“Not so simple to buy land in Bali,” she keeps telling me. “Not like to walk into a bar and buy a beer. Can take long time.”
“We don’t have a long time, Wayan.”
She just shrugs, and I remember again about the Balinese concept of “rubber time,” meaning that time is a very relative and bouncy idea. “Four weeks” doesn’t really mean to Wayan what it means to me. One day to Wayan isn’t necessarily composed of twenty-four hours, either; sometimes it’s longer, sometimes it’s shorter, depending upon the spiritual and emotional nature of that day. As with my medicine man and his mysterious age, sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.
Meanwhile, it also turns out that I have completely underestimated how expensive it is to buy property in Bali. Because everything is so cheap here, you would assume that land is also undervalued, but that’s a mistaken assumption. To buy land in Bali—especially in Ubud—can get almost as expensive as buying land in Westchester County, in Tokyo, or on Rodeo Drive. Which is completely illogical because once you own the property you can’t make back your money on it in any traditionally logical way. You may pay approximately $25,000 for an aro of land (an aro is a land measurement roughly translating into English as: “Slightly bigger than the parking spot for an SUV”), and then you can build a little shop there where you will sell one batik sarong a day to one tourist a day for the rest of your life, for a profit of about seventy-five cents a hit. It’s senseless.
But the Balinese value their land with a passion that extends beyond the reaches of economic sense. Since land ownership is traditionally the only wealth that Balinese recognize as legitimate, property is valued in the same way as the Masai value cattle or as my five-year-old niece values lip gloss: namely, that you cannot have enough of it, that once you have claimed it you must never let it go, and that all of it in the world should rightfully belong to you.
Moreover—as I discover throughout the month of August, during my Narnia-like voyage into the intricacies of Indonesian real estate—it’s almost impossible to find out when land is actually for sale around here. Balinese who are selling land typically don’t like other people to know that their land is up for sale. Now, you would think it might be advantageous to advertise this fact, but the Balinese don’t see it that way. If you’re a Balinese farmer and you’re selling your land, it means you are desperate for cash, and this is humiliating. Also, if your neighbors and family find out that you actually sold some land, then they’ll assume you came into some money, and everyone will be asking if they can borrow that money. So land becomes available for sale only by . . . rumor. And all these land deals are executed under strange veils of secrecy and deception.
The Western expatriates around here—hearing that I’m trying to buy land for Wayan—start gathering around me, offering cautionary tales based on their own nightmarish experiences. They warn me that you can never really be certain what’s going on when it comes to real estate around here. The land you are “buying” may not actually “belong” to the person who is “selling” it. The guy who showed you the property might not even be the owner, but only the disgruntled nephew of the owner, trying to get one over on his uncle because of some old family dispute. Don’t expect that the boundaries of your property will ever be clear. The land you buy for your dream house may later be declared “too close to a temple” to allow a building permit (and it’s difficult, in this small country with an estimated 20,000 temples, to find any land that is not too close to a temple).
Also you must take into consideration that you’re quite probably living on the slopes of a volcano and you might be straddling a fault line, as well. And not just a geological fault line, either. As idyllic as Bali seems, the wise keep in mind that this is, in fact, Indonesia—the largest Islamic nation on earth, unstable at its core, corrupt from the highest ministers of justice all the way down to the guy who pumps gas into your car (and who only pretends to fill it all the way up). Some kind of revolution will always be possible here at any moment, and all your assets may be reclaimed by the victors. Probably at gunpoint.
Negotiating all this dodgy business is not something I have any qualifications whatsoever to be doing. I mean—I went through a divorce proceeding in New York State and everything, but this is another page of Kafka altogether. Meanwhile, $18,000 of money donated by me, my family and my dearest friends is sitting in Wayan’s bank account, converted into Indonesia rupiah—a currency that has a history of crashing without notice and turning to vapor. And Wayan is supposed to get evicted from her shop in September, which is around the time I leave the country. Which is in about three weeks.
But it’s turning out to be almost impossible for Wayan to find a piece of land she deems appropriate for a home. Setting aside all the practical considerations, she has to examine the taksu—the spirit—of each place. As a healer, Wayan’s sense of taksu, even by Balinese standards, is supremely acute. I found one place that I thought was perfect, but Wayan said it was possessed by angry demons. The next piece of land was rejected because it was too close to a river, which, as everyone knows, is where ghosts live. (The night after she saw that place, Wayan says, she dreamt of a beautiful woman in torn clothes, weeping, and that did it—we could not buy this land.) Then we found a lovely little shop near town, with a backyard and everything, but it was located on a corner, and only somebody who wants to go bankrupt and die young would ever live in a house located on a corner. As everyone knows.
“Don’t even try talking her out of it,” Felipe advised me. “Trust me, darling. Don’t get between the Balinese and their taksu.”
