by Nigel Barley
The Overland Whippet had previously belonged to von Plessen, made over to Walter in exchange for two of his paintings, and he now resumed unspoken ownership, uncontested by Walter since he also paid for all very necessary repairs and a new set of tyres. Von Plessen and Conrad, at the wheel, sat at the front in steaming raincoats, Walter and I behind, the light car skittering across the slick surface as the trucks grumbled up behind. All went well till we were about three miles from our goal. At the base of a steep incline, torrential rain had washed the light surface dressing off the rock base of the road and coagulated into a thick paste in which the tyres would not grip. Planks, vegetation torn from the roadside and flung under the spinning wheels, brute manpower, all to no avail, they all – naturally – opted to stand in the rain and squabble. Von Plessen raged and stamped, made as if to lay about him with his directorial megaphone, was offered defiance by the rest and caved in.
“Walter, this is crazy. We can’t work in this.” He was shouting to be heard above the drumming of water on the canvas of the trucks.
“Viktor. I assure you. The rain will stop soon. We must go on. This is the only night we can do this for the next two weeks.”
“How do you know? You can’t tell the weather. No one can.”
Walter smiled. “It’s not just a matter of weather. There are good days and bad days, the phases of the moon, the intermeshing of the different Balinese calendars. I consulted a priest.”
Von Plessen stepped back, genuinely astonished. “Our filming schedule is being decided by a fucking priest?”
“We must keep moving at all costs,” opined Dahlsheim, nervously. “To stay here longer is to invite attack from the natives. I am sure I saw movement in those bushes.”
Walter turned and shouted to Conrad in Russian and precluded further argument by seizing a camera tripod and splashing off on foot. Conrad, grinned and reached back to grab the main camera body from the floor of a truck and raced after. A cameraman will sooner let you lay hands on his wife than his equipment so Scheib was soon off in hot pursuit with the reserve film stock in his arms, uttering Scheissing-great Bavarian Arschloching-oaths, certain words coming through loud and clear like the taste of venison in curry. To a film crew, the main camera is as the battle standard to a Roman legion, so they followed too. An exhausting hour later, we were setting up with hands trembling from fatigue as the rain died off into ethereal and photogenic steam. Bamboo platforms had been set up to allow more dramatic angles. With only two cameras, they would have to be rushed from location to location during the performance and edited into coherence later.
The dance was to be performed and filmed in the space before the old temple and was very much Walter’s big scene. For weeks he had been coming here alone or in the company of Katharane Mershon, a big-boned modernist dancer from Sanur. There were two versions of the full-lipped life she led with her sparrowlike husband Jack and their reasons for living there. The first had it that they were good, simple folk, moved by the plight of the inhabitants of heat-soaked Sanur into establishing a free clinic where locals might be treated for the many minor ailments to which the climate there disposed them. The other had it that they had there adopted a beautiful and pliant Balinese youth whom they serially and jointly debauched with almost forensic deliberation, paying his mother a dollar a month for the privilege. Probably both were true.
Walter was crouching down with his arm around a spectacularly muscled, loinclothed man in his early thirties who was leaning affectionately against him. My jaw dropped. Behind crowded a whole army of pared athletes all naked but for a little strip of the Javanese batik cloth. Walter turned to me. “My friend Limbak,” he introduced loudly in Malay and glowed with paternal pride. Balinese theatre uses the technique of a narrator addressing low characters who are there just to provide someone to be talked to. This, I foresaw, was to be my part. “The greatest baris dancer on the island.” Limbak blushed. I knew the baris, a demanding military dance that came in a hundred different variants. In Sanur, it was said, they had a form where the men dressed up with glasses, stuck their teeth out and imitated Chinese; elsewhere women imitated men. “But we’ve moved him on a notch or two. Wait till you see.”
Von Plessen was hovering, rudely overshadowing, nervously puffing. “Christ, Walter. All these people. At the rehearsal we had a dozen. I thought you hated Wagner. Next thing you’ll be using fucking dwarves with tuned anvils. Wait, of course.” He clapped his hand nastily to his forehead. “That’s the iron gamelan of the Bali Aga you were telling us all about at such length the other day.” Even more nastily. “How much is this costing us? Can’t we cut it down?” Walter ignored him.
