The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  One night Peng dug around in his pack, brought out a sheaf of papers in a plastic file folder, and handed me a creased letter, its edges tattered, dated 1999. I recognized the handwriting. Bruno’s whimsical block letters, headlined “Message from the Penan for the CM of Sarawak. Honoured Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud: We the Penan live in big problems: Samling and LLT Co., who work on your land, command to exploit our forest in Ulu Limbang, have destroyed our clear drinking water, our food-resources and our graveyards. We ask you to act like our father who cares for his children: please withdraw the logging licences within all Penan homelands and protect our virgin forest, who gives us life. Thank you. We send greetings to you and your wife.” Five thumbprints lay next to five names, including Along Sega and Lakei Suti Megut, Peng’s father. For sixteen years he’d been carrying that letter.

  Mountains surrounded the clearing we were staying in, and as soon as we left, we headed straight up. We climbed all day, emerging onto a deeply forested ridgetop that my GPS said lay at thirty-five hundred feet. We were in misty clouds, the air chilled, the ground a carpet of rotting trees and deep leaves. The skeletal remains of three Penan huts lay in a cluster, and as Peng investigated which one to repair for the night, a man emerged from the trees. He too was leading a monkey and he wore a traditional Penan loincloth, his buttocks bare, his hair in a long mullet. He and Peng sat down opposite each other, each clutching their monkeys. They didn’t look at each other, but spoke quietly, in a hush. After a few minutes the man walked off, vanishing into the forest, and the family cut and hauled and tied, rehabilitating one of the shelters. Darkness hit and thick, cold, clammy clouds rolled in, a white mist enveloping everything. The temperature dropped, and Uen built two fires and a little dome of ferns under the house for the dogs, who curled into tight balls around the flames.

  Out there in the black forest I saw a light. Then another, and another, bobbing and weaving in the mist. Like apparitions, ghosts, a line of figures bearing flaming torches solidified out of the clouds. The man in the loincloth, it turned out, had been with a whole family and now here they were, come to visit. Children, adults, an old woman, barefoot, in a flowered sarong and black blouse, high cheekbones, long gray hair past her shoulders. She radiated. Beauty. Elegance. Grace. Nobility. She looked me in the eyes and took my hand, held it softly, smiled, drew my hands to her face and stroked them across her warm cheek. “Family,” Peng said. They crowded into our hut—there were fifteen of us in the tiny space—and Peng lit more chunks of damar resin and Uen stoked the fire and boiled water for tea and the children lay across laps and dozed and soft voices filled the night, warm bodies pressed against me. I heard “Tong Tana,” the forest, in Penan; “babui,” pig; “Lakei Ja’au,” big man—that was me, the patriarch’s soft, warm hand resting on my leg. It was beautiful and disorienting. They were like hippies, idealized rainbow people with really good camping skills, living up here in the forest. Though I felt far removed from the modern world, the reality was that we were in a tiny postage stamp of wilderness that wasn’t even really wilderness—logging roads and settled communities lay a short walk in every direction.

  “We have a house in Long Tebagan”—a recent Penan settlement nearby—said the man, whose name was Agan. “But here in the forest is home. I walked with Bruno. I hunted with Bruno. Company tidak bagus,” he kept saying. The company—the logging company—is no good. They had solid frame houses just down the mountain and yet here they were, living up in the cold and rain and mist for no other reason than that’s where they liked to be.

  We broke camp, walked a day, cut through the tangled hypergrowth of secondary forest, and popped out onto the sudden harshness of a rocky, rutted logging road. It felt strange to walk along it, such a hot, violent contrast, a tear of rocks and barren hardness compared to the soft, cool, damp forest. “Tidak bagus,” Peng said. Not good. At a high bend over a precipice, Peng pointed into the distance. A gash in the trees. Another. The brown of buildings. “Long Seridan,” he said. We walked on, escaping into the forest toward evening, where they quickly built another hut. But our time was ending. The next day, Peng said, we would reach town. We pushed on in the morning along the logging road, and after an hour of walking the boys disappeared into the jungle and reemerged with a Yamaha scooter. They bent over it. Fiddled. Lifted the seat and took out a foot-powered air pump and pumped up the front tire. Dui mounted and Ulin hopped on back and they sped off. Ten minutes later Dui returned, without Ulin, and I climbed on board for a mile. And so it went, with backpacks and blowpipes, six of us, three dogs, and a monkey, hopscotching at death-defying speed, skidding and sliding a mile at a time until we reached the outskirts of Long Seridan. Peng and I were the first to be dropped off, and as we waited for the others, thinking to take advantage of the privacy, I paid Peng the two hundred dollars in Malaysian ringgit we’d agreed upon. The minute the rest of his family arrived, he took the money out, divided it into five portions, and gave everyone equal shares. I should have known. To share equally was the most essential Penan trait.

