by Nigel Barley
“Walter. How could you be so shameless?”
He shrugged. “Better sorry than safe. Anthropologists spend their lives looking through other people’s keyholes. They must occasionally expect us to look back.”
“Well … what did you see?” He looked up at me and smiled and said nothing. Just chuckled. “Walter. Who was it? What was going on?”
He rose and dusted off the backs of his legs with irritating langour. “I think I’ll go and take a look at that well.” He sidled off round the corner and I heard his voice talking to one of the servants. I made to follow, paused, looked up at the transom. The cry rang out again. God help me, I had to know. I could have borne not knowing but to have Walter know and not tell was insufferable. Each step of the stairs creaked beneath my tread. At any moment, one of the boys would come and catch me red-handed and -faced. The chair stuck, then scraped on the floor, wobbled as I climbed up. Bamboo did not make good furniture. The door was hung to open outwards. If it opened now I would be pitched over the edge to a death only slightly better than the embarrassment of being caught. I put my face to the glass and looked in.
At first I could see little but my own dismembered reflection. Light was leaking into the bedroom through drawn curtains from outside. The bed was sited facing north as prescribed by Balinese notions but the head of the figure sprawled on it had its back towards me. Never mind. It was blonde and unmistakable as it twisted from side to side in denial or some agony of surrender. And crouched between its legs was another dim figure engaged in an activity that looked vaguely doggish, with hands raised to Jane’s breasts like a man randomly twiddling the knobs on his wireless set to improve reception. Suddenly the whole scene shifted into focus and the dog raised its head. Not Gregory. Not one of the boys. Certainly not McPhee. Margaret! Gruesomely naked but for necklace and dangly earrings, her mouth a great red smear hinting at God knew what vampiric perversities. No wait. That was not the blood of menses nor Rangda’s due of afterbirth. That was lipstick and, unless further degradations had been attempted, it had been put on her mouth and only subsequently smeared in the heat of battle. It seemed for a moment that she looked directly at the transom and saw me, but the laws of physics surely prevented that, and she returned gurgling to her task as the dreadful cry rang out again from Jane and I teetered back on the trembling chair and fled from the house.
Outside, Walter was calmly talking to Greg, over by the wall of the well, like two old men discussing the season’s crop of runner beans. Surely, by rights, Greg should have been up there with Margaret, taking pictures, tripod twirled to a rakish angle, stopwatch held up to the light, ears straining to pick up any revealing slip of the native tongue. I could hear Walter showing off, reciting some fancy Malay pantun, full of puns on the well as a joyful source of water and the eye as a sad one, Greg all nodding, dutiful interest. On seeing me, he switched to a more Freudian mode.
“You’re not going in deep enough,” Walter was saying with surely calculated salaciousness, flashing glances at me. How much did Greg know? What was he prepared to put up with? “You’re up here on the backbone of the ridge and, in the dry season you’ll end up just scratching at a damp bottom. I reckon you need to go down another thirty meters but there’s always the danger of bedrock that you’ll not be able to penetrate, so you might want to think about moving down towards the river and drilling your shaft in a virgin patch.” He brightened, abandoning metaphor to a better idea. “Unless you use explosives. Dynamite should get you flowing again.” He could see it all in his mind, lighting the fuse, the hiss, the roar, the almighty bang. What fun. “Yes! Dynamite!” he nodded, “that’s the thing.”
“Walter, they’d never let you get your hands on dynamite.”
“Black powder! Lee King sells firecrackers. He must have access to gunpowder. A Beryl – I mean barrel – of that should do it!”
Greg laughed and slapped Walter on the back. “Well, I was in the Officers’ Training Corps and it sounds a little dodgy to me, old man, but I think we’ll have to ask Jane. I don’t know how long she’ll be.”
