Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  “The offerings have been made. The ground has been broken. Tomorrow we start building!” McPhee over his flying fox and mushroom pie.

  Walter made his crooked face. “It needs more chilli. Some zing extra. Tomorrow? Er, I don’t think so. It’s only a few days till galungan when the ancestors come back for a visit. Everything stops for galungan, Colin.”

  “Does it last all day?”

  Walter choked. “All week, two weeks really. Then in ten days you have the next holiday of kuningan. We shan’t see much of the boys for a bit, I’m afraid, they’ll all expect to go home. It’s no good fretting. Even if you threatened to fire them, they would still rather go home. That’s why the Dutch prefer regular Javanese domestics. So just smile, wish them a good time and maybe give them a little extra for the journey. You, after all, have red hair, like a Balinese demon. If you want to be a good demon, you have to try harder or all sorts of stories will get out about you.”

  In preparation for the visit of our ancestors, the kitchen was re-equipped with new utensils and baskets and we all dressed in our best. Walter alone disdained Balinese costume, not out of pride but rather humility.

  “You see how terrible Westerners look in such dress, like Balinese in shirts and shorts. Our proportions are all wrong.” I had thought I looked rather nice.

  The townspeople had decked the streets with artfully pendant penjors, long bendy bamboo poles with frilly decorations on the ends, that converted every passage into a triumphal arch. Each region, sometimes each hamlet, had its own style and there was fierce competition to be more beautiful, more elaborate than one’s neighbours. The focus of Walter’s interest were the lamaks, geometric representations of a mysterious female figure – das Ewig-Weibliche, according to both Walter and Goethe – made by pinning together contrasting green and yellow leaves of the sugar palm. The result is a beautiful fluttery creation half a meter wide but eight or nine meters long, hung from the coconut palms, or altars or rice-granaries. Their evanescent beauty is doomed to wither in a single day and be thrown away. Walter had been drawing them for years, had hundreds of designs tucked away, but somehow always recognised a new variation. There was talk of publishing a book of them. “This,” he remarked, rapidly sketching on gripped pad, “is the reason why I have doubts about the museum plan. Balinese art is not supposed to be eternal like Western art, but falling apart, included in the natural cycle of things. Yet, I suppose, I sketch butterflies and dragonflies for natural history museums, that may live but a few short days and that is much the same.” He shrugged.

  At the cross roads was a Barong, the masked mythical creature that is the sworn enemy of Rangda, the witch, and most closely resembles the Chinese dragon, though the Balinese lack of literalness allows it to come indifferently in several incarnations as a lion or a pig. It was frisking and capering happily, clapping its wooden jaws to the marching gamelan that accompanied it. The two men inside seemed to communicate by some means that allowed synchronised footwork at front and rear. The temples had all been cleaned and decorated, were heavy with incense and flowers, offerings and fruit and feasts and festivals were on offer all over the island, Walter’s presence ensuring we were welcome everywhere. In Gelgel we witnessed ancient plays whose end was marked by men going into fierce trance and turning their krises on their own bare – but mystically protected – flesh as they tore at live chickens with their teeth in the clouds of stamped-up dust. In the cool, jungle pura of Batukau, ancient royal temple of the kingdom of Tabunan, we watched serene offerings made to the gentle spirit of the lake beneath the fanned tree-ferns and afterwards a stately and disdainful baris executed with long spears. It was here that I realised that henceforth, baris dancers will always seem, to me, to be imitating Charlie.

  At the time of kuningan, we made a pilgrimage to the watery temple of Tampaksiring, where Soekarno would later build his sacrilegious bungalow of a Ruhr industrialist above the gushing spring. Here had been shot the scenes of male and female nude bathing so scandalously cut into the end of Walter’s film and I have no doubt that Soekarno, always a dirty-minded man, was, in due course, spryly active at the window with his binoculars. On his own, I know, Walter would have been in there with the water worshippers but Jane’s presence made him oddly abashed. Later, the local Barong came snorting down the hill and cast bathers into a trance by the power of its presence and Jane annoyed the dazed victims by her pedantic questioning that – both intrusive and remote – recalled that of the therapist. “And just what word would you use for that? Uhhuh. And when you say that word how does it make you feel? Really? Oh my.” Scribbling, scribbling. She was always scribbling.