  Everything felt wrong. The road, now paved, too hard. The lack of trees barren. We walked to the Magoh River, one hundred yards wide, the river where Bruno was fishing when Roger Graf first met him. Waded across in the current, the water to my waist. Walked into civilization. A concrete, two-story longhouse. A little concrete airport terminal. A fence and shimmering black runway. This was also where Bruno had met James Ritchie. The longhouse was empty, now all cool white tile floors and curtains and pictures of Jesus. Peng and I lay down on the floor, so clean and shiny and straight-edged. The boys disappeared, returned soon after with plastic bags full of Coca-Cola and candy and cookies. Peng looked so small and quiet and shy. I went out, started walking, found a guesthouse with a squeaky clean living room lined with sofas and chairs, a big TV, a table laden with food under little screen covers to keep away the flies. This was the guesthouse Bruno had once stayed in, though in those days it had been simpler and by the runway, and it was owned by Mutang’s cousin.

  “Bruno stayed off and on many times,” Sinah Siren said. “He helped me repair the ceiling and would go into the jungle with the Penan and then come out and stay for a month here. But the police from Limbang came and arrested him and after that we couldn’t have him stay with us. For a long time I took his letters and give them to people flying to Miri or Marudi, but then I couldn’t anymore. We loved him.”

  I took a room, a room with walls and a door you could shut and a real bed and no bugs in my hair, and I booked another room for the Meguts. The guesthouse was simple, but it seemed like a temple of excess, and when I got the gang there, they stood in that shiny room armed with their spear-tipped blowpipes and parangs and poison arrow quivers, Peng in his giant bare feet and mullet, the boys in jeans that I now saw were filthy, ragged, full of tears and holes. They were all muscle and dirt. None of them had their upper two front teeth. They looked feral. They were feral. Pure hunters. The wild men and women of Borneo. The real thing. The last, most valuable treasures of all. I had walked twenty-five miles in a straight line, perhaps many more on the ground, covered thousands of vertical feet, over eighteen days. As promised, Peng had brought me into and out of the forest. We’d probably exchanged no more than five hundred words in almost three weeks. I had, for hours and hours and hours, just sat with them and walked with them and listened to them, and I felt like I knew them, at least a little. Ulin with his constant joking and laughing. Dui the consummate older cousin, stoic, quiet. Uen, who could swing a parang with power and precision, and who always made sure I had a hot cup of coffee or tea or, when we ran out of those, just hot water. We sat down under bright fluorescent lights on chairs at a plastic table, with serving trays piled high with fried fish and rice and fresh paku paku, and suddenly I wasn’t the clumsy one, the klutz, anymore. Now everything was upside down and I moved with sureness, while this family who had seemed like supermen to me a few hours earlier were painfully shy, barely looked up, barely touc
hed their food. Everything they knew, every skill they possessed, everything they stood for was useless in my world, the world that was taking over everything everywhere. The Malaysians around Long Seridan looked like overdressed, citified dandies with their bright clothes and hip haircuts and motorcycles, a world of excess and artifice. The Meguts had beds, but that night the family slept on the floor.

  In the morning we walked to the airport, me, oddly, it felt, leading the way, leading the hunters to one of my temples, through a routine at which I was an expert. The airport was one room, open-walled, but the family didn’t want to go inside. I checked in and then we all sat on a bench outside, a lump in my throat. I kept saying that I was fine, that they should go, but Peng insisted on staying to the very end. A plane swooped in, roared overhead, landed, turned, and taxied over. It was time to go. I said thank you over and over in English and Malay and shook warm, dry hands that barely squeezed at all, and walked onto the twenty-seat plane, a strange cocoon of artificial white plastic. An alien world in every way from Peng’s forest hut. The door thunked shut. We taxied slowly to the end of the tarmac, swiveled, and as we hurtled down the runway I caught a glimpse of Peng and Ulin, blowpipes and monkey by their side, with their faces pressed against the chain link.

