by John Coast
To my relief, Mario made no trouble about coming with us. He told a friend to take his bird home and handed over his bicycle to the man as well. I hoped this meant that the new dance was ready in his head.
An hour later we were waiting in Mario's house while he changed into a fine dark green sarong, put on a new headcloth at a jaunty angle, slipped on a bright pink shirt which he wore outside the sarong, and added a clean towel tied round his waist.
"Are you ready, Bapa? Nothing else to bring with you?"
"I am ready," he replied. "What more should I need?" answered we left, Mario shouting out to his wife, asking her to remind his friends to take over his work at the office on the morrow.
When more arak had been served in Kaliungu and the meal was being made ready by Rantun, we asked Mario to tell us more about the dance. What was the story, we wanted to know—and what music was he using?
He walked over to one of our metallophones, calling over to Sampih, "Learn this tune, Pih. I will need you to play this at first in Pliatan while I am holding the girl." And he played out a most simple, silly little melody, repetitive and catchy. In ten minutes not only Sampih but Kusti also could play it.
"What tune is that, Bapa?"
"It is nothing, that tune; but it is good for us to use at first. I must teach this Raka her basic movements and steps before using the true music. This will be a new style to her."
"And the story-you say it is about two bumblebees?"
"Oh, don't worry, Tuan. It will be a simple story. Raka will be the girl bumblebee, Sampih the male. It will be enough, don't you think?" "Perhaps, Bapa. But the details of it are not yet clear?"
"They are not yet thought out. But it will come; I must see Raka dance first. If she is suitable, the story will come of itself. You will see, Tuan. Do not trouble yourself.
And that is just what did happen. For three days Mario held Raka or danced before her until his pink shirt was dark with sweat; and when he was tired, Sampih took over. And in those three days several very important things developed. First we had the pure joy of watching Mario teach. Mario has probably the most superbly mobile actor's face in the world. When he taught it was as if he was giving a performance, one eye cocked always on his audience. He held Raka in the same way that Gusti Biang had done. He showed her each movement and phrase a score of times, most patiently, watching her try to mirror him with eyes as alert as a eat's, sometimes squatting on the ground looking up at her, then jumping up to flip some Legong—haunted hand into a bumblebee position, clicking his tongue, sighs of satisfaction nicely mixed with anger and feigned or real disappointment. But it was when he danced in front of her, showing her precisely what he wanted, that I was open-mouthed at Mario's genius. This tall, noble man of fifty odd years became a little girl, every emotion necessary to a timid, delicious, bewildered and finally angry and frightened small child passing over his face, till the compound was filled with villagers, who watched amused, but greatly puzzled, for the quality of Mario's greatness was beyond their ken.
But in Ni Gusti Raka he had found a worthy pupil. She learned with a speed that embarrassed her teacher's inventiveness. Her ability to copy faithfully the right movements was matched by an emotional echoing of Mario's superb face in a way that was unbelievable in a ten-year-old child. In the end Mario left for Tabanan again to fetch Pan Sukra, his drummer, so that the club could begin learning the true music. As he left, he praised Raka, but added deprecatingly, "It is often like this, Tuan. In Bali this is normal." But I believe that Mario was running away from Raka till he could think out the dance more wholly. But our friend the Anak Agung, too, would also not yet admit anything unusual in little Raka. When we understood this we became careful, for we realized that his pride was slightly hurt—the two Legongs were of his family and Oka was his very own daughter; and we were selecting for the honour of this new dance a Wesya, a neighbour, someone from outside his family. So we went gently, since we valued both him and the Legongs very highly, and I explained that if we were to go abroad, it would be necessary for the other girls also to learn this role; and that if I had chosen out Raka, I was daring to select her from more international standards, whereas I was quite prepared to admit that as Legongs, Oka and Anom had no rivals at all.
Mario was so excited, it seemed, that two days later he went directly back to Pliatan by bus, taking Pan Sukra with him. He called at Kaliungu for the briefest of moments, eyes gleaming, "Greetings, Tuan. I come for a moment only. Here is my music composer, Pan Sukra. We go now to Pliatan. Will the Tuan be coming up tonight?"
