Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
Tags: #Non-fiction
When we return to Ubud, I go straight back to Felipe’s house and don’t leave his bedroom for approximately another month. This is only the faintest of exaggerations. I have never been loved and adored like this before by anyone, never with such pleasure and single-minded concentration. Never have I been so unpeeled, revealed, unfurled and hurled through the event of lovemaking.
One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else’s body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn’t there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient’s body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: “Do you want your belly pressed against this person’s belly forever—or not?”
Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story. There are no parts of our bodies which are in any way allergic to any parts of the other’s body. Nothing is dangerous, nothing is difficult, nothing is refused. Everything in our sensual universe is—simply and thoroughly—complemented. And, also . . .
complimented.
“Look at you,” Felipe says, taking me to the mirror after we’ve made love again, showing me my nude body and my hair that looks like I just came through a NASA space-training centrifuge. He says, “Look how beautiful you are . . . every line of you is a curve . . . you look like sand dunes . . .”
(Indeed, I do not think my body has looked or felt this relaxed in its life, not since I was maybe six months old and my mother took snapshots of me all blissed-out on a towel on the kitchen counter after a nice bath in the kitchen sink.)
And then he leads me back to the bed, saying, in Portuguese,
“Vem, gostosa.”
Come here, my delicious one.
Felipe is also the endearment master. In bed he slips into adoring me in Portuguese, so I have graduated from being his “lovely little darling” to being his
queridinha.
(Literal translation: “lovely little darling.”) I’ve been too lazy here in Bali to try to learn Indonesian or Balinese, but suddenly Portuguese is coming easily to me. Of course I’m only learning the pillow talk, but that’s a fine use of Portuguese. He says, “Darling, you’re going to get sick of it. You’re going to get bored of how much I touch you, and how many times a day I tell you how beautiful you are.”
Try me, mister.
I’m losing days here, disappearing under his sheets, under his hands. I like the feeling of not knowing what the date is. My nice organized schedule has been blown away by the breeze. I finally do stop by to see my medicine man one afternoon after a long hiatus of no visiting. Ketut sees the truth on my face before I say a word.
“You found boyfriend in Bali,” he says.
“Yes, Ketut.”
“Good. Be careful not get pregnant.”
“I will.”
“He good man?”
“You tell me, Ketut,” I said. “You read his palm. You promised that he was a good man. You said it about seven times.”
“I did? When?”
“Back in June. I brought him here. He was the Brazilian man, older than me. You told me you liked him.”
“Never did,” he insisted, and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. Sometimes Ketut loses things from his recollection, as you would, too, if you were somewhere between sixty-five and a hundred and twelve years old. Most of the time he’s keen and sharp, but other times I feel like I’ve disturbed him out of some other plane of consciousness, out of some other universe. (A few weeks ago he said to me, completely out of nowhere, “You good friend to me, Liss. Loyal friend. Loving friend.” Then he sighed, stared off into space and added mournfully, “Not like Sharon.” Who the hell is
Sharon
? What did she do to him? When I tried asking him about it, he would give me no answer. Acted suddenly like he didn’t know who I was even referring to. As if
I
were the one who’d brought up that thieving hussy Sharon in the first place.)
“Why you never bring boyfriend here to meet me?” he asked now.
“I did, Ketut. Really I did. And you told me you liked him.”
“Don’t remember. He a rich man, your boyfriend?”
“No, Ketut. He’s not a rich man. But he has enough money.”
“Medium rich?” The medicine man wants details, spreadsheets.
“He has enough money.”
My answer seemed to irritate Ketut. “You ask this man for money, he can give to you, or not?”
“Ketut, I don’t
want
money from him. I’ve never taken money from a man.”
“You spend every night with him?”
“Yes.”
“Good. He spoil you?”
“Very much.”
“Good. You still meditate?”