“Oh, I should think about another ten minutes should be about right,” Walter said. We both frowned and looked questioningly at him. “Oh. I heard sounds of stirring, running water, you know.” Walter’s knowledge of the female sexual climax proved accurate. And ten minutes later, there they were, hand in hand no less, the adulterous minxes, taking advantage of male innocence to flaunt their Sapphic urges. Margaret had shed the harlot jewellery and wiped her mouth of Delilah’s paint and looked as cleareyed and scrubbed as though she were back from singing in the church choir. With shock, I remembered that her first fieldwork had been on something like the sexuality of adolescent Samoan girls in church schools. Oh dear! It struck me then that most anthropology is really autobiography. I could not bring myself to kiss her though Walter, with a total disregard for hygiene, unhesitatingly planted a great wet kiss of greeting on her lips.
“Stay to dinner,” urged Jane, looking relaxed and oddly beautiful in a simple linen dress. “We have turtle.” Not just turtle but a turtle, presented by McPhee’s Kuta musicians cum fishermen. And there it was, poor thing, turned on its back, legs pedaling the air, helplessly awaiting the butcher’s knife. “Satay for everyone. I’ll tell the boys.” I had an unwanted vision of Margaret, red lipped, going down determinedly on the dank sea beast. I have never liked turtle meat, heavy and oily and with an attenuated taste of fish that speaks of involuntary contamination rather than true flavour, so I ate sparingly, mainly of rice and peanut sauce. Its flesh would not be wasted. The Balinese regard it as a great luxury and would spin it out amongst themselves in a web of exchange and social obligation. Beryl would be eating roots and berries back in Ubud, bringing Walter’s book to term, like a dutiful wife.
It was one of those evenings like ruched satin that you can only have before age makes you constantly aware of the tinny ticking of life’s clock. I recall it now in a thick wash of sepia tones. At this altitude, you looked down on the plains as from a high tower and the wind had a slight chill delicious in the tropics. Walter mixed a cunning new cocktail in an antique silver bowl and floated delicate purple and red bougainvillea blossoms on top, then decanted it into delicate little glasses.
“We shall call it ‘Breast Stroke’ in honour of the turtle – and various other things.” I shot him a warning look. He always went too far.
“Why the tiny glasses? Looks like the product of an ant’s orgasm.” Greg tasted warily. Then, “I think maybe ‘Walter’s Dynamite’,” he offered hoarsely. “This would certainly bore a hole through solid rock.” Walter slid behind McPhee’s piano and improvised some gentle bespoke variations on Balinese themes, caressing the keys breaststrokelike, the music blowing out into the darkened ricefields. I turned towards Greg.
“How did the research go in Batuan?” I asked. When conversation fails, it is always easiest to get a man talking about his work.
“Absolutely non-stop, old man.” He blew air. “With Margaret as taskmaster, between work-sessions, one barely got time for a wank and a sandwich before being lashed to one’s labour again.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Greg. It was fascinating,” corrected Margaret, sweeping in and tapping ash from her cigarette. Did I imagine fishy breath? “Fulfilling. Painters make good specimens except for their notorious inability to put their art into words. Frustration breeds trancelike passivity and withdrawal from the world, a cultural validation of temperamental tendencies to dissociated states probably originally rooted in childhood toilet training.” So that was it. My lessons in perspective were simply grace notes to the organisation of bowel movements. Greg clamped his mouth shut and, himself, withdrew into trance, watching with owl eyes as he displaced his own attention to the anal cleaning of his pipe bowl.
“And what do you think of their paintings? Are they any good?”
She frowned. The concept was alien to her. “Okaaay. They are neither good nor bad, Rudi. They are merely a cultural symp
tom like the sustained emotional passivity of our last village, Bayung Gede.” Irritation flared. I had been to that village, too, knew the men she had been working with better than she did. I could see, in my mind, their thin, bony chests like those of skinned rabbits.
“And when you were in Bayung Gede, the simple fact they were malnourished, riddled with malaria, iodine-deficient and therefore prey to hypothyroid conditions – was that, too, a mere cultural symptom or part of the explanation for any passivity?”
