by Nigel Barley
‘Darius is coming?’
He grunted.
‘Darius is not coming?’
An identical sound. I was alone in the forest with no food, a man who could not talk to me and no idea where we were going. But at least he seemed obsessed with a sense of purpose and an urge to get on. He was clearly dissatisfied with the progress we had been making and urged me forward. He adopted a new ploy, following from the rear and – as we rode along – suddenly swiping Bugger Me from behind. The result was as before. Bugger Me would shoot forward in a mad dash, threatening either to unsaddle me or plunge my face into razor-sharp leaves. I shouted and finally managed to poke his horse so that it reared up most satisfactorily. Thereafter, he restricted himself to whispering at Bugger Me in tones of such evil menace that it was every bit as effective.
Hour followed hour. The gnome whispered insidiously in the forest like a heavy breather. The rain came on more heavily. Leeches reached out for us from the trees, gathering around our necks and wrists like tangled jewellery. Blood began to drip from their bites. Travel books tell you to kill leeches with cigarettes. They make excellent cigarette stubbers but it does not kill them. Occasionally, we would glimpse a field through the trees, not rice at this altitude but manioc growing on almost vertical slopes.
The red soil streamed with water, glistening and slimy. I recalled the comforting passages in my mendacious travel book where travellers were recommended to take a gentle stroll through this terrain, carrying a backpack. I pictured myself slithering and sliding up and down these dangerous screes in increasing despair and exhaustion. We came to a village but my hopes of shelter were dashed. It was long abandoned and choked with hairy creeper that swarmed with spiders.
We rode down the main street, once paved with large blocks of stone that had been ripped up and tumbled by the burrowing plants. We picked our way up a giant’s staircase with steps some two feet high. Smashed stone rice-mortars littered the ground as after some domestic affray of gigantic proportions.
It would have been nice to eat, but this was far from the gnome’s mind. He did not seem even to drink water, so I tried to ignore my own thirst in the pouring rain and soon a throbbing headache merged with the pounding of the horses’ hooves. It was at this point that I remembered that despite all the medication I had brought, the aspirins had been left behind.
By late afternoon, we emerged high on a ridge with unbroken forest stretching implausibly far in all directions. Mamasa must be back there somewhere but it was totally invisible. Perched like a swimming pool on a hotel roof was a solitary but magnificent rice-field, the plants that implausibly rich green that only rice can produce. To one side stood a fine sturdy house with smoke rising from the back and a smell of roasting coffee. Children waved delightedly from a veranda. It would be good to stand upright again.
The gnome shouted something and rode up to take the lead. Incredibly, we ignored the house and rode straight past to plunge into forest again. One word was understandable, terlambat, ‘too late’. I was being punished for riding too slowly. I began to hate the gnome.
The last hour added the torment of despair to the rest of the day’s sufferings. The rain hissed bitterly through the leaves all around us and it was dark before we arrived at a miserable shack by the wayside.
I have never been faced with the arrival of two complete strangers at nightfall, both liberally caked with mud and blood, who assumed they could simply eat my food and stay at my house. I hope I never shall. I fear I should display myself less hospitable than my host, a young farmer, and his family, who had migrated from the hot coast lured by the prospect of land they could call their own.
It was a modern house of planking with plenty of gaps to allow the wind to whip in and out. Although we were in the forest, no one wasted wood on a fire for anything but cooking so we sat on the hard floor in our soaked clothes and shivered. It was the moment to dig out my new Mamasa cloak. Though soaked, it would at least keep out the draughts. I buried myself in its clammy folds.
The farmer spoke Indonesian. He had lived here for three years, having been encouraged to migrate by the government. But life was hard. They no longer received any help from the authorities and the first priority was, of course, to get the mosque finished. In the cold up here, you could not get more than one harvest of rice a year whatever you did. Had I heard of the other group of tourists in the mountains? There were four Frenchmen on horses riding about. Darkness fell, but there was no money for an oil lamp. We sat in the dark, our faces only intermittently illuminated by the glow of cigarettes. Children crept in, swathed in thin cloaks. Not for the first time, I felt desperately inadequate. I wished I could play the flute or crack jokes in the language they were whispering in.
