by Nigel Barley
“You see why I live here. Bali is the only place I have known where it is possible for me to love humanity in general. I feel myself humbled and civilised by their goodness.”
I thought I saw tears in his eyes and, indeed, felt them briefly in my own. Then, over his shoulder, I glimpsed something that distracted me.
It was one of the most beautiful images I had ever seen, something stepped straight from a painting. A young girl leaned against one of the palm trees, barebreasted, in a bright, flowery sarong, a gold necklace around her slim throat and red hibiscus plaited in her hair. The artist in me flared up, rearranged her in a lying posture, no wait, she was reaching up to pluck blossoms from a tree, no, some kind of fruit – memories of Eve, unspoilt, innocent – a passion fruit! She was perfect. I was shaking with artistic excitement. Over by the coconut palms, she thrust one leg forward and scanned the horizon. I pointed, stayed Walter’s hand on the wheel.
“Stop! Walter, don’t you see? My perfect model. The absolute essence of Bali. I must find out who she is. I must paint her to save my soul!”
He looked round in alarm, then rested his forearms on the wheel and laughed deep and hard, shoulders quivering, incapable of speech. “Bonnetchen! Ha ha. You can’t … Ha ha … Don’t you know …?”
Over by the palm trees, the nymph leant back again languidly and raised one arm in a melodramatic pose that showed the profile of her full breasts to advantage. Walter patted my knee comfortingly.
“Poor Bonnetchen! Sometimes you talk like a romantic novel written for schoolgirls. You are not the only artist who lives here. Look, there is a Belgian painter who lives in Sanur, Le Mayeur. You might like his stuff, all pretty pastel shades and wobbly post-impressionist boobs. That is Ni Polok, his model. He never paints anything else, worse than Monet and those damned water lilies. Whenever I bring tourists here – er … visitors – he sends her down to the beach to lurk among the trees like the Loreleimaedchen and lure them back to the house where he sells them a painting of her. God knows he’s got hundreds and they’re spreading all over the world. You will have noticed that she is somewhat lacking in artlessness. She used to be a famous legong dancer before she got old.”
“Old? But she can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.”
He gunned the engine. “The career of a legong dancer extends from the falling out of her first teeth to the onset of menstruation. After that, the pretty ones get snapped up as concubines in the royal houses and the others are sent back to the fields. And you had better not cross Le Mayeur since he is very well connected. It is said that the local controleur was upset by the fact of a white man living openly with a native and tried to deport Le Mayeur. Le Mayeur wrote to his cousins, the Belgian royal family, who phoned up their cousins, the Dutch royal family, who gave the Governor-General a rocket who arranged for the controleur to be shifted to a hellhole in Timor. Since then, people don’t cross him and you shouldn’t either.” He slapped the side of the car, shouted to the woman who laughed, waggled her backside coarsely at him and trudged off humming. In the back, the boys blushed and whispered.
We drove slowly along the coast, heading south, the road cutting inland to avoid bays and inlets but with occasional vouchsafed glimpses of sea and sand. Resem and Badog held up their sarongs like streamers, whooping into the hot wind, till they were dry, then slipped them back on, once more becoming perfectly behaved choirboys. Walter’s eyes were busy in the sky. Suddenly Resem shouted and pointed and he let out a hunter’s cry of triumph and veered off, bumping down a bank of razor grass towards the sea. A deep thrumming rang out through the undergrowth and then, all at once, a great beast reared up over the trees, black and red, with whiskers of white – a huge kite, treading the wind, its snout out to sea. When we ran out onto open beach, there were six men hanging on to it, chests heaving, muscles straining, holding on for dear life and giggling as one bounced along on his behind.
As everywhere, Walter was welcome here, an old friend, handshaking, patting shoulders, trading smile for smile. Immediately, one man made way for him on the rope and his shoulders tingled with its energy as it bucked and dived against them, his hair flying in the breeze, at once fitting into the team, knowing the right thing to do.
“Bonnetchen!” He gestured me over, put my hand on the rope, let me feel the surges of zithering power. “Kites are important here, a thing of men. They have heads and hearts. This is a bebean, a catfish kite, but there are other kinds. Did you know there is a special temple for kites? And kites have magical power. They join earth and heaven, stop disease and the mice that eat the rice. A man who flies a kite, like us, performs a public act.”
