by Nigel Barley
“You have no one to blame, Walter, but yourself,” said Goris. “The government have repeatedly asked you to co-operate with them in the founding of a Balinese museum and you have never taken up the offer. It is the only way to place the Balinese heritage in a place of security.”
“You should do it Walt,” declared Temp in a hicksville voice he used for comic effect but that seemed to be taking him over. “Museums are great. I got me one, the California Heestorical Society. Got it real cheap.”
Walter groaned again. “Do you see me as the director of a museum, in a tie, filling in forms? It has anyway been my experience that museum directors are pompous fools or rogues, sometimes both, who only love the sound of their own voice.”
“I can’t argue with that,” said Temp. “Yup, we get through ’em by the dozen. All total assholes.” He gestured for more drink. It was naturally understood that the whole evening was on him.
“It could be arranged,” urged Goris. “A purely administrative official could be appointed who would take all the humdrum daily work off your hands – like Bonnet here with your teaching – yours would be a purely inspirational role.”
“But museums are fearful places, full of the corpses of objects, cutting them off from life, a dead hand that would stifle the Balinese imagination. The greatest contributor to the Balinese creative spirit is the white ant, chewing away at dead wood and ensuring everything must be constantly renewed.”
I intervened. “Look Walter. You can’t have it both ways. Either Bali is a dying culture whose ancient treasures are being frittered away, or it is creative and vibrant and must resist ossification. Actually,” I said, suddenly inspired and surprising myself, “you can have it both ways. Have a museum for the best of the past linked to a shop where visitors can buy the best contemporary art. Then you couple the two together. They fertilise each other.”
“Yes!” interjected Miguel. “And the artists can work in a sort of collective – call it a club to slip it past the Dutch – to maintain standards and ensure the true communal nature of peasant art. Walter, you must do it. For the people.”
“Clubs are great Walt. I got me one downtown called the Bohemian Club. I get together there with the boys. Why!” Temp clapped Hub affectionately on the shoulder. “That’s where Hub here got started with the dancing in a private room when he was still just a kid.” They stared at each other in misty nostalgia. “No one would have guessed back then that you would design costumes, seeing as how you didn’t hardly wear one.” There was, I understood, a Mrs Crocker, a serviceable sugar heiress, acquired, wed and swiftly archived in a white-painted house somewhere. Walter groaned again like an old bear beset on all sides by snapping dogs.
“But then we would be just like those terrible art circles in Java, full of old women who only like pretty trash done in pastels and ignore the natives except as models. You see them – they go to those exhibitions and talk about the frames.” The people who had bought my paintings.
“Why couldn’t you have Balinese, natives, on the committee, like we do in Mexico, like in the villages here?” This from Rosa, who, as far as I knew, had never set foot in Mexico.
Walter held up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right. I’ll think about it. Goris, tell them I’ll think about it. No more. A dog that has been bitten by a snake always fears sausages.”
“What?”
“It is a saying of the Urals.”
“A toast to that!” boomed Temp dispensing more champagne. He rose to his feet with great dignity. “Sir, may Dame Fortune smile on you and your endeavours and fulfil all your aspirations – jest lahk a slapped whore.” We raised our glasses and toasted.
“And now,” sipping Hub growled huskily, suddenly revived, sharp-toothed and dangerously bright-eyed though unsteady. “Where do we go in this town for a little … fun?”
Fun, I could foresee, would involve wilful destruction of property, injudicious violence given and received, the plumbing of depths, possibly consorting with monkeys. Ah no. Denpasar had not been constructed with fun in mind.
“I must be off,” I announced. “A meeting at the Little Harmonie club.”
“Clubs are great,” announced Temp. “I got …” He frowned. Wait. “Aw sheet!” He had already said that. Walter smiled knowingly, looking – it seemed – through me.
“Don’t drink too much. You know it disagrees with you.” He drained his glass and Hub did the same and lobbed his off into the shrubbery where it, disappointingly, did not smash.
“Oh no. There will be no drinking. I shall stick to a good dose of their nice hot chocolate.” But when I arrived Dion was not to be seen. The head waiter was weary, had had a long day, irritably shaking his dead to dispense tired dandruff in all directions.
“He has gone. Disappeared.” Wiping smeary glasses on a frayed cloth. “No I don’t know where. It is just as well. The police were here asking questions. Politics.”
As I trudged to my lonely bed, I heard a sudden girlish shriek and what could only be loud American fraternity baying from the lapangan kota. followed by the crash of splintering wood and a blast of Madame Butterfly in chorus. Fun, for those that liked that sort of thing, had clearly begun.
***
Goris had exceeded his brief. The museum was now considered a fait accompli and Walter was summoned to numerous meetings with the Resident in Singharaja. Every day brought official letters rattling through the door, the small arms fire of bureaucracy. It seemed that the Governor General in distant Batavia had taken it into his head that a Balinese museum was indispensable to Holland’s chosen role as protector of the Balinese way of life and planned a visit, whose highlight was to be the opening of the completed institution, in just one year. The Governor General was a man with a whim of iron. Ancient plans were hastily disinterred, funding conjured from thin air. Walter groaned. The letters started having footnotes and appendices, projections, evaluations and estimates. Naturally, each contradicted the one that had gone before. Walter groaned yet louder and disappeared from the world to paint a picture.
