by Nigel Barley
‘Nenek, one buffalo is for you. We would have to pay for your ticket and look after you there.’
An expression of relief swept over his face. When were we going to England? If it was immediately, he would need to buy quite a lot of areca-nut.
‘That,’ said Bismarck with authority, watching him go, ‘is a good old man. You are working with him?’
I told him about the exhibition.
‘I am delighted. For once, the people who make things will get the money, not crooks and dealers like me. I have a big house here, lots of land. If you need help or want to store things, I will help. No charge.’
I found it hard to think of Bismarck as a crook. Perhaps, on second thoughts, he did have very little to do with Hitler.
* * *
Johannis and I returned to Baruppu’ and found not only that Nenek had returned but that his daughter had too. She bore all the marks I had come to recognize of a Christian Torajan worthy woman. Nenek and I would wander away from her somewhat heavy virtue and talk about the old ways. In the evenings we would play a sort of party game where he and his neighbours would dig out their old heirlooms or even old everyday objects and talk about them.
Nenek was particularly proud of his tall pedestal rice-dish, standing some three feet tall, the stem of bleached buffalo bone that was the prerogative of a to minaa. Another man had beautiful wooden vegetable dishes carved with buffalo heads. Others had old swords and cloths.
‘These are not toys,’ explained Nenek. ‘They bring wealth to a house. We need them for festivals.’ He had a cautionary tale about ancient cloth that had been sold and brought misfortune to all until it was returned to the house where it belonged. He brought out a square of very soft, very thick fur with two cords attached. ‘What is this?’
I turned it all ways. Johannis prodded quizzically at it. A grin split his face. ‘I know.’ He placed it delicately on his head like a toupee and tied the strings. Nenek and his cronies rocked on their heels with delight. In a single smooth movement, Nenek snatched it off his head, tucked it under his buttocks and sat down.
‘In the old days, Torajans only had rocks to sit on. So we used these.’ He pulled out another strange thing, long and pointed with bulbous swellings at either end. It was made of bone or very hard wood. It looked a little like one of those mushroom-shaped objects that women used to use for darning socks. I shook my head. Again Johannis leaped in.
‘It is used for mending the holes in socks.’ Nenek and I laughed at such a naive thought.
It was, Nenek explained in a low voice, the Torajans’ secret weapon against Buginese men. Johannis and I looked at each other blankly, while Nenek was delighted by our puzzlement. He explained, cackling, that it was a penis-bar, inserted crosswise in the male member and drove Torajan women wild with delight. This was the reason that any Torajan women who slept with a local man in the old days, would never look at Buginese men even with their long noses. Johannis went silent and looked thoughtful.
I was surprised to learn that Nenek had a wife in another part of the village.
‘We don’t live together any more,’ said Nenek. ‘She became a Christian. All my children have become Christians. I am the last one left. But they keep going on at me. I say I was born in this religion and I will die in this religion.’
Nenek seemed to have been undermined by a surprising tolerance. ‘They get this religion from school,’ he declared. ‘If it wasn’t for school no one would change, but it’s good too. Without school, we would all be ignorant like in the old days.’
It was sad to think that when he died the old religion would die in Baruppu’ too. There was no one left who wanted to undergo the burden of committing to memory the thousands of lines of verse that constitute the knowledge of a priest. It was hard not to cast Nenek in the role of an embattled bastion of tradition. Yet he was someone who had engaged the modern world. At one time he had been a dealer in coffee. During the Japanese occupation, he had hidden Chinese Indonesians in the village. He had learnt to speak Indonesian and to read and write by sending grandchildren to school and making them tell him, at the end of each day, what they had learned. He had taken what he wanted from the modern world and left the rest. But Torajaland was a place where the self-evident opposition between traditional and modern was difficult to maintain. It was income from modern tourism and jobs in the Indonesian state that fuelled the ritual inflation that seemed to be going on all over the area. People who would not have been permitted sumptuous funerals in the old days were investing in them now, converting their cash into status – rather as nineteenth-century English industrialists spent their fortunes on ruinous country estates. Even a Christian funeral required the presence of a to minaa whose traditional wisdom would be chanted through a loudspeaker. Yet when I mentioned my plan of taking Nenek to London to the village head, he was aghast.
