The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  A day later Georges and Mutang returned to the car and drove back to Limbang, arriving at dawn. Georges flew on to Miri and then to Kota Kinabalu in the neighboring Malaysian state of Sabah. Borrowed a typewriter from the front desk of his hotel and typed Bruno’s long letter and faxed it to the ITTO in London and to Fabiola in Switzerland. Went to the post office and mailed a hard copy. Went to a photo developing agency and suddenly realized Bruno was famous. What to do? He gave the film to the clerk and then talked to her nonstop, a stream of senseless tourist words about seeing Gunung Mulu and climbing mountains that kept her occupied until the pictures flopped out of the developing machine, and she never even glanced at the photos. Flew to Bandar Siri Begawan in Brunei, where he checked into the Brunei Sheraton and where he’d arranged to meet Mutang with Bruno’s things—they wanted Bruno to travel with nothing. Georges won’t say exactly how he worked the passport, but he had a Swiss one and he switched the photo, slowly, carefully, and gave it to Mutang, who gave Georges Bruno’s things. Next he went to a travel agency and booked a Qantas Airlines flight from Singapore to Frankfurt for Bruno, under the name on the passport. He gave the ticket and money to Mutang, who returned to the forest and drove Bruno out to Limbang, where Anja was waiting. His legs were covered in bruises and scratches, not to mention the gaping hole in his calf, so Mutang gave him his blue jeans, his best, most expensive pair. Anja and Bruno took a taxi to the airport for an early morning flight to Miri, just another tourist couple. Mutang’s cousin went to check on them. “It was a big police sports day in Miri and the whole airport was filled with policemen. There were all these police looking for him but they didn’t recognize him.” Bruno, bearing the false passport, with his mousy short hair, his big glasses, carrying a briefcase, boarded his first plane. He sat next to a policeman, who failed to recognize him. They flew to Miri. There, he heard that some Penan would be putting on a cultural show in the city. He wanted to go. Anja, apoplectic, called Georges, who was still in Brunei, said Bruno wants to go to this dance. Georges said put Bruno on the phone. “I told him, ‘You will never go there! Ever. What are you thinking? I’ve put my head in a noose and you’re going to go to a dance where you might be recognized?’”

  “Okay, okay,” Bruno said. “I won’t go.”

  Georges flew to Singapore. Bruno flew to Kuching and then on to Singapore. “It was strange for him. It was so bright. The jungle had been so dim.” But he was shifting fast, stoic, showed no emotion or nostalgia for the life he was leaving. Georges put Bruno on the plane to Frankfurt, from there to Zurich. He told no one, not even Bruno’s family. Only when Bruno’s plane left the ground in Singapore did Georges return to his hotel and fax Fabiola that Bruno had escaped and was inbound to Switzerland. He asked her to pick him up. It was March 1990, six years and three months since Bruno had flown to Singapore, and six months since he’d been bitten by the pit viper.

  A day later, Bruno Manser knocked on his parents’ door in Basel.

  III

  Return

  What I was feeling then, such very depressed feelings, my ancestors called nelangsa—feeling completely alone, still living among one’s fellows but no longer the same; the heat of the sun is borne by all, the heat in one’s heart is borne alone.

  —PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER, THE EARTH OF MANKIND

  From beneath his mattress one day, Michael Palmieri pulled out a thick sheaf of carefully hand-drawn treasure maps, detailing the rivers, tributaries, rapids, and longhouse communities of Borneo. (Carl Hoffman)

  Twelve

  It was February 2016, another perfect Bali morning, the air balmy and humid, yet before the heat of midday it felt almost womblike. To ride my rented motorcycle through the streets was a sensual feast of smells. Sudden drafts of plumeria so sweet it was like sniffing an open bottle of perfume. Cloves from Indonesian cigarettes replaced by acrid car exhaust replaced by incense from corner temples. Each smell came and went quickly, hitting my nose for a few moments of olfactory stimulation, before a whole new onslaught. A few weeks before, Michael had showed me a photo on his phone of an old Dayak shield. One of his contacts in Borneo had texted it to him, offering it for sale. It appeared, like most Dayak shields, as a long hexagonal shape, brown with hints of red. Big circular eyes under a smoky old brown patina. He’d leaned in close to the photo, outlined it with his finger, pointing out the eyes, the mouth, the fanglike teeth. “If this is real—well, it looks real, but it might be repainted—and if it’s not . . . I have to buy it,” he said. “Take a chance on it. I don’t need any more. I have thousands of objects spread all over. I could never sell it all and when I leave this earth my son Wayan and my nephew will have it all. But the thing about art is it’s an opiate. A drug. A need. For beautiful things. I love beautiful things with history and power. You see it and you have to have it and its power.”

