by Nigel Barley
“What were the unusual circumstances?” He looked blank. “In the letter. It says something about unusual circumstances?”
Walter cleared his throat and swallowed, straightened up and smiled, as if for a closeup. “He was killed on the way to the premier of that damn film. Aristotelian tragedy and so on, undone by own hubris. He was in one of those big cabrioletts the Americans like, with the roof down – it was a clear sunny day – and was thrown out when it hit a lanternpole.”
I frowned. “A lamppost? How come it hit a lamppost? Was he drunk?”
“That’s not clear, though with Plumpe you can bet he’d had a drink or two. When I first knew him I was very young and innocent and thought he was very wise and sophisticated, then I realised he was just drunk all the time. I was with him the last time they dried him out and you could tell it didn’t take. You can’t make someone give it up till they are ready – and he wasn’t. Hub says Garbo told him Plumpe wasn’t even at the wheel but the studio are hushing it up. It seems he had a young Filipino valet. He was at the wheel and Plumpe’s head was, for some unimaginable reason, beneath the instrumentboard.”
I thought about it. “Do you suppose …?” We were both grinning. Walter rested his forehead hotly against mine. I smoothed his hair and rubbed his ears like a cat’s. It just seemed the right thing to do.
“Let us hope so, Bonnetchen. Simultaneity of symbolisms and so on. Corny I know, but the critics love it. Like in one of his films. All comes together in the end. He would have liked that.”
9
“Of course, I have no formal qualifications in music,” said Walter, executing a particularly difficult arabesque, “as I told Leo Stokowski when he was here – but then neither have the Balinese. You might say,” he twinkled, “that, as musicians, they are an unqualified success.” All this going down well enough with guests Colin McPhee and wife Jane Belo, both formally degreed up to the ears and taking Walter’s remarks as deference not the dismissal I was sure they were. They had met the Covarrubiases in Paris, seen the Balinese show at the Colonial Exhibition and just embarked on a hymn of praise to Sayers, the artist who had executed the murals – “though, of course, they, themselves, had no formal qualifications in art”.
McPhee might not be impressed by Walter’s playing – he was, after all, a concert virtuoso himself, as well as a recognised composer of the modernist school – but he was by the dropping of Stokowski’s name. His enemies, of course, maintained that the mercurial conductor and showman was born pedestrian Leonard Stokes in London and had confected his exotic accent, leonine mane and exuberant mannerisms from scratch. The disdaining of the normal baton and the arrangement of concert-hall lights to focus on his hands and the dramatic shadows they threw had come about after his experience of the Balinese shadow play. He had also made a speciality of bedding Garbo and marrying an heiress. McPhee had followed him in that. It was Belo’s family money that had subsidised this pelagic excursion.
McPhee, pale, Canadian, red-haired and weakly handsome, very pink, exhibiting the first signs of what Walter would term “porculence”, about thirty in – of all things – a suit . Belo, of the same age, even paler, strawlike blond hair cropped boyishly short, very thin with a wealth of nervous mannerisms and wearing a simple cotton shift like a nightgown, as if she had been snatched from a sanatorium in the middle of the night. The pair, freshly married but uncovarrubiously distant, living as in parallel but never touching.
Conrad had been present at dinner, looked her over in silence and clearly decided that – as an intellectual – she was Walter’s patch rather than his. He had left to go to the village where he claimed, as so often nowadays, to have a lesson in Balinese. Possibly, but – if so – then the improvement in linguistic skill did not match the time and effort he was putting in. I suspected a love interest. And why not? He was young and undeviant.
But what was striking now was the blatant buzz of sexual transmission between McPhee and Walter to which she and I remained resolutely deaf. It was, if nothing else, embarrassingly rude to his bride. Pert little Resem had just served coffee with great grace, patting the cups into perfect alignment with delicate fingertips as only the Balinese do and McPhee had given him a look that virtually ripped the sarong from his loins. I felt a flare of paternal outrage over such molestation.