Then last week Felipe found a place that seemed to fit the criteria exactly—a small, pretty piece of land, close to central Ubud, on a quiet road, next to a rice field, plenty of space for a garden and well within our budget. When I asked Wayan, “Should we buy it?” she replied, “Don’t know yet, Liz. Not too fast, for making decisions like this. I need talk to a priest first.”
She explained that she would need to consult a priest in order to find an auspicious day upon which to purchase the land, if she does decide to buy it at all. Because nothing significant can be done in Bali before an auspicious day is chosen. But she can’t even ask the priests for the auspicious date upon which to buy the land until she decides if she really wants to live there. Which is a commitment she refuses to make until she’s had an auspicious dream. Aware of my dwindling days here, I asked Wayan, like a good New Yorker, “How soon can you arrange to have an auspicious dream?”
Wayan replied, like a good Balinese, “Cannot be rushed, this.” Although, she mused, it might help if she could go to one of the major temples in Bali with an offering, and pray to the gods to bring her an auspicious dream . . .
“OK,” I said. “Tomorrow Felipe can drive you to the major temple and you can make an offering and ask the gods to please send you an auspicious dream.”
Wayan would love to, she said. It’s a great idea. Only one problem. She’s not permitted to enter any temples for this entire week.
Because she is . . . menstruating.
104
Maybe I’m not getting across how fun all this is. Truly, it’s so much odd and satisfying fun, trying to figure all this out. Or maybe I’m just enjoying this surreal moment in my life so much because I happen to be falling in love, and that always makes the world seem delightful, no matter how insane your reality.
I always liked Felipe. But there’s something about the way he takes on The Saga of Wayan’s House that brings us together during the month of August like a real couple. It’s none of his concern, of course, what happens to this trippy Balinese medicine woman. He’s a businessman. He’s managed to live in Bali for five years without getting too entwined in the personal lives and complex rituals of the Balinese, but suddenly here he is wading with me through muddy rice paddies and trying to find a priest who will give Wayan an auspicious date . . .
“I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along,” he
always says.
He was bored in Bali before. He was languid and killing time, a character from a Graham Greene novel. That indolence stopped the moment we were introduced. Now that we’re together, I get to hear Felipe’s version of how we met, a delicious story I never tire of hearing—about how he saw me at the party that night, standing with my back to him, and how I did not even need to turn my head and show him my face before he had realized somewhere deep in his gut, “That is my woman. I will do anything to have that woman.”
“And it was easy to get you,” he says. “All I had to do was beg and plead for weeks.”
“You didn’t beg and plead.”
“You didn’t notice me begging and pleading?”
He talks about how we went dancing that first night we met, and how he watched me get all attracted to that cute Welsh guy, and how his heart sank as he saw the scene unfolding, thinking, “I’m putting all this work into seducing this woman, and now that handsome young guy’s just going to take her from me and bring so much complication into her life—if only she knew how much love I could offer her.”
Which he can. He’s a caregiver by nature, and I can feel him going into a kind of orbit around me, making me the key directional setting for his compass, growing into the role of being my attendant knight. Felipe is the kind of man who desperately needs a woman in his life—but not so that he can be taken care of; only so that he can have someone to care for, someone to consecrate himself to. Having lived without such a relationship ever since his marriage ended, he’s been adrift in life recently, but now he is organizing himself around me. It’s lovely to be treated this way. But it also scares me. I hear him downstairs sometimes making me dinner as I am lounging upstairs reading, and he’s whistling some happy Brazilian samba, calling up, “Darling—would you like another glass of wine?” and I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life? But when I finally brought up the topic with him one night, he said, “Have I asked you to be that person, darling? Have I asked you to be the center of my life?”
I was immediately ashamed of myself for my vanity, for having assumed that he wanted me to stay with him forever so that he could indulge my whims till the end of time.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a little arrogant, wasn’t it?”
“A little,” he acknowledged, then kissed my ear. “But not so much, really. Darling, of course it’s something we have to discuss because here’s the truth—I’m wildly in love with you.” I blanched in reflex, and he made a quick joke, trying to be reassuring: “I mean that in a completely hypothetical way, of course.” But then he said in all seriousness, “Look, I’m fifty-two years old. Believe me, I already know how the world works. I recognize that you don’t love me yet the way I love you, but the truth is that I don’t really care. For some reason, I feel the same way about you that I felt about my kids when they were small—that it wasn’t their job to love me, it was my job to love them. You can decide to feel however you want to, but I love you and I will always love you. Even if we never see each other again, you already brought me back to life, and that’s a lot. And of course, I’d like to share my life with you. The only problem is, I’m not sure how much of a life I can offer you in Bali.”