"Of course, Bapa. We'll see you then." And off they hurried, a most remarkable phenomenon in Balinese, Mario's long legs impatient with the small, sturdy figure of Pan Sukra beside him. When we arrived about nine o'clock that night in the village we found the gamelan well into the first melody of the new dance; and it was Kebiar music, though new, Mario told us, having been composed originally by Pan Sukra for a club in Marga, near Tabanan: but it had never been used. And anyhow, these tunes were arranged for a girl dancer, while the original ones had been for a man.
It took about three weeks for the thirty minutes of music to be perfectly mastered by Pliatan, and at the end of that time Pan Sukra went home to his village. Then the Anak Agung, Made Lebah and Gusti Kompiang grinned freely."Now it is our turn," they said.
"What do you mean?" we asked.
"Aggh! This is crude music. Now it is a matter of tabuh-style.
You will see. It must be rearranged and polished by the club."
And during the next couple of months Mario would keep coming up to the puri for a day or two at a time, but never stopping longer than three days because he could not bear to be away from his fighting cocks for a time longer than that. And Luce and I camped in Pliatan, daily eating our food there, which Rantun wrapped for us in little banana-leaf bundles, so that we had no need to bother the generous hospitality of the Anak Agung.
And we saw the story of the dance unfold, as Mario had told us it would, creating itself bit by bit, with ideas thrown in from us all. We saw Raka as the little bumblebee sunning herself in a flower-filled garden, in moods of surprise, delight and fear; we saw the gaudy male bumblebee enter, and Sampih could pick up Mario's ideas with the speed with which a western ballet dancer follows an enchainement in class; we saw him spy the delectable little bee, zoom towards her, court her, frighten her by his advances till she fled from him. Then Sampih danced alone in baffled fury as the Kebiar music raged around him, and in the last rollicking melody he danced a Kebiar of sheer frustration around the whole gamelan, flirting desperately with its members. This was a development out of Mario's original Kebiar, and he called it now in full: Tumulilingan Mengisap Sari—the Bumblebee Sips Honey.
Luce was meanwhile busy with the costumes. Sampih's was to be that of a normal Kebiar dancer, but in the boldest gold and purple bee-like stripes, Raka's kain was to be long and trailing, and of gold and green cloth and very feminine; her body was to be encased in glittering purple, and at her hips were to be two ontjers, streamers of apple-green chiffon which flowed as she danced like transparent wings; on her head was to be perched a crown of golden flowers, with gold antennae quivering. All our Pliatan family were engrossed in this dance, for it was a new thing and it was ours.
This was when we first began to know the characters of the three little girls, and we even made serious and round-about enquiries of Raka's family, for we let the Anak Agung know that we found her a most attractive and perfect child, and had there been any chance of adopting her as ours, we would have loved legally to have taken her. But her family were living and proud of her, and she was inseparable from her friends Oka and Anom.
As we sat long hours with the children, we began to hear some of the secrets of the puri. They told us, for instance, that Djero Wanita, the young wife of Dewa Gde Putu, had fear and respect for rats which many Balinese designate with th
e superstitious title of Djero Ketut—"Fourth Born of Unknown Caste.” Each day Djero Wanita would feed them with her own hands in the neat bate of the Dewa. Then, when we asked Oka how it was they all had lice in their hair, so that, in common with all Balinese children, they were for ever delousing one another, they answered, "Beh! We don't like lice! But just try to persuade everybody else in the puri the same thing, and then ask Agung Adji's permission to bum all our bedding!"
Dewa Gde Putu told us amusing tales about his brother.
"Adoh! But my brother is hopeless with money," he once said.
"Tjoba! He never gives money away to anybody-as if he were a miser, hating to give it even to his wives. Yet he can't keep it-always it vanishes! If he has any cash, all the puri knows it will be in the pocket of his shirt hanging up in his room. So the mother of Bawa, maybe, needs money and takes a few rupiahs. My brother does not notice.