She shook her head sadly. “No, no, no. You do not understand, Rudi. Nature has nothing to do with it – least of all in Bali. Have you never seen a Balinese man breastfeed his baby? Look, when I was in Manus, I collected over 35,000 pieces of children’s art and discovered that they are totally free of the animism that characterises Western children’s paintings. They have just not been taught that that is what children should be doing. The whole thing was beautifully put to a colleague of mine working in the American Southwest by an old Red Indian storyteller. He told her that, at the creation, the Great Spirit had handed each people a clay cup to dip into the waters and give form to their way of life. ‘But now,’ he said, ‘our cup has been broken’. The Balinese cup is chipped and cracked and leaking badly but it is not yet broken. What we must do is capture its outlines before it is shattered by the impact of the outside world. It is always the case that nature provides the keyboard but culture plays the tune. QED.”
Over her shoulder, Walter played a – to me – very natural-sounding tune on a clearly cultural keyboard. Under the pretence of refilling my still-intact cup, I crossed the room to where Jane sat alone, staring out into darkness – dissociated some might say. I sat down beside her.
“Colin and I are getting divorced,” she said coolly without preamble. Then, “Oh my!” She slumped and collapsed internally like a badly mixed soufflé. “I’m sorry, Rudi. I didn’t want to make a scene. I guess I only really gave up all hope today.”
“Any particular reason?” Well, what about the fact that he was off the whole time, scandalously chasing dirty little boys up and down the hills of Sayan? Maybe that’s where he was at this very moment. Or that she had just been lesbically tongue-lashed by Margaret?
She smiled weakly. “It’s general,” she said vaguely. “He has grown, changed, developed different interests.”
“And you,” I asked, with more emphasis than I had intended. “Have you developed different interests?”
She turned and looked at me and smiled sadly again. “I have never been unfaithful to Colin with any other man.” Ah no. I had not asked that. Anyway, she was lying through her teeth, telling the strict truth to hide it, as I had once with my mother – “No woman, mother,” I had said.
“Does that mean you will be leaving Bali?”
“Not necessarily. At least not for long.” A desperate look came on her face. “I have this book I am writing on trance. Margaret says it’s good. I must finish that. The whole thing with Colin can be handled by efficient divorce lawyers. Margaret has been most helpful in that area.” Little did we know then that poor Jane would shortly break down in acute schizophrenia and spend much of the rest of her life in and out of clinics in what they cruelly termed, in those days, ‘the lithium trance’. Tears welled up in her eyes and Walter was there, on cue, the good plain uncle, without pantuns or dynamite, wiping them away with a broad swipe of the thumb, as though she were a little girl. Only he could have done that and made it the right thing.
“I know my playing is pretty good stuff,” he smiled, “but I didn’t expect to move this audience to tears. You should have come to the Little Harmonie, Jane. We could have used you with all the flinty hearts there.” Margaret, seeing the tears, fluttered over and I moved away, back to Greg. This evening was becoming a curious minuet.
“Schismogenesis,” he said, as if in a tutorial, and sucking his empty pipe to look wise. Did he never actually light the damned thing? “This hostility between Margaret and Beryl. There is a small disagreement between A and B that becomes progressively amplified over time, feeding on itself and driving the parties intractably asunder. I call the process schismogenesis. Where we worked before in New Guinea, you found it everywhere – basis of the feud – but there is none of it in Bali. Did you know that if two chaps just can’t get along, they have a sort of ritual to declare them incompatible. Then they can avoid all the normal social contacts – don’t have to say hello – not a dicky bird – and it caps the whole thing. Even the music and dance. It never gets anywhere. Every time it approaches a climax or a resolution, it just backs off and calms down again. You know Margaret calls Beryl ‘Rangda’? Well, in the Balinese version, Ragda and Barong engage each other but, in the end it’s just a draw. They both back off. Margaret’s idea of a proper response to a slight is rather different.” He laughed. “In an ideal world, she’d really like to kill her adversary in single combat, then burn down his house, slit his children’s throats and rape his wife. Of course, nowadays she can only do that in the academic press but ideally a book should have, not an appendix, but a spleen. For Margaret, conflict is a sine qua non of life.”
“What is this?” asked Walter suddenly there. “Sine qua non? I always though it should mean ‘an impoverished Chinaman’.”
Greg laughed. “And your own car, Walter, with its dodgy radiator, would be an auto da fe.”
