by Nigel Barley
They were all in Campuhan, whisky in their glasses, Rosa breathing a thread of smoke from an ivory cigarette-holder and gripping the hand of Miguel on the sofa in the same newly married passion. Probably in their mid-twenties but somehow young for their age, he in a lightweight tropical suit, she in an elegant shift of thin grey silk. He offered round a slim cigarette case in white gold and ebony, flared a matching lighter. Smoking was still an act to be performed with elegance in those days.
“Why did you not tell the boys?” I was saying. “Nobody knew where you were. Nobody knew what to do.” Even to myself I sounded like a brittle, hysterical wife. Walter soothed. The Covarrubiases smiled wanly. Perhaps their first row lay still before them. As for two men in a clearly domestic tiff … well, they had both worked in the theatre, she as a performer, he as a set designer. Such scenes neither surprised nor shocked them.
“But that would have destroyed the beauty of the moment – to just walk off because I felt like it, to be free. That’s the greatest feeling on earth, Bonnetchen, to be totally free. Besides, I didn’t really know where I was going or for how long. The telegramme merely said a concert tour, as an accompanist, in Java. As it turned out, with that violin prodigy, Fritz Hinze, horrid brat. He scraped the strings and I banged the ivories, Mozart suffered and everybody clapped. The old ladies loved him. Fantastic for a boy of that age, they said and pinched his cheeks … Quite true. But I suspect he will still be fantastic for a boy of that age in twenty years time. If you read the reviews closely, I had the better of the encounter. As it turned out it was just a few weeks but I brought something back that will knock your socks off.” Since kecak he was keen on the knocking off of socks. He led me back up to the new music room. The Covarrubiases followed, still stickily linked, and paused on the landing to snatch a very wet kiss with maximum adhesion.
“Mrs Covarrubias!”
“Mr Covarrubias!”
“Oh my God,” whispered Walter. “Newlyweds. I suppose it’s a complicated name and they have to practise but can’t they stop gumsucking?”
“That’s a very nasty word.”
He smiled, as though at a compliment. “Isn’t it?”
The boys had already lit the lamps and muted them to a golden glow. New people inevitably meant music. There was the gamelan orchestra, used by the local group, sitting like a jury, there the Steinway grand, there – oh my God – another Steinway grand.
“But Walter, how can you possibly …? What on earth do you want with …?” Smirking he slid behind it and banged down on the keys. The sound was weird, uncanny. It was like biting into a cake that turned out to be made of corned beef and cheese instead of the expected chromatic sweetness. And then a haunting melody trickled out from between his fingers, a tune from the Balinese shadow theatre, limpid and inchoate. After a dozen or so bars, he jumped up and clapped his hands with delight.
“Tuned to the gamelan scale. You can play Balinese music directly on it. I found it in the old concert hall in Semarang – pig of a town Semarang – totally out of tune, full of dead lizards and birds’ nests and so on and somehow gave a recital on it that was so bad it convinced them it was beyond saving. So I got it absurdly cheap, had it repaired and retuned – you know the Javanese can do anything – and here it is. You will note,” he stroked his hand over its top, “the special American satinwood finish. You might say …” he twinkled leeringly, always a sign that a terrible joke was coming, “you might say I got it for a song.” He laughed at his own joke. The Covarrubiases put their heads together and whispered, puzzled. “Anyway, it was what you might call a” – leeringly – “sound investment.”
“Stop it Walter.” The money from the film, the concert tour, I was sure it had already gone and not to pay the teetering bill at Lee King’s. Not, strictly speaking, my business but still …
“That music. It was beautiful.” Miguel’s English was soft, the “r”s a little rolled, the sibilants with a rustle as of Mexican brushwood. They had perched on two of Walter’s elegant Nias stools and were peering down into the river, sharing a cigarette by passing it back and forth as Western schoolboys and Balinese men do, Rosa showing a lot of coffee-coloured leg. As a dancer, she had a very Balinese sense of her own body as a separate instrument with which she was not emotionally involved. Legend had it that an anthropophagous giant, specialising in the eating of legong dancers, had once lived in a hollow down there. Locals pointed out a big, pierced rock, way out in the stream, as the place where he had ground chilli for his fried rice. In Bali it is unthinkable for even a cannibal not to eat rice. The imagination always has its boundaries. “I should like to hear more, if that is possible.”
