The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  After seven hours, we reached the next tree house. It was lofty, with grand views over the forest, like a weightless Italian landscape painting; all misted blues and feathery horizons, but with a feeling of suffocating isolation. Juha went forward with the tobacco, the three men there yelling into his face and running around him with the arrows pointed at his chest. I think his blue eyes unnerved them deeply. But tobacco calms all things eventually, and there came a moment when we all sat down and the big lizard-hide pipes were lit and the men came up sheepishly and took our hands with a shy “Nari, nari.”

  That night, over nasi goreng (fried rice with whatever other ingredients are at hand) and brush turkey eggs, we asked two Kombai elders living there about their myths. The old men were gritty and stern; hideous bark earrings distorted their lobes. One was called Vedawayo and the other man was his son. They sat next to our single candle, which was fixed to the edge of the table amid a storm of moths. They stared at the candle. “It burns,” they said, “but it doesn’t go out.” And they clicked a finger behind their front teeth, a gesture, like koteka wriggling, that translates as “Wow!” To turn them away from their wonderment to ours, we asked them about their beliefs.

  The neighboring Korowai believe that the world is made of three concentric circles. At the center are the living; around them live the dead. And beyond both is a great body of water that they call The Great Dog, where the dead reside. The Kombai, however, were reluctant to divulge their cosmology, regarding it as a pious secret that should not be revealed to outsiders. They merely recounted their creation myth. Once upon a time, the human race lived like grubs inside a large noken bag high up in a tree house. They were fed sago until one day, having grown big, they spilled out and learned how to multiply, coming down from the primordial tree house to the earth.

  As they told us this, they ate live sago grubs from a piece of bark, first breaking their necks, then biting into the fatty flesh. And what about kakua-kumu?

  “Ah, sorcerers are everywhere!” Vedawayo said, shaking his head bitterly. “I killed one years ago. I ate him. But that was years ago. Not now.”

  They looked down between their knees at the ground, avoiding our eyes, though not, it seemed, out of shame. Their tone was matter-of-fact.

  “Would you eat one now?”

  Nods. There was no other way of annihilating them completely. “I killed one,” the son said, “but I didn’t eat him. I tied him up and shot him dead. I threw him into the river and then drank the water mixed with blood.”

  Because the soul for the Kombai resides in the brain and the stomach, it is these two items that have to be eaten if the evil spirit is to be destroyed efficiently. So we were surprised the son had not eaten the brains.

  I then asked them where they thought we came from.

  A dry, indecisive sigh. “We don’t know. Some of us thought you might be from the forest where the sun rises, others said the forest where the sun sets. But we don’t know which.”

  “We don’t come from the forest,” Woolford said.

  When it was translated by Yanbu, they stared stonily at the ground. What did that mean? Woolford went on: “We come from outside the forest.”

  At this, they shook their heads direly and clucked. Outside the world? How was that possible?

  Even Yanbu looked doubtful. Did we really come from where we said we did? What lay beyond The Forest if not The Great Dog?

  Neither man had ever heard of Wanggemalo.

  “What happens,” Juha tried, “when you die?”

  They shrugged and, for some reason, scratched their balls. “Your soul goes walking in the forest.”

  The conversation had a curiously veiled quality. The Kombai do not lightly divulge things about themselves to strangers. But there was also the problem of language, which none of us could solve. Yanbu and the Kombai often drifted off into discussions of their own, as if Yanbu was grappling with concepts impossible for him to translate into Bahasa. I remembered then the poor Tasaday of the Philippines, who had apparently gotten so sick of prying outsiders that when interviewed they fell into a fantastical private language called “nafnaf,” in which all the words ended with the sound “naf” and that no professional linguist could understand.

  Later, I fell into a severe exhaustion in my tent. For the first time since we had set out, I felt morbid and unhinged. I watched the outlines of praying mantises crawling over the mosquito nets, their bodies glistening and pulsating. A bright pink spider the size of my hand suddenly ran across it. The jungle’s gorgeous horror: how beautiful were the giant funnel spiders that can kill a parrot. Beetles orange as coral, fiery ants strung out on hanging vines as they marched vertically toward the canopy. The insect world that is never still for a second, that cannot sleep.

  More bubbling laughter now echoed through the trees and, for the first time, I felt a sullen contentment under which the unhinged hysteria still simmered—a change in the body, perhaps, as it adjusted to the ferocity of nature. My notebooks had already crumbled into clots of wet paper and I was relieved. Everything rots in the jungle, but of course this is desirable in the end. What remains is a deliciously moronic survival in the face of all the mantises and spiders. The ecstasy of not dying.

  In the morning, however, we awoke to a nightmare breakfast that almost annulled this feeling: our hosts had brought a large plate piled high with tiny roasted legs, so small that we had to eat about thirty of them each. They were disgusting, like caramelized pork chops hacked from a midget Frankenpig. They surely weren’t the jungle delicacies I had previously hoped to avoid, bandicoot bladders, for example, or Blyth’s hornbill eyes. We sucked on them like schoolboys, unable to get satisfaction. But what were they?

