by Nigel Barley
Back at the Harmonie, I needed a stiff drink. It came with another ferreting priest, Father Robert Scruple, lurking at the bar, an expert on the more extreme heresies of the early church, now appointed to a roving commission about the Eastern Sees and here to press the Dutch to revoke their interdiction on missionary activity in Bali. Earlier baptisms had led to canny converts refusing to pay their dues for village activities, since all assumed the participation of the local gods, and they had finally been chased away like lepers amidst great ill-feeling. Not only had this caused public disorder, it also undermined the efficient system of traditional local government that saved the Dutch endless bother. I had read at length about Father Scruple in the local paper. He sported ecclesiastical black so immaculate that it glowed with a sort of well-brushed halo and he would shortly produce a report declaring the natives to be panting for the evangelisation so brutally denied by law, which convinced no one, not even the Dutch who were often only too willing to be convinced by implausible reports. He was still bristling at the indignity of having a trunkful of Bibles impounded by beachside Buleleng customs officials as “contraband literature”, a term normally applied to works of political sedition and pornography. He sipped neat scotch with economical little swigs.
“The deceased, that poor young man, I gather you were a friend?” It seemed the pastoral position was habitual. He could smell out a lost soul as a sheepdog would a lost sheep or perhaps simply spot the weakest and most vulnerable in a flock as would a wolf. The accent was a curious mixture, part Italian, part Australian. I nodded. “Was he of the faith?”
I could not resist a smile, recalling Walter’s usage of the expression. “Er … living where he did, it was impossible for him to attend church regularly but he was of a spiritual turn of mind.”
Father Scruple’s eyes gleamed behind their round lenses. This was not an answer. If there was any logic-chopping or evasion to be done around here, he, as a trained man of the cloth, should be the one doing it.
“You seem to be telling me that he was a most Christian atheist. He died unshriven, then? Answer me that, if you will.”
“There was no time … It was so fast … He was not one for formalities. But he was a good man, I would almost say that, in some ways he was almost a saintly man. Look, I’m no expert in such matters, unlike yourself, but his soul, I’m sure, was relatively pure – few sins of commission, maybe a few light ones of emission.”
“I think you would mean ‘omission’.”
“Possibly so. As I say, I am no expert.”
He settled a well-shod foot on the bar rail, at his ease in such places, in such postures. Behind me I heard a voice say, “Awkward business. I’m afraid the German reputation smells rather round here at the moment. It was that woman the Countess he sent down. She played a lot of whist and cheated rather badly. She tried it on with the controleur so we had to run her out of town.”
“How exactly did it come about?”
I sighed, not wanting to go through it all again but perhaps the grace of a spiritual confession might prove efficacious even to as Protestant a soul as my own. My glass was shaking in my hand. God knows, I was in clear need of purgation of all this poisonous emotion.
“It was mid-afternoon and we had all decided to go for a swim. He chose the place himself, near Lebih, on the east coast. The sand is wonderful there and he had always loved the spot for the little temple of coral rock that runs down into the sea.”
Father Scruple nodded grimly. “The innocent are frequently misled into confusing the merely romantic and theatrical for the truly spiritual.”
I wasn’t having that. “Precisely – I think – what Martin Luther used to say about the Roman church. You know people believe that whole area of Insaran is full of magic and witchcraft and is anyway too close to the island of Nusa Penida where the dead go and where epidemics come from. It is where Ratu Gede Mecaling, the demon king, lands every year, bringing famine and pestilence to Bali.”
He smiled, a professional in the presence of an amateur. “Superstition. Superstition. My son. I beg you to remember my cloth and the terrible, insane delusions you are casting upon it.”
“… Anyway, we arrived and parked and got changed.” In fact, we had just thrown off our clothes like innocent children and run, laughing, straight into the sea but I would not offer him such an easy target for his disapproval. “We had not gone any distance, only up to our knees in the water. Elli – Fräulein Beinhorn – called out and asked whether there were any sharks and he laughed and said yes and started clowning and splashing about and then he just dived under. We thought it was all play and laughed too and then his head reappeared and he was screaming and the sea was all red and the look on his face …” I paused and gulped breath. “We rushed over and grabbed him and then … realised he was horribly light …” I tried to drink and the glass castanetted against my teeth and sloshed down my shirt. I rested it on the polished bartop “… there was this great fin and it – the shark – came straight for me and rubbed against my leg as it passed with this great thrust of its tail.” I shuddered, feeling again the insinuating silkiness of its touch, the kid-gloved caress of death. “We dragged him to the shore and we were screaming too. One leg was completely gone and the hand on that side and fingers on the other. You could see bare bone stripped to the knee, all white. We told the family that he lost consciousness at once and never suffered but it wasn’t true. He just lay there and screamed and screamed.” The glass in my hand was splashing little waves of whisky and clicking against the bar. Father Scruple took it gently from my grasp and set it down. My voice was getting loud. I was making a scene. I didn’t care.
