by Sharlene Teo
“Would you like a drink?” I ask her.
“Oh, yes please,” the woman replies. “That would be nice.” I bring her a carton of red longan tea.
“Thank you,” she says as she sips through the straw. “I was feeling very heaty. Are you Amisa’s daughters?”
“Not me, her,” Circe replies. “She’s Szu, and I’m Circe.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Szu,” the woman says. “Wait, which one is Szu?”
“I am.”
“Ah, I see,” she says. “How grown up you are!’
Circe and I exchange a look.
The woman is very statuesque. She smells like classy boutiques, and up close I see the foundation patted all over into her face, spread over her pores and slightly smudged in the humidity. She could be anything between her late twenties and her early forties.
“Did you work with my mother too?” I ask. Out of the corner of my eye I notice that my aunt is sitting ramrod straight and watching us.
“Not me,” the woman replies. “Iskandar Wiryanto is my dad. He worked with your mother.”
She’s smiling but her eyes are serious.
“Can I help you?” my aunt asks. She’s come up behind us. She sits down one chair away from the woman.
“I was just chatting with your granddaughter.”
“She’s my niece,” Aunt Yunxi says, unsmiling. “Have we met?” she continues. “I’m Yunxi.”
“I’m Novita,” the woman says, embarrassed. “My father directed the Ponti movies.”
“Ah, of course. Iskandar Wiryanto,” says Aunt Yunxi. “I heard so much about him. How is he?”
“He passed, ten years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happens,” Novita replies, taking in the funeral awning. “I didn’t know Amisa had family in Singapore. We spent a lot of time together.” Novita directs this statement at me, not Aunt Yunxi. “Would you like to hear a story about your mom, Szu?”
“Got no time,” says Aunt Yunxi.
“Uh. Sure,” I reply, even though I don’t like the way the woman addresses me as if I’m six, not sixteen. “What story?”
Beside me, Circe leans forward in her chair.
“Oh, a funny one,” Novita says. She glances towards my aunt. “I’ll keep it brief. I was five when they filmed Ponti! The first time I met your mother on set, she approached me wearing this light-brown samfoo, her hair in braids. Even dressed so plainly, she looked like a princess. Just so perfect. We played marbles on set. Anyway, the second time I visited the set, my father points at this cluster of huge banana trees and says, hey, Novita, why don’t you go over there? Maybe I’ve hidden a present. So I do that. And just when I get really close the leaves rustle, and your mother leaps out at me, growling. This time she’s all in white and her mouth is bloody. I screamed and ran as fast as I could, but I didn’t see the metal pole.”
“Jeez,” Circe says. Novita looks around at her audience of three, including my frowning aunt who has her arms crossed.
“Then what?” asks Circe.
“I knocked my front tooth out. I still remember the crunch. I saw stars. Blood everywhere. We were never able to find it. We looked all over.”
“So Mrs. Ng scared the tooth out of you,” Circe says, and laughs.
“Oh yes!” Novita says, and clasps her hands.
I imagine my mother parting the leaf blades, feral, angry. It makes me shiver. Aunt Yunxi has a hooded ex-pression on her face. Her mouth is pursed.
I grimace at Novita. I don’t know what to say. I assume she’s mistaken Circe for me again, as if we’re completely interchangeable. Novita brings her hand up to tuck her hair behind her ear and I notice her fingernails, dirty, with chipped bright-red polish.
“Well, thanks for coming to pay your respects,” Aunt Yunxi says. “But I’m afraid we are packing up.”
I glance at the clock; it’s only 10 p.m. Last night we wrapped up long past eleven.
“What a shame,” Novita says. “Szu, I have so much I want to tell you about your mother.”
“Another time. Thanks for coming,” Aunt Yunxi says. “I’ll show you to the gate.”
My aunt gets up from her chair and stands there staring at Novita like she’s a picture she wants to take off the wall. Novita picks up her bag and slings it back over her shoulder. She reaches over Circe to throw her drink carton in the black bin. When she looks back I am surprised to see that her eyes are reddened and a little wet. She stares at me for a moment.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she says. “I’ll see myself out.”
