Tales of a Female Nomad (25 page)

I go back to Bali knowing that my brother and his family will be there if there are problems, either major or minor. With Dick, his wife Margaret, and their daughters, Michelle and Danielle, just a few towns over, I feel secure in leaving. And I also have a feeling that my mother is in for new, happy adventures with Amparo.

I have been away for three months. During my absence, Tu Aji has bought a refrigerator. The women who cook have no interest in ruining perfectly good food by putting it in a refrigerator. They continue to shop for fresh ingredients just before they cook. And if there is leftover food, they continue to give it away or feed it to the dog. Everyone tells me that food doesn’t taste good if it is kept in a refrigerator overnight. I am the only one in the
puri
willing to eat last night’s dinner the next day. They are amused at my lack of taste.

Tu Aji has not bought the refrigerator to preserve food. The refrigerator is for making ice. He has been seduced by the iced juices in the tourist restaurants around the island: fresh fruits, like pineapple, banana, and papaya, swirled in a blender with water, sugar, and ice. They are thick and fruity and healthy, and
“enak sekali”
(delicious).

Tu Aji has also bought a blender. And he has instructed his architect-son, Tu Man, to learn how to make juices. An architect, Tu Aji tells me, unlike the women in the kitchen, has mechanical skills.

“Would you like a juice?” he asks me while we are sitting and talking on my patio late one afternoon. And when I say yes, he calls across the courtyard, “Tu Man? Man? Tu Man?”

And from wherever he was, Tu Man arrives and takes his father’s order. Then he disappears into the kitchen, where he plugs in the blender. The sound of a machine in the kitchen is new and strange. In this kitchen there have never been machines . . . no blender or processer, no coffee grinder, no toaster. Even rice makers are years away for this family.

When the whirling stops, Tu Man delivers a tall, fruity, icy glass of papaya-banana juice; and then he goes back to the other side of the garden, where he was trimming hedges (with hand-clippers).

Every day Tu Aji has a glass of juice, and each time, he calls for his son, loudly across the courtyard. “Tu Man? Man? Tu Man?” And Tu Man, who is over thirty, arrives to serve his father.

I have been back for two weeks when one evening, Tu Aji, Tu Biang, and I are talking and Tu Aji’s craving hits. He wants a juice.

“Ah,” he says, “but I remember now that Tu Man is not here. I cannot have it.”

I smile, happy for the chance to serve him. “I will make your juice,” I offer.

“Do you really know how?” he asks.

“Of course,” I say. Then I turn to Tu Biang. “And I will be happy to show you how to do it.”

I go to the kitchen and plug in the blender. I look around for Tu Biang but she has gone to her room. I peel and cut some papaya and banana and put it in the container. Then I add water and sugar and ice. Tu Aji is waiting at the table when I bring him his juice.

Later that night Tu Biang joins me on the patio outside my room. “What happened to you?” I say. “I was going to show you how to make juice in the blender.”

She giggles. “Rita, you don’t understand. If I learn how to make the juice, Tu Aji will stop calling, ‘Tu Man? Tu Man?’ And he will begin calling, ‘Tu Biang? Tu Biang?’ Thank you very much, but I don’t want to learn.”

After a few weeks, I settle into my old routine. I bike to the beach and meditate early each day. I write every morning. And I study Indonesian and read in the afternoons. I usually have lunch and dinner with Tu Aji.

Late one morning, as I am sitting in front of my computer, Dayu Biang hands me a banana-leaf package. There’s a sparkle in her eyes as she tells me she has brought me a present.

Yesterday, when I asked her about the kids and the old people I had seen in the rice fields who were “fishing” for dragonflies, she told me how she wishes she were young enough, or old enough, to catch dragonflies again. Then she stopped her chores and we went “fishing” in the yard. Our pole was the spine of a palm leaf, tapered to toothpick-size at one end. The hook was the tarlike sap that came out when she scraped a frangipani tree trunk.

We smeared the thin tip of the spine with the sap and went after dragonflies, who are apparently attracted to it. And when they didn’t come to us, we tapped them as they rested on a wire, and they stuck. Dayu removed the wings and skewered the bodies, piling up seven tiny dragonflies on a stick. Fortunately there weren’t enough for a meal.

