by Tom Robbins
James played louder. People drew closer. And before long there was an impromptu fiesta in progress: literally dozens of people singing along, mostly to interminable renditions of “Guantanamera,” the one song to which all present knew the words. Obviously, we weren’t Russian, but it took a while before James and I were identified as Americans, for many, if not most of them, had never encountered an American. They knew some rock and roll, however, having listened clandestinely and at considerable risk to Miami radio stations. And they knew Chiclets. Man, did they know Chiclets. Somewhere -- if only in their mythology -- they’d come into contact with the tiny pellets of candy-coated chewing gum and automatically associated them with America. The land of the free and the home of the Chiclets. Chiclets and stripes forever!
Hesitant to interrupt James Lee -- in Cuba you don’t mess with the music -- kids surrounded me, just pleading for Chiclets. Now I knew practically no Spanish, and much of what I did know was from a Tex-Mex idiom not widely understood in Cuba -- but I’d seen handmade signs in California shop windows that read SE HABLA ESPANOL, a statement I always took to mean “We have Spanish,” as in “We have command of the Spanish language.” For years, I’d been confusing habla with the verb haber, “to have,” when in actuality, hablar is the verb “to speak.” So when I kept protesting to the young Cubans, enunciating clearly so they wouldn’t misinterpret, “No habla Chiclets,” what I was really saying was “I don’t speak Chiclets.”
Well, it was an honest statement: I did not speak Chiclets. Later, however, when I came to realize why the Cubans had been regarding me as if I were some kind of Yankee nut job, I had to ask myself, “Why not?” Trying to imagine what Chiclets might sound like, I began to teach myself a basic Chiclet lexicon. You know, the essential phrases. I still recall a few (they sound like passages from Beowulf being recited by cartoon mice), but can only pronounce them after I’ve consumed four or more Cuba libres.
Linguistically versatile if far from fluent, I can goof up any number of languages and with varying results. The first time I dined alone in Paris, for instance, I made a mistake that conceivably could have gone in my favor.
Perusing the menu at Polidor, my favorite affordable restaurant in that city of magnificent and expensive places to eat, I thought that the veal in a cream sauce sounded good. However, when the drastically cute waitress came to take my order, I mistakenly asked not for veau en crème but vous en crème, and it took me a moment before I understood that I’d told her that I wanted her in cream.
Of course, that was what I really wanted. Like no habla Chiclets, it was a truthful statement, and Freud, bless his heart, would have immediately recognized it as such. The waitress, being French, simply took it in stride. With neither a giggle nor a blush, she wrote down my order and brought me the veal. It was delicious, but having now comprehended my error and fantasized about the potential result, I couldn’t help but feel a wee bit cheated.
Linguistic malfunctions involving chewable and edible substances are not limited to peasants such as I. Consider John F. Kennedy on a historic day in Germany in 1963.
Among the confections favored by sweet-toothed Deutschen is a jelly-filled pastry they call the Berliner. Now, in the German language, articles of speech (such as “a,” “an,” “the,” etc.) are never placed in front of nationalities or other nouns that identify persons according to their place of origin, although articles, quite naturally, are placed in front of pastries. Thus, there are waggish grammarians who insist that when President Kennedy -- shod in hand-tooled leather shoes, a fine Harvard cravat about his neck -- buttoned himself into a heavy black cashmere-and-wool topcoat, stepped from a bulletproof limousine onto a privileged podium, and with dignity, passion, and compassion announced his solidarity with a beleaguered city by intoning, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” what he actually said was, “I am a jelly doughnut.”