Yes, I do still meditate every day of the week, slithering out of Felipe’s bed and over to the couch, where I can sit in silence and offer up some gratitude for all of this. Outside his porch, the ducks quack their way through the rice paddies, gossiping and splashing all over the place. (Felipe says that these flocks of busy Balinese ducks have always reminded him of Brazilian women strutting down the beaches in Rio; chatting loudly and interrupting each other constantly and waggling their bottoms with such pride.) I am so relaxed now that I kind of slide into meditation like it’s a bath prepared by my lover. Naked in the morning sun, with nothing but a light blanket wrapped over my shoulders, I disappear into grace, hovering over the void like a tiny seashell balanced on a teaspoon.
Why did life ever seem difficult?
I call my friend Susan back in New York City one day, and listen as she confides to me, over the typical urban police sirens wailing in the background, the latest details of her latest broken heart. My voice comes out in the cool, smooth tones of a late-nite, jazz-radio DJ, as I tell her how she just has to let go, man, how she’s gotta learn that everything is just perfect as it is already, that the universe provides, baby, that it’s all peace and harmony out there . . .
I can almost hear her rolling her eyes as she says over the sirens, “Spoken like a woman who already had four orgasms today.”
But all the fun and games caught up with me after a few weeks. After all those nights of not sleeping and all those days of too much lovemaking, my body struck back and I got attacked by a nasty infection in my bladder. A typical affliction of the overly sexed, especially likely to strike when you’re not used to being overly sexed anymore. It came up as fast as any tragedy can strike. I was walking through town one morning doing some chores when suddenly I was buckled over with burning pain and fever. I’d had these infections before, during my wayward youth, so I knew what it was. I panicked for a moment—these things can be awful—but then thought, “Thank God my best friend in Bali is a healer,” and I ran into Wayan’s shop.
“I’m sick!” I said.
She took one look at me and said, “You sick from making too much sex, Liz.”
I groaned, buried my face in my hands, embarrassed.
She chuckled, said, “You can’t keep secrets from Wayan . . .”
I was in godawful pain. Anyone who’s ever had this infection knows the dreadful feeling; anyone who hasn’t experienced this specific suffering—well, just make up your own torturous metaphor, preferably using the term “fire poker” someplace in the sentence.
Wayan, like a veteran firefighter or an ER surgeon, never moves fast. She methodically started chopping some herbs, boiling some roots, wandering back and forth between her kitchen and me, bringing me one warm, brown, toxic-tasting concoction after another, saying, “Drink, honey . . .”
Whenever the next batch boiled, she would sit across from me, giving me sly, dirty looks and using the opportunity to get nosy.
“You careful not to get pregnant, Liz?”
“Not possible, Wayan. Felipe has a vasectomy.”
“Felipe has a
vasectomy
?” she asked, in as much awe as if she were asking, “Felipe has a villa in
Tuscany
?” (I feel the same way about it, by the way.) “Very difficult in Bali to get a man to do this. Always the woman problem, birth control.”
(Although it is true that the Indonesian birth rates are down lately due to a brilliant recent birth control incentive program: the government promised a new motorcycle to every man who would volunteer to come in for a vasectomy . . . though I hate to think the guys had to ride their new bikes home
the same day.
)
“Sex is funny,” Wayan mused as she watched me grimacing in pain, drinking more of her homemade medicine.
“Yeah, Wayan, thanks. It’s hilarious.”
“No, sex
is
funny,” she went on. “Make people do funny things. Everyone gets like this, at the beginning of love. Wanting too much happiness, too much pleasure, until you make yourself sick. Even to Wayan this happens at beginning of love story. Lose balance.”
“I’m embarrassed,” I say.
“Don’t,” she said. Then she added in perfect English (and perfect Balinese logic), “To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
I decided to call Felipe. I had some antibiotics at the house, an emergency stash I always travel with, just in case. Having had these infections before, I know how bad they can get, even traveling up into your kidneys. I didn’t want to go through that, not in Indonesia. So I called him and told him what had happened (he was mortified) and asked him to bring me over the pills. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Wayan’s healing prowess, it’s just that this was really serious pain . . .
She said, “You don’t need Western pills.”
“But maybe it’s better, just to be safe . . .”
