by Nigel Barley
“Rudi. What were you listening to?”
He hesitated. “Oh, a political thing from Batavia. It is of no significance.” His eyes narrowed. “Where are you from? What is your work?”
“From Ubud. A painter.”
A broad grin spread over his face. “Oooh. You are Tuan Piss.”
“No. My name is Rudi.”
“Then you are Tuan Piss’s little brother.”
I shrugged. “If you like.”
“What are you after, Tuan Rudi? Perhaps I can help you find it.” The eyes flashed in the lamplight.
“Just walking, ‘eating the wind’. It is very hot tonight.” I passed cigarettes. Walter had taught me to always carry them as the small change of sociability. I had ended up smoking them myself. A few accepted, sembahed thanks, pretended not to be listening.
“Perhaps,” he suggested coyly, striking a match, “you are butterfly hunting? Here there are very lovely butterflies.” He gestured widely. Kupu-kupu malam, “butterflies of the night”, “moths”, is a flowery, lepidopterous term for prostitutes. “And where is Tuan Rudi’s wife?” He wore a wedding ring but it would mean nothing.
“Sleeping.” It made no sense to talk of being unmarried in the Indies, for here only the criminally insane were unwed. In a land where everyone had to marry, like it or not, they would all know about the welcome relief of sleeping wives. “And your wife?”
“Sleeping too – in Semarang.”
Pig of a town, apparently, Semarang.
“A beautiful city, Semarang. You are Javanese?” I liked him, a cool, intelligent young man. Possibly a school teacher?
“Of course.” He eyed me with superior knowledge. “You do not recognise me.” There was something nagging at the back of my mind. This afternoon. “I served you your coffee at the Little Harmonie. I work there. I noticed you.” He eyed me closely. “You like Javanese coffee. Do you perhaps like chocolate?”
I smiled. “They say that once you have tried chocolate, plain white milk never tastes good again.”
“I have heard that too. But for some it is the other way round. After so much chocolate, a little milk can be an interesting change. Myself, I like to drink beer but I cannot afford it.”
“They sell beer at the Little Harmonie. Perhaps you would like to take a glass there with me?” The heat was rising between us. He leaned back and took a good look, making up his mind whether I could be trusted, was worth the risk. He had a sweet, little nose.
“It would be difficult for us to drink there together. The head waiter watches me all the time, always criticises me. People would not understand … unless … I think you have a room on the ground floor?” I nodded. “Perhaps you might order some beer, take it to your room, leave the window open and I could join you to talk some more. But perhaps that would disturb your wife.”
“My wife sleeps elsewhere. She sleeps very soundly. That would be nice. I should like that.” We shook hands. My palms were clammy. Our eyes locked. I stood. My enthusiasm must have been clear to all.
“Perhaps you should take a pony cart back. Nyoman over there is very good.” Nyoman, little and happily buck-toothed, was beckoned over, whipped up his steed, eager to get a final fare. “I shall follow behind.” Spreading the benefit around. Looking after his friends. Gotong-royong. Walter would approve. That was fine.
Forty minutes later, a lithe figure slipped through the window. I poured beer. There was nowhere to sit but the bed. He drank, held it in his mouth, savoured, a real treat.
“Aaah!” He leaned forward and stroked my arm experimentally. “Dutchmen are hairy. Like monkeys.” It was a clear signal. I stood, boldly lifted him against me, unbottoned gently, flattened my hands against his firm waist. He broke contact and bent away blushing.
“I am sorry. I am malu.” Shy, ashamed.
“There is no need, Dion. We are both men. We both know what men look like and that these things happen. Take your time. There is no hurry.”
“No. It’s not that. Look, I am poor. I am ashamed because I have holes in my underwear.” There was rage blazing in his eyes.
“Oh, Dion.” Now I felt a rush of embarrassment, anger at the world for making this proud creature ashamed, for dashing this tender moment to the ground. I turned off the lights, drew back the curtain so that we stood in pale, forgiving moonlight. Our embrace was warm, gentle, surprisingly tentative. Our bodies were both shaking, despite the heat. We lay down. He stretched out like a beached starfish on the musically creaky bed, closed his eyes and suffered me to stroke and nibble and lick, all the strain disappearing from his face. I loved having the run of him, having someone to be kind to. He was deeply beautiful.