There are others -- mostly earnest liberals -- who argue that this interpretation is merely an attempt to besmirch the reputation of a great statesman. I contend it’s nothing of the sort. From my perspective, in fact, the opposite is true. I’ve had occasion now to lug my taste buds all over the planet, exposing them to dishes ranging from the sublime -- foie gras mousse in a brown morel sauce (Paris), and warm zabaglione with fresh wild strawberries (Rome), to the challenging -- snow-frog fat in custard (Hong Kong), and red ant larva (northern Thailand). In all my gastronomic globe-trotting, however, I cannot honestly say that any food item, with the possible exception of a perfect tomato sandwich, has had a greater impact on my palate and my eye or generated richer, more varied imagerial associations than the jelly doughnut, that plump pastry Pantheon, that unbroken circle, that holy tondo, that doughy dome of heaven, that female breast swollen with sweetness, that globe of glorious goo, that secret round nest of the scarlet-throated calorie warbler, that sun whose rays so ignite the proletariat palate, that hub of the wheel of sustenance, that vampire cookie gorged with gore, that clown in an army overcoat, that fat fried egg with a crimson yoke, that breakfast moon, that bulging pocket, that strawberry alarm clock, that unicorn turd, that jewel pried from the head of a greasy idol (a ruby as big as the Ritz), that Homeric oculus (blind yet all-seeing), that orb, that pod, that crown, that womb, that knob, that bulb, that bowl, that grail, that . . . well, you get the picture.
Whether consciously or subliminally, JFK could not have identified himself with a more wide-ranging, democratically inclusive sustenance than a jelly doughnut. How might it have affected his legacy, not to mention world peace, had he proclaimed “Ich bin ein Kraut” (I am a cabbage) or “Ich bin ein Kartoffelpuffer” (I am a potato pancake) instead?
As I may have made clear in these confessions (luckily for the reader, and me, as well, Chiclets isn’t a written language), I’ve never been accused of gastronomic timidity. In recent years, I have become increasingly disinclined to partake of morsels intimately connected to deceased members of the animal kingdom, but I can recall only once in my travels when I shied away from an opportunity to sample exotic fare in an exotic setting. That occurred when I was invited to sup with my subjects (that’s right, subjects) on the day I reigned (I’m not joking) as King of the Cannibals.
I was in northwestern Sumatra with a small group -- eight paying river rafters, four guides from Sobek/Mountain Travel (the California-based adventure company), and an English-speaking Indonesian forest ranger who spent his downtime reading Louis L’Amour cowboy novels -- intent on becoming the second party to ever run the Alas, a remote river that cuts through the largest expanse of tropical rain forest left in Asia; a dense jungle, home to orangutans, rhinos, and tigers, and perpetually threatened by Japanese timber companies.
Adventure travel is by definition unpredictable, and in the steamy dawn, as we set out from Berstagi aboard a snub-nosed buslike vehicle of unknown manufacture, hoping to put our inflatable boats in the water before the sun became more ornery than any L’Amour gunslinger, we found ourselves on a fortuitous anthropological detour. At a pee stop in the leafy hills not far from where the pavement runs out, we met a surprisingly sensitive field geologist from Mobil Oil, who informed us with genuine excitement that a rare daylong exhumation ceremony was about to transpire in an isolated village of the Karo Batak, a tribe of former (?) cannibals, and though disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to join us there, he drew us a crude map to the place in case we were intrigued. We were. Following the oilman’s directions, we drove an abusive dirt road to its dead end, then hiked five miles (this had better be good) into a National Geographic wet dream.
Aside from the occasional oil explorer, timber cruiser, or misguided Christian missionary, the Karo Batak had never been exposed to blue-eyed devils. Yet, when -- blue eyes as wide as poker chips -- our foreign mob suddenly appeared out of nowhere, we were received as honored guests. So gracious was their hospitality, in fact, that after a confab, tribal leaders declared that a pair from our group would be crowned their king and queen for the day.
Being ob
viously strong and demonstratively sweet-natured, Beth, a veteran Colorado River guide, was a logical choice for queen. Why they chose me as their king I haven’t a clue. Certainly it had nothing to do with my literary reputation, although some novelists are known to practice verbal cannibalism, biting and gnawing on one another insatiably at cocktail parties or in reviews. At any rate, our hosts escorted Beth and me to sexually segregated longhouses where they wrapped us in regal sarongs and other colorful raiments and hung about thirty pounds of solid gold ornaments -- the village treasury -- from our respective necks and appendages. (They must have figured we were too weighted down to skip town.)