‘You can’t possibly,’ he said. ‘It’s not fair. He hasn’t even been to school. I have. I know the names of almost all the railway stations in Holland.’
The next time I saw him I asked, ‘What would happen, Nenek, if you went to England? No one could declare the time for death ceremonies. No one could tell them when they could start building houses again.’
He laughed. ‘That’s no problem. In the old days we did it by the stars not the calendar. I’m the one who decides when the stars are right. I can do it when I like. Let’s just go. My body is old but my heart is young. I love new things.’
It was time to take my leave. I had managed to extend my visa once. I would not be able to do so again. Nenek and Johannis saw me to the end of the valley. Torajans are uninhibited weepers and we were all the worse for tears.
‘If Nenek comes, Johannis, you must come too.’
He grinned. ‘If God opens the way.’
With the corniness that only deity or Hollywood allow, there was a beautiful rainbow over the valley.
‘That means good luck,’ said Nenek.
I wondered whether I would ever see them again.
The Return Match
For once, my pessimism was misplaced. It took only two years and five visits to Sulawesi to get every stick and twig of the materials necessary to construct a rice-barn back to London. The shipment included rocks to be ground into paint, rattan for the roof and the largest pile of bamboo I have ever seen. Only then was it possible to bring over four carvers to build it inside a gallery of the Museum of Mankind in the heart of the city. It was surprisingly difficult to ensure that it would neither fall through the floor (people do not usually weigh rice-barns) nor extend upwards through the ceiling. There were some very low points along the way.
When I first returned with the exciting news that the project was on, Nenek failed totally to recognize me. In my mind I had often imagined this scene. He would, of course, cry. Probably so would I. But a year had passed since we met and all putty-men look the same.
‘I cannot possibly go with you to London. Last year, there was an odd Dutchman who came. I promised I would go with him.’
Another bad moment was when the trucker who was supposed to bring materials from the village to Rantepao attempted to renegotiate the contract en route and ended up by dumping everything by the roadside. It became a matter of desperate urgency to get it moved before the first rains came. By then, difficulties had compounded themselves to the point where I arrived in Ujung Pandang with two enormous lorries of wood, nowhere to store them, a ship due to sail the next day and no money to pay anyone. Before we could embark material, it had to be inspected and documented three times. We ended up, in the rain, at ten at night, with the entire shipment spread out in the road, trying to photograph it in the dark. A minibus drew up and from it sprang Nenek with as much sprightliness as his seventy-odd years could muster.
‘I have come to help unload the wood,’ he announced. ‘Are we leaving for England now?’
The only factor that triumphed over all these difficulties was the astonishing helpfulness of ordinary Torajans. They
helped not because they were being paid or because it was their job to do so, but because they saw I needed help. The final blow was the devaluation of the Indonesian currency in the midst of the operation which, far from being an unexpected windfall, nearly wrecked everything as all banks refused to change money for some two weeks. It was typical of the Torajan hotelier that when I explained my total absence of funds and my need to leave without paying, he simply shrugged. ‘I know you will send me the money as soon as you can.’
Personal documentation had been a major difficulty. It is very hard to get travel papers for a man who does not even know how old he is. The forms that needed to be filled in seemed perversely ill-adapted to carvers living up a mountain in Indonesia. Telephone number? Educational certificates? Income in money? Even remembering names and ages of all children defeated the younger men. They worked out that one had eight children and one seven, but did not know their ages or even relative order of birth. That was the sort of thing only women knew.
