Empire of the East (21 page)

The Pope’s visit fell short of being a universally acclaimed success. To an outsider who has always assumed ironclad solidarity in the Catholic ranks it came as a surprise that such a Catholic publication as
Timor Link
could have entertained some doubts as to whether the visit was a good idea in the first place, since it was seen by many as a victory for the Indonesian military. Of the Pope’s pronouncements the paper said ‘in customary fashion his language was oblique if not ambiguous’. Much stress was laid upon the ritual of earth kissing, on this occasion omitted. ‘Would you have liked to see the Pope kiss the ground at the airport?’
The Advocates
correspondent asked Bishop Belo, to receive the flat reply, ‘Yes, that was my desire.’

Nothing distils more to perfection the spirit of this occasion than the carefully prepared homily the Pope was dissuaded from delivering in Latin, which only two or three of the high-ranking ecclesiastics of his entourage would have understood, before finally compromising with an English translation comprehensible possibly to one in a hundred of his audience. I learned from
Timor Link,
as a further surprise, that Bishop Belo had contemplated cancelling the visit, and was even more astonished that it should have been in his power to do so.

It is evident that Bishop Belo remains very much his own man, and that this is recognized and fully appreciated by the people of his diocese.

In the absence of a priest, Sister Paola was called upon to conduct a service in the village of Gari Vai, some twelve miles away, and took us there with her. The church was large, and rather splendid for so small a place, although devoid of the usual furniture. That there had been a heavy loss of life in the parish was evident by the presence of numerous women in the deepest mourning. We were struck by the singular fact that they remained outside the church during the service — motionless black-shrouded statuary dotted through the surrounding trees, or placed kneeling by the windows or the door. Could this, we wondered, have been a Catholic concession to Tetum custom, with the distancing from the community of those seen as carrying the contagion of death? As usual, there were few men about, but at a certain moment, when the service was about to start, a small group burst through the door, fell to their knees, following this by full-length prostration in almost Islamic style.

Our appearance in Gari Vai produced the familiar amazed reaction among its people, although in this small and remote place where Tetum culture would have been less diluted than in Venilale, feelings were better kept under control. Instead, after the service, we were courteously directed to a double bamboo seat where the majority of the population formed a semi-circle, several persons deep, with the small children in front, to contemplate us in absolute silence. After two or three minutes of this experience, cautious smiles began to break out in the back row, and then one or two of the older children pushed through to kiss our hands. When Sister Paola came for us they all clapped.

From Gari Vai we drove to Bercoli, where the situation was much the same. Here there was less pressure upon us due to frantic preparations for the arrival of Bishop Belo, who had agreed to eat a midday meal with the villagers on his way to Venilale. The headman at Bercoli was a government appointee, who saw the occasion as an opportunity for reconciliation and goodwill. Learning of the Bishop’s intention to break his journey here, this man had sanctioned and provided the necessary material for a hall to be built for his reception. This, a bleak breezeblock construction among magnificent banyans, had been erected in exactly one week. Thereupon the headman had called for volunteers to clear the place up, and now the inevitable teenage boys were hacking away energetically with their machetes, cutting the village grass blade by blade.

In his book
Indonesia’s Forgotten War,
John G. Taylor mentions that in three days in April 1989 alone, twenty persons were shot in Bercoli. It is thus understandable that, with a shortage of men, a guard of honour for the Bishop could only be provided by combing the area for suitable women. These were being trained in drumming and marching backwards, a ceremonial exercise normal in East Timor, where such escorts were not permitted to remove their eyes from the face of the dignitary thus honoured. They were a taut-faced, rather fierce-looking collection, very thin as usual, with two of them outstandingly pregnant. These had been placed at the end of the two files, where it was perhaps hoped that their condition would escape the Bishop’s attention. Drilling them was a Timorese army veteran. Although of extremely dark complexion, his European features proclaimed him a descendant of one of that small legion of indomitable men who conquered half the world, then uncomplainingly carried out the order to mate with any native woman they could, to produce the sons necessary to defend the new possessions.

