The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  That same month, Bruno, dressed only in a loincloth, undertook a ten-day hunger strike in front of the headquarters of Marubeni, the largest tropical wood importer in Japan.

  On the surface, the campaign was going well, Bruno’s constant stunts and speaking engagements generating ever more publicity around the world. The spark was all Bruno, he was the figurehead, but the organizing details fell to Roger and Georges, his oldest and best friends, stalwarts, and the only people who weren’t acolytes. But they were working for free, becoming exhausted, burnt out. “It was crazy,” said Georges. “Like hell. Bruno didn’t even have a phone, so it was all at my house or Roger’s. TV. Radio. It never stopped. I had a job. Roger had a job. And we were worried about Bruno.” They corralled him, made him promise to slow down and take two days a week off. He didn’t. “I tried to fence him in and that was a mistake,” said Georges. “You cannot do that with Bruno. The job grew bigger and bigger and bigger.” And they needed money, always more money to fuel the struggle. Bruno’s rescue from Sarawak alone had cost $25,000. Now he was flying all over the world. Bruno didn’t think about money; Georges did, constantly, to keep everything humming, and he started asking media for “contributions” in order to interview Bruno. And for all of Bruno’s single-minded dedication, he also acted capriciously, selfishly, sometimes disappeared for hours or even days at inopportune times. One summer day a rally had been organized up in the Alps, and Bruno was one of three featured speakers. Thousands of people streamed up the hills for the event, and when it came time for Bruno to speak, he had vanished. No one could find him. Long after the event was over, in the dark of night, he reappeared. He’d found a cave, he told Roger Graf, and he’d wanted to explore it. No apologies. “All of these people had worked for him and gone to see him speak and he just blew the whole thing off,” said Roger. “It was incredible!”

  Tension mounted. The journalist Ruedi Suter invited Roger and Bruno to his country house in the Black Forest to talk things through. It was raining, cold, and Suter’s wife worked all afternoon cooking a hearty soup. They took a walk and once again Bruno vanished. Gone. No one could find him. They returned to the house. Waited. Night fell. The soup was long ready. Finally Bruno appeared with four big trout. He had caught them with his bare hands. “He was very proud and we had to grill the trout,” said Suter, “but Roger was not amused.”

  He had, in fact, had enough; he quit his job and lit out for South America for the next two years. “I just wanted to have my own life,” Roger said. Then Bruno and Georges’s money quarrels increased, and Bruno said that that was all Georges cared about. “After all I’ve done for you, you think the only thing that interests me is money?” Georges shouted. He had given Bruno $5,000, his whole life savings, when Bruno was still in Sarawak. He had risked his freedom to rescue Bruno, had spent thousands on phone calls and faxes, had worked day and night. “I said, ‘Okay, that’s it! I don’t want anything to do with the organization. If money is really important to me, you can pay me back every single cent I’ve spent, around $20,000.’ I thought he’d come around and say he was sorry, to forget it, but he didn’t. Not for years, anyway.”

  Bruno was now unleashed, surrounded by sycophants and followers who couldn’t say no to him. And he was once again sneaking in and out of Borneo.

  Four hours by boat from the nearest road, at an Iban longhouse, we found Lusan, covered in traditional hand-tapped tattoos. (Carl Hoffman)

  Fourteen

  The bell rang clear and high-pitched, the chant monotone, sound and words mixing with incense, which sent the words to the gods. Overhead, the leaves of a banyan tree, its silver-gray trunk six feet wide and wrapped in a black-and-white-checkered cloth, rustled in the merest whisper of breeze. Michael Palmieri and I sat cross-legged on a woven rattan mat next to Jiro Mangku Nuada, a mangku (a Balinese priest) with black Henry Kissinger glasses and buck teeth and a waiflike body dressed all in white. We wore batik sarongs, with traditional Balinese headdresses, or udeng, on our heads. Slightly behind me and to my right sat Michael’s pembantu, his housekeeper, there to guide me through the ritual.

  We were bound for Borneo the next day, and before leaving Michael insisted we “ask for permission.”