Nenek made matters worse by changing his mind half-way about who should accompany him, so that when I returned to Baruppu’ the village was split into warring factions, each of which felt it had been wronged and expected me to put matters right. Then there were predictable hitches. It is always awkward to get spears and swords on to jet aircraft, yet they were part of Nenek’s priestly outfit and he would not be parted from them. Less predictable were problems in Java, where the word Nenek can only be used of aged females and the Immigration Department were ill-prepared for a man to be so called.
Nevertheless, quite suddenly, they were here in an English ‘hot season’ with the wind and rain howling outside the house. It seemed only fair that, as I stayed with them in Torajaland, they would stay with me in England.
The carvers were like a history of Torajaland in miniature. Nenek, in his seventies, was a high priest of the old religion and was in overall charge. Tanduk, a large affable Christian in his early forties, would do most of the heavy woodwork. Karre, an irascible Christian in his mid-thirties would do most of the carving and the roof. With some justification, he was known as ‘the buffalo’. Johannis, now a student of English and a modern pagan, would be a channel of communication and general link-man.
From the start, they were amazingly adaptable. As carvers, they were used to the idea of working away from their homes and families. Johannis was the only one who had lived in the city, but Nenek had already once experienced an aeroplane and loved it. Technological toys held little wonder for them. It is true that they were amazed that English telephones would permit people to speak to each other in Indonesian and never tired of using them. Central heating they adored, as do I – I had had it put in in preparation for their coming. But it is always true that electronic gadgets, which cannot possibly be understood by a layman but must simply be accepted, cause less sustained speculation than human abilities. They, who had come to astonish the English with woodworking craft, were fascinated by bricklaying on building sites – the speed, the economy of movement of skilled workers. It was always difficult to get Nenek past a building going up. He would stride amongst the brickwork asking questions. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Why do they do that?’ ‘How much does a crane cost?’
The problem with some novelties lay precisely in their being assimilated to something Indonesian that they already knew. While it is normal to stand in an Indonesian bathroom and simply throw water all over yourself, in an English bathroom the consequences can be disastrous. While there was no problem about turning taps on, they would never remember to turn them off, since in Torajaland, water simply gushes eternally from a bamboo pipe. They never quite believed me when I told them it was safe to drink the water from the tap without boiling it and furtively continued to take their own precautions.
I confess to taking a certain pleasure in noting that they found it as impossible to cross an English road as I did an Indonesian one, but rapidly found that I was developing the paranoia of a parent. I found myself planning routes so that they crossed as few roads as possible and noting pivoting paving slabs so that I could warn Nenek against them. The smallest journey became a nightmare of imagined dangers and snares for their unwary feet. It sometimes seemed as though they had been sent exclusively to make me suffer what I had made my parents suffer as a child.
‘Come and eat!’ I would say. ‘Yes,’ they would reply. Fifteen minutes later, they were still sitting carving.
‘In ten minutes we must leave,’ I would warn them. But when we tried to get through the door they would still be in sarongs watching television.
In the early years of this century, the American anthropologist Boas took some Kwakiutl Indians to New York. Apparently, they were unimpressed by the tall buildings and cars. The only things that struck them were bearded ladies in Times Square and the knobs on the ends of banisters in lodging houses. It is impossible to predict what people from another culture will find remarkable.
The first shock for them was that all British were not white. West Indians look to them like Irian Jayans, the Indonesian half of New Guinea, so they tended to expect them to talk Indonesian. Chinatown did not surprise them. ‘Chinese are good at business. They get everywhere.’ Indians they would assume to be Arabs. The most mortifying experience was to discover that there is no slot ‘Indonesian’ in English folk categories and that they themselves would be regarded as Chinese.
A second shock was that all Europeans were not rich. Admittedly, they had seen young puttypersons in Torajaland playing at being poor, but everyone knew they would be carrying larger sums of money than a Torajan farmer would see in a lifetime. Why did I have no servants, no car and chauffeur? They were distressed by the drunks who roam the streets of London, being unused to situations where you pretend that people shouting at you are not there. That people should have no work and receive money from the government staggered them like right-wing Tories. Surely they had misunderstood? Were these people not pensioners? Had they not at some time been in the army and were receiving money for their wounds?
