by Nigel Barley
In my country, I declared, we did not pay for our wives. Yes, it was the same in other parts of Toraja – though not here where women were respected – which was why the Buginese liked to marry Torajan women from other areas. In my country we paid money on divorce. Same here. In my country, however, if a poor man married a rich woman, he might ask money from her. They looked pitying. How could we allow people from one class to marry another? Of course it would not work. Anyway, a woman should never marry beneath her for the sake of her children, since her status determined that of hear offspring. We were well into an analysis of the class and marriage system – a difficult job like teasing the bones out of a fish – when my informant became increasingly confused and inconsistent. The moment to stop. But he did not want to.
‘Wait,’ he said, ‘I’ll check.’ He slipped into the next room to ask his father, I assumed, and I felt a pang of guilt that the poor old man should be disturbed. Soon, he re-emerged thumbing into a large blue-bound book.
‘Here you are. It’s all in here.’
It was his thesis on the marriage system, examined and approved at the university in Ujung Pandang. He was an anthropologist.
As I left, he produced a visitor’s book in which I was invited to write my name, my reaction to the house and – gentle hint – the size of my contribution to its upkeep. I noted with disapproval that a party of thirty American anthropology students had been round the month before. Torajaland began to feel very crowded. There was an urge to get my own back for my disappointed expectations. I indicated the windmills up on the hills.
‘What are those for?’ I asked casually. He frowned.
‘Odd you should ask that. I’ve noticed that however many times you ask the old people about them, you seem to get a different answer every time. It’s my belief that they are simply a marker of time at the harvest, part of a wider complex involving stick-fighting and the use of spinning tops but it’s not impossible that they have a material function in scaring away birds.’ Totally defeated, I retired.
Back at the inn, the young Christians had evaporated like the morning dew. Only the disorder of the furniture and a slightly acrid whiff of vomit betokened the excesses of youthful piety. The family of the proprietor and I were the only occupants, together with a deaf mute who wandered in and a Japanese construction-worker who spoke no Indonesian. The Japanese showed tearful pictures of the family he had forsaken to come and work on the road. I was tempted to get out my blonde woman but refrained. The son of the house discussed the dangers of flying in eloquent gesture with the deaf mute, while I did the son’s English homework. The next day, it came back heavily corrected. It was full of incomprehensible questions such as, ‘Is the moon at seven o’clock or behind the door?’
Meanwhile, the wayward daughter of the house spent the evening pulling white hairs out of the head of the Japanese. Her excess of makeup, the clearly half-European child she had returned with from Bali despite the absence of a husband, allotted her fairly firmly to the local category of ‘wicked woman’. She regarded me purposefully throughout the evening while I refused to notice her attention.
Abruptly, she spoke, ‘I have a friend who knows you well.’
I feigned polite interest. ‘In Indonesia?’
‘Yes. In Indonesia too. They know you very well.’ The pronoun did not reveal the sex of the person in question.
‘Is your friend male or female?’
She smiled knowingly. ‘A little of both.’ She cradled the head of the construction-worker in her hands.
A transvestite? Not the actress from the theatre in Jakarta?
She continued, ‘But my friend wants to know you better and has given me a message for you.’ She tweaked another white hair from the crown of the Japanese.
I tired of this mysterious mode of communication carried on literally over the head of the Japanese. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘who is your friend and just what is the message?’ She giggled, let go of the head so that the poor man nearly fell on the floor and danced across the room to slap down a piece of paper before me.
‘This is the message,’ she beamed. ‘My friend is Jesus.’ It was a religious tract.
Since it was market-day, the goats had been reluctantly persuaded to yield tenancy of the football pitch to heaps of produce from the surrounding countryside. Strange, lumpy vegetables like cancerous growths and sliced jackfruit like sections of brain were heaped up in pallid, glistening mounds. The wooden shops had thrown open their folding doors and displayed the cheap goods of China and Japan, canned mackerel, scented soap, matches, keyrings showing girls whose bras dropped off when they were held upside down. From the very middle of the throng, a staccato voice fed through a whistling loudspeaker seduced the credulous through an obstacle course. If you ducked under ropes and over cables, leapt heaps of tomatoes and slithered through pools of effluent you came to the still centre.
There you would find a huckster-healer, peddling powders that cured everything from dysentery to infertility. At one point, all the ladies were sent away so that the delicate problem of ‘male weakness’ could be raised. The focus of attention was a sensational plastic torso whose organs could be scooped out to demonstrate the malady in question. In concession to popular taste, it was in the form of a blonde Western woman with enormous clip-on breasts, and hair that could be pulled out in clumps as an aid in the discussion of dandruff.
