Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  Charlie laughed as Alit entered, unbidden – flashing a smile at the world with beautiful wonderful eyes – and served crisp rice crackers, smoking hot from the wok of Mas in the kitchen. Charlie watched the fine triangle of his back as he strolled away. “It’s fantastic, the way they move. Like they’re all on roller skates”. He was, I recalled, an afficionado of the roller skate. “People in the West don’t move like that. Maybe once they did. Now everybody slouches like I do in my pictures after I’ve lost the girl. They’ve had the crap beaten out of them. You’ve not been back since the Crash, Walter. Things are bad – really bad – you can’t imagine. There are four million unemployed. Last year 20,000 people killed themselves. Soup lines, bread queues, little starving kids in the snow with no shoes and their arses hanging out. In Oklahoma people are selling their kids. Next they’ll be eating them.” He crunched happily on his snack. “Here everybody gets one square meal a day and has a place to sleep. I used to think things had moved on since my childhood in the East End. Now I wonder. Like I said to Churchill, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, there must be a better way. Maybe the Russians are right.”

  Walter choked on his juice. “I was there for the Russian Revolution.” He made it sound like a first night. “The bloodshed was horrible, people behaving like beasts. The solution to politics is never more politics. Look at the Balinese. They sort out their affairs with their neighbours, each man on his own land, in peace and co-operation. There are no politicians here.”

  Charlie nodded. “You may be right. I’ve talked to the world’s greatest economists, the US President. They say it’s the gold standard. We’ve got to get off the gold standard and cut the cost of credit so the working stiff can get the decent life he’s entitled to. I met Gandhi in London in some tiny terraced hellhole of a house down the East End – extraordinary little thing wrapped in a bedsheet. He said he wanted to drive industrialisation out of India and I said he was crazy. You can’t put back the clock. He said that was exactly what he intended to do since it was machines that made India dependent on the West and the worst machine of all was the clock. Once India regained total, real independence, it could have the machines back on its own terms.”

  Walter sighed happily. They had reached consensus. He had become Balinese. He needed at least the pretence of consensus before he could draw a line and move on. “And now,” he said, “a treat – legong. Coming Bonnetchen?”

  I groaned. Those little girls. Not again. “I have things to do.” I would sketch Alit. I remembered those eyes - what was it? Beautiful, wonderful? More seriously, Alit’s knees still challenged me to the core of my artistic being. I could not rest until I cracked them.

  The next morning I came to take my coffee. Walter’s was, after all, by far the best and cheapest restaurant in Ubud. A softly tinkling piano could be heard from upstairs, constantly repeating the same phrase with occasional crashes and oaths. I recognised the sound of musical composition. Alit came in smiling, knotting his bright new sarong. It was a really good one, finest Yogya batik, swirling with birds and plants. Walter – I knew – would have been over there identifying the various species whereas I simply took in the beauty of the general pattern. Alit twirled for me to admire. I admired.

  “Coffee, Tuan?”

  “Coffee.”

  As I drank, Walter came up from the garden clutching orchids for the house, purple, white, yellow, one tiger-striped.in red.

  “How did it go last night?” I asked.

  “Fine. We went to Peliatan. Charlie loved the dance. Syd filmed it.” He dropped his voice. “Did you know when they were in England they shared the favours of the same girl – their secretary? No wonder she got behind with the mail. Extraordinary, the things one learns. At the end of the dance, Charlie asked me whether the girls were ‘available’ like the girls in Tahiti.” He dumped the flowers with all the self-righteous effort of an oppressed coalminer emptying his barrow.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that, if he could decide right away which one he wanted to marry, I would open negotiations with the parents and, as soon as she started menstruating, we could move on to the next stage. That cooled him down a bit and then I felt guilty. So I said that really wasn’t my area of expertise and he should go and talk to Le Mayeur.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes and looked like a little boy ready for parental rebuke. I refused to play that game.

  “What’s the plan for today?”

  “Before he goes anywhere near that old poseur, Le Mayeur, I have something he will want to see.” He took my hand, me now the wayward child, and led me over to the space by the door where his new works acclimatised before being cast into the world. “There!”

