by Nigel Barley
The roads were awash with one of those colourful Balinese crowds you find at any festival: old women, babies, men, children clutching flaming torches, the sort that makes them feel safe and happy at night. A little girl struggled past, carrying her fat younger brother who, surely, weighed more than she did. Wild shadows flickered on the compound walls as Walter braked his way delicately through the snaking crowd and drew up at a crossroads.
“Oh look,” cried Beryl, “there are the Meads.” She pointed but sat, waiting for me to climb out of my awkward boot seat, banging my knee nastily, so I could open the door for her and then stepped out with practised grace, swinging both legs round, knees together, to touch the ground before transferring any weight. Then she strode across lightly to Greg and Margaret. “Hallo darlings. Super to see you.” Kisses on both cheeks. “What a ghastly journey. I’m an absolute wreck. Where did you park your car?”
Margaret’s mouth became a straight, lipless line. “I’m afraid our fieldwork budget doesn’t run to automobiles, Beryl. If we want to travel in style, we have to depend on the courtesy and consideration of our kind friends. We came by truck and walked the last few hours across the fields, carrying all our equipment. The bad part was the leeches.” She exhibited bloody stigmata on wrist and shin and nodded at hollow-eyed Made Kaler, crouched, panting, over by the wall, leaning on the camera tripod like a crutch.
There came the sound of another car and the lights of a large Chevrolet swept over us. It was the McPhees, Jane driving, roof down.
“Sorry if we’re late everyone. Colin was late bringing the car back. His little friend had to be taken to Sanur and it seems it just couldn’t wait.” There was a shit-eating grin on his face and a certain tightness around her lips. I recognised the marks of a man caught with his hand in the till or the biscuit barrel or the wrong pair of trousers – or something. Colin climbed out grumpily – no greeting for anyone – and went to sit on a low wall and sulk.
“Okaaay,” said Margaret, frowning. “We should do a quick preliminary survey and decide where to arrange our observers. I don’t suppose there will be enough light for useful photography, Greg, but you should obviously try to arrange something beforehand. We will need to collect the performers’ names and personal details for psychological profiling and so Made can carry out follow-up interviews. He will need to be near the front so he can pick up any chance remarks they may make in Balinese, indicative of state of mind.”
“Darling,” Beryl interrupted, turning to me. “I wonder of you could fetch my deckchair from the car and do you suppose someone here could boil me a little water for tea?” Margaret contemplated balefully.
“More likely to tell her to go boil her head. Synchronise watches now, everyone. I have eight twenty-four, five, NOW! Remember that each individual dance sequence has to be timed separately.”
Beryl glared back, eyes blazing like a cat’s in the dark. “I don’t need a watch darling. What was it Keats said? Something about ‘a hundred handicraftsmen wore the mask of poesy’? Since dance is about the expression of the divine human soul, the only instrument I need is this.” She touched her fingers delicately to her heart, then frowned. “Or was it Pope?”
“The Pope?” Walter quizzed, eyebrows raised. “What has the Pope to do with it? I must go and speak to the head of the compound. It is necessary to show respect.” He fluttered away.
Margaret smiled sweetly. “Just as you wish, Beryl dear. Thank you for the offer of your heart but I think science requires something more than that somewhat mature instrument.” I handed Beryl her chair and noticed Jane, fuming, tears in her eyes, drop her notebook and Greg swoop to retrieve it. He gave me a lugubrious wink as he handed it back, touching the back of her hand, bare flesh to flesh.
“I’ll help Greg with the camera,” I offered, Made coming with us, men scuttling instinctively from the incomprehensible and ancient wrath of women like cockroaches from the light. In Bali, the entire audience do the same anyway, splitting into two groups, women and children in one, men in the other. The spontaneous process of sorting is like watching an amoeba dividing under a microscope. We set up with our backs to a compound wall, people obligingly ducking out of our way.
“Things seem to be getting a bit sticky with that woman,” Greg muttered, tightening legs and calibrating lenses. “Best to keep a low profile.” He fiddled approximately in the dark. “There, that should do nicely.” He withdrew and began much more complex operations and adjustments with his pipe, rolling and tamping tobacco down into its little charred crater.
