Island of Demons

by Nigel Barley

  “That,” said the mustache, “is impossible. Those classes are only for the boys from the royal houses, not outsiders, and we could not go to Ubud. It is dangerous for Sanur men there.”

  Was Tuan Rolf at home?

  “Unfortunately both the tuans have gone to the market in Denpasar. If you come back in the evening, you will find them.” He looked round at his fellows and whispered. “But you must be careful.”

  “Careful?” I echoed. “Why careful?”

  He hesitated and one of the others murmured something under his breath, into his cigarette and he looked down and could not fix me in the eye. “Those two tuans have strange habits. That is why we do not come here at night. It is because they are twins. What can you do? It is their nature. From the womb they were too close together.”

  I had returned, bubbling with rage at the infamy of the Sanur operations and revealed them to Walter as he swam. It is hard to tell whether a man is shrugging as he executes the breast stroke seen from the rear. It is nothing but a series of aquatic shrugs – but I am fairly sure he did.

  “It is difficult. They are my partners in the akvarioom but I am not sure we are partners in the art shop.”

  “But this is immoral, fraud …”

  He shrugged or perhaps just breast-stroked again. “There is nothing to be done. It is according to the configuration of their culture and culture is nothing but personality writ large.”

  “What?” I wondered, at the time, where he had got that from. Now I know …

  “What?” Walter was poking my knee.

  “Don’t you recognise the voice?” He had just vigorously rewound but the music still drooped with tropical langour. The wavery tenor, those absurdly fronted vowels. Of course. “It’s Noel,” I said. “Something about mad dogs and Englishmen.”

  “I still can’t understand a word,” complained Walter. “A mouth full of balls.”

  Greg grinned with a striking assortment of teeth gripped around his pipe stem. “Couldn’t have put it better myself, old boy” he said.

  ***

  It was not debauched Vicki who smoked but austere Margaret – like a factory chimney. She sat down there in the garden, on a deckchair, in a large floppy hat and one of those dreadful fieldwork maternity smocks, and puffed away manfully. “The important thing,” she declared, “is to collect truly scientific data. Subjective impressions have their place but nothing is as good as rigorous observation and the use of tests like this allows direct comparison across cultures. It is better to have one event described by three observers than three events described by one.” There was Jane, Made Kaler – a cheerful and intelligent young man with unnaturally long hands – and Margaret herself, all with notebooks drawn, triply observing. Made had been issued with a shiny, new wristwatch for professional purposes and was enjoying the sight of it shining on his wrist. Walter and the other boys sat on the ground further off and observed – presumably – subjectively. They were laughing at something Walter was drawing in the dust with a stick, no doubt something of a satirical nature.

  “Synchronise watches,” Margaret commanded as if a general going into battle. “Don’t forget time and date at the top of each page.”

  The focus of all this scientific observation was little Resem, cross-legged in the garden. He had recently grown a sweet little moustache that accentuated the cupid’s bow of his mouth and, unaccustomed to it, he constantly touched it and tasted it with his tongue. He shot a shy smile up at Greg and me on the balcony. I could tell that I would soon have to sketch him again. I liked Greg. There was something terribly reliable and upright about him. He was, I suspected, a true gentleman and I could see why women liked him too. We were having one of those man-to-man talks that I have always been bad at, assuming as they do, all manner of ordinary knowledge that has never come my way.

  “Margaret writes lists,” whispered Greg dolefully. “You know. Things to do, questions to ask. Drives me bonkers. My mother does the same thing. I found one the other day and you’ll never guess what item fourteen was. ‘Sexual intercourse’. And the thing was, she’d crossed it out and written ‘carry forward till tomorrow’.” He had two cameras slung around his neck and his own notebook. Usually, they used both stills and cine but today, a mere rehearsal, it was just stills. “When we first met, up the Sepik river, she was still married to that crazy sod, Reo Fortune, New Zealand anthropologist, a real bargain-basement bastard. Wrote on the Dobu – nasty bunch of tossers, aggressive, jealous, always trying to kill each other with sorcery – except that’s all balls. That’s not the Dobu. That’s Reo. You know he used to knock Margaret about? Lost a baby that way. And women are not like us, old man. They hang on to these things and bear a grudge. You can imagine what it was like with the three of us shut up in a broiling mosquito-proof room up the arse-end of New Guinea, drinking every night and arguing anthropological theory. Little by little Margaret grew away from him and towards me. I knew he’d kill me if he found out. He had a gun that he was always waving about. When it came to the point, he was quite calm. Just asked me to play him a game of chess. Odd thing is, I can’t remember who won.”

