Island of Demons (41 page)

“What about a house?”

“I'll get my carpenter to build you one. It could take a week or two but you'll need that long to get your papers sorted out and do some deal on the land. They're bound to send you up to the Resident to be cleared. The people here won't want to take the responsibility.”

“What about house workers?”

“I've got a couple coming to see you tomorrow. They'll be here at about ten.” Margaret was impressed, despite herself. This was too easy. She was not suffering enough to make her data seem valuable. Too many events and nor enough structure. She looked unhappily on as Walter did a gibbering monkey dance – not
kecak
, pure, pre-Hindu monkey – of triumph and then shuffled over, arm-swinging – to chink Arses with her and turn the music back up.

McPhee turned to me and whispered. “Thank you for looking after Sampih.” Oh Christ. I had forgotten all about him. I didn't even know where he was.

“Did you find him changed?” I asked cautiously. He glowed like a tedious pigeon-fancier suddenly allowed to talk about his hobby.

“Marvellous. He's come on so far with Mario's teaching and Rosa, before she left, was a great help. She managed to get him interested in politics as an outlet for all that rage. He now realises his enemy is not just his father but the whole structure of world capitalism.” I wondered how he would set about killing that.

“Ah! Er … is that entirely a good thing?”

“Absolutely!” His eyes glowed. “Thanks to us, he has found himself. He talks about organising something like the Pita Maha for dancers, a sort of union that would break the control of the rajahs and the aristocrats and control the new sponsors, the tourists. Dance can become a weapon of social change. Even Jane is keen on the idea.”

“Have you talked to Walter about this?”

He shook his head truculently. “Walter's got nothing to do with this. You know how old-fashioned he can be. This is the future.”

I had just had a bit of trouble with Pita Maha and the future. One of the duties wished on me by Walter's sloth was the administration of the museum shop. It had done very nicely, bringing the tourist market and the artists together while avoiding bruising direct contact that could devalue the work they were producing. But while I had been away, behind my back, there had been some sort of campaign in the Press, alleging the incompatibility of the museum and the art business. I could not quite discover who was behind it all but I suspected the dealers in Java and Denpasar who saw valuable profits flowing back to the artists as opposed to their own ready pockets. Official pressure had been brought to bear and the shop had been closed, leaving Walter's aquarium as the only big, local outlet. The effect on the artists' income had been disastrous. Rolf Neuhaus had been treasurer of Pita Maha at the time and I went to the aquarium to find out just what happened. It was worse than I could ever have imagined.

All the flags and
Trara
had naturally been put back in their box but the shop there was flourishing and I watched a charabanc-load of tourists passing through, snapping up the most ghastly fish daubings There were acceptable Pita Maha works on sale alongside but there was something odd about them too. Round the back, I found a sort of workshop with half a dozen men working away peacefully in an open pavilion, sitting and chatting as is the Balinese way, while painting the horrors I had seen round the front. The foreman, a mature man with a charming moustache, came forward to greet me. The others rested on their arms and smiled as I passed round cigarettes and asked casually, “Who is it that you work for?”

“You speak our language? That is good. Tuan Rolf.” Yes. They all nodded. And what was it they were doing there with that black and white painting? I had seen it at the Pita Maha the week before.

“Oh that is from the painters at Batuan where they only paint in black and white but Tuan Rolf says the tourists like coloured paintings better so we colour them in for the Batuan men.

And in the shop, I observed, I had noticed that the names of artists were painted on the works but it seemed to me they were the wrong names. Perhaps there had been a mistake, some confusion?

“Oh no. That is no mistake. The artists, of course, are like us, simple men who cannot write, so Tuan Rolf writes the names for them and tourists like some names, which are lucky names, and do not like others so he always chooses the most lucky names to write so they are happy.” There was no dissimulation. In Bali no one has copyright or authorship. For Balinese, as for Vicki, ideas were free and objects and music were made together in groups. A signature was just another part of the design that made people happy. Now, I must drink some coffee, black and cloyed with sugar, to make
them
happy. I settled, sipped. This work, was it good work?