  Now, sitting in a walled temple courtyard built around the sacred banyan tree, he whispered in my ear as the mangku chanted. “He’s saying we’re going on a long journey and he hopes they’ll watch over us.” Two round trays lay at Nuada’s knees. One held a plastic bag of frangipani blossoms, a round brass bowl of holy water, and a stick of burning incense. The other tray held more holy water, a container of uncooked white rice, a container of arak for the gods, and a banana leaf. In a plaited basket were three more sticks of burning incense, and neat piles of brilliant red, blue, and white flowers. The bell, its handle a Hindu vajra thunderbolt, rang and rang, the chants hypnotic. The only words I recognized were “Kalimantan” and “Saraswati,” the Hindu god of knowledge and wisdom. Nuada flicked holy water on us and we sipped it from a small cup three times. We tossed pinches of flower petals, red, white, and blue, for Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. Pressed grains of dry rice to our foreheads, throats, and hearts. Took a few bites. Tossed a few grains to the ground. Scooped the smoke from burning incense to wash it across our faces.

  I was an atheist, but I was middle-aged and had experienced enough loss and existential angst to nurture a growing appreciation for ritual and metaphor. All was not logical. All was not understandable. Control was an illusion. In the swamps of New Guinea, far from the nearest road or store or even electrical light, I had once been present as men beat drums and chanted for twenty-four hours straight under the stars and flashes of heat lightning, communicating with the spirits and ancestors, spirits they could see and feel as surely as the shadowy trees around them. In Bali for months now I had watched and heard ceremonies in my neighborhood’s temples and on street corners and sometimes even in the streets themselves. Every morning my pembantu placed a fresh little basket of offerings, including sometimes a coin, candy, a kretek cigarette, flower petals, and always incense, before my front door. Whether spirits were real or not wasn’t the point, I was coming to understand. God, the ineffable, the great questions and wonders, could never be explained through science or technology or consumerism alone. The human spirit yearned for something bigger; it always would. That was its nature and its curse. We had all been cast out of singularity, oneness, Eden, and we were all, like Bruno Manser, restlessly trying to get back to the arms of the mother, as he put it, even if we didn’t articulate it. The rituals and ceremonies of old, I realized, watching the banyan leaves rustle as the bell rang and the God-given rice—food, life itself—fed our heads and hearts and souls, didn’t explain anything, not logically, anyway, but in their action they said we didn’t know and that we hoped and acknowledged the beauty and mystery of our existence. We weren’t literally communicating with the gods; we were doing something bigger. We were propitiating our own questions, wonders, doubts, and imaginations, confirming our very humanity in doing so.

  That was the appeal of the Dayaks in Borneo, the Balinese, the Asmat in Papua, the reason for our fascination with indigenous people. And for the statues and artwork they produced and that rich collectors wanted in their living rooms. The rituals, the statues, created a continuum of past and present and future for their makers. They anchored them. The Dayaks, the Balinese, the Asmat, they were surrounded by their ancestors and they had an intimate connection to the trees and birds, to the stars and the animals they hunted. They knew who they were, where they had come from, and where they were going. They experienced a wholeness that we lacked. The rituals and their accompanying works of art were, for westerners, the physical manifestations of a lost world, a lost way of living. They had a treasure that had slipped from our hands, but that we dreamed of still.

  But there were two sides to that treasure. We westerners flew onto the islands and admired the rituals and temples. We snapped photos of ourselves in sacred spaces and made
a show of yoga asana against their stone carvings; a few of us even attended a wedding or cremation. But we only wanted it when it suited us, for we wanted our freedom too. We came, we ogled, we left. Even the expats I knew who lived for years in Bali hired mangkus when it suited them. But for the Dayaks of old, for the Balinese even now, their religion and its sacred duties were all-consuming. The average Balinese woman and man spent a vast part of their energy and days preparing offerings, attending to temple activities, weddings, funerals, cremations, teeth filings, baptisms, caught in a web of never-ending obligation to family and community, temple and spirits that would suffocate the average American as surely as a full Latin mass. Mutang, the Kelabit Dayak who like most of the Dayaks in Sarawak had become an evangelical Christian, acknowledged as much. “In the old days you had to be so observant, so attuned to the environment; it took all of your time and energy. When a certain bird passed you had to know it and see it and if you didn’t it could cause a big injury. If you can’t be that respectful of nature, if that’s not embedded in your heart, the old model doesn’t work anymore.” For Mutang, Christianity was new, modern, and it offered a much easier life without “fear” and “taboos,” but for so many westerners traditional Judeo-Christianity came laden with too much baggage; it was the old model that no longer applied with its old force. We New Age spiritual seekers loved the idea of Balinese rituals or Dayak spirits in the leaves and trees, with a dash of yoga and namaste. Bruno had been different because he’d wanted it all the way. Owning a statue, even my participation in the ceremony, was “culture lite.” A dabbling. A souvenir. And that was good enough for most of us.

