Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  She was beginning to irritate me.

  “Then all we would need to do is just teach the Balinese to write – which by the way they already know how to do.”

  She took out a cigarette. Miguel lit it for her and then sat down and began to draw with firm, bold strokes. “A change in the way that oral cultures record themselves can have terrible consequences for the peasants and the value attributed to indigenous forms.”

  I pointed to the camera she was bouncing off firm breasts. “That, for example …”

  “My pictures are purely for our own record, not to be allowed to pollute the spring from which we drink. Traditional artists should remain anonymous and part of the collectivity.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” I cried. “Everyone here knows who is the best carver or dancer or painter around. They become famous and people recognise their work.” Miguel looked up.

  “The important thing,” he pronounced, “is that they work collectively, for goals defined jointly and in agreed ways. All the rest can change without disrupting the social order and introducing the false god of Western individualism. We learned that in Mexico during the Revolution.”

  I decided to change the subject lest I be instructed on Mexico during the Revolution. “Whom is this cremation for?”

  Miguel flicked open a smaller notepad and read out a name that meant nothing to me. “Royal house of Klungkung, related to kings of Gelgel,” he explained with a shrug. Rosa leapt in.

  “But, of course, the really important thing is that it allows two hundred and fifty poor peasants to free the souls of their dead and finally liberate them by attaching them to the burning of feudal aristocrats. Their corpses become,” Rosa said with relish, “beasts of burden for the poor.”

  Miguel smiled and held up his drawing. It showed an emaciated Balinese artist siting crosslegged before an easel, loinclothed and bare chested, with sticking-out ears and tufted hair. In his hand he held a paintbrush and his head was rammed through the hole in a Western painter’s pallette – actually only big enough to take his neck – to his evident distress. Holding the pallette, was a snarling caricature of me, immediately recognisable, though prefiguring Heinrich Himmler in its skinny body, wire-rimmed glasses and dead eyes. The whole thing seemed to have been done in a dozen damning slashes of the pencil. Fortunately, at this moment, Walter reappeared and appraised.

  “Yes,” he smiled. “Very nice. I like the way you have decomposed him into triangles and squares like the Cubists. Stylish. But, like all portraitists, you have flattered the sitter.” Covered by the drawing, he whispered, “Take your revenge by taking their picture.” He pushed the Leica into my hands.

  “What? How? I wonder,” I smirked, “if I might take your picture. This is after all your honeymoon and you have taken so many pictures of others.” I dropped the front of the case.

  “Perhaps,” said Miguel, “it would be better sitting down.” He looked around vainly for somewhere to sit.

  “No, no,” said Walter. “Like that is fine, you two together, the festival as background.” I was used to the apparatus and swiftly set aperture, speed, focus – click. Miguel looked annoyed.

  “And now,” Walter smiled, “we must take a quick walk round to see where we are.” He seized me by the arm and led me away.

  “What was that,” I whispered, “about the photograph?”

  Walter paused at a stall and bought two glasses of tuak, palm wine, pushed one across to me.

  “Try this. Totally pure, from the sap of the coconut palm. It’s been filtered through the entire length of a treetrunk.” We sipped soapy, skimmed milk with a taste of mould. “I noticed, in all the pictures they showed me, that Miguel is always shown sitting down. Now, he has a nice face,” he explained, swallowing, “but the most enormous arse, childbearing hips, female from the waist down – very un-Balinese.” Ah, so that was it. “As a caricaturist he’s obviously aware of it. In fact, he’s very touchy about it so he always likes to be photographed sitting down, which lessens the impact.” He laughed. “And remember,” he quoted solemnly, “men seldom make passes at boys with fat arses.” Wait. No. That can’t be right. It would be years before Dorothy Parker would not say that. Instead, “And now, this is your first cremation. Let me give you the tour.”

  This event had been planned for years and represented the spending of tens of thousands of dollars by a people who normally calculated in fractions of a cent, the economies of years blown away in a few heady hours. The Dutch administration had tried in vain to legislate against such un-Calvinistic excess, the Balinese simply side-stepped the regulations, exchanging goods and service amongst themselves, pointing out that no money had actually changed hands. Excess was what it was all about.

