by Nigel Barley
Jane, Mrs Pussy, came and perched beside me, lit two cigarettes, handed me one, just as Rangda made her first appearance to a crash of gongs that echoed back from the other side of the ravine and a shudder ran through the crowd. The puppets for other characters were held close to the screen so that they were small and sharp but Rangda fluttered some way behind it, large and inchoate, as if still crystallising into existence.
“Rangda is the non-childbearing woman,” she said, “for whom everything is jealousy and negativity. Sometimes I think that’s me. Of course, sometimes it’s Margaret. That’s why she was so keen to use the name for Beryl. You men without babies just don’t have the same things to put up with. And in the dramatic version, the kindly, protective Barong is the nurturing father and gets all the good lines.”
I shrugged. “In the mountain villages here, men without children are not allowed to live in the centre or play a full role in life. They are considered never to have grown up, like – I suppose – Walter and myself.”
“But they don’t get all the evil and bad crap in the universe dumped on them, like Rangda. Margaret sees the roots of Rangda in the teasing mother as the embodiment of fear. Look …” She pointed. A mother was ignoring her desperately struggling child, slung under one arm, staring off into space, not even at the screen. “The mother alternately plays with the child and then just ignores it, a sort of cultural schizophrenia, that makes the Balinese so passive yet permanently anxious. The convulsions of the possessed are just the tantrums of the ignored child. We may not say it but we are never far from despising those who love us. And all men marry their mothers.”
Such nonsense. “Please,” I said, with distaste. “I did not marry mine.”
She smiled. “You sure didn’t Rudi. You chose the other option and shunned all women. And, for once, in tonight’s version Rangda gets it good, killed stone dead by a mighty holy man. Ida Bagus’s favourite, all-male version.” She threw down her cigarette and stood up stiffly like an old barren, non-childbearing witch, rested her hand softly and sadly on my shoulder and went over to the Meads. Margaret was making energetic notes in the torchlight, arguing with Greg over something. I heard him say “Oh, put a sock in it, Margaret” and I got up and went to the kitchen. Low lamps were lit, clotting the shadows in the corners. There was a jug of water on the table but in this house they drank – rashly – the water unboiled and unfiltered, straight from the well. Coffee was still warm on the stove. That would have been boiled. I looked round for a cup, found none and poured myself some into a glass that stood on a shelf over the sink. In my household, after washing, I had instructed that glasses be rinsed in boiled water. Here, I would have to take a chance. The Balinese liked to know how much everything cost in a fancy foreign home, transforming it into a museum of bule profligacy, so, in the McPhee household, the routine for washing glasses primarily targeted, not hygiene, but the preservation of the price tags gummed on the bottom.
“Leyak! Leyak!” Witch! Witch! I slopped coffee down myself, cursed and made for the side wall. Walter was already there, peering into darkness.
“What is it?” He pointed. Over in the fields, was a wavering light, dancing over the surface of water. It could be a witch, or a torch, or a lamp or the biggest firefly in the world or anything you wanted it to be. The shouting was from a child. Doubt was already creeping into its tones, dissolved in communal laughter. It was that point in the play where Rangda calls out to her acolytes, the witches, to come to her in the midnight graveyard and the dalang always milked it for everything is was worth. The lamp was dimmed, the orchestra fell – antimelodramatically – silent as his cracked, insane, unaccompanied voice yelled to the forces of darkness to come – right here, right now – and the audience trembled, made each other jump and squealed in delicious terror. Jane’s teasing mother, out there, would be shouting “Boo!” at her screaming child and the play’s success would be reckoned by the number of dead bodies, undoubted witches, children of Rangda, found in the village the next day. The performance had never wavered and now the players crashed and banged into a collective fight scene, individual blows marked by Ida Bagus’s rapping toe-hammer. Good against evil. Male against female. Life went on.
14
They came in the night in trucks with shouting, crashing of gears and deliberately importunate lights. They came on New Year’s Eve with no congratulatory wishes, no ingratiating bottle tucked under the arm. They came with a warrant for the arrest of Walter Spies.