They arrived at a moment of high political activity, just days before a General Election, and were amazed at the lack of respect we show politicians. ‘We would go to jail for that!’ was their constant cry. Yet it should not be assumed that they envied us our freedom. To them, it appeared more as lack of order, as messy and reprehensible ill-management. Johannis summed it up swiftly. ‘I see that England is a place where no one respects anyone.’
The position of the Queen puzzled them too. Like many foreigners they found it hard to imagine the relationship between a female prime minister and a female sovereign and drew the inevitable conclusion that only women are eligible for positions of power in this strange land. ‘It is like the Minang people of Sumatera,’ they opined with appropriate ethnographic example. ‘There it is the women who own everything and the poor men are sent abroad to work for them. You are just like them. We are sorry for you.’
The offices of sovereign and prime minister became confused. They kept asking why the Queen had not stood for political office. It also worried them that I did not have her picture on the wall as, in Indonesia, one would have the President’s portrait.
Certain concessions had been made towards the Torajan way of life. It would be easier for me to change than to ask them to. Beds were unpleasantly soft. They preferred mattresses on the floor. Instead of spreading themselves around the house, they all slept in one room. ‘If we had a nightmare and slept alone, who would comfort us?’ Spittoons were essential for Nenek’s habit of chewing areca-nut. It is very hard to buy spittoons in London.
In their first few days, two things troubled them more than any other – the unearthly hush in which English people live, and lavatory paper. Where was the noise of cassette-players, honking traffic, street-pedlars, screaming children? They could not sleep at night. The only sounds were owls, always frightening, associated with witchcraft. To Torajans, a good house, a successful family, is characterized by bustle and children and the presence of
a constant stream of visitors that would drive a Westerner mad. Eventually they took to playing pop-music very loudly till they fell asleep. As for lavatory paper, it was simply the most appalling thing they had ever heard of. They were deeply shocked by European lack of hygiene. ‘English women look very attractive,’ said Tanduk, ‘but when I think of the lavatory paper and how dirty they are, it puts me off.’
In all this, our positions were suddenly, ludicrously reversed. I became their informant trying to explain my culture to their relentless probings. Not surprisingly, they often found my explanations inadequate. One element of the exhibition was a Torajan water-powered bird-scarer. As the water flows from level to level of the rice-terraces, it operates a clever pivoting mechanism that makes a loud noise. This is sufficient to frighten away birds and other predators. At the bottom of our version was a pool of water. Every day, people threw money into it. Nenek was intrigued by this. Why did they do it? Did they think an earth spirit lived in the pool? I was unable to enlighten him. ‘They do it for luck,’ or ‘It is our custom,’ – neither satisfied him. He would walk round the gallery every day to look at it and inquire the value of each coin, muttering his amazement. ‘When I am old,’ he said, shaking his grey locks, ‘I shall come and live here and dig pools – so people can throw their money in.’
We travelled to the museum every morning by underground train. They liked that a lot and rapidly became masters of it. Fellow passengers were sometimes alarmed to see them climb on hugging pieces of wood they had insisted on carving at home the night before. Initially, Nenek had difficulties with escalators. Although he could run over a greasy log bridge in Torajaland, where I would have to get down and crawl, he found it hard to cope with staircases that moved or the motor skills involved in standing up in a moving train. It was only a matter of time until the source of the problem was tracked down. It was shoes. The wearing of shoes is the mark of formal dress in Indonesia – the equivalent of wearing a tie. Not to wear them at all, or just to wear sandals, is the sign of being a rustic. People who have gone much of their lives unshod have very broad feet and find it painful to cram their feet into shoes. Once Nenek had been persuaded not to wear them, he was able to walk much better and no longer teetered perilously on the escalators.