Food was brought in, chicken – wealth indeed for a farmer such as this. I too would be grateful for it – not like on Aeroflot. It smelt delicious but suddenly I was too tired to eat. When I tried, my teeth simply could not get into it. I hid it in my cloak for disposal next day. The gnome and the farmer demolished the rest with a great heap of rice. I recalled the restaurant in Ujung Pandang where I had been served a huge colander of rice as ‘rice for one person’.
A small child came in and, without formality, sat on my lap. In the obscurity, I passed it the chicken and it chewed in the darkness in conspiratorial silence.
The next thing I knew it was daylight. As a guest I had been guilty of lack of conversation and appetite. To this was to be added the offence of falling asleep in mid-meal. Every limb seemed set in bitter cramp and my mouth was haunted by the familiar furry taste of the overnight Channel crossing. The headache was gone but there was a new problem. I was blind. I could distinguish light from dark but objects had only the vaguest, blurred outlines. My eyes were hot and swollen and someone was driving a hot needle into both irises. There was something wrong with my breathing too. Snot streamed from my nose and I began a sneezing fit that seemed endless and left me weak and gasping. It must be pneumonia. As I lay helpless and terrified a figure swam into view. From the voice, it was the farmer. He was laughing, actually laughing at my suffering. In that moment I knew he had poisoned me. Rage and self-pity fought for mastery and self-pity won. He reached forward and took my cloak. He could not even wait for me to die before stripping the corpse! I was too weak to resist. He giggled again.
‘Chilli!’he said.
‘What?’
‘Chilli. They use chilli to dye the cloth. You should never wear a Mamasa cloth that has not been washed at least three times or better still buy the new ones that don’t use plant colours. There is a new smooth sort.’ I knew he meant rayon.
He took the cloth away and laughed a good healthy laugh. An hour later, I had washed and eaten some baked manioc. I could see and breathe again and felt the light-hearted relief that recovery from an illness always brings. Only the gnome looked displeased. He metaphorically, and the horses literally, were champing at the bit. I was no longer capable of leaping on Bugger Me but hauled myself on to the firewood raft of saddle. In my gratitude and relief, I probably gave the farmer too much money. In farewell, he gave the horse a slap. It plunged crazily forward. Another day had begun.
It is hard to distinguish the next four days from one another. They assumed a separate ghostly reality characterized only by the pounding of horses’ hooves both inside and outside my head. Sometimes it rained and I was very wet. Sometimes it was sunny and I was very hot. The horses too seemed to become increasingly fractious and fights among them broke out until it became a major inconvenience.
The gnome refused to stop anywhere, being obsessed by some grim and uncertain purpose. I found no Torajans living lives of noble ethnographic simplicity. Indeed, as we moved deeper into the forest, it became denser and less marked by human settlement until there were hardly any people at all. Only occasionally would we come across lonely woodcutters, like as not crouched in wretched, leaky shelters by the roadside or sawing logs into planks by hand. There can be few more miserable rol
es in life than the bottom half of a two-man saw in a forest in the rain. All the sawdust goes full in your face. But I could not talk to these people. I think the gnome could not either. We must have crossed some invisible linguistic frontier. So we lapsed into total silence except for Bugger Me who still received whispered menaces from the gnome. On occasion we spent the night in one of these shelters in a miasma of sawdust, smoke and mosquitoes, sleep made fitful by the rustling of tin-cans that had been arranged in an elaborate pest-scaring device operated by a string tied to the big toe of the woodcutter in residence. We subsisted on a diet of rice and chilli. I had almost stopped eating.