This is a concern I’ve had, too. I’ve been watching the expatriate society in Ubud, and I know for a stone-cold fact this is not the life for me. Everywhere in this town you see the same kind of character—Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life that they’ve dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely, where they can live in a gorgeous house for $200 a month, perhaps taking a young Balinese man or woman as a companion, where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it, where they can make a bit of money exporting a bit of furniture for somebody. But generally, all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again. These are not bums, mind you. This is a very high grade of people, multinational, talented and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally “married” or “employed”); now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say, there’s a lot of drinking.
Of course, the precious Balinese town of Ubud is not such a bad place to putter away your life, ignoring the passing of the days. I suppose in that way it’s similar to places like Key West, Florida, or Oaxaca, Mexico. Most expats in Ubud, when you ask them how long they’ve lived here, aren’t really sure. For one thing, they aren’t really sure how much time has passed since they moved to Bali. But for another thing, it’s like they aren’t really sure if they do live here. They belong to nowhere, unanchored. Some of them like to imagine that they’re just hanging out for a while, just running the engine on idle at the traffic light, waiting for the signal to change. But after seventeen years of that you start to wonder . . . does anybody ever leave?
There is much to enjoy in their lazy company, in these long Sunday afternoons spent at brunch, drinking champagne and talking about nothing. Still, when I am around this scene, I feel somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz. Be careful! Don’t fall asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life here!
So what will become of me and Felipe? Now that there is, it seems, a “me and Felipe”? He told me not long ago, “Sometimes I wish you were a lost little girl and I could scoop you up and say, ‘Come and live with me now, let me take care of you forever.’ But you aren’t a lost little girl. You’re a woman with a career, with ambition. You are a perfect snail: you carry your home on your back. You should hold on to that freedom for as long as possible. But all I’m saying is this—if you want this Brazilian man, you can have him. I’m yours already.”
I’m not sure what I want. I do know that there’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, “Let me take care of you forever,” and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely . . .
I was thinking about all this last night after Felipe fell asleep, and I was curled up beside him, wondering what would become of us. What are the possible futures? What about the geography question between us—where would we live? Then there’s the age difference to consider. Though, when I called my mother the other day to tell her I’d met a really nice man, but—brace yourself, Mom!—“he’s fifty-two years old,” she was completely non-flummoxed. All she said was, “Well, I’ve got news for you, Liz. You’re thirty-five.” (Excellent point, Ma. I’m lucky to get anyone at such a withered age.) Truthfully, though, I don’t really mind the age difference, either. I actually like that Felipe is so much older. I think it’s sexy. Makes me feel kind of . . . French.
What will happen with us?
Why am I worrying about this, by the way?
What have I not yet learned about the futility of worry?
So after a while, I stopped thinking about all this and just held him while he slept. I am falling in love with this man. Then I fell asleep beside him and had two memorable dreams.
Both were about my Guru. In the first dream, my Guru informed me that she was closing down her Ashrams and that she would no longer be speaking, teaching or publishing books. She gave her students one final speech, in which she said, “You’ve had more than enough teachings. You have been given everything you need to know in order to be free. It’s time for you to go out in the world and live a happy life.”
The second dream was even more confirming. I was eating in a terrific restaurant in New York City with Felipe. We were having a wonderful meal of lamb chops and artichokes and fine wine and we were talking and laughing happily. I looked across the room and saw Swamiji, my Guru’s master, deceased since 19
82. But he was alive that night, right there in a snazzy New York restaurant. He was eating dinner with a group of his friends and they also seemed to be having a merry time of it. Our eyes met across the room and Swamiji smiled at me and raised his wineglass in a toast.
And then—quite distinctly—this small Indian Guru who had spoken precious little English during his lifetime mouthed this one word to me across the distance: Enjoy.
105
I haven’t seen Ketut Liyer in so long. Between my involvement with Felipe and my struggle to secure a home for Wayan, my long afternoons of aimless conversation about spirituality on the medicine man’s porch have long since ended. I’ve stopped by his house a few times, just to say hello and to drop off a gift of fruit for his wife, but we haven’t spent any quality time together since back in June. Whenever I try to apologize to Ketut for my absence, though, he laughs like a man who has already been shown the answers to every test in the universe and says, “Everything working perfect, Liss.”
Still, I miss the old man, so I stopped by to hang out with him this morning. He beamed at me, as usual, saying, “I am very happy to meet you!” (I never was able to break him of that habit.)
“I am happy to see you, too, Ketut.”
“You leaving soon, Liss?”
“Yes, Ketut. In less than two weeks. That’s why I wanted to come over today. I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve given me. If it wasn’t for you, I never would’ve come back to Bali.”
“Always you were coming back to Bali,” he said without doubt or drama. “You still meditate with your four brothers like I teach you?”
Eat, Pray, Love Page 37