As if sensing my disbeliever’s touch, the kite folded immediately into a slow dive and the men began, as one, to run in the opposite direction, wailing, stumbling over each other and me until the behemoth skittered to the ground with a reasonably gentle thud and a crack of bamboo and we all fell over and lay there in a heap, laughing till our lungs ached.
“There you are,” Walter stretched and turned his cheek back and forth against the damp sand, enjoying its cool abrasion. “We are winning, Bonnetchen. Little by little you are becoming human, a giggler, despite yourself. You see, you are beginning to enjoy your own stumblings. And now we must bring you closer to God.”
We drove on, the car almost coasting on its own, engine hushed. Turtle Island lay out a small distance to one side with little boats plying back and forth. We stopped and ate in the shade of some trees. A poor family, burned black by the sun, broke off from work on their salt pans to watch us large-eyed. The boys happily ate rice from banana leaves, off to one side. Walter, of course, had thought to bring sweets for the thin, dirty children and cigarettes for the adults and was greeted like one of the deities that descend, at regular intervals, to dine at Balinese temples and dispense the small change of their blessings. We moved on again.
“This is a special place,” said Walter.
“But you say that about everywhere!”
He looked surprised, then considered. “That’s true. But then every place is special”. He dug sand out of one ear pensively. “The Balinese have no history, Bonnetchen. Most peoples divide time into sacred time and everyday time. The Balinese live every day in sacred time so they go straight from family reminiscence to myth and myth soaks into the soil.” We drove along the narrow peninsula towards Nusa Dua, a bare, arid contrast to the lushness we had just left, one of those geographical oddities that finds no human use. “This has always been a wild place,” said Walter. “A sort of hunting reserve for the royal family, with a few fishermen here and there – criminals, runaways, even lepers at one stage. Oh and it is the very best place for snakes. There are more snakes here, and bigger ones, than anywhere else in Bali.”
On all sides was rank vegetation, mangrove swamps, featureless mud. The road suddenly began to rise and we whined up a series of hairpin bends in low gear, nasty dry branches reaching out to touch and scratch us and then stopped.
We were on a narrow headland that rose towards the sky. I went to the edge and looked over. Several hundred feet down, huge waves crashed against the bare rock and dissolved in spray and thunder. Above us towered a temple in grey stone. “Uluwatu,” said Walter. “Eleventh century, one of the most important temples guarding Bali – long before the Muslims drove the Hindus out of Java in the fourteenth century and they came to establish themselves here. Don’t get me started on that. I hope you are not menstruating Bonnetchen? No? Not even manstruating, ha, ha? No? Then we can enter.” The boys yawned, crouched down and began to play cards, plucked from God knows where, behind the car – they had seen enough temples in their young lives – while Walter led me up a long staircase and through gate after exuberant gate. An aged guardian of some sort shouted at us angrily, but when Walter turned and greeted him, he was suddenly all toothless smiles and sembahs, bowed, waved, urged us, agonised with love and respect, on through a portal flanked by ancient stone elephants till we were at the highest t
errace, thrust out into the ocean like the prow of a ship with wind buffeting our faces. Walter ran his hand gently over the rough stone. “Coral, from the sea. Living rock. See all the little creatures compressed into it?” He closed his eyes and stared blindly out into the empty ocean, weathering himself in the elements. “What I said about myth … When I come here, I do this and allow myself to sink into the earth – what you call letting moss grow up your legs. We are both painters, in our different ways, and know what a terrible instrument the eye can be. The whole history of the Enlightenment has been the conversion of everything else into something that we can see so that it can be measured so that we become eyewitnesses at some trial of Nature. To close the eyes wilfully is the only way to know the poetry of a place.”
I shut my eyes, seeing only the pinkness of the sunlight glowing through the lids. I felt, rather than heard, the roaring of sea and wind. It was as if I could sense the swelling rise of the soil about me. Then, Walter tweaked my glasses off my nose and I smiled and opened my eyes, in soft rebuke, to see a hideous monkey clutching them and making off across the precipitous rocks.