“Elli drove the car like a demon. We brought him to the hospital at Denpasar though we knew it was no good. What else could we do? It seemed to take hours and all the time he was still screaming.” I sobbed. “Thank God the doctor was on duty. They gave him something for the pain and put him in a cool bed and he quietened and after a little while he stopped breathing altogether and it was all over. All over. We just felt relief, cowardly, I know. There was no blood, even in the car, he had bled out. There was no hope.”
“There is always hope my son. We must never give way to the sin of despair.” A mere ecclesiastical reflex. He sipped, clearly not despairing or at least not giving way to it.
“But you see he knew. He knew.”
“Knew what, my son?”
“It was as if he had conjured up the monster, as if it came straight from his own imagination with the sole purpose of devouring him. A few days before, Walter turned up with this balian, a diviner.” I saw him prick up his ears at the familiar heretical territory. “You know how they are, wild hair, muttering, that odd sackcloth outfit. You know they don’t often predict the future? Their speciality is predicting the past, picking out something forgotten from before that is having bad consequences now. Walter was doing research, as always, and, when it got to divination and horoscopes, this man surprised everyone by accepting Walter’s challenge to tell the future. He got out his calendars and the rest of the stuff and read off our destinies.” Scruple hissed, recognising the old enemy, and gripped the cross about his neck. “He did us all, even the boys. He said the sea would take us. The boys laughed at that because, as you know, the ashes of all Balinese end up in the sea anyway. Then he said Elli and I would lead very long lives to make up for the others in the household who would die young. That shut them up, I can tell you – except Walter – ‘Ars brevis vita longa est, eh Bonnetchen?’ That night he had a nightmare and woke up the entire house with his screams.” Screams, screams, I couldn’t even stand the word any more. “They found him standing by the bedroom door staring at the image of Kala Rahu carved on it.” Father Scruple frowned, resenting the unfamiliar theology. “Kala Rahu is a demon who got hold of the gods’ drink of immortality and took a gulp but had its head cut off before the potion could reach its stomach. It hops around on one leg with enormous teeth and, for revenge, eats the moon
at eclipses – oh my God.” I saw teeth, blood and darkness. I saw the scene from Walter’s film where the cackling witch – this time toothless – eclipses the sun. A tremor started, shaking me from head to foot and I had to grip the bar.
Father Scruple waved his manicured finger in admonition. “These are not things to be trifled with, young man. Divine foreknowledge is not a party trick. I see your immortal soul thrust into deadly danger here. The devil often wears a comely face as amongst these deluded and shameless brown souls. You should get down on your knees and pray, ask for forgiveness, leave this heathen island and return to Christian lands – myself, I have a great fondness for Melbourne where my sister Edna lives but you may have other ideas – where you can restore your soul and free yourself of the enchantment I have seen in this place where priests are not allowed to be about their work of salvation.” He sprayed angry saliva like holy water.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s only since I got here that I have discovered that I have a any soul at all and as for shameless, the Balinese are completely shameful – er, ashamed … er … full of shame.”
A hand fell on my shoulder. I turned. “I have been telling him what happened. I’m sorry. I know I’m making a scene when it must be even worse for you.”
Walter smiled sadly and gently. “Poor Conrad,” he said. “We won’t ever forget him. He is now part of Bali for all time. As for the rest of us, it is already too late and I think we will never leave this place. In its way, it is eating us all up, little by little, maybe as freewilling victims.” He brightened. “But there is the carver outside I would like you to meet, from Batubulan. He has a version of Kala Rahu for poor Kosja’s headstone with a most unusual use of perspective. A Balinese design on a Christian headstone. Imagine! Something new. Very exciting. The only problem is whether the techniques developed on soft volcanic rock can be easily applied to granite.” He raised a finger as an idea struck him. “Perhaps it might make a good exercise for your chicks, Bonnetchen.” Turning. “Please excuse us Father.”
Father Scruple blazed disapproval and extended his hand petulantly, ring raised intimidatingly for kissing. Walter smiled politely and shook it with a formal and very secular click of the heels.
10
The motion pictures had not been a great success in Bali. At first it was thought that this was because the Dutch and English captions on the screen could not be understood by the natives and they had been replaced by Malay. The small number who spoke, let alone read, the language defeated this. So someone was paid to stand in front and deliver a shouted soundtrack in Balinese, over the thundering of the piano, played by a muscular and competitive Dutch lady. In time, this performer developed his art and attained an almost complete independence from the original storyline, inventing freely, transforming tragedies into low comedies so that heroines would be cast out into the incomprehensible snow to the accompaniment of roars of Balinese laughter and “Hearts and Flowers”. Thus, irony was introduced to the Balinese. But the whole ambience was hostile to the idiom of local performing arts, where plays went on all night but were known in advance from a hundred previous tellings and required only flickering attention. Spectators would wander in and out, have loud conversations, cook snacks, engage in dalliance, breastfeed their families and, of course, pay nothing at all for the privilege. Art did not interrupt the maelstrom of life.