  ***

  I was hot and unhappy and regretted bitterly coming along on what was only conceivably a treat for a simple-minded anthropologist. The branches were cleared to the height of the heads of the Balinese, which was about my shoulder, so that they kept slapping back and hitting me in the face. The bees were driving me crazy settling around my eyes to drink up the sweat. I should have stayed at home and worked up one of a series of sketches I was doing on bare-breasted women of the market. The village was a good fifteen minutes’ walk – Walter-walk not that of a human being – from the motor road where we had left Jane’s Chevvy. There were at least a dozen places where she could see her kris-dancing and go through her questions on trance and possession but no, it had to be Pagutan. I knew, of course, exactly why it had to be Pagutan – because of Rawa. About thirty, skin light and smooth, tall for a Balinese, staggeringly handsome with his black hair unfashionably long, magnificent chest and thighs – a firm favourite of Walter’s – Rawa. Of course, Rawa was the local ladies’ man, a great climber over compound walls after dark, father it was alleged, of half the beautiful children in the village, his own foaming sperm hosing away that of skinny, weakling, ugly rivals. “Waste of a good man,” Walter had stated, headshaking. The thought of seeing Rawa, alone, kept my feet moving through the evanescent dusk. He was, I realised with sudden sad insight, what Luigi would have grown to be. And then we came out onto the space before the temple and there he was, muscular arms folded over bare chest, a sarong of virginal white, short even for a Balinese sarong, matching immaculately tied headcloth. I cleaned my sweaty glasses. He was dressed to act as a priest this evening then but, even so, Rawa liked the ladies to see what they did not need to go on missing. His smile of welcome glowed equally white through the gloom. He shook hands. He liked shaking hands, and now that he had mastered the gesture, he did it every fifteen minutes or so.

  “Tuan Walter. Tuan Rudi.” His hot eyes rested on Jane. He had not had one of those yet. He swept forward and set his smiling face endearingly at an angle as does a puppy. “Nyonya.” The voice was husky and seared like the baking inland winds of the hot season. Walter slipped his arm around Rawa’s consenting shoulders and they moved off to arrange the performance of the evening, the usual conflict between good Barong and evil Rangda. What interested Jane most, of course, were the points at which performers went into trance, either as performers or, at the end, when the men, having failed to kill Rangda, turned their daggers against themselves in nguruk. The advantages of doing it here were that Rawa was reliable as a middleman, the dancers excellent, they performed as agreed, on the dot, and they had even built a handy sort of grandstand so visitors could get the shots they wanted, for this was a regular spot for tourists to come. We knew, as Jane would not, that the men here were going into trance three times a week. Walter returned smiling. I could smell Rawa’s aromatic sweat on him, like the scent of a tom cat. Walter himself never sweated.

  The performance ran its course as at Gelgel. The Barong transformed from friendly pet to savage guard dog, dived and charged and swerved and cowered. Rangda was appropriately revealed in the smoke of detonating fireworks, waving her talons and stomping. Walter gave Jane a running commentary and Rawa, I noted, came and sat at Walter’s feet, casually plucking hairs from his chin between two coins, then rested his beautiful head on Walter’s k
nee, who lightly stroked his shoulders as you might run your hand down the glossy flank of a quivering stallion. Nothing in the least homoerotic there for a Balinese, though Walter seemed very much not to mind making the gesture. Rawa was an outsider, a sentana, a man who had come to live in his father-in-law’s house. He never seemed to have a special friend like the other men but was aloof and lonely. Doubtless, his nocturnal ramblings were resented in many a household. Possibly this was why he was so welcoming to Westerners who gave him the approval he sought in vain at home. I looked back at the performance. The Barong was rushing at Rangda and they fought, the quadruped finally vanquished and rolling in the dust by the mother of witches. At this point, his supporters went into trance on cue, yelling and waving their daggers, she, spitting curses and raising a white cloth against them so that they were ensorcelled and turned their knives against themselves. They twisted and pirouetted, some wept and rolled on the ground, pressing their daggers against their invulnerable chests. Suddenly Rawa stiffened and leapt to his feet with an animal cry, rushed into the arena, snatched up a dropped dagger and slashed at his chest. He, too, had entered a trance. But wait. This was not the miracle expected. A red line appeared under his left breast, blood gushed, spurting with each beat of his heart, between surprised fingers. Attendants leapt forward, caught him as he collapsed, carried him off. “Oh my!” cried Jane, writing desperately. Walter was on his feet, round the back as they pressed staunching betel leaves and red acacia blossom into the wound. I followed shamefaced, laiety intruding on a clerical space. This was too good an opportunity for other villagers. As he lay there, stunned, on a rock, an old man, with a beautiful peaceful face, came and kicked Rawa very deliberately in the chest, re-opening the wound, shouting about uncleanness and women. Others, still in trance, were prey to other passions, rushed up and thrust their mouths at the gushing wound, sucking down his precious lifeblood, staggering away slurping and liplicking, gore clogging their moustaches, like so many sated Noseferatus. I was strangely stirred by the violence and bloodshed and, looking into the wound, saw there only prime red steak, fresh and tender, felt the flare of a bizarre cannibal appetite. Walter hesitated, shouted to a priest, “To! To! – Look! Look!” then, suddenly resolved, held the ravening vampires away himself with a raised bare arm, regardless of their daggers. “Don’t just stand there Bonnetchen, support him!”