  Margaret and Greg were centring their work on the relationship between child-rearing, personality and trance, which may not have been entirely unconnected with the fact that a crucial part of their funding was from the American Committee for Dementia Praecox. And the principal checks for schizophrenic tendencies at the time were the Holmgren and Weigl sorting tests that Resem was about to undertake. As was usually the case with Margaret, there was madness in her method.

  “It’s her mind that fascinates me, you see,” whispered Greg, staring hungrily at her. “Margaret is about half as clever as she thinks she is, which still makes her a genius. Clear as a bell. Full of ideas and intellectual roughage. She’s the most exciting woman I’ve ever known.”

  “Made.” Margaret’s voice was clear as a bell from below. “Have you noted down the exact words Walter used when giving our subject his instructions?”

  Made nodded and flipped back the pages. “Got.”

  “All right.” She looked up. “Are you ready Greg?” He gave her a thumbs up and grabbed his camera. “Right. Go!” My mind flashed back to von Plessen. This was not research. This was a movie.

  She leant forward and handed Resem a handful of bits of wool of various colours. The idea was that he should sort them out. Everyone began scribbling though nothing at all was happening that I could see. Greg leaned forward and very deliberately took a photograph, the dull thunk! of the shutter very loud. Resem spread the threads out on the ground and began to arrange them neatly in a series of parallel lines. Like many Balinese, he had the hands of a surgeon.

  “He’s doing it all wrong,” hissed Greg from the side of his mouth, “not sorting them out into different colours.” He looked at Margaret nervously.

  Having put down half the threads in this fashion, Resem turned his head sideways and now began to lay the rest carefully across them, at an angle of ninety degrees. After a couple of minutes, he looked up and smiled. “Finished.”

  Greg doubtfully took another photograph. Margaret looked annoyed.

  “Either,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in judgement, “this young man is colourblind or he suffers from severe frontal lobe dysfunction.”

  “Er, actually Margaret. It’s nothing like that,” offered Walter, shuffling forward on his rump as dogs do when wiping their backsides. “You gave him threads and, to him, that means not just colour but cloth, so he’s arranged them as you would set up a loom to weave them together and make that ikat cloth that you have seen all over the island.”

  “Bugger!” hissed Greg.

  “Oh my!” said Jane.

  “Data corrupted by interference of extraneous cultural patterns,” intoned Margaret coldly, as she wrote in her notebook and struck out the page with a line. She made a noble and long-suffering face. “All right Jane, give him the Weigl. Go!”

  The Weigl test consisted of pla
ques of wood in three different shapes and four different colours, so that there were many possible ways in which they could be grouped. Resem sat there in the sun and studied them, then rapidly shuffled the pack with the unexpected dexterity of a croupier handling cards and dealt them out decisively on the ground, to form a pretty starburst pattern as if in mosaic. Greg snapped again with his camera. Margaret looked very near to snapping, herself.

  “I would point out,” noted Walter in extrapolation, “that Resem has arranged the four basic colours according to the cardinal points, as if in a temple offering. Lots of structure there then.”

  “Thank you Walter.” Margaret was showing all the signs of exercising a very great patience. She scribbled again and drew another thick line in her pad. “Jane, the basket of objects.”

  Jane rose to her feet and went over to the side of the house, pulled away a sheet and revealed a hamper of mixed goods, bought from the market – knives, spoons, crockery, tools of all descriptions. She brought them over and dumped them down before long-suffering Resem.

  “Go!”