But today, Dayu Biang’s nephew spent the morning on assignment in the rice fields; he came home with fifty dragonflies. And while I was writing, Dayu Biang sautéed them in coconut oil with onion, shallots, garlic, hot pepper, and salt. Now she can’t wait to watch me eat them.

My friend Dayu Biang, who wouldn’t even take a bite of the French toast I made the other day, and who told me a few weeks ago that she wasn’t brave enough (
“tidak
berani”
) to get into my hammock, is awaiting my first crunch of dragonflies with a smirk on her face.

Once, long ago, I ate chocolate-covered ants, but they didn’t look any different from chocolate-covered peanuts. The dragonflies in my package look exactly like what they are: wingless dragonflies. I pop one into my mouth and bite into it. It tastes like a crispy vegetable sautéed in garlic and shallots and hot pepper. There’s nothing wrong with the taste. It’s the tiny legs tickling my tongue that I’m not too fond of. Dayu stands there while I eat the dragonflies like potato chips. I do get her to eat a few.

After I have been back in Bali for four months, I decide to go to the U.S. My brother reports that Mom is doing fine, but I want to see for myself.

United States

CHAPTER TWELVE

BACK IN THE UNITED STATES

Mom has a new haircut, her nails are painted, and she looks well. She never did discuss feelings with me, nor has she, like most of her generation, shared her pain. This time is no different. She doesn’t say anything about how she is adjusting to being without my father, but both she and Amparo tell me about the meetings and lectures and concerts they’ve attended, the dinner parties they’ve given, the friends they’ve shared. Amparo is taping my mother’s stories about her life and family, and with my mother’s help, she is putting together an album of pictures, with captions.

I don’t know if I am projecting or if there really is an excitement in my mother’s tone that suggests she is reveling in the companionship of someone, unlike my father, that she does not have to drag to concerts and lectures, sometimes kicking and screaming. She and Amparo are enjoying their time together. At seventy-seven, Mom is experiencing her own version of liberation.

Amparo has hired Gera, an Italian woman from Argentina, to come every Wednesday to do my mother’s hair and nails. Sometimes Gera brings her six-year-old daughter, Romina; and while Amparo enjoys a few hours away from the house, Gera and my mom and Romina bake cakes and quiches and make pasta from scratch.

Amparo’s children and grandchildren come frequently as well. My mother’s house, which had gotten old and stodgy in recent years, is a pulsing, multigenerational community.

I stay in the States for several months, taking care of business, both mine and my mother’s, getting health checkups, meeting with my agent and my publishers . . . and most important, catching up with Mitch and Jan. They are both successful journalists in New York. I love seeing them in their adult worlds, wrapped in glamorous, high-profile lives.

Mitch has just reported the inside story of how a drunk motorman caused a subway crash in New York City. (That reporting would help his paper win a Pulitzer Prize.)

Jan is working on the popular gossip column in
New York
magazine called “Intelligencer.” She talks to celebrities every day and is building an impressive list of “informants.” Jan and Mitch are both interesting and talented people. I enjoy being with them. They have active and full lives; I’m glad I do too. I’m going back to Bali.

Garuda, the Indonesian airline, flies out of Los Angeles to Bali. I decide to stop and visit a friend in L.A. for a week before I return to Bali. On the last day, as I am getting ready to leave for the airport, my mail package from Connecticut arrives at my friend’s house. My brother waited until the last minute to send it so that I’d be up-to-date. One of the envelopes contains a telegram from a woman friend in the Netherlands whom I met at the
puri.
It was delivered to my mother’s house four days ago. No one noticed it was a telegram, so it was tossed into the Rita pile, to be FedEx’d with everything else.

A second telegram was sent to Jan’s address, this one from Tu Biang and her sons. It is in one of those red striped envelopes that says, “Open immediately. Urgent information inside.” Or something like that. It was delivered to Jan with the regular mail four days ago, and Jan figured it was a solicitation letter for starving children in Ethiopia or pandas in China, something that could wait a day or two. Her mail package arrived in the same FedEx delivery.