The Balinese are one of the most organised peoples in the world. Every adult male is a member of all sorts of groups, in the hamlet, for the organisation of water distribution, for music and temple matters, even for kite-flying. These groups are run by committees, elected officials, little democracies that need no outside interference. Our artists’ organisation fitted right in. At the top, of course, had to be Agung Raka, as titular head though it was recognised he would do nothing. Cokorda Agung would do all the real work. Correspondingly, Walter would be the senior white member though I would undertake most of his duties. Balinese participation was assured by the appointment to the main committee of Gusti Nyoman Lempad as the oldest artist. Amongst a people of determinedly sunny disposition, he was that rarest of things: a genuine Balinese curmudgeon. Then there had to be heads for different regions, Cokorda Rai from Peliatan for example, different skills – painters, weavers, silversmiths, sculptors, in all, some hundred and fifty members and the whole thing was so complex that it could never work so, in a very Balinese fashion, the actual formal structure would be simply ignored. Everyone had to come to the house of Raka, as titular head, but, once there, all this hierarchy would be in abeyance. But rules of hospitality, of course, must he maintained, so all were served glasses of diluted pink squash of vengeful sweetness. It took some time for everyone to understand how the whole thing worked. Finished works would be submitted for discussion every Saturday at the palace. The committee would look at them and there would be an open debate about their merits. They might be accepted or rejected by the organisation. If accepted, they would be sold at a good price through the museum shop or the dealerships and exhibitions with which the group had links. These extended as far as my old friend, Vorderman, the Amsterdam dealer. It required a lot of trust for such poor men to allow foreigners they did not even know to carry away and hold their creations, for months or even years, without payment. Only when money began to flo
w back to the artists in a steadily increasing trickle, did the message spread that this was a worthwhile thing.
At first, everyone was shy of criticising the works of others, simply murmuring, “Very nice” with downcast eyes, for the Balinese are a desperately polite people. It was Walter who decided he must make them see that criticism could be constructive. He pulled something coyly out of his bag, no doubt a new painting none of us had yet seen.
“Even the teachers among us must be subject to criticism. We can learn from you as you from us.” He looked to me for support and I nodded enthusiastically. I thought this was extraordinarily brave of him, submitting his own work and urging them to comment, pointing out his own shortcomings to get them started. He propped it up on an easel and stood back. Too late, I recognised my sketch of Alit on the beach.
“But how did you …? Where did you …?”
“Now you will note,” intoned Walter smoothly, “that the artist has tried to be modern. It is a drawing of a single, real person – not a mythological being – and I’m sure you all recognise the subject.” Murmurs of “Alit”. “Quite so. So it attains at least the lowest kind of resemblance. But what else do we see here?”
“There is a lack of animation,” declared busy little Sobrat, standing and reknotting his sarong. “It is a picture of a boy just sitting. And just one boy. It is not ramai. It is lonely. Why should anyone want to buy a picture of a boy just sitting?”
“The knee’s wrong,” grumbled Gusti Nyoman, pointing and laughing. “It’s terrible. Alit’s not a cripple.” This from a man who had never got beyond the conventions of temple painting and was obsessed with figures that moved like puppets in three-quarters profile.
“Yes and see,” offered a man from the floor who himself carved nothing but the most execrable wooden frogs, “how badly he has tried to cover it up by putting that big shadow where no shadow could be. See where the light is coming from. It is impossible.”
“Do we accept this work then for our group?” Cries of “No” from the floor. Walter smiled. “So now you see how it works. We must all be frank and then the artist can learn from his own mistakes instead of just trying to cover them up.” They applauded, exuded love for Walter, finally offered up some of their own works – all heavily praised and accepted, even the damned frogs. Agung was delighted. At last he was getting art.
But sorting out all such practical matters was as nothing compared with finding a name for the organisation. Various Dutch and Malay forms were proposed but all sounded like a trade union or political party and would invite Dutch disapproval. Balinese mythology was ransacked, the sun god Surya, the Supreme Teacher Batara Guru, Saraswati, goddess of learning, were all yoked to our wagon and proposed but failed to ignite the passion of their worshippers. Then, one evening, we were driving in the Whippet to Walter’s house with a load of paintings. Aboard were Sobrat, myself, an American art historian called Clair Holt and Gusti Lempad. We were all listening to Lempad complaining as usual. I no longer recall which of his many wrongs he was rehearsing. It may have been tax, or the government or that fact that no one ever listened when he complained, but I do remember that he was in full flow. At that hour it was pitch dark and it was unfortunate that, just as we passed the cemetery, the main headlights failed, plunging us into complete obscurity. Luckily there was bright moonlight – we had been the previous day to a full-moon ritual at a nearby temple – so Walter kept going, knowing better anyway than to stop at a cemetery, in the dark, with a carload of Balinese. He shouted something about the verfluchte grosse Scheinwerfer being kaputt and this was passed around in various languages, Walter’s English rendition being that “the great shine- throwers were broken”. Clair Holt thought this hilarious and tried to explain why to the Balinese. Gusti Lempad, of course, understood not a word, yet from all this emerged somehow the Balinese term Pita Maha, the Great Shining. It dropped like a stone into our conversation. We all knew it immediately for what it was. This then became the name of our organisation, invented by a dicky seat full of uncomprehending Balinese who were totally in the dark.