It was for such reasons that the picturehouses in Denpasar and Buleleng catered nowadays for a largely European audience, yet an enterprising and innovative Armenian, Mr Minas, had not let matters lie there. Seeing a gap in the market, he had bought a lightweight Japanese projection system, loaded it onto bicycles, ridden by coolies, and taken it around the villages where they set up under the immemorial waringin trees of the marketplace. A bedsheet was spread, the acetylene lamp was lit and the film projector turned by relays of pedalling legs. There was no spot on the island too remote to be visited by Minas and his minions and they relied, for their living, entirely upon the Balinese sense of shame. Curiosity, the boredom of village life, above all the lure of ancient and familiar Charlie Chaplin films enticed people into the market. After a brief taster to fire the appetite, the hat would be passed around before the main programme and no one risked the public scandal of giving absolutely nothing. The setting, the relaxed ambience, the absence of formal payment, all conspired to make these visits acceptable to the Balinese mind and gradually Charlie Chaplin became the only famous film star on the island.
It was a shock, born of his celebrity, that he had a dumpy younger brother called Sidney who – constantly facemopping – could nor stand the heat.
“Christ Charlie, it’s hotter here than a fried fanny. I fought California was bad enough but this is drivin’ me mental.” He was filming us with one of the new compact cine-cameras though we were doing nothing but sitting on the verandah away from the afternoon sun. Syd was someone who filmed everything. A camera in his hand was like a dummy in his mouth.
“Please, not that word.” In his childhood, Charlie’s mother had been locked up in the madhouse, he and Syd in the poorhouse. His melodramatic plots were plucked from life. “Stop thinking about it, Syd. Go and sit in Walter’s lovely river. Go and drink Walter’s lovely river. Think cool thoughts. That’s what Pola Negri used to tell me most mornings about two o’ clock when the old devil stirred.”
Charlie was urbane, in silk shirt – unbuttoned at the throat – and slacks, perfectly groomed and manicured like his vowels. The face was young for his forty-odd years but the hair – lovingly marcelled – pure white. Hollywood gossip, i.e. Plumpe, said that it had turned overnight during the vicious divorce from Lita Grey, married at sixteen and divorced a few years later with a sensational settlement of over $800,000 and a million in costs. Young girls were Charlie’s undoing. He bore it like a cross.
“I’m sorry about Murnau,” said Charlie, sipping guava juice. “He was a great talent. There aren’t that many great talents in Hollywood. I know you were friends – more than friends. I’ve been asked to write something – you know – a whatsit, a review – eulogy – for the trade mags. He didn’t get on with the studios.” Splashing and groans from downstairs. I started. Syd was swimming down there – wallowing – somewhere out of sight. There were no sharks in rivers.
“Do you have problems with the studios?” Walter, a fellow professional, coolly swapping experiences.
“Not any more. I’ve been lucky enough to get control. Syd may not look much but he’s a business genius. This thing I’ve just finished, City Lights, I did the script, acted, directed, produced and now wrote the score. But the bastards never leave you alone. You know all those old films I made in the Tramp costume? They have this new trick of recutting and remixing and releasing them as new films and I don’t get zilch. Those bastards would suck the marrow from your bones. That’s why Fairbanks. Pickford, Griffiths and I set up United Artists.”
“That’s interesting,” mused Walter. “You see that’s exactly the same method the Balinese use to compose new works of music. No one gets royalties there either.”
I interrupted hastily. “You never wanted to do talkies, Mr Chaplin?” I was, I confess, something of a doting fan. I wanted to ask for an autograph. Walter would kill me. Charlie shook his head.
“Words are for lawyers. That’s what they argue over and argue in. Have you ever noticed that the most important communication is never done in words? It’s all in our eyes and in our faces. A guy doesn’t have to say he loves a girl. It’s just that, till he puts it in words, it’s not legally binding. He sang in a good tenor voice:-
“I can’t forget
when we first met
Beneath the starry skies
But most of all
I would recall
The magic of your eyes.”
A corny, lacrimose little tune.
“I just wrote that. Singing in movies is fine but talking lowers them, brings them closer to the everyday. It’d be as stupid as putting a commentar
y over one of those Balinese dances Walter’s so crazy about.”
Walter shifted uncomfortably. He had done just that in his kecak. From downstairs came a strained voice in Syd’s joke falsetto.
Beautiful eyes
What have they seen to make them so beautiful?
Wonderful eyes
What have they dreamed to make them so wonderful?
Sorrowful eyes
What have they seen to make them so sorrowful?
Beautiful wonderful eyes.