Apart from this, the material culture on display was more than a little disappointing. A few dispiriting cloths were on offer, the dyes now strictly chemical. The most expensive was of rayon. As I peered disconsolately through the pile, I felt someone slip a hand under my shirt and begin tickling me. Spinning round, I looked into the grinning face of the horseman from yesterday. In a gesture worthy of Errol Flynn, he spun his tubular cloak around his neck so that it hung down his back and hugged me to his bosom.
‘If you want cloths,’ he whispered, ‘come with me.’
Soon we were in a wooden coffee shop in a thick fug of clove-scented cigarette smoke. The patrons were mountain people, short, wiry, thick-haired and wizened. The men wore their cloaks up around their ears like bats and cloths were pulled out from under the table, bundles of them tied up with string. They were bright red and orange with stripes of cardwork patterning. The colours were natural and would fade gently.
‘From the plants,’ said my guide, touching the colours with the tips of his fingers. We began to bargain. It was a gentle business. Once more, it struck me how unlike African bargaining it was – the absence of aggression and furious posing. We pushed prices back and forth in a curiously disinterested way, a bit like wine-tasters swilling vintages over their palates. Soon we had agreed and I had a fine new cloak. But the encounter had given birth to another idea. I would hire a horse and head up into the mountains.
There is a tradition in anthropology that the amount of physical suffering of the researcher is a measure of the value of his data. Like many other presuppositions, it is tenacious in the face of good negative evidence. Another such idea is that, beneath the complex surface where traditional and modern meet, there lies a layer of real ethnography, the pure uncorrupted Indonesia. If you can only get far enough from towns, you will surely find it. From this perspective, a horse-ride into the forest seemed like a good idea.
* * *
I have never liked horses. My experience of riding them is small and dismal. They intuitively know that you are frightened of them.
I spent a great deal of time over the next couple of days talking to people in town. Just as the difficulty of haggling is enormously increased if you have absolutely no idea of what is a reasonable price, so it is extremely awkward to pick out the best horses for a journey when you have little idea of what a good horse looks like or even what your destination is.
People told me of villages in the hills where there were ancient houses, where people were still pagans, where blacksmiths had strange habits. It seemed all I had to do was head north. I spent even more time look
ing at horses. I guessed that excessively thin mounts and those with large festering sores on their backs were best avoided. Intuition suggested I should look at their hooves, so I did that without quite knowing what I was looking for. The owners, however, definitely expected it. The proverb told me I should at all costs look at their teeth so I did that too. It was much like the ways, in the past. I had pretended competence before the owners of second-hand cars I might buy. What they did not know, however, was that I had long abandoned all hope of judging horseflesh. It was the owners I was judging.
There is obviously some deep kinship between horse traders and second-hand car dealers. Both categories seem to hold an undue number of deeply shifty characters with large bundles of currency hidden about their persons. Prices never seemed to be simple. It was always a matter of a certain sum paid now with a discount for this and that and a need for careful calculation. Arithmetic seemed to enter some strange new domain. I found it hard to understand why one person should require a minimum of three horses. Only at the last minute did I discover that one trader was proposing to charge me extra for the use of a saddle. When I asked who was responsible for horse-feed they stared at me blankly.
‘Horses eat grass,’ one explained gently. What about food for myself, for a guide, blankets, cigarettes? They shrugged. That was up to me. As for themselves, they would take nothing and expect nothing. They would rely on me.
Finally, I found the right man for the job, one with the splendid name of Darius. There was no mistaking his open, frank face, the straight look in his eyes, the lively intelligence – the good Indonesian. We squatted down beside the horses’ hooves I had just finished looking at and shared a cigarette. I explained the nature of my expedition. He nodded in understanding. There were interesting people in the hills, and fine houses too. I would be all right with him. He understood that I was new to this country and would need help. The horses were good. I would ride this one – see how fat it was. We could leave tomorrow. Meet at the bridge at 5.30 a.m.
This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us
It did not come as a great surprise to be still sitting under the bridge at 6.30. Rubber time is a fact of life even the Indonesians make jokes about. The system whereby 5.30 is expressed as ‘half-six’ is often misunderstood and meetings are fraught with difficulty. I was under the bridge for the reason that it was pouring with rain, big wet blobs spattering down that had shown the roof of the bridge to be full of holes. There was a distant jingling of harness and I looked up hopefully. But it was not Darius. I looked down into the brown water gushing underneath as the horses slipped and juddered on the planks behind me and came to a halt, tossing their heads and steaming.
I turned to see a slightly benevolent garden gnome, swathed in a plastic waterproof of Lincoln Green. Time stretched out between us. He coughed. I tried a greeting and discovered, as I had expected, that he spoke hardly any Indonesian and furthermore had no teeth. I looked at the horses again, while the gnome looked doubtful. Perhaps he wanted me to look at their hooves. The lead horse looked much as Torajan horses normally do, short, shaggy, resentful. It eyed me appraisingly and its lips curled. The second was almost invisible beneath a pile of plastic jerrycans. The third was familiar. Surely this was the chubby beast selected as my mount?
