‘This is the head,’ he said, tapping one man on the shoulder. He turned round. It was Hitler.
‘Ah,’ said Hitler, ‘I already know this gentleman.’
I rapidly began to think of excuses and explanations but there was, it seemed, no need. Indeed, he began to apologize to me.
‘There has been a difficulty regarding that object,’ he whispered. ‘I no longer have it. It was confiscated by the police. But I hope shortly to have another and I will contact you again.’
I assured him I would await his visit with bated breath and returned to my seat, sweating profusely.
One rather stout lady seemed worthy of special note for, despite the great heat, she was wearing a thick fur coat and waving at me as at an old friend.
‘Who is that?’ I asked the sailors. They giggled.
‘That is “Dutch Auntie”. She lives in Leiden and has come all the way back for this festival. She wears her coat of dog-fur to show how rich she has become in your country.’
Noting that we were talking about her, she broke away and came to join us, greeting me in Dutch.
‘Sorry,’ I replied in Indonesian, ‘I’m not really Dutch but English.’
‘Never mind!’ she replied. ‘You’re a Westerner like me. I live there now you know. Look how pale I have become. I suffer so when I come to Toraja – the heat, the dirt. In Holland we go everywhere by taxi.’
Johannis appeared behind her, ill disposed to listen to her pretensions. ‘Ah. I remember you. You used to run a noodle stall near the market.’ He cleared his throat and spat.
If looks could ki
ll. Johannis would have dropped on the spot. Dutch Auntie gathered her fur coat about her sweat-bedewed shoulders and stalked off. This was a foolhardy act since she was wearing high heels unsuited to loose rock and she insisted on covering her departure by offering a sickly smile and a wave of the hand over one shoulder. One moment she was there, a focus of pathetic affectation that somehow made me feel ashamed. The next she had gone – plunging over the ledge on to the dancers below. Fortunately no one was hurt. She was later to be seen sitting under a tree while a child fanned her with a banana leaf, all the while wearing her fur coat and asking the names of things, since, as she constantly explained, she spoke so much Dutch she had forgotten almost all Torajan.
In the course of the day, a considerable number of bodies were wrapped and replaced in their respective tombs. On the following day, Nenek would kill a chicken and declare the end of the festival. Then people could go back to growing crops and building houses – the activities associated with life. It was now almost dark and time to head back to the village.
Dutch Auntie collected together her kin and set off in one direction. I, Nenek, Johannis and a group of neighbours set off in another. A young man, leading his son by the hand, invited me in excellent, almost courtly, Indonesian to visit his house near by. It was a fine old building, richly carved and decorated in the local style.
‘This,’ he said with evident pride, ‘is my house. From my ancestors for generations. Those are my fields. My grandfather worked them when I was a boy. Now I work them in turn.’
Nenek was fretful. He wanted to get back to his end of the village before dark but the man who introduced himself as Andareus was gently persistent in his hospitality.
Inside, the traditional house had, like all others I had visited, reached its own compromises with the modern world. A large ghetto-blaster stood threateningly in one corner next to a hideous sideboard carved with traditional Torajan patterns but coloured with gloss paint. Yet this was still an ancient house where ancient patterns of generosity were maintained. Andareus pointed out of the window. ‘My mother keeps on at me to put in a modern bathroom and fill in the bottom of the house with cement but I tell her to bathe in the stream is better and that we must respect an old house. Otherwise it is like an old woman in the clothes of a bar-girl.’
We drank coffee and ate the special cakes of palm-sugar that are a Torajan token of hospitality. Both father and son wore black sarongs, not the shorts that are now almost ubiquitous. It was good to meet a man who seemed to have resisted much of the worst of the modern world, a man of clear intelligence and charm who seemed content to stay in this remote village and cultivate his garden. But such categories were mine rather than his.
‘Where did you learn such splendid Indonesian?’ I asked. ‘Are you a teacher?’
He grinned and switched casually to idiomatic American. ‘I guess I learnt most at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,’ he confided, ‘when I did my master’s in satellite communications. Before I could learn English, I had to do intensive courses in my own national language.’ He grinned and poked his son affectionately. ‘This one speaks English and Indonesian as his first languages but when we come here he can’t talk to his grandmother. He gets real bored. Where I work in Kalimantan we have a swimming pool and a video. He misses that. We only came back for the festival – to rewrap my father’s body. He thinks it’s a lot of bother over a stiff.’
My disappointment must have been evident. Westerners have an inherent tendency to use the rest of the world to think about their own problems. Andareus was no ‘noble savage’ pointing out the inadequacies of our own world. He was rather more of a modern man than I was – fluent with the jargon of computer and electronics. His values were probably much the same as mine. His attachment to the traditional world was as much an outsider’s as my own was. It was seen from the comfort of an air-conditioned modern bungalow in Kalimantan, possibly just a kind of romanticism. He rubbed salt into my wounds by his relentless self-awareness.