  He’d sent the contact two hundred dollars, with the promise that if it was real and he wanted it, he’d send more. The shield had arrived, and I was on my way to Michael’s to see it.

  Thirty-five years had passed since he’d bought the big boat on the Mahakam. Logging, palm oil, coal mining, oil drilling had taken billions of dollars from Borneo’s once pristine rain forests. Not to mention roads, television, Christianity, and mobile phones, all ubiquitous in even once remote places. Longhouses were rare in Indonesian Kalimantan; in Malaysian Sarawak they were often pink or purple concrete. Bali was no longer just the province of a handful of avant-garde artists and hippies, special people seeking original experience, but of masses of spiritual seekers whose experience was anything but original; riding through the streets of Ubud was like a slalom course around tanned, mala bead–bedecked men and women carrying yoga mats. Often if you didn’t make an advance reservation for a class at Yoga Barn, the largest shala in Ubud, you’d be out of luck, the classes full. The main practice space, a hundred-foot-by-fifty-foot open-walled temple to Western hunger for Eastern solace, routinely filled with seventy-five souls in hundred-dollar spandex pants, many covered in tattoos, often vague “tribal” imitations of those ancient and powerful Dayak tree-of-life swirls. One evening during a class, primal screams and grunts and great heaving moans came from the smaller space below; ecstatic dance and Tibetan bowl meditation classes were offered weekly. Yoga teacher trainings and retreats in Bali were constant and everywhere. My social media feeds were lighting up with women in skintight pants and tiny tops striking natarajasana—dancer’s pose—or shirtless dudes upside down in handstands in front of ornately carved stone Balinese temple gates. The message was clear: yoga asana was good, but asana mixed with Balinese traditional religion was a hundred times better, more powerful. It was all food for the soul, even though it was fare as common now as artisanal coffee at Starbucks. People were desperate for a world that no longer existed at all in the West and barely existed anywhere else. I went on a date with an American woman who owned four villas, had undergone extensive plastic surgery, and looked me straight in the eye and told me she was a healer. On a date with another American, a woman with five thousand Facebook followers who traveled the world giving yoga retreats, we ended up drawing in a store-bought mandala coloring book after she read my fortune with tarot cards. The cutting-edge lives that Michael Palmieri and Bruno Manser had sought had now become another commodity. Westerners were hungry, thirsty, starving for the mystical sacred worlds of the Balinese, the Dayaks, Native Americans, Indian yogis, for something beyond themselves and the cold logic of science, for a meaning and connection to metaphor and the unknown and to nature. It was so big it had become big business.

  Tribal art, art created to propitiate spirits and to call them forth to watch over ancestors and villages, art that was, in essence, a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds, had become big business too. In 2001 the total value of tribal art sold at auction (not including works sold privately) was $14 million; by 2014 sales exceeded $100 million. One statue alone, carved by a nameless African in Burkina Faso or the Ivory Coast—no one even
knew which—who no doubt possessed nothing of material or technological value, but a gift for human form and an unsullied connection to his environment, sold at Sotheby’s for more than $11 million. Indonesian tribal art represented a mere fraction of that, but still, a single Dayak carving fetched nearly $200,000 in 2014. It was a huge, unregulated, and legally gray market, with Bali the epicenter of objects from Indonesia and much of Oceania. And it was that much more opaque because the days of easy pickings were gone, villages and homes mostly emptied of their pusaka, architectural elements, and public village guardians. Which didn’t mean there was nothing to be had. In the perfect metaphor, deforestation and its accompanying erosion altered the courses and historical flows of rivers, turning up the occasional ironwood statue buried in preserving low-oxygen silt. Wholesale forest burning occasionally turned up ancient stone statues. And Borneo was dotted with thousands of caves, into which ornately carved Dayak ossuaries had been long ago placed, sometimes with accompanying guardian figures and artifacts. And things in caves can be incredibly well preserved. There was still stuff out there, and it was more valuable than ever.