I open both telegrams on the day I am returning to Bali . . . the day of Tu Aji’s cremation.

I remember nothing about the twenty-two-hour journey from L.A. to Bali except watery eyes and the recurring thought that something very deep and important has been taken from me. In the taxi riding to Kerambitan, I am disoriented. Everything looks strange; it is as though I have never been here before.

I have no idea what I will find in the
puri.
Tu Aji
is
the
puri.
Tu Aji is Bali. And now, suddenly, he isn’t. I am hurt. He knew I was coming back today. Why didn’t he wait so I could have said good-bye? Perhaps he knew that I could not have given him permission to leave.

I am dreading my reentry. I won’t even have the comfort of the rituals. They are over. So are the processions. All those things that make death easier. The family has spent the last five days releasing his spirit from this world and wishing him well in the next one. I don’t even believe he is dead.

I arrive in Kerambitan from the airport at eleven o’clock at night. The
puri
is full of people. Tu Biang, the nine sons, and all their wives and children are there. And friends and family and two women from the Netherlands who studied with him, one of whom had sent me the telegram I received too late. We all hug and cry. I sleep that night on a mattress on the floor next to Tu Biang and four of her grandchildren.

Three months later I am still in Kerambitan. It is not the same. Without Tu Aji, the essence of the
puri
is gone. But I cannot abandon his family. Tu Biang has said that she feels stronger because I am there; she is frightened that all the westerners who have always come to study with Tu Aji will stop coming. She is right to worry. The intellectual elegance that he brought to the
puri
is gone. I feel his loss intensely. From time to time I am overwhelmed with sadness.

There is a small altar in Tu Aji’s library where I can stand among his books and papers, light a stick of incense, and have a conversation. I bring him the chocolate he was not supposed to eat while he was alive. I tell him about ideas I have for books. One day I spend half an hour communicating with Tu Aji, and then I walk out of the library and begin writing. I can’t stop. It is as though I am possessed. I’m writing an allegory about animals who live in a banyan tree in Bali. Tu Aji is in it. So am I. We are a mouse and a bird, from opposite ends of the world, who become the best of friends. The words are pouring out of me. I can barely do anything else.

For three weeks I write fiendishly. Then, in the middle of my inspired writing, I get word by mail that I have sold a book to an American publisher. A few hours later, a young man from the village arrives at my patio with two tourists from Germany.

Bali is loaded with tourists, but very few of them ever find their way to Kerambitan, which is nothing more than a comma in the guidebooks. The ones who do have chosen to detour from the recommended itineraries. They’re rarely American, usually interesting, and always a touch adventurous. And since I am the only westerner in residence, when tourists appear in the village, they are brought to me. I think of it as holding court in my little part of the palace.

Michael, the German tourist (who is with his mother), has just come from leading a tour on the southern rivers of Irian Jaya, the easternmost province in Indonesia. For a long time I have been wanting to tour Irian Jaya, the western half of the island of New Guinea. Only two things were lacking: a guide and the money. That day they walked in together. After a dinner of nonstop questions from me, I tell Michael to sign me up for his next trip, which is several months from now.

When he leaves, I try to settle into a routine, but it is difficult; my head is still racing and often disoriented. Sometimes I fill my days with writing. Other times I sit with the women and make offerings. In the early mornings I bike to the beach and walk alone on the black sand, watching the waves and staring out into the vast sea.

In the evenings I often have a young visitor. Wayan is one of the few Kerambitan youths who is brave enough to visit me in the
puri.
At first he comes to practice English, and we talk after dinner for an hour or two a few times a week. Wayan has worked hard on his English, memorizing lyrics, accompanying himself on a guitar as he sings pop American songs. His vocabulary includes the graphic and colorful language of heavy metal and the beautiful romantic words of love songs.

Gradually our friendship deepens and I often ask him for favors, to take me on his motorcycle to the Telecom center at odd hours, or to deliver me to a tourist part of the island where I can watch CNN or eat a Thai dinner. Over the next years, Wayan is one of the most stable parts of my life. Along the way he graduates from a school of tourism and becomes a certified guide. I introduce him to visiting friends, both old and new, and he guides them around the island. He also helps me do the research for a children’s book about how rice grows in Bali, whizzing me from one rice field to another on the back of his motorcycle, looking for stages of plant development.