  Once more, instead of sorting like with like, he shared them out, forming five or six neat piles, bigger objects at the base, smaller on top, hesitated, swopped items back and forth and then settled back on his heels.

  Walter came over and whispered, nodding. “This pile,” he touched, “is what you would need to gut and cook a fish. This one is most of what you need to roll a wad of chewing betel. The mat and the kris are together because, at marriage, the groom has to pierce such a mat with the tip of his weapon as a sign of the unflowering of the bride.”

  Margaret sat crumpled on her chair, cut to the quick, betrayed by science, letting her notebook droop by her side in nicotine-stained fingers. Everyone looked at her as the boys muttered and giggled at this strange and unsatisfactory new form of divination. Then she stirred and it was suddenly as if a dull cinder had burst back into flame. She rekindled herself.

  “Okaaay,” she drawled, sitting up, shoulders thrust back as if in school. “Change of plan.” She turned to address Walter. “The other day, Walter, we were at your aquarium where there is an art shop.” What was this? “I could not help noticing that several of the artists paint in a number of different styles, with far more variation than would ever occur with individual European artists. I wonder whether the reason could be that Balinese feel no need to maintain a consistent personality, that they can run several different personalities without integration. If so …” she leaped to her feet and smiled up at Greg, “then we have shifted the notion of what constitutes an acceptable personality from the universal to the culturally specific and that would solve all our problems and fit the data we have elicited this afternoon. Painting then becomes a mere local symptom of lack of cultural homogeneity at the personal level.”

  “Well done old girl!” Greg enthusing down on her. “What a corker!” She glowing up at him. Both radiating a kind of intellectual excitement that manifested as sexual and physical heat. List or not, I could see what they would be doing tonight in a far from listless fashion. I had a swift prophetic vision of Greg, thrusting sweatily away under the mosquito net, Margaret moaning as he brought his mouth somehow to her ear, despite the awkward disparity of height, and orgasmically gasped, not sexual endearments, but words like “interference of extraneous cultural patterns” and “shift from the universal to the culturally specific”.

  “That, Margaret,” said Walter in tones of ringing sincerity, “ is an idea that would never have occurred to me. Is that really what I have been doing all these years when I thought I was painting?”

  ***

  “Rosa and Miguel have written a book.” Walter waved his copy of The Island of Bali at me in proof, or rather, in evidence, since it was the final printed version that he brandished, not a proof copy, and stuffed, like an overfilled American sandwich, with cuttings from the New York press. It had come hot from the US, published by Kroeber’s, elaborated with Miguel’s zingy drawings and Rosa’s indifferent photographs. “They have been most kind about me in it. Miguel is doing very well out of the whole thing – commissions, reviews, etc. – and has even installed a Balinese exhibition of sorts in the shop window of an American department store. Inside, you can watch his film footage and buy in leisurewear out of cloth he has based on Balinese designs. What is leisurewear?”

  “I think it means clothes that don’t involve a tie. What you are wearing would be leisurewear.”

  “Really?” He looked down at himself in astonishment, like Monsieur Jourdain being told that, all his life, what he had been speaking was prose. “The cuttings say the clothes are ‘gay and abandoned’.” He frowned, stirnrunzelnd. “Is that what I am?”

  I looked inside the covers and saw the handwritten dedication with its elegant curlicues. “It says here you are generous and hospitable.”

  “Then that is what I must be though, according to some words I put in my dictionary the other day, I rather think I am batty and catty and ratty. Still … Vicki wrote a book. Margaret and Gregory will certainly write a book – maybe a whole shelfful of books. Jane is writing articles that will become a book, Colin has published his Balinese symphony and it has been conducted by Stokowski. Now I too shall write a book.”

  I looked at him doubtfully. “Walter, it takes weeks, months, years to write a book. A book is not a painting. Painters are flashy sprinters – one gasp of creativity, all over in a couple of minutes, at most a couple of days – writers are long-distance runners who just keep putting one foot in front of the other when they have long since forgotten why they ever started.”