Jane had told me that she was here to work on trance in ritual and performance, that she was a trained cinematographer hoping to make some films, but that her deeper mission was the “exploration of herself and her key sexual configurations”. I detected resonances of years of psychoanalysis, just the thing that has led Americans to see themselves as particularly deep and interesting, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. It was only my blushes that stifled my yawns. I took it that she had been early introduced into the lesbic-leaning sororities of the Ivy League and was now having doubts. These expressed themselves in the usual anthropological form of the conflict between nature and nurture, that would allow her to discover a totally fictitious “real” her, to which she could henceforth be true. Marriage to McPhee – it seemed obvious to me – had been the clearest possible way of situating herself in a heavily defended sexual no-man’s land. Temp, I could not help thinking, might have been a more suitable spouse, a marriage made – if not I heaven – at least at Harvard. Her talk that night was all girlish gush of her mentor, Ruth Benedict, and a book she was writing which, she assured me, would reshape the entire subject. I don’t believe I ever heard of it again.
“So tell me, Walter, what do the Balinese make of Western music?” Walter stopped playing and turned on his stool, slid out from behind the piano and began walking up and down. An academic audience was as good as a musical one.
“That’s an interesting question, Colin. Jazz interests them. After gamelan practice once, I played them some records of Ted Lewis, you know New Orleans style, and they nodded along and said that was fun – so everybody was happy. Then I played them some Beethoven, one of the piano sonatas. They said it was too busy, too many tunes at the same time, that man needed to sit down and think a bit more and decide what he wanted. So then I gave them a Chopin prelude and some light Mendelssohn. They didn’t think much of those. Just like the Opera Stamboul they said – you know – the Malay opera, all screeching and syrupy melodies – the kind of thing the Chinese love to sit around listening to in torn vests. So then I banged out a Bach prelude and they just sat there entranced. Now, that, they said was real music.”
McPhee laughed and slid behind the keyboard himself, began to allow something slender and Debussyish to flow from his fingertips. Debussy – himself inspired by the music of the Indies at a previous colonial exposition, but Javanese, the sort that was so vapid it sent Balinese to sleep.
“So,” said Walter, rubbing his hands, suddenly businesslike, “tomorrow we can get you started on the musical tour, bamboo gamelans, iron gamelans, north versus south, old versus new. I can introduce you to the major musicians and dancers. There’s so much going on at the moment. The only problem is petrol. Up here it’s worth its weight in gold …” He looked off into space theatrically and chewed his lip as though in thought.
I recognised the opening manoeuvres to reel them in and get them to pay up in advance. So, he was broke again. Murnau’s money – referred to in the house as “the American royalties” – had yet to plump up his account. The signs had been there in the incoherent dinner, the vegetable course being my own contribution from the palace, the rest all stuff from the garden packed out with cheap buys in the market, the whole masked as an amusing introduction to local exotica. Oleg came in with brem, rice spirit, a present from one of the neighbours. The whisky must have all been used up. To coos of appreciation, Walter passed round rustic Balinese cigarettes wrapped in corn husk and a wind of string.
Oleg had grown, and – it must be said – grown ugly. Under the impact of Walter’s kitchen, he had put on weight, one of the few Balinese who would look better in a shirt. Yet he remained as sw
eet-natured as ever and enjoyed the favours of a very pretty girl down in the village where he now passed the night. And he moved in a very Balinese way that belied his weight. For a Westerner of his build to dance could only be a comic thing, yet Oleg still moved with grace and assurance, at ease with his own form. You could imagine him stamping out a creditable baris. I commented on it, then managed to corner Walter, appropriately, in a corner, nudging and whispering. “Moreover,” I finished, “if you value your domestic tranquillity you should make sure Oleg – rather than Resem – looks after McPhee. He’s trouble.” He nodded. Was he really listening? “This is not,” I added, “a matter of jealousy as you will doubtless pretend. It is out of concern for Resem’s innocence. He is surely unaware of what such men are capable of.”
“Mmm. You are right. About the way Oleg moves – how would you say that in English, in German something like körperliche Gelassenheit?”
“Grace?” I suggested. “No. Wait. Poise. He has exquisite poise.”
McPhee looked up sharply, an old bloodhound picking up a distant scent borne on the wind. The corners of his mouth contracted into a shark’s rictus.
“Boys?” he asked breathily. He had been knocking back the brem and his speech was slurred. “Did somebody say ‘exquisite boys’?”
***
Walter raged around the island with the McPhees, showing, introducing, explaining, leading them off the beaten track to places and experiences they would never have found for themselves. It always refreshed him to show off his Bali, drawing strength from the admiration and pleasure of others. There was nothing jealous or proprietorial about Walter. One of his friends was Nyoman Kaler, inventor of the oleg dance, another Mario, inventor of the flashy kebyiar duduk that was a sort of gobbet compilation, a moving rijstafel of difficult dance moves and, of course, Limbak of the new, improved kecak. He shared them all unselfishly, as a good boy does his sweets. Walter was always very firm in the view that Balinese theatre and dance did not merely entertain but showed the young how they should best behave.
