The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  Map

  Dedication

  For Max

  Epigraph

  Nature’s first green is gold,

  Her hardest hue to hold.

  Her early leaf’s a flower;

  But only so an hour.

  Then leaf subsides to leaf.

  So Eden sank to grief,

  So dawn goes down to day.

  Nothing gold can stay.

  —ROBERT FROST

  Contents

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: A Ghost Story

  Part I: Rupture

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part II: Immersion

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Part III: Return

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Carl Hoffman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction reconstructed through thousands of pages of original, contemporaneous journals, letters, news articles, films, still photographs; hours of in-person interviews in Indonesia, Malaysia, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Canada; telephone interviews; and two monthlong trips to Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Kalimantan, where I walked in many of the very same footsteps traveled by the characters in this story. There are a few tales here, however, that feel so wild they defy belief, with no corroborating witnesses or documents. I think they’re true, but only the tellers know for sure.

  Dayak in full war regalia: hornbill feathers, shield, blowpipe, leopardskin vest, and head-hunting sword. (Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. Coll.no. TM-60033041)

  Prologue

  A Ghost Story

  Michael Palmieri heard a crash. Thumps . . . heavy footsteps? It was the middle of the night; maybe it was a dream. He pulled himself out of the fog of sleep. The air conditioner was blowing, and the cold bedroom was lit like the inside of a movie theater from the seventy-two-inch flat-screen TV that he often dozed off to, plumbed right from his villa on the island of Bali to the heart of America via the Internet. College football. The USC Trojans versus the Arizona Wildcats. He loved the Trojans. But the sound was off. And as he registered this, he heard them again: footsteps. Upstairs. Pacing and stomping.

  He jumped up, wrapped himself in a sarong, and quietly pushed open the ornately carved double doors to the living room. On the outside of the door hung a mask, all big eyes and gaping mouth and a long green tongue, with braids of black hair dangling animal teeth and shells and odd seeds, a guardian protecting the inner sanctum of his bedroom. The house flowed into a small garden, like many buildings on the island, and maybe someone had climbed over the garden wall and into his home.

  He flicked on a light switch. There was a lot to steal: aged gongs dangling from coppery brown eaves; glass-fronted cases full of brass Buddhas; amber earplugs; traditional head-hunting swords with elaborately carved bone handles in equally decorated scabbards. The wall opposite the garden resembled a display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a four-foot-tall piece of two-hundred-year-old wood, carved in swirling, stylized branches, reigned as the centerpiece, but around it hung masks with hornbill feathers and haunting mirror eyes and an old wooden ritual vessel in the shape of a canoe, its prow carved in the likeness of a hornbill head, the sacred bird of the island of Borneo. On a stand stood an old shield bearing the same motif of intertwining branches and big watching eyes and fangs, and on his desk lay a bamboo quiver holding poison arrows, its handle carved in the shape of a crocodile.

  Bang. Crash. More footsteps.

  Michael turned left and headed up the stairs.

  On the night Michael told me this story, he looked nearly identical to the septuagenarian actor Jack Nicholson. The same hair, the same complexion, the same facial structure and smile; more than once I watched as women, from out of nowhere, slid their arms around his big shoulders and lifted their phones as he leaned into them and cracked a smile while they took a photo, all without speaking.

  “Do you know her?” I asked the first time it happened.

  “No!” he said. “They think I’m Jack Nicholson. I go with it.”