  “If things had been a little different, I should already have a book.” Oh God. Here it was again. The book that got away, his drawings of lamaks, altar decorations of palm leaf. “You know that Jane took my collection of drawings with her to America, hoping to find a publisher. It was only because she showed them to Margaret that she and Greg ended up here at all. No one would take it. Not commercial, they said. Then Kroeber’s said they would do it if I would pay in $500. $500! I did not have 500 cents. Yet they took Miguel’s book.” He pouted. I pointed him hastily in a different direction.

  “So what is the subject matter of this work to be? Dragonflies perhaps, a work of natural history then. Or maybe your biography. That would have to be unnatural history wouldn’t it?” Nasty that. Why was I being so bitchy? Too much to drink, perhaps. Or maybe I was just tired of everything. Or maybe it was because of where we were. We were at Manxi’s, a new place down on the beach that Greg found more congenial than the “tight-arsed” Bali Hotel. But he was not here tonight. He would be up in the hills at Bayung Gede, pounding away at a typewriter, writing up his notes, Made’s notes, Margaret’s notes or maybe developing films as Margaret typed up his notes. There would be plenty of film to develop. In the course of an hour, one afternoon sitting on his porch, I had seen him fire off three rolls. Manxi’s was a collection of cheap shacks of bamboo and rattan that caught the night breeze and where, in the moonlight, the ocean was reduced to a series of parallel frothy lines and a rhythmic roar beneath the tinny dance music. It was louche, or as near to that as Denpasar ever got, and the backbone of its dissipation was the bored, young airmen from the base next door, their sleepless hormones zithering in the tropic heat. Youthful enough to know themselves immortal – mere airboys really – and briskly omnifutuant in their tight uniforms, they danced and sported with Manxi’s girls, many of whom were male beneath the silky packaging – but no questions, no packdrill, any port in a storm, one orifice as good as any other in the magic of moon- and flickering candlelight. It was certain that all this had not passed unnoticed by the authorities but was provisionally tolerated as a necessary flexibility of civilian rectitude to bring comforts to the military, although it had caused a certain dislocation of trade from the lapangan kota and it was mildly embarrassing to be so well known and publicly greeted by its overflow at Manxi’s. The muscled Javanese barman was twinkling at me conspiratorially o
ver Walter’s shoulder as if … Had we? If so when? Manxi, it should be explained, was a gruesome buxom woman from the Isle of Man, allegedly the mistress of one of the minor princelings and simultaneously enjoyed by an expansive Dutch planter, only intermittently present, from Java. To overcome the Balinese prejudice against red hair she had dyed hers jet black, cut it Cleopatra fashion and looked unnervingly like an exhibit in a museum of Egyptology. Walter lived in terror of her. Once she had shown him her paintings which were of a saccharine sweetness and technical incompetence that he had compared unfavourably even to my own. I could hear her laughing somewhere out on the beach. Appropriate to the darkness, she had a laugh like a screech owl. She would go on, of course, to become a radio propagandist for the Japanese and later enjoy a certain brief notoriety as “Surabaya Sue”, broadcasting against the Allies during the Revolution. But I anticipate.

  “Dance,” said Walter so that I thought momentarily that he was inviting me to foxtrot. “It will be a book, the book, about Balinese dance.” Two airmen were pawing at the same kohl-eyed he/she over by the bar, forming a sort of rhythmically rutting sandwich, bent at the knees but firmly locked at the groin, hands gripping beer bottles from which they occasionally swigged. “Dance on Bali is unique, not merely a highly evolved aesthetic exercise but an integral part of religious and social life.” Each had his tongue in one of his/her ears which provoked loud tripartite giggling as they shimmied approximately to the shellac music. The boys’ backs were wet with a Y of sweat. “Dance here is a matter of the greatest seriousness and it must be captured, explained, got down on the page for the benefit of the whole world.” The he/she drew back and the two airboys kissed tenderly and then transferred their kisses laughingly to his/ her cheeks.

  “Walter, no one knows more about Balinese dance than you but you lack the application and …” more kindly, “… the time.”