We watch her totter down the driveway. She shuffles away much more self-consciously than she came, holding herself stiff as a board. I keep expecting her to veer around and shout something crazy. But she reaches the gate, unlatches it, and avoids our eyes as she turns to shut it behind her.
“That was awkward,” Circe mutters.
“Shouldn’t you be on your way too?” Aunt Yunxi asks.
*
That night I dream of my mother with her hair in an uncharacteristic high ponytail, like one of the volleyball girls at school. Her expression is mild and almost peaceful. She walks up the corridor that runs along the kitchen to my bedroom, to hers, and ends at Aunt Yunxi’s door at the bottom of the hall. She skims and traces the left wall with her fingertips. The smell of burnt tuberose fills the hallway, acrid and distinct. Under Aunt Yunxi’s door a red light is glowing. The light gets brighter and brighter and frames my mother’s smooth, sunken cheeks in orangey red. She reaches out to turn the handle, changes her mind, and turns towards the extraterrestrial glow of the kitchen. That striking woman from earlier tonight is standing in front of the counter, as tall as the fridge. I can’t remember her name. She stares at my mother, her big eyes doleful as a puppy’s. My mother reaches towards her and takes her hand. The woman stoops as she follows. When they are out in the corridor the woman seems to grow; she has to curve her back and hunch up her shoulders. My mother leads her past our doors and towards Aunt Yunxi’s room. When they reach the door frame with its lip of light they turn about and come back down the hallway again. My mother’s bare feet are silent but the woman’s clog shoes clop across the tiled floor. I half open my eyes and stir in bed. My bedroom is bathed in the watery blue of so-late-it’s-morning. Two feet away, the clop-clop-clop sounds out just on the other side of my bedroom door. I blink awake and try to move; fail, listen, panic. By the time my hand meets my face the clopping is replaced by the drone and thump of garbage trucks.
18
AMISA
1978
The first Monday after Didi died, Amisa auditioned for the role of Ponti. It took place on the same day as Didi’s funeral, but she couldn’t bear to go. She stood before Iskandar and his producers in a hollow-eyed daze, did as he said. The motions felt effortless; she had nothing to lose. They offered her the role on the spot. The next morning she quit her job at the Paradise Theatre. Filming started six weeks later, in January.
Every morning as she brushed her teeth she looked in the mirror and thought: Full-Time Actress and Most Beautiful Woman in Asia. Her ego bloomed like the tacky purple flowers printed on the shower curtain. Her hope yawned out over the horizon. She loved the calm eye of the recording cameras, the blinking lights, the costume changes, the gallons of fake blood, fake knives, fake leaves, fake walls, the hustle and hassle of people all gathered to shoot her. The only problem was that she was finding the actual acting harder than she thought.
Some nights Wei Loong came to watch her filming after work. Having him there should have comforted her, but instead she felt even more stilted. Iskandar Wiryanto no longer treated her with the same gushing reverence as at their first meeting. One week into the shoot, he had already revealed himself to be a tyrant, a small-time despot, an egomaniac. But she had signed a contract for three films and would have to see it through.
At the start of week two, they were filming in a field at 2:30 a.m. Even her husband’s presence failed
to quell Iskandar’s anger.
“You are driving me mad! This is not working. Useless. Unusable. We are all doomed.”
Iskandar knocked the clapperboard out of the assistant’s hand and marched towards Amisa. She stood in front of the film crew with the lights trained on her, in a thin white dress, barefoot. Her legs were covered in mud and she had twigs in her long black hair. Makeup made her face chalky, her eyes rimmed in bruises, and she shivered even though it wasn’t cold.
“Here. Stand here, like that, on the mark,” he said, pointing. “And you’ve got to make a show of it when you come out of the tree. Make it more expressive. Right now you are really like a corpse. This is the big reveal. Have some energy. Be graceful, like a dancer, a scary dancer.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I can dance, but I don’t know what’s a scary dancer.”