“I don’t think Margaret and Beryl will ever share a common vision,” I ventured boldly. “Perhaps at some level they’re too much alike.”
He took his pipe from his mouth and stared at me as if I were mad. “What an extraordinary thing to say, old man. I’ve never known two women more different. No, I mean the McPhee household. A bit of trouble there unless I’m very much mistaken. Jane looks a bit of all right to me – for an older woman – but I gather Colin is a total S-H-One Teabag, contributing to neither board nor bed.” He dropped his voice. “Between the two of us, I rather fancy my chances there. Get my end in with her. Take up a bit of the slack. What do you reckon? Is it worth having a crack at her?” He started puffing matches down into the bowl and showered sparks like the volcano up there on the mountain.
I was totally shocked. “But you’re just married. What about Margaret?”
He lay the flat of the matchbox over the pipebowl and sucked hard through gurgling tar, then waved a cloud of smoke away and my objections with it. “Oh Margaret’s got a theory about that. Fidelity is a thing of the heart.” He touched his in parody of Beryl. “Not of the loins. As long as two people are honest with each other and truly close, what one’s little chap gets up to is neither here nor there. It can live a life full of how’s-your-father on its own in fact as well as in fantasy. She calls it her notion of the separable penis.” An arak seller walked past with bottles slung on a long pole and caught his eye. “What about a snort?” he suggested. He haggled, sipped, coughed and turned it into a joke for the watchers.
“Look, Greg, you do realise my situation don’t you? You know that I’m not exactly what you would call a ladies’ man?”
He laughed, swigged more deeply and showed pipe-clenching teeth. “My word, that puts lead in your pencil.” He rolled his tongue around his mouth. “Tastes like old fannies.” I swiftly declined the proffered bottle. “You being a brown-hatter, you mean? Yes, of course I’d worked all that out. I went to an English public school, old man, and then Cambridge – neither of them places where you bend down in the showers to pick up the soap if you’re of a nervous disposition about things like that. Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that about a brown-hatter. I gather from Margaret that the proper term is an ‘invert’ but I’ve never taken to it – always makes me think of jam-making – invert sugar and so on.” At that moment, we became aware of Walter, standing at his elbow in the shadows and looking apologetic, holding – perhaps inopportunely – his brown hat. He looked like a waiter come to tell us the fish was off.
“There is a slight problem.” He fluttered propitiatory fingers. “It is not the sanghyang dedari, that of the heavenly nymphs, that is being danced to night. The news on the wind got it all wrong. It is another sanghyang, instead.”
Greg shrugged. “Don’t worry, Walter. Which one is it?”
Walter footshuffled and made his monkey-teeth grimace. “It is the sanghyang celeng.”
Greg frowned. From behind us, Made gave a bark of laughter, swiftly stifled.
“What’s that?”
“The pig. It’s really quite rare, as a matter of fact. A man gets possessed and turns into a pig. They also do one for monkeys and cooking pots. You must understand what a shocking thing this is for a Balinese. Even babies are never allowed to crawl on the ground like animals. It is one of the most shaming punishments for incest.”
Greg grunted. “No skin off my nose old man. Pigs, heavenly nymphs,
all one to me – all cats are grey in the dark …” Perhaps he would have made a good airman, then. Walter relaxed and grinned, slapped him on the shoulder in relief and settled his brown hat innocently back on his head. “But then, of course, I’m not the one who’d get ratty about a bit of a balls-up.” Suddenly, above the roar of the audience, Margaret’s voice could be heard shouting Greg’s name with irritation and an edge of hysteria. The crowd went silent, shocked, swivelled their heads back and forth between the two as if at a tennis match, taking it all in.
“Better get back there,” Greg said kindly, love in his voice, handing the bottle to Made and moving off. “Poor little thing needs me.”