  He was seventy-two years old, stood five foot ten inches, had gained some girth, but still emanated vitality, a former surfer with a gray soul patch below his lower lip and a twenty-two-karat-gold vajra thunderbolt on a shimmering chain around his neck. Back in the day he’d been Hollywood handsome—chiseled square chin, dark brown hair. He’d even appeared in Playboy magazine in 1972 amid a bevy of naked women. Now he was wearing a classic Hawaiian shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, black shorts, a pair of black Toms shoes. The fruits of his labor, his years of buccaneering from Damascus to Kandahar, from Tehran to Goa, from Srinagar to Beirut, and finally into the remotest heart of Borneo—which he’d loved most of all and where he’d ranged for forty years—filled the world’s most prestigious museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Dallas Museum of Art. The Yale University Art Gallery. The Fowler at UCLA, not to mention the private collections of millionaires in the world’s greatest cities. Bali had long been the epicenter of Oceanic tribal art, with prices for the best pieces now hitting seven figures, a nexus of dealers and collectors with tentacles reaching Western wealth and culture in Paris, New York, Brussels, San Francisco, Geneva—and Michael had brought out many of its masterpieces.

  To the thousands of Americans and Europeans pacing the streets of Ubud, the island’s longtime artistic capital, yoga mats dangling from their shoulders in search of spiritual sustenance, the mystical energy of Bali had been discovered through Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega bestseller Eat Pray Love (or through Julia Roberts playing Liz Gilbert in the film version). But westerners had been drawn to Bali since the 1920s and 1930s, and Michael had been here since the early 1970s. He and his friends had streamed to the island to the east of Java in the Indonesian archipelago in search of freedom, art, passion—paradise. The exotic, the transcendent, the white-sand beaches, the blue-green surf that stretched for miles.

  Not to mention the cheap living, an Eden of palm trees and terraced rice paddies threaded by dirt roads and dotted with Hindu temples, the heady scents of clove cigarettes and incense drifting up to the Balinese gods. They were hippies then, gypsies escaping from conventional lives—and the draft—back home, wherever home was. Some had family money, the rest hustled, though it didn’t take much in those days. Marijuana, for many. Crafts and jewelry and funky tropical clothing for others. And for a few with good eyes and good taste, it had been art from Indonesia’s thousands of islands, many still unexplored oases of traditional cultures and old ways. They’d informally divided up the land into exclusive zones: Alexander (Axel) Goetz took Java. Perry Kesner claimed Sumba. And Borneo was Michael’s.

  Forty years later they were still here, even though the Balinese paradise often appeared sullied now, at least on the surface. At dinner that night, I was stunned when Goetz slipped a gold chain out of his pocket. It was the finest piece of gold I’d ever seen, as thick as my pinkie, so finely woven it felt like silk cloth, as fine as anything in any museum, with a delicate bell on each end. The bells tinkled sweetly. “Javanese,” he said, “twelfth century.” From his fi
nger he slid a gold ring. Heavy, shiny, thick, inlaid with a ruby and two emeralds. Nine hundred years old. Later I would discover that he always wore a heavy antique gold ring, and it was always a different one.

  Across from me at the table was Perry Kesner. He had a shaved head, a gray mustache, heavy eyebrows, a thick New York accent, a muscular body despite his sixty-two years. He wore a deep V-necked tie-dyed T-shirt. Perry, Michael, Axel—they were like men from another time, another place, living remnants of the 1960s counterculture, now with creased brows and crow’s-feet wrinkles around their eyes; you’d never see anyone like them walking the streets of my hometown of Washington, D.C. Which was a funny thing. Art was a world of privilege and wealth: Nelson Rockefeller had created the Museum of Primitive Art in New York in 1954, a collection that in 1976 merged with the Met, a museum standing at the very pinnacle of culture and society. But that was just veneer; underneath the shine lay a murkier world of deals and often shady provenance that the big auction houses and museums pretended didn’t exist. In 2016, for instance, Nancy Wiener, a prominent New York art dealer, was arrested and charged with buying and selling stolen antiquities. “Defendant used a laundering process that included restoration services to hide damage from illegal excavations, straw purchases at auction houses to create sham ownership histories, and the creation of false provenance to predate international laws of patrimony prohibiting the exportation of looted antiquities,” according to the complaint. Among her and her mother’s Upper East Side gallery’s clients over a fifty-year period were Jacqueline Kennedy, John D. Rockefeller III, the Met, and the National Gallery of Australia, which paid $1.08 million for a stolen Buddha it bought from Wiener in 2007.