  It was not my cup of tea, of course, but there was an unmistakable magical – again childlike – quality about it that moved me. I felt aquisitiveness stir within me. This was a large painting for Walter. He had returned to his more metaphysical style, two interpenetrating worlds vertically stacked. In the upper sat a young man in red loincloth – surely those were Alit’s face and the sinuous knees masterfully shown – but the body artificially stretched and tautened by the effort of firing a bow and arrow down into water that became the sky of a lower world. I recognised the stylisation of the Persian miniatures he had once painted on the wall of Murnau’s Berlin villa. Below, lay the deer he had transfixed with his fatal arrow and below that the same creature frisking anew. Around and about one of Walter’s jungles, at the same time adumbrated but precise, glowing with greens and yellows.

  “When did you paint this?” He bit his lip.

  “It was after Kosja’s death. There was too much death about. I had to get it all out. I call it ‘deer-hunting’.” I felt tears in my eyes. It was impossible not to see it as a poignant statement about death and renewal. I sensed the torsion of the hunter in my own chest, the gasp of the expiring deer in my own throat. Walter twirled it casually in his hand. For Walter, like the Balinese, an object was only sacred if the spirit was in it, otherwise it was just wood and canvas, a dead thing. He leaned it against the table leg, at a deliberately casual angle.

  “Charlie!” he called and set off up the stairs, beckoning me after.

  He was seated at the Steinway, cigarette in an ashtray, trailing smoke like an incense stick, the face relaxed with real colour in it, hair flopping over his brow perhaps in emulation of Walter. On the piano top lay precious, now besmirched, music paper and a pen.

  “A man could work in a place like this,” he cried with unexpected relish. “Do you realise I went out last night and no one knew who I was, no crowds, no mobs, no cameras? People don’t recognise me from the screen – of course, with the makeup and wig and costume, that’s always impossible. What gives me away all the time is the pictures of me they keep putting in the newspapers. Here, there are no newspapers and one of the natives said I couldn’t be Charlie Chaplin. I haven’t got a moustache.” He grinned Walterishly, stood up and walked to the parapet, looking down on the river and breathing deeply, sucking Bali, leisure, freedom into his lungs, stretching his arms. “Do you know, I once entered a Charlie Chaplin Lookalike Contest in Santa Monica and only came third. A thing like that saps a man’s confidence.”

  Walter slid onto the stool in his place and accompanied his gestures with Grieg’s “Morning”, played very camply. “I don’t think I mentioned,” he said, “that when I first came to Java, the only way I could earn a living was by playing the piano in the cinema. I must have spent whole days looking up at Charlie Chaplin on the screen and expressing you in music.” Charlie cakewalked towards the piano. Walter matched him step by step with “Felix Kept On Walking”. Charlie stopped. Walter stopped. Charlie set off darting in all directions, switching, changing and Walter banged out “The Flight of the Bumblebee”.

  “Did I mention, Walter, that in England I went to see the king?” He plodded gravely, hands behind his back. Walter struck up the British national anthem. “Then I went to Paris.” Gershwin’s “American in Paris
,” as illustrated by Miguel. “Then Spain.” Flamenco chords stamped out with stiff fingers. “Whilst in San Sebastian, I went to a bullfight.” He parried invisible bulls with a cape. Walter blasted out stripped-down “Carmen”. Charlie stood still and Walter immediately subsided into the undulating introduction to the big aria, rocking back and forth between repetitions of the phrase. “There is a restaurant in the bullring there that they took me to,” he declaimed in mock-Shakespearean actorish. “The famous dish is the bhull’s bhalls …” He gestured artfully from the groin.. Walter punctuated with chords. “Roasted on skewers and I had to eat them, of course. They were so good that, the next day I went back. But the dish was completely different. The balls were small and dry and flavourless. So I summoned the waiter and asked him what had happened. ‘Is easy, senor,’ he said. ‘Today the bull he win!’ Walter boom-boomed two big chords. Charlie flung up his arms, blew kisses to the crowd, rushed forward to rising chords, backwards to descending, received invisible flowers copiously bestowed, coyly bowed and backed slowly – overwhelmed – off the stage to something schmalzy by Chopin and ran, finally, flutteringly, down the stairs to one of Schumann’s “Kinderszenen”.

