The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  At first light, a line of small boys passed by, returning from the river in the mist, each one wearing a fresh white cockatoo feather in his hair and holding a tall tube of cane filled with water. They looked over at me with a sort of sorrow, the pity that the naked feel for the clothed.

  A day’s walk away, the next tree house was called Mamlumburu. The hike was brutal enough, but on the way we passed through a broad river of stunning cold water and stones as large and white as dinosaur eggs. Everyone stripped and began swimming—a fête champêtre! The water was colored like Lucozade, a British beverage of ages past, an acidic orange with green tints. The thirty-foot crocodiles for which Papua is renowned probably did not swim as far upriver as this, but we sent the boys ahead to watch for boya. Who has not seen the famous footage of African crocs nonchalantly tossing five-hundred-pound zebras and wildebeests into rivers by their snouts and tearing them to shreds? There were pools in which grown men could float, their whiteness open to the amazement of Boogie-Woogie and Joshua. For the little boys now followed me everywhere, hips a-go-go, crying “Boogie!” Cultural contamination flowing freely into innocent young minds.

  At Mamlumburu, a young man named Gagerigo came out to meet us. He scowled as he chewed on a twig, and it took some time to persuade him and his old uncle, Mangualo, that we were not there to maliciously enchant them. Gagerigo wore a leaf and nothing else, and his look was somberly averted. Finally convinced, they took us up into the house, which swayed in a stormy wind. The floors were made of bamboo strips lashed together, and the walls were built around an actual tree. Inside, the sago ceilings were covered with mouse and fish heads blackened by the two fires that burned constantly. We lay there shattered after the walk and Gagerigo told us that he was more afraid of us than he was of cassowaries. He too had never seen a white before—none of them had—and as we lay panting with fatigue and watching the lightning over the canopy, they watched us warily, unblinking, but smoking our tobacco. Looking up, I saw that the ceiling was black not with soot but with the bodies of hundreds of small cockroaches.

  During the evening, Mangualo told us that he didn’t want to go to Wanggemalo because he was “scared of clothes.” He then added that he would much prefer it if we were all naked like them.

  “We would be less afraid if you were naked.”

  “We’ll die of malaria,” Juha said.

  Mangualo plucked his pant material. “Why do you wear this shit?”

  The Kombai rarely wash in rivers, in which we were always plunging at any opportunity. “It would be even better if you wore a koteka like us.” I felt that he was on the brink of adding, “And you’d look a damn sight better, too!” For we were now five hobos in tattered clothes, filthy and lacerated with tiny cuts. It was just that the penile inversion operation made me think of Dr. Preecha.

  “So, what do you say?” from Mangualo.

  “Sorry,” I said, “it won’t fit in a hornbill.”

  During the night, I heard Mangualo singing with the other men through the rain, and for a delirious minute I thought they were chanting English words. “Why on earth do we bother?”It was starry and hot, the humidity breaking on the skin in cold drops, cicadas shrieking like referee whistles in the groves of rattan. Inside the tent, everything had begun to disintegrate; it was like the hovel of a hobo living in an underground tunnel. Our paranoia about mosquitoes meant that you had to unzip the door in a flash, dive in headfirst, and then zip it back shut in under a second. From the outside, it was funny to watch, the whole tent shaking and cursing. By eight, the candle was out and there was only the Kombai song wafting across the forest. But then you might have to get up and shit in the jungle, a terrifying ordeal—the buffoon naked in the rain, a camping light strapped to his forehead, enflamed from head to foot with skin rashes caused by deet, holding a soaking toilet roll, tiptoeing among the lethally poisonous spiders. As soon as you turned off the light for the sake of insectal anonymity, a hundred fireflies would descend on your head like flares, lighting you up for the benefit of the animal kingdom: Hey, look, boys, a human shitter for dinner! Stretched on my length of bark, I tried to write with wet pencils, suffocating under the rain fly. My hearing was now so acute that I had trouble concentrating on the inner voice that writes. The jungle produced a monumental noise—whistlings, cawings, shrill peeps, parrot calls. I was now covered with small wounds, thorn punctures, heat and chemical rashes, the skin unwashed in days, the hair growing at a quickened pace so that it was close to being Jesus-like. My nails were black, the tips of the fingers lacerated from clutching at trees coated with spikes. The worst threat was eye infections. I had some drops from Bangkok, which I used every day regardless. But mental cohesion, as I began to discover, is rooted in the respectability and cleanliness of the body. As your body goes to pot, so bit by bit does your mind. It is as if pieces of your internal structure begin falling away like chunks of plaster from a cheap statue. At the edges of this unraveling mental structure lies the shimmering hysteria to which I have alluded. Strangely, however, I was attracted to it. For when do you ever feel the power of encroaching hysteria? It is something buried in oneself that rarely rises to the surface. It is just pure disintegration in the end. But after your mind has disintegrated, what is left? Perhaps what you see in the eyes of a Kombai. But for them, perhaps the kakua were the symbols of this same disintegration.

