by John Coast
The coming of the Stella Polaris was useful to us for two reasons. One passenger bought a painting I had long possessed, the work of one of Java's more publicized modem artists, and the price paid for it, though moderate, enabled us to live in Bali another two months; and another passenger collected a group to see a first try-out performance in Pliatan.
We put on for them some of the Djanger choruses, Sampih's Kebiar, and part of a Legong lesson, for which the little girls had their hair finely combed and decorated with tjampak blossoms, their tiny bodies being wound in the long pink strips of cloth normally used by Djanger girls. And at the end of the performance, which was given in a bate outside, and which was attended also by about a hundred thousand flying ants which circled and hummed round the kerosene lamp, the club collected a sum of about two hundred rupiahs-or twenty dollars. To us, however, the reaction of our audience was more interesting. They universally praised the gamelan and marvelled at the skill of Sampih; and the Legong lesson fascinated them by its giving them the feeling that they were seeing something secret, something very unusual. They loved the little girls. But the proud Djanger came in for the same comments that would be applied to any dance routine based on a line of pretty girls. This was, on the whole, most encouraging to our embryonic work.
But these were not people from the theatrical world, and it was our good fortune that quite soon afterwards, on one of the days when our dove orchids, small, white and heavily scented, were all in flower, there walked up to and hammered at our front gate a tall American, ruddy, direct-eyed, white eyebrows jutting, and with him an elegant little figure in pale olive-green Chinese pyjamas and sunglasses.
Kusti ran from the kitchen to the gate, bringing these guests in to our house.
They introduced themselves as Martin and Connie Flavin, and as we sat talking it gradually transpired that though now a novelist, formerly he had been a playwright, and had had quite a few of his plays on Broadway. When I outlined to him our work, he showed the liveliest interest, and by a natural sequence of events we spent much of the next few days together. With considerable anxiety we took the Flavins to watch a rehearsal in Pliatan, and he, while admitting, mark you, that he was no musician at all, said bluntly that he was convinced we were working with material that had limitless theatrical potentialities. He became our first expert enthusiast, giving us confidence by writing down for us his address in Pebble Beach, California, which at that time sounded as remote as if he had said Seventieth Crater West, Moon. But his imagination seemed tickled by our project and also by our struggle to exist in Bali with a nationalist revolution boiling around us. He invited us to his room in the Bali Hotel, where, in his shirt sleeves, he cross-examined us further in between slicing fresh pineapple for some powerful rum drinks of his own recipe.
“How do you live?” he asked.
"Well, we're selling things at the moment.” We told him about the painting sold to the Stella Polaris traveller, rings, Rolleiflexes.
"But we are also hoping to open a guest-house and take in a few carefully selected guests."
"Have you built it yet? I'd like to see it.
"We'll show it you—including the new bathroom."
"I imagine it must be something like Hawaiian style. But will you be able to live off it when you've finished selling your household goods?"
"Probably not. But we're getting to know a lot of Balinese painters and carvers, and we may sell their work, too. Then various people in Denpasar have asked us to teach English-wives of the Indonesian Army officers want Luce to teach them, and there are Balinese, Chinese and Javanese here in Denpasar who have asked me to take classes."
"Well, you might get by, I suppose. It's quite an adventure."
Then: "Tell me—what's all this about not being able to photograph bare Balinese breasts?"
"Its national sentiment—a new sort of pride."
"But what is back of it? Do they really fine you and take away your camera if they see you?"
"Not only that. They also fine the woman two hundred rupiahs if she allows herself to be photographed. That's a lot."
"God bless my soul!"
"You'd understand the modern Balinese viewpoint better, though, if you'd seen tourists posing Balinese girls as if they were dolls and photographing them as curiosities. You can't let modern education reach Indonesia and expect these people to remain unaware that this is considered primitive. Personally, I sympathize with some of their new ideas—and anyhow, most breasts after they've suckled a couple of children are not exactly aesthetically pleasing."