“Limbak had been experimenting, trying to come up with a new baris. He was trying to get his hands on rifles to incorporate military drill into the dance. Of course, the Dutch didn’t understand that and he ended up in jail.”
“Are we paying by the hour, or by results? Can’t we get them moving, for the love of God? If the priest got it wrong can we get a refund?”
Walter dug serenely in his bag, slowly passed out packets of cigarettes and matches – gently with both hands – smiles, pats, greetings, little jokes. “That baris would have been a sensation and knocked the socks off his rivals in the other half of the village – wearing socks was part of the outfit by the way – but we’ve come up with something better.” The men at the back were putting their arms on the shoulders of those in front, swaying and giggling like schoolboys, tentatively groaning out a sort of deep yo-heave-ho melody. They were excited, tingling. It was infectious.
“Just tell me this is all flat rate and no extra payments for reshoots.”
Walter switched to German for the crew. “We’ve taken Pak Limbak’s baris and grafted it onto the kecak, the old monkey dance used for exorcising evil. In the original version, it’s not much performed, just a very minor element of the whole programme. The demon king Ravana has carried off Sita, wife of Rama, and ravished her. Ravishing strictly offstage. Rama gets Hanuman, the monkey general, to use his troops to fight the demons. Halfway through the dance, half these lads turn into monkeys and, for a month now, they’ve drilled themselves into a real monkey army. Everyone should just relax. They know exactly what they’re doing. There’s coffee coming and nothing more to be done till it’s really dark. That’s in ten minutes.” The reliability of the equatorial nightfall.
“Do we have to pay for the coffee?”
Something in Walter snapped. He looked up at von Plessen and spoke very quietly. “Viktor. Limbak is here because he’s my friend. The others are here because they’re his friends, because they want to try something new, because they’ve never done this before. All we’ve paid for is a few pieces of cheap cloth. What we will get is something you could not buy anywhere else in the world for any amount of gold, a Balinese dream that has never been dreamed before. Now please go and sit over there and we will run through everything with the cameramen before we start.”
He went like a lamb.
The night came, as ever, suddenly, as if someone in Lighting had thrown a great celestial switch. No messing about with twilight in these latitudes. Walter did a final check, lit the lamps and signalled to Limbak. The men arranged themselves, six rows deep, in concentric circles around an ugly, fat trivet of a candelabra and Walter retired to his elevated platform like a pedanda priest at a cremation. “Faces, faces!” Walter urged the cameramen. “Focus on faces, we do no want to shoot them or ourselves – ha, ha – in the feet.” From up there, the men looked like the petals of a beautiful flower whose centre was light. Scheibe could be heard dimly chanting his mantra of Sheissing-, Arschloching-, Huring-. It occurred to me charitably that it might be part of a professional technique by which he maintained the cranking of his camera at a constant speed.
A brief moment of silence – deafening and uncanny – for nothing is rarer and more unnatural on Bali than total silence. Then, at a sign from Limbak, the men rose and sank as one with the hiss of a great se
rpent, then intoned a monotonous melody I recognised from the gamelan, raised it up, pressed it back down into the earth, their voice imitating the instruments of the orchestra. Already a light sweat slicked their swaying bodies, their eyes gleamed, half-closed, as the tune hammered out relentlessly, over and over again. The swaying grew hypnotically in intensity until, in perfect unison, they flung themselves backwards into their companions’ laps – the flower opening, then closing, then opening again. The bodies rose and fell, floated forward and back, a shrill solo voice emerged then plunged under a mass chant of monkey language. “Chak-a-chak-chak,chak-chak-chak-chak.” The sound swelled, dimmed, was flung back from side to side in deafening insistence, the hands shot up and fluttered like the tendrils of sea anemones, dived again in and out of the flickering surf of torchlight. The pounding beat was cross-cut by the waves of inhuman cries and I felt myself begin to shake, the hair lifting from the back of my neck, being dragged down to some animal plane of horror and fear where language did not yet exist.