“Give two hours,” she said. “If I don’t make you better, you can take your pills.”
Reluctantly, I agreed. My experience with these infections is that they can take days to clear, even with strong antibiotics. But I didn’t want to make her feel bad.
Tutti was playing in the shop and she kept bringing little drawings of houses over to cheer me up, patting my hand with an eight-year-old’s compassion. “Mama Elizabeth sick?” At least she didn’t know what I’d been doing to
get
sick.
“Did you buy your house yet, Wayan?” I asked.
“Not yet, honey. No hurry.”
“What about that place you liked? I thought you were going to buy that?”
“Found out not for sale. Too expensive.”
“Do you have any other places in mind?”
“Not worry about it now, Liz. For now, let me make you quickly feel better.”
Felipe arrived with my medicine and a face full of remorse, apologizing to both me and Wayan for having inflicted me with this pain, or at least that’s how he was seeing it.
“Not serious,” said Wayan. “Not worry. I fix her soon. Quickly better.”
Then she went into the kitchen and produced a giant glass mixing bowl full of leaves, roots, berries, something I recognized as turmeric, some shaggy mass of something that looked like witches’ hair, plus eye of what I believe might have been newt . . . all floating in its own brown juice. There was about a gallon of it in the bowl, whatever it was. It stank like a corpse.
“Drink, honey,” Wayan said. “Drink all.”
I suffered it down. And in less than two hours . . . well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed. An infection that would have taken days to treat with Western antibiotics was gone. I tried to pay her for having fixed me up, but she only laughed. “My sister doesn’t need to pay.” Then she turned on Felipe, fake stern: “You be careful with her now. Only sleep tonight, no touching.”
“You’re not embarrassed to fix people for problems like this, from sex?” I asked Wayan.
“Liz—I’m healer. I fix all problems, with women’s vaginas, with men’s bananas. Sometimes for women, I even make fake penises. For making sex alone.”
“Dildos?” I asked, shocked.
“Not everyone has Brazilian boyfriend, Liz,” she admonished. Then she looked at Felipe and said brightly, “If you ever need help making stiff your banana, I can give you medicine.”
I was busily assuring Wayan that Felipe needed not one bit of help with his banana, but he interrupted me—always the entrepreneur—to ask Wayan if this banana-stiffening therapy of hers could perhaps be bottled and marketed. “We could make a fortune,” he said. But she explained, no, it’s not like that. All her medicines must be made fresh each day in order to work. And they must be accompanied by her prayers. Anyway, internal medicine is not the only way Wayan can firm up a man’s banana, she assured us; she can also do this with massage. Then, to our lurid fascination, she described the different massages she does for men’s impotent bananas, how she grips around the base of the thing and kind of shakes it around for about an hour to encourage the blood to flow, while incanting special prayers.
I asked, “But Wayan—what happens when the man comes back every day and says, ‘Still not cured, Doctor! Need another banana massage!’” She laughed at this bawdy idea, and admitted that, yes, she has to be careful not to spend too much time fixing men’s bananas because it causes a certain amount of . . . strong feeling . . . within her, which she isn’t sure is good for the healing energy. And sometimes, yes, the men get out of control. (As you would, too, if you’d been impotent for years and suddenly this beautiful mahogany-skinned woman with long black silky hair gets the engine to turn over again.) She told us about the one man who leapt up and started chasing her around the room during an impotency cure, saying: “I need Wayan! I need Wayan!”
But that’s not all Wayan can do. Also, she told us, she is sometimes called upon to be a teacher of sex for a couple who are either struggling with impotence or frigidity, or who are having trouble making a baby. She has to draw magic pictures on their bedsheets and explain to them which sexual positions are appropriate for which time of the month. She said that if a man wants to make a baby he should make intercourse with his wife “really, really hard” and should shoot “water out from his banana into her vagina really, really fast.” Sometimes Wayan has to actually be there in the room with the copulating couple, explaining just how hard and fast this must be done.
