Video Night in Kathmandu (7 page)

The popular response to these surprising effusions was ecstatic.
“You need ask no questions—the answers are all there,” wrote one visitor in the guest book. “To laugh, to cry, to live,” was the compact assessment of another typical Ubudite. “The two people here have created together a most delicious feast of exotic, tender, beautiful, pensive, meaningful, reminiscent morsels,” reported an American lady. “Yum.”

A German had been moved to exclaim, “Love is life and life is spirit,” and an even more Delphic fellow to cry, “No arts, no views, no position, no subject, no zoo … only the world we all create.” But my favorite appraisal was the considered opinion of the savant who declared, simply, “Ubud, ses cheesecakes et ses plages.”

None of this, however, prepared me for my audience with the Great Man. As I walked into the third of his galleries and began looking around, I noticed, suddenly, that He was there—an elfin figure in a beret, perched on a wooden chair with an aphorism on his lips, and a cigarette too. I began basking in his warmth and serenity. He began quoting prices.

Before he could start talking discounts, I tried to deflect him. “Ubud must have changed a lot in the twenty years that you’ve lived here.”

“Ah yes.” He sighed extravagantly and showed me his profile. “But I … I am a romantic. I think only of the old Bali. It lives in my heart. I”—he paused—“I am a dreamer.”

Silence.

I drank in the ambience of HIS GOODNESS.

“And what,” he began absently, to break the extended silence, “do you do?”

“I write.”

“Ah.” He paused approvingly. “It takes an artist of real genius to create a cavalcade, to create a story of many generations. It takes a great risk to create such a cavalcade. Many fear such a challenge. But I, I am reading a novel now—it was made into a movie, I think—by just such an artist.” I held my breath. “His name”—he paused—“is Sidney Sheldon.”

AND AS EACH
of the three tourist havens had grown more bloated, each of them in time had spawned a kind of shadow self, an annex-town that had materialized by its side to cater to the overflow. As Kuta became overcrowded, the surplus had spilled
over into Legian, one mile to the north. By the time I strolled through the once quiet village, there was little to be seen except a fledgling Kuta. Norm’s, Don and Donna, Diane, Ed’s and Ned’s (“An Aussie Type of Pub”). The Bali Waltzing Matilda, Koala Blue, Surfer’s Paradise. Next to Bali Aussie was the New Bali (serving “Aussie and Chinese food”). For its grand opening, the place promised cockfights and all-you-can-eat orgies.

So too, as every last inch of Sanur had been claimed by a receiving line of thirty hotels strung along the coast, the government had decided to create a new high-rise resort a little farther south, called Nusa Dua. In 1985, at least eleven new hotels were being built in the man-made settlement, and by now there were 4,525 guest rooms in Nusa Dua, offering what one travel brochure called “an oceanfront setting in an exclusive atmosphere.” Nearly all of them were stocked with convention facilities and conventional facilities—squash courts, health clubs, equipment for wind surfing and, of course, theaters for the presentation of local culture. For a touch of imported romance, there were even horse-drawn buggies on hand.

And as Ubud had become every traveler’s favorite place for avoiding every other traveler, more and more people, so it seemed, had decided to hang out in other funky towns such as Jogjakarta, in neighboring Java. Like Ubud, Jogja was still soft and accommodating enough to entice the kind of traveling party rarely seen in Southeast Asia: serious-looking Dutch or German couples reading translated editions of George Eliot, ethereal girls in peasant skirts traveling by themselves with flowers in their hair, whole families that had taken to the road. Murni’s, a landmark in Ubud, served up “Authentic American Upper Elk Valley Hamburgers,” “chili con carne a la Albuquerque” and “the best chocolate chip cookies east of San Francisco.” It also sold postcards, vases, exquisite books. But Lovina, a typical joint in Jogja, went one step further: it had 400 items on its menu (the
spécialité de la maison
was,
bien sûr
, guacamole), as well as filtered coffee; it provided free maps, English-language newspapers and a small library of European paperbacks that could be bought or traded; it posted notices on which Australian girls reported missing boyfriends; and, on its wall, it gave pride of place to a sign that exhorted: “Kefir Rehabilitates Your Health! Please, Drink Kefir every day and you will be healthy!”