  I had no indication that Michael or Perry or Axel were involved in anything illegal, but these post-surfer-hippies around me were among the biggest players in Indonesian art; this was the red-hot center of the business, the real business that you didn’t see when you stood before a beautiful piece in the Yale art museum or in a Paris gallery. They held no university degrees, didn’t pop up on society pages. But if you owned a piece of Indonesian art, or admired one in a museum, there was a good chance it had come via one of them. They were buccaneers hiding in plain sight. And in certain places—the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, the back rooms of museums and auction houses from Switzerland to San Francisco—they were famous, legendary, sometimes controversial. None more than Michael.

  Meeting him had been pure serendipity. I had long been fascinated by the persistent Western obsession with remote tribal people, my own included, and I’d originally come to Bali with thoughts of a man named Bruno Manser. Born in Switzerland, Bruno traveled to Sarawak on the Malaysian side of Borneo in 1984 to live with the elusive, shy Penan—hunter-gatherer nomads who avoided the sun and inhabited the mountainous interior of this wild land. He cut his hair like the Penan, wore a loincloth, hunted with blowpipe and poison arrows, could walk across the giant thorns of the forest floor barefoot, spoke their language fluently. Though at first they called him “Lakei Ja’au,” Big Man, he’d gone so deep the Penan eventually called him something else altogether: “Lakei Penan,” Penan Man. He’d crossed a line, done something rare in the Western mind—had become the exotic Other. I envied him; he’d done what I’d fantasized about doing in that longhouse back in 1987. Then, like a T. E. Lawrence of the jungle, he’d led them in a political revolt against the most powerful forces in the state of Sarawak, the Malaysian part of the island. With Bruno’s help this small band of illiterate and nearly naked hunter-gatherers armed with nothing but blowpipes had brought its billion-dollar logging industry to a halt. Doing so made him a hero, a saint, a messianic cult figure to westerners—Outside magazine named him its Outsider of the Year in 1991—and to the Penan themselves, not to mention enemy number one of the Malaysian government.

  His behavior, though, became ever more reckless, obsessive even. Then, in 2000, he vanished. Poof. Gone without a trace. Rumors abounded. That he’d been murdered by the Malaysian government. That he’d gone native completely, cutting all bonds with the outside world. That he’d slipped away to live as a hermit in the vast reaches of Siberia. Or that he’d committed suicide somewhere in the forest, a man driven mad by his failure to save it and its people. Or driven mad by something deeper and more fundamental—a collapse of his identity, a man who’d walked too far out of himself, who’d left behind his Swissness but could never wholly become Penan. “What had happened?” Time magazine Asia asked, putting him on its cover in 2001.

  And now, before I’d even made it to Borneo to investigate Bruno’s life, I’d stumbled upon this other westerner who’d spent decades plunging deep into the forests, with an altogether different purpose and trajectory, and I was eager to hear the story he told me that night, a story that spoke to the very essence of what I imagined even Bruno in his own way—and everyone in Bali—was after.

  Wide awake that night just three years ago, his senses alert, Michael climbed the stairs to his second-floor hallway. Empty, save rows of carved wooden statues, all hundreds of years old, some half a millennium or more. He opened the door to the bedroom above his. Empty, except for even more objects, including glass cases holding ancient Chinese greenware pottery and a stone bracelet seven thousand years old.

  There was only one room left. He padded across the smooth floorboards in his bare feet. Pushed open the door. Turned on the lights. Nothing. No one. Only a single statue about three feet high, fresh from the rain forests, one of the greatest pieces of his career, in a lifetime of epic journeys among the rivers and villages of the Dayak—the indigenous people of Borneo, known for their rich, dynamic culture.

  This statue had been created hundreds of years before, a guardian figure, squatting with bent knees and hands on thighs and disproportionately big round eyes in a heart-shaped face. Staring. Watching. Carved to guard the spirit of some long-forgotten Dayak noble tucked away and protected in a cave.

