Happy Ant-Heap (18 page)

The background was full of bustle and laughter. The Danis spend much time tidying up their surroundings, and young girls were dashing about with bundles of fresh grass to be spread over the earthen floors of the houses, and renewing mats upon which feet had to be wiped at their entrance. In preparation for the fiesta they had painted their skin with patterns of coloured dots, and, by way of further decoration, white spectacle frames round their eyes. The chief gestured in their direction, shaking his head with a broad-minded smile.
‘Weh, weh,’
he repeated over and over again. It was a formal welcome, which included an invitation to claim a vacant space on the floor of the men’s hut in which a fire burned smokily to frustrate the mosquitoes, but was at least warm.

A few hundred miles to the east the Melanesians of Papua New Guinea, under an Australian-style government, had been hurled in a couple of generations into a recognisable version of the developing world, and there were depressing accounts in the guidebooks of hazards the traveller might be expected to encounter. ‘In some areas rascals terrorise the community…many Papuans live in shanty towns, there is little work and drunkenness is rife…crime is the favourite topic of conversation…houses are barricaded—the middle class live in barbed-wire fortresses…you are vulnerable even in a group, so keep off the streets…risks of hold-ups are far greater at night.’ It is an apocalyptic prospect, from which the eye turns with relief to a survival of other times.

1991

T
HE ONE THING THAT
impressed me about the airport building at Wamena was an enormous artificial flower placed in the path of arriving passengers. This, a four-foot-across polystyrene Rafflesia, had been so painstakingly created that for a moment I thought I detected a sickly floral fragrance in its vicinity, whereas the fact was that the airport as a whole smelt of nothing but a powerful anti-mosquito spray in use. After the flower came the information desk, where I enquired for a taxi driver who, according to a Jayapura agent, could usually be found at the airport and was the only Dani in Wamena who spoke English reasonably well. I was taken to the back of the building, where he was pointed out to me, occupied with some tourists who were photographing him in national garb. He was short for a Dani, with glittering eyes and a black beard, and as he hurried forward at the end of the session to introduce himself, his limp translated itself into a skip. His flat fur hat, of the kind once worn by Henry Tudor, enhanced a dignity by no means impaired by his nakedness. Apart from this head covering, he wore nothing but a two-foot yellow penis gourd held in the upright position by a string round the waist. The scrotum had been tucked away at the base of the gourd, exposing the testicles in a neat, blueish sac. This did not surprise me, for as the plane taxied in I had noticed half a dozen naked men unloading a cargo plane.

We shook hands. Namek repeated the Dani greeting
‘weh, weh’
(welcome) a number of times, excused himself, went off and came back wearing ill-fitting ex-army jungle fatigues. It now turned out that the taxi in which he had a quarter share was the magnificent ruin of an ancient Panhard-Levasseur, formerly owned by a Javanese Raja, which now awaited us, refulgent with polished brass, at the airport gate. In this we travelled in some state to a
losmen
(hotel) he recommended, where I took the austere room offered for one night, then, after a quick tidy-up, joined him in a species of porch, opening on to the street, where we discussed the possibilities of an investigatory trip into the interior.

By chance we had arrived in the midst of a minor crisis. The town had been showered overnight by large flying insects which, although harmless, were of menacing appearance. Many of them had found their way into the
losmen,
where they hurtled noisily across rooms and down passages, colliding with staff and guests, and then, their energy exhausted, were added to the piles into which they had been swept, until time could be found to clear them away. Namek took a gloomy view of this phenomenon, promising, he assured me, a change in the weather, which was likely to be for the worse.

‘How do you come to speak English so well?’ I asked him.

‘My mother was killed in an accident and a Catholic father adopted me,’ he said. ‘From him I am learning English and Dutch.’ He spoke in a soft sing-song, eyes lowered, as if soothing a child, then looking up suddenly at the end of each sentence as if for assent.

‘Now I am a registered guide,’ he said, ‘no other taxi has assurance. Also I work in my garden. Tomorrow I will bring you sweet potatoes.’

‘Are you married?’