Walter moved back and resumed, doing a little dance with his shoulders as he played. The melody was like a fish in the water. The stars were very bright tonight.
“We came here to look for something,” said Rosa tiredly.
“We had had enough of New York.” They spoke antiphonally, like the two sides of a gamelan, passing back the cigarette after each line.
“Miguel could not stand it any more, the noise, the shallow people, the empty rush for material possessions.”
“It is different in Mexico. Time is slower. We thought it might be different here.”
“Miguel and I wanted to look for another way, a place where perhaps things are simpler, where people are different … better.” Her voice was flat, monotonous.
“We saw pictures. There was a film. We met Andre Roosevelt at our wedding in the house of another illustrator and he spoke of you. Bali seemed to us special.” He shrugged. “Perhaps we were foolish. Perhaps I am speaking total nonsense.” Walter turned from the keyboard and smiled, pushed his hair back from his forehead.
“You are. But you speak it very well. Bali is not special. Bali is magical! It is an island. All islands are magic because they are complete worlds with their own sea, sky and land, a separate reality. Islands are the stuff of our dreams, the only place they can live in the modern world. And Bali is also a special island with volcanoes, forests, lakes, rivers, ancient ruins too. Islands are the universe in miniature but separate, subject to their own laws, places where the rules of the mainland have no force. People here live in harmony with nature which is why their culture weighs so lightly upon them whereas ours crushes us under its wheels and squeezes the lifeblood out of us like a great machine. Here people work together to make beauty which is at the centre of all. All the priests, musicians, dancers, artists are part of life, grow their own food with their own hands, feed their children and loved ones with the fruit of the fields that surround them. I have looked all my life for a place where I would know how to just be. Bali is that place. It has driven me sane.”
I was astonished. I had never heard Walter speak out a coherent credo with so much calm assurance. Rosa’s face glowed.
“You mean …” She sat erect, fists clenched and looked round in rapture at Miguel. “… the people here … they are natural socialists?”
“Er …” I had sat quietly. I had been good. I had not dashed any cold water on all of this. Now I looked at him seated at his second Steinway grand with its American satinwood finish and said, “And you, yourself, Walter. Do you live in simple harmony with nature?”
He turned and grinned with crushing insincerity. “Me? Me? I am so in harmony with nature, dear Bonnetchen, that, at the full moon, I almost feel myself begin to menstruate.”
***
“This is downright embarrassing.” No one heard me above the din. We were racketing through the countryside in the Overland Whippet, myself in the dicky, Badog up front with Walter and navigating with that intuitive map Balinese carry always in their head, revolving around the direction of Gunung Agung, the mountain seat of the gods. It was never “turn left” but “go west”. Walter did not seem bothered by the deafening noise that came from the rear and our having lost the silencer on a rock several miles back or, as Walter put it: “the knockpot has fallen from the outpuffpipe”. “Never min
d,” he had dismissed my protests with airy frivolity, “the more noise at a Balinese wedding, the better they like it.”
The wedding was Badog’s, polishing his teeth and combing his hair there in the backviewglass, but Walter had, as ever, anticipated matters. There are a number of ways you can get married in Bali. One is for parents to arrange the whole thing, with or without the use of a matchmaker. But far more common is kidnapping. This is not as bad as it sounds. Often it is a sort of elopement, both families and the couple are in full agreement and the act of violence is simply an administrative shortcut that saves everyone a lot of bother. The girl arranges to be at a certain time at a certain place so she can be conveniently carried off by the groom and his friends. The bride’s family have to storm around and summon the whole village and make a great fuss and search futilely for their daughter and then the boy’s family turn up to pay a fine and make amends and the whole thing is regularised. But the Balinese, like Walter, love an adventure and a bit of melodrama and every bride and groom anticipates this day with trembling excitement. To be carried off in a motorcar was the very greatest chic and by two white men to boot would make her the envy of her friends.