TheMcPhees settled in a damp house in Kedaton, near Nyoman Kaler, where McPhee worked like a European – not a Balinese – demon, recording and transcribing music, banging out the basic tunes on an old tropicalised upright piano. Of course, in those days we had, as yet, no way of recording sound in the field so it must all be done by hand. The Balinese, themselves, had no system for noting down anything but the most basic melodies so that McPhee had to drag it all out of their heads and memories as passed down from nameless ancestral composers. Communal art as described by Miguel, except, of course, that it could be owned and one hamlet might well capitalistically buy a new tune and the secrets of its performance from another, lock, stock and barrel. The McPhee choice of residence, just across from the shelter in which the hamlet’s orchestra practised, might have been seen as the triumph of duty over domestic quiet, had it not also allowed ready access to Nyoman’s young and comely nephew, Made Tantra, whom – it soon became clear – McPhee was assiduously, but not monogamously, courting. He was a striking boy, with long, straight hair that he always decorated with great style. Sometimes, it was a flower tucked behind the ear, or a poignantly unopened budlet woven into his crisp forelock. On one occasion, at an evening festival, it was flashing fireflies tied into his hair with tiny threads.
“You should say something to Nyoman about his nephew,” I urged. “They go everywhere together. It is shocking. How old is that child? Thirteen? Fourteen? A scandal.”
Walter sighed. “Nyoman does not care about anything but his gamelan orchestras. Of those he is fiercely jealous. Anyway, Balinese do not count birthdays so they do not have an age. When a boy starts behaving as a man, he is a man. What is wrong with you Bonnetchen? We go everywhere together. You don’t know what they actually get up to. It may be entirely innocent. You spend so much of your life disapproving of things, Bonnetchen, that I think sometimes you disapprove of yourself. Those ladies who buy your paintings in Batavia would be as outraged about us, as you are about Colin and Made. They would joyfully crucify you if they knew about your activities on the lapangan kota.” What did he know about …? “Look, either you believe such moral lines are universally the same or you admit they are not and then you cannot redraw them just for your own convenience. What is gravy for the female is also gravy for the male goose.” Gravy for the female? Ah, sauce for the goose. “You cannot disapprove of Made and Colin on the grounds that they are simply wrong and excuse yourself as simply right. I should disapprove if I thought Colin were treating him badly or making him unhappy but you do see that that is quite different? Sex is not good or bad. It is how you use it to affect other people. Once you throw away universal rules you are left simply with the pagan virtues, kindness and good manners.”
“Colin’s out with Made. He’ll be back soon,” explained Jane with a sour Texas twang, as she showed me over the bare, comfortless house. “You know, I’ve sort of done this before. My first husband was a artist, George Biddle. He lived in Tahiti, adopted some local children. Why, he even wrote a book about it. You know, someone just made the most marvellous film about Tahiti, called ‘Tabu’, filmed right where he lived?” Good God – Murnau. Then – first husband? Jesus. How many had she had?
“Oh, Colin’s only my second. We decided to get wed after I wrote a essay in anthropology at the Sorbonne. ‘Is marriage a human universal?’ I guess the answer they wanted was ‘Yes but only if you let “marriage” be stretched so far it doesn’t mean a thing any more’. You know, men marrying men, people marrying the dead, a girl taking up with a whole heap of brothers and so on – the way they do in different places. Colin and I were real close at the time in temperament. He was studying under Nadia Boulanger. There were problems but when you looked at all that marriage data, us two getting married didn’t really seem so odd any more. So we just went ahead and did it. My analyst said it was a great step forward in my maturational phase to embrace a feminine man and so move towards dealing with my own temperamental inconsistency. I guess it is the same for you, having made the decision to live in partnership with dear Walter.”
“Walter and I do not live together! We are friends.”
“Oh my! Now I’ve embarrassed you.” She resumed her tour like the guide to a palace. “Most of the furniture we just borrowed from the manager of the Bali Hotel. He was a most obliging gentleman.” She prodded one of the beds and it responded with a groan. “You see? In Bali, even the beds are musical!” she smiled. “Colin says it’s a B flat.” Oh my God. Surely that was the bed that Dion and I had played and harmonised upon. My eyes misted. We had got whole chords out of it.