At five in the morning, as light flowed into my Jogja
losmen
, a German girl sat at the breakfast table poring over Jung’s
Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Yet even as each of the resorts had stretched and stretched to accommodate the crowds, still the tourists kept swarming in, scattering north and south and east and converging like mosquitoes on one unvisited corner after another. And even though many a visitor treated Bali with the regretful solicitude one might extend to a lovely girl on the brink of adolescence—at once purified by her presence and somewhat terrified by her future—each year found new towns in eastern Bali popping up like insect bites. In 1984, the new haven of solitude was Lovina, the thinking man’s Kuta-Legian on the northern coast; in 1985, it was Candi Dasa, to the east, another place previously unmarked on the map, which had doubled the number of its
losmens
in just six months and began to report its first cases of thieving. One quiet place after another became a Quiet Place, whose most notable characteristic, after a while, was its noise; every area famous for being unpeopled fell before the consequences of its fame. The 6,000 tourists of 1966 had become 207,000 by 1985, and every other number had been scaled up accordingly. A shrewd local told me that he had purchased five acres of land for $25 in 1972; since then, the property had appreciated by 14,000 percent.

INDONESIA, OF COURSE
, had taken none of this lying down, and in Bali, as in parts of Java, it was hard not to feel that, beneath even all the surface changes, the place had lost something of its innocence to the West. Almost every time I walked down an Ubud or Jogja street, I was arrested by a cheery voice and then by a dazzling smile. Where did I come from? What was my name? Did I need directions? Where had I bought my T-shirt? Did I know the story of the
Ramayana?
Could I not stop for a chat over tea?

Usually my interlocutor was a beautiful, slightly shady boy of college age with a ready smile and uncertain interests; a self-professed student or dancer, he nonetheless seemed to spend most of his days sitting around
losmens
, playing pool or taking
Aussie girls for scooter-rides. And though perhaps he half hoped for money or a favor, my new friend usually seemed happy just to sit around chatting about the wonders of the West.

The first topic to be considered was generally that of money: how much had I paid for my plane ticket, how much for the local bus, how much for a night in the
losmen?
The figures I delivered struck me as absurdly low ($8 for a twenty-hour bus ride, 60 cents for a hearty meal), but the Indonesian boys listened with the same fascination that I might have given to the tax returns of Howard Hughes or J. Paul Getty. Small wonder, perhaps. While I was in Java, the Jakarta
Post
advertised a dinner with Miss World in the capital that cost $4,000 a head; that was equivalent to twenty years’ salary for the average Indonesian teacher.

Yet even as their unfamiliarity with money situated them inescapably within one of the poorest nations in Asia, my self-appointed guides to Indonesia also displayed a familiarity with things Western that could put many a Westerner to shame, in more ways than one. Their special subjects of expertise, like those of any bar-hound in New York, were sex, sports and show biz. One day in Jogja, a young bravo called Agus delivered a detailed and authoritative disquisition on the mating habits of Americans that started with his own beliefs—“Sexual intercourse before marriage, no good!”—and culminated with the startling conclusion: “In America, it’s a case of ‘no money, no honey.’ Right?” That same day, in a garden restaurant nearby, I saw a local girl accost a sunburned Swiss student. What’s your name, she probed gently. “Erik.” She giggled. “Erik Estrada?” The Swiss man looked dazed.
“CHiPs,”
she explained admonishingly, but that was no help at all.

On my very first night in Java, as I tried to catch a good night’s sleep on a bench in a railway station, I suddenly felt a hand on my body. I rolled off my suitcase pillow and looked at the sky. Dark. I checked my watch—4:10 a.m. Not quite myself, I took stock of the scene. I now, so it seemed, had not only a roommate, but also a bench mate. Eyes flashing, my slim-hipped new friend asked me where I came from. New York. His ardor noticeably dimmed. “AIDS!” he pronounced, and moved back a little. Firmly believing that this might not be the ideal time for a tête-à-tête, I nodded vigorously. But my potential companion was not so easily deterred. Did I like men? In certain contexts.
And women? Sometimes. Ah, he said, snatching up his own word as if it were a prompt, there are two kinds of woman, the soft and the hard. And so, in the darkened, empty hallways of a large railway terminal on a tropical island, at 4:30 in the morning, I was treated to a most persuasive treatise on the two kinds of woman, the soft and the hard, as epitomized—so my versatile lecturer told me—by Olivia Hussey and Grace Jones.

Of all America’s ambassadors to the archipelago, however, the most popular seemed to be its athletes. When first I arrived in Kuta, I found the proprietress of my
losmen
and her husband staring intensely at a TV screen. I looked closer and found that the object of their attention was a college basketball game between Lamar and Villanova. In the same Balinese village, I heard, for the first time ever, a rap song celebrating the skills of Julius Erving. Two teenage Indonesian friends hotly debated the strengths and weaknesses of American soccer. (“Look at the mighty Cosmos,” said one. “But recall,” parried the other, “that all their stars were imported.”) And the household god of the entire nation while I was there was an eighteen-year-old super flyweight whose admiration for “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler ran so deep that he had actually shaven his head and changed his name to Yoni Hagler.

