by Nigel Barley
“No thank you,” Walter replied. Agung waved the servant away and he sighed and shuffled all the way back, still kneeling.
“Do you have an automobile, Mr Bonnet?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“A pity. I should like to have an automobile but my brother is in dispute with the controleur. He will only allow what he considers the main rajahs to have an automobile with a golden parasol on the engine-cooler lid.” The what? Ah, a Walterism for the radiator cap. “My brother considers any automobile without such a parasol an affront.” He lapsed into silence and brooded.
“The Cokorda,” Walter said to me waggishly, “is my boss.”
Agung giggled. “It is true, Mr Bonnet, though he was actually engaged by my elder brother. I have many brothers.” He made a face to show that each and every one of them was a burden to him. “My father had forty-six wives and thirty-five concubines but I only have one. That is the modern way. As a member of the nobility, I was permitted by your countrymen to go to school in Denpasar. I lodged opposite the gates of the Bali Hotel which was good for my English. Every day, I would hear these white people talking about art, art, art and where they could buy it and the high prices they would pay. I had no idea what art was. I looked it up in the Dutch dictionary but had no idea what kunst was either. The more people tried to explain, the less I grasped it, but since there was so much money in it we knew we must find out. My brother and I were on a visit to our dear cousin in Yogya, in Java, where Walter directed the Sultan’s orchestra and at dinner, one night, we were seated side by side and he talked much about art. It seemed that Java had already got it so we knew that Bali must have it too, so we hired him to teach our young people to have it. Our cousin was very angry that we took him away. Only Walter had been able to teach the palace musicians the foxtrot and the Dutch national anthem and the difference between the two, which pleased the Resident very much.” A frown crossed his serene features. “That was some years ago now and still I ask Walter, ‘Where is the art? Do we have it yet? When is it coming?’”
Walter, glowing with confidence, was not in the least put out.
“Agung, as I keep explaining, art is not just a thing, it is above all a state of mind. Already we have made great progress and soon there will be more. That is why I have brought Mr Bonnet here to help me with this matter. I have been requested by the government to produce a series of official paintings showing the history of the Indies in which Bali, I shall insist, must have its place. This will take much of my time but, of course, for government, I cannot refuse. As Holland’s greatest living painter, it is our huge privilege to have Mr Bonnet here to teach the young artists in my place. Success will surely follow.” I stared at him in horror. He winked. “It is extraordinary that he should be here at this moment. I see in it the nothing less than the work of destiny.”
The idea dropped into my mind like a stone down a well. So there it was, the work of destiny, an act of Bali itself. I was hopelessly seduced by the idea. that Bali had somehow chosen me. I felt myself, astonished, surrendering to the conceit. There is nothing worse than to be free. The Cokorda expressed delight and clapped his little hands together. By now, I suspected, he must have despaired of ever turning Walter into a mere employee.
“Wonderful! Wonderful! You know that in order to attract Walter here we had to promise him a place in the palace with food, free canvas and paint – oh – and he was most insistent that all the men he might want to paint should be willing to pose for him.” No fool then. He knew. “We might be able to offer you to share the same inducements.” He studied me with an excessive and deliberate – as it seemed to me – very Balinese innocence. “Do you like to paint Balinese men, Mr Bonnet, or women, or do you like mountains and fields? But then, perhaps, it was just the free paint that attracted Walter to us and he didn’t find any of us pretty at all.” He giggled, I blushed. What was he really saying? What did he know? What had he heard? Had the boys gossiped? Had Smit mentioned my naked breasts? I left with a sense of having met someone who was either infinitely simple or profoundly subtle but then, that was the way I was beginning to feel about Walter too. On our way to the palace, he had pointed out to me the little zig-zag gates that Balinese build at the entrance to their compounds. It seems that demons and other hostile beings are so stupid that they can only move in straight lines and so are totally flummoxed by them. Walter, then, on present evidence, was no demon. We walked back towards the door and turned to bow before going through it. “A very good bye,” called the Cokorda. Walter bowed, sembahed and whispered. “They also promised me a small salary that never quite turns up. Good luck with that Bonnetchen.”