‘You see. I only learned to value the old way by going abroad. If I had sat in my village I would have thought of America as the Kingdom of Heaven. So I come back for the festivals. For years we have been leaving the mountains to make a living but we always come back to spend the money here in festivals. This one,’ he gestured towards his son, ‘is different. He knows little of the old way. He grew up abroad. He’s not a Torajan. He’s modern Indonesia.’
Modern Indonesia contemplated us with equanimity, scratching at a mosquito bite.
We set off through the lowering gloom towards the village. Fine dust lay soft under our feet like sand on a tropical beach. Nenek strode away at a pace Johannis and I found hard to match. At a corner in the road that overlooked a dramatic gorge stood a man wrapped in a blue blanket, only shifting over five feet in height but sporting a magnificent lush moustache. He grinned delightedly and shook me by the hand. Not quite knowing how to show friendliness, I admired the buffalo he was guarding, on the principle that if you make friends with a man’s dog, you make friends with him.
‘This,’ he declared, ‘is how I spend my time making arrangements for my buffalo.’
‘Do you have many buffalo?’
‘Just one.’
‘How is it possible to spend all day making arrangements for just one buffalo?’
Nenek barked his amusement and, in a gesture I was to come to know well, pointed a closed hand at me (the polite way of pointing at someone), helpless with laughter.
‘The number has nothing to do with it. It is like a young man who has much hair. He just rubs his hand through it, and it looks good. As he gets older, he has less hair, so it takes him longer and longer to arrange it. So it is with buffalo.’
The buffalo-man laughed too. In fact, of course, both he and Nenek, like most Torajans, had indecently prolific hair.
‘If I had more buffalo,’ said the man, ‘I would be a lord cat.’
‘What’s a lord cat?’
‘It’s a special sort of cat that sits at home and never leaves the house. It never touches the ground. It would be afraid.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘It looks like other cats except that it never leaves the house – unless the owner carries it to the rice-barn to kill mice.’
We talked more about the creature until we arrived at the bridge. Like many Torajan bridges it had a roof and seats were built into it. Bridges make ideal places to gossip on rainy days. From the buffalo-man I learned that lord cats are expected to guard heirlooms that are stored in the rafters of noble houses and in the barns opposite them. They should only mate with other lord cats brought by their owners to the house for that purpose. Once again, the Torajans were talking about their own class system through animals. The cats, with their heirlooms and restricted mating patterns, were modelled on, and models for, noble families.
We parted to trudge to our separate houses but the rain managed to catch us in that relatively short space. We arrived back soaked and shivering. It seemed the right moment to break out a bottle of King Adam whisky, secreted in my baggage. The name ‘whisky’ is a term of misapplied courtesy or extreme irony. The contents are rice-spirit coloured with caramel. Nenek looked at it doubtfully.
‘It is good when you are cold like this,’ I explained, ‘like medicine.’
‘Medicine?’ He homed in on the word. Soon he was sipping it appreciatively, but from a teaspoon summoned from the kitchen. Johannis’s father entered coughing, cast a hopeful glance at the bottle and was about to accept some until his wife appeared and looked righteously at him from the door. Crestfallen, he returned the glass to the table.
‘I do not drink spirits,’ he announced uncertainly.
‘This,’ said Nenek, ‘is making me strong. Come to my house tomorrow so we can talk. Johannis will bring you.’
‘What time?’
He looked at me pityingly. ‘I have no watch. Just come.’
He gathered up his props and leaned over the balcony t
o propel mucus with neat pressure from one nostril. Pausing at the door to shuffle on plastic sandals, he turned round and grinned wickedly.
‘That medicine,’ he said in courtly fashion, ‘could I take the rest of it with me? It really seems to be doing me good.’ He shuffled off into the dusk.
It was the appropriate moment to raise a delicate matter.
‘Where,’ I asked, ‘is the place to “cast water”?’ Johannis gestured vaguely.
‘We use those banana trees down there for small water. For large water it’s a bit difficult here. You have to go and stand in one of the streams.’
‘Where do you wash?’
‘There is a place near the bridge. It is too cold to wash.’
‘Would you show me where it is?’
He grumbled good-naturedly but finally sighed. ‘I will come with you. You will need to wear a sarong. I have stolen little packets of soap from the hotel.’
A Torajan bathroom is a wonderful thing. It is a simple rock enclosure into which fresh mountain water gushes through a bamboo pipe. Modesty is preserved by fixing a stick across the opening and draping a sarong over it. This system works well for those about five feet tall. For anyone over that height, all is revealed. Since, however, it was dark that would not be a problem. Johannis pressed a bar of soap into my hand. We took turns to stand under the thunderous waterfall. He was right. It was too cold but very refreshing. We both seemed to be having a similar problem with the soap, however. It doggedly refused to lather. The water must be very hard. Only when we returned to the house and the light of the paraffin lamp did the reason become clear. It was not soap that he had stolen but little bars of chocolate. We had smeared them all over ourselves.