***
“Tuan Walter,” said sad-faced Resem, “is in the garden.” His voice sank to a tone of hushed awe. “He is crying.”
“Do you know why?”
He opened his eyes wide and shrugged as if to say, “These crazy bule. Who knows why they do anything.”
I made my way down the steps and the little path that skirted the river. It was a bright, cool day. The butterflies were aflutter. Bougainvillea and hibiscus provided splashes of colour against a dark green backdrop. A black cat lay on a rock and blessed me with a smile and a contented closing of both eyes. It had a smooth, long tail not the kinked tail of a Balinese cat. There was something feline, it occurred to me at that moment, about Walter – the same ability to do absolutely nothing without suffering boredom, the infinite capacity for soaking up affection and then just stalking off without attendant burden of guilt. But crying. Oh God. It must be his mother. It could only be his mother. I began to rehearse various scenarios in my mind. Would he go home? If so, would he return? I found him, out of sight of the house, hunched – very small, shaded by a cluster of rustling bamboo. He turned a tear-stained face towards me. Only then did I see the cockatoo perched on his shoulder and tugging at his hair as if arranging it for a mad scene.
“It’s Plumpe,” he said. Plumpe? Who the hell was Plumpe? Was it one of the other animals? Plumpe sounded like a hedgehog. I flicked quickly through the list of those I could remember, ready to adjust my response anywhere between commiseration and joshing disbelief. He groped blindly in his top pocket and pushed a letter at me. Not an animal then.
It was from a firm of Moneterey attorneys, Habgood and Waymark, announcing the death of their client, Friedrich Murnau, né Plumpe – I had forgotten – and a substantial bequest, in his will, in favour of Walter. The only problem lay in the contestation of the will by a former business partner, the freezing of all his estate’s rights in his latest film and the expectation of a complex coroner’s hearing, owing to the unusual circumstances of his death. As a result, it was impossible to place a figure upon the cash value of the inheritance. Even at this remove, the lawyers could be heard licking their lips at fat fees. I looked at the date. It was three months old.
“I was going through that pile of letters about the museum that I had left unopened and found this one. There was another from Temp who had heard from Hub who met Garbo after the funeral in Berlin.” He sighed and suddenly gripped his knees in a spasm of anguish. The cockatoo complained and flapped away to a tree. “He always told me I was the love of his life. When someone says that it’s like a curse and when they say it as you are leaving them it’s a determination to make their whole life a tragedy out of spite. And when your first love dies it’s like a little taste of your own death.”
As usual, I did not know what to say but all he needed was someone he could talk to frankly and without dissimulation, someone who would not be shocked by the sort of emotions of which he would speak. “Did you love him?” I asked.
“Of course. In fact I still do. That he is dead makes no difference. In fact, some people are easier to love when they are dead than when they were alive.”
“Where is Conrad?” I asked somewhat desperately.
“Oh,” he batted the question away. “We had a young lady visitor, some friend of Claudette Colbert. He has taken her off to an odalan festival at Tampaksiring.”
I had noticed that, nowadays, Conrad always took the ladies, Walter the men. This household was becoming totally an economy of seduction. I sat down awkwardly and took his hand. He seized mine and gripped with cold flesh.
“He always told me his money was safe in Switzerland, so I don’t know … When I knew him he didn’t have two extras to rub together. You know that during the war he was a pilot and went up on a reconnaissance mission. From up there, the whole world looked like hell except for Switzerland where all was peace and quiet, no tracks even to
be seen in the snow, like in a silent film, so he landed there with a tale of mechanical and compass malfunction and they interned him in a nice chalet till the end of the war. He was supposed to come here this year. He was sick of Hollywood, had fallen out with Fox. Like Nosferatu, he wanted a place where he could step out into the light and just be himself. I told him Bali was that place. He had bought a yacht and even named it ‘Bali’. If only he hadn’t made that last stupid film first.”
“What was that?”
He wiped snot on the back of his hand and dried his eyes with his sleeve like a little boy. It was no good, every instinct made me desperately want to mother him.
“It was called ‘Tabu’, some silly romance about tragic love and magic in a South Seas paradise, lots of tits and bums and palm trees.” It sounded rather like one of Walter’s films. At the end of “Island of Demons” they had even inserted two scenes of male and female nude bathing that included the boys from the house. They had screamed with embarrassment when Walter showed them the stills. I held out the letter and he took it back with a shaking hand and stowed it away. “He had two of my paintings. I wonder if I could get them back.” Already, he was thinking like an artist.