“Expressive dancer!”
“What is that? Why must you always say so cheem?”
“Are you stupid?”
“No, I’m not, and you can’t talk to me like that.” She crossed her arms and jutted out her jaw.
“Come with me,” he said. He grabbed her arm. Her husband just looked on, as did the two camera assistants and the surly electrician Ah Choon, who had a mild smirk on his face. Iskandar Wiryanto led her past the piled-up equipment and empty catering table, over to his tan-brown Ford Cortina in the car park.
“Get in,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I say so.”
Reluctantly, she sat in the passenger seat. He got in beside her and slammed the door. It was dark in the car and its vinyl upholstery reeked of smoke and pickles.
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere, that’s the point. Listen, Amisa, I know we have our differences. But I have so much faith in you. I know you can do something special.” His voice was slow and soft and his mustache moved as he talked so she could only see the bottom of his mouth, like a ventriloquist’s puppet. “You have to channel the right energy and really focus. Stop just standing there and looking pretty only. Be like how you were on your audition. Remember when you cried and howled, and you were so furious that we thought you were going to scratch our eyes out? Hamid and Chek Bee and Roddy and I were blown away. Completely floored. Try and equal that.”
“My brother just died, back then,” she said. She stared at her small pale hands on her lap and the remembering subdued her.
“Look at me.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Why not? I’m your director. It’s my job. And we signed a contract.”
She turned towards him slowly, her face catching a slice of yellow light. “What do you want?”
“Your power. Ponti! needs some of that. Without your power there is no film: my vision is ruined. Don’t just rely on your looks. That’s the easy way out. Be my Pontianak, my murderous ghost, inside and out. Go deeper. Channel all the shit you want to shout about. You feel a lot, Amisa, I can tell. It’s all seething under that perfect face of yours, waiting to be coaxed out. Life is loss, right? You’re only twenty, but don’t you have regrets, don’t you worry where the time has gone? You might tell me, no, Iskandar, I’m so young and pretty, saya tidak mengerti! But I’d know you are lying. Because everybody has regrets. And everybody wonders where time has gone.”
She sighed and looked out of the window, at the car park with its reed-grown, sordid lots.
“Your brother would be happy for you to do well,” he continued softly. “I know he would. Trust me. You can be great. You have something special.”
Iskandar Wiryanto was fifty-five and still reminded her of a hawk-eagle. She felt a pang in her chest partly en-gendered by that likeness. Inside the stuffy car, it dawned on her for the first and only time in her life: this strong, disorienting twinge that straddled fear and pleasure. She respected him, she supposed. He scared her, and nobody else commanded that. She wanted to prove him right. What was special about her, behind her incredible face? Did she really have a lodestone of wonderfulness nested inside: something chimeric that sparkled and warped, a brilliance waiting to be called? She didn’t know, but he seemed sure.
She started going over to the Wiryantos’ house after shoots some evenings or late afternoons, depending when they wrapped and what time they started. This was common knowledge amongst the crew and her costars, and Amisa adopted the same prideful unabashedness that she had in her village. So what if people thought she and Iskandar thrice weekly typified a film-industry cliché: the ingénue leading actress sleeping with the ageing director—the most appealing penis being the one attached to the most power. So what if most of the crew and costars hated her, and Novita, the director’s five-year-old daughter, followed her around the set like an annoying little ghost she couldn’t shake off.
The Wiryantos lived in a sprawling, professionally decorated bungalow in East Coast with two separate wings. Mrs. Wiryanto occupied the left wing, which smelt of lilacs and citrus. Amisa only peeked in once, saw a labyrinth of walk-through cupboards filled with steam-pressed designer gowns and endless shoes in fancy boxes.