***
“I simply cannot,” I said in tearful emotional outburst, “stay here another day.” Perhaps I had been too greatly exposed to theatre since my arrival in Bali.
It was not the animals, though the day-long screeching of the parakeet, that so delighted Walter, grated on my nerves. The sickly deer had been despatched by a hard-hearted villager and turned into several meals for us and credit with the meat-hungry neighbours. The monkeys had reverted fully to the wild and last been seen heading west towards the Great Forest. Recently, Walter’s interest had turned, thankfully, towards insects that were captured and contained within glass jars and thus impinged less on our social lives.
It was not the boys. The foreseen complications and jealousies had not materialised. We all remained the most affectionate friends. The neatly segregated relationships with which I had grown up did not seem to apply here. Friend, lover, master, servant were a beast divided up into quite different cuts.
It was not the relationship between Walter and me – well, not just that. I had accepted that we were two Thomas Mann characters, from different novels, wandered into the same plot, both embodiments of the cold north, looking for our warm south and naturally not finding it in each other. It was sad – even comic – rather than tragic. There might not be love but there was much more than cold indifference.
It was, rather, the Countess that sharpened the problem to the point where action was required. The announcement of her arrival was brought by one of the boy from the post office, a gangling, permanently exhausted youth, armed with a bicycle and a peaked cap into which messages were tucked.
“What’s a Gräfin?” he asked as he handed one over.
“Sort of like a Cokorda’s wife,” Walter explained, thumbing the envelope open and reading.
“Well. You’ve got one coming.”
“So I see.”
It was unfortunate that this was the precise moment when her honking car – or rather Fatimah’s – drew up outside with smiling Bagus at the wheel and a hatchet-faced woman of a certain age, grimly hatpinned in tweed and feathers despite the heat, beside him. She had been sent by Walter’s mother, a deluded goose of a woman whom he quite naturally adored, one excessively in awe of empty titles, and bore a letter of introduction from her like a warrant to distrain upon his goods. Walter was there, up the steps, car door open, hand extended, bowing and heelclicking – gnädige Dame – then, God save us, handkissing. She was tall, aridly thin, with eyes the colour of sloe gin and a charmlessness reminiscent of my own. Bagus leapt from the vehicle in a nice new shirt, green as peppermint, and rushed up to me, then paused – stranded between two gesture systems – as we half handshook, half bowed, dithered, patted each other shyly on the upper arm and circled like two boxers in the early stages of a fight.
“You have found Tuan Piss.”
“Yes, I have found him.” The boys emerged and fell upon Bagus in loud and joyful greeting – no dithering there despite alleged differences of caste – and whisked him off to the kitchen with the telegraph boy and his bicycle, for group refreshment, while the Countess, arm interlinked with Walter’s, moved into occupation of the house like an invading army. I was left, as at Uluwatu, quite alone and unheeded before a heap of luggage strapped to the hot car, in the stench of petrol and rubber. Well, I was not going to be ta
ken advantage of. I selected the smallest hatbox, just to show willing, and carried it down to the main house and the sitting room.
“Affairs in Germany are quite terrible,” she was braying. “Many persons of quality have been reduced to labour, the middle classes have abandoned all pretence at respectability and the poor are suffering of course – but then they are used to it.” Walter was not really interested in Germany except inasmuch as it directly affected his family. It was too remote. What had it to do with us here? And then, being a fundamentally decent man, he was bored by the generality of politics. “Oh,” she caught sight of me, “be careful with that, whoever you are. You look clumsy and I see you cannot be trusted. It is fragile and quite irreplaceable. Bring it here at once.”