  In the middle of the chants Michael leaned over again and said, “He’s talking about the wild animals, and to keep us safe from snakebites,” and as the little ceremony ended, the mangku tied a red string on our wrists, though he struggled with Michael’s thick arm. “Big banana!” he said in Indonesian, laughing.

  When he’d first gone to Borneo in the 1970s, the trip from Bali required a bus to Gilimanuk, a ferry to Java, and then another bus or train to Surabaya, there to catch a flight to Balikpapan, the largest city in East Kalimantan. If all went smoothly, the journey took a full day. Now Michael and I were flying direct, nonstop from Bali in ninety minutes. From Balikpapan we’d travel to Samarinda, a city that I had last visited in 1987, and then maybe head up the Mahakam River, maybe not. It depended on how it all looked, what people said when we got there. He moved fast and he wanted to hit West Borneo and Sarawak too. From my trip there in 1987, I remembered Samarinda as a searingly hot, dusty backwater, a city-town of one- and two-story buildings and corrugated roofs and half-paved streets, a place that felt like the end of the earth. Times had changed, Michael warned me. Everything would be different now. Roads snaked everywhere. Oil and coal and timber had been pouring out of the island for decades. Fortunes had been made. “We’ll be lucky if we find anything,” he said. But the moment he’d contacted a few connections there, the texts and calls had been flooding in. “The jungle drums are beating!” he said. “They know we’re coming.”

  I was eager to see Michael in action. His stories were fresh in my mind. Mon petit cowboy swaggering through the streets of Paris. Sailing across the Persian Gulf. The wheeling and dealing in Afghanistan. Fifty years of buying and selling and hustling across borders. In some ways it was all too much to believe. But travel has a way of stripping away the veneers, and now I was going to see how he’d done it. Michael was in his seventies; he rarely drank, he rarely stayed out past 9 or 10 p.m., he wore hearing aids, he sometimes referred to himself as “the formerly handsome Michael Palmieri,” but he still had a certain swagger, or so it seemed on Bali, at least. The international tribal art market was a vast network that led from the jungles of one of the quintessentially romantic places on the planet to the most affluent galleries and auction houses and living rooms in the West, and Michael had long been a key figure in that economy. An economy of not just objects, but ideas, myths, fantasies of jungles and head-hunters and wildness. It was the treasure of a myth, and now I was going treasure hunting at the source with the master himself.

  The minute we hit the airport, it felt like a power switch went on. I could see it. Michael was the most outgoing person I’d ever experienced. He had no shyness, no fear, no reticence, no shame. He talked to everyone. Not just gate personnel and flight attendants, but children and old ladies in hijabs. A constant patter. In English. In Indonesian. A chatter that wouldn’t slow down for nearly a month and that sometimes repulsed people but mostly drew them in, made them laugh, often uproariously. He wasn’t a clown and he wasn’t just another obnoxious American. He was something else, a giant, smiling force of nature whose sheer physical size and self-possession carried a whiff of danger laced with humor. The perfect buccaneer.

  Michael’s warnings about the pace of development in Borneo notwithstanding, Balikpapan shocked me. It might have been any big Indonesian city anywhere. Four-lane roads packed with cars and motorcycles. Canyons of ten-story glass-and-concrete buildings, tangles of overhead wires and satellite dishes and billboards. It was hard to imagine Dayaks or Penan anywhere, which was my own silly romanticism, for we would soon meet many and they all, or almost all, looked as modern as anyone else. We checked into a big white hotel with humming air conditioners and fifty channels of television and fought our way across the street—eight lanes of traffic—as the sun dropped, to a little half-outdoor street restaurant with plastic chairs and tables serving rendang, a slow-cooked dry curry originally from Sumatra that we both coveted.