“Mmm, chocolate,” I whispered. He giggled.
“I am not a bencong,” he said firmly. “You cannot use me like a woman.” I stroked the hair, pressed my lips to the strong neck, breathed in the musky smell of him. Walter had said something about ignoring the eyes.
“It does not matter.” I slipped an arm lightly around his waist, feeling warm, heart-beating humanity. “Like this is fine. As long as we can be together. If we just sleep like this, I am happy, Dion.”
He rose and laughed, rolled over on top of me.
“You are a nice man, I think. But just to sleep, I feel, would be a waste. I do not often get the opportunity to do this. We can do better than sleeping.” He rubbed his nose against my cheek, inhaling, in that most delightful of gestures, an Asian kiss, then bent more prosaically to his purpose. Sadly, in that moment, as we wrung resonant music from the bedsprings, I realised that what I really wanted, far more than anything else, was to draw him just as he was at that second. That would be true intimacy. That would be possession.
I woke to arrogant pre-dawn cockerels – rose with the cock – feeling oddly worn. Dion was already dressed, heading for the window, diurnal heat. It was an awkward moment. I thought of just letting him go, then – ashamed – propped myself up on the pillows. It was the right thing to do. It was what Walter would have done. Walter always found it easy to do the right thing, a man of easy virtue.
“Dion needs money?” I whispered.
He looked at me evenly. “I have work. I did not ask you for money.”
“No. You did not ask but friends should help each other. That underwear business. It is not right that you should be ashamed. If I gave you some money for new underwear, you could come and show me what you had bought the next time I am here. I should like that very much. It would be the act of a friend. Gotong-royong.”
Twenty minutes later, he was coolly serving me coffee in the dining room, scrubbed, immaculate, hair still wet from washing clinging to the nape of his brown neck. Outside, people were sweeping, sprinkling water, beating carpets. I was the only one that knew what he wore under that uniform. The thought inflamed me.
“Good morning, Tuan Rudi. Did you sleep well? I have only coffee here but I remember that you love our hot chocolate. May I get you some?”
“Indeed, Dion. I can’t get the taste of your hot chocolate out of my mouth. It will inhabit my dreams for ever. I should be delighted to have more.”
We looked at each other with unwilling amusement – I would dare to say – genuine liking. Our nocturnal secret was transforming the normal forms of social life, revealing them as no more than absurd stage flats that could be knocked down at any moment we chose. The stern head-waiter looked on with surprise and approval. The clients liked a bit of cheery chat. The boy was finally learning how to behave with the guests, learning to know his place.
***
I walked back into Campuhan in sizzling early-afternoon heat to find the Countess’s luggage arranged in a neat stack in the entrance – though with the smallest and most fragile cases at the bottom and a huge trunk balanced on top. It was as if someone had piled up all the irrefutable arguments as to why she should leave. Yet instead of the debris of a shattering confrontation, the house seemed to be full of rainbows and sunbeams. Tuan Walter, the boys – welcoming wit
h smiles – declared to be absent. A mountain man had called in on his way to consult a famous village healer, a balian, just up the road and Walter had gone along to investigate, document, help out. The Countess, herself, could be heard tra-lah-lahing offstage, something, appropriately, from The Merry Widow and when she entered, it was as one transformed, hair let down, a frock of light, frilly stuff, what looked like makeup on her gritty features.
“Mr Bonnet,” she actually smiled, “I hope you had an enjoyable stay in Denpasar. As you will have noticed, I myself am bound in that direction.”
“What happened?” I was cautious, suspicious.
She swirled round girlishly. “Walter simply explained that he could put me up no longer, that he needed the space, that I must return to the Bali Hotel.” This was deeply unbelievable.
“And you were not … displeased?”
“Oh no. Well, perhaps a little at first. But he put it all so charmingly that now I can only agree.”
I had still failed to make all this fit the world as I understood it. “How exactly did he put it?”