Badog, oiled, perfumed, freshly coiffed, let out a shout and stood and waved joyously. There was his beloved, sitting by the roadside, hot and peeved. It seemed we were late. She was very young. There was no denying she was beautiful, flawless skin, supple body, perfectly symmetrical face with bee-stung lips and elfin ears pierced with gold. When she saw us, or rather Badog, her anger evaporated and, intimidated, she turned all coy, simpering and giggling, blushing and waggling about in cutesy movements from the legong dance as she was introduced. Ayu was her name. Then Badog grabbed her.
I had always regarded as overblown those representations of flailing limbs and physical confusion seen in the various classical versions of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Now I was to learn my error. A Balinese bride makes it a point of honour to put up a good fight and Ayu struck out soundly with fists and nails. She was a good strong girl, muscles honed by years of physical labour and two effete Westerners were no match for her. Badog had seized her from behind but could do nothing to restrain her kicking feet and windmilling arms. An old man in the field behind paused from poking in the mud and watched, then made a gesture rather like Fatimah’s shaking of the bottle and cackled obscenely. I danced around the edge like a flyweight, seeking to grab her hands but, whenever I did so, encountered only a sizzling bare breast. “Oh sorry!” She swung a great slap, saw that it was about to connect to her beloved Badog and clouted me with it instead. “Oh my God!” Then, good streetfighter that she was, she lunged forward and kneed Walter hard between the legs and he went down. “Jesus! I should have brought Conrad. Normal men have more experience of hitting women.” The old man in the field was beside himself with glee, slapping his scrawny old thighs. I wondered whether I should ask him to come and help.
Walter was up again and limping to the boot of the Overland Whippet, then back with a blanket.
“Capturing women,” he gasped, “must be much like catching wild baboons” and threw it over her head. “This always calms them down.” The effect was indeed remarkable. Ayu let out a scream that would have etched glass and lashed out blindly in all directions, lost her balance, grabbed at anything within range and tumbled into the flooded field, taking Walter with her. The old man was less happy about that. There were germinating rice seeds in there and women were not supposed to have any contact with the fields at that stage.
It was at this moment that the KPM charabanc chose to round the corner – Cokorda Agung, my employer and landlord, in modern dress industriously ringing the bell – and packed with white tourists. It slowed, as though to afford them a better view of Ayu’s rucked up skirt, smooth, golden thighs and bare breasts, my red, obviously just-slapped face – her handprint clear upon it – as the Cokorda raised his hat with the other hand.
“Good afternoon, Mr Bonnet.”
“Good afternoon, Cokorda.”
The faces of the white women showed shock and the righteous disapproval that goes with marriage documents, those of the men – I am quite certain – nothing but the greatest envy. The vehicle drove on and disappeared as if the violent abduction of women were an everyday event – which it was. Walter’s head reappeared from under the blanket. “Quick Bonnetchen. Get her legs.”
By now Ayu must have felt she had done enough to fulfil the requirements of a chaste and dutiful bride and allowed herself to be conveyed to the car and the firm, manly grip of Badog who seemed absurdly invigourated by the whole thing. Walter started the engine and we drove off with a wedding train of loud detonations, Ayu lapsing into further coy gigglings. The old man waved his hat and cheered, rotating his dessicated groin.
A couple of miles further on was the marital hideout, the house of a complaisant friend who had prepared a love-nest where their tryst would be consummated and where they would await forgiveness. The neighbours had come out to watch their arrival and, as Ayu was led from the car, the women’s smiling faces spoke of the memory of first tender love, the men’s hot eyes of anticipated sex.