  At the beginning of his book on Papua, Tobias Schneebaum gives us a quote from Carleton Gajdusek’s Papua New Guinea Journal for 1961. Gajdusek, one of America’s most famous Renaissance man scientists, did critical work on prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease among the Fore people in Papua New Guinea in the 1950s and had a long love affair with this magical island. One could say that the affair was literal—he had a pronounced taste for Papuan boys, whom he imported to his mansion in Maryland for years on “scholarships.” Convicted by the FBI of child abuse, he fled to France, claiming to be the victim of a witch hunt. In any case, in his journal, which the FBI had confiscated, he wrote:

  It is strange how mediocre all in civilization seems—art, journalism, philosophy, motion pictures and even music, whenever I leave or “come out from” the Papua New Guinea bush. I would have suspected the reverse … Perhaps it is their remoteness from the real nature of man and his natural world environment that makes them appear flat and unreal.

  This was the other side of the disintegrative pain.

  On the trail the next day a boy appeared out of nowhere, walking from tree house to tree house, a speared bird in his hand. His hair was threaded with pieces of wild orchid: wild sweetness in motion. He was also headed to our next tree house. It was a lucky break, for he had been at the pig feast the other day and remembered us. We wouldn’t have to have the usual psychodrama upon our arrival.

  The chief was called Mambi. He shook our hands with a papery warmth. Nari nari nari. The Kombai also now called me nare, “older brother.” There was something moving about his tone. “We hope,” he said—I thought wistfully, if a forest man can feel wistful—“that you’ll come back one day to see us.” It was the first time that a Kombai had expressed a desire to see us again.

  We smoked in the early evening, flying foxes shrilling in the trees. At this point, I could not resist asking Mambi a question that had been nagging at me for some time. You see the missionary airplane going overhead, I asked him, but what do you think it is? You’ve seen it several times, no? But do you never wonder how or why it flies?

  His head dangled listlessly and he bit his lower lip. “I just run away and hide when it passes overhead.” The others all shook their heads and said the same.

  So I explained that it was we white people who made the planes and made them fly. It was our machine, our way of getting about.

  “So,” Mambi asked unexpectedly, “how does it fly, then?”

  I was halfway through my explanation of the dynamics of winged flight when I realized that I had no idea how airplanes fly. He looked intently at me, curious to see a man wh
o could not explain how his own artifacts actually worked. And suddenly I dreaded his asking me how my flashlight worked or how my Gore-Tex boots were waterproof. About these marvelous inventions of my own culture I was essentially as ignorant as he—that is, he knew much more about his stuff than I knew about mine.

  The next morning we went down to a claustrophobic part of the river closed in with massive sagos, men and women together. The men were going to cut down a sago tree with their hulking stone axes. The felling took an hour, hard and sweaty work. After the palm had come down, it was split open, and the women moved in with stone clubs to smash the interior to pulp. The pulp was then drained through a frond and rolled into balls. The men all sat down to smoke, and a soporific mood descended upon us. It was then that I looked up and saw Juha standing to one side in the forest surrounded by a large group of the younger boys. The tall Viking blond covered in butterflies, the boys shouting and stamping their feet. Juha! Juha! Construe this as one may, I couldn’t help noticing how easy it was for humans apparently divided by immense differences to bond without language.