“Well, we had a delightful dinner for once, chicken with fern shoots and then a dessert of some fruit from the garden. We even had wine. Walter said he needed it to help him do something he didn’t want to. Then he explained everything.” I listened attentively, not greatly liking all this. “The boys had all disappeared and he served me with his own hands. Then he played the piano, just for me, something special he wrote from Russia that he never plays to anyone else. That made him sad and made me want to comfort him.” I saw only too well where all this was going. I was frankly shocked. “It is a pity he had to leave on an errand of mercy. I would have wished to say thank you properly. I wonder …” she proffered an envelope “if you might give him this. I have to go. Walter arranged a lift in the charabanc.” I was everyone’s postman these days.
Walter returned schoolboyishly sheepish, neck craned round the door edge, hat in hand, as I was eating my tea. He moved into the room like a mouse scuttling from cover to cover.
“It’s all right,” I said, “she’s gone.” Then … “Oh Walter, how could you? How could you take advantage of an old woman like that when you were showing her the door?” He did me the honour of not pretending he did not know what I was talking about. He sat and sighed and looked, himself, puzzled.
“I did not show her the door. I showed her all the doors. She was breaking my feet, a milestone around my neck. I had the nose full of her. It was a pure boffe de politesse. I wanted her to go away happy and it is easier than talking, so I pulled out all the socks. She is not old. Fifty is not old. Ruined grapes may yet be good raisins.”
“Is that perhaps the way they put it in the Urals? Very well, elderly. But Walter. A woman, an elderly woman, an elderly nasty woman. Walter, you are such a tart.”
He called through the doorway for tea, turned, shrugged.
“As to that, I can say various things. We are all tarts at one time or another but the important thing is to not be a tart who is only paid the wages of a respectable woman. Did I take advantage of her or she of me? She was, as you say, nasty.” I thought of Dion. Had I been compassionate or predatory? Was it not a free trade between equals? But then the underwear stood up and argued against that. Had we been equals? Perhaps where there was such disparity of wealth and power, choices were never free which was why most women ended up married to men. I shook my head. Life was too complicated. He was saying, “I have studied musical counterpoint which gives a man a firm grasp of sexual fundamentals. Then, you must recall that, in my youth, in Berlin, I was a professional dancing teacher, paid by the hour. Often, ladies of a certain age would pay extra for supplementary dances of a special nature. What I mean—”
“Yes,” I interrupted. “I see just what you mean.” And I could see it all, Walter joking his way through the whole thing, making it unreal. “Young man,” she would have said, “I cannot give you my heart.” “Madam, my aspiration did not rise so high as the heart.” She, of course, would understand nothing.
Resem brought tea, bread, jam, in little dishes. He, too, seemed lightened by the departure. We paused as he set it out, taking trouble to create a balanced composition and lay the knives at complementary but opposed angles. I wondered whether she had had the decency to tip the boys.
“Well … then there is the fact that, as a painter, I construct from the imagination whereas you seek to depict, naturalistically what is before you. All cats are black in the dark. To me in bright sunlight also. And …” he sighed, smirked and ran his hands through his hair, “it worked. I played my trump card. She has gone. There was no row. Everybody is happy, except, it seems, you.”
I handed him her envelope. My trump card. Perhaps it was an embarrassingly passionate declaration, perhaps tearful, tedious reproach. I hoped so. I felt he was getting away too lightly, as he had all his life.
“But how, Walter, can you condemn the Balinese for prostituting themselves in the tourist trade with their carving and painting when you do the same with the gifts that God gave you? With your very body which is worse.”
He gave a hoot of triumph and waved a cheque at me.
“You see! Happy!” He looked abruptly sad. “But this is a German cheque, worthless.” He looked more closely and got cross. “Given that it can never be cashed, I really think she might have been more generous.” It was all at once all too much, a sudden truth became clear to me.
“ I simply cannot,” I said bitterly over the too-sweet marmalade, “spend another day in this house.”
I don’t know quite what I expected from Walter – tears, apologies, requests on bended knee to stay, at least a sharp intake of breath. All I got was a distracted, “I’m sure you know best, Bonnetchen. If I were you I’d take up the Cokorda’s offer, move into the old water-palace. It’s a perfectly good spot. I lived there for ages before coming here. Then you can always drop by. I need the room anyway for Conrad.”