The scene had been heavily over-engineered – a dozen dark Moluccan troops with rifles, controleur Smit at their head clutching a rolled document like a public proclamation, waving handcuffs and wearing the revolver he had never before got out of its cardboard box. They leaped from the trucks, crouched low, fanned out and approached the house as if in expectation of a withering volley of defensive fire. Alas, this tactic took no account of the fact that only a narrow staircase led down to the main building, so they were forced to crush together again and virtually fell, mutually jostling, through the front door. This disappointed them, for they had looked forward to kicking it down. Colonial troops were inordinately proud of their desperately uncomfortable but very splendid high boots that set them above the unshod local population. All this, I had later from one of the Moluccans, known to me from his regular appearances – in quite a different uniform and footwear – in the prowling after-dark parades of the lapangan kota. Walter, to Smit’s enormous disappointment, was simply not there. Even his managers, Lindner and Dreesen, were absent – at that moment innocently looking forward to the promise of the new year through pink champagne in Manxi’s bar – but there would be time for them later. The troops had to content themselves with a token amount of happy destruction and with rooting the terrified boys out from under their bed with poking rifle barrels, though they were more scared of the black faces than the guns. On principle, the boys knew nothing, swiftly rolling down the shutters of native incomprehension to turn blank, questioning faces on their colonial captors. They were rounded up and taken away in tears, it having been explained to them that they were to help the authorities in their inquiries into breaches of the Netherlands Penal Code Article 248 (2) of which they had never heard and which they did not understand. Then they came for me.
Access to my studio, insomuch as it was formally still part of the palace, involved a rather more extensive etiquette. Nevertheless, at three in the morning, the result was much the same – the sound of marching feet, the crunch of gravel, the door burst in – the eruption of the starkly political upon the nakedly domestic. My inherent modesty drove me, in those days, to the wearing of a sarong whilst sleeping, though for Smit, that, too, might be a dangerous sign of “going native”. Though I rose from my chaste and lonely bed with expressions of astonishment and outrage, I must confess that none of this came as a great surprise to me. I had even considered the merits of allowing them to discover me naked, red-faced therefore not red-handed, for come they must.
The obscure act of the Penal Code in question, it should be noted, proscribed physical intimacy between adults and minors who were members of the same sex. This, I felt sure, embraced McPhee’s shameful activities but not those of myself or Walter. Much was made of the affront to Queen Wilhelmina’s dignity that such behaviour constituted, something which seemed to me mysterious. I could see that the motions of her genitals, involving as they did the legitimacy of the state, were a matter of concern to me but not vice versa. (“Vice versa,” Walter would have quipped. “Isn’t that what we’re charged with, Bonnetchen?”) Until the very end, poor Resem was convinced all this fuss sprang from the disrespectful manipulation of his loins into the shadowed silhouette of Her Majesty on the living room wall.
Advance warning had come via McPhee’s expensive annual subscriptions to Batavian newspapers, delivered by air. When their divorce had come through, Jane had left with the Meads and he had stayed on alone in all the conditions of increasing seediness that come upon a solitary man living o
n scant funds. I had visited him some time afterwards to find him bearded and chainsmoking, petulant and lachrymose, drinking at ten in the morning and shockingly indiscreet in his indiscretions. Now, seeing which way the wind was blowing, he had promptly decamped, abandoning the house, Sampih and Jane’s pussies to their fate, but, traps packed, he had sent one of his boys over with the front page – and much would be made of this at the trial – with an attached note that read: “In view of the precarious situation, I have decided to head back to the States at once. I think you might want to do likewise”. The newspaper, it is true, was full of alarmist international news, the crumbling peace accords between Germany and the Allies since the Reich had gulped down the Sudetenland with scarcely a belch, the threatened annexation of the Polish corridor, the imminence of another European war – nothing it would be argued, that could be of relevance to us here, up a hill, in far Bali. But beneath the pinned note, lay another article with the infelicitously worded headline, “Crackdown on Boy Sex in the Indies – More Arrests to Follow”.
It was with this present scene in mind that I had ensured that I would be sleeping alone and, around the room, arranged a cavorting throng of dancing and bathing Balinese ladies – as randomly disconnected as in any splodgy roundel by Matisse – comely and bare-bosomed, in oils and pastels, like some nineteenth-century deathbed tableau of the great artist and his works. They would bear strident false witness for me. I was cowering behind what Walter termed “my protective breastwork”.