  Yanbu’s eyes were those of a loony Mother Goose as he explained, picking them up and turning them over like edible gemstones, as if to show how rare and precious they were—and what an honor it was for us to digest them. “Mouse hinds!”

  A changed mood now swept over us, for the next tree house was going to be a very different excursion. Rumor had it that a pig feast was planned for the following night, and that several families would be present. This meant that there would be thirty or so Kombai in attendance. They were gathered to smooth over a delicate matter: earlier in the year a kakua-kumu had been murdered from one of the tree houses and the clan needed to heal the rift among its members. Pigs would be slaughtered by way of atonement, but the intrusion of strangers had not been anticipated.

  This place was called Kalamburu. There was a bend in the trail as it rose toward a high crest denuded of trees, burned to a sienna hue and the stumps of cut boles left jutting up like black fangs. The column stopped in a field of huge ferns, and cries of greeting shot back and forth. As it happened, it was my turn to offer the tobacco. We could tell that the Kombai were excited; the cries were a little hysterical. And I would have to go in alone with Yanbu.

  As I walked forward alone into the clearing, the sound of my feet on burned twigs was loud as firecrackers; the sudden shouts of the men swarming around me, however, were far more muted. At that moment, I wondered if all this was an elaborate mise-en-scène arranged behind our backs like the “native scenes” in Yanimura. After all, I was not an anthropologist. I knew nothing about these people. Perhaps they would come rolling down from their tree houses armed with digital cameras, crying, “All right, you white bastards, say cheese!” This suspicion passed. There were two magnificent tree houses, far taller than the others; the men retreated to them, pawing the ground and glaring at this incredible white creature, strange as a unicorn, holding a bag of Indonesian shag and tottering forward on shredded hiking boots. There were about twenty of them, their bows drawn. I inched forward, for there was nothing else to do. An arrow suddenly flew over my head with a satisfying basso sound—a whoosh corresponding to a shot of adrenaline. Then another. The missile flew into the trees behind me, where far behind me the porters hit the deck. Yanbu pulled a face forcibly stuck halfway between amusement and
sardonic disdain. He said something jovial in Kombai, which must have been something like, “Don’t worry, city boy, they don’t miss!” A Kombai who means business will shoot you through the pupil at a hundred yards without blinking. But I felt like laughing as part of the same hysteria I had felt earlier in the day. It was a crowd of “natives” from a Bob Hope movie. The kinky warriors from Bali Hai!

  An older man in a large hornbill koteka crept forward, a look of catatonic stupefaction on his face. He swayed from side to side, glassy-eyed. Quite suddenly, he pushed the arrow loaded in his bow forward and indicated that I should spear the tobacco packet on it. He didn’t want to risk touching me. Slipping the tobacco off his arrow, he felt the alien plastic and licked it. An alien taste. He opened it and sniffed. An alien scent.

  The meeting was bizarre for both of us, but there was a far-reaching imbalance in our respective preparations. He could not be prepared for my hair, my skin, my eyes, the texture of my industrial clothes, my watch and shoelaces, the musty smell of deet insect repellent, the copious sweat. It was not surprising that he could not bring himself to graze my hand, though he tried over and over, shaking his head, completely perplexed. I loomed over all of them, a great white Gulliver gone astray.

  But by now Yanbu was there and urging him in Kombai to shake hands. His name was Chief Mamandeo. “Nari, nari,” I tried. And we began saying “nari” to each other, over and over, as if reassuring each other that we were both human after all. An hour later, they had all calmed down and were smoking our tobacco in their pipes large as didgeridoos, pulling expressions of snobbish disgust but smoking it all the same. “When we saw you,” Mamandeo admitted, “we thought, what could that be? Then we were mad. Then we were scared shitless.” They laughed. “We didn’t kill you, though.”

  The pig feast lasted until dark. Frenzied dancing and songs as the forest dipped into a flame-thrower sunset, the men and women disappearing together in the jungle, leaving the white men alone on the ridge, gazing into mists and palms. The ocher and white shields on the sides of the tree houses caught the sun as it died, and the designs seemed clearly reminiscent of Australia’s Aboriginal equivalents. Then the people returned as a tightly bonded mass, shouting together, fused into a collective trance. Our porters had joined them, mouse tails tied around their heads. When their eyes caught ours they held back the grins—the constipation induced by a very subtle betrayal.

  The pig was cooked in stones wrapped in leaves, the hair scraped off with bamboo knives. As they ate apart from the women, the men scooped up blood in large oyster shells. We were offered the capricorn beetle grubs from the inside of the sago palms—huge, white beasts that are the Kombai equivalent of caviar. Crunching them alive, as the true Kombai gourmet must, was like biting into a sausage skin filled with explosive pus. When Mamandeo came down to the tents afterward to smoke with us, accompanied by two brothers, I wanted to know how they had acquired these shells. He shrugged. Trade with neighbors. So this was an example of vicarious contact that anthropologists liked to cite when proving to you that there is no such thing as an “uncontacted” people. But did he know they came from the sea?

  “What is it, sea?”