  Oh gladly. I took him on my knees and adopted a pose somewhat after that of the grieving Virgin in Botticelli’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ – one that many critics at the time felt excessively odalisque. His white headcloth suggested a bandage so I untied it, wadded it into a pad and pressed it tenderly to the wound. Another man came up, apparently solicitous, then – grinning – tried to drag Rawa to his feet by the hair as he lay limp and dropped him like a broken doll back on my lap and laughed. Walter shooed the madman furiously away. A priest finally strode up, splashed cooling holy water, fumed incense. Men dropped to the ground like stones, lay still or struggled groggily to their knees. Then consciousness returned with a rush and Rawa too sat up, stared down, not badly hurt after all, but amazed at his own defilement and pain.

  “I must,” announced Jane pushing past, “interview this man.”

  Soon I could hear her say, bending over Rawa “And just what word would you use for that? Uhhuh. And when you say that word how does it make you feel? Really? Oh my.” Scribbling, scribbling. She was always scribbling. My knees ached and my hands were sticky with Rawa’s hot blood and sweat. I was not in a trance. I felt pain quite vividly where he had been dropped on my knees. But of course no one concerned themselves with me.

  11

  Walter had a natural empathy with aristocrats and they immediately regarded him as “one of us”. That is not to say he was snobbish and despised us peasants, quite the reverse. It has always been the mark of true aristocrats that they are socially unassuming and spread their friendships widely. Like the English Prince of Wales, indeed, Walter saw himself as empathetically in harmony with ordinary villagers by some kind of social short circuit, enjoyed their company and was keen to help them in any way he could. And like an aristocrat, he seldom paid his debts, for any infusion of cash was seen as a windfall, something to be profligated on making the moment special before it leaked away, not to be spent on the dull and everyday. But he disliked the aggressive mediocrity of colonial life, with its invidious social distinctions and petty acquisitiveness and always favoured the special few who sought spiritual rather than worldly wealth – especially if they had plenty of money and their first impulse was to give lots of it to him. After all, the sensation of having Walter’s hand in your pocket was, in many ways, not wholly disagreeable.

  Barbara Hutton would, in a few short months, come of age and be quite simply the richest woman in the world and, though not an aristocrat herself, had a similar taste as Walter for them. She would soon embark on a lifelong series of failed marriages with failed European princelings – tirelessly repeating the same mistake – interrupted solely by one with Cary Grant who puzzled her by neither abusing her nor stealing her money. Consequently, he bored her. The present candidate was one Alexis Mdivani, a soi-disant Georgian prince and fortune-hunter whose relentless attentions were the motive for this world trip. Although she had good lawyers, in contrast to the Woolworths stores on which her fortune was based, in love she bought expensively and sold cheap. Her mother had committed suicide. Her father had abandoned her. Homing in on her tragic private life, the newspapers had started calling her the ”poor little rich girl” after Noel Coward’s song. Bing Crosby had recently driven her into hiding with his popular offering of “I found a million dollar baby in a 5 and 10c store”. She was dumpy and shy and insecure and might as well have been walking around with a large target painted on her back. She talked with that odd honking accent that used to be the sound of Fifth Avenue but has now, I believe, entirely disappeared from the world apart from the call of the Canada goose. Her companions were the Kinnerleys – Jean and Morley – wealthy Anglo-Americans in their late thirties, she from a titled English house, he a successful publisher. Slim, sophisticated, assured, they knew everyone by their first names and assumed everyone else held the key. “David” was the Prince of Wales, “Mary” the English queen. Morley talked constantly of some new poet – “Eliot” – whom he considered a personal discovery, though I never found out his surname.