"There's probably something in that."
"Of course the funny thing is that to the Balinese the breast has little sexual appeal-you become used to it. I think I shall develop a fetish about ankles, myself. But to the Balinese it is unthinkable to bare a thigh—and that's why the Esther Williams pictures in Denpasar always sell out. They stop their women's breasts being photographed, and have a wonderful time whistling in the movies when they see bathing beauties. Don't you think that's rather amusing?"
He turned to his wife, not answering.
"And what do you think about it, my dear?"he asked.
When the Flavins dined with us on their last evening in Bali I was laid up with a chill, which I feared was a return of malaria. To the last they encouraged us, and as Luce dropped them back at the hotel they shouted in farewell," Don't forget: keep in touch."
From their seats in the Great Mountain the gods now sent another infliction to trouble Bali during this rainy season. As the New Year came and the auguries seemed better, because, thanks to Islam Salim, murders and rumours of murders were becoming steadily fewer, a pestilence descended upon the villages.
Our first realization of it came one morning when we were driving up the road to Sayan, Sampih's village. Sampih was learning to drive the jeep, and we often used this route to Pliatan because it was quieter, the road passing only small villages and wide expanses of sawahs, gradually ascending to the foothills. As we entered the villages I noticed by the sides of the road rough gateways made from bamboo poles crudely interwoven with fronds of coconut palm, and outside one village, in the middle of such a gateway, I glimpsed a black, painted coconut husk, grinning at us like a skull.
"Look Sampih! What is that?"
"I don’t know,” he answered.
"Oh, come on, Pih—it must mean something."
"Well, perhaps it means that there is sickness in the village. That might be a warning to strangers."
And this is how we learned for the first time that a plague of small-pox was sweeping through Bali, a tragic legacy from the Japanese war-time occupation followed by years of political strife afterwards. To the Balinese peasant, however, smallpox was a gift from the gods, to be accepted with resignation. They made many offerings, set up the warning gateways and waited for the scourge to pass.
But one day a messenger came to us from Kusti's village, telling me that one of the favourite models of Theo Meier, who was still on leave in Switzerland, was sick of the dreaded tjatjar. I was asked to bring medicine So, taking Kusti for company and also so that he could visit his family, I put penicillin and sulpha powder in the jeep and drove up the sixty-five kilometres to Iseh village, half-guessing that this would be a Balinese wild-goose chase.
Iseh is a poor mountain village lying at the foot of the Great Mountain, perched on the rim of a deep, fertile and most beautiful valley. The people, however, live in dingy hovels, roofed with reversed bamboo tiles, in small, muddy compounds. Life is far more primitive than in either Denpasar or Pliatan. The sick girl's uncle met me in one such wretched yard, in his hands holding a piece of white-pink, albino buffalo horn which he was laboriously carving into an exquisite figure of a crowned pedanda high priest. My visit was in vain, he feared—the child had the smallpox—it was from the gods—nothing could be done—he was sorry the Tuan had been bot
hered.
In the next yard I was met by the girl's grandfather, who irritated me by his polite and lengthy welcome, but who gave me hope, nevertheless. It was nothing, he said, just a few spots-perhaps nothing heavy at all. Thank God, I thought to myself, for this was a lovely young girl, and I patted my sulpha powder in my pocket, foreseeing a patch of septic scabies.
They took me inside a hut almost pitch dark—a wise precaution, this, for modern science and Balinese doctors know that smallpox scars are shallower and the pain less maddening if the sick person is kept in the dark. And in this filthy shack I made out some old women and the girl's mother. They looked blankly at me. "Greetings, Tuan," they said, and chased some chickens away that were on the bed and kicked out a fair-sized pig which had been sleeping on the black mud floor. As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I could see the bamboo bed, or shelf, where the child lay. I groped my way towards her.