The sanghyang celeng was not a dance at all, but it was certainly a performance. Since people are worried about the possessed running off and doing themselves harm, it always takes place in a closed courtyard, so it turned out that we had set up the gear in the wrong place. The performer arrived in his Beryl-like leotard with clumps of palm raffia tied all over his body and settled quietly in a corner. He had a long, most unpiglike tail with a pink tip. The crowd began to sing a monotonous song about pigs and their food and the man swayed his head and upper body along with the tune and began slowly to let his head sag and grunt. As he neared trance, the crowd began a sort of rhythmic clapping and suddenly he was up on all fours, running around, rubbing his body on the walls, squealing, rushing at people and sending them screaming and scrambling onto roofs and walls. Some men threw water into the centre of the court and stirred it up, splashing with their feet till it formed a good thick ooze. “Gelalang, geliling. Gegalang, gegiling!” they shouted. “Wallow! Wallow!” The crowd took up the chant in that moronic, throaty voice all crowds have at football matches and the pig threw itself into the mess and rubbed its face and flanks in the filth. Then it rushed off again to drink from the gutter and threw itself in the slime on its back with the pink tip of its tail poking ambiguously up between parted legs and making copulatory motions to the huge delight of the crowd. Even little children knew full well what was going on and jumped up and down, pointing and beside themselves with glee.
“The Balinese have a notion of the separable penis,” Walter remarked smoothly to Margaret, smirking at me.
“Really? That’s most interesting.” She scribbled notes furiously. I glared at him. How long had he stood there listening to what Greg and I were saying? Longer, anyway, than I had realised.
“It is simply part,” he said in authoritative clipped tones, “of the way that their whole idea of the human body is less integrated than our own. You will have heard the story of Kala Rahu, the demon, who was dismembered and only partly reintegrated the parts of his body?” He grinned at me and thumbed his nose. Kala Rahu. Poor Conrad. This was all too easy. Giving candy to a baby. Margaret wrote notes, nodded, carried away.
“Yes! Yes! This is fantastic! It’s exactly what I was saying to Greg. When he reaches for anything, his whole body is involved.” She lunged forward from the waist in demonstration. “But when a Balinese does it, only the hand and the arm move. It all fits! Hence their lack of passionate participation, disengagement, withdrawal, trance even!” The pig had subsided and was sitting on its haunches, crying softly, as little boys danced around it, taunting, threatening to drag it off to market and ignominious slaughter. It wiped its eyes on its tail and, all at once, began to quiver and stiffen and men rushed up quickly, scattering the children, and doused it with jar after jar of cold water as the man re-emerged from the pig, humanly supine, limbs rigid, grief and distress very real. He was carried off to a shelter, wrapped, massaged – pinched really – by a dozen caring hands and called back with his human name. Margaret was so excited, I wondered if she weren’t entranced too but – no – our culture, as she would have said, does not validate that.
When it was clear it was all over, we headed back to the cars. The Meads would be given a lift by the still-silent McPhees. Made Kaler would stay the night and collect more data in the morning. Beryl was still going on about tea. There can’t have been much in tonight’s spectacle to slake her thirst for expressions of the divine human soul.
“Don’t forget, Made,” Margaret hectored, “to collect as many accounts as possible of what people remember they saw and why they did the performance at all. Get down the actual words. Do not complete sentences for them. Even if they can offer no coherent reason, that, too, is good data, in itself.” Walter went off to thank, take leave, spread a little happiness in the form of paper money for the men, coins for the children. “A time for change,” he intoned, as he handed out kepengs. Made looked at me and shrugged.
“Why do they do it?” He rolled his eyes. “They do it because it’s fun. It makes them laugh. Didn’t it make you laugh?”
Margaret was immediately there, notebook lethally drawn. “Are you saying that in Bali expressive culture and trance are merely ways of gaining cathartic release from the demands of a repressive personality structure?”
“Huh? Er. Yes?”
Margaret’s technique for eliciting information always resembled the beating of a confession out of a reluctant witness. She smirked and thrust out the prognathous chin in triumph. “QED.” And made a big happy tick in her book.