“There have to be special offerings formally laid out and Badog has to get through the necessary consummation before they wilt. Rather a nice touch that. Poetic.” We left them, standing in the doorway, he, aflame, absolutely no sign of premature wilting, rubbing his cheek against hers in ecstasy and gasping out his thanks.
“Time for us to be off. No need to rub the groom for good luck. Look at them Bonnetchen,” sighed Walter settling behind the wheel, delighted, like a gossipy old auntie. “So young and beautiful and they can’t keep their hands off each other. They have become totally ‘co-varrubious’. Their babies will be beautiful whereas people like us can only make dry art. But enough of serious matters.” He scowled like a boy being made to eat his greens. “We deserve some fun. Let’s go to a cremation. Back to the house for an early night and to lick our wounds and then, first thing tomorrow, we head for the coast.”
***
Rosa and Miguel had first established themselves at the Bali Hotel, Campuhan being too far out for their cosmopolitan tastes. In those days, the groups of musicians and dancers who performed for tourists were chosen from the best traditional artistes and no one saw any harm in it. With the decline of aristocratic subsidies to such groups, it seemed natural that tourists were to be the new sponsors of art and support traditional values. We had not yet seen the prostitution and debasement that too much easy money, uncoupled from good taste, can bring. The leader of the Bali Hotel group was Gusti Alit Oka from Belaluan, one of the foremost musicians and woodworkers of his day. He was in the habit of introducing himself as “an aristocrat by birth, a carpenter by trade and a musician by choice”. From the regular Friday-night performances, Rosa, Miguel and Oka had become firm friends. It so happened that he had a building to let, a rudimentary garage, and they had bought a dilapidated Chevrolet. In an odd sort of logic, they ended up borrowing some cheap furniture and living in the garage in Belaluan, with the Chevy parked out front, and from there, in his company, they executed Walteresque sorties to the ceremonies, musical performances and monuments that attracted them. It was no surprise they were here, holding hands, as we drove up at Krobokan, turning all heads with our multiple detonations. Walter dug in the back for notepad and camera and we joined a milling mass of people around what I recognised as the Pura Dalem, the temple of the dead. Somewhere, a gamelan orchestra was playing.
“You are very beautiful,” an old man was saying to Rosa flirtatiously. “You could be Balinese. Even you,” addressing Miguel, rapidly darkening under the Balinese sun, “could easily pass for one of us.” I saw Walter pout. Blond and blue-eyed, he would never be Balinese even after all his years of effort and study to acculturate. The beautiful are unused to such slights. The rest of us hardly notice them. I thought of Manet’s The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, the aristocratic imperialist shot by the natives he tried so hard
to identify with and the body stuffed by a local embalmer. Since there was no indigenous demand for glass eyes of the piercing blue shade of Maximilian’s, they substituted brown. He had finally been made to look like a local.
Walter waved and mouthed a cursory hallo. “Excuse me, I must do some ‘hallo darlings’.” A term, no doubt, from the backstage of the theatre. He moved off and could be seen crouching and sembahing to various groups of old men, getting his head modestly down below theirs, lots of nodding, touching of shoulders.
The Covarrubiases were loaded up with full fieldwork kit, cameras slung around their necks, pockets bristling with pencils, pads clutched in their hands, both for sketching and the taking of notes. Rosa was dressed, as though for horse-riding, in khaki slacks and boots, Miguel in open-necked shirt and trousers that matched hers. Behind them lurked Oka. We greeted.
“Welcome, Mr Bonnet. I hear good things about your teaching our painters in Western techniques.”
“What’s this?” Rosa asked sharply.
“Some classes in perspective, shadow, Western media, that sort of thing,” I said modestly, “for the lads in Ubud.”
She flashed the whites of her eyes contemptuously as in the dance movement the Balinese call nyegut. “But our role here should be merely that of humble amanuenses of the Balinese, to record without changing.”