  Later, we went for a swim.

  There was a sinisterly opulent river below Mambi’s tree house, its white sand beach sheltered by Pará rubber trees. A threat of crocodiles, and the water deep, opaquely cold. Malinowski’s nirvana. We swam naked through interconnecting pools. There was now a sort of jungle-military comradeship between us, a nonverbal understanding of sorts. We had become a bit like the band of boys in Lord of the Flies, without, of course, the animosities or the need to kill pigs.

  “I wonder,” I said, “if the Kombai will stay the same after we leave. What will they be saying about us—what do they think about us?”

  How does a forest people see whites, the product of millennia of innovation and striving? In Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, mystified Africans sing about them: “Here is a white man who is neither a father nor a doctor. He has no beard. He comes from a long way away—we do not know from where—and he tells no one to what place he is going nor why. He is a rich man, for he drinks whisky every evening and he smokes all the time. Yet he offers no man a cigarette.”

  High up in the sky, trails of smoke appeared, drifting from the tree house. The cane grass was tall enough to cover a man, but it shivered and shook. The Lost Horizon or Shangri-La might be places consisting of this simple handful of elements: grass, water, light. In the far future, when the earth is a continuous tourist development connected by magnetic trains, there will be a fantasy based on these elements, for in effect there already is. The idyll of depopulated splendor has receded outward from the Lake District circa 1800 to Papua New Guinea in 2005. Whatever we may think about the grander economic forces of history, it is tourism that has effected this insane revolution, one that has pushed the romantic loner ever outward toward more violent ruptures with his own world. In the future, these environments will probably have to be carved out of game parks and patrolled reserves, like the pueblo of Malpais visited by the Alphas in Brave New World. The Kombai would be like the Indian guides in Huxley’s novel, their bodies painted, their “black hair braided with fox fur and red flannel,” and their shoulders draped with turkey-feather capes. The Primitives who live outside the charmed world that is both brave and new. But it will, if possible, be much easier to visit them by helicopter.

  From then on, the trails began to loop slowly back to Wanggemalo. On the GPS device, the “no data” zones alternated with foggy patches of digital terrain. We all began to get diarrhea. At one tree house there was an immense clearing overlaid by a lattice of interlocking logs. Below it, at the bottom of a steep hill, the river curled around islands of mud, and in the windless humidity here I began to get cold chills, as if a fever were breeding inside me. The men from the tree house came down at twilight and danced with us, holding hands and snapping their legs open at the knees like rubbery epileptics. We pranced about like this for an hour. A plate of bird eyes was produced. The men said, “To our surprise, you are not cold.” Our dicks were wrapped in banana leaves and we smoked naked in the tree house, swaying like birds perched in a nest. Where are we? I thought, gazing out at mile upon mile of tossing palms.

  “All night,” the men said, “we have been talking about you.” But who were they? I ate the eyes, in a state far beyond disgust.

  “I am coming unstuck,” I found myself saying to Juha. “Or something like that. Do you want to get back?”

  “Yes and no. Yes.” He grinned with reluctance. The enlightened man’s reluctance.

  “Perhaps. But then what did we come for?”

  We came for a bit of heart of darkness, no? And yet the Kombai were rather sweet in the end. The heart of darkness wasn’t them. It was Nature.

  “But Nature here is what it really is. And now we’re scared, no?”

  When I looked out over the forest, I didn’t feel fear. It was nothingness. A green ocean with no features, no past, no memory. I could see why the Kombai believed two things: that it was all there was in the world and that it was filled with kakua-kumu. This mass of seething Nature had form and shape, symbolic zest. Otherwise it would not have struck fear into them.

  I began to dream about the trail itself. In my dreams it formed a series of endless loops going nowhere. But my own panic was not necessarily shared by the companions. For one thing, I was very mystified by how much better disciplined Georg and Theresia were, for every predawn I was woken by a Teutonically energetic zipping and unzipping of tent apertures as they neatly folded every article of their gear and stowed it into their waterproof bags, already ready to go an hour before the Milo came to the camp table. So our characteristics persist, even national ones. Juha went off on long, lonely meditations with his walking stick, looking exactly like the young Max von Sydow. Woolford and I, the Anglos, read our books and talked about the 2004 election, which had been decided in our absence. The Papuans loved saying the word “Bush.” What could that sound mean?

