I told everyone that my birthday was coming up in July and that soon I would be turning thirty-five. I told them that there was nothing in this world that I needed or wanted, and that I had never been happier in my life. I told them that, if I were home in New York, I would be planning a big stupid birthday party and I would make them all come to this party, and they would have to buy me gifts and bottles of wine and the whole celebration would get ridiculously expensive. Therefore, I explained, a cheaper and more lovely way to help celebrate this birthday would be if my friends and family would care to make a donation to help a woman named Wayan Nuriyasih buy a house in Indonesia for herself and her children.
Then I told the whole story of Wayan and Tutti and the orphans and their situation. I promised that whatever money was donated, I would match the donation from my own savings. Of course I was aware, I explained, that this is a world full of untold suffering and war and that everyone is in need right now, but what are we to do? This little group of people in Bali had become my family, and we must take care of our families wherever we find them. As I wrapped up the mass e-mail, I remembered something my friend Susan had said to me before I left on this world journey nine months ago. She was afraid I would never come home again. She said, “I know how you are, Liz. You’re going to meet somebody and fall in love and end up buying a house in Bali.”
A regular Nostradamus, that Susan.
By the next morning, when I checked my e-mail, $700 had already been pledged. The next day, donations passed what I could afford to match.
I won’t go through the entire drama of the week, or try to explain what it feels like to open e-mails every day from all over the world that all say, “Count me in!” Everyone gave. People whom I personally knew to be broke or in debt gave, without hesitation. One of the first responses I got was from a friend of my hairdresser’s girlfriend, who’d been forwarded the e-mail and wanted to donate $15. My most wise-ass friend John had to make a typically sarcastic comment, of course, about how long and sappy and emotional my letter had been (“Listen—next time you feel the need to cry about spilled milk, make sure it’s condensed, will ya?”), but then he donated money anyway. My friend Annie’s new boyfriend (a Wall Street banker whom I’d never even met) offered to double the final sum of whatever was raised. Then that e-mail started whipping around the world, so that I began to receive donations from perfect strangers. It was a global smothering of generosity. Let’s just wrap up this episode by saying that—a mere seven days after the original plea went out over the wires—my friends and my family and a bunch of strangers all over the world helped me come up with almost $18,000 to buy Wayan Nuriyasih a home of her own.
I knew that it was Tutti who had manifested this miracle, through the potency of her prayers, willing that little blue tile of hers to soften and expand around her and to grow—like one of Jack’s magic beans—into an actual home that would take care of herself and her mother and a pair of orphans forever.
One last thing. I’m embarrassed to admit that it was my friend Bob, not me, who noticed the obvious fact that the word “Tutti” in Italian means “Everybody.” How had I not realized that earlier? After all those months in Rome! I just didn’t see the connection. So it was Bob over in Utah who had to point it out to me. He did so in an e-mail last week, saying, along with his pledge to donate toward the new house, “So that’s the final lesson, isn’t it? When you set out in the world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping . . . Tutti.”
93
I don’t want to tell Wayan about it, not until all the money has been raised. It’s hard to keep a big secret like this, especially when she’s in such constant worry about her future, but I don’t want to get her hopes up until it is official. So for the whole week, I keep my mouth shut about my plans, and I keep myself occupied having dinner almost every night with Felipe the Brazilian, who doesn’t seem to mind that I own only one nice dress.
I guess I have a crush on him. After a few dinners, I’m fairly certain I have a crush on him. He’s more than he appears, this self-proclaimed “bullshit master” who knows everyone in Ubud and is always the center of the party. I asked Armenia about him. They’ve been friends for a while. I said, “That Felipe—he’s got more depth than the others, doesn’t he? There’s something more to him, isn’t there?” She said, “Oh, yes. He’s a good, kind man. But he’s been through a hard divorce. I think he’s come to Bali to recover.”
Ah—now this is a subject I know nothing about.
But he’s fifty-two years old. This is interesting. Have I truly reached the age where a fifty-two-year-old man is within my realm of dating consideration? I like him, though. He’s got silver hair and he’s balding in an attractively Picassoesque manner. His eyes are warm and brown. He has a gentle face and he smells wonderful. And he is an actual grown man. The adult male of the species—a bit of a novelty in my experience.