‘I have two wives,’ he said. ‘My father had two handfuls. That is the way we say for ten. We are always counting on fingers.’ He raised his eyes to mine with a quick, furtive smile. ‘You see we are going downhill.’

‘Catholic, are you?’

‘In Wamena all Catholics.’

‘Doesn’t your priest object to the wives?’

‘For Danis they are making special rules. It’s okay for them to have many wives. I cannot catch up with my father. Times now changed. Maybe one day I will have one wife more. That is enough.’

There was a moment of distraction while the
losmen’s
cat raced through over the furniture in chase of the last of the fearsome insects. Namek showed me the agent’s letter to him. ‘My friend says you are wanting to see of our country. May I know of your plans?’

‘I haven’t any,’ I said. ‘This is just a quick trip to get the feeling of the place. What ought I to see? Merauke-Sorong? The Asmat, would you say?’

‘You may show me your
surat jalan
[travel permit]. Did you put down these places?’

‘I only put down the Baliem. Can the others be added here?’

‘No. For that you must go back to Jayapura for permission to go to these places.’

‘In Jakarta they said it could be done here.’

‘They are wrong. Go to the police office and they will tell you.’

‘It seems a waste of time. Let us suppose I go back—am I sure of getting the permissions?’

‘Here nothing is sure. One day they are telling you yes, the next day they say no. They will not agree to tell you on telephone. Now also the telephone is not working.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

He was reading the
surat jalan,
going over the words, letter by letter, with the tip of his forefinger, each word spoken softly, identified, and its meaning confirmed.

‘With this
surat jalan
you may go to Karubaga,’ he said.

‘And what has Karubaga to offer?’

‘Scenery very good. Also you are seeing different things. There are women in Karubaga turning themselves into bats.’

‘That’s promising,’ I said. ‘How do we get there?’

‘By Merpati plane,’ he said. ‘To come back we are walking five days. In Karubaga you may find one porter. Maybe two. Also one bodyguard.’

‘Why the bodyguard? Cannibals?’

The thick beard drew away from his lips as he humoured me with a smile. ‘No cannibals. Sometimes unfriendly people.’

The many frustrations of travel on impulse had left their brandmark of caution on me. ‘What are the snags?’ I asked. ‘Tell me the worst.’

‘Very much climbing,’ he said. ‘Heart must be strong.
Surat
to be stamped by police in five villages. At Bakondini no river-bridge. Porters may bring you on their backs across, or rattan bridge to be built one day, two days—no more. Every day now it is raining a little.’

As he spoke a shadow fell across us. Part of the porch was of glass, and through it I saw that, where a patch of blue sky had shown only a few minutes before, black, muscled cloud masses had formed and were writhing and twisting like trapped animals. A single clap of thunder set off a cannonade of reverberations through the echoing clapboard of the town, morning became twilight, and then we heard the rain clattering towards us over the thousand tin roofs of Wamena. Pigs and dogs were sprinting down the street, chased by a frothing current, then disappearing behind a fence of water.

The rain stopped, the sun broke through, and the steam rose in ghostly, tattered shapes from all the walls and pavements of the town. Mountain shapes, sharp-edged and glittering, surfaced in the clear sky above the fog. ‘In one hour all dry again,’ Namek said.

We came back to the question of travel. ‘I’ll think about Karubaga,’ I said. ‘Any suggestions about using up the afternoon?’

‘We may go to Dalima to visit my smoked ancestor,’ Namek said. ‘For this we may bring with us American cigarettes.’

In Wamena they smoked clove cigarettes, and there was a long search in the market for the prized American kind that were rarely offered for sale. By the time we found a few packets, the shallow floods had already dried away, and we set off. We chugged away on three cylinders into the mountains to the north, left the car sizzling and blowing steam at Uwosilimo, and trudged five miles up a path to Dalima. In these off-the-beaten-track places the Dani had held on to their customs until the last moment, cropping ears and amputating fingers years after such exaggerated expressions of bereavement following the deaths of close relatives had been stamped out elsewhere. Persons of great power and influence, known as
kain koks,
were not cremated in the usual way but smoked over a slow fire for several months and thereafter hung from the caves of their houses, where they continued to keep a benevolent eye on the community for decades, even centuries, until the newly arrived Indonesians launched their drive against ‘barbarous practices’, took down the offending cadavers and burned them or threw them into the river.