Wayan and I laugh a lot. It is important for me to have a friend outside of the
puri.
There is little laughter these days within. Among the people in Tu Aji’s family, I talk most often to Tu Man. He is trying to find out who he is without his father. Most Balinese men his age (thirty-four) are married, but I have never seen Tu Man with a woman. I have never even seen him look at a woman. From time to time he and I go off on his motorcycle to do errands: we buy birds in the bird market in Denpasar (two parakeets die in their paper bags before we get them home); we buy a table for the garden; we buy tiles for the bathroom. We often pass beautiful women, but Tu Man never looks.

Tu Man moves slowly and talks slowly. He spends hours clipping hedges, planting cuttings, thinning flowers. Often in the early morning I see him standing in the garden staring at his plants for long periods of time in a sort of meditation. He is an architect by training, but his love is taking care of the garden and the birds. Unlike his father, whose laughter frequently filled the
puri
with his love of life and his enthusiasm for discovery, Tu Man has a weighty demeanor.

One of the only times I have ever seen Tu Man laughing was when Jan was here. She and I involved him in a cross-cultural comparison of animal noises. Tu Aji was still alive, but he was out for the evening. Tu Man does not speak English, and he has never been interested in learning. So, during the four months Jan was in Bali, they never talked. But one night, Jan and I were sitting at the table after dinner and Tu Man joined us. The night air was filled with the mating calls of frogs. I imitated them with the American version of a frog call.

“What does a Balinese frog say?” I asked Tu Man.

He made a frog sound. “
Dokodokodok.
”

“And a goat?” I said, making an American goat noise. He did a goat in Balinese, “
Mbeek,
mbeek.
”

Cats in Bali say, “
Meong,
meong.
” Dogs say, “
Ngongkong,
ngongkong
.”

Pigs, “eeleng.” Horses, “Hiiiiik, hiiiiik.” Ducks, “Kwek, kwek, kwek.”

The three of us laughed and oinked and meowed and meonged and kweked.

In those days, Tu Man didn’t mix much with guests. People came to see Tu Aji, and Tu Man was far in the background. That night of animal noises was the only time he ever interacted with Jan.

It is more than two years since the night of the animal noises. Four months since Tu Aji’s death. I am leaving again. This time I plan to be in the U.S. for several months. Amparo has written that everything is fine with my mother, but I want to see her. The driver is picking me up at eight in the morning to go to the airport.

At seven I wander over to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. I am sipping it at the table, mentally checking off all the things I have to do before I leave, when Tu Biang joins me. I can tell immediately that something is up. She is carefully dressed and combed, and when she says that Tu Man has asked her to talk to me, her tone is formal. I am nervous; formality does that to me.

Tu Biang is the first to speak. “Last night Tu Man asked me to speak to you before you leave. He would like me to ask you for Jan’s hand in marriage.”

I never saw it coming.

“If Tu Man married Jan, you and I would be
besan.
I would like that,” says Tu Biang with a big smile.

This is not something they arrived at lightly; it is a considered decision. I must be very careful.

“I am honored that Tu Man would like to marry Jan. And you are right. It would be nice if we were
besan.
” I laugh. “But I think it would be very difficult. They don’t speak the same language, and they hardly know each other. In the West, young people get to know each other before they decide to marry.”

“They could learn to love each other,” she says. “That is what happened to Tu Aji and me.”

At this point Tu Man joins us. He has waited an appropriate amount of time. Now it is his turn to talk to me, with his mother present.

I speak first. “Tu Man, I am honored that you would like to marry my daughter. I am also surprised. You have talked to me many times about the difficulties of an East-West marriage. Have you changed your mind?”

“I thought about it,” he says. “And I realized that it is not the same for everyone. We are all different people. I would give her freedom. If she wanted to live in the United States for six months, that would be all right with me.”

“But if she married you, she would want you to be with her.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. I have to be here.”

“You know that more than 50 percent of the marriages in the United States end in divorce . . . and usually the woman is given custody of the children.”