Smit stood there, blazing torchlight down on me, dark silhouettes crashing into each other behind him in the confined space. “Boots,” I said, invoking the householder’s sacred right to protect his property. “Would you mind asking your men to take off their boots? The floors here are a shallow skim of raw cement over soil, polished to a high finish. Your men’s boots are wrecking it.” I reached out for matches, laid ready on the bedside table, and made a pantomime of coolly lighting the lamp.
From the shadows, my ladies leapt to prominence and Smit, on reflex, took off his hat as his men gawped and started sniggering behind their hands, like schoolboys in the presence of smut.
“Alright sergeant. Take the men outside. Two to guard the door. Ten minute cigarette break.” He turned to me, thrust his hands in his pockets and began nervous ball-juggling. There was nowhere to sit but the bed. He wasn’t going to do that, so I did, gathering the sheet to hide my undress. “There’s more to this than boots,” he asserted. “Anyway, as it is, the Germans are stamping all over Europe with their big boots. Where’s Spies?”
“Walter?” I raised both hands in a delicate gesture from Balinese dance to express my innocence. “I have no idea …” I struck my thigh, through the thin stuff, as in one of Charlie’s hammy films. Careful! Soon I would break into a song and dance routine from one of Noel’s musicals. “You know of course that he has a house at Iseh? – where he paints? – I expect you will find him there. What’s all this about?” I rubbed in his disappointment, mimed puzzlement. “Did you expect him to be at home? Isn’t everyone out at parties, having fun anyway? It is New Year, after all – for us Europeans that is. Unless, of course, you’ve gone native.” I fair beamed benevolence at him. Walter was, of course, not at Iseh or anywhere in that direction. With a bit of luck, he was already in Java, being looked after by friends in the administration, all shunted there from Bali by the new Governor General. He would throw them all off the trail by walking, on little paths, to Singarajah and rendezvous with a car there. In Java, he would be safe.
“I’ve got my eye on you, Bonnet.” He delved deep into a pocket and juggled unhappily.
“That’s comforting to hear, controleur.”
He gestured at my harem. “Don’t think I don’t know what you get up to with the ladies of the night on the lapangan kota but we can’t – as yet – touch you for that. One of the traditions of the Indies, I suppose.” He lit a cigarette, blew smoke, threw the used match loutishly on the floor. “We might be able to do you for underaged girls.” He nodded at the paintings. “Some of those look pretty young to me and all these pictures should add up to a good long stretch behind bars, get the right judge, but that’s a can of worms we don’t really want to get into. That’s only natural, after all. This is all about boys, corruption of male minors. Nasty. How come a Dutchman spends so much time with a” – he sneered – “shirt-lifter?” He paused, confused, Balinese seldom wore shirts, among women only prostitutes. “A sarong-lifter?” That would not do either. Male and female both wore sarongs and, in my experience, Balinese were quite finnicky about “lifting above” things of the below. “A pillow-biter?” But a fixture of the Indies was the tubular pillows, known as “Dutch wives” that you wrapped yourself round at night to allow air to circulate. We all drooled on our pillows.
“What about ‘flower-boy-fancier’?” I suggested urbanely but a quiver of fear had crept into my voice. Jail? Under the sheet, I was slick with sweat. I cleared my throat. “In the old mountain villages, all boys who have their adult teeth but are, as yet, unmarried, are so designated. They are held to be particularly suitable to serve as vessels and vassals of divinity.”
He grinned, despite himself, and plunged his hand back to grip his privities, like the little flower-boys do whenever they feel insecure. “I think that might fit nicely. Our colonial children must be protected.”
“Look. The only ‘boys’ in Walter’s life are the houseboys who, as you are well aware, are far from being children – the appellation a matter of social station, not age. The fact is, all sorts of people pass through Campuhan, male, female, Balinese, bule. Walter is very popular. Barbara Hutton – I believe – wanted to marry him. You surely can’t imagine he sleeps with them all. I would guess that Walter is a very cool man sexually. You will be saying next …” I stared him coldly in the eye, “that I sleep with him.”
Smit mouthed distaste. “No need to be offensive.”
“The fact is that Walter has done more for the Dutch and for the Balinese than any other single person I know. The last Governor General would never have put up with this.”