The words “please” and “thank you” were clearly unknown to her in any language. Grinding my teeth, I crossed the room and plonked it down beside her, on the floor. Over the back of the chair was a foxfur stole – a horrible thing – with paws, tail, head and eyes, looking as if the unfortunate creature had fallen under a rigorous steamroller, a most inappropriate garment. The boys, I foresaw, would be nervous around it. I half wished the monkeys would return. They would have known what to make of it. Nevertheless, I extended a hand in greeting.
“Bonnetchen … er Bonnet, Rudolf Bonnet. A guest here – like yourself.”
She pursed her lips sceptically, averted her gaze and, ignoring my own hand, extended her own, wrist cocked, for kissing. I seized it, twisted firmly and shook it hard, feeling her shoulders bounce gratifyingly against the hard chair back and experiencing the sort of greedy pleasure that would come to a Lutheran publicly disdaining to slobber over a Pope’s ring.
“Rudi,” drawled Walter in an unknown languid voice. “Would you be an angel and go to the kitchen and ask the boys to fetch the Countess some tea? They seem to have quite forgotten us.” So, then, I was Rudi again and a sort of unpaid butler and Walter, the chamaeleon, was already colouring himself into an aristocratic accessory.
As if I were not there, as if I were a native who did not speak German, she turned to smirking Walter and said, “What a funny little man. He reminds me of poor Herr Hitler. You know they wouldn’t let the dreadful booby take his seat in Parliament because he was still an Austrian. The only good thing about him is that he would get all those work-shy men – I can’t think why they call them the working class – into the army. The lower orders always look so much tidier in uniform.” And Walter smirked and nodded.
Over the course of the next week that smirk would set into an ever more desperate wild-eyed rictus. First there was the problem with the steps. Why were they so steep? Why were the bedrooms near the noise of the kitchen? The architect was a fool. Why was the river so loud at night? It seemed that my own room was the only one that was even tolerable, so I found myself moved out.
“You will understand, Bonnetchen. She will not,” soothed Walter. Then there were all these Balinese who came to the house. Why were they always sitting about? Some even sat on the furniture not the floor and drank from our cups. They weren’t clean. It wasn’t safe. And why were they always dancing for so long and talking a foreign language? Why were they always grovelling to their gods?
“You might as well ask,” countered Walter mildly, “why they work their poor gods so hard, dragging them down to ceremonies all over the island. They barely get a day off.”
Very well. But why was there no hot water for bathing? Why did we eat rice and not proper tinned potatoes? Why was there no wine? Then came the matter of lamps.
The Western nations have served the Balinese very ill in their classification of volatile hydrocarbons. Gas and gasoline, petrol and petrole, benzine, kerosene, paraffin and oil jostle each other and dispute an over-populated semantic field. A major source of mortality is the use of petrol in oil lamps, which, of course, despite their name, habitually burn paraffin, by confused servants who thus convert them into firebombs. At Campuhan, Walter wisely opted for the standard golden glow of old, sooty-wicked oil lamps by which to engage in music or conversation after nightfall. The Countess yearned for modern petrol lamps that blazed with pure white light so that she could paint publicly, in the midst of the living room, and interrogate Walter on matters of style and technique. Which was better, dark or light background? What was the colour of a Balinese sky? Even I found her daubings of geese and ducks horribly sickly. Having been refused her lamps, she travelled to town on her own initiative and my petrol and bought a vast array of luxuries on Walter’s account at Lee King’s. Since the result of the economic crash had been to actually cheapen goods from the local market but drive the price of imports through the roof, it was not the moment to buy tins of cheese, let alone foie gras, as she did. Moreover, acts of wild prodigality were strictly Walter’s domain. She then went further and persuaded the manager of the Bali Hotel to “lend Walter” a petrol lamp for a few months that she bore back in triumph. Walter was silently furious, Resem noisily ecstatic at the new toy that glowed with the wonder of the latest gas-mantles. Sensing the inevitable storm, I took the opportunity to cadge a lift on the KMP charabanc from Buleleng that occasionally made a deferential detour to give the Cokorda a ride into Denpasar. As honoured front-seat passenger, social elevation marked by a high cushion under his behind, he was permitted to ring, without let or hindrance, the brass bell that substituted for a hooter.