  Michael had first pictured it in a dream. He maintained a network of local runners throughout Borneo who were on the lookout for good pieces, and almost a year before he’d gotten a text message from one of his contacts. Dayaks searching a limestone cave for the nests of edible swiftlet birds (a delicacy in Chinese cuisine) had found a statue. Was Michael interested?

  He was.

  But the Dayaks feared that disturbing the site might disturb the swifts, which might stop coming and building nests to harvest. They backed away.

  Nine months passed until the contact pinged Michael again. The community needed money to build a new clinic and they were ready to sell.

  What does it look like? Michael asked.

  I don’t know, the man said. I haven’t seen it.

  Try to get a photo of it, Michael said. But he knew well the area where it had been found in East Borneo. It could be from the Modang, a Dayak subgroup known for its especially beautiful—and valuable—carvings. That night he saw the piece in a dream. Clearly. As if he was looking at a photograph. He texted his contact: I’m coming. Meet me at the airport.

  He flew to Balikpapan, in East Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, then drove hours on potholed roads to a village, where they chartered a speedboat and arrived upriver in the middle of the night. Tobacco, gifts, they smoked and talked and finally brought out the statue, wrapped in a dirty cloth. Unveiled, it took Michael’s breath away. His adrenaline surged. He felt victorious. It was the piece in his dream—the exact same one! He’d had a vision and there it was. Whoa, he thought. It was beautiful. Powerful. Muscular. Ancient. A piece like this made him feel full and whole.

  A few years ago he would have thought it two hundred years old, but recent carbon-14 tests of Dayak statues were revealing some to have been created possibly far earlier, controversial dates that if accurate upended many assumptions about the age of material wooden culture in Southeast Asia. To those who’d made it, the statue represented something beyond itself: a universe, a way of living in the world, a time of magic and
portent and unseen dimensions. It wasn’t just a beautiful carving, but a doorway to everything that embodied Borneo, a vast, dripping, fecund island once full of leopards and giant hornbills and trees so tall you couldn’t see their tops and tiny mouse deer and rhinoceroses and huge pythons and more insects than anywhere on earth, full of the men and women who’d made it their home for longer than memory and created beautiful things in a dreamscape of sacred, mystical consciousness. He had to have it. He had bought and sold thousands of pieces over the years, and he still owned hundreds, tucked away in hidey-holes around the world, but when a good one came along, well, it was an addiction. He had to own it.

  They haggled all night. More cigarettes. Homemade tuak rice wine; the Dayaks like to drink.

  Finally a figure: the price of a car, a mind-boggling fortune in a place like Indonesia and twenty times more than he’d ever paid before.

  He’d shipped it home to Bali, put it in the upstairs bedroom, and now, just a few days later, he was hearing the crashes, the footsteps. But nothing was there. At least, thank God, the statue was safe.

  Michael went to bed.

  But the same thing happened the next night.

  And the night after that, and the night after that.

  Some people might have dismissed those strange sounds. Others might have been spooked, freaked out by what seemed inexplicable. But not Michael. He had been around long enough, had experienced enough of Dayak culture to know that this wasn’t a problem of our world. He called a dukun, a Balinese shaman. Dressed in white, the white of purity—white sarong, white hat, white-buttoned cotton blouse—the priest walked into the house, walked up the stairs and into the room. His hair stood up. Goose bumps erupted on his smooth skin. He had fear in his eyes. “Hidup! Hidup!” he said. Alive! Alive!

  The shaman and his wife laid down a poleng, a magically protective black-and-white-checked cloth, a wall that spirits cannot cross, and placed their sacred tools upon it. Holy water, offerings and flowers and incense. The shaman sat cross-legged, burned incense, rang a bell with a vajra thunderbolt on the handle, back and forth, back and forth, and a luminous high-pitched sound, clear and strong, a sound that pierced right to the heart of the world, rang out through the house as he chanted in Balinese and Bahasa Indonesia.