Namek’s ancestor had been one of the few successfully hidden away, and now, in a slightly relaxed atmosphere, he could be discreetly produced for the admiration of visitors with access to cigarettes from the USA which, he let it be known through a shaman, was the offering he most appreciated.

The whole village turned out for us in holiday mood, the women topless and in their best grass skirts, and the men in the local style of penis gourds, with feathers dangling from their tips. We distributed cigarettes and the current
kain kok
tottered into view, overwhelmingly impressive with the boar’s tusks curving from the hole in his septum, his bird-of-paradise plumes, and his valuable old shells. Beaming seraphically, he punched a small hole in the middle of the cigarette and began to smoke it at both ends. He was the possessor of four handfuls of wives, and of this Namek said in a sibilant aside, ‘Now he is old, and his women play their games while they are working in the fields.’

With this the smoked ancestor was carried out, having been crammed for this public appearance into a Victorian armchair. One arm was flung high into the air with a malacca cane grasped in the hand. The other hand, reaching surreptitiously down behind his back, held the polished skull of a bird. The Tudor-style hat affected by all the clan’s leading males was tilted jauntily over an eye socket, and the ancestor’s skin was quite black and frayed and split like the leather of an ancient sofa. His jaws had been wrenched wide apart by the fumigant, and now the old
kain kok
lit a Chesterfield, puffed on it, and wedged it between the two molar teeth that remained. Behind him descendants of lesser importance awaited their turn to make similar offerings to the ancestor.

The scene was in part grotesque but abounding in good cheer. The women rushed at us giggling and happy to show off their mutilated hands, and the men seemed proud of the tatters of skin which were all that remained of their ears. The village was a handsome one, scrupulously clean and well kept, and I was fascinated to see that the villagers had uprooted trees in the jungle and replanted them in such a way that they drooped trusses of fragrant yellow blossoms over the thatches of their houses. These attracted butterflies of sombre magnificence, which fed on the nectar until they became intoxicated and then toppled about the place like planes out of control, and were chased ineffectively both by the children and the village dog. In such Dani communities it is more or less share and share alike, and it seemed that in the allocation every child over the age of seven had been given a half-cigarette. These they were puffing at vigorously, and the village was full of the sound of their jubilation.

1993

T
HIS WAS THE LATEST
of five visits to Guatemala. The previous one was back in 1970 and had coincided with one of the country’s frequent states of emergency. The plane landed at Aurora Airport only twenty minutes in advance of a rigorous curfew imposed at 9 p.m., and the taxi driver assured me that this would be taken so seriously that, if I failed to get to my hotel by that time, I should have to take refuge wherever I could. We made it with a minute to spare, the city lights went off and the guests in the Pan-American Hotel huddled for the rest of the evening under the feeble illumination supplied by a generator. During the night I was awakened by occasional shots, one of which smashed a window in the hotel’s dining room. Next morning life had returned to the confused and bustling normality of any Central American capital.

The shots in the night turned out to be no more than a part of present excitements, for 25 November, the day after my arrival, had become by governmental decree the date on which Yuletide celebrations were to begin. Perhaps in an effort to redress the tensions of the moment, they were to be exceptionally prolonged, occupying a whole month, and on a scale never previously attempted. By nine in the morning I was down fighting my way through the crowd on Sixth Avenue for a view of the first of the parades. Here the city’s leading stores had complied with the order to spray their windows with plastic snow, fireworks were popping off everywhere and through the sound of these explosions a hundred loudspeakers spread through this part of the city the tremendous nostalgia of Bing Crosby dreaming of a white Christmas. Santa Claus came into sight on a float, preceded by boys carrying cardboard cut-outs of reindeer and one brandishing a pair of cast-off antlers donated by the zoo. Father Christmas, in the moment of passing, had discovered a bottle of
aguardiente
in his robes, and opening a breach in the cottonwool stuck to his face, shoved the neck into his mouth and swallowed. He was drunk.