“Stop him!” I shouted in terror. “Oh, I haven’t got a spare pair and without them I’m as blind as a bat!” I lunged at the creature and it scampered away to a high point showing its teeth. To attempt to follow it would be suicide.
“Perhaps,” suggested Walter sweetly, “you should forget your eyes, attune to your other senses and appreciate the poetry of the place.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” I looked for a branch to attack the monkey with.
“What is it with you and monkeys?” pondered Walter with irritating detachment. “Perhaps you are a reincarnation of the hideous demon, Rahwana, and doomed to wage eternal warfare on the troops of Hanuman, their general. One day I will write a piece,” and then he saw my face, “no. Not perhaps the best moment, I see that. Bonnetchen, if you would like your glasses back, I would suggest you sit down perfectly still and make not a sound while I have a quick word with our friend.” He stretched out his upper body low over the rocks and turned up his face to the creature. His mouth made lippy sucking motions and produced a series of fat plops and soft farts. The monkey, that had been subjecting the spectacles to an almost professional ophthalmic examination, looked up. Walter repeated the process, now blowing kisses and reached, with infinite slowness, into his pocket to bring out a sweet, rustled the paper wrapper seductively and held it out. The monkey looked down over the cliff, as if considering dumping the glasses over the edge and then thought better of it. Instead, it approached cautiously, held out the glasses with one hand and took the sweet with the other. Then, it scampered back to its perch and flashed new defiance with crunching teeth. I looked for a rock to throw but Walter was firm.
“There,” he said, restoring the glasses and taking the rock gently, “we have made our barter. Even monkeys are reasonable when approached in a reasonable monkey way. It is not their fault. They are like the people of Denpasar. They have learned that when they behave badly towards visitors, they are rewarded. And now it is time for our siesta.”
We trod fine, windblown sand underfoot as we made our way through blank sun to a clump of trees a few hundred meters off. Walter stretched out on the soft ground and placed a large, spotted handkerchief – surely a comic prop for some routine with villagers – over his face. Resem lay back against a tree in dappled shade and Badog curled up beside him and put his head in his lap which Resem softly explored, nail-clicking, for fleas. All three closed their eyes and were immediately – outrageously – fast asleep, leaving me abandoned, awake, helpless and hapless, by default on guard against monkey molestation. To pass the empty time, I might happily have sketched them but had neither paper nor charcoal. If I roused Walter – I knew – he would airily suggest I try sketching in the sand with a stick since the work of all artists is mere marks in sand, or some such nonsense. I tried to sleep too but first there was a twig digging into my back. Then, the grass itched against my neck. Then, marauding – possibly stinging – ants found me. I sat up again and contemplated their sleeping innocence with envy and resentment. I worried that this spot was a natural latrine for temple visitors. What was I sitting in? Every man, surely, peed against a tree such as was my backrest. What was that rustling in the undergrowth? Perhaps it was one of the huge snakes that Walter had spoken of or – even more sinister – a small but deadly scorpion. When they awoke smiling and refreshed an hour later, I was exhausted, anxious, almost tearful with reproach. The boys exchanged heavy downcast glances. Tuan Rudi was grumpy again.
We set off back down the hill, Walter having paused to take elaborate leave of the guardian. He had not started the engine, relying on gravity, and the magic of our silent motion excited the boys again as we gathered speed through crunching leaves and skidded gummytyres ever faster round the bends. As we descended, the sounds of sea and wind hushed and merged into the mechanical noise of crickets. Walter smirked.
“The crickets are a little behind the time today. Still, as the English say ‘better stridulate than never’.” He sniggered at his own joke and watched me in the backlookglass, while I remained stony-faced. We motored without motor for over a kilometer and then, as we crept to a halt, Walter cut in the engine with a jolt that smacked of the bite of sad reality. We headed north, along a road dotted with villages where dogs came out and barked at us, as a novelty, in the street. Each hamlet, it seemed, had some artistic speciality.
“That place is good for woodcarving. That for silverwork. There lives an old man who makes exquisite masks – you know, the ones on the stairs. There is a woman there who weaves fantastic ikat – the cushions on the sofa. That is a place for stonecarving. There is the best place for carved kris handles …”
I was still feeling peevish. “Buy a lot of kris handles, do you? Is there anything Balinese don’t do?”