***
It was not Margaret’s flat-footed gait or machete-cropped hair that shocked. It was her occasional unexpected touches of girlishness – the shiny and dainty backstrap shoes she wore with the fieldwork maternity smocks, the unexplained appearance of earrings at her lobes. I had even seen her wear makeup and mistaken it for scabies ointment. Perhaps, the ghastly thought struck me, under all that ethnographic khaki, she wore lacy undies. But the Meads were in town and thus in their gladrags more often now. Margaret had had a nasty dose of malaria and Greg a stubborn bout of colic – “Must be more careful with the water, old boy. Bali sending a shot across our bowels” – and were putting up at the McPhees to recuperate and write up. They were working on the painters of Batuan, very close to being my patch – I had, after all, my chicks among them – and felt irritation and a sense of intrusion that made me even more impressed by Walter’s complete generosity of spirit to outside researchers staging Viking raids of plunder on his work. Even so, I could not resist dropping by the McPhees’ to keep an eye on what they were up to.
Walter had built the place in conformity to Balinese notions of space. So the kitchen and its fire lay to the south, this being the direction of the sun and corresponding god, the well was dug to the north and the realm of the sea god, the barn set up to the west, house shrines to the north-east and so on. It kept the servants and guests happy and drilled the importance of cardinal points into the McPhees themselves and soothed poor Made Kaler who was originally from the other side of the mountain and so totally disoriented at living ritually back to front in the south.
One of the disadvantages of Walter’s position as architect-almost-on-site was that he was expected to sort out any problems that might arise, as in the present case where the well had run dry. So we found ourselves making the mid-afternoon walk, as so many times before, across the gem-like green of the ricefields towards the ridge on which their house stood with a certain high incumbence, enjoying the swish or reeds and grass against our bare legs – a memory from childhood – and steeped in the mellow clatter of wooden cowbells. “We make a beeline,” said Walter, “which is as the crow flies.” Arrived at the house, we were greeted with bowing regret. Tuan Colin had gone out in the car. Tuan Bayung – Gregory – had gone for a walk. It was not known when he would return. Both the nyonyas were taking a siesta. Perhaps we, ourselves, might care to rest downstairs, or lie down in one of the pavilions, and tea would be brought. We settled in the main living room with its great, carved beams, views out over the valley and minstrels’ gallery running round all four sides. Plush cats had disposed themselves all over the furniture. The interior of the house virtually purred with them, for Jane had a weakness for cats and was nicknamed Nyonya Meng, “Mrs Pussy”, by the Balinese. For the l
ocal builders, no detailed plans, such as Walter abhorred, had proved necessary, just a rough sketch, a wave of the hand and a walk round the site. They made the whole thing work and limited their fussing to arcane numerology – the odd and even numbers of beams and such. Traditional bamboo and thatch were forgiving media that would expand to accommodate Western architectural obsessions yet augmented the organic feel of the finished building. There was not a nail in the place, everything tied together with rattan and pegs and the whole resting lightly on the earth, more a piece of knitting than a Promethean construction. When the mountain sent out one of its many earth tremors, brick and stone split and tumbled but bamboo and wood merely yawned and stretched. We tucked our bare feet up on the soft sofas (“Sofa so good” – Walter) and I admired the quality of Nyoman Lempad’s carving as Walter instinctively charmed the houseboy, poured tea and settled back, staring up at the internal spiderwork of the roof struts, impressed by his own design.
“In Bali, every house is based on the body of its owner,” Walter mused, “combined in the correct proportions. So this one is saturated with the span of Colin’s arms and hands and the length of his feet.” The thought made me feel as if I were clutched in a pudgy, sweaty-socked embrace – quite sick. We sat in silence for a while.
Then the peace was split by a cry from upstairs, piercing and primeval, almost a sob, a reprise of the Widow Traverso’s scream. It was not a cry for help but rather a noise imbued with the despair that only comes of a terrible wisdom, like the last defeated sound you will ever make in this world. We both leapt to our feet and I was halfway to the front door when I realised that Walter was not with me but halfway up the stairs. Above each door, was a transom that allowed light from the bedrooms to fall down into the gallery. I watched, appalled, as Walter skirted along the polished passageway, took a chair from against the wall and climbed on it to peer boldly in through the fanlight. He nodded, smiled, returned the chair to its place and sidled down the stairs and past me to sit on the front step and light a cigarette.