“I just don’t know why the manager was so nice,” she prattled on, “considering he’s losing business on the deal. He even had his people bring it all round for us and put it in the rooms. It’s just shameful, I know, but I can’t help thinking it’s some kind of ploy.” McPhee’s cue to enter hot, sweaty-browed, crying out for lemonade.
“Boy?” he enquired eagerly. “Some kind of boy? He flopped down on a chair, looking up bright-eyed. “What kind of boy?”
Then, suddenly they were gone. Walter insisted there was no mystery to it. The McPhees’ visitors’ permits had simply expired and so they had to either leave or go through the lengthy and expensive procedure of becoming residents. I, myself, had found it relatively easy to regularise my position owing to my Dutch nationality and have, moreover, always been punctilious in such matters. I asked Walter how he had managed it. Surely any permission he had to remain must be long defunct? He smiled.
“Oh, no. It is still funct. I did it the Balinese way,” he said airily. “A friend of mine has a brother who knows someone whose wife’s cousin works in the Resident’s office. He arranged for my file to be lost. I am the Mata Hari of Gianyar, a ghost. I do not exist in this world.”
Made Tantra took their departure badly, tearfully. In farewell, he had boldly arranged for his photograph to be taken by Mr Kasimura, the photographer of Denpasa
r, wearing a new suit, hair brilliantined and against a painted backdrop of the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. The buttons on his jacket were retouched, by hand, in gold, before expensive framing. I had known it would all end in tears. I am seldom wrong in these matters.
There now came a period of calm with no visitors. Walter, through rubbing shoulders with McPhee, had rediscovered himself as a musician and spent hours pencilling transcriptions of the music of the shadow-plays, leaping from piano to piano and dragging the boys away from their work to discuss versions of the flowery elaborations to the main tune that might be added by improvising accompanists. They would crouch at the foot of the piano, dusters and saucepans discarded, shaking their heads, arguing and banging out alternatives and variations on instruments looted from the gamelan.
In the evenings, after dinner, they set a lamp in the middle of the floor and we all gathered round as at a camp fire, myself, Walter, Resem, Alit, occasionally Oleg and Conrad, sitting cross-legged in pairs. Walter had somehow found three identical copies of Grimm’s fairy tales in Denpasar, translated ruthlessly into Malay and these were used to teach the boys to read, ourselves looking tutorially over their shoulders as they passed from a world of Germanic elves, gnomes and witches via one of Malay poleng,jin and tukang sihir to Balinese kala, tonya and leyak all with lengthy oral footnotes. Through their similarity to the Balinese Tantri tales, the stories formed a bridge to the hottest news as the Balinese understood it. Prompted by their texts, the boys chatted, wide-eyed of latest events. Last year a monkey-faced man had been captured near the Western forest and locked up but such misfortune had been visited on the captors that they had sent for a diviner who had told them it was one of the invisible people, gamang, revealed through some enchantment, who must be freed and returned to his home. They had loaded him with gifts and sent him off and now the harvest was fruitful as never before. Other terms caused difficulty. A gingerbread house was a challenging concept in the Indies. The translator had reached for the Malay kue kukus, “steamed cake”, deftly adapted by Walter to kue kakus, “shithouse cake”, with such facial expressions and lugubrious rolling of the tongue that the boys became hysterical. Then he started in on aduk, meaning “to beat a mixture” but also Balinese slang for copulation, with shameless miming of the licking of the spoon, by which point he could calm them only by driving protesting Mas from the kitchen and establish the reality of such a cake by making one on the spot. Later, Resem would lean trustingly back against my chest, chewing the hot, steamed fruit confection and resting his hand familiarly on my leg as I tapped out the awkward rhythm of a Malay sentence on his thigh. All this was, for him, totally non-sexual, since as a friend, I might touch him anywhere but his hair, which alone would be to show excessive familiarity. For me, of course, it was very far from empty of meaning. In the cold North, the slightest physical contact had brought down on my own head all the thundering interdictions of the vengeful god of the Old Testament and his prophet, Moses. Yet here, as I felt the hot firmness of his body against my flabby own, it was with a sense not of frustration but of gentle fulfilment. I suddenly realised that, since my youth, I had been having sex with people for the greater and simpler pleasure of going to bed with them and just touching the wonder of their bare and vibrant skin.