I have no idea how long the performance lasted. I drifted in and out of the consciousness of heat, sound, light and dark, throbbing male flesh, breathed it in, wiped it dripping from my eyes. From subsequent experience, it was perhaps a little over half an hour. At some point, individual characters emerged. At some point, I recall Limbak in the classic high pose of baris, knees flexed, arms high, fingers fluttering and eyes distended in apoplectic fixity as the rhythm pounded on and the monkey-chattering crackled across it. I could feel their deep staccato shouts through the soles of my feet. The story was told in wailing language far beyond me in layer on superimposed layer. I recall the monkey chorus replaced by the same cadence expressed in perfect handclaps, then the parting of the singers into two crescents, wrestling monkeys and demons that overshadowed and intimidated each other till the demons rose and swelled and drove their adversaries out into the echoing night, their cries growing fainter and fainter until the only sound was the soft beating of the lamps’ flames like neglected sails in the wind.
Walter was down from the platform and rushed out into the dark reappearing, hugging dazed, prostrate Limbak, sweat coursing down his face and chest, loincloth sopping wet, leading him back into the light as though for an encore, pouring delight and congratulation into him, sitting him down, mute, kneeling at his feet and clasping his hands in rapture. I sat quietly in my corner since it would be impossible for me to embrace those glowing, saturated atheletes with even a pretence of merely platonic glee. Von Plessen and the crew applauded wildy, all except Scheib who, professional that he was, was already checking the camera gate for any Scheissing- , Ficking-, Arschloching-problem.
None of us knew, that night, just what it was that we had given birth to. I have seen it so often since for, from that moment, the Balinese took up the kecak, nurtured it, made it wholly their own. Never have native and foreign minds meshed and fused so completely. The new version was a sensation and swarmed over the island like the monkeys it contained. They perform it now at distant Uluwatu for the tourists, as the chewing baboons look on impassively at this impertinent attempt to recount simian history. If you have not seen kecak, you have not seen Bali. And of course, it lives and breathes and changes. I once witnessed a version incorporating a black American tap-dancer, the “chak-a-chak” hammered out by his own fervent heels, the face not a bad approximation of goggle-eyed baris. Yet, not so long ago, I saw it described as “the epitome of immemorial Balinese culture, reaching back into the mists of time and unchanged for thousands of years”. Margaret Mead was less kind about its inautheticity. “Kecak?” she once said. “Walter’s kecak? I think you mean ketchup.”
8
It was Walter who brought surfing to Bali, even if we did not, then, know the word. After the completion of the film, the “wrap” as it was called, the crew were understandably in high spirits. It was initially unfortunate that an evening stroll down the main street of Ubud, with drink taken, coincided with the heaviest downpour of the year. One moment, the air was clear and Walter was progressing, handshaking and greeting down the road. The next, the heavens opened and vomited bucketfuls down on their heads. The locals squealed and ran, Walter looked up and laughed. Then a stack of broad planks stacked at the roadside caught his eye. The normally tranquil streams that edge the road, used for washing and other domestic purposes, were now raging torrents, a meter deep, whirling away all the accumulated rubbish of the year, scouring out their beds and racing down the hill to rejoin the river. With a “Beh!”, Walter seized a plank, flung himself face down on it in the flow and cascaded down the stream, whooping and cheering, as cowboys are supposed to ride bucking broncos. Conrad and von Plessen roared and hallooed, similarly took to the waves and shot along the street, ducking under the little bridges leading to each house, helpless with laughter. I withdrew under the eaves of a house and wiped my glasses. The Balinese came out and looked, pointed wonderingly. Soon all the young bloods in town were riding the thundering streams, racing Walter and each other, with the older and more dignified doubled over with laughter, cheering them on. Several came to grief, heads were split, clothes were shredded, money was gambled and technique evolved rapidly. The lads were all sure-footed farmers, used to teetering along the tiny raised paths of the paddy fields like tightrope walkers and they clamped their feet to the boards like suckers. As the water level continued to rise, it proved possible to leap over the little bridges to rejoin one’s board over the other side, to control the speed of the plank by the angle of its inclination, to execute elegant dancerish motions. Soon the whole town was lining the ditches, clapping, laughing, jeering foes, cheering heroes. I don’t think it ever happened again. Conditions were, somehow, never quite right for it and, in a few years, Bob Koke would bring Hawaiian surfing to Kuta Beach and proclaim it as something new. The Balinese had always turned their backs to the sea, fixing their gaze on their holy mountain, after all the sea was for disease, dirt and death. Yet perhaps, here, a seed had been planted. A murky, rainy day had become a festival. Walter gave them that.