On the last day, I could tell something was in the air. Our solitude was abruptly shattered by the arrival of a convoy of horses coming the other way. Our own path proved to be the tributary of some greater highway. A deep groove had been worn in the centre of the track by generations of horsemen. All branches above head height had been knocked down by the constant traffic. Unfortunately, I extended rather further in both directions than most of the locals so I was forced to raise my feet to clear the sides of the groove while simultaneously ducking my head to avoid the branches. This, together with the constant danger of a fight amongst the horses, made for a trying journey.
Indonesians drive on the left. This meant that as we climbed the mountain clockwise, we were on the outside, ill-equipped to encounter the descending convoy, its horses splayed out with jerrycans of paraffin so that they knocked and banged against our own, threatening to push us over the edge. There was much dithering and shouting, horses skidding on the loose rock. Feeling that cowardice was the better part of discretion. I abandoned my own mount and climbed on foot. At the top was a middle-aged man in a bright cloak who giggled on seeing me and jumped up and down on the spot in glee.
‘Belanda – Dutchman!’ he cried, pointing at me.
Toraja!’ I countered, pointing back. It was the funniest thing he had ever heard and he repeated his little dance of delight. After days of total silence, conversation was heady stuff.
‘I thought you were the group of Frenchmen riding through the hills – eight Frenchmen on horseback. But you are alone. Or did the others die?’ That seemed funny too.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked, getting in first.
He pointed over one shoulder. ‘From the north.’
‘What is in the north?’
‘Two kilometres up there is a fine house, then the town.’
We chattered on until the gnome came up, driving the horses before him. My new friend creased his brow.
‘One thing I do not understand.’ He indicated the horses. ‘Why do you travel with two stallions and one mare in heat. Does it not make things difficult?’ Clearly, I should have looked at more than the hooves.
Experience had taught me not to take estimates of distance literally. It would be splendid to see what the carved houses of this area looked like. Whatever the gnome said, I would insist on stopping. I got my camera out.
Almost exactly two kilometres later, however, we emerged from the forest. The gnome reigned in his horses, extended a hand in a sort of ‘there you are’ gesture and uttered his first Indonesian for days. ‘We have arrived,’ he announced with all the decorum of a footman.
We were standing in the centre of an immaculate putting-green, whose tender surface looked as though it would be bruised by an unkind word. Staring at us in some dismay were a group of Japanese, faultlessly attired in what must be deemed ‘leisure wear’, shorts and checked shirts, gesturing with ergonomic putting-irons that we should ride around rather than across their golf course. They seemed in no way surprised by our appearance and as we circuited the fringe of grass under the trees, they returned to their practice, peaked American baseball caps purposefully bent towards the balls they addressed.
The fine house was not, as I had assumed, an ancient carved dwelling. It was an American-style bungalow, with shiny aluminium roof and plastic floor-tiles. Most important, however, to one bereft of food and drink, it was clearly some sort of clubhouse or at least a bar. I felt a brief absurd moment of panic that I would not be allowed in without a tie.
There is always pleasure in re-enacting, in the flesh, the cliches of the cinema. We climbed stiffly down, beating the dust from our clothes as Roy Rogers was wont to do and hitched our horses to the rail in front of the building. We sauntered, stiff-legged as John Wayne, into the building and went up to the bar. My camera hung about my neck like an accusation.
I did not expect to be understood but somehow had to say it.
‘Gimme coupla beers.’ The barman flashed a grin.
‘Sure boss. You want Japanese or domestic?’
‘Domestic. You speak good English.’
‘Sure. I had three years in the nickel mines up north with the Canadians. I speak but good. You with the group of Frenchmen on horseback – twelve of them with three guides?’
‘No. What is this place?’
‘This coffee plantation. All the Japanese managers come here from outstations. Coffee cooked here. Where you from? You got kinda funny accent.’
‘From Mamasa. We came over the mountains by horse.’
‘You crazy. Why you don’t come by truck like everyone else?’
‘By truck?’ As if on cue, a truck could be heard reversing outside.
‘Oh.’ The gnome was sucking down beer, making interrogative gestures about further supplies. I felt I ought to get angry if only I could be bothered.
