Empire of the East (23 page)

There were no difficulties in country walks taken in the neighbourhood of Venilale, although they usually turned out to be a melancholic form of exercise, through wide, silent landscapes imprinted with blond leaves of banana plants growing in gardens where the houses had vanished. In one case a stylish portico rescued from a ruin had been stuck imposingly across the front of a standard government 12ft x 18ft shack.

We set out to walk southwards in the direction of Bibeleu, the second sacred mountain, appearing at a distance of six or seven miles as a mist-washed isosceles triangle at the back of a rolling heathland, braided here and there with juniper thickets. It was a lonely place, the only sound apart from that of our voices being the falsetto despair of the constantly repeated call of an unseen bird. The jungle thickets we found, on closer inspection, contained occasional trees from which the lower branches had invariably been stripped. As such mutilations were illegal, they had been done in a way that produced no more than the effect of a crazy bonzai styling. The first thicket we investigated contained a soldier of eighteen or so in a brand new and wonderfully pressed uniform, and with a trained vacancy of expression, who may well have been just keeping out of the way. Now, with a relaxation on movement, the village deforesters were everywhere and the ten years’ growth was being hastily lopped away. Next to foodstuffs, wood had become the most important commodity in the Venilale market, and we were informed that a species of female mafia had already sprung up through which this valuable trade was controlled.

The young guitarist from the
passeio
had taken to accompanying us on these outings. He had been recommended to us as possessing a smattering of English, which he hoped to improve, but in our short acquaintance produced a single intelligible sentence, which even then fell short of conveying his meaning. ‘Last week my brother and sister died,’ he said, after a period of agonized concentration. ‘No, no,’ said the nun who was acting as interpreter, ‘it was not last week, but last year.’ Thomas, as he called himself, was a Tetum-speaker, throwing into this mellifluous and expressive tribal language a few thorny words of Portuguese. Once in a while he produced a small square of slate upon which someone had chalked words he was hoping to add to his vocabulary.
Boot, hedgehog, horsewhip, 2-stroke motorcycle.
He was an unobtrusive and diffident presence, tailing along behind at a distance of three or four yards and occasionally twanging urgently on his guitar to draw our attention to some feature of the sinister wilderness through which we were trudging that had sparked off strong emotion. He possessed a range of theatrical grimaces of the sort exhibited in the Chinese theatre, which speak more than words — but only for those holding the clue to them. A twang of the guitar might be a signal for the eyebrows to shoot up over widened eyes and the corners of the mouth to droop in a sort of depressed smirk. We followed his eye, wondering what could have happened to provide fury or grief among a largely featureless spread of thickets, cunningly pruned trees and sallow rocks at this particular spot. The road, hardly better than a track opened by the gnawing of goats, twisted through the contours of the low hills. Once in a while we saw teams of emaciated women dragging branches (stripped from forest trees like huge combs) through the scrub on their way down to Venilale. Once only were we able to identify the cause of Thomas’s excitement, when a spar of charred wood poked through the undergrowth on a ridge over a shallow valley. This had been a village, but no more of it remained than the Romans had left of Carthage. The cemetery down in the valley had escaped interference. Low walls of rock enclosed the old burials, with their inscriptions and even the faded remnants of the photographs intact. The recent mass graves had been squeezed in between: little anonymous mounds sprouting numerous five-inch-high crosses. The cemetery was kept tidy, with not a weed to be seen.

Not enough of the original population remained to rebuild such villages, but every mile or two we passed a shack put up for a family relocated by the roadside. The road had been engineered in such a way as to provide the speediest possible drainage of torrential rainy-season water into the valley below. Thus the gardens provided for the shacks were on dry, barren soil. In one of these, a woman whose pregnancy was grotesquely defined by her fleshlessness was at work with her three small children, extending by a few metres her cleared and planted area, for this purpose gouging out tufts of deep-rooted, sabre-toothed grass. We noted even the youngest of the family, a child of no more than four, tugging desperately at the deep, resistant turf.

‘How old are you?’ I asked the woman.