I ask, “And is the man able to shoot water out of his banana really hard and really fast with Dr. Wayan standing over him watching?”
Felipe imitates Wayan watching the couple: “Faster! Harder! You want this baby or not?”
Wayan says, yes, she knows it’s crazy, but this is the job of the healer. Though she admits it requires a whole lot of purification ceremonies before and after this event in order to keep her sacred spirit intact, and she doesn’t like to do it very often because it makes her feel “funny.” But if a baby needs to be conceived, she will take care of it.
“And do these couples all have babies now?” I asked.
“
Have
babies!” she confirmed with pride. Of course they do.
But then Wayan confides something extremely interesting. She said that if a couple is not having any luck conceiving a child, she will examine both the man and the woman to determine who is, as they say, to blame. If it’s the woman, no problem—Wayan can fix this with ancient healing techniques. But if it’s the man—well, this presents a delicate situation here in the patriarchy of Bali. Wayan’s medical options here are limited because it is beyond the pale of safety to inform a Balinese man that he is sterile; it cannot possibly be true. Men are
men
, after all. If no pregnancy is occurring, it has to be the woman’s fault. And if the woman doesn’t provide her husband with a baby soon, she could be in big trouble—beaten, shamed or divorced.
“So what do you do in that situation?” I asked, impressed that a woman who still calls semen “banana water” could diagnose male infertility.
Wayan told us all. What she does in the case of male infertility is to inform the man that his wife is infertile and needs to be seen privately every afternoon for “healing sessions.” When the wife comes to the shop alone, Wayan calls some young stud from the village to come over and have sex with her, hopefully creating a baby.
Felipe was appalled: “Wayan! No!”
But she just calmly nodded. Yes. “It’s the only way. If the wife is healthy, she will have baby. Then everybody happy.”
Felipe immediately wanted to know, since he lives in this town, “Who? Who do you hire to do this job?”
Wayan said, “The drivers.”
Which made us all laugh because Ubud is full of these young guys, these “drivers,” who sit on every corner and harass passing tourists with the neverending sales pitch, “Transport? Transport?” trying to make a buck driving folks out of town to the volcanoes, the beaches or the temples. Generally speaking, this is a fairly good-looking crowd, what with their fine Gauguin skin, toned bodies and groovy long hair. You could make a nice bit of money in America operating a “fertility clinic” for women, staffed with beautiful guys like this. Wayan says the best thing about her infertility treatment is that the drivers generally don’t even ask any payment for their sexual transport services, especially if the wife is really cute. Felipe and I agree that this is quite generous and community-spirited of the fellows. Nine months later a beautiful baby is born. And everyone is happy. Best of all: “No need to cancel the marriage.” And we all know how horrible it is to cancel a marriage, especially in Bali.
Felipe said, “My God—what suckers we men are.”
But Wayan is unapologetic. This treatment is only necessary because it’s not possible to tell a Balinese man that he is infertile without risking that he will go home and do something terrible to his wife. If men in Bali weren’t like this, she could cure their infertility in other ways. But this is the reality of the culture, so there it is. She doesn’t have the tiniest shred of bad conscience about it but thinks it’s just another way of being a creative healer. Anyway, she adds, it’s sometimes nice for the wife to make sex with one of those cool drivers, because most husbands in Bali don’t know how to make love to a woman, anyway.
“Most husbands, it’s like roosters, like goats.”
I suggested, “Maybe you should teach sex education class, Wayan. You could teach men how to touch women in a soft way, then maybe their wives would like sex more. Because if a man really touches you gently, caresses your skin, says loving things, kisses you all over your body, takes his time . . . sex can be nice.”
Suddenly she blushed. Wayan Nuriyasih, this banana-massaging, bladder-infection-treating, dildo-peddling, small-time-pimp, actually blushed.
“You make me feel funny when you talk like that,” she said, fanning herself. “This talking, it makes me feel . . .
different.
Even in my underpants I feel different! Go home now, you both. No more talk like this about sex. Go home, go to bed, but only sleeping, OK? Only SLEEPING!”