He relaxed. I was talking again. “Well, actually, yes. They don’t paint – at least not in our sense. There’s a tradition of temple painting where they do the gods in profile, as in the shadow plays, but no depiction of ordinary life. They are craftsmen rather than artists. Each man wants to paint just the same as everyone else and newness is seen as error. But I’m working to change all that.” He slowed at a crossroads, waved to a little old man who danced on the spot in delight, and then accelerated away hard. I had been to enough dull courses on the true meaning of art to be able to pick a fight with anyone on that subject.
“What’s the difference?” I enquired with saccharine curiousity, “between an artist and a craftsman, I mean?”
He considered. “For present purposes, an artist is someone who produces work that interests me, a craftsman someone who makes stuff the tourists buy.”
I smiled even more sweetly as I slid the knife between his ribs. “Don’t you sell your paintings to tourists?”
He looked over and laughed, not in the least put out. “I sell my paintings to art lovers who just happen to be here on a visit.”
“I see.” I grimaced in bitter triumph and then our eyes met in the mirror and, despite myself, the sudden warmth of complicity flashed between us so that we both burst out laughing. He slapped my knee in affection. I felt a wonderful unaccustomed glow around my heart, a heart that finally belonged to someone.
“And now,” he said, “this is Peliatan, not far from home but a special place. And just for you Bonnetchen, the legong, dance of the virgins, said to be the product of the fevered dreams of a ruler about angels.”
They had drawn up a red and black awning over part of the marketplace, shading it from the mellow sun of late afternoon. Under it, sat a group of some dozen men, straight-backed and bare-chested in matching red sarongs with headcloths teased up like flames. Around them stood a gamelan orchestra, percussion instruments gleaming with bronze and gold-leafed carvings, from which flowed a surprisingly gentle and complex melody, tinkling with sensuous variations and artful ornamentation, like a stream through a ricefield. It was subtle and i
mmensely pleasing to the ear, full of soft modulations and warm accents. The musicians flashed eyes and teeth in greeting at Walter who made a deep, respectful sembah to the lead drummer and received a nodded invitation to be seated. Three little girls, tightly bound in irridescent green and gold cloth, like insects, with waving flowers of gold in their hair knelt to attention before the orchestra, faces whitened and rouged. Two were decorated with all manner of coloured stones and mirrors.
Little boys swarmed all over the car, exploring the possibilities of the horn as a supplementary gamelan instrument, Resem and Badog slapping them softly away. A large crowd had gathered but, it seemed, largely indifferent to the music which was – if I understood correctly – directed at the gods, for the women loudly bargained over fruit while the men sat engrossed in cockfights, card games or a primitive form of roulette run by a fat Chinese. For children, the frogs hopping between their feet from one culvert to another were an endless source of fascination. Mothers were breastfeeding or shouting at their offspring while bachelors were hotly eyeing girls or rubbing themselves against them in the crowd. I thought of those 18th-century aristocrats, in their boxes, gambling, chattering and trying to spit on the conductor’s bald head as Mozart’s Magic Flute played the music of genius beneath them. As if he had been waiting only for Walter, the drummer now paused, caught the eye of his troupe and led off with a series of smart taps as the players etched a new theme.
At that time, we had not yet suffered the lisping and syrupy cinematic performances of Shirley Temple but they were exactly what I feared in the Balinese legong dance we had come to see. I have always, from earliest childhood, detested little girls. Much may, no doubt, be read into that simple confession, explaining the course of my adult life, but it was always made absolutely plain to me that little girls had been put into the world solely to stop little boys having any fun, dividing them, undermining their friendships, manipulating and domesticating them till they were broken and reduced like stallions hitched to a milk cart. My own sisters were always bursting into tears, throwing tantrums, twisting my parents round their little fingers with cutesy wiles or screaming in their frilly frocks to get their own way which always involved me not getting mine. There is something particularly vile about the screams of little girls – that totally tuneless, high-pitched, almost whistle – that is insufferable, that unmasks them as inhuman creatures from another planet. And Walter had brought me here to watch little girls at their wiliest and it was all my own fault, thanks to my fit of artistic enthusiasm in Sanur. And then, after the introduction, it started.