“Oh Yes! Much better than being fishermen which is what we did before. That was very hard and dangerous and sometimes we even enjoy the painting. There is a kind of satisfaction in it. It is best when I am allowed to use red paint but mostly, I only do the yellow bits.”

Look, I told them, they must come to my classes. They could learn to paint better. They could use all colours. I would teach them in Ubud. It would cost them nothing. They giggled and blushed and shook their heads.

“That,” said the mustache, “is impossible. Those classes are only for the boys from the royal houses, not outsiders, and we could not go to Ubud. It is dangerous for Sanur men there.”

Was Tuan Rolf at home?

“Unfortunately both the
tuans
have gone to the market in Denpasar. If you come back in the evening, you will find them.” He looked round at his fellows and whispered. “But you must be careful.”

“Careful?” I echoed. “Why careful?”

He hesitated and one of the others murmured something under his breath, into his cigarette and he looked down and could not fix me in the eye. “Those two
tuans
have strange habits. That is why we do not come here at night. It is because they are twins. What can you do? It is their nature. From the womb they were too close together.”

I had returned, bubbling with rage at the infamy of the Sanur operations and revealed them to Walter as he swam. It is hard to tell whether a man is shrugging as he executes the breast stroke seen from the rear. It is nothing but a series of aquatic shrugs – but I am fairly sure he did.

“It is difficult. They are my partners in the
akvarioom
but I am not sure we are partners in the art shop.”

“But this is immoral, fraud …”

He shrugged or perhaps just breast-stroked again. “There is nothing to be done. It is according to the configuration of their culture and culture is nothing but personality writ large.”

“What?” I wondered, at the time, where he had got that from. Now I know …

“What?” Walter was poking my knee.

“Don't you recognise the voice?” He had just vigorously rewound but the music still drooped with tropical langour. The wavery tenor, those absurdly fronted vowels. Of course. “It's Noel,” I said. “Something about mad dogs and Englishmen.”

“I still can't understand a word,” complained Walter. “A mouth full of balls.”

Greg grinned with a striking assortment of teeth gripped around his pipe stem. “Couldn't have put it better myself, old boy” he said.

***

It was not debauched Vicki who smoked but austere Margaret – like a factory chimney. She sat down there in the garden, on a deckchair, in a large floppy hat and one of those dreadful fieldwork maternity smocks, and puffed away manfully. “The important thing,” she declared, “is to collect truly scientific data. Subjective impressions have their place but nothing is as good as rigorous observation and the use of tests like this allows direct comparison across cultures. It is better to have one event described by three observers than three events described by one.” There was Jane, Made Kaler – a cheerful and intelligent young man with unnaturally long hands – and Margaret herself, all with notebooks drawn, triply observing. Made had been issued with a shiny, new wristwatch for professional purposes and was enjoying the sight of it shining on his wrist. Walter and the other boys sat on the ground further off and observed – presumably – subjectively. They were laughing at something Walter was drawing in the dust with a stick, no doubt something of a satirical nature.

“Synchronise watches,” Margaret commanded as if a general going into battle. “Don't forget time and date at the top of each page.”

The focus of all this scientific observation was little Resem, cross-legged in the garden. He had recently grown a sweet little moustache that accentuated the cupid's bow of his mouth and, unaccustomed to it, he constantly touched it and tasted it with his tongue. He shot a shy smile up at Greg and me on the balcony. I could tell that I would soon have to sketch him again. I liked Greg. There was something terribly reliable and upright about him. He was, I suspected, a true gentleman and I could see why women liked him too. We were having one of those man-to-man talks that I have always been bad at, assuming as they do, all manner of ordinary knowledge that has never come my way.