  A powerful Dayak guardian spirit carved hundreds of years ago, collected by Michael Palmieri in the late 1970s, and now in the Yale Art Museum. (Max Hoffman)

  Seventeen

  More and more, as I grew older, I felt surrounded by ghosts. Memories. Of people and places and encounters, of the love whose hand I held walking along a certain beach, or sitting with my father over a bowl of Vietnamese pho; I think it’s what Michael felt walking with me through the streets of Kuching, pointing out where he’d stayed with Fatima, where he’d met Bruno. The longer you lived, the more you loved and lost, the more the world at times turned surreal, Felliniesque, history and experience coalescing into moments of circuslike magical realism: the here and now in front of you even as your memory and imagination populated the scene with crazy pastiches of all you’d taken in, read, seen, experienced. Time is linear, but your imagination and memory are not. That’s how I felt walking the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris during Parcours des Mondes, the most important tribal art gathering in the world, after a year of living the stories of Michael and Bruno.

  Everyone was here. Men in round horn-rimmed glasses and blue suede driving loafers, elegant women in tippy heels and silk scarves, sipping coffees and glasses of red wine at the packed little round tables of La Palette or Le Balto, on the corners of rue de Seine and rue Mazarine. I spotted Bruce Carpenter, fresh off the plane from Bali, in black jeans and a black sports coat. Perry Kesner, wearing a velvet corduroy sports coat and red-and-black-striped slacks, looking vaguely like an Elizabethan court jester. The American dealers Bruce Frank and Mark Johnson. The Schoffels. There was Jean Fritts, Sotheby’s worldwide director of African and Oceanic Art, and Katherine Gunsch, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Teel Curator of African and Oceanic Art. Rodger Dashow from Boston, one of the world’s foremost collectors of Indonesian tribal art. Paris sparkled under a cloudless September sky, the air warm, the laughter and voices and tink of spoon on rim, the sound of the heights of Western wealth and culture. Next to me sat a man, tan, thin, of a certain age, across from a woman. “Yes, that is lovely,” he said to his tablemate, fingering her ring. “Khmer. Original. Very lovely.” He didn’t know me, but I recognized him from news reports in the Jakarta Post and local Bali press: Roberto Gamba, an Italian arrested in 2010 in Bali for trafficking in pratima, small carved figures often adorned in gold and precious stones, that live in the heart of Balinese Hindu temples—living gods to the Balinese. The Indonesian police found him, the Post recounted, in possession of 110 of the effigies, with another twenty-four in a nearby warehouse. When one of their own was arrested, many of the dealers in Bali immediately jumped on planes and left the country, a man in Paris told me, fearing a crackdown that never came. But Gamba, the rich foreigner, hired the best lawyers money could buy. He served five months in prison; his seven local accomplices received sentences of between six and a half and seven years. Clearly, his conviction hadn’t slowed him down.

  It was the ghosts that interested me, the shadows of what wasn’t here, that I couldn’t shake out of my peripheral vision, my memory. The long-dead carvers and shamans from the other side of the world, from a different time altogether, who floated over every glass case or geometric white cube holding shrunken heads and Dayak hampatongs and coffin ends. The galleries—sixty of them nestled within a few blocks—were all stripped down, minimalist spaces of halogen lights and pale wood floors and white walls, but I looked at their wares and saw once great rivers strewn with rounded boulders and dripping jungle. I saw the longhouse in Ehing, off the Mahakam River, that I’d spent the night in, in 1987, and I saw Peng Megut and his family, the final holdouts in that vanishing wildness, that disappearing wilderness, huddled in the cool mountain air carving blackened meat off a deer skull, oblivious to so much of what was valued and worshiped in Paris. I saw Michael, in cowboy boots and flowing brown mane, prowling these same streets in the 1960s, and then I ran right into him, in a more literal sense. There, in Tom Murray’s gallery beneath the track lights, glowed a two-foot-high piece of an ossuary, a squatting figure with a big penis, holding his palms up in supplication. A lovely, alive piece carved long ago among great trees and humming insects. Michael had collected it years before, and I could picture him doing so, the days on the river and in the rain, and I imagined the journey it had traveled to finally reach here. It was Murray’s now and he was selling it for $125,000. Against another wall stood another Dayak carving; Michael had brought that one out too, and now Murray was offering it for $60,000.

