Empire of the East (24 page)

‘Yes, of course. If this is something the people want, let them have it.’

But what of the significance of the dance? What of the dance as an act of worship? Those were questions I would have liked to ask, but quicksands stretched ahead, and I drew back. The procession moved on a few hundred yards then stopped once again to allow the Toyota’s engine to cool and for a break from marching in which the dancers could whip themselves into a brief frenzy. Everyone who had survived in this wasteland and had retained necessary strength had rushed to Venilale. Even the old King, supposed to be at least one hundred and ten, tied to a bed in his shack and caught up in the delirium of approaching death, had called for ex-subjects to carry him into town, and volunteers had been forthcoming although in the end the idea was dropped. In these hold-ups the dancers went running up and down, foaming at the mouth, and waving their tin swords, with the stewards in charge of the groups sprinting after them to drag them back into line.

A small earnest man I’d not seen before, and never saw again, although he must have known us, cornered me to explain such wild performances. ‘They’ve all been inside for years,’ he said, ‘and when you come out you go to extremes. When they took me to Atauro prison they put me in the coffin for four months. It’s dark. You hear nothing, you see nothing and it just fits your body. When you come out all you want to do is run about. Sometimes they made you drag an iron bar to quieten you down. Even now I want to run around with the dancers. Four years in Atauro, then another four in Cai-Laco. It leaves its mark. You’re never the same again.’

The stewards had hustled all the dancers back into line, and the procession jogged forward, the women marching backwards at its head, followed by the Bishop on his platform in the Toyota, very erect with eyes narrowed to search the distance. Now, with the church in sight, the elderly regulars from the
passeio
watched keenly from the sidelines — the aristocratic gentleman with cane and spats, an old soldier of the Portuguese army wearing medals bought at a sale of effects, a
senhora
in a print frock salvaged from the thirties with a maid indifferent to the happenings, her bereaved eyes fixed on the Soul Mountain lifting its incandescent mass from the heat mist spread through the valley.

A stage had been knocked together outside the church, and from this the Bishop delivered an immensely long, eloquent and moving speech in Portuguese. It was dedicated to the six virtues, of which he placed justice firmly in the lead, quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas saying that it was ‘the firm and constant will to give to each person what is theirs’. Nothing could have been clearer than that the Bishop was convinced that this had not been done; and his audience were unanimous in their agreement.

That evening, to our huge surprise, we were invited to the banquet to be held in the incompleted building of the new seminary. Since notice of this was only given two hours ahead of the event, there were panic stations over the matter of refurbishing the now impossibly soiled and travel-worn white dress. The seminary building occupied part of the site of the ruined school, having a large, bare refectory which in spite of its size had managed to retain an atmosphere of austerity appropriate to a semi-monastic building. In this, benches had been placed all round the walls, seating about two hundred Catholic supporters in the neighbourhood. A long central table would accommodate headmen whose domains were to be absorbed in the spiritual unity of the new parish, intermingled with church dignitaries; the Bishop and those close to him were to be seated at the cross piece at the table’s top.

We arrived at a moment of intense excitement and the pleasurable chaos to be expected in a situation where no public function on this scale had been held for so many years, where everything was in short supply, and nothing could be found. Timorese notions of hospitality forced people to rush about in all directions, trying to find cutlery and plates and chairs for each other. An emergency raid on the orphanage kitchen produced a supplement of tin plates, but an alarmed outcry was immediately raised when it became known that these were the green-painted platters reserved for the sufferers from tuberculosis.

Crisis raged in the adjacent kitchen. Two days earlier we had been present at the nuns’ headquarters when a boy of fourteen who had inherited the position of pig-killer for such celebrations arrived with a long knife and a small porker wrapped like a gift parcel. This, following Sister Paola’s indication, he had carried out of sight behind a statue of a saint in ecstasy, while we made ourselves scarce. The best of the cadaver had been expertly converted by the sister into a hundred-odd slices of salami, which were hung over a fire for a specified number of hours to smoke in readiness for this occasion. Then suddenly the wind had dropped, the fire could not be persuaded to smoke, and the planned epicurean heart of the feast had suffered annihilation.