  Walter stood up from the piano and looked me in the eye, held up his finger, counting. “One, two, three.” A clatter and an oath followed by silence from downstairs. Then …

  “Walter?” Charlie reappeared, breathless, clutching the painting, holding it out at arm’s length. His face glowed. “Is this one of yours? Have you just finished it? You must let me buy it. Please! It’s fantastic. I need to have it on my wall so when I go crazy I can see that there’s one sane place in all the world.”

  “Well …” Walter made the face of a man wrestling with simultaneous constipation and haemerrhoids. “I wasn’t really thinking of selling that one but … for you, Charlie …”

  Charlie was revived, electrified. I thought of myself all those years ago in Italy, slowly thawing in the sun. That night the men from the local gamelan came to rehearse and, in honour of the famous guest, performed their baris in full costume. Amidst the swelling and dying of the music, they danced in perfect synchronisation, arms up, elbows crooked, fingers windmilling – three white-faced figures, their dilated eyes and corked mustaches a sort of tribute to the Little Tramp. At the end of it Charlie, like the rest of us, leapt up and applauded. Then he slipped into the space before them, inhaled and gathered himself.

  Charlie, of course, had never seen a baris in his life, let alone danced one. Yet he assumed a caricature of the pose with the unerring accuracy of one of Miguel’s cartoons. Feet, elbows hands, eyes popping with terror not art, the crouched posture – everything was perfect. The actual steps had nothing of the military movements of the original – I seemed to recall them from one of his films, an ingratiating dance of courtship performed on ice – maybe he had even married that girl as so many others – but the Balinese loved it. After two or three steps, the drummer leapt for his instrument and brought the musicians in with the wild thundering beat of the introduction and they dropped cigarettes and seized their hammers and began the theme, a simple crashing up and down the scales, laughing and swaying. After a couple of minutes, Charlie became so outrageously flirtatious in his movements that they threw down the hammers, slapped their thighs and applauded, hiding their blushing faces behind each others’ backs. Never one to let a crowd go when had them in his hand, Charlie moved on, gave them his “Animal Trainer” song, a music-hall number about a circus trainer laid low by the vicissitudes of life and reduced to running a flea circus:

  I found one but I won’t say where

  And educated him with care

  And taught him all the facts of life

  And then he found himself a wife

  I give them board and lodging free

  And every night they dine off me

  They don’t eat caviar or cake

  But they enjoy a good rump steak

  Off my anatomy

  It is an odd sensation

  When after meals they take a stroll

  Around the old plantation

  I thought Walter would die under the burden of translation, so many of these concepts being unfamiliar to the audience, but he wisely followed the example of the Balinese film narrators and adjusted the original to fit the world he was in. It was, he explained, a song about a man who borrowed his good friend’s clothes only to discover he had fleas. Charlie’s grimacing and desperate embarrassed clutching at various parts of his anatomy had the required effect and they were soon helpless with laughter. Then the boys brought rice, chicken, fish roasted in banana leaves, palm toddy and spread them before us so that soon we were all sprawled on the floor – the boys too – eating and laughing and exuding a goodwill and happiness that lay beyond language. Syd filmed with grim determination, a stogie glued to his lower lip, as though gathering evidence for a lawsuit. It was typical that Charlie was concerned about the dancers.

  “What do I do, Walter? Should I slip them a few bucks? Should I give something to the drummer? Should I pay the dancers more? Should …”

  “Give each man one dollar when they leave, to show a little gratitude and respect. This is not,” – was he aping my own prissy voice? – “a commercial transaction.”

  Syd flopped down beside us exuding a fat man’s sweat.