There was then a royal procession back to the principal longhouse, where now on display were the remains of seven persons recently exhumed from the graves where they’d lain for seven years while their families saved enough money to fund the ceremony that would finally usher their spirits into the Karo Batak version of heaven. The bones were lovingly washed, dried, and stacked in seven neat piles, a skull atop each pile like a bleached cherry on a Halloween sundae. Then the celebration began.
Squatting along the sidelines, several older women, grandmother types, were chewing betel nut, and though readers may find this hard to believe, I felt it only polite to join in. The grannies, with big toothless grins, obliged me. Well, as I soon discovered, betel nut ain’t Chiclets, baby. Wrapped in a leaf coated with a paste of mineral lime (the stuff with which we used to line ball fields and tennis courts), betel nut numbed my mouth, stained my teeth and lips the color of a matador’s hankie, and left sores on my gums that didn’t heal for days, but it gave me the energy to keep pace with my “subjects” as the lot of us danced ritualistically around and around and around those graveyard sundaes.
The steps were repetitive, fairly easy to learn, and in a kind of conga line that jerked rhythmically to music provided by two groups of drummers and snake-charmer flute-tooters, we literally danced the day away. The relatives of the deceased, having sacrificed for years to finance this ritual, at the conclusion of which the remains were to be permanently reburied, weren’t about to waste a minute of it.
Afternoon was beginning to purple like the best English prose when the music abruptly stopped, dancers relaxed, and the entire tribe seemed to utter an extended sigh of accomplishment and release. Queen Beth now emerged from a dark corner of the longhouse, where she’d sequestered herself most of the day, afraid perhaps that she might be pressed to dance, chew betel nut (though only the elderly -- and I -- so indulged), or, worse, allow her royal spouse his conjugal rights. Members of our rafting party exchanged glances now, wondering if it wasn’t time to take our leave. It was then that our eyes were directed to a voluminous cauldron resting on live coals at the center of the longhouse, and in which there bubbled a stew more gray in color than that shade of gray that separates the eater from the eaten. It was din-din time in the cannibal village. Definitely time to go.
Now, in fairness, the Karo Batak seemed much too innocent, too tame to be practicing man-eaters, and despite periodic reports to the contrary (rumors spread by neighboring tribes), were said by the Indonesian government not to have lunched on their fellows in about four generations. Some were converted Christians (leading me to wonder if they didn’t especially enjoy Holy Communion), and the Karo Batak mind is so inexplicably disposed to the game of chess that within a year after being instructed in its intricacies, members were said to be playing on a par with European masters. Go figure. Nevertheless, one look at that ghoulish gray stew and we were moved to excuse ourselves. Beth and I changed out of our sarongs, surrendered our gold trappings (the headpieces alone could have financed a Las Vegas pawnshop), and as abdicating monarchs, shook every hand in the village before taking the long muddy trek back to our bus.
Now, at the very worst, that stew meat was dog. Or monkey. More than likely it was only chicken. Be that as it may, I shall never cease to insist that once upon a time, in the tiger-haunted hills of Sumatra, I wielded the savage scepter of the King of the Cannibals. And at those who might dispute that claim, I’m fully prepared to hurl the ancient and traditional curse of the Karo Batak: “I pick the flesh of your relatives from between my teeth.”
Two days before we hobnobbed with the Karo Batak, we’d visited an orangutan rehabilitation center. It’s true, but lest anyone think that in some Darwinian fluke the big red apes might be distantly related to Lindsay Lohan, let me assure you that what plagues orangutans isn’t drugs or booze. These primates were addicted to something far more dangerous: human beings. Imagine a Betty Ford Clinic where the demon to be exorcised was Betty Ford.
Baby orangutans were said to make wonderful pets. Beautiful in a sort of goofy way -- resembling a cross between Homer Simpson, Lucille Ball, and the Gerber Baby -- they look like a creature you might expect to speak Chiclets. Instead, they jabber primate nursery noises, and gurgling and cooing, become very attached to their human owners, upon whom they bestow bountiful hugs and kisses. They remain affectionate as they grow older, but by the time they’re half grown, they’ve become so strong they’re breaking ribs with their embraces and furniture with their playfulness. Among affluent Indonesians, it has long been a fad, a status symbol, to keep a young orangutan as a house pet -- that is, until it reaches an age when, innocently enough, it becomes a house wrecker.