  Perhaps it was the horse that first attracted her. The equestrian pose is inherently aristocratic. Portrait painters have known that for centuries. And it displays a man’s thighs to advantage. I have always noted women to be particularly vulnerable to thighs. Then again there was Walter’s Russian accent, the blond smile, the gigolo charm that he instinctively turned on full blast, with too much eye contact, laughing at things that weren’t funny and so on. Her laugh, in return, was particularly irritating – a sort of equine snort. In brief, he was as catmint to her and in a few days she was clearly smitten and swept off her feet by the heated exoticism of it all. If only Walter had had a title. I began to wonder whether she had been padding up those stairs to the Kala Rahu door but surely etiquette required that he visit her, that she “receive” rather than “present”. By close questioning, I had established from the boys that no Russian piano music had been played in the house – not that it was any of my business. They all went riding every morning and often ended up at the McPhees’. Inevitably, Bärbli – as she suffered herself to be called though she had spent a life fighting against “Babs” – knew Jane. It seems they had shared an analyst together which is apparently the American equivalent of an in-law relationship.

  One morning I was sitting in the garden sketching one of the hornbills as it chewed on its own feet when she came and sat beside me. She had let it be known that she was a poet and had recently published – privately – a book of her poems. They all held themselves to be well-versed in poetry. Morley described the book shiftily as “not entirely devoid of merit” though the process of versification
seemed to consist entirely of her wandering around with a pained expression and sucking a pencil. That morning, she was, I confess, radiant, transformed by an inner light. I had an urge – swiftly suppressed – to ask her to pose.

  “Hi, Rudi,” she honked, laid down her sucked pencil and replaced it with a cigarette, clearly expecting me to leap forward and light it for her. I ignored that and concentrated on my hornbill’s scaly feet. “Tell, me. Why does Walter call you ‘Bonnetchen’?”

  “Why does he call you ‘Bärbli’? Walter is like one of those early explorers who feels he has the right to rename everything since it is only when he sees it for the first time that it really exists.”

  She gave up on the cigarette and stuck out her lower lip like a child. “You don’t seem to like Walter very much today. I thought you were his friend. I think he’s just darling.”

  I pressed too hard and broke the point of my pencil. “Damn and blast!” The bird, reacting to my voice, flew off. I lay down my own pad and pencil, sighing. “Look,” I said, very calmly. “Barbara. You are very young and innocent and there are certain things you may not have realised about Walter.” I took a deep breath. I was not quite sure how I should put this. I groped for thoughts and words to put them in. “Walter is not as other men.”

  “You mean,” she finally lit her own cigarette, “that Walter is homosexual?”

  “Well, yes.” I was genuinely surprised. She laughed. It was not such a bad laugh really.

  “Like cousin Jimmy,” she smiled. “Jimmy is absolutely my best friend in the whole world and he adores the New York theatre – all those costumes and chorus boys and Ethel Merman. He takes me to all the openings and I have to keep him in little presents for his little friends who can be quite cold otherwise. He is devastatingly handsome of course. His father was just the same way. Jimmy says that playing football does not mean you can’t enjoy the odd game of tennis. Both are just a matter of ball control.” I was shocked. She was less innocent about Walter than I had been. No wonder she got on with Jane. Perhaps they were both reproducing the wisdoms of that same seedy analyst. I had never played tennis in my life. “It’s so peaceful here. You know what drove me away from New York?” I shook my head. “I went to Cartier’s with Jimmy. Oh we were very naughty. I spent $150,000 on trinkets, little things that caught my eye, and when we got back to the Rolls there was a crowd of street people, dirty, ragged, thin. They knew who I was and they looked so angry when they saw the Cartier bags. I guess it was a mistake to wear furs and diamonds in daylight. Oh those mean, horrid faces! They started shouting and banging on the roof and spitting and the driver just sat there and – can you believe it? – wouldn’t move just in case he knocked a couple of them down. Then, thank God, the police arrived and drove them away with their nightsticks. I fired the driver, of course. But here everyone is happy and well-fed and loved and everyone just adores the princes.” She had met Agung who had charmed her over tea and softpedalled his way into her favour by placing his regal foot gently on hers under the table. “My father hired a detective after that but I soon got rid of him.”