Smit sighed. “The last Governor General did not realise the trouble these damn foreigners cause, constantly interfering in Dutch affairs and setting themselves up above the law. The sooner we’re shot of them, the better. Teach them a lesson they won’t forget. The last Governor General did not have a son-in-law with similar vices or a wife who made his life hell about it.”
“Hell”, “wife” – I immediately thought of his own embittered, psalm-singing soulmate. So, judging by the look on his face, did he. This could be their ticket back to the Hague or, at least, Weltevreden, the trim Dutch quarter of Batavia, gardeners, trams, ladies’ tea parties on the manicured lawn and all the other provincial comforts. That would draw her fangs a little.
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me. It doesn’t end there. We’ll need a statement and you’ve still got questions to answer. For God’s sake, man, put on some white man’s bloody clothes!”
As I struggled into a pair of presentable trousers and a shirt, Smit turned, shocked, away from the sight of my undress and contemplated the heaped-up, naked female flesh, unabashed. Outside, the men shambled to their feet, tucking snuffed smokes into top pockets, and fell in around me. I did not, of course, recognise my acquaintance from the lapangan kota. It appeared, to my relief that, for the moment at least, I was merely a witness and thus not subject to handcuffing. In the various courtyards we crossed, the silent palace residents gripped flickering torches of damar resin like extras from La Bohème and peered at me in curiosity, as though I were someone they had never set eyes on before. As the first rays of dawn struggled up from the east and I was hauled, trembling, up into the rear of the truck, I am sure I heard an excessively matinal cock somewhere crow once and then a second time.
Arrived in Denpasar, it seemed to me that the eyes of the by-now-rising Dutch residents were similarly eloquent, as I was frogmarched into the administra
tive buildings. “There he goes,” their looks said with satisfaction. “The dirty bugger. Thought he was better than us and now he’s going to be shamed in public, shown up, stripped bare, humiliated, thrown out of the country. It’ll be in all the newspapers and he’ll never sell another painting again. Serves him right. Someone should write to tell his mother.”
The architectural icons of the eastern empires affect the grandiloquence of Greek classical styles but reduced to the proportions of the Indian bungalow. On the main administrative building, whitewashed and fluted Doric columns towered up a full ten feet to support a complex entablature incorporating the Dutch royal arms executed in soft plaster and picked out in gloss paint. I was led beneath it and across a sort of grey-hued reception area, down endless corridors, along a covered outside walkway fringed by spiky plants and through various locked, metal gates. It was only when a leprous iron door was thrown open and I was pushed into the dark interior, that I realised that this was the town jail, entered – appropriately – from the rear. As the door clanged shut, Smit’s chuckling voice said, “Oh, by the way, Happy New Year”, like a hat, flung in contemptuously after a drunk. Then silence. I went and sat on the bed.
I sat there, more or less, for two days. There was little else to do. It was a bare cement cell, perennially damp, with an unglazed, barred window. No furniture apart from the cot that came with a thin kapok mattress, a palimpsest of every possible form of nocturnal incontinence. Above the bed, someone had scratched a crude caricature of buggery as though in welcome or admonition. Yet it fired my imagination. In my mind, during the empty hours, I painted over it an elongated mural, depicting the life of the Indies. Against a frond and wave-draped background, muscular farmers, wiry sailors, insinuating, robed Chinese, held aloft the wealth of the archipelago – calculating each paintstroke and mixing each colour in the pallette of my head. I cursed myself for my lack of prescience. I had brought no cigarettes or matches, no money to buy provender or suborn the loyalty of the visibly Balinese guard in his blue cotton uniform. Young, swarthy, with broken teeth, it occurred to me that he might, himself, be a prisoner here. Nevertheless, he brought me food three times a day, rice and undifferentiated slop – neither exactly hot nor cold – not unlike my daily dole from the Cokorda’s kitchens really but resisted all attempts at conversation or ingratiation. This is unheard of in the Indies, so I deduced that he must be acting on explicit orders. My excretory functions were dealt with by a chamber pot, emptied by the same guard once a day into a fly-buzzing bucket, brought for that purpose and already containing the effluent of others. It was of identical design to the one in which he delivered my drinking water and my disordered mind dwelt obsessively on the circumstances in which they might be confused. More troubling, I had not brought my supplies of quinine and other specifics. I could feel myself weakening at the whine of each questing insect.