A goat was to have provided the basic sustenance of the repast, but it had gone adrift en route from pasture to table, calling for frantic improvisations on whatever edible was to be found. Slowly a vulnerable calm began to assert itself and I settled to the problem, when it would have been inappropriate to take notes, to impress the details of this scene upon the memory. I was surrounded by faces, both young and old, from old-master paintings in which a succession of emotions were reflected, briefly but with the utmost clarity, before their return to innocence and emptiness.

Here again were the splendid, stiffly perambulating waxworks figures from the
passeio
: the three oldish ladies in their re-made curtains, chattering in high-pitched ventriloquial voices and bestowing dazed smiles; the
Primeiro Cavalheiro
in his cricketing blazer worn with a winged collar; the
Capitão das Festas
with his badge of office depicting Silenus, drunk and riding on an ass. Three guitarists, faces bloated with embarrassment, had been unearthed and dragged here to sing unsuitable songs in which the word
amor
was repeatedly heard. Our white-moustached patrician who had just drifted up to exercise a few sentences in Johnsonian English settled our doubts. ‘There is no carnal significance, sir. This song symbolizes the love of Christ for his Church.’

These people had learned to live for the moment — or perhaps they had always done that. Pain, in East Timor, was rarely indelible. My interest in them was returned, although with discretion. We were always the objects of side-glances and conjecture. Bland as their expressions remained, we knew that our Timorese friends had never wholly recovered from the startling novelty of our appearance, our bleached skin, outlandish clothing, and the sound of our faltering speech. What — we knew they asked each other — could have brought us to such a place as Venilale? Perhaps it was something to do with the British alliance with Portugal of old. Those in this gathering who had reached middle age and had learned their history according to the Portuguese myth, remembered with admiration the English piracies in the early centuries of the New World. England had been able once to roll over all forms of opposition. Surely it could still make its voice heard? Perhaps we were the emissaries of the British government who would report back after hearing the story of their miseries from their own lips.

Perhaps it was the strength of this rumour that had placed us at the head of the table seating the village notables, and a few feet from the Bishop himself; who, when our eyes met, nodded and smiled. So close were we that it would have been impossible, despite the festive tumult from the further end of the room and the rousing ballads of the guitarists, not to overhear snatches of his conversation with his clerics, appearing to be concerned wholly with routine ecclesiastical topics. When the banquet was over he came up to speak to us for a few minutes. He was enormously relaxed and easy to like, small — as men so often are who fill the great roles in history. He shrugged in the direction of his escort of priests. ‘There are so many people,’ he said. ‘Please come to see me next week.’

This we would much have liked to do, but the next morning we were due to return to the capital. We considered the possibility of postponing the flight back to Bali and Jakarta for a few more days, but as it turned out these arrangements could only be made in Díli itself.

Next morning the nuns gave us a lift in the truck to Baucau, where we caught the bus to Díli. In East Timor buses have the agreeable custom not merely of depositing passengers in the town of their destination but of delivering them at their street address. In such countries where savagery is predominant, the ordinary citizenry seems so often to be kinder than elsewhere, and in this case the bus driver had not only insisted on our sitting in the front seat, but took us to the Turismo by a circuitous route so that we should see as much of the town as possible. In this way we passed through outskirts that had escaped brutalization. There was rain in the air that had softened the edges in this scene and had turned the tender sea-washed greys and greens down by the shore into an old Caribbean aquatint.

Our reception at the Turismo lacked the good humour displayed on the occasion of our previous arrival. Quite unintentionally I had fallen into the habit of speaking Portuguese, and now, in picking up the keys of the rooms, the word
obrigado
slipped out. The reaction was startling. The girl receptionist who had been pleasant enough at our first meeting, let out an angry shout: ‘Obrigado!’ causing a member of the staff seated nearby to jump out of his chair, and one of the caged parrots noted by the correspondent of the
Figaro
to utter a piercing squawk.