“Yes, yes.” The drink was getting to us. We had been drinking steadily – now unsteadily – all evening. Walter dispensed more, sacerdotally, from the bowl on the piano. “And a volte-face would be the expression on your face when you got an electric shock.”
Greg was warming up. “A cul de sac would be a hessian anus.” He rubbed his rump, dog-like against the edge of the keyboard, gasping pantomime relief. We had the giggles, like schoolboys being naughty behind the bicycle sheds. Walter was bent double, gasping and grabbing at the …
“Piano nobile,” I suggested daringly, “would be ‘grand piano’.”
“Casus belli,” Greg thrust out his stomach in a grotesque paunch or, feu de joie, now clutching his groin, rolling his eyes in simulated pain and intoning roundly, “an inflammatory venereal disease.”
That really set us off. And then Greg looked across the room and stiffened, straightened up, dropped his hand from his crotch, suddenly sober. Margaret and Jane were kissing with a tenderness and appetite, feeding on each other’s lips, that belied any further pretence at mere compassion.
“Noli me tangere, Margaret,” he said with an edge of American bitterness in his voice, “or, as they say in Rome, ‘hands off my tangerines’.”
Walter was in an expansive mood, driven to draw generalisations from the experiences of the day – in other words drunk. “You know, Bonnetchen,” he stage-whispered in my ear. “I never guessed Margaret was a lesbian. It just shows how prejudiced one can be. I thought she wore those ghastly clothes because she was a Christian.”
13
I may as well come clean about it. Further dissimulation would be otiose. I had not, of late, visited the lapangan kota. Partly, this was a financial matter. It was suddenly as if the world had seen enough of Balinese dancers and bare breasts and my paintings trailed in the art dealers’ of Amsterdam. Since the museum shop had been closed and I had had Neuhaus kicked off its administrative board, Walter’s shop at the akvarioom was closed to me, giving no direct outlet to the local tourist trade. I was not about to hawk my canvases from door to door in the hotels as Balinese did. There was also – I confess with shame – the fact that I was getting free, at home, what I might have paid for in the public domain. Putu, the palace servant who looked after me, had recently assumed new duties. Walter’s description of him as “ugly” was wide of the mark. In his mid-thirties, he had always had a chunky quality, it is true, and with a dark, flat face and curly hair that Balinese themselves look down on as the mark of unrefinement. You might say that he had been created to play the role of one of Hanuman’s monkey soldiers in the kecak, with a great, too
thy grin and big ears. But it is surely the place of the artist to find beauty where others are incapable of seeing it. I could detail the soft, blue-black flue on his forearms, the delicate curl of his hair behind his ears, but these would be simply secondary justifications for a gentle passion that I would never reveal to Walter. Quite simply, his plain, hard and efficient body pleased me like the old, unfussy, Dutch country furniture I remembered from childhood. Since Putu already took care of my food, laundry and domestic cleaning, our newly physical closeness seemed – if you will permit the expression – a natural extension that he took easily in his stride. All Balinese know what a terrible thing it is to sleep alone and the fact that we had developed our sleeping to “an exchange of strokings” was unremarkable. Even strangers sleeping in the hamlet’s shelter huddled together, meshing their concavities and convexities. It was a physical solace that came with no extravagant declarations and hot avowals, no agonies of identity or conscience, shrugged on almost without comment. It was a thing of the greatest possible comfort.
Beryl had left in an advanced state of literary gestation, half the book written, the rest promised, a publisher already found. Her departure was marked by an extended party with gamelan – Putu at the font in a new sarong, playing the cymbal-like cengceng – and dancers. The highpoint was an extraordinary performance, by Beryl, of a choreographically correct Moroccan bellydance that she had mastered during her researches there, Walter smacking the drums into vigorous north African tempo as Beryl gyrated her stomach as a sort of absent space, with the boys and the gamelan players watching agape. Afterwards, she had to be carried to her room, prostrate, and slowly revived with spoonfuls of warm goat’s milk so that she might witness the anthropological tableau staged in the garden by the boys, under Walter’s direction.