"Greetings, Gusti," I began. "I have brought... " and found myself retching and running from the hut. The women followed me to the door, watching me, not criticizing but perfectly calm.
"A moment, Gusti Mother," I said. "In a minute I will enter again. I have never seen this sickness before."
And presently, partly from shame, partly from pride, but mostly from pity, I forced myself back into the now evil-seeming atmosphere of the hut.
On the hard bamboo bed lay what had once been a beautiful little girl. I saw a grossly swollen red body, entirely covered with disgusting pustules from its head to the soles of its feet. Eyes and mouth were almost invisible beneath the swelling. Her nose, madly irritant, the poor child had rubbed so that the skin was broken and its shape already destroyed. This awful bloated shell was so unrecognizable that I could not have told whether the body was that of a young girl or an old woman. It was a terrifying and pathetic sight.
Making a sorry job of it, I tried to speak to her. "Gusti Ayu, I am glad to see you are not so very ill. I have brought some good, strong medicine for you. And very soon Tuan Theo will be back from Switzerland to look after you. I will send you milk and foods up from Denpasar. And I will go now to find a medical orderly and ask him to come here every day to give you injections to make you strong. Try to feel that the orderly, Tuan Theo and I are all working for you; and try to help us by fighting to get better quickly, little Gusti."
And by God knows what miracle, live she did. I persuaded the orderly to come and give her penicillin injections daily against the secondary infections; Luce sent up tinned milk and other foods from Denpasar, and Theo came back in time to give her a long course of body-restoring injections. Her hair fell out, but began to grow again slowly, thinly; and with a ruined nose and pitifully scarred, the brave child was hobbling around her village again within a few months.
But on that first day, frightened, feeling saturated with the foul germs from that stinking hut, I drove back to Denpasar like one possessed, straight to the hospital and the resident doctor, where Kusti and I were vaccinated at once; and on the next morning our entire household was vaccinated, too.
The smallpox went on spreading. In some of the villages the baleans, village doctors, advised against vaccination, so that the Government eventually had to pass a law ordering every man, woman and child to receive the vaccine. But we would hear of three hundred people who had died in Boeg-Boeg, four hundred in a village near Gianjar, a hundred and fifty around nearby Sanur, until the casualties soared into the thousands.
One evening we met two young tourist doctors who had just qualified and had never seen smallpox. They jumped at the chance to see some, for we told them we were off to Saba, where a relation of one of the Legongs had just succumbed. On the way, just outside Saba, we were held up on the grassy track by a long and strange procession of villagers. All of them held wooden staves with pieces of green foliage tied to them, and as they walked they chanted and shouted savagely, banging their sticks on strips of metalor gongs, journeying to the sea, where they would make a special ceremonial cleansing for the effigies of their gods, whom they were bearing along on little raised shrines supported on their shoulders. This must be some sort of metjaru, we explained to the doctors, to drive out the evil spirits who had brought the smallpox, and which had now become an intolerable punishment.
But it was not until the vaccination was completed and the dry weather had come again that the smallpox left Bali.
The Legong lessons were interrupted in February by the approach of Galungan, the great Festival of the Balinese New Year.
"A pity," the Anak Agung said. "We still need more than a month before the Legong will be ready to perform in public. Also, the costumes are not yet made. The club would have liked to have had the Legong danced for the first time during Galungan."
But since this was impossible, the work of the club stopped, and only the little girls continued to work just as hard as before with Gusti Biang.
"What is the meaning of Galungan, Anak Agung?" we asked one day. We were sitting gossiping idly while old Gusti Biang was massaging the children, noting the increased bustle about the puri.
“At Galungan we celebrate the New Year—that is, the Balinese year of two hundred and ten days. For ten days the ancestral gods come down to receive our offerings at their shrines and to enjoy the feasting with us."
"Then it is not Hindu, it's more of an ancient (I wanted to say animistic, but did not know how to) festival?"