‘Are all the people who come here Japanese?’
‘We got some guys work up at the radio station. They spend all their time watching porno movies over the satellite from Thailand, so they don’t come in much.’
On the wall above his head was a carefully lettered sign in English defining the Rules of the Club.
‘The palm-trees to the west of the green are to accounted a natural hazard as are the dropping of animals.’
‘Is there anywhere to stay?’
‘Sure. There’s a joint down the main street.’
I led Bugger Me down the road, a line of makeshift houses with a frontier air about them. No one seemed to be dropping animals.
The ‘joint’ was readily identifiable by the stack of beer bottles and the line of sheets hanging on the fence. The gnome and I terminated our arrangement with the passing of money. When I removed the large roll of raddled notes from my pocket, there was a leech nestling in the centre like a symbol of usury.
The establishment was run by a depressed-looking Chinese whose growing family had expanded into virtually all the rooms, thus simultaneously increasing his expenditure and cutting his income.
The latest addition was a bony son who had returned from studying architecture and lived on a balcony producing drawings of skyscrapers that would never be built. He had a very loud cassette-player on which he listened to pop-music and Christian sermons with equal enjoyment.
There was not much room for me, so to minimize my disruption of domestic arrangements I was allocated part of the floor in a room that otherwise contained the giggling pubescent daughters of the house. They were shielded from my impudent gaze by the curtains that surrounded their four-poster bed. A constant stream pattered in and out so that I never quite knew how many were inside as the curtains danced and bulged to whatever female operations were carried out there.
These distractions were as nothing to those of the clock whose electronic chimes produced a sound, on the hour, similar to that produced by British battleships. When I mentioned it to the owner, he swelled with pride.
‘My son did that,’ he said. ‘Before it was very quiet.’
Despairing of sleep, I went to find the gnome. He had already filled his jerrycans with paraffin and immediately set off back to Mamasa. As for me, I thought I might as well use that motor road and go on to Rantepao.
Of Rice and Men
The first thing I saw as the truck pulled into Rantepao was a mosque painted a prosperous green and adorned with a dome beaten f
rom aluminium sheeting. It was the fasting month and till dusk no Muslims would be eating or drinking. A pious mumble came from inside. The second thing was a man bent double outside the mosque vomiting copiously. He was clearly drunk and promising whatever God it was he served a better life in future. My fellow-passengers tutted censoriously. Not a Torajan, they assured me. On the dashboard was a sticker, ‘Christ died for your sins.’ Two ancillary images of scantily clad Chinese girls and a man drinking stout suggested what those sins might have been.
After the horse-ride from Mamasa, I felt cosmically fractious – simultaneously cold and hungry and tired and bored with no notion of what it might be that could reinstitute a state of well-being.
Near the market was a small hotel. Small, clean and inexpensive, it seemed it might offer solace for spiritual outrage. In the centre of the garden stood a Torajan rice-barn. These beautiful structures are to be seen all over the mountainsides. They stand some twenty-five feet high on great tubular legs and are richly carved and painted all over. The crowning glory is the roof, a gracefully concave curve of bamboo tiles that sticks out fore and aft like an admiral’s hat. Underneath is the platform, that most important social space in a Torajan village. It is always cool under the barn. There is always a convenient surface to lean your back against. I slipped off my shoes and settled back to doze.
We never know what fate has in store, at what point blind chance will enter into our lives in a way that we will afterwards re-gloss as due to our own intentions and planning. As I sat, psychologically and physically outraged, on the platform of a rice-barn in the middle of Indonesia, fate decided to send me something I was not even looking for – a field-work assistant. He came not in a puff of smoke but in a waiter’s uniform.
‘Hallo boss!’ I opened grudging eyes to see a small dark figure, grinning from ear to ear and tossing a tray up in the air to catch it again on the outspread fingers of one hand. He dropped it with a clatter.
‘I bring you a beer?’