  We explained what sea was. Water, big, horizons. I tried to describe a whale. “Like a giant pig?” they asked. After that, I made a clumsy attempt to explain that I had flown here from Bali, which was not too far from Papua. They were both part of Indonesia.

  “What is it, Indonesia?”

  “A big country with many islands.”

  “Country?” The brows knitted.

  The two brothers, Morgana and Andono, also discussed the matter between themselves. Finally they asked, “What is Papua?” Which brought the topic to an end.

  Behind them, the brooding shapes of trees, a dark ruin. And the darkness here was gripping, filled with tension, so deep that nothing could stab through it except the energy of twentieth-century gadgets. As we sat at our crude table with the candles, men and boys swarmed round to stare at the bright images in our digital camera displays. The older men could not grasp what they were—they expressed fear of looking into the LCD—but the children were quick to grasp the idea of a difference in scale between image and reality.

  Kelly asked them if they had seen a white man before.

  Morgana: “We thought you might be people. But white skin? Ah, then we were shocked.”

  “Shocked?”

  They shook their heads and spat.

  “Shocked. Who knew men could be white? And women, too.”

  They groaned softly for a while, as if this was truly an appalling idea, as no doubt it is.

  We said then that we had walked three hundred days to reach them (the equivalent of a plane journey from Europe, we thought), and this made them click their teeth and mutter, “Haren!” How about that?

  Then there was the assorted campers’ junk on the table. A tin of Gong Kuang Chinese biscuits from Jakarta, decorated with a sinister picture of a perfect American family sitting down to dinner—except that their eyes were subtly Chinese. Suangis? The plastic Nalgene water bottle with its ice-blue tint. The Kombai had never seen an artificial blue before, and this radical color struck them as extremely haren. As for cups and forks, they were incomprehensible. Our clothes were equally astonishing, and as always the candles were a sensation.

  “We live in darkness,” Andono said. “Could you bring us a candle if you come again?” Since his Kombai didn’t have a word for candle, he used the Bahasa word we had used, lilin.

  I then offered them our malted biscuits. With extreme caution they held them up to the candle, turned them over, inspected them gravely, then stuck out their tongues to graze the surface. They were nonplussed and deeply suspicious. Then, egged on by Yanbu, they bit tiny morsels off.

  The Kombai have an elegant way of spitting. They form a blob of saliva on their lips, lean over, and let it fall silently.

  Mamandeo: “It makes me want to vomit.”

  Next, a spoonful of white sugar. They nibbled at it and then, with ineffable disgust, went through the same spitting motion.

  Morgana: “It makes us want to vomit.”

  We tried a simple cup of water next. But it was the plastic that upset them, the feel of it against their lips. They spat it out.

  Andono: “It makes me want to vomit.”

  Afterward, we walked back up to the crest, smoking with the men, while they lit their way with bunches of burning grass. Far across the forest, hundreds of fireflies blazed under flashes of lightning; points of burning grass swung to and fro below as people wound their way back to other tree houses. We listened for a long time to the Kombai men singing, the monotonous twanging of the bamboo harps. It was striking that men who ate witches could sing so gently. Some claimed never to have heard of their neighbors, the Korowai, and several had never heard of Wanggemalo. For a moment, I looked up and saw the Kombai men gathered around the last dying candle. The concept of wax had them mightily perplexed. So many boggled minds in so small a place! But it was surely a case of crossed wires, of endless misunderstandings. Our notion of change is integral to us; if Papuans have been on this island for thirty thousand years, then we are forced to marvel at both their ingenious adaptations and also, less piously, at their slow pace of change. We, congenital tourists, wondered why they didn’t travel far and wide; they wondered why we did.

  “But then,” Juha pointed out, “why should they travel far and wide? They think we’re mad for traveling far and wide. They must look at all our gear, our things, and think we’re insane.”

  “We are insane,” I said.

  But there were the Kombai. of and for themselves, charming and lusty. I liked them. They were hospitable and, when all was said and done, kind. They had humor—as much as anyone. More than the French, probably. And it was true that, talking about their “stasis,” we were assuming that they were in some way outside of history. Yet hadn’t Brimob only a few miles from here shot an Indonesian officer through the eye with an
arrow? History surged around and through these “virgin” forests, an invisible poison. Hidden to the court of world opinion, the OPM waged its desperate guerrilla war of independence against the Islamic superstate. OPM units fought Brimob units with forgotten savagery. And then there was us.

  I was woken at four a.m. by rain falling through my tent roof. It’s a golden rule of camping to peg your rain fly before sleep, but this happy camper had failed to do so. Within seconds I was outside, naked, with a lamp on my head, struggling with the rain fly as a monsoon rain crashed down. Seconds more and I had become Laocoön and the Tent, a writhing mass of flesh and nylon, screaming abuse at pegs, ropes, and even my own hands. But there are moments that define the experience of a place, and as I was struggling with the intractable fly, soaked from head to foot and alone in the middle of the forest, I began laughing hysterically to myself, at myself. Looking up, I saw the Kombai warriors huddled together under one of the tree houses, patiently watching the scene. One can only imagine their thoughts confronted with this vision of white sanity and initiative. “Thirty thousand years, and they still can’t figure out a rain fly.”