He’s been living in Bali for about five years now, working with Balinese silversmiths to make jewelry from Brazilian gemstones for export to America. I like the fact that he was faithfully married for almost twenty years before his marriage deteriorated for its own multicomplicated plethora of reasons. I like the fact that he has already raised children, and that he raised them well, and that they love him. I like that he was the parent who stayed home and tended to his children when they were little, while his Australian wife pursued her career. (A good feminist husband, he says, “I wanted to be on the correct side of social history.”) I like his natural Brazilian over-the-top displays of affection. (When his Australian son was fourteen years old, the boy finally had to say, “Dad, now that I’m fourteen, maybe you shouldn’t kiss me on the mouth anymore when you drop me off at school.”) I like the fact that Felipe speaks four, maybe more, languages fluently. (He keeps claiming he doesn’t speak Indonesian, but I hear him talking it all day long.) I like that he’s traveled through over fifty countries in his life, and that he sees the world as a small and easily managed place. I like the way he listens to me, leaning in, interrupting me only when I interrupt myself to ask if I am boring him, to which he always responds, “I have all the time in the world for you, my lovely little darling.” I like being called “my lovely little darling.”(Even if the waitress gets it, too.)
He said to me the other night, “Why don’t you take a lover while you’re in Bali, Liz?”
To his credit, he didn’t just mean himself, though I believe he might be willing to take on the job. He assured me that Ian—that good-looking Welsh guy—would be a fine match for me, but there are other candidates, too. There’s a chef from New York City, “a great, big, muscular, confident fellow,” whom he thinks I might like. Really there are all sorts of men here, he said, all of them floating through Ubud, expatriates from everywhere, hiding out in this shifting community of the planet’s “homeless and assetless,” many of whom would be happy to see to it, “my lovely darling, that you have a wonderful summer here.”
“I don’t think I’m ready for it,” I told him. “I don’t feel like going through all the effort of romance again, you know? I don’t feel like having to shave my legs every day or having to show my body to a new lover. And I don’t want to have to tell my life story all over again, or worry about birth control. Anyway, I’m not even sure I know how to do it anymore. I feel like I was more confident about sex and romance when I was sixteen than I am now.”
“Of course you were,” Felipe said. “You were young and stupid then. Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we’re doing? Do you think there’s any way humans can love each other without complication? You should see how it happens in Bali, darling. All these Western men come here after they’ve made a mess of their lives back home, and they decide they’ve had it with Western women, and they go marry some tiny, sweet, obedient little Balinese teenage girl. I know what they’re thinking. They think this pretty little girl will make them happy, make their lives easy. But whenever I see it
happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
I said, “My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn’t that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?”
“Darling, I’m southern Brazilian. I can keep a broken heart going for ten years over a woman I never even kissed.”
We talk about our marriages, our divorces. Not in a petty way, but just to commiserate. We compare notes about the bottomless depths of post-divorce depression. We drink wine and eat well together and we tell each other the nicest stories we can remember about former spouses, just to take the sting out of all that conversation about loss.
He says, “Do you want to do something with me this weekend?” and I find myself saying yes, that would be nice. Because it would be nice.
Twice now, dropping me off in front of my house and saying goodnight, Felipe has reached across the car to give me a goodnight kiss, and twice now I’ve done the same thing—allowing myself to be pulled into him, but then ducking my head at the last moment and tucking my cheek up against his chest. There, I let him hold me for a while. Longer than is necessarily merely friendly. I can feel him press his face into my hair, as my face presses somewhere against his sternum. I can smell his soft linen shirt. I really like the way he smells. He has muscular arms, a nice wide chest. He was once a champion gymnast back in Brazil. Of course that was in 1969, which was the year I was born, but still. His body feels strong.
My ducking my head like this whenever he reaches for me is a kind of hiding—I’m avoiding a simple goodnight kiss. But it’s also a kind of not-hiding, too. By letting him hold me at all during those long quiet moments at the end of the evening, I’m letting myself be held.
Which hasn’t happened for a long time.
94
I asked Ketut, my old medicine man, “What do you know about romance?”
He said, “What is this, romance?”
“Never mind.”
“No—what it is? What this word means?”
“Romance.” I defined. “Women and men in love. Or sometimes men and men in love, or women and women in love. Kissing and sex and marriage—all that stuff.”
“I not make sex with too many people in my life, Liss. Only with my wife.”
“You’re right—that’s not too many people. But do you mean your first wife or your second wife?”
“I only have one wife, Liss. She dead now.”
“What about Nyomo?”
“Nyomo not really my wife, Liss. She the wife of my brother.” Seeing my confused expression, he added, “This typical Bali,” and explained. Ketut’s older brother, who is a rice farmer, lives next door to Ketut and is married to Nyomo. They had three children together. Ketut and his wife, on the other hand, were unable to have any children at all, so they adopted one of Ketut’s brother’s sons in order to have an heir. When Ketut’s wife died, Nyomo began living in both family compounds, splitting her time between the two households, taking care of both her husband and his brother, and tending to the two families of her children. She is in every way a wife to Ketut in the Balinese manner (cooking, cleaning, taking care of household religious ceremonies and rituals) except that they don’t have sex together.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Too OLD!” he said. Then he called Nyomo over to relay the question to her, to let her know that the American lady wants to know why they don’t have sex with each other. Nyomo about died laughing at the very thought of it. She came over and punched me in the arm, hard.