  “When you die,” explained Walter, “you normally get buried unless you’re a Brahmana, when you get burned straight away. When the time is right, the families, go to the graveyard and dig up the bones again and they’re put in those towers there.” I turned in astonishment. Swaying towards us, in a cloud of dust, was the Manhattan skyline in motion, uncountable towers of bamboo and wood, covered in cloth, coloured ornaments, tinsel, dangling fragments of mirrors flashing in the sun, roofs like Chinese pagodas, images of fanged monsters. Each was carried on the shoulders of dozens of straining men, not content to simply bear such a weight but running, turning twisting, this way and that, laughing and shouting, with marching gamelans delivering bursts of music like machine-gun fire. “It confuses the spirits,” said Walter. High up were what I already recognised as pedanda priests hanging on for dear life, sprinkling holy water or making the arcane gestures known as mudras but that was the only dignified element in the proceedings. Baskets of rotten offerings were carted to the cemetery by the women, pursued by packs of hungry dogs. As bodies were unloaded, there were fights and attempts to carry them off, jostling, shouting. Breughel would have been at home. “The whole affair,” said Walter, without irony, “is governed by the strictest regulations down to the smallest details.” The decayed offerings, the sweat of the men and incense, the smell of trampled grass, the clinging stench of human decay combined into a miasma I shall never forget. “The old bodies are fine – just bone – as are fresh ones, but a lot here are at that awkward intermediate stage.”

  Walter was snapping away happily, working hard to avoid getting steatopygious Miguel or Rosa in shot, though, apart from clothes – as he well knew – they might have passed for Balinese. The men were manhandling, in every sense, the human remains into the great sarcophagi of hollow tree trunks, shaped like bulls, lions, fish, sea-monsters. Strings of Chinese kepengs were flung on the body, water, silks, more water, the music swelled. Then came one of those unfortunate pauses that occur in the rites of men as if an actor had missed his cue. “No cause for alarm,” assured Walter. “They’re starting the fire.” I had an image of priests offstage, groping embarrassed in their robes, turning on each other, cursing that they had all forgotten the matches. Walter read my mind. “It has to be kindled by the sun or friction, the only pure fire. Sometimes takes a while.” The crowds passed the time by shinning up the towers and plundering them, whooping, for trinkets and mirrors. Then, the flames were there, licking about the pyre, belching foul smoke, spreading to the other pyres, as if wildfire, and then the towers. The heat, added to that of the sun, was unbearable, beating at us from all sides. Sparks were flying high into the air, coming down on our clothes and hair. Somewhere, there were fireworks or maybe it was exploding bamboo. Soon, men were poking at the corpses with long poles as in a vision of Hell, laughing, cracking the resistant skulls and bad jokes I could not follow, calling out on the dead to burn faster. Everywhere was the crash of collapsing towers and coffins as their supports burned away and bamboo, smoking flesh and sizzling fat tipped into the eager flames. “Oh my God … I must … I have to …” I fled to the entrance, crouched against a tree, breathed in deeply the breeze from the sea. A terrible tremor like rigor mortis passed through my entire body and I collapse
d, shaking. Then Walter was there with life-saving unholy water, talking and gesturing over one shoulder to Miguel. “… marvellous display of artistic exuberance … affirmation of life in the treatment of death … drink this Bonnetchen. I shall tell everyone you went into a holy trance,” as Rosa said in his other ear, “… rejection of crass materialism and declaration of human equality in the face of mortality …”

  “… affirmation of social hierarchy and shared values …”

  “… the revolutionary burning down of futile social distinct-ions …”

  Miguel lit a cigarette, inhaled smoke, blew it out gratefully through his nostrils, tongued away tobacco scraps. “Actually,” he said – making me a friend for life – “it all reminded me most unpleasantly of a barbecue I once enjoyed in Texas.”

  We sat and gathered strength, rested in the shade, watched as the fires died down and families gathered to begin poking around in the ashes for undigested scraps of their loved ones. At a certain point, little boys were given licence to start fishing in the cinders for red-hot kepengs that they then threw joyfully at each other without parental rebuke. The dogs munched on. Something for everyone. The sun edged down towards the horizon.