The headman, wearing trainers and denims, looked on with approval. Although Javanese, he was so Westernized that his eyes seemed to be changing shape. Quite unconsciously, while we were chatting, he took a plastic credit card out of his pocket, gestured with it, and put it back. A Tetum collaborator stood at his back, ready to smile whenever the headman did. He carried a cockerel under his arm for which the headman showed he did not much care. ‘The Bishop’, said the headman, ‘is coming on a white horse. He is descending from horse, then we carry him in chair into hall for reception, speeching and good lunch. We are much praising his visit.’

A group of grass cutters came by, hopping like frogs and slashing with their machetes, and he nodded happily, and said, ‘Cheerio.’ After that he took me to a pond by a stream at the back of the village where they grew spinach. Here some old ladies were scrubbing away at the leaves they had cut, which would feature in the Bishop’s lunch. ‘Is very good for blood,’ the headman said.

It was close to midday when we got back to what had been the village’s dark centre, now illuminated by a flush of light squeezed through the tight-shuttered curtains of the banyans’ roots. The severe-faced Tetum women — thinking God knows what — still marched in reverse, banging on the kettledrums hanging from their necks, and here and there the black-draped shape of a mourner still crouched facing east.

Some trestle tables had arrived and were to be carried into the hall, and the headman dashed off to supervise their positioning. It was the moment for an onlooker to sidle up with information in broken Portuguese he could no longer suppress. ‘There was a man from here went away to work. They said he was Fretilin and they shot him and sent him in a coffin back to his father. But here they say there must be no public burial. So they dug a grave and tipped the body in just as it was. I tell you this, because it is not right.’

The man bowed, backed away, and was lost to sight.

Lospalos, close to the eastern tip of the island, had not only been at the centre of desperate fighting between the Indonesian forces and the Fretilin, but remained a stronghold of the Church. There were four priests in the area; the senior who held the ministry in the town itself, although an Italian, being remarkably known as Father Ernie. It was for this father that Sister Paola had an urgent message. Since the post did not function in East Timor, this would have to be delivered by the driver of the orphanage truck, and when she suggested that we might like to go along with him we readily assented.

The road impressed with a sensation of desertion even more than the one from Díli to Venilale had done. For a number of miles, long barren stretches of it ran close to the sea, after which, the way barred by plateaux bearing some similarity to the mesas of Mexico, it twisted south through the wide plain of Fuiloro to Lospalos. Much of the emptiness through which it ran had become familiarly known as ‘dead earth’ because all those who had filled it were dead and gone, and human activity had come to an end; although nature had already begun a re-arrangement of the scene in its own way.

Down by the sea there had been villages, and faint rectangles drawn in charcoal marked where the houses had stood. The water’s edge was incarnadined with coral and the sea had flung the black remnants of feluccas up onto the beach, where, salt had eaten through their vitals. Fish traps embedded in coral detritus had grown fur like that of a reindeer’s antlers, with the sea-lice fidgeting over it in search of prey. Among this ancient wreckage a single sea-going craft had been streamlined and reshaped over the stagnant years by gentle, marine decay. The land was dead but there was submarine life in plenty. The fishermen, our driver told us, had harvested a great variety of molluscs in these waters, and the available crop had steadily increased throughout a decade in which they had been left unmolested. And there they were to be seen, inky graffiti of clustered shells scrawled through the shallows, and among the coral heads, and the drifting shadows of the fish.