Then comes the mother of Oka—perhaps one of her children needs a new anklet, so she, too, takes some money. It is like a bank, that pocket! Then the mother of little Bangli, the son who is the apple of his father's eye, only two years old, goes in her turn to the shirt pocket and it is empty. So she asks my brother for money. Give me my shirt, he replies, gruffly. There is nothing there, shouts the mother of Bangli, and so once again we have a KRISIS in the puri.
“Oh, we are a funny family. Always it happens like this; and never does my brother act differently. At first he suspects everybody in the compound. Then, if he suspects one person, "Itu bangsat!” he will mutter—"That louse!" But never does it dawn on him that the culprits are his own family and that he himself leaves them no other method of finding money. Yet at other times I think this is a clever trick of my brother—that he deliberately puts there the money he doesn't mind losing."
It was June and the dance was almost ready when we had a letter from Henri Fast telling us that the U.N. Conference was indeed to take place in Denpasar, beginning at the end of July. Furthermore, he, as the host to the conference, wanted to know whether the Pliatan club, at a not too exorbitant price, could put on a Balinese feast and dance performance in the Anak Agung's puri for the hundred and twenty delegates. The arrangements of it he would gladly leave to us.
That evening the club and the Anak Agung agreed that this would be a fine occasion on which first to present the new bumblebee dance. So that night there was no rehearsal, but instead Kuwus, a butcher in the club, and Bregeg, a pig dealer, and the Anak Agung and his wives, worked out the cost of the necessary roast sucking pigs, the smoked ducks, the chickens, the goat for the Moslems, the Zawar, the sate, the fruits, the traditional Balinese decorations, the oil for scores and scores of lamps, the hiring of chairs for the guests and glasses and plates and spoons to feed them, and lastly, the fee for the dancers. Next morning I wrote off to Fast, and we soon came to a satisfactory agreement.
Then, by some misfortune, but largely, perhaps, because the Foreign Ministry in Djakarta was in part responsible for the conference, I found myself elected on to a committee in Denpasar as the man to plan four days of entertainment for the conference. Here I became surrounded at once by parochial jealousies.
It was now that we met the teacher, Nyoman Kaler, for the first time. An old, old rival of Lotring's, we had more admiration for the latter, but had kept outside their two factions in Denpasar, which had existed even in Colin McPhee's time. Both of them had been the pupils of our aged neighbour in Kaliungu, Ida Bagus Boda, with whom we preferred to chat.
But Kaler now started coming to our house in the evenings just after dark, entering always by the back gate. A gaunt man in his fifties, protuberant-eyed and of a cold personality, he drank arak with us and seemed friendly enough. He came to discuss "basic fundamentals” with us, he said, he said mysteriously, in a deep, staccato voice; but he ended by inviting us to eat at his house where there might also be some dancing. So we went and ate a spitted sucking pig with him and saw the dancers and orchestra of Pemogan, which was his real objective, and in that the dancers had newly commenced their dancing, we could only offer this club's orchestra the opportunity to play in the Bali Hotel on the conference's opening night.
The chief Indonesian organizer of the whole project, one Sumarno, stayed at our guest house with his pretty wife all through the week and no unsurmountable difficulties arose. The conference was as tiresome as all such conferences, and Sampih had just got his driving licence and was invaluable in the help he gave Luce and myself in this work.
The U.N. delegates saw the Monkey Dance in Bonah village, and had lunch with Lemayeur and Polok on the beach, where Polok forgot herself far enough to attempt to dance some fragments of Legong; and on the final evening of the conference the Masked Play went on to uncontrollable lengths in the Bali Hotel hall, till in the end the show was for the Balinese of Denpasar only, while the unfortunate delegates were trying vainly to sleep.