I spent an agreeable day pottering in the unaccustomed Western atmosphere of the Little Harmonie club for Dutch residents, reading fresh newspapers beneath the fans, strolling in the library, gossiping with gin-soaked old Indies hands in the pillared bar. I would stay the night there, head back tomorrow. Throughout late afternoon, more and more drifted in, rehearsed ancient wrongs, news, jokes. “Just got back from Semarang. Do you know it? Pig of a town. We went to the club there, all falling down. In the dining room, we said to the secretary, ‘Put us near the hole in the carpet so we can see the floor show!’”
Then, as the evening set in, the mosquitoes took to the air, the night-smelling flowers gave out their scent and the rosy sky faded to black, I decided, with a faint tingle of excitement, to take my habitual stroll to the lapangan kota. In the Indies, every town centres on its “town field”, a grassy, green space handy for parading troops, loyal schoolchildren and, as my countrymen were finding to their increasing annoyance, protestors in favour of independence. That in Denpasar was conveniently near the Bali Hotel and a place rich in memory. When invading Dutch troops had arrived, some fifteen years before, the ruling house had accepted the futility of military resistance and embraced the spiritual path of puputan. The palace and its retainers and followers – men, women and children – had dressed in pure white, put on their finest jewels, and marched into the Dutch guns, completing their own extinction, where necessary, by suicide. The troops – mainly Christian Moluccans – had been briefly shocked, then turned to the workaday business of looting the bodies. The world’s journalists had not been impressed. Universal condemnation had ensued and, as a result, Bali was now handled with kid gloves with even missionaries forbidden to disturb the status quo.
Curiously, the spot was not regarded with any particular awe. Like most others of its kind, this town field was the place of forbidden nocturnal activities, the tail to the coin of Dutch rule, a little square of moral extraterritoriality. One end was conveniently obscured by a clump of spindly trees with a building probably originally intended as some sort of a sports pavilion that was edged round with a low brick wall now providing seats for those that congregated there. People who rested there during the day usually chewed betel and spat its blood-red juice in all directions so that it looked as if some foul murder had been perpetrated on the spot. This evening, someone had hung up a flickering lamp and around it was the usual mix, like a crowd scene from La Bohème. There were exhausted rickshaw drivers, lolling, smoking lontar-leaf roll-ups, in the seats normally occupied by passengers, feet up on the handlebars. Eight or nine, gloriously overdressed ladies of th
e night were gossiping in throaty voices that alone showed they were really gentlemen of the night. The Southeast Asian mind naturally equates sexual deviance with transvestism. In some parts of the Indies, Walter would tell you, such persons had important ritual, sacerdotal functions but, on Bali, where women danced as men and boys as girls, it was simply for recreation. I avoided them. For myself, women’s dress was simply the wrong packaging for what I desired. Moreover, beneath the frills and fripperies of these bancis lurked strong male muscles and a temperamental sensitivity, bred of persecution, that made them irascible companions. A few lads, potential customers, were smoking and joking with the “girls”, for men sleeping with them are regarded as sexually normal. Others, even younger, with bright eyes but no money were hovering sniffing in the heady incense of sexual heat. Cheap rice spirit was being handed round. A couple of older men, possibly pimps, voyeurs, fixers in general, played cards off to one side and added dignity to the scene. A sharp-featured young man in Western dress was wrestling with the dial of a whistling and thrumming wireless whose back lay open to accommodate supplementary wiring leading to a large acid battery in one corner.
“May I,” I asked quietly, “sit down?”
Conversation died like the slammed lid of a trunk but, even in surprise, they were courteous, wiped off the wall, gestured in invitation. The young man clicked off the raddled wireless and wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers before presenting it for shaking. He was in his mid-twenties, slim, dark.
“The booster station must be down. Signals can’t get over the mountains. My name is Dion.” Good Malay but with throaty Javanese vowels.