Having dumped our baggage we drank a Coca-Cola and went for a walk along the front, watched the woolly-headed children chasing land-crabs, and a man with a sledge-hammer trying to break a useful lump of iron from one of the beached landing-craft, then returned. The receptionist, who appeared to have calmed down by now, gave us a thin smile. This seemed the moment to try to organize a delay in our departure, but she shook her head.

‘There are no seats.’

‘That’s what they told us in Bali when we came here, but the plane was half empty.’

The grimace of anger returned. ‘There are no seats.’

Our keys were not on the board, and there was a longish wait before the key to Claudia’s room was forthcoming. The room had been turned over in an amateurish fashion, but nothing was missing.

The same receptionist was on duty in the morning when we left for the airport.

‘Salamat jalan,’ she said with some emphasis, meaning in Indonesian, goodbye.

‘Adeus,’ I replied in Portuguese, and she shook her head as if troubled by a fly.

The waiting taxi driver had heard this exchange and showed his delight. ‘Vivan os companheiros,’ he said as I got in. Long live our friends.

We caught the plane back to Bali, where we parted company. Claudia returned to Java to attend a medical conference in Bandung. For me the long-planned experience of Irian Jaya was about to start.

I
TOOK OFF FOR JAYAPURA
two days later and after a six-hour flight over an empty ocean landed for refuelling at Biak island in the north-western corner of Irian Jaya — a principal US base in this theatre of World War II, but long since devitalized by peace. Both the moments of coming to land and those following take-off offered a view that was memorable. Biak in the local language means coral town. It was from coral that the village now become capital was largely built, and the coral spread in all directions like contoured mist through the shallow sea. Until recently, inaccessibility had helped Biak to hold its place among the undiscovered paradises. There was an exciting wildlife in forests that so far had escaped the loggers, including such rarities as marsupial cats and tree-climbing kangaroos. Enormous bird-wing butterflies sucked at decaying fruit fallen from the jungle trees, and a bird sanctuary teemed with parrots, sulphur-crested cockatoos, and pigeons said to be as large as geese. All these pleasant things lay under sentence, for, said the
Jakarta Times
, the best of Biak had been acquired by compulsory purchase by a consortium which would now develop it as a resort for Japanese tourists, making a start with seven hotels, and as many golf courses as thought essential by the Japanese developers.

A short flight from Biak brought me close to the great uninvestigated swamps of West Papua, a milky, green frontier creeping towards me over the sea. Here I was about to touch on the edge of what has remained, after the Polar regions, one of the least known areas of the globe. The forest first appeared as veinings of deeper colour in this vaporous surface, then a mould or moss that broke up the flashing reflections of the swamp, then at last came the trees that had rooted in solid earth, hundreds of thousands of them, although still no more than a crimped vegetable pattern stretched over most of the land in sight. It was a pattern without variation or interruption. To the south the faintest of pencilling sketched in the outline of the Van Rees Mountains. I was flying parallel to the shore and through the opposite cabin window a metallic ribbon of beach divided the trees from the flushed coral sea, upon which in a hundred miles not a single craft had been seen.

Something remarkable in the way of a city might have been expected as capital of this great unknown. As an outpost of colonial power in conquered territory it should have been full of the remembrance of things past, of jaded pretension, of the stage scenery of a tropical fin-de-siècle and dignified decline.

Nothing could have been further from the case. The Dutch had established themselves here in 1906, when almost at the end of their colonial tether, in the hope of keeping the Germans from sneaking westwards over the frontier of their sphere of influence in New Guinea. They put up a minimum of government buildings, sentenced a few unpromising civil servants to a piteous exile, ordered the natives to cover their nakedness and to keep holy the Sabbath day, called the place Hollandia, and settled with sophisticated awareness to await the end. The city’s inability to develop a personality has been underlined by its three changes of name since those days.