There’s a law in Sumatra against harboring an orangutan, but the Dutch, who controlled the island until 1949, devised a program whereby a wealthy violator could “donate” his rowdy juvenile ape to the government. The owner would thereby avoid punishment and save face (important in that society), the ape would go into rehab. At the forest compound east of the capital, Medan, pet apes would be weaned from human dependence, made wary, even fearful, of men; and gradually reconditioned so that theoretically they could function independently in the wild. A high platform had been erected in the jungle about a half mile from the compound proper, and very early each morning, bananas and milk would be set out atop it, on the presumption that the surrendered apes hadn’t yet learned to sufficiently fend for themselves. Visitors like us, who’d hiked into the feeding station, would start to hear branches snapping as one by one, young orangutans would come swinging through the trees to receive their government handout: a simian food bank, you might say.
As implied, the rehab compound was quite a ways in the boondocks. In order to make that sunup hike to the feeding platform, our rafting group had to spend the night at the compound. The Dutch had built two Western-style houses on the grounds, one of which was occupied by resident rangers, the other left empty for visitors; and by empty, I mean completely unfurnished. We were to lay out our sleeping bags on the bare floors of the two main rooms. There was, however, a tiny room in the rear, off the kitchen and near the edge of the jungle, that had a separate entrance -- and a cot. Now, I’d hurt my back on the volleyball court shortly before leaving home, so I petitioned our Sobek guides to allow me, for my spine’s sake, to sleep in that room. To be honest, sore back or no sore back, the main reason I coveted those isolated accommodations was that I’m an almost pathologically light sleeper: should a moth land on my windowpane or somebody strike a paper match within forty yards of my bed, I snap instantly awake. You might as well set off fireworks next to my bed as snore in my vicinity, and I knew that Big Jim Pleyte, with whom I’d previously camped in Africa, was, for one, a world-class snorer.
When, however, our guides asked permission for me to sleep in the little room, it was denied. We were told that it was reserved for rangers. As bedtime arrived and the room showed no sign of occupancy, Beth petitioned again on my behalf. And when refused, she persisted. Beth wouldn’t give up. She just badgered. Finally, the ranger in charge reluctantly caved in. I unfolded my sleeping bag on the cot’s bare mattress and enjoyed a restful slumber there.
Okay, fast-forward a week. We’d set up camp on the banks of the Alas after a long day on the river, and were heating our evening repast over an open fire when two forest rangers passed by
in a motorized canoe. Following a friendly exchange, during which we inquired about wildlife in the vicinity (I, for one, was hot to see a tiger), we invited the rangers to eat with us. After dinner, they inquired what we’d seen of Sumatra since our arrival in the country (our personal ranger, temporarily setting Louis L’Amour aside, was interpreting). When we related that prior to putting into the river we’d spent a day and night at the orangutan rehab center, they nodded approval. Then one of them asked, “Did you happen to see the haunted room there?”
The “haunted room”? Hello! Instantly, we knew the room to which they referred, and as the rangers elaborated, all eyes swung back and forth between them and me. That small room off the kitchen is left empty, they said, nobody will sleep there anymore. Why? Because on several occasions in the past, a beautiful naked woman with very long black hair has appeared in the narrow clearing at the rear of the house, called to the ranger who happened to be staying in that room, and beckoned him to follow her into the jungle. Those who did were never seen again.
The account was told with sober conviction, and in that setting -- in Sumatra, generally -- it was easier to accept as truth than it would have been in Seattle, or even Appalachia. There is something a little spooky about the Indonesian hinterlands, a dark undercurrent, a sense that preternatural forces are at play there, generating in foreign visitors skin-prickling sensations that cannot be easily dismissed as mere susceptibility to the primitive fears of superstitious locals. As the rangers talked about the haunted room, there was around our campfire an epidemic of goose bumps, and people kept looking at me as if I, a survivor, might have something to add. I did not.