  Miguel looked around in deep content. “I should like to write it all down, everything that we can discover about these wonderful people. I should like to understand. The problem for me, as someone who grew up in Mexico, where we have all sorts of crazy festivals for the dead, is not to try to explain why the Balinese do the same. It’s to try to understand why people in the West don’t.”

  Walter perked up. “You mean we should be the focus of all those anthropologists, as the deviants in the world, not exotic peoples? I like that.” He chuckled. “I shall await a team from the faculty at Leiden. I’m sure they would find me fascinating.”

  “What happens now, Walter?” I was still more interested in the Balinese than in us.

  “The ashes are put in a coconut, wrapped in white cloth and ultimately taken to be cast in the sea, final dissolution of the flesh, then everybody bathes to wash away pollution.”

  “And the soul of a dead person?” I asked.

  Walter frowned. “As you would expect, there’s some disagreement but most people say it first goes off to Heaven or Hell and then comes back. If it was good in this life, it may go up in caste, if bad it may come back as an animal, but those are only theoretical positions. Most people are neither that bad nor that good. In practice, you return as a new member of your own family. After the birth of a baby, you go along to your local diviner and find out who it is that’s come back.”

  “And Heaven,” I asked. “What’s that like?”

  He looked astonished. “Heaven? But it’s just like Bali, just like this – what else? – exactly like this. Only, in Heaven, of course, there are no Dutchmen.”

  ***

  “So Badog has gone for good then?”

  At the forest-giant table, through a magnifying glass, Walter was examining the huge, red dragonflies in a killing jar converted from one made originally for the preservation of fruit.

  “Oh yes. This was just a temporary thing for him.” He removed one with long tongs, pinned it to a sheet, crucified it. Later, he would paint it and send the picture to the botanical garden at Bogor. “He has spread his wings. From somewhere he found money to pay for the ceremony. From somewhere, he found money for another field. So he and Ayu are growing rice and making more Balinese – things good in themselves, as I am sure you will agree.” I had little doubt that Walter was that “somewhere”.

  “So you have just Resem and Oleg now?”

  He looked shifty, held the lens up to his face, became, himself, a sea creature glimpsed in the depths. “Oh no. Now we have also Alit, Badog’s cousin.” He tonged out another specimen, saw that it had lost a wing, discarded its imperfection. “Would you like to meet him?” He turned and called through the doorway for tea. After a few minutes of saucepan noise he came, smiling and traytinkling. Very tall for a Balinese, broad-shouldered, the face of a happy angel but with a slight moustache that gave his upper lip a derisory curl and made him look unshaven therefore seedy, therefore slightly … soiled. Alit means “small”. We were introduced. Giggling, he engaged in the unfamiliar gesture of handshaking. His long-fingered touch was warm and velvety. I slumped over the table.

  “You know, to tell you the truth Walter, I’d rather hoped he might be ugly. It would make coming here more restful.”

  Walter frowned. “What on earth for? To be surrounded by beauty lifts me. Anyway, it is hard work to find an ugly Balinese. Yes, we have Oleg but that was mere chance, ugliness is something he has discovered for himself and grown into and you, yourself, have done very well with Putu at the palace, a very plain man.” He surgically skewered a calopteryx water-nymph with a long pin. “I expect you will have a hang to sketch him. As Badog’s cousin, Badog naturally explained the nature of his duties to him.” Sex was simply unproblematic for Walter. He had always found it easily, bestowed it with grace, enjoyed it rather as one might this cup of tea, without fear or passion. To him it was not the fall of the Roman Empire or the humiliation of sin or self-degradation or even the strutting measure of one’s worth in the world. It was just sex. I determined that I would not sketch Alit. Since coming to the Indies I had been like a boy in a pastry shop with eyes agog, greedy mouth and hands permanently sticky. That was not what life was for. I changed the subject.

  “Where is Conrad?”