  “If you could be any age, what would you be?” I asked him as we savored our spicy stew and moths crowded the bare light bulbs above our head.

  “Thirty,” he said, without thinking. “Just coming into my own powers and knowledge, but still young. Those first years, it was hard. There were some really difficult times. When I was lonely. Had no money. Was homesick. Wanted to go home, but I couldn’t.” A look crossed his face, one that I hadn’t seen before. Inward-looking. A little bit sad. A rare crack opened. “Once I left and the war, the draft, started, I couldn’t go home. That forced me to be bold and to persevere and to learn new languages. I was just a dumb surfer kid who knew nothing, and it took me a long time to get knowledge. If the war hadn’t been on, I’m sure my life would have been completely different. I would have left, yes—I had girl trouble and wanted to see Europe and have adventures—but I’m sure after a year or two I would have gone home. But I couldn’t. I was stuck.”

  Those words hit me hard. That was something that happened, in a certain way, to all of us. How the choices we made put us on rivers that carried us to our fates, journeys that became harder and harder to disembark from the older we got. But I hadn’t thought it had happened to him. I had always seen Michael as pure boldness, admired that in him. And Bruno too. Men who’d chosen such a profoundly different path, had followed their crazy dreams in pursuit of the most intense adventures, a different life entirely from the normal nine-to-five. In my imagination I’d always just assumed every piece of Michael’s life had been pure choice, unlike the poor working schmucks stuck in offices in Washington, D.C., or Basel, Switzerland, anchored down by mortgages and meetings. But at that instant I realized the paths Michael and Bruno had chosen had been just as hard to veer off of. Seeking an obscure treasure, a sort of paradise, they were chained to it just as surely. So many of the former hippies in Bali lived without permanent legal status, couldn’t by law actually own their homes, had never paid a dime in taxes, and had no retirement benefits. Even keeping bank accounts was becoming harder in a post-9/11 world where governments tracked money. What could a buccaneer do at a certain point in his life but buccaneer? What could a middle-aged guy who really wanted nothing more than to live in the deepest forest with hunter-gatherers do when there were no more hunter-gatherers or rain forest left? Michael loved to watch college football and American TV from his house in Bali and he was pure American in so many ways, but he could n
ever go home again. And that epiphany about Michael would soon help me understand what happened to Bruno perhaps more than anything else, a man who ended up on a cul-de-sac with nowhere to go, no way out.

  In the morning we jumped in a taxi to Samarinda, arriving to what was now a big, sprawling city cut by the quarter-mile-wide brown Mahakam River, jammed with freighters and container ships and wooden Bugis schooners, their arching, high prows lining the docks. Looking down on it from my tenth-floor air-conditioned room, I tried to remember it thirty years ago and could barely do it. I didn’t recognize anything. Its modernity and sprawl and traffic wiped my memory clean, felt disorienting, dislocating.

  Michael’s phone was buzzing like a vibrator with a broken off switch. “C’mon,” he said, “we’re being picked up right now!”

  Ali Hajj jumped out of a waiting Toyota SUV in the hotel driveway. “Ah, Pak Michael!” he said, embracing him in a long, tight hug. He was late middle-aged, wearing white cotton slacks and a white T-shirt, a gray mustache and goatee on a meaty face, a brushed steel watch the size of a small clock on his left wrist, his fingernails long and sharp. “This man,” he said, as we lurched through the crawling traffic along the riverfront, “he taught me everything! He is my brother, my teacher.” They had first met, he said, back in 1978 on the Samarinda waterfront when he was twenty and Michael needed a porter. “I carried for him, and now . . .” He had seen income and opportunity, had learned the business, had become wealthy, had been to Mecca, and owned a sprawling shop, which we pulled into a few minutes later. It was, to me, incredible, magical, every inch filled with carved, eroded statues and Dayak hats and mandaus and stone Buddhas and Dayak ossuaries and Chinese martavan jars and glass cases crowded with hornbill ivory and fetishes, brass earrings, rooms and rooms of it, two floors, floor to ceiling, the whole thing dusty and dark, the floors creaking.