  To make matters more complex, the dearth of new objects on the one hand and the enormous prices they fetched on the other birthed a new industry of fakes. The popularity of auctions and the Internet and tribal art books brought clear, high-resolution photos of objects that sold for unimaginable prices to a local Indonesian who might live off of a few thousand dollars a year, and anyone could see the kinds of pieces most in demand. Dayaks, Balinese—the archipelago was rich with skilled carvers who could imitate anything. The best things had—usually, but not always—certain identifiable patinas, depending on what they were; things that had spent years outside were weathered with erosion, cracks, mold, and lichen; objects that were handled were deep black and shiny with human touch. With time, patience, and skill, however, a faker could sandblast a piece, could erode it with pressure washers, could even grow lichen and mold. You could even take an old, not very special piece and recarve it; if the wood was ancient, who could tell the difference?

  Suddenly fakes were everywhere, and only the most trained eye could tell the difference, and even then it was hardly foolproof. At Parcours des Mondes in Paris, the world’s most important annual tribal art show, in 2013, Judith Schoffel de Fabry, the daughter of one of the most respected dealers in tribal art, had offered a Dayak sculpture for $1 million that came with extensive scientific analysis, including carbon-14 dating and high-resolution optical/stereo microscopy, electron microscopy, and infrared and X-ray spectrometry. Dealers and collectors broke into war, with some swearing the piece was real, others just as confident it was fake. The reality was, no one really knew, the whole enterprise so opaque the piece was withdrawn from sale.

  The network behind all of this was sprawling and amorphous, a tangled web of rivers and tributaries along which art flowed from the jungle to the galleries and living rooms of the rich. Throughout Borneo there existed a network of runners, locals, often Dayaks, who still ranged throughout the villages and forests of their home territory on the island in search of new old objects. Freelancers at the bottom of the food chain, they sold to dealers in the cities of Kuching or Samarinda, or they called people like Michael directly. Or they got on an airplane and arrived in Bali to make the rounds. Dealers like Michael bought from them sometimes, sometimes from Indonesian dealers. Michael usually sold to other dealers, who had galleries in the West or showed at the annual tribal art shows in New York, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, San Francisco. It was not uncommon for a piece to go from some local who’d found it to a runner to a dealer in Kuching to another runner who’d take it to Bali and sell to someone like Michael who’d sell to a more public Western dealer who’d sell to a rich Western collector. Everyone took a percentage; the standard for making a deal was 10 percent of the sales price.

  Michael was now seventy-two years old. His days of ranging into the farthest crevices and nooks of Borneo for months at a time were over. He still went in occasionally, but mostly only when he received word of something specific, and his destination was usually a city. Nor did he often attend the retail end of the market—the tribal art fairs in Europe or the United States; these days his stock ran deep and he was content to let other collectors and dealers find him.

  Genuine old Dayak shields were rare—a good one could easily fetch $20,000—so I was eager to see the piece that Michael had just been sent. I parked my bike and, as usual, his door was wide open. “It’s a fake,” he said, the minute I walked in. “Look,” he said, handing it to me, wearing a pale pink-and-black Hawaiian shirt, faded blue Thai fisherman’s pants, and a pair of black kung fu slippers. The shield appeared old, the paint faded, the back inside covered with dust and the odd lingering cobweb. To me it looked real, as genuine as the one he had sitting on a stand in his living room and that he’d owned for years. “It’s way too heavy,” he said, telling me to pick both of the shields up. I did; his was incredibly light, much lighter than the one that had just arrived. He turned it over. “Look here. The rattan isn’t right,” he said, pointing to thin bands of binding throughout the shield. “When rattan gets old it has this look.” He handed me a bamboo poison arrow quiver that lived on his desk, with similar woven rattan, except the quiver’s was burnished a deep brown; it glowed. The binding on the new shield was dark, lifeless. “There’s all this dust on the insides along the bindings which they rub on it. It’s fake, no question. I told him it was fake. Says he didn’t know. I said I want my money back.”