  Walter sighed and lay down his lens. “Conrad has gone to take Rosa and Miguel to Pulaki, over in the West. Rosa became over-excited on hearing the news of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on the wireless. Apparently it is the beginning of Armageddon, a new world war.” He made the sceptical face that was his habitual response to politics. “When I told her I had no idea where Manchuria even was she accused me of burying my head in the sand. So I suggested she should go and bury hers. The sand in Pulaki is volcanic and black and the hot waters are healing. They go by outrigger from Bedugul and camp on the beach. It is Conrad’s allfavourite place. There are tigers there. Like many young men, he likes to shoot things. I went there before with a visitor who shot things but he got carried away and shot the canoe, several times, and so we fell out in both senses.” He lay down the lens with a sigh and pushed the clutter away. “What the hell. Shall we go? We could drive there and join them. It would be a nice outing for Alit.”

  As I was passing through the door, on my way home to collect my overnight survival kit, something caught my eye, fixed above the opening. “What’s this? A new painting?” When had he done this? When Walter was at a painting the whole of Ubud knew about it. It was an act that required groans and lamentation and involved and defiled the whole community like a woman giving birth to twins.

  He came and stood behind me. “There is a new dance called Oleg, invented by Nyoman Kaler. It shows the mating of two Balinese bumblebees. You know they have a particular kind of motion?” He swayed from side to side like a seagull in a gale. “Young Sobrat has painted it. I think it shows great promise. I showed them how to use watercolour but they always make a total gouache of it.” He waited for laughter. None came. “So now we have not just a member of the household called Oleg. We have a dance and a painting.”

  I was not surprised that he liked it. It owed much to his own technique, richly jewelled and coloured, crowded with figures. So. Although it was me that took them labouriously through their exercises, it was Walter’s style that they copied and his approbation alone that they sought. Balinese pupils remain fiercely loyal. The relation between a teacher and pupil is so close that a student may not marry his guru’s daughter. It would be a sort of incest against his spiritual father. I had not, until then, visited the west of the island. It would take us all day to reach it for roads from west to east were always lacking. It was all hotter, drier, emptier than the east, with no refreshment in the winds, the soil thin and baked to hot aridity, the vegetation mostly waxy-leafed scrub who
se roots clutched at the earth. Forests here were not to be confused with the mossy, orchid-dotted steambaths nesting in the armpit-like valleys of the other side. For here there was none of the copious water that allowed the Balinese to indulge their taste for irrigation and the whole region had been neglected by the Dutch, themselves a canal-loving people, who had seen in the south Balinese obsession with channelling water a kindred mark of civilisation.

  “There is,” commented Walter, “a very fine temple, linked to the monk Niraratha who came from Java in the sixteenth century to a large town that stood here. Worried for their security the head of the town asked for it to be shifted to another state of reality by the saint and so it was. The town exists but is invisible, the people, gamang, exist but cannot be seen except by dogs. There are, of course, holy monkeys.”

  “No,” I snapped. “No more monkeys.”

  We stopped along the way at a market instead, bought green coconuts and little banana-leaf packages of fried rice as a madman made faces and naked children screamed and ran away. Woven mats and great red pots were stacked by the roadside, being offered for sale. Alit was bravely nervous, like all Balinese away from home – this was, after all, a place of magic – and gripped the amulet that hung around his neck. We drove on. It was not until nearly sunset that the road skirted the sea and Alit let out a great cry and then gobbled Balinese hysterically. Walter stopped the car and turned to me in surprise.

  “The sea,” he said, oddly moved. “This is the first time Alit has seen the sea. His family had some sort of old feud with the Brahmanas of Sanur so they could not go there. Come on Alit. I will introduce you.” They ran off, like little boys, Alit bending down cautiously at first towards the unquiet water, then paddling in the waves, then running back in delicious, giggling terror as they rushed in for him and collapsed between his toes. They returned, grinning, glowing, Walter yanking resisting socks over wet feet, suddenly tired. “After a certain age, Bonnetchen, there are no new experiences, you become dead, wooden. Everything is old. Even such a magical thing as the sea loses its power to amaze. Your senses are tired and you have to get your excitement from others, younger people, more generous and resonant instruments. You become a vampire, like Nosferatu.”