And then he disappeared, Conrad along with him. The boys opened their eyes in pretty innocence and shrugged. They did not know. Maybe jalan-jalan, travelling. I set about my duties as an art instructor, teaching my chicks – his chicks really – Western perspective. Many had brought other skills with them from which they had to be laboriously weaned. Little Sobrat had been apprenticed as a maker of puppets for the shadow theatre, cutting the filigreed shapes from thick buffalo hide, colouring and gilding them. He had lived, till now, in a flat world.
“You do not,” I urged, “really look at each others’ bodies as I do. Look at the way you paint them. They are tubes attached to a salak fruit. Who has the best thighs amongst you?”
They tittered and blushed. They did not notice such things.
“Nonsense,” I thundered. “In the West, artists are dispassionate students of the human body. When they want to know how to paint the human form, they must first learn how it works. They are like doctors. In the past, they studied with doctors. Now, who is to be our model.” There is always someone ready to betray his friend.
“Please, Tuan,” called out a pale boy at the back, pointing. “Togog has a rickshaw driver’s legs.” Cheers as he was pushed to the front, made to hitch up his sarong and sit, face blazing, on a stool.
“Now,” I resumed, magisterially stroking caramel thigh, “see how many contours and textures are here in this fine thigh.” More cheers. “Here,” I gripped without pity, “is the Vastus Lateralis. Here the Vastus Medialis. Here,” I sculpted with cupped hands, “the Biceps Femoris.” I tweaked. Togog yelped, to the joy of his comrades. “Note that muscles slide over the top of each other; they shorten and thicken. Skin stretches and changes its texture.” I palpated, a stern-faced connoisseur of thighs. “Every thigh is a conversation of skin and bone and muscle. I never want to see your pictures full of tubes again.” I sent Togog back to his place, barely resisting the urge to give him a pat on his pert
little Gluteus Maximus.
***
It was Steinway and Co. of Hamburg and New York, manufacturers of grand pianos by appointment to the royal houses of Europe, that brought Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias to Campuhan. Already a gifted caricaturist and graphic illustrator, Miguel had just won a prize from the eponymous company for his fashionable illustrations of Gershwin’s An American in Paris, all leaning Eiffel towers and scribbly poodles, images of the jazz age. It is a sad truth that artists always make most money from their worst work – my own bare breasts for example – and Miguel would do very nicely from a series of caricatures called Impossible Interviews drawing two totally opposed characters in juxtaposition, the most famous being “Clark Gable meets the Prince of Wales”. He had done less well with a set of studies of the blacks of Harlem – the New York version, not the Dutch – that were part of an early foray into anthropological caricature. It was not that anthropological caricature was condemned as racist, simply that it was seen as too commonplace. Rosa was a famous modernist dancer and much photographed, in her own right, in the glossy magazines. Only South Americans were supposed to be able to dance in those days, so she had changed her stage name from domestic Rosa Cowen to exotic Rosa Rosaldo which fitted her lustrous dark eyes and thick black hair, pulled back now in the inevitable pony tail that is the mark of the out-of-costume hoofer. Both darkly handsome, both small people, though he Mexican and she American, the Covarrubiases were a well-matched couple and similarly inspired by Krause’s erotic photographs with an interest in all things Balinese. Bali was to be their honeymoon, their little earthly Paradise, steeped in sex and self-discovery. And it was on the cramped steamer from Surabaya to Singharaja, as they sat maritally glued together at the rail, searching for things in nature that reflected the heat of their craving, that they encountered a fascinating golden young man to whom they already carried, in Miguel’s jacket pocket, a letter of introduction from Andre Roosevelt – Walter.