‘Twenty-nine.’

She would have been thirteen when the great storm swept her childhood away, compelling her to adapt to a normality of hunger, or perish. Nothing in this thin body served any other purpose than to foster survival, and nothing about it was wasted. Her sharp nose, almost deprived of nostrils, was drawn to a point over the cartilage. The lobes of her ears had gone, and shallow hollows like the fluting of a column had been gouged in her neck. She had hands of iron with dark muscular swellings over the finger joints like those of a climbing animal. With these fleshly economies and adjustments nature had protected her, just as it had permitted all the old of the island to be culled. ‘Husband?’ I asked her, and she shrugged her shoulders. No husbands. Few men. Yet half the girls pregnant, and no shortage of children. Strange.

‘Don’t people steal your cabbages?’

The question seemed to embarrass her. My impression was she was pretending not to understand.

‘They’re all hungry, aren’t they?’

She considered the matter then nodded her head. ‘They are hungry,’ she admitted grudgingly, as if in answer to an eccentric question.

‘Don’t they take the cabbages from your garden for themselves?’

‘Take?’ she asked. ‘Take?’

‘Steal, I mean. Rob you.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. It might have been incomprehension or it might have been the true facts of the case — that however powerful the persuasions of hunger, the poor here did not steal from the poor. I was inclined to believe that with these tiny cabbage patches left to look after themselves, often miles from their owner’s hut, this must be the case. That family’s possessions, apart from fourteen cabbages, were the usual magnificently strutting cockerel and his hens, and a starveling dog, fiercely repelled by the cockerel as soon as it attempted a timid approach. Poultry-keeping could be the salvation of such households, yet here again dietary prohibitions of the kind imposed by so many brands of faith forbade it. Somehow on this not quite barren hillside the chickens managed mysteriously to support themselves, and to appear in excellent condition, but they are
leluc
— sacred according to the Tetum religion. Neither they nor their eggs may be eaten, and it is said that the truly orthodox Timorese will see their children die of hunger rather than breach this taboo.

Back in Venilale we were caught up in the mild hysteria of excitement over the promise of a fiesta to be held again after so many years. The seven chieftains now on the verge of their submersion in a quiet takeover by the Church had sent representatives and all the appropriate materials that could be gathered by way of contribution to the decorations. Many of those we saw were strikingly different in appearance from the Timorese of Venilale, giving rise to the speculation as to whether separate racial ingredients were involved. Much of the gala attire was striking indeed. Horsemen rode in wearing gilt dunce’s caps with eruptions of feathers bursting from their tops, and there were dark-faced knife-carrying women in crimson sarongs. A line of splendidly got-up joggers slowed for respectful salutations as they passed. Many of these people seemed thrown off balance by contact with an almost unmanageable freedom, reminding me of the bewilderment of a previously impoverished pools winner who is unsure how to handle wealth. Three or four years before men had been shot on the spot for being found out of their houses at night. Now, after the long, claustrophobic years, unaccountably and at a stroke, twelve hours had been added to the day. For years the villagers had been penned up at night in squalid little shacks. Determined now to make the most of a concession that might at any time be withdrawn, many refused at first to go to bed, wandering about in the darkness, gazing up with wonder and relief at the stars.

Sleep was at an end at 3 a.m. when drummers went into action by torchlight in the cleared space next to the orphanage HQ. By dawn this had been taken over for rehearsals by stern-faced women, like those at Bercoli, marching smartly forwards and in reverse. Next on the scene were the boy dancers of the cockerel cult under the leadership of the aged shaman in his wonderfully tied turban and navy pullover. It now appeared that there was a triangular association here not only with a totemistic rooster but with the moon, seen by its votaries as a cockerel under another aspect, in token of which these eight- or nine-year-olds now wore moon discs on their bare chests, and sickle moons on their foreheads, both stated to be of beaten gold. From that time on, in whatever part of the town we happened to be, we constantly ran into the shaman and his team going through the vigorous contortions of the dance, to the shrillest fife music I have ever heard.