  The last hike was the hardest. At the far side of the sago swamps, slowed by heat exhaustion and diarrhea, I finally heard a cock crowing. It might as well have been Big Ben. Some boys came running out into the jungle with armfuls of seersack fruit, whose flesh smells like Turkish delight and whose seeds are larger than olives. The villagers came to their doors to stare. We were soaked with mud, with haunted eyes and long beards now spattered with coconut fiber and seersack pips. So, they might have asked, how was your vacation? How was it being out of the world?

  The women returned with the flying foxes and brush turkey eggs, which, when cooked, turned out to contain perfectly defined fetuses with eyes. The electrical storms raged through the evening, through our long, recuperative sleeps on the bunk beds and, in my case, on the porch, where I liked to slumber close to the rain. Brimob reappeared with some sweet potatoes for cooking and asked us with great politeness whom we had met and where. I had ferocious nightmares, in which the Kombai took a keen interest. The boys asked me questions. “How, Lorry, do you kill the kakua in your forest?”

  I tried to describe New York. They shook their heads and spat.

  I said I lived on an island in a tree house with forty-six women, none of whom I knew. I rarely went hunting these days. I sat by my fire eating frozen sago grubs, drinking fermented pond water, and watching out for demons. I sometimes went walking.

  “Walking?”

  Traveling, wandering. Just for fun.

  “Shooting birds?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Uey! Shooting birds is fucking great.”

  But what was with the wandering for fun? Only kakua did that.

  I opened the piano and tried to play. The Kombai collected their pay—paper money, though there was little use for it—and camped all over the house watching us. A harmonious chord coming out of the piano stilled them at once; they cocked their ears. In return they showed me how to clean the wax out of my ears with a sago grub. In the dusty glass of the house’s one remaining window I could see how much thinner I was, and
in light of the regime of Chiva-Som it was ironic to consider that I had now lost some twenty pounds.

  When we left Wanggemalo, I gave my baseball cap to Boogie-Woogie Baby and my punctured Therm-a-Rest to Stephanus, who had hauled my pack through fifty miles of jungle and who would relish this rubber article as an objet d’art rather than as a deficient sleeping aid. There were sad leave-takings. It was Wanggemalo that now seemed like Manhattan, a veritable metropolis. The whole population came onto the airstrip to see us off, waving with a melancholy knowledge that we would never come back, though they said the very act of coming back would mean a great deal to them. Even the witch was there, waving with the others. The porters came and held on to our hands as they murmured our names, and the sound of the plane was intensely strange as it came back to us. I almost wanted to run into the bush and hide from it, as the core Kombai did. Tears in the eyes: who would have expected it? And the plaintive, “Come back, Lorry, come back and see us!” I could imagine the party that would erupt if I ever did.

  After a night in Wamena, cold in the rain, we flew back to the coast—to Jayapura, to Sentani, to the Javans with their pale skins and their abundance of motorbikes, to the world of cold Cokes and pillows. There was a ritual shaving of the beards and haircuts in a small Javan barbershop across the street. The equally ritual first Coke burned the mouth and the throat. The coldness of which civilization is capable is impressive. The hotel itself now felt like the Hilton, or a small, comfortable lunatic asylum. Just to have a bed, a washbasin, a bucket of cold water in a corner and a plastic scoop. At night, to see the candles lit on the betel tables all along the road and to see the headlights skimming along it. The Life of Chopin was still playing on the TV, and the Russians still came out for breakfast in their airline shirts and beach shorts. It rained day and night. I lay on the bed shivering, sleeping for hours, dreaming, chain-smoking. A beautiful young German girl appeared in the room next door, all dressed up in jungle gear—a young anthropologist about to go off to do fieldwork on the Yanimura River. She seemed nervous, spooked by the goofy vibe of a Papuan town. I heard her clicking away on her laptop all night. She wanted to hear stories about the Kombai. She said we all looked “wasted but healthy.” How could I not think of the young Mead?