“Margaret writes lists,” whispered Greg dolefully. “You know. Things to do, questions to ask. Drives me bonkers. My mother does the same thing. I found one the other day and you'll never guess what item fourteen was. ‘Sexual intercourse'. And the thing was, she'd crossed it out and written ‘carry forward till tomorrow'.” He had two cameras slung around his neck and his own notebook. Usually, they used both stills and cine but today, a mere rehearsal, it was just stills. “When we first met, up the Sepik river, she was still married to that crazy sod, Reo Fortune, New Zealand anthropologist, a real bargain-basement bastard. Wrote on the Dobu – nasty bunch of tossers, aggressive, jealous, always trying to kill each other with sorcery – except that's all balls. That's not the Dobu. That's Reo. You know he used to knock Margaret about? Lost a baby that way. And women are not like us, old man. They hang on to these things and bear a grudge. You can imagine what it was like with the three of us shut up in a broiling mosquito-proof room up the arse-end of New Guinea, drinking every night and arguing anthropological theory. Little by little Margaret grew away from him and towards me. I knew he'd kill me if he found out. He had a gun that he was always waving about. When it came to the point, he was quite calm. Just asked me to play him a game of chess. Odd thing is, I can't remember who won.”

Margaret and Greg were centring their work on the relationship between child-rearing, personality and trance, which may not have been entirely unconnected with the fact that a crucial part of their funding was from the American Committee for Dementia Praecox. And the principal checks for schizophrenic tendencies at the time were the Holmgren and Weigl sorting tests that Resem was about to undertake. As was usually the case with Margaret, there was madness in her method.

“It's her mind that fascinates me, you see,” whispered Greg, staring hungrily at her. “Margaret is about half as clever as she thinks she is, which still makes her a genius. Clear as a bell. Full of ideas and intellectual roughage. She's the most exciting woman I've ever known.”

“Made.” Margaret's voice was clear as a bell from below. “Have you noted down the exact words Walter used when giving our subject his instructions?”

Made nodded and flipped back the pages. “Got.”

“All right.” She looked up. “Are you ready Greg?” He gave her a thumbs up and grabbed his camera. “Right. Go!” My mind flashed back to von Plessen. This was not research. This was a movie.

She leant forward and handed Resem a handful of bits of wool of various colours. The idea was that he should sort them out. Everyone began scribbling though nothing at all was happening that I could see. Greg leaned forward and very deliberately took a photograph, the dull thunk! of the shutter very loud. Resem spread the threads out on the ground and began to arrange them neatly in a series of parallel lines. Like many Balinese, he had the hands of a surgeon.

“He's doing it all wrong,” hissed Greg from the side of his mouth, “not sorting them out into different colours.” He looked at Margaret nervously.

Having put down half the threads in this fashion, Resem turned his head sideways and now began to lay the rest carefully across them, at an angle of ninety degrees. After a couple of minutes, he looked up and smiled. “Finished.”

Greg doubtfully took another photograph. Margaret looked annoyed.

“Either,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in judgement, “this young man is colourblind or he suffers from severe frontal lobe dysfunction.”

“Er, actually Margaret. It's nothing like that,” offered Walter, shuffling forward on his rump as dogs do when wiping their backsides. “You gave him threads and, to him, that means not just colour but cloth, so he's arranged them as you would set up a loom to weave them together and make that
ikat
cloth that you have seen all over the island.”

“Bugger!” hissed Greg.

“Oh my!” said Jane.

“Data corrupted by interference of extraneous cultural patterns,” intoned Margaret coldly, as she wrote in her notebook and struck out the page with a line. She made a noble and long-suffering face. “All right Jane, give him the Weigl. Go!”

The Weigl test consisted of plaques of wood in three different shapes and four different colours, so that there were many possible ways in which they could be grouped. Resem sat there in the sun and studied them, then rapidly shuffled the pack with the unexpected dexterity of a croupier handling cards and dealt them out decisively on the ground, to form a pretty starburst pattern as if in mosaic. Greg snapped again with his camera. Margaret looked very near to snapping, herself.

“I would point out,” noted Walter in extrapolation, “that Resem has arranged the four basic colours according to the cardinal points, as if in a temple offering. Lots of structure there then.”