We had been told by the nuns that Venilale, and probably all the small towns and villages of East Timor, were virtually free of crime. It was to be taken for granted that all such consideration of the problems of morality were based upon the ethic imposed by Moses on his descent from Mount Sinai, as set forth in the Book of Exodus.

The Timorese, the sister said, were weak on all the Commandments handed down by Moses dealing with their obligations to God — but very strong indeed with those concerned with one’s duty to one’s neighbour. They were outstandingly observant in the Commandment calling upon them to honour their father and mother, so far as they had survived, and no fathers or mothers anywhere were better off in this way. The murder rate, she believed, was infinitesimally small, compared, say, to the United States. It was hard even to make a Timorese understand what the ruling against bearing false witness was all about. Adultery? ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d have to think about that one.’ This left covetousness and theft. She shook her head. ‘You have to remember this is an egalitarian society,’ she said. Status was determined, she thought, in Orwellian terms, in being more equal than the next man. No one wanted to live in a big house. No honours were conferred upon an accumulator of property. ‘You could say that covetousness is unknown in East Timor. And theft.’

Yet suddenly in this almost crime-free society a competitive urge had insinuated itself. The forthcoming procession was a religious occasion, when it was incumbent upon participants to wear headgear composed of the longest cockerel plumes to be obtained. The first hint of what might happen occurred to me when an acquaintance made on the
passeio
asked, ‘Did you bring a cockerel with you, sir? If so, I should keep your eye on it.’ In fact all cockerels had been placed under close surveillance for the period and it was a matter of local outrage when on the day before the Bishop’s arrival an exceptional bird with which someone had presented the orphanage was found to be bereft of its tail.

Two days went in the scurrying ant-like labour of every spare male to be found to strip the fronds from all the palms and to cut, twist and weave them into miles of complex roadside decorations. On the third day, to the spreading outcry and the great dinning of drums, both far and near, the Bishop arrived. Absurd hopes that he would be mounted on a white horse foundered as a Toyota truck, so heavily enshrouded in garlands on the radiator and sides that little of it but the wheels was visible, trundled into sight.

The Bishop stood on a platform fixed behind the front seats, arms at his side and the palms of the hands turned outwards in the ‘standing Buddha’ posture to been seen in Burmese temples. An archway had been built at the entrance to the town where Claudia and I waited to take photographs, and here, both for ceremonial reasons and because steam was hissing from the Toyota’s radiator cap, the cortège came to a halt. A rush of tribesmen for a closer view of their leader was momentarily impeded by Claudia’s wondering encirclement by a small crowd of those who had never before seen a fair-haired girl in a white dress. We stood our ground and snapped shutters. The tribesmen blew on their archaic horns, clashed cymbals and shrilled their flutes. Nothing moved in the Bishop’s features; he gave the impression of an awareness not wholly dependent upon vision, of a kind shared perhaps with the most practised of card-players. The radiator calmed, the Toyota jerked forward and, the Bishop having miraculously kept his balance, the procession moved on.

With this, the musicians who accompanied the shaman’s cockerel-dancers renewed their tremendous squealings. They had been placed not in front of the Bishop, as promised by the nuns, but immediately behind. The purpose of the dance was to invoke the awe-inspiring vitality of a fighting cock in combat with a challenger, and both the young boys and old man, eyes staring furiously from their heads, leaped high into the air, twisting their bodies in a half-second’s mid-flight before dropping back to earth. Thus, for a moment the pagan symbols of the moon were displayed within view of the cross. In theory such ritual performances, unless held to be devoid of all but tourist attraction, are ruled out by the monotheistic Indonesian Pancasila. Yet here the Church was prepared to show not merely tolerance in its handling of the animist competition, but had sided with it in the face of government disfavour. As another sister had said, ‘The shaman is on the side of the people. He shows them sympathy and love, and there are times when he can be of material help. Most people cannot obtain medicines, but many of his herbal cures are effective. His influence is for good. We are coming closer. Soon we believe he may ask to attend mass.’

‘And after that — will the cockerel dance still go on?’