I was stunned, staggered. “Who is Conrad?”
“Oh, haven’t I mentioned him? My cousin. He lives here. Didn’t you know? Oh, you will like Conrad.”
***
And so I ended up at the water-palace without so much as a valedictory boffe de politesse. It was not a great change, just a couple of hundred meters down the road, within the chatter and children’s noise of such a lesser palace but withdrawn, off to one side, the haunt of Walter’s giant red dragonflies. In previous times it had been the secluded spot where the more libidinous rulers had staged their amorous liaisons and so was richly provided with private exits. Here also, the more studious had decrypted the intricacies of ancient literature as scratched on lontar leaves so that tranquillity was an entrenched habit with the force of law. The ancient pavilion had long succumbed to the climate and the ravages of insects but, on the original plinth amidst the waters, they had built a simple but elegant, one-floored structure of grass and bamboo that breathed in light and air and met all my needs. Walter’s hand was to be seen in many of the details, the raised dais that housed a huge sofa by day, become a bed by night, the care with which simple but solid furniture had been selected and arranged. Whereas I had previously suffered invasion by monkeys, it was now ducks and their pursuing little guardians who might burst in at any moment while the Cokorda was mostly busy or elsewhere and left me in peace. The pert domestic boys of Walter’s establishment had been replaced by Putu, a mature palace retainer of indeterminate age, who damped down my passions to the slow smoulder conducive to labour. And Walter and I visited each other daily. On most evenings, I would collect a dish of vegetables and rice from the palace kitchens and take it along to a sort of joint picnic on the great table of his house.
A focus of my activities was the balai, the freestanding shady pavilion of the palace where meetings might be held, or the gamelan orchestra or the dancers practice, for it was here that my chicks collected. The spot was chosen deliberately, for painting was held to be the lowest of the arts in Bali and this must change
by association. Music, dance, carving all had their important place in social and religious life but painting was only occasionally required for temple calendars or ceremonial beds or whatever, and then, in accordance with Balinese ideas, it was never a matter of individual creativity but of a group of male friends sitting around, each chatting and joking and contributing to the general image according to established rules and norms. As in everything else, it was the ancient tales of the Indian Hindu corpus that were the main subject matter to be drawn and drawn upon. My chicks, all boys in their mid or late teens, had been selected by Cokorda Agung and assigned to Walter for artistic instruction. Some had been chosen for their obvious artistic talent and desire to learn, others in the serious hope that painting might provide a remedy for their inherent laziness and fecklessness – all Walter’s favourites these – and the rest because they were simply palace “extras”, as Walter cineastically termed them, and had no better way to pass their time. All had in common that, unlike ninety per cent of the Balinese population, they had affectations of high caste and nobility – a sop to the Dutch who restricted education to the aristocracy lest it inflame social unrest. So there was Anak Agung Gede Sobrat sucking his paint brush next to his cousin, pencil-sharpening Anak Agung Gede Meregel while Ida Bagus Made Nadera practised a conjuring trick whereby he made his rubber disappear from one hand to the other.
On that first morning, they all sat, cross-legged and straight-backed but grinning, in two neat lines, sarongs tucked up into the sort of giant nappy worn for dirty work, all teeth and sticking-out ears. On their laps rested the pads of precious smooth paper that would revolutionise Balinese painting. Walter crouched down, fixed them in the eye and grinned right back, instantly becoming one of them and certainly the most mischievous. They glowed in his presence. It was clear that they adored him. It was also clear that our methods would be totally opposed. In retrospect, I realise that, by Balinese standards, he was probably an excellent teacher since, on that island, knowledge is not simply poured, by the bucketful, from the full head of the teacher into the empty head of the student. It is not even freely given. It must be first made mysterious and then coaxed, little by little, in return for favours or service, into the light. At any moment knowledge may be unmasked as only preliminary or downright false and there is always another stage beyond, which the student may never reach, since the final transfer may never be made. Small wonder then that a guru, a teacher, is an honoured, almost divine, being for whom a student becomes a sort of willing slave. Walter loved being one.