Life inland, responding to a check in one direction, was on the move in another. Regular cultivation of the soil had come to an end with benefit to spontaneous and unaided growth. Seen from a hill’s summit, the dead earth was marked out with what might have been taken for the inscriptions or traceries of pre-historic man, or even space-invaders. Rice-paddies had been cut here, tended, irrigated and fertilized for generations, and now what remained of them were meticulous geometrical shapes growing wildflowers to rejoice the heart of someone indifferent to husbandry. Flowers had sprung up everywhere in the vacated land: bright doodlings where ploughs had meandered through the rocks, and windborne seeds had since fallen on fresh earth. The road ran on the edge of a paddy crammed with self-sown gourds like misshapen phalluses, fenced as if against thieves by vast thistles that had sprung up in the path surrounding it. Here the temporary calm and servility of a man-made oasis had been obliterated and replaced by an incomprehensible exaggeration as new forms of life smothered those unable to adapt to change. The dazzling pallor on the earth had darkened the sky, and our surroundings seemed to vibrate to the tremendous, symphonic wheeze of the crickets. It was at this moment that a horseman trotted towards us through the purplish band laid along the horizon. He was the first human being we had seen that day outside a town. As he came closer we saw that he wore a poncho sewn with feathers and had a bandage across his forehead in a way that partially shaded his eyes. He reined up, bowed and gave us a smile undermined by appeal. Then he turned in his saddle, following us with his eyes and waving continuously and with a kind of desperation as the distance between us increased and we finally passed out of sight. Our encounter with this lone figure added new depths to the intense sensation of isolation conveyed by the dead earth itself.

We drove down the glittering snakeskin of a road cut through a quartz outcrop under the first of the mesas afloat in a saffron mist. We passed more cracked and riven paddies with their sinister flowers, and so on towards Lospalos. Somewhere in this last stretch, the forest made its sudden appearance as a dark and solid flux of vegetation so dense as it poured over the hilltops that at a few hundred yards the eyes could hardly separate the trees. All efforts, with the use of defoliants, to demolish this arboreal stronghold had failed, and whatever the tangle of interlacing branches concealed by way of deep ravines and secret caves remained largely uninvestigated. It was somewhere in this vicinity in 1990 that the Australian journalist Robert Domm had paid a hazardous visit to Xanana Gusmao.

Lospalos, principal town of the district of Lautem, seemed not so much to have been devastated by the long and supremely savage war that had raged around it, as to have been subjected to a depersonalization. It was like a place within range of the normal lava flows of Etna or Vesuvius, where the habit of living for the moment is engrained, advance planning inappropriate, and undertakings conditional. Here, people lived not by choice but an accident of fate, among temporary structures of corrugated iron, and kept going somehow with a minimum of security and hope.

Not all the plastering by the latest in counter-insurgency aircraft had quite succeeded in driving the insurgents out of these mountains. A curfew that for years had kept the population indoors from dusk to dawn had only just been lifted. Even now a largely peasant people were allowed to cultivate their crops only in sanctioned areas. Such measures could only increase local detestation of military rule, and when the Indonesians came to the conclusion that secretly or otherwise they were up against the whole population, they were probably right. Their suspicions drove them to invent novel methods of terror. Persons seen as unenthusiastic in their support might be called upon to demonstrate their loyalty by joining death squads charged with the public execution of captured guerrillas or major suspects. For such occasions they would be issued with an assortment of farm implements, cudgels and sticks with which to do their work.

We located Father Ernie in his office surrounded by clamorous supplicants. He was the mercurial southerner of legend, eyes full of amusement and outrage, spouting a defective mixture of Portuguese and Tetum, hands put to work to fill the gaps when verbal communication failed. Papers slid from his desk-top as he shoved a passage for himself through the crowd. It was soon evident that the appeals for assistance were in the realms of temporal rather than spiritual matters. A goat representing a family’s total capital had disappeared. A woman was there to plead for malaria pills (the supply sent by international aid had been stolen and gone into shops), a man dragged the Father away from us to display testicles swollen from a soldier’s kick. There was sympathy or admonition despite all the necessity for caution, a guarded optimism, the shadow of despair sculpted in a delicate play of the fingers and expressive narrowings of the eyelids, tongue clickings, and backwards jerks of the head.

‘Don’t they come to you for confession?’ I asked. He tapped the side of his nose in a gesture that seemed to unite us in secretly shared knowledge of a worldly kind. ‘The poorer you are, the less there is to confess,’ he said. ‘These people are very poor. They’re given a few hundred metres of land to live on. If they want more they’re told they must pay taxes for roads. “What roads? they ask.” There aren’t any. “Anyway, what do we want with roads?” ’