  Word on the street, he said, changing the subject, was that there was a wealthy Swiss collector in town, one who he’d never met. Michael wanted to make contact with him. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ve got to get the word out.”

  As we walked to his car, a man appeared out of the bushes in front of us. He held out a plastic baggie, like a drug dealer offering a bag of weed. “Gold dust,” said Michael, taking the baggie, peering into it. “Just mix it with a binder and you’ve got real gold paint.” And then came another wad, this time a sheaf of brown papers, between each of which was a sheet of gold leaf as thin as tissue paper, shimmering in the morning sun. “Tidak mau”—don’t want—he said, waving the man away.

  We drove out to Kerobokan, through intersections so packed with motorcycles and cars it was almost a scene out of Mad Max, to Jalan Tangkuban Perahu, a winding street lined with antique shops, one after the other, for a solid mile. “All these used to be in Denpasar, first, then moved to Kuta, then Legian, and now they’re out here,” he said, a march that mirrored the frantic growth of southern Bali. “In the old days the runners from other islands came to Denpasar and stayed in a losman [cheap guesthouse], and there were four or five all right there, and so I’d go from losman to losman and see who’s there. They’d come with boxes and boxes of stuff. Had no phones then. Then they started coming to my house.”

  We parked the car outside of Daeng Iskandar’s, the largest and oldest of Bali’s dealers, a Sumbanese man who’d made a fortune in the trade. A group of young men in tennis shoes and blue jeans and T-shirts lounged outside the shop, another group across the street. I wouldn’t have noticed them, and if I had, I would have thought nothing of them. Groups of people lounged everywhere in Bali. But like hustlers and their network of scouts and runners on an urban street corner, these men were all part of the antiques trade. “Pak Michael!” they yelled as he waded into their midst, exchanging fist bumps, clapping them on the shoulder. “This guy,” he said, taking out his big iPhone 6 and opening a photo of a middle-aged white man in a suit, speaking in Bahasa Indonesia. “Do you know him? Have you seen him? I want to meet him. Five hundred thousand [about fifty dollars] if you get him to me. To my house!”

  They nodded. A few said they’d seen the Swiss around, but none had spoken to him. “Five hundred thousand,” he said again, as we headed into Iskandar’s.

  We passed through a gate into a shaded courtyard behind walls filled with men sitting on chairs smoking.
They too were runners in the trade. Daeng, his wife said, was taking a nap. Objects filled the yards and four buildings, piled on tables, leaning on walls. Dayak coffins. Eight-foot stone megaliths from Sumba. Hampatong guardian figures from Borneo. Swirling roof finials. Earrings from Borneo and bracelets and beads and kris handles in brass and rubies and a room with a pile of folded pua textiles three feet tall and ten feet across and paintings stacked three feet deep lining the walls and benches—old Balinese paintings. “He doesn’t even look at the artist’s signature, he just buys everything now,” Michael said. “He’s rich. Very, very rich. In the early days he went to Samarinda and there was a statue and it was hugely expensive and no one would risk it. But he was bold and he bought it. Sold it for a lot of money. That made him. Had a little shop here. Then he moved. In old days the shop was filled with excellent masterpieces, but now it’s all mediocre and who knows what.”

  We drove down the road to a shop owned by a woman named Nunu. More loungers. More rewards offered. Nunu’s shop was small, uncluttered, and I could see things were better there. “Everything here is real,” Michael says. “She has class, taste, and a reputation to uphold.” I spotted a pair of bronze bracelets six inches long, oxidized to a lovely gorgeous blue-green. “Dong Son,” Michael said. “Very old. Maybe two thousand years. These”—he picked them up, examined them—“these look like they came right out of the ground. A tomb. I bet someone took them right off an arm—probably a bone right in these. They were originally made in Vietnam, but Dong Son pieces went all through Borneo as trade items. Everywhere.”