“I only had one wife,” Ketut went on. “And now she dead.”
“Do you miss her?”
A sad smile. “It was her time to die. Now I tell you how I find my wife. When I am twenty-seven years, I meet a girl and I love her.”
“What year was that?” I asked, desperate as always to figure out how old he is.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe 1920?”
(Which would make him about a hundred and twelve by now. I think we’re getting closer to solving this . . .)
“I love this girl, Liss. Very beautiful. But not good character, this girl. She only want money. She chase other boy. She never tell truth. I think she had a secret mind inside her other mind, nobody can see inside there. She stop to loving me, go away with other boy. I am very sad. Broken in my heart. I pray and pray to my four spirit brothers, ask why she not anymore love me? Then one of my spirit brothers, he tell me the truth. He say, ‘This is not your true match. Be patient.’ So I be patient and then I find my wife. Beautiful woman, good woman. Always sweet for me. Never once we argue, have always harmony in household, always she smiling. Even when no money at home, always she smiling and saying how happy she is to see me. When she die, I very sad in my mind.”
“Did you cry?”
“Only little bit, in my eyes. But I do meditation, to clean the body from pain. I meditate for her soul. Very sad, but happy, too. I visit her in meditation every day, even to kissing her. She the only woman I ever make sex with. So I do not know . . . what is new word, from today?”
“Romance?”
“Yes, romance. I do not know romance, Liss.”
“So it’s not really your area of expertise, eh?”
“What is this, expertise? What this word means?”
95
I finally sat down with Wayan and told her about the money I’d raised for her house. I explained about my birthday wish, showed her the list of all my friends’ names, and then told her the final amount which had been raised: Eighteen thousand American dollars. At first she was shocked to such an extent that her face looked like a mask of grief. It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is the absolute value of human emotion—joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma; dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing. This news I had just handed to Wayan was too much for her to take in, she almost received it as a cause for sorrow, so I sat there with her for a few hours, telling her the story repeatedly and showing her the numbers again and again, until the reality began to sink in.
Her first really articulate response (I mean, even before she burst into tears because she realized she was going to be able to have a garden) was to urgently say, “Please, Liz, you must explain to everyone who helped raise money that this is not Wayan’s house. This is the house of everyone who helped Wayan. If any of these people comes to Bali, they must never stay in a hotel, OK? You tell them they come and stay at my house, OK? Promise to tell them that? We call it Group House . . . the House for Everybody . . .”
Then she realized about the garden, and started to cry.
Slowly, though, happier realizations come to her. It was like she was a pocketbook shaken upside down and emotions were spilling all over the place. If she had a home, she could have a small library, for all her medical books! And a pharmacy for her traditional remedies! And a proper restaurant with real chairs and tables (because she had to sell all her old good chairs and tables to pay the divorce lawyer). If she had a home, she could finally be listed in Lonely Planet, who keep wanting to mention her services, but never can do so, because she never has a permanent address that they can print. If she had a home, Tutti could have a birthday party someday!
Then she got very sober and serious again. “How can I thank you, Liz? I would give you anything. If I had husband I loved, and you needed a man, I would give you my husband.”
“Keep your husband, Wayan. Just make sure Tutti goes to university.”
“What would I do if you never came here?”
But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
“Where are you going to build your new house, Wayan?” I asked.
Like a Little Leaguer who’s had his eye on a certain baseball glove in the shop window for ages, or a romantic girl who’s been designing her wedding dress since she was thirteen, it turned out that Wayan already knew exactly the piece of land she would like to buy. It was in the center of a nearby village, was connected to municipal water and electricity, had a good school nearby for Tutti, was nicely located in a central place where her patients and customers could find her on foot. Her brothers could help her build the home, she said. She’d all but picked out the paint chips for the master bedroom already.
So we went together to visit a nice French expatriate financial adviser and real estate guy, who was kind enough to suggest the best way to transfer the money. His suggestion was that I keep it easy and just wire the money directly from my bank account into Wayan’s bank account and let her buy whatever land or home she wants, so I don’t have to mess around with owning property in Indonesia. As long as I didn’t wire over amounts bigger than $10,000 at a time, the IRS and CIA wouldn’t suspect me of laundering drug money. Then we went to Wayan’s little bank, and talked to the manager about how to set up a wire transfer. In neat conclusion, the bank manager said, “So, Wayan. When this wire transfer goes through, in just a few days, you should have about 180 million rupiah in your bank account.”
Wayan and I looked at each other and sparked off into a ridiculous riot of laughter. Such an enormous sum! We kept trying to pull ourselves together, since we were in some fancy banker’s office, but we couldn’t stop laughing. We stumbled out of there like drunks, holding on to each other to not fall over.
Eat, Pray, Love Page 33