‘Where is Darius?’
The gnome rustled, finally extricated an arm and pointed up into the hills. He pointed at himself and me and indicated the same direction.
‘He has gone on ahead?’ The gnome gurgled assent. It was the moment I had dreaded. I had to get on.
Circling the beast suggested no obvious way of ingress. Wait a minute, there was something wrong here. There were no stirrups. Moving round to the front to adjust the reins. I found there were none of those either.
‘How do I get on?’A burr of indistinct vowels was followed by the Indonesian for ‘jump’. I jumped and ended up prone across its back. Horses automatically know when they have an idiot aboard. Mine chose this moment to move off and cannon into the horse in front, which turned round and bit it. The saddle was unlike any I had ever encountered before. It seemed to consist of a bundle of firewood, cut wide to splay the legs out and covered with sacking. It was loose, twisting round under me and depositing me back on the ground. Fortunately, Torajan horses are less than half as big as Western horses so it was no great distance to tumble. It was unfortunate that the beast in front was backing up. It promptly bore down on me and stamped away about my head like a Scottish dancer. Ignoring the chance to inspect its hooves. I rolled whimpering out of the way while the gnome wrestled with the pile of jerrycans and cursed.
It was clearly the moment to take charge and set the course in which our relationship would run. At such times, language difficulties count for nothing. I stood up and explained that I had never ridden a horse before and would require instruction. The gnome grunted. A small appreciative crowd had now gathered, of the sort that any minor incident can summon. Fortunately, Torajan children are not shy and one emerged to explain the basic controls. A child of about ten, he swung himself into the saddle with insolent grace and explained that you had to grip with your knees. The hands should grasp the front of the firewood saddle. In moments of stress such as swimming rivers (was I going to be swimming rivers?) it was best to simply dig your fingers into the mane. The horse knew the words for ‘left’ and ‘right’ in Indonesian.
‘Thank you. Now tell me how I start it – no, how I stop it first.’ He reached forward and grabbed a handful of hair on the horse’s forelock and wrenched its head round shouting, ‘Stop!’ It seemed likely to work. The horse was totally submissive. He leapt lithely down. I attempted to replace him. It was like one of those pathetic spectacles at holiday camps where aged grannies are persuaded to ape the movements of dancing girls. The child sighed and went to the roadside where he pulled out a dagger and cut an enormous stick.
‘To start, you beat the horse with this and shout “whoosh”.’ I tried a few delicate ‘whooshes’ without the stick.
‘No, not like that. Whoosh,’ he screamed and gave the horse a mighty slap on the rump. With a neck-jolting jerk, we lurched off, me scrabbling for a foothold, a kneehold – anything. The crowd hooted in joyful derision. The motion was exceedingly unpleasant. Opposite corners of the beast seemed to rise simultaneously so there was no place of rest on the firewood raft. The gnome and the jerrycan horse galloped up behind and overtook. It seemed we had already set off. Under the green plastic hood was a gigantic smirk.
We rode for twelve hours that day without stopping. The road stretched ahead, depressingly visible for miles, a vivid red scar across the landscape. At first we followed the gentle contours of the valley through a light and not unrefreshing rain. Soon, we struck uphill. Fields dwindled and disappeared. After half an hour of steady climbing, we were in the forest. It was not the rain-forest I had known in Africa, a cool and shady place. Here it was dank and steamy. Every plant seemed to have sharp or spiky leaves, to reach forward to slice at your flesh. It was surprising to see the house-plants that had to be cajoled into reluctant growth in England. Here, they were disgustingly fecund with thick green leaves. You felt that if you stopped they would swarm all over you.
On a more used trail there would have been bridges. Instead, every few miles would come the roar of water followed by a slow descent, the horses jumping and skidding down wet rocks to the river itself. At this time of year the torrents were low, so the horses just plunged in up to their haunches and felt their way across the stony bottom. Always at the low point would be a thick cloud of mosquitoes or butterflies that settled and drank your sweat.
The horse submitted me to subtle tests. It rapidly learned that when cries of ‘whoosh’ failed to accelerate it. I would be strangely reluctant to use the sapling. It slowed down to a dawdle. Hoping to make a truce between us, I inquired its name. The gnome mumbled something like ‘Bugger me’. The horse responded to it and broke into a trot. Little bits of technique began to emerge. I fo
und that it was easier to lean backwards when going down the slopes and forward when climbing.
We must have been slowly climbing because it got steadily colder. The rain became heavier. The horses’ backs began to steam. I was grateful for the heat percolating through from Bugger Me. The gnome stopped to adjust the jerrycans and I wandered off to cast water. We shared a cigarette. Where, I inquired, was Darius?
‘Darius?’ He pointed back the way we had come, the fingers fluttering to indicate the distance that divided us. ‘Darius is ill.”