  Floating over it all I saw the ghost of Bruno Manser, in and out of every gallery, and every champagne-fueled discussion of tribes and sacred worlds and “the way it used to be,” and his desperate, mad attempt to save it for real, to live it; this last treasure.

  Whenever Bruno traveled in Borneo, his friends and family often didn’t hear from him for long periods. That was normal. So it wasn’t until six months after the date of his last postcard to girflfriend Charlotte Belet that anyone realized this time was different, that something was wrong. And six months is a long time in the hot, wet, biologically teeming environment of the rain forest. The trail was cold. Over the next several years, seven searches were carried out. The Penan tracked him. Helicopters scanned the peaks of Batu Lawi and surrounding forest. His brother Erich and a band of Penan hiked to the peaks and scoured the area around them. They found not a sign. Martin Vosseler, keeping the promise he’d made to Bruno to come look for him, spent a month in the Kelabit Highlands asking about him, searching for him. Nothing.

  No trace of Bruno has ever been found. Not his big green backpack, not a single piece of cloth; something should have been visible if he’d fallen or injured himself while climbing the peak. His most romantic followers like to imagine him out there still, a man who went rogue, became his soul mates, became a Penan, living nestled in some Edenic virgin patch of forest. But that’s the biggest fantasy of all, for the untouched forests of Borneo are gone. There is nowhere there left to hide. Erich, his family, his followers, cling to the idea that he was captured and murdered by agents, official or unofficial, of the Malaysian government. Which is certainly plausible.

  But those who worked with him the longest, who loved him yet also resisted his charms, people like Georges Rüegg and Roger Graf, believe he chose to die. Not by hanging himself or shooting himself or slitting his wrists, but by recklessness, provocation. That he wandered far off by himself, intending this journey to be his last. I thought of Michael Palmieri’s words, of getting stuck, and who was more stuck than Bruno? The Penan had believed in him and he had let them down. And he had believed in the Penan and they had let him down every time they settled or put on a T-shirt or went to work for a logging company. He couldn’t be
ar to live in a quiet Swiss village, work in some office. He had left his own culture, but nothing lay on the other side. The wilderness was gone. The forest was gone. The nomads of the rain forest were nomads no more. That he loved and was loved matters little. He could be reckless. Selfish. Self-absorbed. Single-minded and pure, uncompromising.

  “I’m convinced that he killed himself,” said Roger Graf. “It’s from my gut and it’s not out of character for him. I saw him interviewed in the Swedish film shortly before he vanished and I was shocked by how aggressively he answered the questions. I didn’t recognize him.”

  “He said he wanted to go to Batu Lawi,” said Georges Rüegg, “but when he was there before, when he was living in Sarawak, he still got lost in the jungle for three weeks, and if that happened when he was used to living there, well, he was fit but he was ten years older. I hitchhiked all over North and South America, and when I was in a good mood, it was great, but if I wasn’t, no one picked me up. Things didn’t go my way. Why is that? It’s all about your mental condition. If you’re not in good mental shape, you’ll have difficulties, and he was not in a good condition to move in Sarawak. You can see it in his body, his face. He traveled a lot, in and out, in and out, but you cannot always expect it to be the same. My feeling when he left was that he was no more himself, no longer in harmony with himself.

  “I was a herdsman for so many years and it was beautiful, but then I couldn’t do that anymore because my knees were bad. The end was sad, yes, but only the end—the whole thing wasn’t. How can you say that life is sad just because one piece of it ends? For me, it’s really important—if you lose your beliefs, then it’s a really sad moment. Then you’re really a poor person. I had the feeling that by the end Bruno had no more beliefs. The art of life is to grow old, but not to lose your beliefs as you do. Or if you lose them, to find new ways to be glad to be alive. That’s the art of life. But Bruno lost all his beliefs and he crashed. He couldn’t evolve, and that’s the tragedy.”