  Charlie poked him affectionately in the ribs. “We are facing lean times, Walter. The world is going through a bad moment.” He expertly excised a comic film-prop fish-head-and-skeleton from the roasted flesh and lay it aside. Balinese would later seize that rejected head as the best part. “The modern age is coming after us all. Democracy is a luxury. Stay here, keep a low profile till we can afford it again. But that won’t be soon. Maybe you will get away with it and the bastards will pass you by. Whatever … I’m coming back here,” Charlie said fiercely, spooning rice. “Next year I want three months here. Einstein was right. Keep it simple. I met him in Germany, lived in some crappy cold-water walk-up apartment. Took them some flowers, they didn’t have a vase. Put daisies on the dinner table in a jam jar. I asked him if he kept a notebook to jot down, impressions, ideas. I do. You know, the way a cat stretches, the motion of a falling leaf, the idea for a ballet where each dancer would be a single cog and they’d all fit together to make a machine, phrases – ‘dance is thought made free’ – that kind of thing. ‘Ideas?’ he said. ‘But I only ever had one!’ He maintained the greatest joy in his life was not mathematics but Mrs Einstein’s cherry tart.”

  Charlie went to bed with his whole being atingle, the entire orchestra shuffling off up the road in single file, silhouetted against the moon, hands on each others’ shoulders and waddling in imitation of his famous pigeon-toed walk. Penguins really but, of course, Balinese have not heard about penguins, which makes the gesture neither better nor worse. Perhaps, in years to come, another new dance will come out of it. We never really know what seed we sow or when.

  ***

  “This is not,” Walter said primly, “a hotel.” He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the new rooms being constructed. Plumpe’s money and the cash from Charlie’s painting had sparked an expansive phase.

  “Right,” I said. “There are guests and they pay to stay here and eat here but it’s not a hotel.”

  Walter wagged his finger triumphantly. “It has no fixed tariff. Hotels charge so much per night, so much per cup of coffee, so much per glass of beer. There is a written bill with taxes. Here we are not like that. I prefer it if people pay what they best think. It is more a voluntary donation. Some people,” he pointed out, “like the Countess and yourself, pay nothing at all. The McPhees are not being charged.” They had returned out of the blue, unexpectedly resolved to settle and commissioned Walter to build them a Campuhan-style compound a few miles up the road in Sayan, no expense spared. It was an amazing site, standing on a bold ridge and looking down over the river some 150 terraced meters below, with neatly rising ranges of mountains behind and they visited it
almost daily on the horses that otherwise kicked their hooves against the walls of the new stable out back. Walter was in his element, spending someone else’s money lavishly on bringing his own ideas to fruition. The rooms were to be scattered at various levels over the site, with all sorts of artful features. There would be a dance studio and a minstrels’ gallery, God knew what else. After Charlie’s bullring story there might be one of those too. Oh they were paying all right.

  “Oh my,” declared Jane. “Poor Colin is sooo frustrated. When he asks about the house, they say it is the wrong time for cutting grass for the roof, and there will be no cement for the floor till the end of the year when the sailing ships head back from Borneo with the monsoon, and the bamboo has to dry for nine months before you can use it and you can’t do this because the wood has to be used the same way up as it grows and you can’t do that because everything has to be an odd number. He was so pleased yesterday when he found they’d got this big room up and watertight and then they said no that was only the house for the workmen to live in once they got started on ours. They can’t even break the soil till one of those priests has checked the calendar and found the right time and then there have to be the right offerings.” She stuck her fingers in her hair, both sides, and pulled it out into dog’s ears. “Aaargh! Colin’s no help. He’s spending days interviewing the staff. We have twelve so far in matching sarongs. They look so cute! And we have three secretaries alone, including Made Tantra. But I have no idea what all those boys are going to be doing.”

  At night McPhee took over Walter’s kitchen. In Paris, he had been seized by a sudden passion for cooking and taken cordon bleu instruction so that he and Walter now embarked on a sustained zoological culinary quest, exploring the flora and fauna with their teeth. They filleted, diced, marinated, puréed and steamed and porcupine fricassée, hornbill goulash, anteater casserole all graced our table. The number of animals about the place had crept slowly beyond that which was tolerable. This campaign reduced them to a more reasonable substratum population defined by its inedibility.