On the evening of the feast in Pliatan the whole puri compound was lit by hundreds of tiny oil lights, and in the inner court long tables covered with coconut-leaf mats and heavy with bright flowers were ready to receive the guests. No police came over from Gianjar to help us (another little local political matter of "face"), so that most of the delegates had to get out of their cars in an appalling traffic-block and walk from afar into the puri, where they at once could help themselves to mountains of the best Balinese food, served in buffet fashion and presided over by Luce. The club and the rest of us were all waiters for the night, and we were defeated only by the Indian delegate, Sir Mirza Ismail, whose strict diet, alas, permitted him to eat only a banana or two.
That night Mario himself played the terompong and sparred for a moment with Sampih in a "Cockfight Kebiar"; and as Mario walked off the dancing floor, the music of his Tumulilingan began, and for the very first time the dance of the two bumblebees was performed in public. After the Tumulilingan we gave the Legong. And packed together uncomfortably though they were in the narrow confines of the puri entrance, most of the foreign delegates were entranced. The senior official of the Foreign Ministry sat good-naturedly on the matting floor behind the drummers; and the tired lady who was private secretary to the Indonesian Prime Minister, dozed throughout.
It was a warmly, wonderfully chaotic evening. And when, hours and hours later, it seemed, the last car had borne away the last members of the seventeen-nationality audience, we could all of us at last sit down and eat, too.
But the evening was little Raka's. This child, who had danced perfectly her bumblebee dance for half an hour, followed by her exacting and longer role in the Legong, was still running around as lively as a cricket at one o'clock in the morning; and though we tried to make her eat with us, it was she and the other children who pranced happily around with plates of food and glasses of arak, very proud and full of laughter, waiting on their elders.
6
Of Guests and Guest-Houses
*
It so happened that Luce's birthday fell on the day of Tumpak Wayang, the day when all the music and dance clubs of Bali make offerings to Dewa Pergina, God of the Dance; and in that we were members of the club, we celebrated this day with them.
Under the great lichee trees at the entrance to the puri a bamboo altar was raised, and onto it each instrument of the gamelan was lifted and arranged, while the families of all the club members brought trays laden with the usual offerings of flowers and fruits and foods, piled in bright pyramids, and these were offered to the gamelan and placed beside and between the instruments on the altar.
Then we all sat on the floor of the rehearsal verandah together, while a pemangku priest blessed the occasion, lighting his incense and tolling his small, long-handled bell of brass to call the god to partake of the offerings. And when his prayers had been said and the formulae and sacred mantras had been intoned, he rose and with a leaf flicked over us all the tirta, holy water, which the Balinese received eagerly in cupped hands, c
lamouring for more, raising it to their lips or anointing their own faces.
Earlier in the morning the three Legongs had walked up the shady road to the temple of Gunung Sari, which had an especial affinity for dancers, and there the same priest had drawn magical patterns and designs on their foreheads, their closed eyes and all their limbs, so that the God might thereby make these his servants attractive and beautiful in the eyes of their beholders.
There were, in fact, many customs connected with the gamelan itself, and we had learned, for instance, never to step over an instrument but always to walk around it; and when we had asked the Anak Agung the meaning of this he told us that it was a matter of respect—a gamelan had a soul, not a human soul, but a power of its own that enabled the players to draw fine music from it. And, said he, it thus came about that a club which respected its gamelan would more easily prosper, for in truth it was paying respect to its own standards. A club which treated its gamelan as lifeless blocks of wood and metal, would damage its own artistic spirit. In Pliatan the discipline in connection with the gamelan had always been great, and this in part explained why they had been able to enjoy so fine a name for such a long time.
This seemed essentially healthy to us, and we tried never to break any of the customs which our friends found to be right. On this present day we merely pledged ourselves to do all we could to see that the next Tumpak Wayang be celebrated abroad.
During our work in the last few months, though, we had again been forced to recognize that we were still living in a period of tumult. Hitherto, incidents which disfigured the peace of Bali had been purely internal, affecting only the Balinese. But we few foreign residents were now dismayed to hear that the seventy-year-old Lemayeur had been seriously wounded by a gang of men who attacked his house by night, while soon afterwards, only a thousand yards from his house, two Dutchmen had been brutally murdered.