Foreign names, in fact, seemed the most precious currency of exchange in Indonesia, magical coins to be traded with every emissary from abroad. Often, my initial conversation with young Indonesians consisted merely of a recitation of familiar names—Michael Jackson, Rambo, Larry Holmes, Madonna—delivered in much the same spirit in which two people, newly introduced, might fish for an acquaintance in common. Once, as I sat drinking tea and watching the sun come up over the rice paddies of Ubud, a local boy strolled up to me, smiled and sat down at my feet, as for a weekly tutorial.

“Michael Jackson,” he began tentatively. “He African?”

“No. He’s a Negro, an American black.”

Nioman took this in. A few moments passed.

“Same with Lionel Richie?”

“Yup.”

“Him Negro?”

“Uh-huh.”

This, too, was digested in time.

“And Marvin Hagler Negro?”

“Yes.”

“And Michael Spinks?”

“Yes.”

By now we were gaining momentum. Nioman looked thrilled with his new discovery.

“And Muhammad Ali Negro?”

“Right.”

“And Larry Holmes?”

“Yes.”

“And Ronald Reagan?”

I paused for a moment, and Nioman looked alarmed. I tried to explain that though many a star of stage and song and sports arena was black, the President of the Union was white. Nioman looked incredulous at first, then crestfallen. I began to wish I had voted for Jesse Jackson.

DEVELOPMENT, IN SHORT
, had come to Bali as crookedly as it had to many another such place, and most of the boys I met, having dropped out of school because their parents could not afford the fees of $3 a month, were unable to read or write in their own language, yet were fluent in English. By now, therefore, it had become a commonplace to portray the Western presence in Bali as a snake in a tropical Eden. Even in my small-town California home, a local library carried a tome entitled
Cultural Involution: Tourists, Balinese and the Process of Modernization in the Anthropological Perspective.
And when I consulted
Bima Wasata
, a pamphlet put out by the village of Ubud to explain its culture to foreigners, I found
Buta
, or the force of evil, defined as follows: “Evil power can be many things. It might be too much money from tourism, or the imbalance number between locals and visitors, or the local people who think about moneymaking work.” All three kinds of evil, one could not help but notice, arose from tourism.

And the image of the virgin violated was all the more tempting in Bali precisely because the great distinction of Bali lay precisely in its purity, its innocence of suggestiveness, at its best, the island had the springtime grace of a virgin who does not need to understand the beauty or the weight she carries. Indeed, it was innocence, above all else, that the Balinese (like Prospero)
deemed holy: children were venerated on the island for the very Wordsworthian reason that they were recent arrivals from heaven, the closest thing on earth to messengers from the gods. Thus it was strictly forbidden for anyone to touch a child on his head, and until the age of three, every infant was carried on the shoulders of his elders so that he would not have to come in contact with the impure earth. Many of Bali’s most divine duties were entrusted only to virgins: a village that felt itself to be possessed would select two little girls, known as “heavenly nymphs,” to don white dresses and perform the
sanghyang
dance, casting out evil spirits as they moved together in a trance, swaying to the rhythm of an unheard music. These days, however, the signs outside the travel agencies in Kuta shouted: “Virgin Dance! Only $5 (U.S.)!”

And though virgins might be the first victims to be sacrificed on the altar of tourism, others were sure to follow. Traditionally, the Balinese had always shunned the sea, believing it to be the hiding place of malefic spirits; today, however, the beach at Kuta was packed with local vendors and villagers in swimsuits who were more than willing to confront demons if it led to extra dollars. So too, one of the Gauguinesque beauties of Bali—celebrated by all its early visitors—had been the majestic unself-consciousness of the local women as they went about their daily tasks bare-breasted. But in turfing the natives out of Eden, the West had supplied them with a fig leaf. After a series of Western documentaries in the thirties had tried to sell the tropical garden as Toplessness Central, Balinese women had been forced to follow the example of prostitutes and cover themselves up. Yet even now, local vendors did a brisk business in portraits of natural maidens undressed. And these days, ironically, it was the Australian girls in Kuta who sought to get back to nature by shedding their tops (to the amusement of the young Balinese and the consternation of the old), while the local girls wrapped themselves up against the invasion of staring eyes. Decadence, perhaps, could be defined as nothing more than the artificial embrace of what once had been natural.