"It is Hindu-Bali, Tuan" he replied solemnly. "So offerings' are made to the gods, and—what else?"
"Oh, many things. It is the gayest time of the year, and we all dress up in our best and newest clothes in order to melali—to go out and enjoy ourselves. At dawn, or even in the middle of the night before Galungan, we all get up and kill our fatted pigs to make lawar, and..."
"Lawar? What is lawar?"
“You have not yet eaten lawar? Beh! You have pleasure in store!
Lawar is made from many meats, but for Galungan we make it from pork. We shred the meat and skin of the pig, mix it with raw blood, chopping it all up very fine, we spice it and mix in many excellent herbs—and then we have lawar."
“It sounds... interesting. May we try some lawar with you, Anak Agung?"
"Tuan John, Tuan John-adoh! you are always running ahead of me. Do you wish to invite yourself to my feast? It was on my lips to invite you and the Nyonya to eat with me and the whole club on the day of Penampahan Galungan."
''I'm sorry, Anak Agung. My western haste again! But we'd love to eat with you and the club."
"Good. And besides the feasting, this is the season for bringing out our Barong. You'll see two in Pliatan. One from the puri of the Punggawa, and one being made now, a sort of toy Barong, by the village children."
And so indeed we did celebrate our first conscious Galungan since we'd been in Bali. First, we made presents of new clothes to Rantun, Agung, Kusti and Rantun's children; and then, with a magnificently dressed Sampih, wearing new kain, new shirt and a gaudy headcloth, we drove to Pliatan and ate lawar and yellow saffron rice with the club. Enormous plates of yellow rice, with four variants of lawar and sate. It tasted dry, hot, and partly what the Balinese call asem—a little sour. The little girls were not allowed to eat with us and the men of the club, but ate somewhere in one of the wives'houses. This was on the Galungan Eve.
On Galungan Day we found Denpasar packed with brightly dressed people, many villagers having come in from afar, pacing the roads to demonstrate their finery, while all the buses and taxis and private cars were jammed with people out to enjoy themselves. The road to Pliatan was overhung with tall penyor, giant bamboo poles thirty feet high and more, bedecked and ornamented with flowers and woven coconut leaves, their tips weighed over like immense fishing rods straining against a catch, but instead of a fish, from the end of the penyor would be bobbing fantastical figures in traditional style, again cut out by the women from young palm leaves.
Galungan was a family celebration. The ancestral gods were made welcome with lavish and exquisite offerings of fruit and flowers and meats and rice cakes, piled high on flat red trays, and in the evening the air was filled with the blue smoke from the incense placed with each offering before the gateways, while dogs fought and snarled to pick out the edible scraps.
And all during this week, and through till the Day of Kuningan was past, the fabulous monsters, the Barongs, gambolled and played, preceded or pursued by their perspiring orchestras with slung instruments. The two dancers inside one of the Barongs from a hill village north of Pliatan was said to have played its way through Ubud village, actually chasing some children up a mango tree, so that this mythical, shaggy monster with its red and gold leatherwork harness and myriad glittering small mirrors, was to be seen looking down into the Ubud puri from the mango-tree's branches.
For two or three weeks all serious work in Bali ceased. Then suddenly Denpasar looked normal again, and we knew that Galungan and Kuningan had passed.
4
Our Legong: and the Great Mario
*
When the little girls had been learning to dance for about one month, the Pliatan orchestra started to rehearse the Legong music with them, and we had been able to see each section of the dance, phrase by phrase, built into a full classical Legong lasting just under one hour. Later, we were told, they would learn other parts: the Love Dance, or the story of the witch, Tjalonarang. And this gentle Legong music, played by a smaller, lightened gamelan, was to me more attractive and elusive than that of the magnificently flamboyant Kebiar.
In Kaliungu we had placed our two borrowed metallophones in the front house, and all the time I would be asking Sampih to play the Legong melodies for us.