Novita had a round room in the middle, full of toys still perfectly new and wrapped up in plastic. Mrs. Wiryanto encouraged her daughter to be a collector, rather than someone who messed and crinkled things up. The right wing was Iskandar’s domain, where he conceptualized and wrote his scripts. He occupied a huge book-lined study with a parquet floor, a big television, a record player, and a board for his script ideas. It was into this room that Amisa followed him during her visits, and he always locked the door behind her. His daughter waited outside, scratching at the woodgrain from time to time like a small dog that hadn’t been fed.
Inside, everyone thought they were fucking like animals. It would have seemed so; she emerged from the house with messy hair, dazed eyes. Even Wei Loong, she was sure, must have pictured filth in there with the same limp, helpless anger that made her detest him. Ah Choon the gaffer, Anson the second camera operator, and Poh Heng the special-effects man were the worst gossips of all. One day, she heard them conferring behind a bougainvillea bush at lunch break. They were saying the lewdest things in Hokkien about what she and Iskandar got up to in his house; what Iskandar was sticking in her front and back doors; how many times; what their little Indochinese baby would look like with such a lunatic for a dad and a dumb, moody bitch for a mother; whether poor Novita had to plug her ears with cotton wool to drown out the horrible sounds. Amisa didn’t bother to shove her way through the bushes and confront them.
The truth was, she wished their speculations were true. By then, it was what she wanted. She surprised herself. She had fallen in love with the most hideous man she had ever met. Unbeknownst to almost everyone else, the handsome leading actor Abdul Aziz was the one who snuck in and out of Mrs. Wiryanto’s wing, and one time they even ran into him in the corridor wearing nothing but a towel, his glistening broad chest exposed. Iskandar waved cheerfully to him and told him, “Have fun, just be careful.”
What Amisa and Iskandar did in the locked room did not fit the mode of a conventional affair. Because he didn’t lay a finger on her.
It went like this. They entered the room. She put down her bag. He drew up a chair and sat. He pointed and made her lie in the middle of the floor, with her arms and legs spread out. Most times she was fully clothed; other times he made her take off all her clothes and get into a pair of faded white trunks that looked like adult diapers. She would cross her arms over her breasts and he would say, Don’t be stupid, put them down. And he would talk to her. That was it, just talk, but how potent his talk. Spirals of speech about how boring she was making herself and how much better she actually was. How she was a dead gray soul in a beautiful shell, or a sublime soul in a flawless but awful husk of being, depending on his mood. How her beauty meant nothing in a murderous world where men just wanted to fuck and kill her and nobody cared what she thought. And where women saw her as a challenge, or a husband thief. He brought up her brother,
her mother, her sister, her village, and how they disapproved of her. He made her tell him how many men she had slept with, an estimate, and he sneered. He was so impossibly cruel that after a while she just took it, came to expect the degradation, felt it was somehow deserved. He made her repeat lines of the script to him over and over until the words stopped making sense, and then he laughed at her English pronunciation and told her it didn’t matter what she sounded like, they were dubbing the films over anyway with a voice actress from Los Angeles called Savannah Roberts, and Amisa couldn’t sound better or more intelligible even if she tried for a million years. He broke her spirit and built her up again within the hour by soothing her with his honeyed voice, telling her impassioned stories about the tangled wilderness of Sumatran jungles; the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of communists; the terrible ways that Suharto’s dictatorship prevailed; how he had had no choice but to leave forever, his life now scattered across Asia and Europe, his artistic vision to make these horror films that would put Indonesia and Singapore on the world map. He had so many myths to tell, an unquenchable thirst to cram his moods and memories into ninety pages of script and make it explode across the screen. The character of Ponti he based on his own dead mother, who bore a slight resemblance to Amisa. He would make her unbelievably famous. Her face would grace billboards in Hong Kong, Paris, Hollywood; she would fly across the world in private jets; she would be his muse and they would attend the Golden Horse Awards and the Oscars together. She would be immortal.
One day, she got up and reached her arms towards him, half naked and so lissome and entreating with her hair all mussed, pert breasts and sparkling eyes. She was giving it her best shot. He put his hands up in a gesture of polite disgust and supplication. He was so good at saying and doing things that were both commanding and placatory all at once.